Daylight Saving (14 page)

I took my hand away from the wound. “What happened that day? When you did the treatment on me and then passed out?” I said.

She took a breath. I could see that it was an effort even to think about it. “A lot of things happened. Occasionally when I treat a person, I get images of events that may have happened to them in their past. Sometimes I see things that might happen in the future.”

I didn’t like where this was going. I was beginning to feel cold. “And you got these images with me?”

“Yes,” she said. She tutted. “Tash will kill me for saying this. She thinks it’s nonsense, and she doesn’t want me to worry you. . . .”

“Tell me what you saw,” I said.

“It was so unclear,” she said. I pushed my plate aside and stopped doodling. I could tell she was trying to recall what she had seen, but it was hurting her, making her weak. Her face clouded over with distress. The curls by her ear were moist with sweat.

“What’s wrong, Chrissy?” I said.

“Usually it’s clear what’s coming from the past and what will happen in the future. But with you, it was all mixed up. I couldn’t distinguish what was going to happen from what had happened already.”

Jesus,
I thought.
I’m in the loop.

“Look,” she said. “When a person is severely traumatized, the past, present, and future can get confused. Former soldiers suddenly believe they are back in the war zone when in fact they’re sitting in a pub. Because they can’t make sense of what happened to them, the memories go into the wrong part of the brain, and they seem to be happening
now.
They hear all the same noises, smell all the same smells. If you can’t deal with a bad experience, it just keeps happening to you over and over again.”

I perked up. Maybe that was what was happening with Lexi.

Chrissy kept talking. “Perhaps you are so deeply traumatized that —”

“Yeah, yeah. Look,” I said. “If you know someone who is, like, deeply traumatized — if they’ve had something really bad happen to them . . .”

“Are we talking about you here, Daniel?”

“Yeah, sure. Whatever. If they can’t deal with it, and it keeps happening over and over again, how can you help them?”

“They have to talk about what traumatized them. If you can put the bad things into words, into a story, then it goes into the correct part of the brain and gets stored away like all the other memories. It stops repeating in the senses.”

“Right,” I said. I thought about all the parts of Lexi’s story that she had blocked out. All the bits about the attack that she had glossed over when she told me. The parts she said she couldn’t remember. I picked up the pen and began doodling again.

“Daniel. I can do this with you. If we talk about what happened with your parents, we can make sense of it together.”

“Me?” I said.

“Yes,” she said.

“Nah,” I said. I chewed some more pizza, feeling the grease seep out of the stretchy cheese. The problem with Chrissy’s solution was that Lexi wasn’t
imagining
the bad thing happening again — she was actually experiencing it. Her cuts and slashes were real. And so were mine.

“Is it cold in here?” I said.

“No, Daniel. It’s boiling. Did you know you’ve been drawing circles for half an hour?” she said.

I looked down. She was right. Circles of all different sizes filled the folded paper napkin.

“I suppose that’s got a deeper meaning,” I said.

She smiled. “Tash says it means ‘balls.’”

I laughed. “What do
you
say?”

She took the napkin. “Well. Circles usually mean family. The need for connection and family union.”

“That makes sense, I suppose,” I said.

“But strangely, they can also mean that you are trapped in a dangerous relationship.”

I looked up at her, and she met my gaze.

“Daniel,” she said.

“What?”

“When I was doing the treatment on you, I felt the presence of another person.”

“Who?” I said, feigning innocence.

“A girl. It was like she was fused to you. She was in pain, and she was taking you with her.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I felt it strongly,” she said, and put her thin fingers over my hand. “It was powerful, and it was dangerous.”

“You’re wrong,” I snapped, pulling my hand away.

She sat back. “OK. Maybe I am. God knows I’ve been wrong before. Tash’ll tell you that. She says it’s all bunkum.”

I stared at the table. Then it came to me. If I could get Lexi to go through what happened on the night she died, if I could get her to search in her memory and remember exactly where he pulled her into the trees, then I could go there. I could be there to stop him when the clocks went back. It was the only hope.

I picked up the napkin. “I know what the circles mean, Chrissy.”

“What?”

“Time.”

“Pardon?” She looked baffled.

“Time is a circle. Yes, it’s powerful. Yes, it’s dangerous. But when it comes around again, you can damn well change it.”

I walked out of the restaurant, already calculating my next move.

Before going on to meet Lexi, I dropped by the cabin to get some money and my swim trunks. I crept in quietly, in case Dad was back and tried to drag me into some aggressive racket sport with his new friends. My shorts were on the radiator near the kitchen, and as I sneaked along the hall area, I could see the cord of the telephone snaking around the door of Dad’s bedroom. His voice came in the muffled tremors I was used to. I stood by the door and listened.

“Mmm. Yes. He’s fine, Anna. No. It probably wasn’t the best idea in the world, but you know Daniel. He makes the best of it. Aye.”

Anna. He was talking to Mum. I decided to leave the trunks; I turned and opened the front door as quietly as I could, scared that I might break the spell.

I went to the shops near the Dome and noticed how things had changed for me. My awareness and my vision were greater than they had ever been. I noticed, mostly, the glint of camera lenses in the cold sun, staring down from the corners of buildings. I noticed the vigilant, bullish security men who haunted every doorway, in their black shiny jackets, their breath and cigarette smoke pluming high in the frosty air. There were posters everywhere for a party called “Turn Back Time.” To celebrate the extra hour when the clocks went back, there would be a bonfire and a concert in the forest, featuring tribute acts playing the greatest hits of the seventies, eighties, and nineties.
Party for longer on the night that just keeps on giving.
Fancy dress was optional but encouraged. I shuddered.

In the Tropical Dome’s reception area, chlorinated kids with red eyes sat on hammocks while their parents tied their shoelaces. I smiled at the receptionist, a thickset man with a shaved head. A fitness instructor of some kind. Arms like twisted electrical cable. “Yes?” he said.

“Hello,” I said in my brightest voice. “Do you happen to know if Ryan is on duty at the pool?”

“No. He doesn’t come on until five. Why do you want to know?”

I thought of Mr. Evans and his report of a lifeguard seeing a boy with open wounds in the water. “No reason,” I said. “I just need a word with him about something.”

The receptionist looked at me carefully. Something seemed to occur to him. “Hang on a minute,” he said, all of a sudden smiling and kind. “Just let me check whether he’s in the staff room. Wait there.”

He went over to a corkboard on the back wall. I saw a passport photograph of
me,
stuck there with a blue pin. The receptionist stared at the picture and read the little note next to it. I was gone before he had a chance to turn around and check.

Walking out to the lake, I saw that there were even security cameras in the trees. I looked up at the last one, which was placed high in a tree on the threshold of the wooded area surrounding the water. I picked up a stone. I knew I shouldn’t. But I gave a one-finger salute with my left hand and launched the stone with my right. For a kid who didn’t do sports, it was a fair old shot, catching the lens dead center and flipping the camera up to point at the sky.

Lexi was asleep under the red coat when I found her. She was curled up in a mound, trembling with the cold. I knelt down beside her and swept some of the damp hair from her face, which was now swollen and bright with blood and bruises. I had never expected her demise to be so colorful. I had been afraid of her wounds, but now I bent close to her, smelled the lake on her skin. I went to kiss her, but she reached out and grabbed my shoulder. The grip was weak, but enough to scare me half the way back to Derby.

“Daniel,” she said.

I replied with a noise like a dying cow.

“A gentleman asks permission.”

“I’m sorry.”

“And he usually waits until the lady is awake.”

I sat back and watched her lift herself painfully onto her elbows.

“You scared the hell out of me,” I said.

“You ain’t seen nothing yet,” she said.

I knew what she meant. I knew we had it all to come. She reached out and touched my face. Her own skin had a weak glow now, like the wax of a candle when the wick is lit. “Danny boy, you look a little peaky. Are you OK?”

“I’m fine,” I said.

“You haven’t found any more cuts and bruises on yourself?”

“No, no,” I lied.

She squinted at me, in the same way my mum always did. As though she could see into my fibbing soul.

“I bought you a present,” I said, to change the subject.

“Another!” she said. Then she coughed — a harsh, dry sound — for a few seconds. “Goodness me, Daniel. What a suitor you’ve become. A present per day.”

I’d remembered her telling me how she longed for fingernails, and I’d found some fake ones at a drugstore. I gave them to her now, and she put a hand to her chest. “Oh, you didn’t! Daniel, this is the most thoughtful gift.” She looked at her hand, the nails stubby and bleeding or blackened, and then she opened the packet. “What color shall I paint them?”

I took out a jar of nail polish. “Red,” I said.

“Will you do it for me?” she said.

“With pleasure.”

We carefully attached the nails to her fingers, and — with her guidance — I painted the plastic in long crimson strokes. The little fingernails only needed two strokes each.

“I’ll have to stay out of the water for a while,” she said. “While these set.”

“Why do you have to keep going into the lake?”

“It keeps me fresh. If my hair dries out, everything goes bad. My skin starts to turn blue; my organs start to collapse. I don’t know why. It’s just the way it is.”

“Right. That’s why you ran away on the night we went fence jumping.”

“Correct.”

“And that’s why you don’t smell weird and have rigor mortis.”

“Why, Daniel! Such kind words.”

I smiled. “Sorry.”

She spread her fingers and looked at her nails. “You are in credit, Daniel. Definitely in the black.” She looked out on the lake. “It’s so cold at the moment. Difficult to swim in there.”

“I need to talk to you about tomorrow night,” I said.

She let out a long, shaky sigh. “I’d rather not,” she said. “Can’t we just enjoy the time we’ve got left?”

“Knowing what’s going to happen to you, I don’t think I could
enjoy
it.”

“I’m bloody freezing,” she said.

I gave her my sweatshirt, and she sat up, put it on, and then wrapped the red coat around her shoulders. The sweatshirt was far too big, and her body seemed minuscule inside it, only the red beacons of her fingernails sticking out of the cuffs. “Did you speak to your mum?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. “And when I got back to the cabin, Dad had called her.”

“Score!” Lexi said.

“I told Mum about you,” I said quietly.

“How much detail did you go into?” Lexi asked.

“Only the major things.”

“What, like,
‘Tall, thin, smashed-up face, dead . . .’?
”

“I told her you liked history.”

Lexi laughed. “Yes. I
used
to like history. But now I’m starting to find it a bit repetitive.”

“Well, then, let’s do something about it.”

Lexi raised her arms in protest. “What the hell can we do about it?”

“I spoke to this woman, called Chrissy. She’s some kind of psychologist or mystic or something. She reckons if you talk about a traumatic event, you can stop it repeating.”

“You think I need therapy, young man?” she said. “You think
talking about it
is going to make these wounds go away?” Lexi pointed to her face.

“Well, you haven’t come up with any better ideas, and I won’t just accept it. I can’t. Will you at least try?”

She put her hands over her face and coughed. “What do you want to know?” she said.

“Whatever you can remember,” I said. But I had other motives.