Mind Secrets: A Science Fiction Telepathy Thriller (Perceivers Book 1) (2 page)

But the boy got up and stood in front of her. A couple of inches shorter than her, and still clutching his arm, he lifted his nose high to suggest he was superior. “
I’ve
been waiting ages, so why does
he
get seen to as soon as he walks in?”

Michael stepped back, not wanting to be a part of the argument. He glanced behind and saw Linda on reception had one eye on what was going on while dialling a number on the phone in front of her.

“You need an X-ray,” Hobson told the boy. “When someone is free to take you down to the X-ray department, you’ll get one and not before.”

“You think I’m an annoying, ungrateful teenager, don’t you?” said the boy.

Nurse Hobson’s face flushed.

The girl, still sitting down, kicked out her foot and jabbed the boy in the ankle. “Jack, stop it!”

Michael wasn’t sure what was going on. He glanced behind and saw a security guard at the reception desk talking to Linda. The man didn’t look like he could secure very much with his grey hair, glasses and gross belly that hung over the belt of his trousers.

The boy seemed not to notice, or to care. “You don’t think people like me should be treated on the NHS, do you?” he said.

The red in her face turned from embarrassment to anger. “My God,” she breathed. “You’re a perceiver.”

The girl got up and grabbed the boy’s elbow. “Jack, shut up!”

The security guard was suddenly there, his hands on his hips, his fat belly sticking out in front of him, flaunting the authority his uniform gave him. “Problem, Nurse Hobson?”

“No,” said the girl before the nurse could reply. “We can sit and wait to be taken to X-ray, can’t we, Jack?”

Jack looked like he was about to say something in reply, but the girl tugged at his arm. She sat down herself and didn’t let go of his elbow until he reluctantly sat down beside her.

“Thank you, Charles,” said Hobson. “I think we are fine now.”

“Very good,” said the guard. “I’ll be just over here if you need me.” He retreated back to the reception desk. He leant the side of his body against it, not taking his eyes off the two teenagers.

Hobson resumed walking. Michael followed behind, not sure exactly what had just happened.

“You’re not a perceiver are you?” asked the nurse as they walked.

Michael wasn’t sure what a perceiver was, but he decided to say that he wasn’t one. “No.”

“Good,” she said. “I hate perceivers. The little mind reading bastards.”

~

MICHAEL DIDN’T KNOW
what to say when Nurse Hobson asked him about his medical history. As far as he could remember, he had no history at all, let alone a medical one.

She looked up from her clipboard, twirling her pen between her middle and index finger, and gave him the same warm smile she had used when she first saw him outside of the hospital. “Name?” she said.

“Michael,” he said.

“Michael …?”

She prompted for a surname, but he couldn’t think of one that fitted. Was he called Smith or Jones or Papadopoulos? He didn’t know.

“What about your parents? We could contact them to tell them you’re safe.”

He tried to remember. He closed his eyes and thought of the concept of mother and father, hoping to find an image inside his memory, but his mind was empty.

When he opened his eyes again, the cubicle was blurry from the moisture that had formed there. He wiped the dampness from his eyes, determined not for it to turn to tears, and gripped hard to the edge of the mattress where he sat, feeling the slippery plastic that lay beneath the sheet.

Hobson must have seen his distress, because she put the clipboard and pen aside. “Maybe we can fill that in later,” she said.

After slapping on a pair of latex gloves, she selected a pair of scissors from her tray and cut into the sleeve of his shirt, removing all the fabric from his arm apart from the bloodied piece stuck to his wound. “What happened to you, then? In a fight were you?”

“No,” he lied. “I…” He thought back to his encounter with Cooper on the stairs, remembering the pain as the knife plunged into his arm. “I … stabbed myself.”

“You stabbed
yourself
?” said Hobson with a smile. “That’s a new one.”

“I didn’t mean to,” said Michael. “It was an accident.”

“I see,” said Hobson. She didn’t seem to believe him, but she also didn’t press the matter any further as she dabbed water-soaked pads onto his shirt to soften the congealed blood.

She chatted about the weather, in that typical British fashion, as she gently removed the last of the fabric from Michael’s wound, cleaned up around it, spread on some anaesthetic gel and closed it with five stitches. Michael bore the pain. It made him feel alive, it made him feel real. Even though his earliest memory was only a few hours old.

There were other things about life he remembered. He knew that it was a British trait to talk about the weather with strangers, he knew that smoking could damage a person’s health, he knew not to admit to the nurse that he had been stabbed in a fight. It was strange, like he had everything he needed to exist in the world, without any of the background.

“What do you know about amnesia?” he asked, as Nurse Hobson tied off the last stitch and snipped the thread free with her scissors.

“Amnesia?” she said, surprised.

“It’s when someone loses their memory,” said Michael.

“I know what it is,” she said, “I was wondering why you were asking.”

“No reason,” said Michael.

“I see.” She said it in the same way she had when he told her that he had stabbed himself, like she didn’t believe him. “It’s rare. It can happen when someone has gone through a trauma, or if they’ve had a bump on the head. Have you had a bump on the head?”

“No,” said Michael. He had woken with a headache, but there was no bruising or blood on his skull.

“Well, it’s usually only temporary. Unless it’s a serious brain injury, people get their memories back gradually over a few days or weeks.” She snapped off her latex gloves and laid them on top of the mess of bloodied cleansing wipes on her equipment tray. “I just need to get the doctor to sign off on this, I won’t be a moment,” she said.

She swished aside the curtain and went out to find the doctor. As she swished it shut again behind her, Michael worried that he had said too much. The last thing he needed was to be hospitalised by a doctor concerned he had some sort of brain injury. He had been in the hospital long enough, he decided, and needed to go.

On the examination bed next to him was his bloodied shirt, or what was left of it after the nurse had cut off the sleeve. His torso was naked and, although he wasn’t cold in the warmth of the hospital, that wouldn’t be the case if he went outside.

He hopped off the bed, just as the curtain was pulled open. He thought it would be the doctor come to examine his head, but instead it was the girl from the waiting area.

“You’re Michael, aren’t you?” she said.

“Yes.” He crossed his palms over his chest, embarrassed that he was half naked in front of her. Not as if they covered up much.

The girl bit her bottom lip to disguise her amusement, getting reddish brown lipstick on her teeth. In the harsh light of the examination cubicle, he saw she wore subtle make-up to create the impression of flawless skin. A line of black drawn under each eye emphasised her wide brown irises, which didn’t so much look
at
him, as look
into
him.

She brought out a scrunched up bundle of light blue fabric from behind her back. “You might want this,” she said, handing it over.

Michael took the bundle. It was soft, made out of artificial woollen fibre. He unfolded it to see it was a long-sleeved jumper about his size. “Where did you get this?” It looked too big to belong to the thin girl.

“From a couple of cubicles down,” she said.

“You stole it?” said Michael, trying to figure out why a girl he didn’t know would be stealing clothes for him.

“The man won’t be needing it,” she said. “He died ten minutes ago.”

Startled, he dropped the jumper on the bed. His hands felt dirty from touching something worn by a dead man and he wiped them on his trousers.

The girl giggled. She looked up and down his naked torso, adding to his embarrassment. “You don’t want to go out like that,” she said. “And you’ll need to go soon if you don’t want the men to catch you.”

“Men?” A chill passed through him and he shivered in the warmth of the hospital air.

“They’ve been walking through the hospital looking for a stab victim called ‘Michael’. They’re pretending like they’re police, but they’re not police.”

Michael looked at his blood-stained shirt with only one sleeve scrunched up on the bed and, next to it, the dead man’s jumper. He had no choice, he grabbed the jumper and put it on. The wool felt soft and warming against his skin.

“How do you know all this?” he asked.

“I’m a perceiver,” she said, as if it was obvious.

“What’s that?” said Michael.

Her penetrating gaze surveyed his face and looked into his eyes, so deep that it made him feel uncomfortable. “You really don’t know, do you?” she said.

A noise of voices – deep, men’s voices – startled them both. The girl turned and snatched a quick look through the curtain. “They’re checking the cubicles now,” she said as she turned back. “You haven’t got long.”

“Why are you doing this?” said Michael.

“Let’s say I know what it’s like to be hunted by people who don’t understand you.”

Michael joined her at the curtain and peered out. He took a deep breath as he saw the back of a man in a grey suit standing at the foot of a cubicle two spaces down, apparently talking to whoever was in there.

He turned back to the girl, knowing she was right. “Thank you …” He was going to use her name, but realised he didn’t know what it was.

“Jennifer,” she said.

“Thank you, Jennifer.”

He took another look out of the curtain and, while the man in the grey suit still had his back to him, he slipped out into the main part of the hospital. As quietly as he could, he retraced the way he had come, fearing at any moment he would hear the sound of pursuing men’s footsteps. But with his head down, resisting the urge to run, he walked through the waiting area without turning a suspicious head, out through the double doors and into the night.

CHAPTER THREE

MICHAEL WANDERED
the streets until the sun lifted itself above the buildings and spilled its orange light onto the pavement. It chased away the chill of the night and warmed the surface of his skin. But inside he remained cold and hungry. He passed cafes opening their doors to early morning customers. They enticed him with smells of cooking sausages and bacon, but he could only stare through the windows. He had no money.

The streets swelled with people venturing out into the rush hour. Workers on early shifts in cleaner and shop assistant uniforms gradually gave way to office workers in suits and smart shoes. There were children in school uniform: boys in grey blazers with red trim and girls in black jackets and dark blue checked skirts giggling in groups of three and four. The people jumped on buses or caught taxis or rushed across pedestrian crossings. All with somewhere to be. Michael had nowhere to be. He just walked. Like a ghost walking among the living.

After a couple of hours, the traffic thinned and the schoolchildren, businessmen and women gave way to young mothers with pushchairs and the elderly. Michael kept walking, and the more he walked, the more people looked at him. An old man gave him a sideways glance while pretending to fiddle with his glasses. A woman adjusting the display of shampoo in a shop window stared at him as he walked past, then hurriedly looked away when he stared back. A toddler in a buggy pointed at him and shouted, “Teenager!” before his mother grabbed his hand and stuffed it back inside. One elderly woman with a large shopping bag even crossed the road to avoid him.

Michael stopped to look at his reflection in a shop window. Perhaps there was something on his face. Perhaps his arm was bleeding again. But something else reflected in the glass caught his attention. The same word, in mirror writing, that the toddler had called him:
teenager
.

Michael turned and saw it was part of a poster encased behind transparent plastic on the side of a bus shelter.

Is your teenager a perceiver?
it read.
Get them tested at school! It’s quick, painless – and absolutely free!

Another poster, printed on ordinary paper and taped to a lamppost, read:
Get Teenagers Out of Your Head!
Then, underneath, in smaller letters:
Brought to you by Action Against Mind Invasion
.

A radio blaring out of the open window of a hairdressers carried the words of a newsreader, ‘…
are denying claims that up to five per cent of teenagers are perceivers
…’.

People stared at him because he was a teenager. Like Nurse Hobson, the population feared perceivers were seeing into their minds and reading their private thoughts. They knew that all perceivers were teenagers and didn’t seem to care that not all teenagers were perceivers. So they continued to stare at him, to steer their children away from him and to cross the road to avoid him.

~

MICHAEL SLEPT
that night on a park bench. A fitful sleep, disturbed by sounds of wildlife in the trees, the loud voices of people walking home from the pub and the fear of being attacked. Huddled up to preserve his own body heat, he was small, vulnerable and alone. The night breeze leached away his warmth and he woke with the dampness of dew soaking through his jumper.

The days that followed passed in a stream of unmarked time. Time was a concept other people used to order their lives. For him, there was no lunchtime, no dinnertime and no bedtime. Just lightness passing into darkness and the constant search for food, shelter and warmth. He walked and he stopped, walked and stopped, wandering the streets like a vagrant.

No, not like a vagrant. He was a vagrant. A homeless person, a tramp, a bum.