Strangers in the Night (5 page)

Inviting him back in.

Inviting them
all
back in.

Back to their place of safety.

The rain drenched his clothes.

Hammered down on his head.

It drummed the car’s metal roof.

Even as his parents loaded their suitcase into the back of the car, even as his father grabbed hold of Mitts’s sports bag and threw it in too, he knew they would never be returning home.

Nobody had said anything.

Nobody had told Mitts what was going on.

But he knew.

He
just
knew.

That was all there was to it.

And then there was only the stench of cheesy feet.

Of rotten oranges.

Doctor Heinmein at the wheel.

Expressionless.

Driving Mitts away from all he had ever known.

Forever.

* * *

Mitts could hear their voices now.

Mumbling.

Garbled.

Mixing and fading.

One into the next.

When he crooked open an eye, the whole world which surrounded him was bleary. He breathed in and caught an aftertaste of the basil-flavoured tomato sauce.

And those same cheesy feet.

That sweet stench of rotten oranges.

His chest felt tight, and he could feel something clinging to his wrist.

He breathed in, trying to regain his senses.

And really knowing that he was helpless.

That he had been . . . rendered helpless.

When Mitts finally did get his eyes open all the way, when he managed to distinguish forms from the blindingly bright, white light, he realised that he was back in his bedroom.

The twitch of the springs in the camp-bed mattress beneath him.

The plastic container.

His wristwatch lying beside his bed.

He blinked again.

Trying to draw the scene clear.

Three figures—
three
of them.

One sat on the bed.

The other two hung back.

Just shadowy blurs for now.

But, with another few blinks, Mitts drew them clear.

He made out his mother and father.

His father supporting his mother.

Both of them with anxiety strewn across their features.

Anxiety for
him
.

He felt a warmth pass through his blood.

And then he turned his attention onto the foreground.

Onto Heinmein who perched on the edge of the mattress. His fingers coiled about Mitts’s wrist. Taking his pulse.

Heinmein’s palms were a touch sweaty.

He wanted Heinmein to release him.

But when Mitts looked beyond the ragged, white lab coat, and up into those black eyes, he couldn’t help but see the determined drive staring right back at him.

The doctor counting out the beats of Mitts’s heart within his mind.

Measuring Mitts’s health, comparing it to whatever cold, hard statistics he used to keep tabs on human-life signs.

Finally, Heinmein released Mitts’s wrist.

Heinmein retreated from the bed. Without another word to anybody, his clipboard dangling down from his fingers, he limped out of Mitts’s bedroom.

Brought the metal door shut behind him with a distant
clang
.

Mitts turned his attention back to his parents. His brain still felt somewhat foggy. And he could feel a tingling sensation dancing its way all across his skin. He tried to sit up, but it was impossible, he only slunk back down onto the camp-bed mattress.

Felt the springs jutting into his spine.

Someone—his mother . . . his father?—had dressed him in his pyjamas.

When Mitts looked up again, both his parents were staring down at him.

Both of them wearing looks of deep concern on their faces.

He took in his mother’s face.

He caught sight of her black hair, cropped back to the nape of her neck. She wore a nightgown, as if Mitt’s father had only just roused her from sleep.

Mitts’s father wore the shirt, as he had before. That splodge of tomato sauce still there, as yet uncleaned.

Mitts saw how those dark circles continued to cling to the bases of his mother’s eye sockets. That her eyeballs were webbed with red veins. She seemed to have grown thin, just as Mitts had.

He wished there might be something he could do for her.

Something he could do to help her condition.

But, feeling his energy waning once more, he knew he didn’t even have enough strength to help himself.

If only he’d been bigger.

If only he’d been born stronger.

Then maybe . . .
maybe
. . .

Mitts looked to his father, standing to his left, and then to his mother, who had taken up a position on his right. He thought back on what his father had said; the last thing he remembered.

In the kitchen.

That puff of buttery steam from the pot.

The crippling nausea which’d gripped him.

How he’d slipped from the stool and fell.

Right . . .

. . . Down.

It’d all gone black.

Or had it?

Mitts recalled something, some sort of a . . .
another world
?

Those dark-purple hills.

That buffeting wind.

And then
. . . darkness.

Mitts realised his parents were speaking to him.

Slowly, their voices made sense.

At first, they were as indiscernible as the beating of birds’ wings.

Mitts had to concentrate.

He screwed up his forehead.

His father’s voice; first, thick and gruff, came to him.

“. . . How’re . . . feeling?”

Mitts tried to nod back to his father, but, in that second, he was blindsided by an overwhelming migraine. It ripped through his brain.

Laid waste to what might’ve been rational thoughts.

Rational words.

In the end, Mitts heard himself groan.

He felt his mother’s cool touch against his cheek.

It calmed him.

Slowed his swiftly beating heart.

He turned to her now.

Feeling the creeping, tingling sensation all through his blood, Mitts tried his best to clear his mind. To bring his mother clear. But her features continued to blur.

He made out her lips.

Distinguished words.

At last.

One long string of clarity.

“Doctor Heinmein,” she said, “he will be back in a few moments, with some medicine, something that will help.”

Mitts couldn’t quite recall if Heinmein entered his bedroom then . . . or if it happened several minutes later.

But the world, soon after, was lost in a cacophony of sulphur-smelling chemicals.

And dreary, drug-induced sleep.

* * *

Mitts woke feeling a chill.

It was like those mornings, back home, in early September. The time in the year just before his parents would switch on the central heating. Sometimes Mitts would wake up shuddering, almost unable to breathe, from the cold of the night.

He would pry himself up out of bed, shove his duvet off him and go fetch his black, fleecy jumper out of his chest of drawers.

Then he would tug his duvet back up and shiver himself into some sort of a light sleep until the brightening morning woke him later.

On those mornings, he always asked his mother to make hot chocolate for breakfast.

He remembered, feeling the bags tugging at the bases of his eye sockets, how he would peer down into his swirling cup; breathing in the gentle, smooth odour of chocolate, feeling it channel warmth back into his bones as if it was some kind of elixir.

When Mitts glanced about the room—the room within the Compound where he was now—he saw that it was dark, all except for a single light source.

It took him a couple of moments to figure out it was a torch.

A sickly, yellow circle of light illuminated a shadowy corner of the room.

It was strange, now, to see anything that wasn’t rendered by the striking, too-bright
white
fluorescent lights of the Compound.

There was something almost
natural
about the torchlight.

Mitts lifted himself a little up off his spring-loaded, camp-bed mattress.

The springs creaked out beneath him.

He could tell there was a person sitting there—slumped—resting upon his plastic container. He realised the plastic container had been moved away from its previous position just below the ventilation hatch.

He wondered if anybody: his mother, his father, Heinmein might’ve taken a look inside.

If they had then surely they would’ve discovered the screwdrivers there.

Perhaps somebody had noticed the screwdrivers had gone missing from the maintenance cupboard. Even though Mitts had gone out of his way to snatch the screwdrivers from a little-used cupboard, he couldn’t help feeling that—somehow—fate might’ve conspired against him.

Made it so he simply wouldn’t be allowed to get away with what it was he hoped to achieve.

The figure slumped up in the corner. He held a book in his hand.

The figure aimed a glance at him.

Mitts finally recognised his father’s profile.

How his father had his sleeves rolled up.

His father, still in silhouette, folded the page of his book and laid it down carefully on top of the plastic container. Then he trod on over to Mitts.

As he drew closer, as Mitts used the torchlight to read his father’s face, he saw his eyelids were drooping. Like his mother, his father had black bags beneath his eye sockets.

Even how he had approached the bed, he could tell that his father’s energy was depleted, that his shoulders sagged, that his gait dragged.

Mitts wondered if the Compound had sapped his father’s strength.

As it had sapped his own.

His father perched down lightly on the edge of the mattress.

Mitts heard the springs within his camp bed slink back and forth.

His father reached forward and laid his hand across Mitts’s forehead. “How’re you feeling?” he said.

Mitts tried to swallow, but felt as if something blocked his throat.

When he tried to cough it loose, he rendered himself unable to breathe.

It was only with his father’s help that he was eventually able to sit upright in bed.

Mitts looked to his father, feeling his eyes streaming with tears from the effort of trying to clear his throat. Mitts’s chest tickled and he could feel a tightening sensation over his veins. Although Mitts had never wanted to as a kid—back when he’d been carefree, and they’d lived at home—he now had a seemingly irrepressible desire to go run through a park somewhere.

Just rush back and forth, grinning all over.

Feeling the tickle of oxygen flowing into his lungs.

Bringing him back to life.

But that life was gone now.

The Compound was all that remained.

Just Mitts and his mother, and his father.

Having got his coughing fit under some sort of control, and trying to ease his weary body, he looked to his father.

His father attempted a smile, but it withered and died upon his lips.

He looked away from Mitts, as if he couldn’t bear to look him in the eye.

As if it was all it would take to set things right again, Mitts reached out and grasped hold of his father’s thigh. He gave it a squeeze. “I’m . . . I’m okay, Dad,” Mitts got out.

But, the truth was, Mitts felt very far from ‘okay’.

In fact, even right then, he could feel the swirling nausea returning to him.

And there was nothing he could do.

Except lie himself down.

Stare up at the ceiling.

And wish it away.

* * *

The next time Mitts woke, he realised that he’d been dreaming about those dark-purple hills.

About the buffeting winds.

And he had smelled that sulphuric odour, all around him.

On his clothes.

In his mouth.

In his
lungs
.

His mouth tasted of pill capsules: that plasticky,
nothing
taste.

He could hear a light
hum
in his ears.

When Mitts looked about himself, still feeling those pinpricks of pain from the coughing fit who knew how many hours ago, he realised that the main light in his room was illuminated.

That, once more, the bright, white light had returned.

That meant it was daytime.

Heinmein had put the lights in the entire Compound on a timer so that it might emulate the day.

But the sun was one thing, and artificial light was another.

And Mitts couldn’t say that he felt any the better for the bright, white light which streamed through the room.

Now, though, Mitts was alone.

He looked across the room, to the plastic container, where his father had been sat. The torch was still there, lying on top of it. And the book his father had been reading was there too.

Mitts breathed in deeply. He wondered if he had the strength—if he
still
had the strength—to hoik himself up. To set himself on his own two feet.

There was only one way to find out.

He had to try.

Mitts shovelled off his blanket—easier to summon the strength than he had imagined—and he eased his body over to the edge of his camp bed.

The slipping and sliding of the springs beneath him sent jitters through his body.

He so wished that they would be silent.

He recalled his bed back home, when he could easily move around without making so much as a sound. That time was
gone
, though . . . no point wondering after the past . . .

Now at the edge of his bed, Mitts summoned the strength to dangle his legs, to have his toenails scrape the laminate flooring.

He glanced up to his bedroom door, half expecting to see either his mother or father there, looking on.

With some vacant expression on their face.

But there was no one.

He was alone.

Somewhat heartened by his efforts so far, Mitts used the metal frame of his camp bed to help himself up onto the soles of his feet. Still holding the metal frame, he felt his balance come and go, as if he hadn’t stood for weeks rather than a matter of hours.