Three Moments of an Explosion (24 page)

Tova considered asking him what it had felt like, but did not. “What
are
you eating, then?” she said. “And how’s your work?”

“You mean are they pissed off with me going in to hospital all the time? They have to put up with it, really, don’t they? Imagine if they started giving me shit about it.”

The intrusions had maintained press interest for longer than in a traditional year. Tova kept seeing articles asking whether safety had been too low a priority. Politicians complained, as they did every year, as they did after the Notting Hill Carnival. Charlie texted Tova that he had turned down an interview with the
London Evening Standard
.

She called Charlie every day and was concerned whenever it took him any time to answer or get back to her. Sometimes it was hours.

“I’ve been a bit all over the place,” he said a week after their lunch.

“Where are you? Are you in work right now?”

“Calm down. I was, I was just there but then I went to the lab. I wanted to see … I can hear you’re worried … I’m on my way back home, though, I’ve got stuff I need to …”

“Can you hear me, Charlie?” she said. “The line’s terrible.”

“It’s fine for me. I’ve just been talking to the others.” She knew he meant the others who had been intruded. “We were talking, after the session.” Their appointments overlapped. Sometimes Allen and her colleagues saw several of them together. “Just, you know, talking about what happened. It’s interesting. That’s all. Everyone sort of remembers different bits, sort of has a different feeling about the way it all happened, you know?”

“No,” she said. “Obviously, no.”

He told her thank you but no, she couldn’t buy him lunch, and he promised to call the next day. When he did not she went to where he worked, an administration department in a publisher of trade magazines.

“We told him last week not to bother coming in for the next week or so,” his boss told her. “He needed to get his head together. I’m not blaming him, I’m just saying.”

“He was here yesterday, though,” Tova said.

“I didn’t see him.”

Charlie was not at home. When she texted him Tova could see her messages went through, but he didn’t have the settings activated that let her know whether or not he had read them.

The young doctor Derek Jansen whispered down the phone, so Tova knew that his boss was in the room.

“I shouldn’t really be talking to you,” he said.

“I know and I really appreciate that you are. I’ve been a bit worried about Charlie.”

“Yeah, I get that. I know he’s a bit … It’s just, doctor-patient stuff, you know? It’ll just take a while for him to get back to himself. Slow and steady. Some people respond slower than others.”

“Is he slow?”

“I’m just saying. It takes everyone however long it takes them.”

“Did you ever work out what went wrong? For an intrusion to happen so fast?”

“Sometimes it just happens. It’s not like there’s anything odd about this specimen, really. I mean, we are taking a look. We’re working as quickly as we can. Charlie and the others are patient with what we do, which is helpful, so we can do comparative stuff. More than patient, they’ve been volunteering to come in every day.”

“Volunteering?”

“But we have to be quick: preservative can sort of mess with your results, so we can’t use that on the specimens. Hence the fridge, although even keeping them in the cold store, this batch of heads is going off quicker than I’d like. Hello? Are you there?”

“Sorry,” said Tova. “You got me thinking.”

The next day she took a taxi to the hospital in the late afternoon. She felt absurd, huddled in her warm coat in the tiny park across from the sunken entrance to the lab, a direct entrance from the street. She sat disguised under layers. She waited.

First the patients left, then the lab staff. The sky grew dark. She saw a squat man in his thirties, a woman, and Charlie himself come up in a group and nod to each other and walk briskly away. Minutes later Derek ascended, wrapping a scarf around his neck. A short while later Dr. Allen, talking loudly into her phone.

Less than half an hour after they had left, the squat man returned. He looked around him, he then descended. Then Charlie came back.

He walked quickly and his shoulders were up.

Tova gave it a minute, then approached slowly to the top of the stairs, leading down to the laboratory door. She descended quietly. She wiped a window beside the threshold clean. Tova dropped the filthy tissue and put her hands to the glass and looked in.

One light was on, in the farthest corner of the room. There was no motion. The illumination came from the refrigerated annex: the door was propped open. Tova moved a little to see inside and said clearly and as calmly as she could, “Oh Jesus fucking Christ, Charlie.”

She could see him sitting, motionless, his back leaning against a bench within the refrigerated chamber.

He did not look like a person but like a puppet, top-heavy, bad and absurd, because he wore the pig’s head again.

Tova hammered on the door.

“Charlie,” she shouted. “I’ll get the cops if you don’t let me in.”

He was not moving but someone else was. The squat man had been sitting near him on the floor, she realized, and now was rising, shuffling toward her. “Let me in right fucking now,” she said.

He pushed the door open a slit and started to say something guarded and Tova shoved past him easily and came inside. The man’s face was moist and he smelled. Tova ran to the cold where Charlie sat slumped.

The skin on the pig’s head was wrinkled and bruisy blue. Charlie’s shoulders were claggy with its half-frozen matter. The cut in its cheek flapped. Loose flesh hung under its sinking eye.

“Take it
off,
” she shouted. She cried out in more disgust to see a woman kneeling in the corner, wearing a cow’s cold head.

Where the thickset man had been sitting was a hacked-off crocodile head. “You can’t come in here like this,” the man said. “This isn’t your business. You can’t do that.”

He plucked at her as she pulled at the pig’s head Charlie wore. She slapped the man’s hand away.

“Help me or fuck off,” she said.

“You can’t just
yank,
” he said. He had swellings on his wet face. He hesitated a moment then took hold of the pig’s flesh. “Look,” he said. “You have to—” He ran a hand gently around the neck hole, pushed his fingers into the dead mouth, making Charlie moan. “OK.”

They pulled the head off together and tipped it away. It hit the floor with a moist thump. Tova kicked it and it rolled unevenly and she saw the black tentacles on its inside, writhing on the swollen lump of its tongue, clutching for Charlie’s face. They twitched sluggishly in the chill.

Charlie blinked, slick with mucal coating. She reeled from the smell of him. His chin looked gnawed. Swellings wept on his skin.

“Tova,” he said. He focused slowly. “Tova.”

“Charlie,” she said. She almost cried. “Look at you … What are you doing?”

“Tova.” He wobbled slowly to his feet. “What are
you
doing?” His voice was thick as if he was drunk. “This is, you know I have to—”

“Seriously, Charlie?” she said. She shivered and watched her breath. “Don’t fucking talk shit to me. I know what you’re doing. This isn’t your treatment,
look
at you.”

“You don’t even know,” he said. “What you’re talking about.”

“Christ, you can hardly talk. What are you doing? How’d you get in, did you steal the keys to this place? Did he?” She pointed to the man who had worn the crocodile. The cow-woman did not move.

Charlie left the cold chamber and went to a basin and turned on a tap. He bent to it. He did not drink, but he stuck out his tongue and closed his eyes as the water ran over it.

“I’m going to be sick,” Tova said. The marks on his face were already deflating, but she could see them still raw in his mouth. His tongue was gray and dimpled, looked almost moldy.

Charlie opened his eyes and they widened when he saw the pig’s head lying on its side.

When Tova brought out her phone, Charlie came back to her and knocked it out of her hand. He stared at her, startled with guilt. The other man picked it up and returned it to her but it was broken. Charlie ran his hands over the inside of the pig mask.

“You have to go,” the crocodile man said to Tova.

“You need help,” she said.

“It ain’t like that,” he said. He pushed her gently toward the door.

“It is, though,” she said. “I’m calling the cops.”

“If you do that,” he said, “they’ll come here and it’ll get bad. You want them on us? You want to send him to jail? Look—” He stood with her by the bottom step and tried to formulate something. The muck on his face had dried into foul crust. “Look, I know we can’t … You can’t understand. It’s … we’re fixing this. This is the last time.”

Of course she didn’t believe him. Despite her threat, nervous of what they might do, she was not ready to set the police on Charlie. She called Derek instead.

“I don’t know how,” she said, “but they got keys to your lab. No wonder the heads’ve been going off quick, they’re breaking in there and putting them back on while you’re at home. They’ve just been sitting there.” She heard him catch his breath and whisper a curse. “How bad is it?”

“It’s not—I don’t know,” he said. “The intrusion itself, the feelers? They’re gross but they don’t do you any damage, we don’t think. And it’s not as if everyone in intruded heads goes this way … but it can be addictive. We’ve got some substitutes. I think they gave some to the woman who wore the hippo. It doesn’t normally go on like this, not this long …”

“Everyone keeps saying that, it doesn’t normally. It has, though. And they’re there right now being junkies. Maybe I
should
send the police.”

“Wait. We ought to—look, I’m going to call Dr. Allen, and we’re going to go over. I’m heading over now. She needs to know about this.”

“Do what you need to and do it fast. I’m not going to watch Charlie fall apart like this.”

“OK, give me like an hour. I’ll call you back.”

In fact he called her much before that and shouted down the line at her, his voice querulous and panicky.

“They’re gone,” he said. “They must’ve taken off as soon as you left. The police are on their way, it’s all gone wrong. Treatment went great with the others but I don’t know what’s happening to these three, I don’t know what’s going on. They took them.”

“They took the heads?” Tova said.

“They took the heads.”

The police went to his flat but Charlie was not there, and it did not seem as if he had come back after going to the hospital. Tova was abruptly sure that she would never hear anything of him again.

The police asked her if she could shed any light on what Charlie was thinking, what his motivations were. What he might do.

“We’re concerned for their safety,” the officer said.

“Me the fuck too,” shouted Tova, “and no I don’t have any idea, that’s the whole point, I don’t know what he’s doing.”

Tova was wrong. Within two days, she did hear reports of what Charlie was doing. Charlie, and Neil and Simone, the intruded wearers of the pig, crocodile, and cow’s heads.

A couple in London’s northern suburbs reported seeing three masked, naked people in their garden. Journalists visited the ring of affluent commuter towns and mega-fields surrounding the capital, following more leads.

A teenager uploaded mobile phone footage onto YouTube. An ugly patch of dead, tooth-white trees by an unkempt field. A broken-down combine harvester rusted by oily mud. The footage wobbled.

“There,” someone said to the unseen cameraman. “
There
. Are you blind, man?”

In the distance, in the fringe of growth, two unclothed men ran from tree to tree. They kept hold of the swaying heads they wore, the bobbing crocodile’s and the pig’s. They were too far to make out well but Tova could see the ugly gray-white of Charlie’s skin and the brown of Neil’s, their stiff ridiculous motions. The men ran without enthusiasm, heavy and unconvincing with aimless urgency, as if hiding, then as if hunting, only making themselves more visible. They stopped and stood tall and looked around through the mouths of their meat masks. They dropped to all-fours and disappeared from sight. You could hear the unseen boys who filmed them goading each other to go closer. The footage ended.

“What are they doing?” Tova said.

“I don’t know,” said Derek. She could hear him breathing, trying to work out what he was allowed to tell her. “We have theories but—”

“So tell me theories.”

“No. I’m sorry, I’m not going to because they’re literally just—we don’t know.”

“They’re trying to live off the land,” she said.

“We’re guessing.”

The police asked her if Charlie had tried to contact her. She laughed at them. “Have you seen what he’s doing?” She did not like the sound of her own voice.

The papers called the fugitives the Animal Three. They were filmed again by news helicopters, from the bonnetcam of a police car, on CCTV behind warehouses. They shivered with cold in the shallow muddy pond by a fallow field. They picked across a rugby pitch in fading light. A nightwatchman saw Charlie through a fence, taking eggs from the hutch of a pet hen and cracking them one by one through the mouth of the pig, into his own.

Simone stood in rubbish behind a co-op and stared into the security camera lens. The cow’s head was collapsing on itself, deliquescing on her head. The horns had tipped in toward each other as the crown of the head rotted, as if straining to touch their tips together. The skin was mottled and maggots dropped from it. Simone shuffled toward a gravel pit.

“This isn’t the fucking Wild West,” Tova said. “We’re talking about an estuary in Essex. Why can’t someone just find them?”

“You’d be surprised how long a person who knows what they’re doing can hide out,” the liaison officer said. Delingpole was a woman barely older than Tova.

“Charlie’s in fucking
admin
 …”

“Well not any more he’s not.” Tova had no response to that. “Look … Thing is, we think we
do
know where they are. Tova, will you help us?”