Under My Skin. Zoe Markham

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СКАЧАТЬ so driven, that some days I can’t help but believe he’s going to do it; of course he’ll figure it out. Other days, I think to myself that if he hasn’t done it by now, this scientific mega genius recruited by a super-secret government agency, then he never will.

      The threat of my ever-dwindling supply of vaccine, coupled with my ever-increasing difficulty in finding any kind of escape to my days is starting to make me go a little bit… odd. I talk to myself a lot now. I talk to Mum all the time too. And Tom. I’ve typed a million texts to him, and I save them all, even though I can’t send them. I wrote him a letter too, acres of real words on real paper, telling him everything, and then I fed it to the fire and watched it burn.

      I’m starting to think I really need to get out – somehow. Dad worries himself half to death thinking about would happen to me if I did, and I used to do the same, but now I find I’m starting to worry more about what will happen to me if I don’t.

      *

      Lately Dad keeps bringing home these Living France magazines, and whatever glossy women’s mags are featuring anything at all to do with Paris. He’s trying to fire up my enthusiasm, give me something to hold on to, I know, but Paris is his ultimate solution to all this, not mine. I feel lousy thinking like that, because it’s a solution that’s totally for my benefit – and the whole situation is just so messed up that it’s beyond a joke. Neither of us actually want to go there, but it looks like that’s where we’re headed all the same.

      ‘Christophe was always the closest thing I had to a friend at the Agency,’ he tells me, every time the subject comes up. ‘He knew exactly what was going on, and that’s why he got out when he did – before it got too late for him, like it did for the rest of us.’

      ‘Yeah? Then why didn’t he tell you?’ I argue. ‘If he was such a friend, why did he leave you there?’

      ‘He didn’t leave me, Chloe. He sent me his address. Do you have any idea what he risked in doing that? Everything. He risked everything to give me a way out.’

      ‘Yeah? But what if he’s a double agent? I mean, if this whole thing was so top secret, and so intense – if he was the only one who got out, and he knew how dangerous they were, isn’t it just a little bit weird that he got in touch with you and left the super-secret details of where to find him in his covert new life?’

      ‘It’s not like that,’ he always says with a shake of his head when I bring it up, or when I used to – I don’t bother any more because he doesn’t listen.

      ‘Christophe gave me that address for a reason, and it’s not the one you think. I trust him. He’s the only one there I ever did trust, and I don’t have any reason to change my opinion of him now.’

      There are two problems I have with that. One is that if this indisputably trustworthy science-genius Good Guy colleague really is a Good Guy, then why didn’t Dad get in touch with him on day one? Why isn’t he helping Dad with the vaccine right now? And two – why didn’t he talk things through with Dad before he left? Why leave and then send the contact details on? Because they found him, that’s why. They found him, and re-recruited him, and now he’s a plant – a trap we’re about to fall right into. I watch the films, I read the books, I know that it’s never that simple.

      And I don’t want to go. I don’t want to run away to France, and I don’t trust this friend. It’s just another one of the awkward, corrosive secrets that Dad and I have started to keep from each other now.

      I don’t tell him how much I wish I was dead instead of Mum, and he doesn’t tell me half of what goes through his head. The secrets are probably the only things that keep us both anywhere near sane.

      As the days close in and even I start to notice it from behind the blinds, and as our ever-present background timer runs lower, the guilt that I constantly feel only seems to get heavier. It should be Mum here with Dad instead of me. Some days I can convince myself that it’s an absolute godsend that she’s not here, not like this. Others, I wonder how much harder, how much faster Dad might be working if it was her, and not me. It’s a nasty, dangerous thought, but it’s there, and it forces me to acknowledge it. Dad and I were never close, I never really felt like I meant that much to him. It was always Mum who was there for me. She was the one who helped me with my homework, drove me all over the place, and picked up the pieces whenever Tom and I fought and the world was ending. Dad was always at work. Now everything’s flipped around and I’m somehow his entire world, and that doesn’t always make sense to me. Sometimes I wonder if he just pretends as much as I do.

      But then I remember… I never had a choice in any of this. He did.

      And he chose me.

      *

      Trying not to think, or feel, is how I get through my days. I pretty much live in the attic now. I have a huge beanbag up there, an extra duvet which is like the War and Peace of the quilt world, and three electric heaters that, combined, can fry an egg at a hundred paces.

      Whenever Dad goes into town to do the food shop, he always asks if there’s anything I want, and I spend a good part of the week trying to think up things that might make my strange prison-but-not-a-prison more comfortable. I don’t know much about what new books are out there any more, so I ask him to pick me up some old classics that I know about but have never read. It’s weird how now I’m out of school for good I’m suddenly reading “better” books than I ever was before. No more fluffy paranormal romances for me, or gore-fest horrors. I’ve started to become obsessed with the complicated language and kind of… aching darkness of old books. The things I used to read feel almost like when I try and watch TV now: garbled nonsense playing in the background that isn’t loud enough to compete with the fears in my head. I need stronger stuff. I read The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Monk, and this one called Varney the Vampire which is fast becoming my favourite book of all time. The more I have to concentrate, the harder I have to work to follow the language and the plot, the less room there is in my head for anything else. The days blur outside the high windows of my attic, and I don’t even look up at the sky any more.

      Drawing more and more into myself, the biggest change I notice is in my nightmares. Ever since it happened, there’s only ever really been one – the same scene playing out in the same way every night. There was a brief respite when we first moved in, but now it’s back, and it’s starting to feature a whole new opening scene that makes no sense. Dad and I have talked about the dreams, because it’s kind of hard not to when you wake up screaming most nights. I’ve been trying to get my sleep during the day, to keep the tears and the terror away from him. Sometimes it works, sometimes I can read all night and sleep up in the attic most of the day, but it seems more and more that the only place I can really settle to a book is up there, and sleep tends to find me after my bath and my meds no matter what.

      There’s another reason I’d rather not wake him: when I wake up terrified, and he’s there beside me trying to comfort me – when I should feel safe and secure in his presence – I really don’t. I feel the exact opposite. He’s the last person I want to see; I’m scared that if there was anything dangerous in my room, or if I was stronger, or faster, I could really hurt him in that one, painfully clear moment when I remember what he did to us.

      I never hear him have nightmares. I’ve always wondered why.

      The dream has only ever starred me, Mum and Dad, but now a new character has found his way in, and I don’t really know what to make of him. He feels like some kind of СКАЧАТЬ