The Girls Beneath. Ross Armstrong

      ‘You really hate them?’

      ‘I’m indifferent to them.’

      ‘Oh, that’s different. That’s fine. Here’s reason two: It’ll anchor you, by which I mean you’ll judge time better by its presence, it will remind you how you’re progressing in relation to it and therefore will stop you getting depressed.’

      ‘I don’t feel depressed.’

      ‘Well, you could well get depressed. Reason three: The stroking is nice. You’ll just fucking like it. Trust me. Get a cat!’

      I sometimes think the sudden outbursts of swearing are in my imagination, but I think he’s just like that. He’s come direct from the wayward 1960s. His hair is kind of shaggy, his formal jacket sits awkwardly on his shoulders above his loose fitting slacks, like he was dressed by his mother this morning, but even the jacket itself is finding its place on his torso pretty inappropriate and is mounting a slow escape.

      I’ve often seen him hurriedly extinguishing something in a drawer as I enter the room, his desk gently smoking as our conversation begins. His pupils a little dilated and the room smelling leaf green.

      ‘Okay. I’ll get a cat,’ I say.

      ‘And you can have it as what people call an emotional support animal. There are perks of this. For example, if you go on a fucking plane you can take it with you and have it on your lap. You’re allowed almost anything if it’s for emotional support. Big dogs for instance. One chap even got a small horse on a long haul.’

      ‘What? In the cabin?’

      ‘Yes. A tiny one, but it was still a horse. Listen, trust me, in my line of work I’ve seen far fucking stranger things than that.’

      I leave. I get a cat. Now I have a cat.

      *

      Draw a line between the middle of your forehead and the top of your left ear. Make a mark directly in the middle of that line. Then make another mark one centimetre above it. That’s where the bullet went in.

      Right there.

6

       ‘Dee. Dah dah girl dee dah, dah dah, my head…’

      ‘So… Stevens and Anderson are to follow up with the girl’s family. Bartu and Mondrian, you’re giving a talk at the school.’

      ‘What? I want to follow up the missing girl,’ I exclaim.

      A hush. ‘I want’ isn’t a word combination that often gets an outing in the debrief room.

      It’s been a big deal, me coming back so early. They wanted it for me. And for my part, I needed it; I couldn’t stay at home any longer.

      Brains need other brains to develop. If I’m kept out in the cold, in exile, mine will start to recede before it’s even rehabilitated. People go mad when left in rooms with nothing but their own thoughts to haunt them. Inmates in solitary confinement, deprived of sensory stimulation, have been known to forge their own deluded realities, even see things that aren’t there and hear voices. Try not speaking to anyone for a full day when home alone on sick leave, and you’ll feel the chill the icy hand of madness leaves on your shoulder.

      That’s a microcosm of where I am. That’s the narrow end of it, a fleeting taste of the mouthful.

      But they need to know I can be trusted. They’ve shown a lot of faith in a man still trying to get a grip on the newly coloured world spread out in front of him, because in truth, I’m not sure whether I can be trusted or not. Sure, I’ll give it a crack, but I’m certainly not making any promises.

      ‘Me and Bartu will check up on the missing girl. Sounds interesting. Anderson and Stevens, you do the talk at the school. That okay?’ I blurt out.

      If you don’t ask, you don’t get.

      ‘Err… sorry, Tom. That’s not really part of your remit. You get to do… other things. Community work, which in some ways… is the most… important work of all.’

      My face seems to tell Levine everything he needs to know about the validity of that statement.

      ‘Look, a couple of months on the straight and narrow and they want to bust you up a bit. Get you on the force maybe. Fast track. You’ve been told this, right?’ Levine says.

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘There’s so much… good feeling around you, Tom. Good press. Good public err… you know. You’re well thought of, Tom. You. And your story. It’s… uplifting. So, you know…’

      I’m not sure I do. I mean, I think he’s telling me to behave or I won’t get what I want. It’s been a long time since someone’s had to tell me to behave. I used to stay out of trouble, stay in the corners, under the radar. Not anymore it seems.

      ‘So the school for you today please, Tom. The school,’ Levine says.

      ‘Yep. Course. Yep, yep,’ I say, folding my arms and smiling at the rest of the team. Faces and faces staring back at me. Stubbly ones. Pink ones. Pale ones. Happy ones. Sad ones. I’ve no chance of keeping them all in my head. So I just smile.

      We get up to go. I think about the missing girl. It interests me.

      *

      Emre is somewhere between twenty and thirty. I can’t do any better than that for you, perception is difficult.

      But his physical energy, his spirit, if you can imagine such a thing, is by turns fifteen and forty-five.

      He’s springy but with a coolness that belies his youth. He could have a high IQ. Or perhaps it’s a centred temperament that’s learnt. Maybe it’s a religion thing, but I don’t know what religion he is so it’s difficult for me to comment on that, but he’s definitely smarter than he looks. I decide to tell him that as we walk toward the school.

      ‘Hey, I think you’re definitely smarter than you look.’

      ‘Thanks. You’re pretty blunt. Do you know that?’ he says, observationally, no side to it at all.

      ‘Yes, I know that. Thanks,’ I say, politely.

      ‘Is that you? Or your brain?’

      ‘Is there a difference?’

      ‘Were you like this before the accident?’

      ‘Does it matter?’

      ‘No. But I’m interested.’

      ‘What was the question again?’

      ‘Were you like this before the accident?’

      ‘Ah yes.’

      ‘Well… ? Were you?’

      ‘Do you know what, Emre Bartu? I have absolutely no idea.’

      I don’t like it when people call it an accident. We don’t know if it was an accident. Not yet anyway.

      I prefer The Incident. Or The Happening. Or The Bullet.

      I listen to our footsteps and think about people. People like to think their personality is separate from their brain, as if their personality is in the mind.

      The mind, that thing that is the actual self, is presumably located somewhere above the skull, floating free of the brain’s complicated mush of blood, cells, flesh, neuroglia and wires. This ‘mind’ is unbound, simpler, and yet capable of far more complexity than the biology and flaws that pervade within the strait-jacket restraints of the human brain.

      The brain holds people back: from finding the perfect words over dinner that will make our friends revere us as debonair and articulate. If only the brain could take some lessons from the mind, that reliable thing that is uniquely us and always right.