The Girls Beneath. Ross Armstrong

we have nothing else to think with, but this miraculous lump that contains who we are completely and is all our best idiosyncratic parts.

      When patients wake from strokes, and sometimes during them, they often describe not being able to distinguish themselves from the world that surrounds them.

      Their arm is the wall.

      Their head, a computer.

      Their genitals are the trees and landscape outside the window.

      This is reportedly often a euphoric feeling rather than a scary one. It appears to me that this is getting closer to a truthful condition than the general way of thinking. Not misled by the structures we have learnt to see, that define us as the protagonists and everything else as the scenery, these patients accept their place in the world in those moments, on a par with everyone and everything, comfortable with the fact that they are no more than their anatomy.

      ‘Normals’ think of themselves as beautiful hand-crafted originals that always know best, who will prevail even as their bodies fail them. They think their brain contains only facile learnt sequences that make it easier to put your trousers on or cut a cucumber. If only they knew better.

      One day I’ll fill Bartu in on all this. But for the moment I keep this enlightenment as an advantage over them all. Everyone is on a need to know basis, and I’m the only one who really needs to know.

      My inner thoughts work so much faster than my mouth. I can think it all exactly as I want it. But it doesn’t come out quite that way yet. I speak in imperatives, everything slow, but with exclamation marks. I can virtually see them hang in the air after every sentence.

      ‘This is the school here, right? Really doing this are we?’ I say.

      These words pierce the silence we’ve been in for a good five minutes. Bartu would probably have preferred this trip to be filled with witty repartee, rather than the dead air of one man thinking and the other waiting. He’ll have to forgive me. I don’t do patter easily yet. I don’t do off the cuff. Sometimes I forget to get out of my head.

      A car with blacked out windows passes and my eyes follow it away.

      He considers my question. Luckily, I’m pretty comfortable with silence as it’s the condition in which I’ve lived the majority of my life up until this point. Even pre-bullet.

      ‘Look, don’t worry. You don’t have to speak, if it’s uncomfortable or difficult. To the kids I mean,’ he says in an almost whisper.

      ‘It’s not uncomfortable. It’s just boring.’

      ‘Fair enough. I’ll do the talking.’

      ‘We’re not teachers. We’re officers of the law.’

      ‘We’re not really officers of the law.’

      ‘We’re community support officers of the law.’

      ‘We’re part of the uniformed civilian support staff.’

      ‘Same diff.’

      He laughs. A genuine one, I think, not for show. People are sometimes afraid to laugh at me, or with me, but not Emre Bartu.

      We look at the school, it’s a tidy set of red bricks with a pair of pointy roofs. It also contains a playing field full of my past sporting failures and the scene of many rejections and one good kiss.

      Her name, Sarah, flashes into my head and I pat my brain on the basal ganglia for the remembrance. Without the ability to show me Sarah’s face, it merely reminds me that she was pretty, freckled and mysterious, and that I hung around to wear her down. And that sometimes people told stories of the strange things she did. But I can’t recall any of them.

      Old sights, sounds and smells allow you to go down neural pathways you don’t frequently use. The resultant sudden rush of seemingly lost memories is what causes strong emotions in such places.

      I observe this feeling and let it pass through me. None of my teachers will be here, the turnover is pretty fast. Things change swiftly in cities. They change double swift around here. This is a foreign land.

      I won’t announce that I am alumni. I’m not sure they’d care anyway. Some bloke whose biggest claim to fame is getting shot in the skull. I’ll wait till I’ve done something more auspicious with my broken head before I bring it back here and try to hold it high around the corridors.

      He brings out ‘the bag’. I’ve had to handle ‘the bag’ once before, in a training session, but today he has ‘the bag’.

      ‘I’m going to do the talking. You be a presence,’ he says.

      ‘I can do that.’

      ‘Good. Any questions? Anything you need?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘Go on.’

      ‘Right. The girl that went missing, did she go to this school?’

      ‘Forget about that,’ he says, scolding me just enough.

      ‘Okay. But did she?’

      ‘Err… yes. I think so,’ he says in a sigh.

      ‘You think so? Or know so?’

      ‘I know so,’ says Emre Bartu.

      He wants us to go but I can’t walk and think smoothly yet. My stillness means he can’t move. It’d be rude.

      He waits. I pause. I think. Then speak.

      ‘Okay. I’m going to ask about her.’

      ‘Who?’

      ‘The missing girl.’

      ‘No. Please don’t.’

      ‘Why is that?’

      ‘It’s being handled elsewhere. It’d seem… odd.’

      ‘I don’t mind that.’

      ‘Yes. But others would. Others are assigned to it.’

      I shrug and nod at the same time, committal and non-committal all at once. We both stare at the school, he grips the bag, I blink hard.

      ‘It would be interesting. Quite interesting. I’m interested,’ I say.

      ‘Please, don’t. Just trust me, no one wants you to do that.’

      ‘Okay. I won’t,’ I say.

      He touches me on the shoulder.

      ‘Good man.’

      He turns as he bites his bottom lip, a tense mannerism that intrigues me already. It’s always the little things that intrigue me.

      ‘Ready?’

      ‘Yes,’ I say, my movements getting smoother all the time. I can feel myself growing already, spreading out to encompass the space the world outside my room has provided for me.

      ‘Good. Come on then,’ he says as he walks.

      You just have to say you won’t do something. That’s what they want. Little compromises. Promises. Words.

      It’s as easy as that.

      We sign our names and put on those badges with the safety pins attached that ruin jumpers and would do unfathomable things to a face.

      Then we’re in.

7

       ‘Dreams, keep rolling, through me

       Dreams of you and I,

       Dreams that drift far out to sea

       Why does my baby lie?’

      Being back here is sinister. The hallways hum with spectres. Dr Ryans said he didn’t