The Ghosts of Christmas Read online

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  It was because of a row. The row was about nothing. So it all came from nothing. Or, perhaps it’s more accurate to say it came from the interaction between two people. I remember how Ben’s voice suddenly became gentle and he said, as if decanting the whole unconscious reason for the row:

  ‘Why don’t we try for a baby?’

  This was mid-March. My memory of that moment is of hearing birds outside. I always loved that time of year, that sense of nature becoming stronger all around. But I always owned the decisions I made, I didn’t blame them on what was around me, or on my hormones. I am what’s around me, I am my hormones, that’s what I always said to myself. I don’t know if Ben ever felt the same way. That’s how I think of him now: always excusing himself. I don’t know how that squares with how the world is now. Perhaps it suits him down to the ground. I’m sure I spent years looking out for him excusing himself. I’m sure me doing that was why, in the end, he did.

  I listened to the birds. ‘Yes,’ I said.

  We got lucky almost immediately. I called my mother and told her the news.

  ‘Oh no,’ she said.

  When the first trimester had passed, and everything was still fine, I told my boss and then my colleagues at the Project, and arranged for maternity leave. ‘I know you lot are going to go over the threshold the day after I leave,’ I told my team. ‘You’re going to call me up at home and you’ll be all, “Oh, hey, Lindsey is currently inhabiting her own brain at age three! She’s about to try to warn the authorities about some terrorist outrage or other. But pregnancy must be such a joy”.’

  ‘Again with this,’ said Alfred. ‘We have no reason to believe the subjects would be able to do anything other than listen in to what’s going on in the heads of their younger selves—’

  ‘Except,’ said Lindsey, stepping back into this old argument like I hadn’t even mentioned hello, baby, ‘the maths rules out even the possibility—’

  ‘Free will—’

  ‘No. It’s becoming clearer with every advance we make back into what was: what’s written is written.’

  Our due date was Christmas Day.

  People who were shown around the Project were always surprised at how small the communication unit was. It had to be; most of the time it was attached to the skull of a sedated rhesus monkey. ‘It’s just a string of lights,’ someone once said. And we all looked appalled, to the point where Ramsay quickly led the guest away.

  They were like Christmas lights, each link changing colour to show how a different area of the monkey’s brain was responding to the data coming back from the other mind, probably its own mind, that it was connected to, somewhen in the past. Or, we thought only in our wildest imaginings then, in the future.

  Christmas lights. Coincidence and association thread through this, so much, when such things can only be illusions. Or artifice. Cartoons in the margin.

  How can one have coincidence, when everything is written?

  I always thought my father was too old to be a dad. It often seemed to me that Mum was somehow too old to have me too, but that wasn’t the case, biologically. It was just that she came from another time, a different world, of austerity, of shying away from rock and roll. She got even older after Dad died. Ironically, I became pregnant at the same age she had been.

  We went to see her: me, Ben, and the bump. She didn’t refer to it. For the first hour. She kept talking about her new porch. Ben started looking between us, as if waiting to see who would crack first. Until he had to say it, over tea. ‘So, the baby! You must be looking forward to being a grandmother!’

  Mum looked wryly at him. ‘Not at my age.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘That’s all right. You two can do what you want. I’ll be gone soon.’

  We stayed for an hour or two more, talking about other things, about that bloody porch, and then we waved goodbye and drove off and I parked the car as soon as we were out of sight of the house. ‘Let’s kill her,’ I said.

  ‘Absolutely.’

  ‘I shouldn’t say that. I so shouldn’t say that. She will be gone soon. It’s selfish of me to want to talk about the baby—’

  ‘When we could be talking about that really very lovely porch. You could have led with how your potentially Nobel Prize–winning discovery of time travel is going.’

  ‘She didn’t mention that either.’

  ‘She is proud of you, I’m sure. Did something—? I mean, did anything ever…happen, between you, back then?’

  I shook my head. There was not one particular moment. I was not an abused child. This isn’t a story about abuse.

  I closed my eyes. I listened to the endless rhythm of the cars going past.

  The Project was created to investigate something that I’d found in the case histories of schizophrenics. Sufferers often describe a tremendous sensation of now, the terrifying hugeness of the current moment. They often find voices talking to them, other people inside their own heads seemingly communicating with them. I started using the new brain-mapping technology to look into the relationship between the schizoid mind and time. Theory often follows technology, and in this case it was a detailed image of particle trails within the mind of David, a schizophrenic, that handed the whole theory to me in a single moment. It was written that I saw that image and made those decisions. Now when I look back to that moment, it’s almost like I didn’t do anything. Except that what happened in my head in that moment has meant so much to me.

  I saw many knotted trails in that image, characteristic of asymmetric entanglement. I saw that, unlike in the healthy minds we’d seen, where there are only a couple of those trails at any given moment (and who knows what those are, even today?), this mind was connected, utterly, to…other things that were very similar to itself. I realised instantly what I was looking at: What could those other things that were influencing all those particle trails be but other minds? And where were those other minds very like this one—?

  And then I had a vision of the trails in my own mind, like Christmas lights, and that led me to the next moment when I knew consciously what I had actually understood an instant before, as if I had divined it from the interaction of all things—

  The trails led to other versions of this person’s own mind, elsewhen in time.

  I remember that David was eager to cooperate. He wanted to understand his condition. He’d been a journalist before admitting himself to the psychiatric hospital.

  ‘I need to tear, hair, fear, ear, see…yes, see, what’s in here!’ he shouted, tapping the front of his head with his middle fingers. ‘Hah, funny, the rhymes, crimes, alibis, keep trying to break out of those, and it works, that works, works. Hello!’ He sat suddenly and firmly down and took a very steady-handed sip from his plastic cup of water. ‘You asked me to stay off the drugs,’ he said, ‘so it’s difficult. And I would like to go back on them. I would very much like to. After.’

  I had started, ironically, to see him as a slice across a lot of different versions of himself, separated by time. I saw him as all his minds, in different phases, interfering with each other. Turn that polarised view the other way, and you’d have a series of healthy people. That’s what I thought. And I wrote that down offhandedly somewhere, in some report. His other selves weren’t the ‘voices in his head’. That’s a common fallacy about the history of our work. Those voices were the protective action that distances a schizophrenic from those other selves. They were characters formed around the incursion, a little bit of interior fiction. We’re now told that a ‘schizophrenic’ is someone who has to deal with such random interference for long stretches of time.

  ‘Absolutely, as soon as we’ve finished our inter
views today. We don’t want to do anything to set back your treatment.’

  ‘How do you experience time?’ is a baffling question to ask anyone. The obvious answer would be ‘like you do, probably’. So we’d narrowed it down to:

  How do you feel when you remember an event from your childhood?

  How do you feel about your last birthday?

  How do you feel about the Norman Conquest?

  ‘Not the same,’ David insisted. ‘Not the same.’

  I found myself not sleeping. Expectant mothers do. But while not sleeping, I stared and listened for birds, and thought the same thought, over and over.

  It’s been proven that certain traits formed by a child’s environment do get passed down to its own children. It is genuinely harder for the child of someone who was denied books to learn to read.

  I’m going to be a terrible parent.

  ‘Will you play with me?’ I remember how much that sound in my voice seemed to hurt. Not that I was feeling anything bad at the time; it was like I was just hearing something bad. I said it too much. I said it too much in exactly the same way.

  ‘Later,’ said Dad, sitting in his chair that smelled of him, watching the football. ‘You start, and I’ll join in later.’

  I’d left my bedroom and gone back into the lounge. I could hear them talking in the kitchen, getting ready for bed, and in a moment they’d be bound to notice me, but I’d seen it in the paper and it sounded incredible: The Outer Limits. The outer limits of what? Right at the end of the television programmes for the day. So after that I’d see television stop. And now I was seeing it and it was terrible, because there was a monster, and this was too old for me. I was crying. But they’d be bound to hear, and in a moment they would come and yell at me and switch the set off and carry me off to bed, and it’d be safe for me to turn round.

  But they went to bed without looking in the lounge. I listened to them close the door and talk for a while, and then switch the light off, and then silence, and so it was just me sitting there, watching the greys flicker.

  With the monster.

  I was standing in a lay-by, watching the cars go past, wondering if Mummy and Daddy were going to come back for me this time. They’d said that if I didn’t stop going on about the ice cream I’d dropped on the beach, they’d make me get out and walk. And then Dad had said ‘right!’ and he’d stopped the car and yanked open the door and grabbed me out of my seat and left me there and driven off.

  I was looking down the road, waiting to see the car come back.

  I had no way of even starting to think about another life. I was six years old.

  Those are just memories. They’re not from Christmas Day. They’re kept like that in the connections between neurons within my brain. I have a sense of telling them to myself. Every cell of my body has been replaced many times since I was that age. I am an oral tradition. But it’s been proved that a butterfly remembers what a caterpillar has learned, despite its entire neurological structure being literally liquidised in between. So perhaps there’s a component of memory that lies outside of ourselves as well, somewhere in those loose threads of particle trails. I have some hope that that is true. Because that would put a different background behind all of my experiences.

  I draw a line now between such memories and the other memories I now have of my childhood. But that line will grow fainter in time.

  I don’t want to neglect it.

  I’m going to neglect it.

  I don’t want to hurt it.

  I’m going to hurt it.

  They made me this way. I’m going to blame them for what I do. I’m going to end up being worse.

  I grew numb with fear as autumn turned to winter. I grew huge. I didn’t talk to Ben or anyone about how I felt. I didn’t want to hear myself say the words.

  In mid-December, a couple of weeks before the due date, I got an email from Lindsey. It was marked ‘confidential’:

  Just thought I should tell you, that, well, you predicted it, didn’t you? The monkey trials have been a complete success, the subjects seem fine, mentally and physically. We’re now in a position to actually connect minds across time. So we’re going to get into the business of finding human volunteer test subjects. Ramsay wants ‘some expendable student’ to be the first, but, you know, over our dead bodies! This isn’t like lab rats, this is first astronaut stuff. Anyway, the Project is closing down on bloody Christmas Eve, so we’re going to be forced to go and ponder that at home. Enclosed are the latest revisions of the tech specs, so that you can get excited too. But of course, you’ll be utterly blasé about this, because it is nothing compared to the miracle of birth, about which you must be so excited, etc.

  I looked at the specs and felt proud.

  And then a terrible thought came to me. Or crystallised in me. Formed out of all the things I was. Was already written in me.

  I found myself staggered by it. And hopeful about it. And fearful that I was hopeful. I felt I could save myself. That’s ironic too.

  My fingers fumbling, I wrote Lindsey a congratulatory email and then rewrote it three times before I sent it so that it was a model of everything at my end being normal.

  I knew what I was going to be doing on Christmas Day.

  Due dates are not an exact science. We’d had a couple of false alarms, but when Christmas Eve arrived, everything was stable. ‘I think it’s going to be a few more days,’ I told Ben.

  I woke without needing an alarm the next morning, to the strange quiet of Christmas Day. I left Ben sleeping, showered and dressed in the clothes I’d left ready the night before. Creeping about amongst the silence made me think of Father Christmas. I looked back in on Ben and felt fondly about him. That would have been the last time for that.

  I drove through streets that were Christmas empty. My security card worked fine on a door that didn’t know what day it was.

  And then I was into the absolute silence of these familiar spaces, walking swiftly down the corridors, like a ghost.

  The lab had been tidied away for the holidays. I had to unlock a few storage areas, to remember a few combinations. I reached into the main safe and drew out the crown of lights.

  I paused as I sat in Lindsay’s chair, the crown connected to a power source, the control systems linked up to a keyboard and screen in my lap. I considered for a moment, or pretended to, before putting it on my head.

  Could what I was about to do to my brain harm the foetus?

  Not according to what had happened with the monkeys. They were all fine, physically. I could only harm myself. We’d theorised that too long a connection between minds, more than a few minutes, would result in an extreme form of what the schizophrenics dealt with, perhaps a complete brain shutdown. Death. I would have to feel that coming and get out, or would have to unconsciously see it approaching on the screen, or just count the seconds.

  Or I would fail my child completely.

  I nearly put it all away again, locked up, walked out.

  Nearly.

  I put the crown on my head, I connected the power source, I took the keyboard in my hands and I watched the particle trails in my own mind begin to resolve on the screen, and I concentrated on them, in the way we’d always talked about, and I started typing before I could think again. I hit activate.

  The minds of the monkeys seemed to select their own targets. The imaging for those experiments showed two sets of trails reacting to each other, symmetrical, beautiful. That seemed to suggest not the chaotic accident of schizophrenia, but something more tranquil, perhaps something like a religious experience, we’d said. But of course we had nothing objective to go on. I had theorised that since it turns out we evolved with every moment of ourselves just a stray particle away, the human trait of seeing patterns in chaos, of always assuming there is a hidden supernatural world, was actually selected for. We’d devised a feedback monitor that would allow a human subject to watch, and, with a bit of training, hence alter the particle tracks in one’s own
head via the keyboard and screen. I had hypothesised that, because the schizophrenic state can be diagnosed, that is, it isn’t just interference like white noise but a pattern of interference, there must be some rule limiting which past states were being accessed, something that let in only a finite number. It had been Lindsay who’d said that perhaps this was only about time and not about space, that perhaps one had to be relatively near the minds doing the interfering, and thus, perhaps, the range was limited by where the earth was in its orbit.

  That is to say, you only heard from your previous states of mind on the same calendar date.

  Which turns out to have been what you might call a saving grace.

  It was like being knocked out.

  I’d never been knocked out. Not then.

  I woke…and… Well, I must have been about three months old.

  My vision is the wrong shape. It’s like being in an enormous cinema with an oddly shaped screen. Everything in the background is a blur. I hear what I’m sure are words, but… I haven’t brought my understanding with me. It’s like that part of me can’t fit in a baby’s mind. This is terrifying, to hear the shapes of words but not know what they mean. I start yelling.

  The baby that I’m part of starts yelling in exactly the same way!

  And then…and then…

  The big comfort shape moves into view. Such joy comes with it. Hello, big comfort shape! It’s me! It’s me! Here I am!

  Big comfort shape puts its arms around me, and it’s the greatest feeling of my life. An addict’s feeling. I cry out again, me, I did that, to make it happen again, more! Even while it’s happening to me I want more. I yell and yell for more. And it gives me more.

  Up to a point.

  I pulled the crown off my head.

  I rubbed the tears from my face.

  If I’d stayed a moment longer, I might have wanted to stay forever, and thus harmed the mind I was in, all because I wasn’t used to asking for and getting such divine attention.

  Up to a point.

  What was that point? Why had I felt that? I didn’t know if I had, really. How was it possible to feel such a sense of love and presence, but also that miniscule seed of the opposite, that feeling of it not being enough or entire? Hadn’t I added that, hadn’t I dreamt it?