Chapter 151: Bell

Undefined Conviction

Chapter 151: Bell

He was waiting on the bench outside the laundrette on the Saturday morning, and Cole walked past him twice before he noticed.

That was the first thing and it should have been the warning.

Twice. Out to the shop for bread, and back again with the bread, and a man in his fifties sitting on a bench eleven feet from his own front door in a good coat he was not wearing properly — and Cole's eyes went across him both times the way eyes go across a bin.

On the third pass the man said: "Morning."

Cole stopped.

He could not have described him.

He stood on his own pavement at nine in the morning holding a loaf of bread and looked directly at a man sitting on a bench, and his eyes told him fifties, coat, ordinary and then nothing else would stay.

Not blurred. Not hidden. Every time he tried to hold the face, the face was fine, and the moment he stopped trying it was gone, and the only thing left was the certainty that there had been a face.

"You'll be trying to remember what I look like," the man said. "Don't. It gives people headaches."

"You're Bell."

"That's one of the things I've been called. It's the one I used in a town you've been reading about, so it'll do." He moved his hand slightly — not a gesture, an invitation. "Sit down. I've come a long way and I'm not going to do anything to you on a bench outside a laundrette."

Cole did not sit down.

"You were outside Trina's."

"I was."

"And in 1984."

"And in 1984," Bell agreed, pleasantly, "and on a sofa in Ashfield in 2016, and at a number of other places you'd find interesting and I'd find tiring to list." He folded his hands. "You've been in America. You met Agnes. I'm glad she's going to Yonkers, it's a nice garden."

Cole put the bread down on the wall.

That was the only warning Bell got and it was enough.

He got up off the bench the way a man gets up who has been expecting to for some time, and he was not there when Cole arrived.

Not dodging. Not there. Cole's hand went through the space where a man had been and hit the bench, and he turned, and there was a man standing four feet to his left, and he had not seen him move.

He had not seen him move because he had forgotten he was looking.

That was the fight, and it was the strangest one Cole would ever have.

Every time he committed, he lost the thread. He would decide to strike and in the half-second of the decision the target would slide out of his attention the way a word slides out of your head when somebody walks into the room — and he would find himself standing on a pavement with his weight forward and no memory of why.

He tried Verdict. There was nothing wrong to correct; Bell's forgettability was not a lie, it was simply true.

He tried the other thing, the door, and it came up behind his eyes — and Bell watched it come up, and smiled, and Cole forgot he'd opened it.

He tried the stupid way, because it had worked in a school corridor.

Taken from NovelPhoenix, this narrative should be reported if found on Amazon.

He stopped trying to see Bell at all. Shut his eyes, on his own pavement, in daylight, and went on sound — footsteps, breath, the creak of a good coat. It was the first genuinely clever thing he did all morning and for about three seconds it worked: he heard a shoe scuff to the right and turned into it and his forearm connected with something that was definitely a man.

Bell said "ah" in a tone of real surprise.

Then Cole forgot what he had been doing with his eyes shut and opened them, and there was nobody in front of him, and he had no idea which way he'd been facing.

"That was good," Bell said, from behind him. "That's the best anybody's managed since about 1971, and I want you to hold onto the fact that it lasted three seconds."

Bell hit him once.

Not hard. An open palm to the sternum, delivered with the unhurried precision of a man who had done it before, and Cole went back into the laundrette window and the glass starred behind his shoulders.

"There," Bell said. "That's what I came to establish. You're very good. You're better than anybody's told me and nobody's told me very much." He stepped back. "And you cannot fight something you can't keep hold of, and I'd like you to know that before anybody sends you after me."

"COLE."

Reeve's voice, from the top of the stairs.

He had come down because of the glass. He was in socks and a T-shirt with his hair on one side and he was holding, for reasons he would never adequately explain, a frying pan.

And he was looking directly at Bell.

Bell turned his head.

It was the first time his face had changed at all. Not alarm — something narrower. The expression of a man who has walked into a room and found a chair where he did not expect one.

"Oh," he said.

"Get away from him," Reeve said.

"You can see me."

"Obviously I can see you, you're in the — you're standing right there, you're wearing a coat like a prat—"

"Describe me," Bell said.

Reeve did.

Out loud, from a stairwell, in socks, holding a frying pan, in about eleven seconds, and he did not hesitate once.

Fifties. Grey at the temples. A small scar through the left eyebrow like somebody had caught it with a ring. Brown eyes, one very slightly lighter than the other. A coat that had been expensive and had not been looked after.

Cole heard all of it and could hold none of it, and felt each detail arrive and slide away, and understood — lying against a cracked laundrette window with his sternum on fire — that Reeve was holding every single one.

Bell looked at Reeve for a long time.

"What's your name?"

"None of your business."

"Refusal to Fade," Bell said, very quietly. "That's what it'll say on the form, won't it. Some clerk in a Ministry annex wrote down Refusal to Fade and thought it meant a boy who didn't want to be left out of things."

Reeve did not move.

"It doesn't mean that," Bell said. "I'd like you to go and look up what it means. I'd like you to do it tonight."

"And you," Bell said, turning back to Cole, and for the first time something in his voice was not pleasant. "You'll want to go looking. You'll get Dana to run my description through something clever and it will come back empty, because every system that's ever tried to hold me was built by somebody who forgot they were building it."

"Then why come?"

"Because in 1984 I stood in a house behind a chapel in a small town and I watched a girl who looked a great deal like your young woman sit in a room for two days without speaking." Bell buttoned his coat, finally, properly, the first time all morning. "And she was told something, and she agreed to it, and I was the one who made sure that afterwards nobody in that town remembered she'd ever been there."

Nobody said anything.

"I'm not here to apologise," Bell said. "I'd like that understood. I'm here because forty-one years later somebody has lit a lamp in a window, and I would like to know who's asking."

He left.

He walked to the end of the road without hurrying, and Cole watched him the whole way and lost him four separate times and found him again each time only because Reeve said there, by the post box, there, by the corner, until Reeve said gone, and he was.

Cole sat on the wet pavement with his back against his own front door.

Reeve came down the rest of the stairs and sat down next to him and put the frying pan down on the step.

"Are you all right?"

"No." Cole had his hand flat on his sternum. "Reeve. What did he look like?"

"I just told you."

"Tell me again."

Reeve told him again.

Cole listened to every word and could not hold one of them, and at the end of it he said, "Again," and Reeve looked at him properly for the first time and his face changed.

"You can't remember any of it," Reeve said.

"No."

"I've told you twice."

"I know."

Reeve sat on a wet step in his socks for about a minute.

"I've been the useless one," he said. "In this flat. For a year. I'm not complaining, I'm just saying it's been — I've been the one who carries things."

"Reeve—"

"And a man just stood in the street that you couldn't see and Dana couldn't see and probably nobody's been able to see for forty years." His voice had gone very thin. "And I could see him. Clearly. I could see him better than I can see you right now."

He looked at the frying pan.

"What does it mean?" he said. "Refusal to Fade. What does it actually mean, Cole, because he said it like he was frightened of it."

[End of Chapter 151]