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By Root 610 0

I’d worked with several times already. I liked Val. She knew what was possible and what was impossible, and if she needed the impossible, she was always prepared to pay extra for it. She’d just moved to a new publisher, and Fantastic Machines was her first big project there. She really needed it to succeed, and so did I. The trouble was that the budget for the thing was starting to get swollen and ugly, largely because the film companies wanted big greedy slices of the pie. So I knew that as well as Val and the editorial people, there’d be a couple of cold-eyed accountants at the meeting. Which is why I was at my worktable two hours earlier than usual, getting cranked up on black coffee, going through the designs one last time, rehearsing my spiel, thinking about what could be sacrificed when the accounts people asked how we were going to trim the figures.

The phone rang just before seven thirty. I was going to leave it to the answering machine, but picked up at the fifth chirrup, figuring it might just be Val.

“Hi,” I said.

There was that little pause you often get when someone realizes they’ve got the wrong number.

Then, “Hello? Is that Clem Ackroyd?”

A woman’s voice with an upper-crust English accent. It spoke my name with a tiny hint of amusement, as though not quite able to believe that anybody could really be called that.

And I knew. Ridiculously, impossibly, I knew. My heart hiccuped. I couldn’t speak, and in the ensuing short silence my dodgy hearing played one of its tricks. The faint static on the line turned into an echoic rustling: the sound of time sloughing its skin.

“Hello?”

“Yes,” I managed, and cleared my throat. “Yes, it is.”

“Clem, it’s Françoise. Françoise Mortimer. Frankie.”

“Dear God.”

“Yes.”

“Frankie?”

“Yes.”

I felt dizzy. (Dizziness when I’m confronted by the unexpected is one of the features of my damage.)

“This is . . .” I said, and couldn’t think what the next words might be.

She supplied them. “Something of a surprise, I imagine. A nice one, or horrid?”

“I don’t know. No, of course not horrid. Christ, Frankie.”

“You don’t want to hang up? You can if you want to. If you do, I won’t call again.”

“No,” I said, and there was probably a touch of panic in the word. “I don’t want to hang up. I’m, I was just . . .”

“Oh, Lord,” she said. “What time is it in New York? Have I got my sums wrong? It’s nearly lunchtime here. Did I wake you up?”

“No, it’s fine. I was . . . I had an early start.”

I was staring down at a penciled piece of nonsense labeled Android Phase Transformer.

I said, “Frankie.”

Like a child who has just discovered a thrilling word and can’t stop saying it.

“Where are you, Frankie?”

“Bratton. The manor. I’ve been here for some time. Looking after my father. He had a stroke. Then he got pneumonia and died. His funeral was yesterday, actually.”

Actually. I was telescoped to a barn. It’s beautiful, actually. Her covering the body that I’d drawn. Memory like a keen fragrance. One I didn’t want. I’d healed and moved on.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“There’s no need to be. He was suffering, and I didn’t like him, anyway. I never forgave him. But I thought it might be interesting to play the role of the dutiful daughter for once. Besides, there was nobody else.”

“What about your mum?” I asked, and immediately regretted it. Mum was a word I hadn’t used for years. I was regressing, losing control.

Frankie said, “Nicole died several years ago. They’d separated, anyway. So now I’m a poor little orphan. That’s not true, actually. I’m a terribly rich middle-aged orphan.”

I couldn’t cope with it. I didn’t want to hear this. For almost forty years Frankie had dwelled like a pearl in my chest, oystered in my heart, something to be dug out and examined when I was wheeled, beyond speech and explanation, to my postmortem. On this morning it was grotesquely inappropriate. I was alive and had stuff in the present tense to deal with.

I looked at my watch. I couldn’t read it. The numerals were blurred because I was freshly full of ancient loss.

Somehow, I said, “How did you find me?”