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Dedication

I dedicate this novel to my mother, Jutta Marianne George (May 18, 1939–September 27, 2017), and beloved wife of Broad Jo.

She always delighted in traveling to all kinds of imaginary worlds with me.

Maybe our lives are nothing but stories that are being read by other people.

DAY ONE

Henri

I jump.

The fall only lasts a few seconds. I can hear the engines of the cars above me on Hammersmith Bridge. Rush hour. I smell the city, the fading fragrance of spring, of dew on the leaves. Then I plunge into the cold water and it closes over my head. I strike out with my arms, gathering speed as the receding tide carries me with it. Despite being more than thirty miles away, the sea sucks the river toward it. My body has not forgotten the tug of the tide; it’s as if I never left the sea, although it’s over twenty-five years since I last bathed in the Atlantic.

Finally I reach the girl.

The river is dragging her along. It wants to own her. It’s intent on breaking down her body into its constituent parts, severing her hopes from her fears, ripping the smile from her lips, and cutting off her future.

She’s sinking into the muddy waters. I dive and pull her closer by her hair. I manage to catch hold of a slender, slippery upper arm. I tighten my grip and gather my breath for the coming struggle. Salty, ice-cold water floods into my mouth. The Thames wraps me in its embrace.

Her face, with eyes the color of the wintry sea, floats toward me. She’s pinching her nose shut with the fingers of one hand, as if she had merely jumped into the lukewarm, chlorine-tinged water of a swimming pool. In fact, she has fallen overboard, one of the many pleasure craft carrying tourists along the Thames. After climbing onto the second-highest bar of the boat’s railings, the girl had tilted her face to catch the May sunshine when a chance wave slapped against the hull, raising the stern and tipping the whole boat forward. The girl didn’t make a sound, but her eyes were brimming with boundless curiosity.

From Hammersmith Bridge we watched her fall—the kissing couple, the beggar in the threadbare tuxedo, and me.

The beggar jumped up from his “turf,” a piece of cardboard in a sunny spot against the suspension bridge’s green rail. “Oh my God!” he whispered. The couple turned to me. Neither they nor the beggar moved a muscle—they simply stared at me. So I clambered over the green cast-iron railing, waited until the small figure surfaced below me, and jumped.

The girl is gazing at me with more trust and hope than a man like me deserves. Of all the people in this city who might have been in a position to rescue her, it had to be me.

I lace my arms around her frail, wet body. The girl kicks out, and her feet catch me in the head and mouth. I swallow water, I breathe in water, but I still manage to make myself buoyant and push for the surface. The world grows louder again. The May wind feels mild on my wet face; the waves send spray into my eyes. I turn onto my back to form a bobbing, watery cot and haul the girl onto my chest so she can breathe and look up at the blue sky. In this position, we float down the Thames past brick facades and wooden boats moored to the muddy banks.

The kid splutters and gasps for air. She seems to be about four or five. I don’t have a clue about children, not even my own.

Samuel. Sam. He’s thirteen and he’s waiting for me. He’s always been waiting for me. Forever. I was never there.

I start humming Charles Trenet’s La Mer, that majestic hymn to the beauty of the sea. Scraps of the French lyrics bubble up into my mind. I haven’t spoken my native tongue since I was eighteen, but now it comes flooding back.

As I sing, I gradually sense that the girl’s heart is settling into a calmer rhythm. I feel her little lungs pumping and her trust piercing the film of water and fear between us. I hold her tightly and use one arm to propel myself on my back toward the bank, where there is a small jetty. My clothes are soaked. I kick my legs like a frog and my ungainly one-sided crawl makes me look like a one-armed bandit.

“It’s going to be okay,” I whisper. I can hear Eddie’s voice clearly inside my head, as if she were there, whispering in my ear: “You’re not a good liar, Henri. It’s one of your greatest qualities.”

Eddie is the best thing that never happened to me.

My shoulder bumps into one of the floating barrels supporting the jetty. There’s a ladder within reach. I grab the girl by the waist and lift her up, pushing her tiny feet higher and higher until she finds a handhold and wriggles out of my grasp.

I follow her. I climb out of the river; pick up the exhausted child, who is desperately trying not to weep; and carry her past yellow, red, and gray houses back to Hammersmith Bridge. The girl entwines her arms around my neck and buries her face in my shoulder. She’s as light as a feather, but she gets heavier and heavier as I walk along, pursued by the nagging thought that I really need to hurry now to meet Sam. I must go to him. I must. My son’s waiting for me at his school.

The same couple is still standing there on the bridge, holding each other close. The woman looks at me in a daze, her eyes wide and shiny. The kohl swooshes at their corners and her beehive hairstyle remind me of Amy Winehouse. Holding up his smartphone, the man keeps saying, “I don’t believe it. I don’t believe it, man. You actually got her. That was unbelievable.”

“Were you only filming or did you think of calling for help?” I hiss at him.

I put the girl down. She doesn’t want to let go, and her tiny hands cling to my neck before finally slipping through my wet hair.

All of a sudden I feel very weak and lose my balance. Incapable of standing upright, I stagger out into the road. The little girl screams.

Something big and hot sweeps into view over my shoulder. I see a twisted face through glass. I see a black bonnet, glinting in the sunlight, swipe my legs from under me. And then I see my own shadow rising at breakneck speed from the asphalt to meet me, and hear a noise like eggshells breaking on the rim of a china cup.

The pain in my head is a thousand times more intense than the agonizing twinge you feel when you bite into an ice cream. Everything around me goes quiet. Then I melt. I melt into the ground. I sink down, faster and faster, as if I were plummeting into a deep black lake beneath the asphalt.

Something is gazing up at me expectantly from the lake’s murky depths. The sky is receding all the time, its arc farther and farther overhead. As I seep into the stone, I see the girl’s face up above, staring sadly at me with her oddly familiar eyes, which are the color of the sea in winter. Her oceanic eyes are now indistinguishable from the lake above me. I merge into the lake and its waters claim my body. Women and men cluster around the shores, obscuring the last patch of blue sky. I hear their thoughts inside my head.

The woman in the Mini tried to swerve out of the way.

The light of the low sun. It must have been the blinding light. She didn’t see him.

From the way he stumbled out into the road, I thought he must be drunk.

Is he alive?

I can make out the beggar in the threadbare tuxedo as he pushes the other people aside, offering me a fresh glimpse of the sky—the never-ending, beautiful sky.

I close my eyes. I’ll rest for a while and then get up again and continue on my way. I can just about make it there on time. It’ll take a while before the roll call for Fathers’ and Sons’ Day gets to Sam and me, to V for Valentiner, his mother’s surname.

Dear Dad,

We don’t know each other, and I think we should do something about that. If you agree, come to Fathers’ and Sons’ Day on 18 May at Colet Court. That’s part of St. Paul’s School for boys in Barnes. It’s on the banks of the Thames. I’ll be waiting for you outside.

Samuel Noam Valentiner

I’LL BE RIGHT with you, Sam. I’m just having a little rest.

Someone pries open my eyelids. The lakeshore is far, far away, high above me, and a man is calling down from the rim of the hole. He’s wearing a paramedic’s uniform and gold-framed sunglasses. He smells of smoke. I can see my reflection in his shades. I see my eyes go dull and glaze over. I see the paramedic’s thoughts.

Come on, his thoughts echo inside the hole I’m in. Don’t. Don’t die. Please, don’t die.

A long shrill beep draws a straight line under my life.

Not now!

Not now! It’s too soon!

It’s . . .

It . . .

The long beep swells into a final drumroll.

I jump.

DAY FIFTEEN

Sam

2:35 p.m. Samuel Noam Valentiner.

Patient visited: Henri M. Skinner.

Fourteen times I’ve written these same words, but every day I have to register again. Every day Mrs. Walker pushes the black clipboard toward me with a form on which I must enter, in capitals, the time, my name, and the name of the patient I’m visiting.

The name above mine is Ed Tomlin. Ed Tomlin also visits my father, always a few hours before me while I’m still at school. Who is he?

“I was here yesterday,” I tell Mrs. Walker.

“Oh, I know that, darling.”

The woman at the Wellington Hospital reception is lying. She doesn’t recognize me at all. Lies have a particular sound: they’re whiter than someone’s normal voice. Her name is printed in capital letters on the sign above her left breast: SHEILA WALKER. She calls me “darling” because she can’t remember my name. English people are like that: they hate to tell the truth—it’s rude.

Sheila Walker’s body bears the shadows of many years. I can tell, just as I can tell with most people. Some have many shadows, others fewer, and children have hardly any. If they do have shadows, then it’s because they come from countries like Syria and Afghanistan, and their shadows grow longer as they grow up.

Mrs. Walker has experienced a lot of sadness, and she’s so preoccupied with the past that she neglects the present. That’s why to her I’m merely a boy in a school uniform whose voice is breaking—with embarrassing effects. Maybe when she looks at me she sees a beach and her empty hand, which nobody has held for years.

I was here yesterday and the day before, though. And the one before, and the eleven days before that too. I cut one teacher’s lesson one time and another’s the next, sometimes in the mornings, sometimes in the afternoons. Today it’s French with Madame Lupion. Scott said I should make sure that I spread the missed lessons across all subjects so the teachers don’t catch on so quickly.

Scott McMillan is a specialist at cutting class, Googling, and doing things nobody else does. He also excels at chess, drawing, and getting bad marks at school. At everything, in fact. He’s thirteen, has an IQ of 148, can fake anybody’s handwriting, and has a rich father who hates him.

My IQ’s a mere 144, which makes him “very gifted” and me “gifted,” or as Scott would put it, “Moi le Brainman, you my smart-ass sidekick, mon ami.” Le Brainman is currently going through a French phase after polishing up on his Mandarin and an African dialect that features lots of clicking sounds.

I’m thirteen too. I’m a synesthete—or, as some boys at my school call me, a synes-creep—and my father’s in an induced coma. That’s like a long-lasting anesthetic, except for the fact that he has small suckers in his brain that are supposed to relieve the pressure, a machine that takes care of his breathing, another one that keeps his blood cool, and yet another one that eats and pees for him. They intend to wake him up today.

Nobody at school, apart from Scott, knows that my father’s in a coma. That’s partly because nobody knows that Steve, my mother’s husband, isn’t my real father. Except for Scott, who once said to me, “Man, at one fell swoop you could be the most interesting boy at school—well, for one wonderful week at least. Give it some thought: you might not want to pass up this opportunity. Being the mystery kid could be one of the greatest things that ever happened to you. It’d work like magic on the girls too.” There are no girls at our school.

Scott and I are the only thirteen-year-olds at Colet Court to have been invited to join Mensa. Scott calls this high-IQ society the “wimps’ club.” My mum says I should be proud of myself, as one of only two Year Eight students among the nine hundred or so young Mensa members in England, but being ordered to be proud leaves a nasty taste in my mouth.

If she knew I was here, she might give me up for adoption. Never speak to me again. Send me to boarding school. I’ve no idea how she’d react.

“Thank you, darling.” Sheila Walker’s voice reverts to its normal color as she picks up the sign-in clipboard from the counter and types my name into the computer. Her long fingernails make a bright green clatter on the keyboard.

“You need to go up to the second floor, Samuel Noam Valentiner,” she says emphatically, as if I didn’t know.

The intensive care unit on the second floor is for patients wrapped in silence and loneliness. That’s why they’re sent here, to the Wellington Hospital’s neurology department. The London Brain Centre—the NASA of brain departments.

Sheila Walker hands me an A4 map of the hospital, the same one I received yesterday and the day before. With energetic swishes of her red felt-tip she circles where we are now—“We’re here”—and where I have to go—“You need to go there”—and marks the shortest route between the two points—“You’d be best taking that lift over there, Samuel.”

Mrs. Walker would be well suited to working at an information desk in the tube. “Turn right for Kensington, straight ahead for hernias, and the morgue’s on your left after the vending machine.”

“Have a nice day, Mr. Valentiner,” she says.

“You too, Mrs. Walker,” I reply, but she’s no longer paying attention.

MY MOTHER came with me to the hospital on the first day. As we waited for the lift, she said, “We don’t owe your father a thing, you know. Nothing. The only reason we’re here is because—”

“I get it,” I interrupted her. “You don’t want to see him. You promised yourself you wouldn’t.”

After a second she angrily retorted, “How come you always get everything, Sam? You’re not old enough!” She gave me a map of the hospital. “I’m sorry. It’s just that your father drives me up the wall. Oh, Sam.”

She wasn’t pleased that I had secretly asked my father to the Fathers’ and Sons’ Day at Colet Court. “He won’t come anyway,” she said at the time. Her voice suffused me like a fragrance, like the scent of rosemary in the rain, sad and muted. At that precise moment I could feel how much she loved me. All at once I could breathe properly, as if I were standing on the world’s highest peak. The ball of phlegm that usually clogged my chest was gone.

Sometimes my love for my mum is so overpowering that I wish I could die so she’d finally be happy again. Then she’d be left with her husband, Steve, and my little brother, Malcolm. A normal family—just father, mother, and child, rather than father, mother, child, and me, the kid who never looks anyone in the eye, reads too much science fiction, and is a permanent reminder of a man she can’t stand.

“Listen,” I suggested. “I’ll go in on my own, but only if I can stay for as long as I want and you wait for me in the cafeteria.”

She gave me a hug. I could sense how much she wanted to say yes, and how ashamed this made her feel.

My mother hasn’t always been like this. There was a time when she worked as a photographer and traveled to war zones. She was afraid of nothing—of nothing and nobody. But then something happened. That thing was me, an accident, and everything changed. Now she sneaks through her own life, as if she’s constantly trying to duck out of harm’s way.

“Please, Mum,” I said, “I’m almost fourteen. I’m no longer a kid.”

My mother ended up going to the cafeteria, and I went up alone to visit the second floor and the man who became my father because my mother slept with him once during what she refers to as an “embarrassing moment.” She’s never told me where and why it occurred.

Sheila Walker has already forgotten me as I make for the lift and take it to the second floor. The first thing I have to do there is put a smock over my school blazer, disinfect my hands and lower arms, and cover my mouth and nose with a white oval mask.

The brain center’s intensive care unit is like a large, brightly lit warehouse. There are beds along three long walls—A, B, and C. Rails run just below the ceiling, allowing blue curtains to be pulled around each bed to form a separate cubicle. On a raised platform in the center of the hall are several counters equipped with computer monitors and controls. Doctors sit there watching screens or making phone calls. Every patient has been assigned his or her personal nurse.

It resembles a refugee camp, because the coma patients aren’t called by their names, only by a combination of a letter and a number. “A3, glucose level falling.” “B9, restless.” None of them is real anymore. My father is C7. One of the “zombies.”

On my first visit, the right side of his head had been shaved and then daubed with orange iodine tincture. Lengths of white adhesive tape had been stuck on his face to hold the breathing tube in place, and his skin was blue, green, and purple—the colors of night, strength, and dreams. When I entered the ward, I felt as if liquid concrete were oozing into my stomach and hardening with every breath. That lump of concrete has been inside me ever since.

I’ve already told you that I’m a synes-creep. I experience the world differently from other people. I see sounds, voices, and music as colors. The London Underground sounds steel gray, like a bagful of knives. My mother’s voice is soft, like soft gauze on a frozen lake. And purple. My voice is currently colorless, but when I’m scared it turns bright yellow. When I speak it’s light blue, like a baby’s playsuit. It’s breaking at the moment, and ideally I would say nothing further until that’s over.

People who know who they are and what they’re capable of have green voices. Dark-green voices, serene and majestic like a wise old forest.

For me, numbers also have colors. The figure eight is green, four is yellow, and five is blue. Letters have personalities: R is aggressive, S is sly, and K is a covert racist. Z is cooperative and F is a diva. G is upright and strong.

When I enter a room I can tell which emotions have been felt in it most frequently. With someone like Mrs. Walker, I can sense how heavyhearted she is by the density of the shadows surrounding her.

I can’t look another person in the eye. There’s too much there, and much of it I don’t understand. Sometimes I’m afraid that their gaze will tell me they’re about to die, which turned out to be the case with our housemaster at Colet Court and our neighbor Mrs. Logan.

People with synesthesia used to be regarded as pathological. Pathologically shy, pathologically oversensitive, a real burden on their families. Children who have it are always screaming, quick to tears, and peculiar in other ways too. When they grow up they often turn out to be borderline, complete schizophrenics, or prone to depression. Many kill themselves because they can’t cope with the world and the way they see it. Hypersensitive crybabies. If there were any pills to treat this condition, I’d be gobbling them like Smarties.

THE FIRST TIME I walked through the ward of the “zombies,” it felt as if their souls were bleeding colors. I perceive that kind of thing, although I’d rather not. Then I caught sight of the man in C7. I felt nothing.

It was weird. I’ve never felt nothing. Only that once. The stranger was lying motionless on his back on an aluminum bed. The shadows around him were thick, the color of the moon. His eyes were closed, and he gave off nothing. That nothing worried me, but only in a strange, standoffish way.

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