tune, became a wall of static and frequency noise.
“Do you remember this evening? You collected an elderly man and woman, Mr and Mrs Wyndham. They’d been walking out at Marland. Their son’s car broke down so they called a taxi to bring them back into the city. You were the driver of that taxi. Do you remember?” The driver offered a confused nod, lost in a dream of his own, and Will said finally, “Forget about us.” He climbed back out of the car and closed the door.
Will and Eloise started to walk towards The Whole Earth and Eloise checked her watch and said, “Twenty to eleven, a good time to catch them.” Then, as an afterthought, “You’ll be able to get me back into school, won’t you?”
“Of course.”
“And you just got back into the taxi because …?” She looked behind and Will followed suit – the taxi driver was sitting where they’d left him, looking confused, fiddling with the buttons on his radio.
“I hypnotised him, muddied his thoughts – he’ll have some vague recollection of us, but jumbled up with other things, false memories. The fewer people who remember us the better.”
Eloise shook her head and said, “There are times when I realise I hardly know you at all. I mean, I know you, but I forget all the weird stuff.”
“That’s one of the reasons I like being with you.”
She looked at Will questioningly.
“Because you make
me
forget the weird stuff. Sometimes when I’m with you I forget …” He tried to sum up the enormity of how transformed he was by her company, but he couldn’t. “I just forget.”
“Me too.” She smiled, and they turned into the narrow street where The Whole Earth was located, less busy than usual, no doubt because of the cold. They were nearly at the café when Eloise said, “If there is a problem with Chris and Rachel, couldn’t you hypnotise them to forget? Marcus Jenkins too.”
“It would make life simpler, but I don’t think so. For one thing, I imagine Wyndham is powerful enough to counter my limited efforts, perhaps even to usethem against me. We should hope, instead, for simple explanations.”
He stopped at the café door and Eloise stepped in ahead of him. Before Will was inside, he heard Rachel say, “This is a nice surprise! What are you doing here?”
Without missing a beat, Eloise said, “We needed to come into the city, but we wouldn’t have asked you to fetch us during opening hours.”
Rachel smiled and kissed Eloise on the cheek. She looked at Will, falling short of encroaching on his physical space, as she said, “Thanks. It
has
been manic this evening. Do you want to go through and we’ll follow as soon as we’re free.”
Chris emerged from the kitchen carrying a tray with soup and bread on it. He looked visibly shocked at the sight of them standing there and it took a moment for him to regain his composure. He placed the food in front of a customer at a corner table, and by the time he turned back to them, he was smiling.
He approached with his arm outstretched, shaking Will’s hand, then kissing Eloise on the cheek as Rachel had. Will noticed his hand was dry and hot, without the supposed tell-tale clamminess of the guilty.
“You didn’t tell us you were coming in.”
“They didn’t want to call us away from the café,” said Rachel. “Isn’t that sweet of them?”
Her response was genuine, but it appeared to irritate Chris in some way, as if she’d broken his momentum. If that was the case, he rebounded quickly enough, saying, “Well, to be honest, this evening would’ve been difficult, but we’ll take you back of course.”
Someone called him from behind and he made his excuses and returned to work. Will and Eloise left Rachel and walked through to the house, sitting on the green sofas where Will had first confronted them about their interest in him. There was a sickly familiarity about the return of his suspicions, made worse by the realisation that Rachel and Chris had been privy to