Dissolution
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Synopsis
“Suspenseful, provocative and surprisingly tender.”—NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW
“Cleverly weaves together time travel and memory games into a hard-to-put-down thriller. It’s an expertly crafted puzzle of a story.”—NEW SCIENTIST
A woman dives into her husband's memories to uncover a decades-old feud threatening reality itself in this staggering technothriller from the bestselling author of Ascension
Maggie Webb has lived the last decade caring for elderly husband, Stanley, as memory loss gradually erases all the beautiful moments they created together. It's the loneliest she's ever felt in her life.
When a mysterious stranger named Hassan appears at her door, he reveals a shocking truth: Stanley isn't losing his memories. Someone is actively removing them to hide a long-buried secret from coming to light. If Maggie does what she's told, she can reverse it. She can get her husband back.
Led by Hassan and his technological marvels, Maggie breaks into her husband's mind, probing the depths of his memories in an effort to save him. The deeper she dives, the more she unravels a mystery spanning continents and centuries, each layer more complex than the last. But Hassan cannot be trusted. Not just memories are disappearing, but pieces of reality itself. If Maggie cannot find out what Stanley did all those years ago, and what Hassan is after, she risks far more than her husband's life. The very course of human history hangs in the balance.
Release date: March 25, 2025
Publisher: Riverhead Books
Print pages: 352
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Dissolution
Nicholas Binge
1
Transcript No. 273: Margaret Webb
Date Stamp: 11 AUG. 2021
11 Hours, 0 Minutes, and 0 Seconds Until Dissolution
You’ve got eleven hours until reset. You need to tell me exactly what happened.
Where am I?
We’ve been over this, Maggie. It’s not important. The only thing that’s important is that you focus on me.
What do you mean “it’s not important”? I don’t know where I am. I don’t know who you are. How can that possibly not be important?
I’m Hassan. Do you remember me?
No…I mean, yes. I think. The name rings a bell.
Take a second. Breathe. You’re in a daze.
Have we…? We’ve met before, haven’t we?
We have.
Where is Stanley? Is he okay?
That is precisely what we are trying to find out.
What do you mean? Oh God, has something happened to him? Is he safe?
Calm down. We don’t have time. I need you to focus—to remember what’s going on. Let’s start by focusing on the present. Tell me about your surroundings. Talking it through will help. Tell me where we are.
We’re in a…Is this an empty swimming pool?
Of sorts. Describe it to me.
What the hell is going on?
You’re disoriented. Your brain is recovering from the shift. Describe to me what’s going on around you—the small details. What do you see? What does it sound like? What time of day is it?
I’m…we’re inside. Is that right? The light is artificial, and there are no windows, like we’re underground. The pool is empty—totally drained—and I’m starting to question if it’s even a pool. It’s too blank, too clinical. More like a giant bath basin.
Where are we, the two of us?
Surely you can see it as well as I can. Oh God, the sunglasses. Are you blind?
I’m not blind. We’re just establishing a cognitive baseline. Think of this like a sobriety test; I need to check you’re properly focused, like counting how many fingers are on my hand.
Okay. Well, we’re set up at this desk right in the middle of the basin. You and me, and no one else, facing each other. It’s deserted. My arm is hooked up to an IV. Why? Am I sick?
What can you hear?
Right now? The only sound is our voices echoing through the room.
Good. That’s very good, Maggie. More. What’s on the table?
There’s…a small cylindrical container, like a pill bottle, as well as a glass of water. There’s a pen and paper and a recording device, as if I’m in some kind of interrogation room. But I’m not. I’m in a pool. Why am I in a pool? Why am I hooked up to whatever is in that IV bag?
The why is not important. You don’t need to worry about that right now.
Oh really? Well, young man, what do I need to worry about?
We need to know exactly what happened that led you here. It’s absolutely crucial, for all of us, that we know this. You need to tell me, in as much detail as you can, about the first time you saw me.
I can’t…remember. I can’t remember anything. What are you doing with that container?
This pill will help jog your memory.
I’ve not taken pills from strangers in a good few decades.
If you don’t start remembering soon, we will run out of time, and this will all be for nothing. The pill is not dangerous, I promise. It will just help clear the fog in your brain. Please. It’s very important that we understand what took place. We don’t have much time. We have to find Stanley.
Okay, okay. Fine. Keep your socks on. Jesus. If I weren’t eighty-three, I’d think
you were up to something.
Urgh, that’s awful. I can feel that right in my throat. It stings. What the hell was that? And, at the risk of repeating myself, what the hell is going on?
Stanley isn’t safe. None of us are safe. Something happened, and I need your help to find out exactly what. Think back: When was the first time you saw me?
What?
We have to go from the beginning. We have to see every moment. It’s the only way we can know for sure. Close your eyes. Let your memories come back. Go to the first time you see me.
Okay, I’ll try, but I don’t know what you expect is going to…Wait. What on earth?
What is it?
I can see it. It’s as though…This is strange—this isn’t like a normal memory at all. I can see the whole room in front of me. It’s like I’m there.
That’s the pill starting to work. It’s a memory enhancer.
This is more than just an enhancer. I can hear the kettle boiling. I can taste the dryness on my tongue from the glass of wine I had last night. I’m not remembering, Hassan. I’m there.
Good—that is exactly what we need. The first time you see me, where are you?
I’m…I’m at home. I think. Or what used to be home. I don’t like calling it that anymore.
Why not?
Because it was only home when Stanley was there. Now it’s just a house—big, too big for me, with too many bedrooms and an open-plan kitchen I used to love. I guess I still call it home when I’m talking to other people. Or when I’m thinking to myself, Okay, it’s been a long day, I should head home, or something similar. But that word’s just a sound now—it doesn’t carry the meaning it once did when Stanley and Leah were here. Because it isn’t ours anymore, it doesn’t feel like mine. Does that make
sense?
Am I in the house?
No. Not yet. It’s just me and Sandra, the lady from Sunrise—the care home. She’s talking to me about Stanley’s condition, but to be honest, I’ve stopped listening. Halfway through the conversation, I get up to make a cup of tea. Not because I want tea but because I can’t stand sitting opposite her anymore. She gives me a sympathetic, condescending look, like she finds it cute that I’m so old and still boil my kettle on the stove. I hate that ageist nonsense—obviously I have an electric kettle, and obviously I know how to bloody use it—but boiling the kettle on the hob gives me an excuse to put my back to her. It allows me to pretend to listen, even while I’m drowning her out.
Do you always ignore people you don’t like?
Oh, it’s not her. It’s the mundanity of it: the back-and-forth about all the kind of nonsense I’ve never wanted to care about—Stanley’s bowel movements, food intake, medication. I used to hate those kinds of routines when I was young, feeling like I was trapped, like I was on a wheel. That feeling’s been growing in me more and more these days. I wasn’t always this callous, you know? At first, when Stanley went in, I obsessed over all that stuff. It was the only way I could establish any kind of control. But now? After the thousandth conversation, I just can’t face it anymore. Frankly, I pay enough to that place that I have earned the right to ignore them when I want to. God, saying that out loud makes me sound horrible. What am I doing? Why am I telling you all this?
The drug I gave you—it encourages verbalization of your inner monologue, stimulating the pathways between your memory and your speech center. This is all good, all these details. Don’t skip over anything. Is Stanley in the care home now? When did you last see him?
He is. I visited him at Sunrise just that morning. He didn’t recognize me, which wasn’t a complete surprise. That’s been happening more and more often recently.
It began several years earlier. When I’d visit, I’d sit by his bed and talk to him about what was going on in my life. Well, I’d invent things, because I never wanted him to know how dull my life had become. I used to tell him how Leah was
doing—off traveling the world, making her mark—but she doesn’t talk to me anymore, and I haven’t the faintest idea why.
But Stanley, he just…wouldn’t respond. He would stare off into the distance, occasionally mumbling something I couldn’t quite catch, and I thought, This is it. This is the moment when my husband forgets me.
But it wasn’t. Not then. I know that because it actually happened two years later. For all my fuzziness, that’s one thing I know I’ll never forget. I walked into his room to water the plants on his windowsill—I like to water them on Tuesdays—and the look on his face, oh God, it was one I’d never seen before. The confusion and the panic. The fear. It makes total sense when you think about it. It’s the same look any of us would give a complete stranger appearing in our bedroom.
He gave me the same look this morning, the morning I met you, but I’m used to it. It happens now and again—sometimes a couple of times a week, sometimes not for a whole month. It always makes me think about something Stanley said when we were younger, though, in our sixties. We’d just finished calling Leah after her first term at university, and the house was emptier than we’d thought it would be. For eighteen years, we’d been half-joking about the freedom we’d have once she left home to do anything we liked, but the truth was, we just missed her.
Stanley turned to me after she’d said goodbye, and he said, “It occurs to me that at some point, you pick up your child for the very last time. And you don’t know. At the time, you don’t know that it’s the last time you’ll ever do it.” He was right, of course: Endings don’t announce themselves. They sneak around you; they shuffle their way past unnoticed until, on some cloudy day, you look out on an empty street and realize everything ended some time ago.
I worry about that with Stanley now. That one day will be the last time he recognizes me. That one day will be the very last time he knows who I am, and for some stupid, silly reason, I want to make an ending of it. I want to tell him it’s okay. God, I almost want to pop open a bottle of champagne just to, you know, mark the moment. To say: If this is the end of fifty-two years of marriage, then that’s okay. I can accept that.
But it really hit me that morning that there won’t be an ending. I’ll just notice at some point that he hasn’t recognized me in months. And
that will be that. It will be over.
Go back to the house, with Sandra. What’s happening?
She’s still talking. I’ve finished making my tea, and I’m realizing that I’ll have to sit opposite her again. Is this right? Am I covering the right things?
I can’t say. We’ll only know from certain very specific details. Keep going.
She’s not talking about Stanley anymore. She’s telling me about her work at the care home, about Sunrise. She hasn’t been there very long—just transferred over from another owned by the same company down south.
“Who’s humoring who here?” I ask. She’s becoming dull, and I’ve almost finished my tea.
“Excuse me?”
I put down my cup. “Are you still talking because you figure a lonely old bat like me needs the company, or am I the one pretending to care about your life out of social nicety? I only say because I think it might be both.”
“Oh,” she says, staring at her hands. “Oh, I see. I should be going.” She gets up and bustles her scattered things together, like a bird gathering twigs for a nest. When she gets to the door, she says, “There was no need to be rude.”
I roll my eyes. After eighty-three years on this planet, I’ve found that, actually, there’s no need to be polite.
I close the door and turn around. In front of me, there’s a corridor, a stairway to the right that leads up to two empty bedrooms and an attic. There are no pictures on the walls—I moved the ones that meant anything to Stanley’s room, to try and help him remember. The others I donated to the charity shop or the skip.
I move from the door and go into the living room. There’s a breeze coming through the windows, a gap in the insulation that I haven’t got fixed. It chills me.
Looking at the sofa, the coffee table, the curtains, I see flashes of my life inscribed upon them: Stanley rolling around on the carpet with Leah, tickling her; her running away, then rushing back for more; Stanley crying on the sofa after she left home and me hiding behind the doorway, not wanting him to see that I have seen him; two glasses of wine and a half-empty bottle on the coffee table, the TV on behind them. The images are there, but they aren’t there—pieces of the past superimposed upon one another, like a canvas that’s been painted over a hundred times. The last coat of paint doesn’t have any color to
it. Just an off-white hue. Barren.
I don’t know why Leah doesn’t answer my calls. It’s deliberate, I know that much. I know she’s an adult now, I do, even if I have to pinch myself and remember that she’s in her forties, but when Stanley started forgetting, she was all I had left. She doesn’t even give me the courtesy of letting my calls ring out, of pretending she’s not available. She just hangs up on me. I’ve sent her pleading text messages. I still send her long emails, hoping that she might read them. Recently, I’ve stopped calling, because I can’t deal with the physical pang of despair—like a wound in my chest—that stabs through me every time she turns me down.
She won’t even tell me what it is I’ve done. I think that’s the worst part. She’s just cut me out of her life like an unwanted piece of gristle.
My sister told me I should sell the house—move in somewhere smaller with fewer memories. One of those little one-bedroom flats where I can live out my days alone eating ready meals and doing “Seniors Yoga with Morganne” on YouTube. But that feels like a betrayal. If there’s one thing I have left, it’s a sense of duty. A sense that if one of us is going to forget all about our family, then the other has to hold on as hard as they can. Every time I find myself forgetting something, anything at all—what birthday cake we made for Leah when she was eleven, what film Stanley and I went to see on our thirty-second anniversary—I feel an intense sense of guilt.
Sometimes I feel like I’m holding a hundred thousand balloons, all pushing to be released, to disappear up into the sky, but I can’t let any of them go. They’re all I have.
There’s a knocking at the door. I remember that clearly because it takes me a second to realize what the sound is. Nobody actually knocks anymore.
Who is it?
It’s you. It’s the very first time we meet. You seem friendly. The first thing I think is how young you look, how rested and fresh. Nothing like you do now. Now you look awful.
What do I say to you?
You’re not going to react to that? You would have smiled before. I remember liking your smile, finding it intriguing. Anyway, when I open the door, you say:
“How much do you know about Sunrise?”
I blink, taken aback. You’re tall, with a dark complexion and a certain sharklike look to your face. Not predatory, exactly, but there’s a hint of danger underneath it. I like that. I’ve always liked that in a man.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“My name is Hassan.” You step through the front door, right past me, and leave me standing there staring out into the street. By the time I’ve managed to turn around, you’re already in the living room and sitting on the sofa.
I follow. Twenty years ago, I probably would have called the police. Ten years ago, I would have screamed at you to get the hell out of my home. But this doesn’t feel like my home anymore, and you’re the most interesting thing that’s happened to me in months.
“What did you say about Sunrise?”
“The care home, where your husband is. How much do you know about it?”
I’m standing in the middle of the room, staring down at you. In films, they use this shot to make one person look powerful and dominating, the other weak. It doesn’t work that way here. You put your hands together in a relaxed clasp and rest them on your crossed legs. I doubt you’ve ever looked weak in your life.
“It’s a care home. My husband is in the memory ward there. They look after him. Who did you say you were?”
What are you thinking at this moment?
Is that important?
I can’t be sure.
There’s a little bubble of worry, because you’re talking about Stanley, and it feels like there’s something wrong. And beneath that, I feel a strange flutter of excitement, like butterflies in my stomach. Isn’t that odd? Like I’ve just bumped into a high school crush. And the moment that I recognize it, it gets swept away by a wash of guilt.
Guilt?
That I should be excited about something potentially worrying. That I should
be getting excited at all. That’s not my job. My job is to take care of Stanley.
“Why are you here?” I ask. You cock your head slightly sideways, as if you’ve seen a squirrel darting up a tree. From out of your pocket, you pull a gold cigarette case and a packet of matches. Before I process what you’re about to do, you light one, taking a deep puff as it rests between your fingers. You glance at me, and your eyes look like they’ve been crafted from mahogany. But…
But what?
Now you’re wearing sunglasses, even though we’re inside this pool. You’re hiding your eyes from me. Why? What happened?
That’s not important. You need to focus on what happened to you—that’s what matters.
You lean forward and say, “Let me tell you a story.” And at that moment, I feel like I haven’t got a choice. I feel like from the moment you opened the door, I’ve been swept up in something, and I don’t have the power to change its course. There’s too much inertia. I’m too old. My legs hurt.
I think about taking a seat in the armchair opposite you. I don’t.
“Three years ago, I met a man. Let’s call him K.”
“Is that his name?”
You give a slight chuckle. “No. He was a young man—early twenties. He’d just come out of university and had managed to get himself an internship at a prestigious news agency in London. For him, this was it: a straight career path to high-flying journalism. Traveling the world. Seeing the sights. All the frills. After a few days of getting people coffees and being introduced to HR routines, he attended his first major briefing led by the editor in chief. He sat there, intently listening for the entire thing, and left with some great ideas for stories he might be able to chase down as soon as he found a spare moment. Ten minutes later, the editor called him into the big office. ‘What the hell was that?’ he was asked. He shook his head, unsure. ‘Look,’ the big editor said, ‘you get an internship like this, you should be thankful. You should appreciate it. I work damn hard, and so does everyone else in here. We certainly don’t expect some jumped-up kid to come in, sit down, and ignore all our hard work.’ Now, K didn’t understand what the guy was talking about and told him as much. The editor got even angrier. ‘You didn’t take any fucking notes. You didn’t even have a pen or a slip of paper. It’s like you
couldn’t care less what was being said!’ ”
I still haven’t sat down, and I’m not entirely sure why. I’m still perched over you like a bony old hawk, enraptured. I’m reminded, for a second, of that scene in The Jungle Book where the snake makes Mowgli look into his eyes just as his tail starts curling around Mowgli’s neck. Before I can really process the thought, you’re continuing.
“K frowned at this, rubbed his chin, and then proceeded to recite every single word said at the briefing from beginning to end. The editor was dumbfounded. Turns out, K never forgot a thing. Most strangely, he didn’t realize until just then that other people did forget things. He’d grown up pretty secluded, thought everyone could do what he did. It had never seemed like a big deal, and no one had ever questioned him like this.”
You pause, as if for thought. I take advantage of the break in words and manage to quickly utter a sentence in a single burst of breath. “What has this got to do with Stanley?”
You reach over and ash your cigarette into a bowl. I don’t remember getting it out of the cupboard.
“The thing about K is that he didn’t go unnoticed. Some people were jealous, others merely interested. He agreed to take part in a research study later that year for big money. He didn’t know what they were doing, exactly—apparently, that was part of the study. He’d just go in and get his brain scanned, then do some simple tests, word games, number skills, that sort of thing. Then he’d go home.
“One day, he goes to work and doesn’t recognize anyone. He recognizes work. It’s the place he’s been going to for the past year. He knows where his desk is and where the office is, but all the people are different. They act like they know him. They nod at him and greet him. Someone hands him a coffee. He’s never seen a single one of them in his life. So what does he do? He calls up his friends, his family—doesn’t recognize any of them either. His mother’s voice on the phone doesn’t sound like any voice he’s ever heard before. A complete stranger is telling him that it’s okay, that she loves him. He panics. Three days later, he hangs himself.”
“Jesus! Did that actually happen?”
You give me a single slow nod. “Absolutely. And what was the one thing
in his life that changed before he forgot who everyone was?”
I look out the window at the street. A woman jogs past in full running gear. She doesn’t look at us, but for some reason, it occurs to me that nobody should be seeing this interaction at all. That it should be clandestine. It feels ridiculous, but I walk over to the window and close the curtains. “The research study?” I ask.
“Run by a group called Sunrise Medical. Of course, outside of a few very well-hidden paper trails, there’s no evidence that it ever took place.”
I’m pacing, trying to work out what the hell you’re saying. My heart is in my chest, beating hard. For some reason, I’m taking this personally. Too personally.
You finish your cigarette as your eyes track me across the room. “I think Stanley was involved in a similar experiment. I think he still might be.”
I stop dead. “You think they’re experimenting on him? You think…Wait, wait, wait. Are you actually saying that Stanley’s Alzheimer’s is…what? That they’ve done that to him?”
“Yes.”
My whole body tightens. This is crazy. This is absurd. You’ve just walked into my house and started telling insane stories, and I have no idea who you even are.
But you believe me.
Yes.
Why?
I don’t know. As you’re speaking, I suppose, the idea occurs to me that if whatever’s happening to Stanley isn’t natural, if it’s being done to him, then it might be reversible. You’ve not mentioned that. You’ve not even hinted at it. But the minuscule chance that it might be within the realm of possibility is enough to make me want to believe you.
“I should get him,” I say. “Go sign him out. Bring him back here.”
“That might not be as easy as it sounds.”
You stand up, and I notice how tall you are, and how intimidating. I swallow the spit that’s building up in my mouth.
“What do you mean? It’s a care home, not a fucking prison. I’m his wife.”
“When’s the last time you remember signing him out?”
“I…” I stare up
at you, losing focus. “I don’t know.”
“Since he was admitted, do you have any specific memories of taking him out of that care home? For any reason?”
I look down at my hands, and for a moment, it’s like I’m seeing them for the first time. I turn them over, looking at the wrinkles on the back, the curvature of the bones. I can feel your eyes on the top of my head. “I don’t know. But I know that I can. Take him out, I mean. In a general sense.”
“Then why do you have no actual memories of doing so?”
I look back up at you. I am lost. I feel like a balloon has just slipped out of my hand and is floating up, up into the sky, never to return.
“But that’s why I chose Sunrise. Because I wanted him close by. It’s just down the road. So I could…”
You put a hand on my shoulder, and I can feel its weight all through my body. “Do you actually remember choosing Sunrise? Do you specifically remember admitting him there?”
I turn away. I can’t take it anymore. I stumble over to the kitchen to try and make another cup of tea so that I can get some kind of handle on reality. I’m trying to think about the day I came to the decision that I couldn’t care for him full-time anymore. I can see myself flicking through brochures downstairs while Stanley’s in the bedroom because I don’t want to do it in front of him. Memories of staying up after Stanley had gone to sleep to read reviews on my laptop. And then…he’s at Sunrise. I’m trying to picture what it was like when I found their brochure or their website, or when I first called them. I’m trying to remember our first visit there and what the weather was like.
But I can’t.
It’s not there.
“What the hell is going on?” I whisper.
You appear behind me, closer than I would expect. I remember feeling both comforted and scared, all at the same time.
“That’s what I’m trying to find out. I need you to listen closely to me: Something very strange is happening in that building, and I don’t think anyone is allowed to leave. And I think Stanley might be the key to working out why.” Then you say: “Will you help me?”
What happens then?
I say that I will. I’ve already decided there isn’t any other choice. Something’s happening to Stanley. Something’s being done to him. I ask you what you need me to do.
And what do I say?
“I need you to break him out.”
2Stanley1950
The school gates were huge. Wrought iron. At least twenty feet tall. He didn’t know how long he’d been standing beneath them as they loomed over him, imperious and forbidding.
Everything in his life up until that point had been small and inconsequential—a fusty bedroom, a tiny kitchen, a cowering mother. The biggest thing he’d encountered in his daily life was a fist.
His father didn’t know he’d applied to Whelton College or even that he’d sat for the exams. As far as he knew, fathers were not the sorts of people you told these sorts of things to. They were creatures to be placated, to be avoided, to be feared. Stanley had never understood why anyone would need, let alone want, a father.
From a young age, he would look at that slurring, red-faced bully and he would tell himself: That is not where I came from. It can’t be. I won’t let it be.
He whispered it to himself at night, under the covers. He repeated it to himself in the shower. He ran it through his mind like a mantra when he walked through the streets of Ryhope Colliery. Boys from mining towns did not go on to do anything with their lives except follow in their father’s footsteps, join them down at the pit. But with each repetition, Stanley added links and chains to a promise that he kept tight in his heart: his story would not be the story of where he came from but, rather, the story of where he went.
And so despite a hostile and unwelcoming home—screaming, hiding, cleaning up messes—he managed to pass the entrance exams. He was now a student at one of the most prestigious boarding schools for boys in the country. With a full scholarship, no less.
But when he stepped onto the train platform with little more than his acceptance letter and a patched-up secondhand uniform, he expected to feel guilt—for leaving his mother behind to deal with that brute, for abandoning her. He thought he would be drowning in it. But he wasn’t. The truth was, he couldn’t picture her anywhere else but with his father. She’d been around that man so long it felt like she belonged there now, like a rat belongs in a cage.
As for himself? He felt freedom. He tasted it in the wind, acrid with railway fumes, that lifted his hair and blew hard into his face. He saw it on the horizon, across untold miles of green fields. He heard it in the screech of the brakes as his train pulled into the station.
There was shame too—at feeling so free, at being so happy to escape, and at the lack of guilt. Though he supposed shame was a form of guilt. Emotions tended to layer themselves like that: sets nested deep within supersets, like circles in an Euler diagram.
Before him now lay four centuries of imposition and expectation. Beyond the gates, stone archways and twisting turrets framed pristinely gardened courtyards; students bustled in groups, tightly knit, weaving among teachers clad in gowns. He was stepping into a new world, and he knew he should have felt intimidated—terrified, even.
To Stanley, it was electric.
Joining third form at the age of thirteen, he found that the intake was tiny—the only
other boy starting in the same year quickly got lost in the hubbub of the first few days, in the whirlwind of new experiences. Everything had its own name—lessons were “orations”; teachers were “professors”; classrooms were either “halls” or “towers.” Periods that he had never seen before appeared on his timetable: Greek history, Latin, philosophy. This was a universe in which distant possibility became probable, in which dreams became something waking, not sequestered in the recesses of sleep.
This, he thought as he settled into a front-row bench in the Third Tower for an oration on calculus, is where I belong.
But it slowly dawned on him that few people spoke to him. Not properly. There was the beaming fifth-year who showed him around the school on his first day, but he had not seen him since. The first few days had been such a flurry of new ideas and thoughts, he’d barely been able to keep up. His English professor referenced books that every child his age must have read, except his house had never had books; his house had never had the safety needed to read one. He found science tricky and Latin trickier. Only maths offered a welcome break from the intensity—a comfort that it had always offered him. It was just numbers and shapes, lines and intersections. It made sense. It always had.
But by the time he was back in bed for the night, when other boys were chatting and playing, he was so tired that he just collapsed onto his mattress and fell fast asleep. By day four, he had seeped into the background—the new kid who didn’t speak, a ghost, a pattern on the wall.
There were odd people here too, particularly among the staff. One lunchtime, when he was sitting alone on a bench with his water bottle and a sandwich, one of the professors approached him. An old lady with silvery hair.
“Excuse me, young man,” she said, approaching him. Stanley glanced around him, unsure why he was being spoken to.
“Y-Yes?”
“I’m going to need that bottle of water.”
Stanley blinked, baffled. “My water bottle?”
“Yes,” she said, and held out her hand. “Now.”
Not willing to make a fuss, Stanley handed it over. She smiled at him and disappeared without another word. This kind of strangeness seemed almost a staple at this old institution, and Stanley found it a little intimidating.
But Whelton was a place of opportunity, not cowardice. He’d seen too much cowardice from his mother, too much acceptance of the brutalities of life. No—he had come here to leave cowardice behind. And so after a particularly challenging oration in the Lesser Hall on
Plato’s Republic, he attempted to approach the three boys who had been sitting in front of him. Though only one of them was tall, all three felt towering in a way that Stanley couldn’t quite identify—a confidence in the way they held themselves, a certainty in the way they spoke.
“Hello?”
The tall one—a boy with striking blond hair that flickered just above his eyes—turned.
“Yes?”
“I’m Stanley.”
The other two turned with him, like cogs. “Oh, look, Barty,” one of them said. “The runt can speak.”
Barty laughed. “What do you want, runt?”
“My name’s Stanley,” he repeated.
“Oh dear,” the third boy jeered. “I think you’ve broken him. He’s stuck.”
“That’s what happens when you come from cheap stock,” Barty replied, his voice matter-of-fact, as though he were explaining a maths problem or a chemical equation. “Think about it, Charles. ...
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