A few minutes later, you try again. This time it cuts out after one ring. You imagine her holding the phone, waiting for your name to appear, her finger jabbing down at the button to cut you off. To get ABBIE off her screen as quickly as possible.

Sighing, you send a text. Lisa, it’s me. It’s REALLY me, whatever you may have read or heard. I’m going to call again. Pick up this time, will you?

Delivered, the phone tells you. Then: Read. Three dots appear, meaning she’s typing. But no reply comes. She must have deleted her answer before sending it.

Encouraged, you try dialing again. And this time it’s answered. She doesn’t say anything, but you can hear her breathing.

“Leese, we need to meet,” you say into the silence. “I know you think this is weird—I do, too. But it’s not like I had any say in the matter.”

   “Jesus,” she whispers disbelievingly. “Jesus. It sounds—it sounds—” She starts to cry.

“Why don’t I come to Spikes?” you say, naming the coffee bar where you used to meet up sometimes, halfway between your houses. “Say at eleven?”

She doesn’t reply, just sniffs back tears.

“Look, I’m going to be there anyway,” you say, after a while. “Please come. I need to see you.”

FOURTEEN

   It has to be said, we couldn’t spot any signs of Abbie’s alleged drug use at work, no matter how closely we looked. What we saw instead was someone immersing herself in a new creative project. There was a full-sized 3-D printer in the workshop, a very expensive piece of machinery for making prototypes. At Abbie’s request, Darren showed her how it could be used to make perfect replicas of almost anything.

She ordered in a load of Newplast, a soft modeling putty favored by stop-frame animators. Then, for a whole week, she took over the printer booth. We didn’t know what she was doing in there, but she started arriving late and working through the night. Tim was cool with that, we gathered.

As with the punching bags, she made no fanfare about this new artwork when it was finished. We simply came into work one day and found Sol, who usually got in earliest, in a state of high excitement.

“You have got to come and see what she’s done this time,” he told us.

   He led us to one of the meeting rooms. And there it was—a life-sized, 3-D replica of Abbie, fashioned out of flesh-colored putty. Apart from the briefest of thongs, she was nude. She stood with her hands on her hips, her torso turned slightly sideways, as if looking at herself in a mirror.

“Holy fuck,” someone breathed, and indeed it was a remarkable sight. Nobody wanted to look uncool by commenting on it directly, but Abbie really did have an awesome body. It was more than that, though. It might only have been a 3-D printout, but you really got a sense of what kind of person she was: vibrant, optimistic, even somewhat innocent.

It was only after we’d been staring for several minutes that someone spotted the printed card fixed to the nearby wall.

     DO AS YOU PLEASE (FEEL FREE!)

  3-D printed modeling putty and wireframe

  Interactive installation

  Dimensions variable

“How is it interactive?” someone else wondered. “It doesn’t do anything, does it?”

“And why dimensions variable?” asked one of the girls.

“Maybe,” Kenneth suggested, “we’re meant to—you know—play with it?”

There was silence while we digested this. Someone bent down and gave the sculpture’s foot a tentative squeeze, just above the toes. “It’s soft, all right,” he reported.

“Hey, don’t ruin it!” Marie Necker protested.

“But I think that’s the whole idea. I think we’re supposed to—refashion it.”

Sol placed his thumb halfway down the sculpture’s right hip and pressed. When he took his hand away, it left a small dish-shaped dimple containing his thumbprint.

   “I don’t think you should have done that,” Marie said nervously.

“Why not?” Sol retorted.

“Has Tim seen it yet?” someone else wondered aloud. That brought us all up short. Whatever we were meant to do with the sculpture, no one wanted to be the one who did it before Tim had had a chance to decide what the right reaction was.

40

   You get to Spikes early. Lisa’s late, so late you start to wonder if she’s coming at all. But you’re confident she’ll show in the end. Somehow it’s just one of the things you know about her.

While you wait, you look through the video clips stored in your phone. They’re of Danny, mostly. In one, taken the morning of his fourth birthday—just a few months before his regression—he’s singing “Happy Birthday” to himself in his excitement. His face is almost broken in two by his toothy smile as he reaches the end: “Happy burfday dear Danneeeee….Happity burfday to meeeee!”

Your voice, behind the camera, can be heard correcting gently, “Not burfday, Danny. Birthday.”

“Burfday!” he repeats eagerly. “Vat’s what I said.” He had a slight lisp—a result of hooking his front teeth over his bottom lip, the speech therapist told you. She said he’d almost certainly grow out of it, but you could help by modeling correct pronunciation.

You sigh at the memory. But then you remember that tiny moment of connection at breakfast over the toast this morning, and you can’t help smiling. Danny might have changed almost beyond recognition, but he’s still your child.

* * *

—

   Lisa eventually turns up at half past, staring at you through the window. You give her a tentative wave and a rueful smile that says, I didn’t mean for it to be like this.

She doesn’t get coffee, just comes straight over and sits down. Physically, she’s not like you—you somehow got her share of good looks as well as your own, she used to say wryly—but you have exactly the same eyes. Most people wouldn’t even notice, but looking at that one part of her is like looking into a mirror. Of course, she’s five years older than when you last saw her, but Lisa always dressed middle-aged anyway.

“I saw you on TV,” she says abruptly. “But somehow in the flesh…” She swallows. “Christ, what am I even saying? There’s no flesh involved.”

“They deliberately made me look terrible on TV. But at least it means I don’t get recognized in places like this.”