Mind Power Read online

  “We need to know how deep the spying goes,” said a woman in a clip played out in the news. Michael recognised her voice as Claudia Angelheart, the leader of the now defunct campaign group, Action Against Mind Invasion. “If I go to the doctor to say I’m unwell, are they reading my mind to see if I’m really sick or a time waster? If I ask for a loan, are they reading my mind to see if I really intend to pay it back? If I report a crime to the police, are they getting inside my head to see if I’m telling the truth? And, if they’re in my head looking for those things, what other private things are they seeing?”

  The news, fortunately, was on one of those pop music stations that only bothered with the real world for a minute before launching back into a string of fast beats interspersed with adverts, and so he didn’t have to listen to it anymore.

  Michael had forgotten he was supposed to give the taxi driver more detailed directions when they got nearer to Mary Ransom’s house, but it seemed he didn’t need them. The taxi pulled over at the edge of the difficult-to-find cul-de-sac lined with tall trees right next to the driveway. He turned down the radio and the beat of the music faded to almost nothing.

  Michael lifted his head from the window. “Are we here?”

  “I could go down the drive if you wanted,” said the taxi driver. “I just didn’t know if I could turn around at the bottom.”

  “Here is fine,” said Michael. He got out of the cab and paid the driver.

  Michael threw his overnight bag onto his shoulder and stepped onto the gravel that formed the length of the driveway down to his mother’s house. His feet crunched over the stones as he walked down, being careful not to step in the occasional puddle which had formed with the overnight rain.

  He had not walked many steps before he could see past the overhanging branches of the bushes to the front of his mother’s impressive, detached and expensive four-bedroomed house. Across the doorway someone had sprayed two words in bright red paint:

  PERCEIVER SCUM.

  Michael felt the disgust rise in his throat. His mother had been distraught on the phone, but he hadn’t really understood why until that moment.

  Each crunching step over the gravel brought him closer to the reality of it. The front of the house had once seemed serene, almost charming in its English country setting, but now it was soiled. The paint had done more than leave words on the door, it had left a disgusting message that violated the sanctity of his mother’s home.

  Michael reached out for the doorbell, but his hand stopped mid-air as he saw the door was ajar. The frame in which it stood – which must have been made from the original wood dating from when the house was built – had been splintered, and the bolts shooting out from the door itself had failed to keep it secure.

  “Hello?” he called, as he pushed the door open and stepped inside.

  There was no reply. Just a collection of muddy footprints on the doormat and a collection of coats which had been taken from their hooks on the wall and dumped to the floor in a jumble of black and grey. He pushed the door shut behind him and it bumped uselessly against the splintered frame so it remained open just enough to keep the cold of the outside blowing through the crack.

  “Hello?”

  Only emptiness replied.

  He opened his perception enough to take in the whole house. He felt only one presence, close enough to realise someone was in the lounge.

  Michael tiptoed over the broken shards of a glass vase that once sat on the shelf above the radiator in the hallway and opened the door to the lounge. What he saw inside was more like a squat frequented by drug addicts than a cherished family home. Across the back wall, sprayed on the cream wallpaper with its delicate powder blue illustrations of flowers, was another disgusting message:

  PERCEIVER SCUM.

  It looked like the vandals had run out of red paint halfway through because the last two letters had been finished off in green.

  The ugly words looked down upon a scene of carnage. There was stuff everywhere. So much that it had ceased to be possessions or important papers and had become merely junk. Someone had taken a knife to an armchair cushion and it lay in the middle of the floor like an old rag while its white fluffy stuffing was strewn around the room like cheap artificial snow in a Christmas shop display.

  Sitting on the sofa, among the litter of her life, was Mary Ransom. A small woman with grey hair that had almost replaced her natural blonde, she sat huddled on the edge of the cushion like a homeless person squeezed in on herself to protect her body from the cold of the outside world. Michael perceived that she knew he had walked in, but her body didn’t acknowledge him. It hurt to feel her shame at what had happened to her, even though anyone could see she was the victim.

  “Mary?” he said. He still wasn’t able to bring himself to call her ‘mum’, even though their relationship had got closer ever since he left Galen House.

  “Michael,” she acknowledged. She shot him a fleeting glance, then went back to stare at her two hands clenched together on her knees. “Why?”

  Walking into the destruction of her home was sickening enough, but to perceive his mother’s distress was heartbreaking. There was nothing in her mind except despair and the shame of her son having to see her so helpless.

  He stepped past her possessions strewn over the carpet and sat next to her. He thought perhaps he should put a comforting arm around her shoulders, but that felt awkward, so he let his hands fall in his lap.

  “What happened?” he said.

  She held out her hands to indicate the mess that was her house.

  Michael chastised himself for asking such a stupid question, but he didn’t know what else to say.

  “It’s because of your father,” she said.

  “Yes,” said Michael.

  “He said don’t go to the trial. He said, keep myself out of it. But I’ll never be out of it, will I? I mean, look – look! – I married a perceiver and they’re going to make me suffer for it over and over again.”

  The cracks in her strong, angry words began to show as emotion overtook her. She rested her head on Michael’s shoulder and he perceived how the feeling of the warmth from his body made her feel more secure. Even in a house with a busted front door.

  He took her hand and held it tightly. They sat like that for a while, her not saying anything and him perceiving that she was trying to keep herself under control, at the same time that she felt she had no control at all.

  “Did you tell the police?” said Michael.

  “I called them,” said Mary. “They came over and took a statement and took photos. They told me they would do their best to catch the people who did it, but you don’t always have to be a perceiver to know they’re lying.”

  “What are you going to do now?”

  She shrugged.

  “You can’t stay here with the place like this. Especially not with the door open.”

  “It’s my home, Michael.”

  “At least get someone in to fix the door,” he said. “Then we can get this place cleared up.”

  “Okay,” she said. Quietly, timidly. “Do you want something to eat?”

  He wasn’t hungry. He was too angry and appalled to be hungry. But he could perceive she wanted to cook something for him. It was something she could do to help which didn’t involve dealing with the vandalism in her house.

  “Yeah, that would be lovely.”

  Mary got up from the sofa and headed out to the kitchen.

  Michael was left in the mess on his own. There was so much of it, he didn’t know where to start.

  The double glazing companies he called said they didn’t have someone to spare to fit a door right away and they suggested getting someone in to board up the front entrance until they could come round and measure up properly. So that’s what Michael did. He booked a cleaning firm who specialised in removing graffiti and a decorator who could rip off the soiled wallpaper and start again.

  By the time he sat down to eat the chicken stir-f
ry his mum had made for him – apparently from ‘leftovers’, even though it tasted amazing enough to be fresh – she was worried about how much it was going to cost.

  “I thought my father had loads of money.”

  “Before the vitamin scandal, maybe,” said Mary. “How much do you think Ransom Incorporated shares were worth after the trial?”

  It was the first time he perceived that she was worried about money. He had always assumed his father was a rich man with money squirrelled away. He hadn’t thought that most of it was tied up in the business: the same business that made the ‘vitamin’ pills that turned so many normal teenagers into perceivers.

  After he’d eaten, Michael picked up all the stuffing from the slashed cushion and Mary went back into the kitchen to get a rubbish bag to put it in. It was easier to see what everything else was after some of the mess was out of the way. He found places for the obvious things, like the TV remote control and mantelpiece ornaments. The rest were Mary and his father’s personal papers and possessions that he didn’t know what to do with. So he gathered those up and put them on the dining table for his mother to sort through.

  Among them, he found a couple of those old-fashioned discs that used to have films on. But they weren’t commercially produced discs with printed labels, they were plain silver with handwriting on them. One said ‘Grand Canyon Tour’ and the second said ‘Michael’s 5th Birthday’.

  He put everything down apart from the second disc. He read the writing again.

  “What’s that?” said Mary.

  “It says it’s my fifth birthday,” said Michael, clutching the gateway to the past with increasingly sweaty fingers.

  “I forgot we had that,” she said. “Your father got keen on taking videos for all of six months, before he got bored again.”

  Staring at the disc did nothing to reveal the secrets hidden inside. He looked to his mother. “Does it work?”

  “Do you mean, can we play it?”

  “I suppose that’s what I mean.” He was more asking if it was possible than actually wanting to see himself at the age of five.

  But she had already removed the disc from his hand and taken it to a cabinet in the corner of the room. She brushed aside some screwed up papers that were in front of it and allowed the piece of machinery to swallow the disc.

  “Turn on the TV, Michael.”

  Michael picked up the remote from the arm of the sofa where he had put it moments before and pressed the on button.

  On the wall, beneath the scrawl of PERCEIVER SCUM in red and green paint, light shone out through the cracks in the television screen which it had been smashed by a vandal.

  Mary came over to the sofa and tugged at his arm so he would sit next to her.

  Together, they watched the image of the same lounge they were sitting in appear in front of them. The same, but different. None of the same furniture was there, there was a long table full of multi-coloured party food. It was almost as bright and colourful as the balloons that hung from the ceiling and the paper hats on the heads of the little boys sitting around it. Michael looked at their faces. All strangers.

  “Is one of them me?” he said.

  He perceived his mother’s surprise. “That’s you at the end, look.”

  The little boy in the yellow hat had the widest eyes it was possible for a human to have. It looked like he was trying to eat the whole spread with his irises. He could perceive his mother’s nostalgia for the image, but to him it was just another boy. He looked closer and tried to see the things in the boy’s face that he recognised from the mirror, but his features were still young and unformed compared to Michael’s stubbled face which he had to shave every day.

  A woman he recognised as his mother – thinner, happier, without a hint of grey – leant across the table and held a lit match to five candles sitting atop a cake of bright red, blue and green icing. The video had difficulty in seeing the tiny flames in the daylight of the past, but there was enough flicker every now and again to tell that they were there.

  “Make a wish,” said the young mother on the screen.

  Michael saw the little boy he used to be take a big breath and puff out his cheeks. He blew all across the cake, probably spitting germs onto the top of the icing as he extinguished the little flames with wind from his lungs.

  The woman cheered and clapped her hands in an exaggerated childish way that encouraged the other children to do the same. But her smile was real. She was loving it as much as the children.

  “Cut the cake,” said an adult male voice out of shot and close to the camera. His father?

  The younger Mary reached behind and pulled out a large knife. Somewhat like the knife the drug addict had used to threaten the shop assistant.

  “Mummy, let me cut the cake! Let me!” squealed the immature voice of the little boy whose birthday it was on the video. Michael still couldn’t quite believe it was his own voice.

  “You can help me, Michael,” said the young mother.

  She came right up close to the boy and he put his small hands over the top of hers on the knife handle. They pushed it down into the soft icing of the cake together.

  Michael perceived a sadness coming from his mother. His real mother, sitting next to him in the present. A feeling of regret burgeoned inside of her, even though he sensed she was trying to hold it back.

  “You don’t remember, do you?” she said.

  “I was five,” said Michael.

  “But you wouldn’t remember even if it was your tenth birthday, would you?”

  “You know what happened to me.” His father had tried to destroy his power to stop it being exploited by others, but all it had done was wipe his memories. He couldn’t remember anything about his life until he was fifteen.

  “All because of perceivers,” she said. Michael felt her emotions turning to anger. “Everything in my life has been ruled by perceivers, ever since I met your father. I didn’t know what one was back then – no one did. He said it meant that I didn’t need to tell him I loved him because he could perceive it. He said feeling my love for him was the most beautiful thing in the world and it made him love me more. I thought it was romantic. I was an idiot.”

  “No,” Michael told her, but she wasn’t listening.

  “When I couldn’t get pregnant he said it was a chance to have a perceiver baby who would grow up to be stronger than anyone else. I thought it would be good for my child – like those foolish, trusting mothers who took the vitamin pills because they thought they were giving their baby the best start in life. Then you were born, and even though you didn’t have any of my DNA because I had to use donor eggs, I loved you just the same. More, I think, because I’d tried so hard to have you …”

  As she spoke, Michael perceived that love. A love that was split between the little boy trying to eat a slice of birthday cake with one mouthful and getting icing round his mouth on the TV, and the real grown up version of him by her side. It made him embarrassed that he couldn’t love her back in the same way.

  “… By the time your perceiver powers emerged when you were a teenager, your dad was getting worried. That’s when he did that thing that destroyed your memories and I lost you. Then I lost my husband when the authorities caught up with him and locked him up. All I had left was this house.”

  She looked up at the words PERCEIVER SCUM scrawled across her wall as images of Michael and his friends running round the garden in party hats played on the cracked television screen.

  “I’m here now,” said Michael. He put a reassuring hand on top of hers and felt how cold her fingers were.

  “Yes.”

  The sound of the doorbell made both of them jump.

  “That’ll be the repairman,” said Michael. He calmed down as soon as he realised what the noise was, but he felt his mother was still shaking beside him.

  “Hello?” called a male voice, presumably from the doorstep.

  Mary smoothed herself down. “I should put the kettle on.”


  “Don’t be stupid,” said Michael. “I’ll deal with it.”

  As he walked out of the lounge, he tuned out Mary’s angry, melancholy, regretful thoughts. But he couldn’t close his ears and, as he stepped into the corridor, he heard the faint sounds of her starting to cry.

  The man at the door was, indeed, the repairman, complete with holdall of tools, overalls and a white van parked in the drive.

  He nodded to Michael as he came to meet him. “Nasty business,” said the repairman.

  “Yeah,” said Michael.

  “You have access to the house round the back, do you?”

  “Um, yeah, I think so.” He was trying to remember if there was a back door. He was sure there must be. He didn’t visit Mary very often and the conversation they had just had was still living in his head.

  “The best thing to do is to board up this opening so the place is secure until you can get someone to fit a new door.”

  “Right.” Michael had little option other than to agree with the expert.

  The man walked to the back of his van. From that vantage point, he had a clear view of the damage. “If I were you, when they come to fit a new door, get new locks on the windows too, and an alarm system and CCTV.”

  “You think these people will come back?” said Michael.

  “I can’t say, but until someone does something about this perceiver business, there’s nothing much else you can do.”

  Michael had to step out of the doorway as the man came towards him with a length of plywood. He promised to make the man a cup of tea after he had made a quick phone call. He walked up the drive to get some privacy both from him and from his mother.

  Michael pulled his phone from his pocket and stood back against the shade of an evergreen bush at the side of the gravel strip. The backup contacts that he had transferred to his new phone included Pauline’s mobile number. It had been a couple of years since he’d dialled it and he wasn’t sure if it still worked.