Here comes Alice, foot in front of foot, her hands in the warm confines of her jacket pockets, her hair carelessly tied back with a scrunchie, her eyes determinedly staring down at her black Doc Martens, step after step after step. She is not thinking. She is trying not to think. Her mind, one of the most powerful in this part of the galaxy, must be crowded with repetitive noise, white noise, random junk, in case it remembers. Left boot, black leather, scuffed, yellow stitching. Right boot, much the same. When she was a girl she couldn't remember which was right and the teacher laughed at her in front of the class. Of course her boots will be the same every step, but so will the paving slabs. When she was a toddler she peed in her wellies and she didn't tell her mum, and she walked around all day with wet feet too embarrassed to talk about it. She will keep walking this street and pretend it's Perivale until it ends, and then, well, she will take another corner and walk down that one. When she was a kid the boys threw her trainers over the school wall, and Manisha knocked their teeth out. I miss Manisha, she thinks. I miss Perivale.
Fuck it, I'm making this up, this isn't Perivale. She stops. She feels the thoughts she's trying to hold back, malevolent thunderclouds at the edges of her mind. Perivale has grey streets, it has shops, it has houses that look like houses. Maybe these would look like houses, if you were colour blind. Except that they're kind of transparent. Alice is autonomous, but even though most of the time she knows what to do in a crisis, there are moments when she wants to ask for help. The thoughts edge closer. Maybe the long walk isn't working. Maybe it has to be vodka and an hour of full volume on the stereo she got from... Oh, maybe it has to be the explosives, she's sure she has some left. Maybe it has to be razor blades.
The thought slipped in, and the sound of its footfall hummed in her head a moment, the memory of how she'd dealt with the pain rippling through her from head to fingertips. Sometimes you can see the pain coming and you can't turn yourself away, and you keep walking, just as she'd kept walking. At least she wouldn't have to hide it from her mum these days. Alice takes a long, slow breath through her nose, and closes her eyes, and breathes it out, and tells herself she is sane.
For a moment her brain is as quiet as the streets.
Actually, that's an oddity too: Perivale isn't deserted, any more than it looks like a rainbow exploded on it. Where is everyone? She peers at the shop beside her, which is orange. None of the buildings seem to be more than one colour; it's like being in a plastic model town for an enormous child. In the silence, she finds herself reading the sign aloud: "Early closing Wednesday". Is it Wednesday? Alice can't remember, but the shop is closed anyway. She shakes the door, and is surprised to find that the door is part of the building; shaking it has no effect, except that the shop turns through a murky brown colour into royal blue. Alice sits down on the pavement, head in hands, and sighs.
But she's not as depressed as she might be. The interruption has changed her mind around a little, the feeling of hanging over an abyss within herself has passed, and she's feeling a little less unstable. She wonders briefly whether her situation can be used as an opportunity for something useful or fun, but after some consideration all she can think of is streaking, and though it's safer when the town is completely empty, it has a fair amount less of a point behind it.
It's as well she didn't, because at that moment she hears footsteps. There doesn't seem to be anyone around, but in an empty town, sounds carry further. After a few minutes she sees a woman approaching, and scrambling to her feet gets ready at last to greet a fellow human; she is almost hungry for conversation. A moment later she is a little surprised to see it's a man she's never met before, wearing a skirt, and becomes rather more surprised when he says, "Oh, hello. It's you."
"You know me?", she says.
He is a short man, clean-shaven, with trusting eyes. By his voice he's from Perthshire, though to Alice all Scottish accents are indistinguishable, and he looks by his muscles as though he often handles something heavy. Alice supposes he seems friendly, and might be kind of fit if she went for blokes.
"I've seen you around," he says. "You know the Dominie? Are you looking for him?"
"You know the Dominie? Wait a minute," she says, and hoists herself onto a transparent aquamarine bench, sitting on the back with her feet on the seat. With a little more reserve, the stranger sits on the seat and looks up at her. She suddenly hopes he doesn't start hitting on her or something. "See," she says, "I came here with the Dominie. I knew I shouldn't have left him."
"Aye, he usually knows best," grins the stranger.
"No, I mean I don't know how he'll manage without me. I'm trying to watch his back," says Alice. The bench hums very softly, and turns magenta as they speak. "I went off because I come from Perivale, right, and this place looks so much like it. Then I couldn't find him again. So I've been walking around since..."
The stranger interrupts, with some excitement. "Yes! When I saw it out the window, I had to leave and explore. This doesn't look like wherever you said to me-- around me, I see the MacLaren lands. And high above it all the Creag an Tuirc-- you see?"
"That?" says Alice. "That's Horsenden Hill."
"Everyone sees what's in their heart."
"Actually, that makes a lot of sense," she says. "The Dominie said he wanted to come here because this whole thing is part of how his people control time and space. But he says it's as much part of the universe inside you as the universe outside you. He says a lot of stuff like that."
"That's so," says the boy. "They call it the Matrix of the Other. Where were you trying to go through it?"
