Claire had put up a poster in the Student Union.  It said, underneath photos of Stephen Hawking and Paris Hilton, If you know who she is and not who he is…  Congratulations!  You’re what’s wrong with humanity!

“Better be careful about that,” Adrian told her, “Mariam might not like it.  Might find it offensive.”

Under ordinary circumstances, Mariam might have asked Claire how much she actually knew about Stephen Hawking, but today, she said nothing.  Adrian didn’t need any encouragement. 

“Give it a rest, Adrian,” said Wayne.

Mariam had her back to Adrian, but she could just feel him shaking his head from side to side, like a dog trying to keep the flies away.  “Nah, mate.  Nah.  Some things…  This is just fucking it!”

Mariam had heard variations on this every two minutes for the last three days.  Adrian loudly insisting that he’d never forgive Mariam for talking to the Obscure Metal Band girls and “trying to get him fired.”  Mariam hadn’t asked him to forgive her, but Adrian still felt the need to carry on reminding her.  It put Claire, Robin and Wayne in an awkward position, but Mariam didn’t feel too sorry for them.  It wasn’t as if they were the targets of an extended nerd-tantrum.

In a roundabout way, though, Adrian had done her a favour.  He’d made sure that she was properly boiling with rage by the time Shaun Mandeville came along, so she wouldn’t be polite to him by accident.

He sauntered into the Student Union, all golden-brown hair and nonchalant swagger, and wandered up to the bar.  “I thought I’d find you here,” he said.

“Good morning to you, too,” replied Mariam.

Shaun did a double-take, raising his eyebrows at her sheer rudeness.  “Seriously?”

Mariam said nothing.  She’d had a bit of practice saying nothing this afternoon.

There was a snorting sound at Mariam’s shoulder.  “Yeah, don’t go expecting much out of her, mate,” said Adrian.

Mariam ignored him.  “What is it, Shaun?”

“I wanted to see if you were OK,” said Shaun, “After Wednesday.”

And now, Adrian was leaning over her shoulder.  In her face.  So close that she could smell his breath.  “Oh.  So he came round to be sympathetic.  That’s nice, isn’t it, Mariam?”

Mariam flared her nostrils and inhaled.  “Adrian, I’m sure there’s something else you could be doing.”

  Adrian stepped back a bit.

Shaun sighed.  “Look, there’s something I need to talk to you about in private.  What time do you finish?”

“Not til four…”  But if Isaac’s (and Alex’s) suspicions were correct, then it might be best for their conversation to have a pretty tight time limit.  Just to be on the safe side.  “…but I’ve got a break in about twenty minutes, if you’re free to talk then.”

Shaun nodded.  “Alright.  See you then.”

*

Most days, Denny didn’t even leave Jonathan’s side office.  He’d been nervous the first few times he’d been here- Jonathan never locked the door when he left, in case there was a fire- but he’d soon worked out that no-one was going to come in.  It was a quiet little island in the middle of a public building.  Denny could hear people walking and talking in the corridor outside, but they didn’t even know he was there.  He was safe, and so was everyone else.

He’d get there at nine, start photocopying and laminating stuff, and only stop for long enough to eat whatever Jonathan had brought up from the café for lunch.  Then it was more of the same until Tavia came to pick him up at four or five.  Seven hours where he was no danger to anyone.  Seven hours where he knew exactly what he had to do.

But today, he wanted to talk to Isaac again.  It was stupid, he knew- Denny missed Alex, and Isaac was Alex’s flatmate, but that didn’t mean that Isaac was just an extension of Alex or anything like that.  You couldn’t just replace one person with another one, like they were toys.

But if Alex was friends with Isaac, that probably meant he was a decent person, right?

Denny left the office and went down the corridor.  No-one was there.  They never were at this time of the morning.  Denny stopped at the top of the stairs and listened.  He could hear Isaac’s voice from the front reception.  He was talking to someone- a guy buying tickets, maybe?  Denny wasn’t sure.  He sat down on the top step and stared at the patterns on the wall.  Strange, fractal vines ending in triangular bunches of grapes.  It made Denny think of pictures he’d seen with people squashing the grapes into wine with their bare feet.  If Denny had that job, he’d be too worried about bringing in bacteria and making their customers sick to do his work properly.  And if he said that to Alex, Alex would seize on it and say that he just worried a lot, and maybe every other time he worried about hurting people was just more of that.  As if Denny never hurt people.  As if he couldn’t.  It was ridiculous- everyone hurt someone.  He was no exception.

The other voice had disappeared.  Denny got up and went downstairs.  He had no idea what he was going to say to Isaac.  If Isaac snapped at him and asked if he’d been following him around spying on him this whole time, Denny wouldn’t have any answer.

Denny knew he should turn back.  But he really, really wanted to talk to someone.

He still might have chickened out, even after opening the door, if he hadn’t seen right away how pink Isaac’s eyes were.  It was as if the bombing had left a burn mark right across them.

Even so, Isaac’s face lit up when he saw him.  “Oh, alright, Denny?  I was wondering when I’d see you again!”

“Thought I’d get a bit of fresh air,” Denny explained.  All the way down the stairs, he’d wondered if he should say he had a job to do downstairs, but he hadn’t been able to think of what.  He barely knew what the downstairs part of the theatre looked like these days.  “How are things on the lower deck?”

“Pretty quiet.  Saskia says there was a guy who came in yesterday and tried to get free tickets because he said he was a friend of one of the playwrights, but I haven’t seen him yet.”

“Good!”

Isaac smiled into the middle distance for a second or two, then snapped his gaze back to Denny.  “Hey, you’ll never guess what happened to me last Wednesday.”

Denny wondered if it had something to do with why his eyes looked pink.  “What?”

“Well, a while back, my friend Mariam got a flyer for this self-improvement group that meets up every week.  So we all decided to go this week, just for a laugh.”  Isaac let out a long, slow breath.  “And it turned out that they were completely insane.”

“What do you mean?”

“They started out by getting us to play a game where we described ourselves with an adjective that began with the same letter as our names.  My friend Natalie made a joke out of it, and honestly, I thought they were going to try and stone her to death.”

Denny had gone cold.  My name is Shaun, and I am spectacular.  My name is Alex, and I am astounding.  My name is Denny, and I am delectable.  “What kind of joke?”

Isaac smacked his lips.  “Um…  ‘My name is Natalie, and I am not enjoying this.’”

“Oh.  And they got insulted?”

“You’d think she’d gone to church and spat in the holy water.”

He’s probably exaggerating, thought Denny.  It’s probably a different group anyway, but he’s probably exaggerating.  Or his friend was ruder than he remembers.  Or…  I don’t know.  “Maybe they were just a bit highly-strung?”

“That’s just the start!”  Isaac leaned forward across the desk.  “They got us to play ‘Simon Says.’  Which was quite fun for the first five minutes, but it just went on… and on… until we were all wheezing and sweating and about to collapse.”

“Oh,” said Denny, “That is weird.”  He used to get tired at the end of games, too.  He’d always assumed that everyone else was into it, until Alex had told him that he felt the same way.

And Denny didn’t think Isaac was exaggerating.  He’d been crying, and he was trying to pretend he hadn’t been.  If he’d been playing up how bad it had been, then he’d have mentioned the crying part as soon as possible.

“And that’s when they started in on the ‘pretend to be happy all the time and never trust your own judgement’ routine.”  Isaac was twitching as he spoke, his eyebrows knotted together in the middle of his forehead.  “It was like being trapped in someone’s basement and… grinned at for hours.  Terrifying.”

Denny could practically hear Pinder’s voice in his ear.  Isn’t it sad how quickly people reject positivity?

“Did they get you to sing a song about Thomas the Rhymer?” asked Denny.

Isaac looked up at him, the tension draining out of his face.  “…Yeah.  Do you know them?”

“I used to.”  Denny’s mouth had gone numb.  “Were they calling themselves the Rhymers?”

Isaac shook his head.  “The Oakmen.”

“Oh.”  Denny settled down a little.  “Maybe it’s an off-shoot or something.  It was two years ago that I knew them.”

“How did you know them?”

This was it.  Denny didn’t know how he was going to tell him.  “I lived with them.  They had a… it was like a farm, and we…”  He felt himself choke on the words.  He couldn’t explain about the Rhymers’ camp to Isaac.  He hadn’t even been able to explain it to Jonathan and Tavia- Alex had done that.  So Denny gave up.  “You should probably talk to my brother.”

Isaac raised his eyebrows.  “Why?  Did he live with them, too?”

“No, but he’ll know what to do about them.”  That was just about the only thing Denny could be certain of anymore.

*

Mariam sat on the bench outside the front entrance, with Shaun beside her- leaning back, legs spread wide in a weird pantomime of laid-backness.  “This isn’t easy to talk about…”  He paused.  “Well, I suppose I should ask how your friend Isaac’s doing, first of all.”

“He’s OK.  He said the other night just brought back some bad memories.”  She couldn’t exactly say, He ran off because he thinks you’re up to no good, and I think he might have a point.  Not this early in the conversation, anyway.

Shaun raised an eyebrow.  “Bad memories?”

“All that talk about changing the way you think and so on.”

“So he’d rather carry on in the same way forever, is that it??”

“Maybe,” said Mariam, as frostily as possible.

Shaun at least had the good sense to look away.  “Look, it’s not really Isaac I came to talk about.  He seems great.  Rosalyn, too.  It’s your friend Natalie I’m worried about.”

“Natalie?”

“You saw how she shoved Jo when she left, right?”  He met her eyes again.  “She almost cracked her head on the side of the table.”

Mariam vaguely remembered Natalie elbowing one of the Oakmen, but she didn’t say anything.  She wanted to see where he was going with this.

“Does she do that often?” asked Shaun, “Resort to violence straight away?”

Pretty loose definition of “violence,” there.  “No.  She was just worried about Isaac.”

“And I’m worried about Jo.  Did you know we almost decided to take her down to A&E?”

“What, because Natalie elbowed her?”

Shaun sighed, and stared disdainfully at her.  Mariam waited.

After a few seconds of making his point, Shaun continued.  “Look, I wouldn’t be telling you about this if I didn’t feel there was a part of you that’s good enough to care.”

Mariam neither confirmed nor denied.

“I’ve met people like her before.  There’s no empathy there.  No moral compass.  What she did to Jo…  That wouldn’t have been the first time.”  He was leaning into her now.  “Violence.  Manipulation.  Things you can’t even imagine.”

Mariam thought this over.  She felt strangely calm, for somebody who was being harangued by a madman.  “And you’re sure you’re not just overreacting because she made fun of your alphabet game?”

Shaun jumped to his feet, making an angry huffing sound.  “Fine,” he said, dusting himself off, “Be blind.”  As he walked away, he added (over his shoulder), “If you don’t like what I’m saying, that’s probably because you know deep down that it’s true.  You can tell that to Isaac, too.”

Mariam watched him go.  She sat on the bench for a few minutes, gritting her teeth and clenching her fists on and off.  I wouldn’t be telling you about this if I didn’t feel there was a part of you that’s good enough to care.  The smug twat!  And how had he expected her to react to being told that her friend was a manipulative psychopath?  Believe him right away and kick her out of the house?  Had other people reacted like that?  They couldn’t have, could they?

Mariam still wasn’t sure what this all meant, but it was pretty clear that Isaac had been onto something on Wednesday night.  The Oakmen were bad news, and she didn’t want anything to do with them.  And, if she could get through the rest of her shift without murdering Adrian, then as soon as it ended, she was off to the Lambton Theatre to talk to Isaac’s boss.

*

Natalie and Rosalyn were walking home from university together, talking about anything under the sun.  Specifically, by the time they got to the corner of their street,  Rosalyn was telling Natalie about a guy from her course who’d tried to convince everyone that a local McDonalds was being sued after a little boy had died in the play area.

“But that McDonalds doesn’t even have a play area,” said Natalie.

Rosalyn nodded.  “I said that.  He said it was round the back, where you can’t see it.”

“Ha!”

“That was how the adder got there, you see.”

“Right.  And when was the last time an adder bite actually killed someone?  Maybe if they were stranded hundreds of miles from a hospital and couldn’t get it treated in time…”

“Oh, but it was a whole nest of adders, you see.  She’d laid her eggs under the ballpit…”

“The fictional ballpit…”

“Right, and they’d just hatched.  So when the boy fell on them, they all attacked him at once.”

“In a co-ordinated attack?  Those are some smart baby snakes.”

“Yes.”  Rosalyn’s face was so resolutely straight that you could tell how close she was to bursting out laughing.  Her mouth had started to look like a duck’s beak.  “Seven snakes at once.  There was too much venom.  He didn’t stand a chance.”

            “Poor guy.  Let’s buy some Archers and drink to his mem…”

            And then the woman appeared in front of them.  She actually stepped sideways just so that she could block their path.

            “Hiii!” she said, in a high-pitched trill.  She had a shiny silver coat, shiny platinum blonde hair, and shiny white teeth.  Before she’d even glanced to the right, Natalie knew that she’d come out of the house with the green blinds.  She remembered Isaac telling them about the guy lecturing him on phantom burglars last week.  “I’m Tamsin.”

            “Hi,” said Natalie.

            Tamsin looked at her expectantly.

            “Um, I’m Natalie, and this is Rosalyn.  Do you live…?”

            Tamsin whirred back to life.  It was like clicking the play button on a CD player.  “My husband spoke to your mate with the stitches the other day.”  The spoke with a bit of a lisp, the put-on kind that girls did on TV to sound cute.  “He said we ought to get together and talk about all that trouble you’ve been having.  Those guys trying to break in.”

            “Yeah?” said Natalie, interested to know where this was going.

            Tamsin looked them up and down.  “So you’re coming back from university now…  Want to come in for a drink?” she asked brightly, her smile widening so that her cheeks turned into two little circles.

            Natalie glanced around.  “Well…”

            “Come on!”  Tamsin reached out and linked arms with her.  “What else have you got on for the next half-hour?”

            Natalie glanced at Rosalyn, who wasn’t giving her any clear ‘no’ signals.  “Alright, then.  Just as long as we’re home in time to meet the others.”

            “What?” Tamsin laughed, “Can’t they come along as well?”

            “Maybe.”  Natalie really didn’t have anything on in the next half-hour.  And she had to admit, she was interested in seeing the house with the green blinds from the inside.  It would be something fun to tell Isaac and Mariam about when they got home.

            Still…  As soon as Tamsin loosened her grip on Natalie’s arm, she quietly reached into her bag and checked that her phone was fully charged and within reach.  Just in case.