Equilibria

By Vrinda Pendred

Anna Nolon is obsessive – about everything. She worries about her grades, her appearance, germs, the pattern of her footsteps, the number of syllables in the words she says, her parents' approval, the future and, most of all, death.

It’s okay – so does everyone else. This is Equilibria: the first society built to accommodate OCD.

But when Aaron comes along – the strange new boy who doesn't quite fit into that pristine society of Holy Balance and Order – Anna is forced to look at the dark shadows hanging over her and decide if perfection is really what she wants.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Vrinda Pendred
• Release date: Nov 25, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463489857

Vrinda Pendred

VRINDA PENDRED originally grew up in Arizona, but moved to England in 1999, where she now lives with her husband and their two sons. Her first novel was The Ladder, a story about two friends learning to grow through their difficult childhoods and find the light that lies inside themselves. She followed this with the YA sci-fi / fantasy series The Wisdom. Vrinda also runs a publishing house for writers with neurological conditions, called Conditional Publications. Their first book, Check Mates: A Collection of Fiction, Poetry and Artwork about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, by People with OCD, was released in 2010 (Kindle and paperback), with future books in the pipeline. In addition to her writing, Vrinda also does freelance proofreading and editing, and spent 9 years tutoring GCSE / A-Level English. She holds a BA Hons in English with Creative Writing, a proofreading qualification with the Publishing Training Centre, and has completed work experience with Random House. On the side, she sometimes writes and performs her own music and runs a herbal tea review blog with a friend. Favourite Book Genres: YA / NA, Science-Fiction, Fantasy, Paranormal, Horror Favourite Fiction Authors: Stephen King, Michael Grant, Graham Joyce, Cassandra Clare, Brigid Kemmerer, Holly Black, James Dashner, Margaret Atwood, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edgar Allan Poe

Book preview

I’ve always been terrified of telling anyone these things. On the outside looking in, things are different. In a way, I’m freer than I ever was. In another, I’m still trapped – this time, by other people’s fears – fears that I might say something that hits a little too close to home.

I don’t want to be trapped anymore. I want to burst out of my skin, grow wings and soar above the clouds – and that begins with this, with now.

I won’t lie: I’m scared to death of how you’ll react. What will you think of me, after you know what I hold in my head? Will you turn away in disgust? Or will you sympathise, perhaps even relate to some of it?

Each sentence I’ve written, I’ve imagined your response – the look on your face, the thoughts in your mind, the fear, the discomfort, the pity, that secret part of you that knows just what I’m talking about but doesn’t want to admit it.

And you know what? Part of me wants this to be disturbing. In fact, I don’t think I’ve made it disturbing enough. Too many times, I’ve thought, ‘That’s too much, that’s going too far.’ Like I said – I’m still trapped.

I want you to understand – to know what it’s like – to shed all those preconceived notions you’ve accumulated over the years and open your eyes to what it’s really like – to make you see this isn’t just the subject of some sensationalist documentary: there are real people dealing with this thing, and it goes beyond anything you’ve ever imagined.

I want to show you all the things you may do yourself, without realising it.

I want to show you the darker possibilities of yourself, by explaining who I am.

But above all, I’m compelled to tell you everything – just to see what happens.

I can’t help thinking these things. Sometimes I think something else is inside me, making me think them; and the more I worry about it, the darker the thoughts become – the more I have to say.

The more I fear your judgment, the more I must confess to you.

And if you do want to turn away, just think: I’m the one who has to live with it.

So just imagine how scared I am of myself.

PART ONE

ONE

The seat beside her was empty – so empty that she could feel the physical absence of the body that should have occupied it. There was a wrongness to it, like a yawning cavity in an ancient monumental mountain no one had thought could break, or a singularity drawing on her with its gravity.

At first, she thought maybe Renner was late. It’s okay, she told herself. He’ll be here soon, and this horrible feeling will pass. The fear will go away.

But Renner was never late, and soon Mr Non was telling the class that he was gone. Moved across town. Just like that. Leaving the seat beside Anna disturbingly vacant.

It was the second time in a year that she had felt such a loss. The idea that someone could simply vanish one day – that one moment she could be talking to them and the next, she would never see them again – made her throat tighten and her heart beat faster.

The school was usually good about arranging swift replacements. Elle had once noted darkly that Nayan’s place had been filled before anyone learned what had happened. So, everything should have been arranged before Renner left.

‘But we’ve found ourselves in a bit of a predicament,’ said Mr Non. ‘All the other Year 12 classrooms have an even number of students. If one is removed, it will leave an imbalance.’

Anna’s hand shot up, but the teacher pre-empted her question.

‘In this instance,’ he said, ‘removing someone would leave a prime number of students in one of the classes.’

An audible intake of breath circled the room.

‘So,’ the teacher continued, ‘the Head is working to transfer in a student from another school where the situation isn’t so…sticky.’

A deep chill shocked through Anna and she shuddered in her seat. Just the word sticky made her feel uncomfortable all over, as if she had dipped her fingers in honey or marmite. On instinct, she tugged at one of her thick black curls, rubbed the end, twisted it around the tip of her finger until it knotted, and yanked it out. There was a brief sting, and then it was over. It helped some, but not enough. She thought she could tear every hair out of her head and still not feel relief from that horrible empty desk on her right.

‘Anna,’ Mr Non startled her.

She dropped her hand to her desk, grabbed one of the nine pens (three blue, three green, three red) that lay across the top of her desk in a row that was straight as a razor blade, and gave the teacher as much attention as she could.

Mr Non was a lanky man of unremarkable height, the rosy-white colour of Starling eggs, with wiry ginger hair he surely spent hours taming each morning. His hair (like that of most of the twenty-seven students present that day) was parted severely down the middle, cutting an invisible line down his broad freckled forehead, between his dull blue eyes, to his sloping nose. When he looked at Anna now, his expression was sympathetic.

‘If you have any trouble while we try to fill Renner’s seat, please do come to me and I’ll see how we can help you,’ he told her. ‘If you need to leave the room at any point, I’ll understand.’ He clasped his pale hands in front of his body, his arms an inch too long for his frame and too thin for his crisply ironed black suit – an unfortunate deformity he ought to get sorted, the students often whispered behind his back. There were places he could have it done.

Anna nodded quickly and looked down at the open notebook that lay on her desk, below the pens. She appreciated the teacher’s concern but disliked the attention it drew. She could feel the hot stares of her fellow students, could almost hear what they were thinking:

Thank the Organiser it’s not me.

Mercifully, Mr Non moved on to the morning’s maths lesson. Like the good student she was, Anna already had her textbook open to the right page, her homework displayed at the corner of the desk. A spare black pen nestled in the spiral binding of her notebook, in case the first nine malfunctioned. Not that this was likely, but it was good to be prepared.

Mr Non clicked a small stylus hidden in his palm and a holographic screen appeared in the air, at the front of the perfectly square classroom. Another click added an image of a series of triangles. A few more clicks and scrawled symbols surrounded the shapes, like prehistoric carvings in some invisible stone tablet.

Anna’s peers alternated between studying the phantasmal aerial images and feverishly jotting things down in their notebooks. They seemed to move as one black-and-white unit – heads up, then down, a flurry of hands. There was beauty in their unity – dependability, stability, purpose.

Anna tried to focus on the teacher’s words, on the hovering shapes. It wasn’t like her not to pay attention, especially not to something as important as advanced trigonometry. She could just imagine the lecture her father would have given her, if he knew – too vividly, in fact.

But she couldn’t help it. No matter how hard she stared ahead, how much she tried to block out the empty seat, she could feel it there beside her, stalking her like a wild animal on the prowl, preparing to pounce on its prey.

The overwhelming vacancy, so painfully near, made her skin itch. The tension crept beneath, threatening to burst forth and take unpredictable form. She tried to relieve herself by pressing her long nails hard against the pads of her other fingers, hard enough to make imprints in the flesh, but this only drew her attention to a tiny chip in the honey-brown varnish on her right thumbnail. She stared in astonishment. She’d just been to the salon yesterday. There couldn’t be a chip already. This couldn’t be happening to her – not with the –

The seat loomed at her, growing in her periphery until she could sense it towering above her, large enough to swallow her, to devour her in its dearth.

She whipped her head sharply to face the seat, to catch it before it caught her. Of course, there was nothing there. It had shrunk back to normal size. It looked harmless, but it wasn’t. Not when it could hurt her this way, with its promise of the unknown. Not when Anna – when everyone – knew how dangerous the unknown could be.

At the head of the class, the ghostly triangles had grown more ornate. It seemed Anna was meant to be working out a calculation, but she had no idea what calculation. Her heart tightened and her breath grew short. The room became a vacuum. It was hard to get air.

Get a grip, she told herself.

She forced herself to breathe in deeply for a count of three, and then out, again for a count of three. Shakily, she reached for a pen (blue), unscrewed the cap, touched the pen to her notebook. Step one was accomplished.

She studied the floating screen for some clue to what was expected, but her thoughts danced elusively through the primordial soup of her brain. And through the mist of her mind, the empty seat was still there, taunting and threatening her. And it had grown arms. She could sense them stretching out of the air, reaching for her.

She snapped her head to face the seat, again. As before, there was nothing.

Well, it didn’t feel like nothing.

Calm down, she urged herself. You can get through this. Just...focus on something else.

She counted in her head:

1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 11, 22, 24, 26, 28, 33, 36....

It was working! She carried on:

...63, 66, 77, 84, 88, 99, 101, 110, 111, 112, 121....

Slowly, slowly, her breathing steadied and her vision cleared enough to focus on the transparent screen. She had a good head for numbers and suddenly knew what she was meant to be doing. With a triumphant smile, she worked out the solution in her notebook, taking care to join up each written number so there were no broken or uneven pen strokes.

In this way, she fought to ignore the daunting emptiness bordering her right, leaving her like an inverted peninsula, with solid land on just three sides. Somehow, she would get through this.

When the bell rang to signal the end of the lesson, it was all she could do not to leap from her seat and run out of the room.

* * *

At lunch, Anna hurried to her usual table before anyone could take her place. Not that anyone would – people liked their routines – but there was always that terrible worry that someone might break the unspoken rule. Then the table would be full and she would have to sit somewhere else. Technically, she could pull over a chair from a nearby table; but she wouldn’t dream of leaving anyone with an odd number of diners.

Elle appeared a moment later, just as eager, and sat across from her. Visually, she was everything Anna was not. If Anna’s skin was the colour of coffee with a splash of milk, Elle’s was clotted cream. Anna’s hair was an impenetrable black that was longer than it looked, because of its tight curls; Elle’s was short, naturally straight, straw-coloured and wispy. Anna was three inches taller than her friend, and while Elle’s figure was almost boyish, Anna had what Elle liked to call ‘good child-bearing hips’ – as if that was any use to Anna, two lunar months shy of eighteen.

Yet they wore the same school uniform: pressed black trousers (for the girls as well as the boys), a crisp white shirt buttoned to the throat, a black blazer and gleaming black dress shoes.

As soon as they were facing each other, they blurted in unison, ‘Renner’s gone.’ They held each other’s eyes for a moment – Anna’s dark and brown, Elle’s the pale blue of the sky on a good day. Then they laughed together. There was relief in that laugh – relief at not being alone with the news, with the implications.

The other usuals filled the remaining eight places at their table and started their own conversations. Anna didn’t like any of them, but they had all shared that table for so many lunches – every school lunch hour for the last twelve years, in fact – that she couldn’t imagine them not being there. It would have felt wrong.

As wrong as Renner leaving.

‘I had to spend the whole of maths next to his empty seat,’ Anna shared. She reached into her school bag and retrieved an air-tight plastic box that sat in front of her. She popped it open. Inside, the box was divided into four equal-sized sections. One contained identical slices of tomato, another lettuce, one slices of cheese and the last, perfectly quartered slices of brown bread. She always packed her sandwiches this way and prepared them at school, so the juices didn’t run into each other in the box and the bread didn’t get soggy.

‘You poor thing!’ Elle declared, her voice thinner and more feathery than Anna’s. ‘He sat across the room from me, so it was strange enough not having him there, but to be right beside it....’ She trailed off like she couldn’t bear to finish her thought.

Anna wondered if she was thinking of Nayan. She wanted to say something about it, had wanted to for months. But as ever, she wasn’t sure she should or how to start. So, she said, ‘It was awful.’ She had built her sandwich, and now lifted it to her mouth. ‘I felt like something was going to jump out and eat me.’ To demonstrate, she took a bite out of the centre of her sandwich, chewed exactly twenty times, and then swallowed. Then she bit off the left corner, which would be followed by the right, then the remaining two turrets of sandwich, left to right, until she had levelled off the top. Then she would repeat the pattern with the next line of bread.

Elle opened her own lunchbox. She never had sandwiches. She hated the way the juice ran out of the tomato slices. Elle opted for whole fruits (but definitely not things like peaches!), a sealed yogurt pot, bread sticks. No doubt it was part of why she was so slim. Her parents were naturally small, too. Even so, Anna fondly recalled those times when they were younger and would sleep at each other’s houses, order a mountain of food and happily gorge themselves. At some point, Elle’s priorities had changed. At some point –

‘How long do you think it’ll take them to replace Renner?’ Anna cut off her own train of thought. She didn’t bother to disguise her anxiety.

Elle shrugged as she nibbled on a bread stick.

Anna sighed over the remains of her first sandwich, somehow already gone. ‘I don’t know what I’ll do if it goes on too long. The feeling was....’ She struggled to find the right way to put it. ‘I thought I was going to die.’

Elle gave her a long look. At last, she said, ‘I’ve felt that way, before. Just the other day, in fact. I was organising all my homework assignments for the year again, because I just had this feeling, you know? That I hadn’t done it right, that afternoon. It was keeping me up at night, so I decided to do something about it. And....’ She took a breath. ‘I’ve somehow lost one of my geography papers from the beginning of the year.’

Anna’s eyes widened and she nearly dropped her next sandwich.

Elle nodded. ‘I know. And I felt just like you did. My heart started pounding, my hands felt clammy, and I thought for sure I was at least going to pass out. I got dizzy and scared – terrified. Oh, Anna, it was awful!’

Anna shook her head. ‘I’m so sorry. What are you going to do about it? School’s almost finished.’

Forever, she added in her head, and she had to suppress a shiver.

‘Oh, I already fixed it,’ Elle said. ‘I stayed up that night to rewrite the paper – and made three back-up files of all my work. I can’t imagine how it went missing, in the first place.’

Anna nodded solemnly. This was something she loved about her friend: when there was a problem, she didn’t sit around; she took action. Anna often wished she could do the same, that she weren’t so paralysed by her nerves.

‘I can’t wait until it’s all over,’ Elle said. ‘School, I mean. I can’t stand the to do list running circles round my head. I write it all down, but I can’t get it off my mind. It just repeats over and over like a bad prayer, you know?’

Anna knew.

‘All I want is to clear everything off my list and be done with it,’ Elle went on. ‘But every time I manage to cross something off, there’s something new to add to the list. Then I’m writing out a new list for the umpteenth time, because I can’t stand looking at a messy list, you know?’

Again, Anna knew.

Elle sighed. ‘Anyway. I just need it all to be over, so I can throw away the list, once and for all.’ She dropped her breadstick as if to demonstrate that long-awaited moment of disposal. Then she grew quiet and still and stared at the breadstick like she thought it might walk away. This was something she had taken to doing more and more, lately. One moment she would be bubbling away, and the next, some idea would take her away to a distant land Anna couldn’t locate.

But today, Anna was determined to try.

‘Penny for your thoughts?’ Anna prompted.

Elle looked up, startled. ‘Sorry.’ She shook her head and shoved the breadstick in her mouth. She munched contemplatively and said, ‘It’s just….’

Anna’s breath caught. She was overcome with the notion that her friend was about to say something big, something important. Something that could change them.

‘It’s stupid,’ Elle finished. She toyed with another breadstick in her lunchbox, as if unsure how it had got there or what it was for.

‘Elle, nothing you have to say is stupid. Just tell me.’

Elle smiled and, after a moment, nodded. ‘Alright. I was just thinking…what if there were a way to live out all these fears in a safe environment? To get them out of our systems?’

Anna furrowed her dark brow. ‘What do you mean?’

Her friend shifted in her seat. She cast a furtive glance at the other occupants of their lunch table, perhaps checking whether they were listening in. They weren’t. They never did.

‘Well, I was thinking…maybe we could…go to the....’

Anna’s eyes grew large and watery. ‘The Compulsion Factory?’ she finished for her in a whisper.

Elle looked like a child caught stealing cookies.

Anna fell back in her seat from the weight of this turn in conversation. ‘Oh, Elle, I don’t know. You know how much just the idea of that place freaks me out.’

‘But why? None of it’s real.’

‘But it would feel real. Realer than real, they say. How will that make it better?’

Elle popped a grape into her mouth. ‘You can programme the room for any scenario you want and just let it all happen. Your worst fears. Let it all out where it can’t really hurt you. Then when you face the situation for real, the feeling isn’t – won’t be – as strong.’

Anna blinked. ‘Isn’t?’ she echoed. ‘You’ve already been there!’

Her friend lowered her eyes. ‘There was a memory I needed to get out of my head.’

Anna’s heart caught in her throat. This was it. They would finally talk about it. ‘Oh, Elle,’ she whispered. ‘Your –’

‘No,’ Elle jumped in. ‘Nothing like that. Just something I did once by accident, something embarrassing I couldn’t forget. They told me not to pick anything too big, if it was my first time. It could be too much.’ For a moment, she looked lost in some dark dream within her mind. Then her eyes lit up again. ‘Your empty seat problem would be perfect, Anna.’

Anna swiftly shook her head. ‘I don’t think I want to.’

They both fell silent. Then Elle said, ‘Okay. But promise me you’ll think about it?’ She sounded pleading, like a child who had stumbled upon new knowledge and didn’t know what to do with it, didn’t want to be alone with it.

‘Alright,’ Anna agreed. She knew her friend wouldn’t let it go if she didn’t say that much. ‘But even if I change my mind, I doubt my parents would go for it.’

There was nothing technically ‘underground’ about the Factory; it was legally recognised and even advertised on television. But the last time she’d seen one of those ads, her father had made a speech about how it would only make things worse. People would get addicted, stop living their own lives – or worse, become numb to the fears and start enacting them outside the Factory.

The Fear is a sacred gift, he’d said in a tone that implied capitalisation. It’s what keeps us safe – from each other – from ourselves. If we start killing each other in the Factory, what’s to stop us killing each other in the streets?

Anna swallowed down the last of her food, unwillingly noting that Elle had stopped eating. ‘By the way,’ she changed the subject before her thoughts could go somewhere she couldn’t bring them back from, ‘we need to go to the nail salon.’

Elle frowned, put down her food and reached across the table for her friend’s hand. She inspected the long smooth perfectly rounded nails until she found the chip in the varnish, and gasped. ‘But you just had these done yesterday!’

Anna drew back her hand and nodded. ‘I noticed it in the middle of my panic attack over the empty seat. Will you go with me?’

Elle gave her a how dare you even ask me? look. ‘Of course I will. After school?’

‘I wish we could go now, but yes. After school would be good.’

‘I’ll tell my dad. He’ll understand.’

Anna threw her a grateful smile and set to finishing the last of her food. She tried to ignore her chipped nail, which seemed to jump off her hand and shout, Look at me! Her eyes drifted across the spotless cafeteria, white as an operating theatre, to Renner’s usual lunch table. The others at that and the surrounding tables had instinctively shuffled around to fix the numbers. It was incredible what an impact one person’s absence could have; it disrupted everything. Anna had hardly spoken to Renner when she’d had the chance. Now she decided she’d taken him for granted.

Elle followed her friend’s gaze and read her thoughts. ‘It makes you realise how important each person is, doesn’t it?’ Something in her voice suggested she was thinking of more than just their lost schoolmate.

Anna met her eyes and smiled sadly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘It really does.’

TWO

Anna arrived home late that day, but with greater peace of mind once the nail varnish had been reapplied at the salon. The manicurist had been horrified and apologised profusely, which Anna had graciously accepted and then shrugged off, despite the anguish the chip had caused her. After all, as bad as it was, it had been magnified by the empty seat, and that wasn’t the manicurist’s fault. Anna may have even unconsciously picked away at the varnish herself, as she regularly did in times of distress.

Almost as soon as she’d opened the front door to her split-level house, her mother was in the foyer. Anna’s parents had met in their thirties, so they were now in their early fifties, but they had a youthful vibrancy that seemed to have stopped the ageing process at least ten years ago.

Her mother, Eve, was darker than Anna, her skin contrasting sharply with the yellow blouse she wore over slim-fitting jeans. As ever, her hair was pulled back into an elegant bun, smooth and slick as oil, revealing bright, intelligent brown eyes.

‘Did you get it sorted?’ Eve asked her daughter in greeting. Worry marked her face.

Anna nodded and showed her the re-painted nail. ‘All better,’ she said. She tried for a smile.

Eve frowned. ‘Then why do you seem so down?’

Anna sighed, shut the door behind her and slipped off her shoes. She opened a cupboard door at the side of the hall and hung her backpack neatly on a hook inside, beside her mother’s snow-white leather shoulder bag and her father’s matching briefcase. Then she tucked her shoes into their place on a wooden rack, on a shelf designated just for her collection of pumps, boots, heels and trainers, and shut the door. She leaned against the whitewashed wall of the hallway. ‘One of my classmates moved, and he used to sit right next to me in maths class.’

Her mother pressed the cupboard door, perhaps to check it was really closed, and then looked at Anna. ‘Haven’t they replaced him?’

Anna shook her head. ‘It’s complicated. They don’t know how long it’ll take.’

Eve raised her brow in surprise. ‘Oh, honey.’ She gathered her daughter into her slender arms. ‘I’m so sorry. No wonder you seem tense.’ She ran her fingers through Anna’s thick mass of curls, haloing around her head in a perfect circle. ‘Maybe I can speak to the school….’

Anna disentangled herself from her mother’s embrace. ‘No. They’re already working on it. But thank you.’ She sniffed the air. It smelled of oregano. ‘Have you made pasta?’

Eve nodded. ‘I’ll just call your father from his study. We were waiting for you.’

A wave of embarrassment washed over Anna. ‘I’m sorry I kept you from dinner just so I could get my nails done,’ she said.

Her mother waved away the concern with one of her long-fingered hands. ‘Nonsense. It was an emergency. These things happen. It’s alright, as long as you ring first. Now, come sit at the table and I’ll get your father.’

She hurried away and Anna exited the foyer, heading down the wide white hallway and into the square dining room at the end. The overhead lights bounced harshly off the pristine walls. In the precise middle of the room, the large round oak table had already been set for three, with a hotplate at the centre. Anna took her usual place at the table, in front of a fully labelled wall display of her school photographs throughout the years, across the room from a round antique mirror framed in carved silver.

A moment later, her father Otto came into the room. He was fairer than his wife and daughter, but with darker features – blacker hair, browner eyes, and a gravity to his expression. He wore a freshly pressed black suit, despite spending most of his days working from home. Anna had once commented that if she could work from home, she’d spend all day in pyjamas. Otto had explained that if he did that, he’d be more inclined to lie around reading or watching television; putting on appearances kept him focused on work.

And anyway, Anna doubted she could truly bring herself to laze around like that, if it were possible.

Otto sat diagonally across from his daughter, near a wall shelf studded with Eve’s collection of porcelain vases, carefully dusted each morning. Once Eve took her place at the table, an equilateral triangle would form between their small family.

‘Hello, Anna,’ Otto said as he unfolded the white serviette from his place setting and laid it over his lap. ‘Did you get your nail fixed?’

Anna nodded and followed her father’s example with her own serviette. ‘How was work?’ she asked.

Otto shrugged and clasped his hands together in front of him, careful not to let his elbows rest on the table. ‘I’m in a transitional period,’ he said. ‘There won’t be much news from me for a long time, perhaps, but it’s all leading toward something big; I can feel it.’

Anna felt a murmur of excitement in her chest. ‘You really think you’ll be able to design the world’s first building based on Pure Mathematics?’ It had been her father’s dream since…well, since forever. It was the whole reason he’d gone into architecture.

He allowed a small grin to slip out of his lips. Anna loved her father’s smiles. He was often serious, as hard and angular as their house (one of his designs). When he smiled, Anna felt like she’d been handed a precious gem or let in on a priceless secret.

‘I’m already working on it,’ he shared in a hushed voice.

Anna gasped in surprise. ‘I didn’t think you were that far along.’

‘I didn’t either. But today, something just…clicked.’ His grin widened.

Anna shook her head in wonder. ‘Wow,’ she breathed. That simple syllable carried the weight of a thousand unspoken words as she considered the implications.

She thought of her house, one of many simple symmetrical shapes, built of sensible squares and triangles – then of the jagged, messy buildings that lined the streets in some of the more experimentally designed neighbourhoods; asymmetrical dodecahedrons, or labyrinths tilted on their sides, shooting vainly up into the sky and calculated with Pure Mathematics. No one had ever been able to design a building both Pure and visually symmetrical.

‘If you’re right,’ she said, ‘you’ll turn all of architecture upside down. They’ll have to rebuild everything, won’t they? The shops, the offices, the houses –’

‘The temples,’ her father cut in.

‘No!’ Anna was shocked at the suggestion. ‘They wouldn’t change those…would they?’

Otto shrugged. ‘What better way to honour the Great Sense of Order?’

Anna opened her mouth to reply, when her mother entered the room carrying a great pot, which she placed on the hotplate on the table. A glance over the rim of the pot revealed pasta spirals smothered in a rich tomato sauce flecked with oregano, basil, rosemary and thyme, fresh from Eve’s personal garden at the back of the house.

Anna drew in deep breaths, relishing the way the aroma travelled through her nose, down her chest, and promised her stomach good things to come. ‘It smells delicious. I’m starved.’

Once Eve had served everyone and sat down, Anna asked her, ‘What about you, Mum? How was your day?’

Her mother smiled. Unlike her husband, Eve rarely didn’t look cheerful. It was another thing that made her look younger than her years. ‘It was fine, honey. Thank you for asking.’

‘Did you manage to finish the book you were working on?’ Otto asked in that soft voice he reserved for his wife.

Eve nodded as she chewed a mouthful of pasta. Anna could almost hear her mother counting those bites in her head – exactly twenty – before swallowing. ‘I finished early, in fact. It gave me time to do some gardening.’

‘You’re so fast,’ Anna said in admiration.

Her mother was a specialist proofreader who counted the number of words in each line of any printed text, to ensure there were always twelve words per line. Eve had once explained to Anna that a long time ago, the printing system hadn’t been so regimented, yet 87% of all printed books already had twelve words per line, to accommodate the best fonts and sizes. Sometimes there would be ten to a line, if the publisher wanted to give the illusion that the story was longer than it was – or fifteen, but only in books with smaller fonts. The variable fonts had been eradicated sometime before Anna had been born and now no book could be published without the words first being counted. Eve’s work was important – and she was renowned for being one of the quickest counters in the industry.

Eve shrugged off the compliment. ‘It’s just experience,’ she said. ‘You’ll be just as good at whatever you decide to do, when you finish school.’ She flashed her daughter a look of encouragement.

Anxiety flooded through Anna. Right, she thought as she chased a pasta coil around her plate with her fork. As if to lend validity to those doubts, the wet spiral flew off her plate – off the table – and landed on the floor by her foot.

For a moment, no one spoke. It seemed no one even breathed.

Then everyone spoke at once.

Anna: ‘I’m so sorry! Oh, Organiser, I’m sorry, I’m sorry!’

Otto: ‘What were you thinking? Weren’t you paying attention?’

Eve: ‘The carpet! It’s covered in tomato. Oh, Otto, that will never come out, not really.’

Otto: ‘We’re going to have to get the room re-carpeted. There’s no choice. Anna, what is wrong with you sometimes?’

Eve (near tears): ‘It’s going to be expensive.’

Otto: ‘Do you think we have that kind of money just lying around, Anna?’

Suddenly, two sets of eyes were boring holes into Anna like she was a plank of old brittle wood, as she desperately tried to make herself smaller in her seat. ‘I…I….’ She didn’t know how to finish that sentence, how to explain herself.

Finally, her mother sighed in that way she did in moments like this. ‘Just go, Anna.’

Anna looked up, stricken. ‘No, I’ll clean it up. I’ll –’

‘Haven’t you done enough?’ her father accused. No trace of his former joviality remained, either on his face or in his voice.

With shame, Anna slowly pushed out her chair, rose from the table and left the room.

* * *

Her throat tight with tears that refused to flow, Anna headed downstairs to her bedroom, which was at basement level. She liked it down there because in winter, it was the warmest room in the house, and in summer, the coolest. Also, it was the only room on that level, apart from a small adjoining bathroom and the utilities room, which meant she had more privacy than, say, Elle, who’d had to share a wall with her older brother until he….

Anna shook away the thought and went into her room, shutting the door softly behind her. For a long moment, she leaned with her back against the door and closed her eyes. Perhaps this time, the tears would come. Perhaps this time, she would have release.

She waited.

No, she decided. Not this time.

She tried counting, again:

…11, 22, 24, 33, 36, 44….

At the same time, a subconscious part of her mind counted in another way: it counted the syllables in each number recited in her head, this time using the more traditional numeric system.

Three syllables in 11.

Three syllables in 22.

Three syllables in 24.

There was something beautiful about the repetition of the number 3. It soothed her, and she opened her eyes. She was met with the sight of her pristine room, everything in its place, tucked away, closed off by virgin-white cupboards so it looked like there was almost nothing there but the furniture. Simple. Empty. Untainted.

She took a breath and heaved herself away from the door. She approached her dresser