The Last Beginning Read online

  “She never did,” Jen finished. “Your parents disappeared. We know that Kate managed to break your father out of prison. How, I have no idea – it should have been impossible. But Kate managed it. They even managed to send evidence of the biological weapon to NATO shortly after Matt’s escape without getting caught. The English government was shut down. But we don’t know what happened to your parents after that. Tom didn’t hear anything from either Kate or Matt after the prison breakout – they just disappeared.”

  “You just let her – my mother – go off alone? You stayed here?” Clove tried to stop her face from twisting into a grimace.

  Tom stared at her, but he didn’t look like he was seeing her at all. “I’ve regretted it every day since.” He rubbed a thumb across his knuckles. “Officially, they are still classified as missing. That means they either managed to escape to France, or perhaps even back to Scotland, or they were secretly taken prisoner by the English government.”

  No one spoke for a while. Clove felt wobbly, a little sweaty. Eventually, she said, “Have you never tried to find them?”

  Tom scrubbed his hands over his face. “I’ve enquired about them, and I’ve got dozens of online alerts set up for any mention of them. But there haven’t been any leads in a long time. I would have done more, but I had to be careful. I’m still wanted by the English authorities − I can’t go and physically look for them.”

  Jen patted Tom’s hand. “It’s been pretty scary over the years. When Tom first told me, I worried all the time that something would happen − that English spies would find him. He’d changed his surname, but that didn’t make me feel any safer. I’ve learned to live with it, and we’ve been left alone, so far. Technically we’re all in hiding.”

  “We’re in hiding from the law?” Clove asked.

  “Well, I am. The English law, at least,” Tom admitted. “Your mum took on a lot when she decided to marry me: a single dad with a six-month-old baby and a secret history of crime.”

  Jen smiled at him, softly. “You’re worth it, hon.”

  “I don’t know how I’d have done it without you.” Tom leant over and kissed Jen quickly. Clove couldn’t bear to watch. Her whole world was crumbling in front of her and they were acting like it was nothing.

  “So I’m not really Clove Sutcliffe?” she asked, trying to bring them back to what was important.

  “You are, legally. I took Jen’s name when we married,” Tom explained. “But if our family was a little more conventional, you’d be Clove Galloway.”

  “Galloway,” Clove repeated, trying the name out. “Clove Galloway.”

  Hearing it aloud made it real. Suddenly it all clicked. Matt Galloway and Kate Finchley were her parents. Her real, actual parents. There was a film about them. About her parents. She’d watched it in a history class once. She’d had to write a paper about them.

  They were her parents. They had saved the world.

  Aloud, slightly hysterically, as if it was the most important thing she’d learnt that day, she said, “MY PARENTS HAVE A WIKIPEDIA PAGE?”

  “They’ve probably got an IMDB page, too,” Tom said, and despite the coldness that had begun to spread through her body, Clove began to laugh, too loud and too manic, and found she couldn’t stop.

  Eventually, after she’d calmed down and drunk a whole glass of water, Clove managed to ask some more appropriate questions. “Didn’t my … mother leave any plans about what she was going to do after she rescued Matt?”

  “No, she didn’t. If she had a plan, she didn’t share it with me.” Tom carefully lined up a coaster with the edge of the table. “But I didn’t push her to. I was done with it – I didn’t want her to go. But I couldn’t stop her. She was set on saving Matt. And in some ways it was a relief… I was out of it. Free.”

  “What about me? How could she just leave me like that, with nothing?” Clove’s voice cracked.

  “Kate left you with me and your grandparents,” Tom said. Somehow, to Clove, that didn’t seem enough. What was an uncle to real parents? What were her grandparents − who were great but getting kind of old and sleepy − to a mum and dad?

  “She always meant to come back. It was only supposed to be temporary. And she did leave something for you,” Tom added. “A box of letters. They might tell you more. We never opened them. I promised Kate I wouldn’t. Spart, do you know where they are?”

  Spart’s tinny voice came from his watch.

  > The box is in a filing cabinet in the most eastern corner of the loft.

  > There’s a nest of mice in the adjacent box. I have called an exterminator, who will arrive tomorrow at 1300 hours. Does this meet with your approval?

  “Thanks, Spart. I’ll get it,” Jen said.

  She stood up, kissing Clove’s forehead as she left the room. Clove breathed in the familiar scent of Jen’s perfume and wondered again how it had never occurred to her that this wasn’t her real mother. Shouldn’t she have known, somehow? Shouldn’t she be able to feel something like that?

  “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?” Clove asked, while they waited for Jen to return.

  Tom sighed. “Kate – your mother, I mean – made me promise to wait until you were older, so that you would understand it all properly. I was happy to do that. For a long time when you were young the situation was still very dangerous. We couldn’t risk you mentioning anything about it at school. After Matt escaped from prison, the English authorities were searching for him and Kate for years. Even though they had saved the world, Matt’s prison break meant that they were the most wanted criminals in England, so I was in hiding. While they could never do anything about me officially as I’m under Scotland’s protection, we always thought that they might try to do something to me in secret, to get information about your parents somehow. It was imperative that no one knew who I really was, or where Tom Galloway had gone. Your grandparents – my mum and dad – came into hiding with us. They changed their names too.

  “If our location had been leaked, all of our lives would have been in danger. Whatever the English government did to Kate and Matt in the end … that would have happened to me, and maybe to my parents and to you and Jen too. We couldn’t have told you the truth, not back then.” Tom smiled slightly as he said, “A part of me did wonder if you knew, though, somehow. Do you remember after you watched the film about them, darlin’? You used to play with Meg at being ‘Kate and Matt’, running away from the police.”

  Clove gasped. “I remember that. I always wanted to be Matt. I used to steal your glasses so I looked like him. Meg was always Kate because she liked her hair.” The memory caused an ache in her chest. What would Tom and Jen have been feeling, watching them play all those years ago? It must have been basically impossible to keep the secret hidden.

  “It was just easier not to tell you anything,” Tom continued. “And we’d built up lives here. We didn’t want to have to go on the run. Especially not with our work at St Andrews. Everything was just coming together with the time machine. It wasn’t worth risking it, not when all of our work was at stake too.”

  Clove swallowed. She stared at her knees. She knew that Tom was watching her with concern, but she couldn’t meet his eye. It was clear that he was relieved to have finally given up the burden of secrecy.

  When Jen returned with the box, she put it on Clove’s lap. “Take your time reading through it. You don’t even have to look at it now if you don’t want to. It’s a lot to take in. If you have any questions, we’re here to answer them. We love you, Clove.”

  Clove closed her eyes and tried to let Jen’s hug calm her, the way it had throughout her childhood. But all she could think was that it should have been a different pair of hands holding her. Her mother should have been someone else.

  CHAPTER 2

  Tom,

  Everything in this box is for Clove. If we don’t come back, give it to her when she’s old enough to understand. Please don’t tell her about us until then. I want her to be a happy child, in
nocent of everything her parents have done.

  Thank you,

  Kate

  Folios/v8/Time-landscape-2040/MS-4

  File note: A note written in 2040 by KATE FINCHLEY to TOM GALLOWAY before she left CLOVE SUTCLIFFE in his care and took a bus to England

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056

  Clove sat cross-legged in the centre of her bed and regarded the box. It was corrugated cardboard, the kind that Tom and Jen used for storage. There were numbers written on it in Tom’s untidy scrawl. She’d probably seen it dozens of times in her life.

  Brushing the caked dust off the lid, Clove watched the particles drift lazily to settle on her duvet cover. She pressed a thumb against the grey specks, rubbing them into the material. Then she lay back to stare at the ceiling, tapping her foot against the end of her bed. She didn’t want to open the box.

  She considered calling Meg. Not to tell her the news − she wasn’t ready for that conversation – but as a distraction. She knew what would happen, though. Meg would want to talk about Alec, and Clove would have to pretend to be enthusiastic about their burgeoning romance.

  She heaved a melodramatic sigh, which made her feel slightly better. Finally, she sat up and tugged the lid off the box and peered inside. There was a folded letter on top – an actual paper letter, like the kind in old films. Below it was a bundle of papers, a lab book and a leather journal tied with velvet ribbon. At the very bottom was a piece of fabric wrapped around a small object. After unwrapping it, she found it was a tiny fox ornament hidden in an old and fragile cardigan. She placed the ornament on her desk, wondering at the history behind it. What had it meant to Kate that she had kept it so carefully?

  There were several shiny photos in the bottom of the box. They showed a smartly dressed man, his dark hair in careful disarray, beaming at a woman in a fluffy white wedding dress. Her red curls fell haphazardly around her face.

  Clove’s heart seized up. This was them. Her parents.

  She opened the letter.

  My beautiful daughter,

  Fingers crossed you’re reading these letters with me at your side, and I’m showing you them while telling you stories about how badass your dad and I used to be.

  Hopefully you’ll find the whole thing utterly embarrassing and go to visit your cool Uncle Tom to get away from our boring anecdotes. That’s the future I want for you – you and Tom gossiping about how awful we are. Matt and me boasting about our epic adventures nonetheless.

  That’s probably not the life you are going to get, Clove.

  I should explain properly. If this is the first time you’ve ever heard of me, I should at least try to make sense, shouldn’t I? Good work on that, Kate.

  I have to leave. I don’t want to. Leaving you behind is the single hardest thing I’m ever going to do. You are the most important thing in the world to me. But there’s more at stake than just your childhood. Your dad and I need to save the world.

  You’ve probably heard the stories, but in case you haven’t, just know that my country is run by terrible people, and I need to try and stop them. I’m leaving you all of the evidence – my journals, printouts of emails and other documents – so you’ll have the full story.

  I have to get your father out of prison, Clove. Not just because I’m in love with him, or because he’s innocent, or because he’s a father now, but because he’s important to the world. I can’t let him rot away in jail, not when he’s still alive for once. Not when there’s still work for us to do.

  I think that’s enough for today. I’ll write to you again tomorrow. For now, I’m going to read you a story. I heard that babies can learn to recognize their mother’s voice from the womb, so I’m reading you the classics, starting with Harry Potter. I tried reading you poetry, but I couldn’t stand it, and neither could you – you kept kicking me. As I’ve been writing this, you’ve kicked me nine times. I think you’re going to be a hyperactive kid.

  Folios/v8/Time-landscape-2040/MS-5

  File note: A letter written in 2040 by KATE FINCHLEY to her unborn baby, CLOVE SUTCLIFFE

  Clove read the entire letter without pausing and then skimmed through the other papers, which turned out to be a mix of diary entries, emails and experiment logs.

  It seemed that her parents had broken into Central Science Laboratories, after following clues in a coded journal written by her mum’s dead aunt, who had worked in the lab in 2019 when the fatal bacteria was first created. By some weird coincidence − or family tradition, maybe − Kate’s aunt had also been called Katherine. Clove’s great-aunt’s journal was in the box, too, along with her lab books − the actual originals! Clove felt like she was holding a piece of history.

  Hours later, when she’d read every detail, she dropped the documents back in the box and curled up around a pillow. She felt dizzy and lost − caught up in something beyond her understanding.

  After a while, she stood up and walked into the bathroom. Staring at herself in the mirror, she drank a glass of water slowly, sipping and savouring each mouthful. No matter how hard she looked, she couldn’t see anything that made her special. She had never expected anything like this ever to happen to her. She wasn’t a dazzling lead protagonist in some adventure film. She was the gay best friend.

  She tried to see whether she could recognize her parents in her features. How had she never noticed that she didn’t look anything like Tom and Jen? She compared her face to the photos, picking out details.

  She had Matt’s nose. It was cute, she thought: slightly turned up. She had Kate’s eyes and curls. Clove’s hair was usually shorter, in a pixie cut, but it was growing out. The mass of dark curls that had grown almost to her neck looked just like her mother’s − only it was brown, like Matt’s hair.

  Her mother loved Harry Potter and hated poetry, just like Clove did. Kate had known that Clove was going to be hyperactive before she was even born – something it had taken Tom and Jen years and years to work out. Tom and Jen. Clove couldn’t think of them as Mum and Dad right now.

  Clove Galloway, she said to herself, repeating the words until they came naturally. Clove Galloway.

  CHAPTER 3

  Folios/v5−v6−v7−v8/Time-landscape-1941−1963−2019−2040/MS-1

  File note: Photographs of KATHERINE FINCHLEY and MATTHEW GALLOWAY, taken in multiple time-landscapes from 1941−2040

  ST ANDREWS, SCOTLAND, 2056

  “Hey, champ,” Meg said, as she sat down opposite Clove.

  Clove was jerked back into awareness. She was in the dining hall at school, apparently having sat through all of her morning classes without taking in a word. She hadn’t wanted to come to school this morning, but Jen had insisted, and now here she was at lunchtime, too lost in thought to do anything except stare at her empty plate. She hadn’t even ordered her food yet. She clicked through the menu screen in the table’s surface, finally settling on curly fries. A few seconds after she tapped the item, her steaming hot meal slid out of a drawer in the table.

  Meg started shaking salt over her own chips. “So have you managed to get your code working?”

  Clove felt completely out of it. “What code?”

  Meg frowned. “I thought that’s why you’d been incommunicado all day. Because you’ve been trying to work out your latest program.”

  Clove opened her mouth, closed it again. “Sure,” she said, hating herself for how easily the lie came.

  Meg flicked her hair back over her shoulders. The soft mess of blonde settled down her back. Clove’s eyes caught on it and wouldn’t let go. Her throat felt tight. She couldn’t remember when she’d started liking Meg as more than a friend, but it was hard knowing that Meg didn’t feel the same way – even harder now that Meg had a crush on Clove’s own cousin.

  “So are you ready for work experience?” Meg asked. “Do you know what you’ll be doing yet? I think I’m going to be helping teach the Reception kids. Do you get to play with the time machine?”

  “I don’t know yet.” Clove
swallowed. Today was their last day of school before they started a week of work experience on Monday. Meg was going into a local primary school and Clove was working at the university with her parents. She had been looking forward to it – and to the week without homework – but now she wasn’t sure how she felt about spending so much time with Tom and Jen. Not after what she’d found out.

  Without even knowing she was going to say anything, she let out in a rush, “Mum and Dad told me I’m adopted.”

  Clove could see the moment the meaning of the sentence hit Meg by the change in her posture, as she registered that the conversation had gone from absent, idle lunchtime talk to a serious discussion.

  “Oh, Clove. Are you all right?”

  Clove nodded, and tried to force away a sudden rush of tears. She was so glad she’d told Meg. Meg always knew exactly what to say. Meg was always there, just when she needed her. If only Meg didn’t need Alec, too.

  “I’m OK,” she said, trying to speak lightly. “I really am,” she added, when Meg looked doubtful. “I know they still love me, they raised me and they’re still my parents − all of that stuff.”

  Meg put down a chip she’d been holding. She looked ready to launch-hug Clove if she burst into tears.

  “Meg, it’s fine, really,” Clove said. “That’s not the part I’m having trouble grasping. It’s who my real parents are that’s causing me to freak out.”

  “What? Who are they? Clove, are you a princess? Powerful!”

  Clove let out a half-hearted fake laugh. “Er, no. I wish.” She focused her attention on neatly lining up her cutlery beside her plate so she didn’t have to look at Meg. “You can’t tell anyone.”