'What are you doing with that chewing gum?'
A momentary look of guilt, followed by an irritated expression. 'I was just taking a few packs. You've got a bloody mountain of the stuff in the garage.'
'You opened one of the boxes?'
'No, it was open already. Jesus, keep them if they're that precious.' She walked over to the corner of the room and picked up a sculpture of a dolphin she'd made at art college. Tom stood where he was, one hand fiddling with the drawstring of his tracksuit bottoms, a frown on his face. Keeping her eyes on him, she skirted round to the door and back out of the house.
Next foray she came back down the stairs with all her bottles of perfume and toiletries. He stood in the hallway. 'I don't understand. Where are you going with that stuff? You're coming home soon, aren't you?'
She tried to get past him without replying, but he blocked her exit.
Charlotte said nothing. Instead she headed back into the front room, crouched at the video cabinet and flicked through the cassettes and DVDs inside. She dropped It's a Wonderful Life, The Wizard of Oz and Pretty Woman into the box.
'I've also made enquiries about nurseries, 'Tom continued. 'There are some very good ones in the area.'
Suddenly she swept Tom's collection of videos onto the carpet. The violence of her action caused him to sit down suddenly on the sofa. 'Tom!'she yelled, her voice quickly dying down to a whisper. 'There is no bloody baby.'
A slither of Tom's brain understood the words, but it was out weighed by the far larger part of his mind that was in total denial.
'Where've you been, anyway? I've been so worried about you.'
'You what?' She looked at him uncertainly.
'Where've you been?'
'Tom, are you hearing me? There is no bloody baby.'
'I was worried about you.'
Confused, she raked strands of blonde hair from her face. 'Well, don't be,' she replied, getting to her feet and walking through to the dining room. She placed the box on the dining table, opened up the dresser's top drawer and started dropping her silver napkin rings into the box. Next she pulled open the second drawer, lifted the napkins out and froze. 'There's a gun in this drawer.'
'Yes, 'Tom replied.
'What's it doing there? Is it real?'
'Yes. It's to protect us. There are dangerous people out there, Charlotte. We have to be more careful, especially with the little one on the way. I've been thinking about babies' names.'
Very slowly Charlotte slid the drawer shut, then moved round towards the door, reaching into her pocket again as she did so. 'There is no baby,' she repeated.
'Oh, but there is. You're pregnant, Charlotte.'
'It was terminated. Last month.'
Tom's head dropped forwards, as if the muscles in his neck had suddenly dissolved. He looked towards his hand and began picking at the seam on the backrest of the dining chair. 'No baby?' he whimpered. His thumbnail began to go white as he dug it with ever growing force into the leather. 'No baby?' His breathing was deepening and picking up in speed, his mind shrinking from her words, desperate to find some way to make them manageable. Suddenly he had it. He looked up at her with tears in his eyes. 'Get out. You're not Charlotte. You've been sent to impersonate her. You're not Charlotte. Get out!'
'Charlotte?' came a voice from the doorway. Tom heard an Australian accent.
Leaving her box on the table, she edged round the wall and ran from the room.
Across the road Creepy George placed his camera on his lap, tilting it forward so he could see the viewfinder. He'd got several good shots of her as she ferried the boxes into the back of the jeep and many at the point when she had leaned forwards to slide them inside the vehicle, bottom poking outwards as she did so. He reached over to the glove compartment and removed a packet of gum from the box he'd stolen from It's A Wrap a couple of months before. Folding a stick into his mouth, he began to ruminate on what was going on.
Inside the house Tom couldn't move. Her words bounced around his head like a pinball, lighting up every part of his brain so there was nowhere dark and comforting for him to crawl. The only way he could make everything all right was to remind himself her words were fake, spoken by something that looked exactly like his wife. Perhaps a robot.
He needed some sort of sense in his world. He could feel the threads of reality unravelling in his fingers, everything becoming disjointed. He looked towards the door, saw his feet moving beneath him. Was he awake? He looked at the clock on the kitchen wall. Tick tock, tick tock. He turned on the taps. Water flooded the takeaway cartons. Soon he saw steam. He held a hand under each jet of water, felt sweet and sour. No, hot and cold. He held up his hands, looked at their backs. Both were bright red. Holding them against his cheeks, one was hot and one was cold. Had Charlotte just been? He wasn't sure. He turned off the taps and went into the front room. An ornament was gone. There was mess on the floor — chewing gum and videos. He thought she had been, but he was so confused.
His mind needed something to latch on to. Something he could reason with. He looked at the video at his feet. Seven. With Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. He looked at the packet of chewing gum lying next to it.
Chewing gum. Everything had gone wrong because of chewing gum. Those dots on the streets, making it impossible for him to walk through the city centre. The blobs ejected from people's mouths, coated in saliva, dropping into ashtrays, urinals, the pavement itself. Squashed flat by feet. Clinging to the soles of shoes. Cementing itself to paving stones. Swarming at the bases of bins. Massing by the bus stops. Gradually drying, losing its whiteness. Turning grey, then black, but never dissolving, stubbornly existing like some ancient lichen, surviving the rain and frost and sun. Chewing gum. It was why he had fled the city centre, why he had lost his job.
He focused on the packet, noticed the words 'seven sticks'.
His eyes shifted back to the video. Seven. That number again.
Why seven? he wondered, mind scrabbling desperately to mesh something solid out of his fragmenting reality. One for each deadly sin, he knew that. But why seven sticks of gum? One for each day of the week?
Other collections of seven occurred to him. The seven colours of the rainbow. Snow White and the Seven Dwarves. His mind flitted about, coming up with the seven wonders of the ancient world. What was it about that number? he wondered, fingertips pressed to his temples.
Tentatively, he edged over to his computer and turned it on. Sitting down, he typed into Google 'the significance of seven'. Results one to ten of more than 1,280,000 hits came up. He started scrolling down the screen.
He read about how often the number features in western culture. Seven days of the week. Seven ages of man. Seven planets in the heavens of old. He browsed through a document that outlined how alchemy was based on seven metals: gold, silver, lead, tin, iron, copper and mercury. Each metal corresponds with one of the seven wandering bodies on which astrology was originally based: the sun, moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn.
Tom scanned on down, skimming articles that spoke of other collections of seven — the seven seas, seven league boots, The Magnificent Seven.
Tom turned the packet of gum over and over in his hand, his mind seizing on the various occurrences of the number, knitting together some sort of framework, trying to create some stability. As a sense of excitement began coursing through him, he got up and went over to the drinks cabinet. All his whisky was gone, so he pulled out a bottle of tequila.
Back at the computer, he swigged some down, doubling over in a fit of coughing. After wiping the tears from his eyes he found that he'd clicked on a new document. Its title was 'The prevalence of seven in the religions of the world'.