What I have learned about psychological survival is that the plan you have for yourself might not be shared by others. That your personal notion of justice is an artificial construct, a luxury and an irrelevance in a world built of cells, minerals, wind, sea, flame, synapses. That the size of a defeat is always in proportion to the size of the ego knocked down. And that all knowledge comes at a price.
Today I am paying it.
Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones which ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.
Today, pig-sick and fallen from life’s untrustworthy grace, I will be indulgent towards myself. I will arrange for a mushroom pizza with extra cheese to be delivered to my door by a wordless bike-helmeted Kosovan. I will watch home makeover pro-grammes on daytime television. I will drown in unabashed moi. I will be my own worst enemy pretending to be my own best friend, tending to my self-inflicted wounds with all the patience and compassion of a committed narcissist. I will recognise passion, sexual fulfilment and romantic love as mirages that may have fooled me once, but never will again. And I will forget that Bethany Krall is being transferred to a maximum security hospital which will feed her heavy doses of narcotics until the end of what will probably be a short life.
Tomorrow, another story: the sequel. In which I hand in my notice at work, inform my landlady, Mrs Zarnac, that I’m moving out of her vinegary domain, ask Lily if I can stay with her in London despite the tricky logistics of a second-floor apartment with no lift, stop caring about the fate of Child By banish Armageddon, and brainwash myself into erasing the fickle, freckled physicist from my psyche. That, at least, is the agenda I have mapped out for myself before I settle down with a towel to dry my hair and check my phone messages.
Upon which the plan changes.
Not as a result of the first message, an emotional outpouring from Lily — whose predicament bears uncanny parallels to my own. She and Joshua have officially split up, and she’s moved out. She thinks she’s glad about it. Probably. Lily’s a vodka aficionado, and the slurring tells me she’s had a festival of her own. She sounds seven shots gone. I feel a wave of affection for her as she apologises and self-deprecates, but it’s followed swiftly by a selfish honk of alarm: does this mean I can’t sleep on her red velvet sofa? My head aches sullenly. More paracetamol, it urges, as though it’s someone else’s head, and I’m its slave. Swallow some. You know you want to.
‘Wheels. Wheels. Pick up the fucking phone!’ As soon as I hear the hoarse baby-croak, I stop towelling my hair to concentrate. She is calling from an anonymous number which I assume to be St Swithin’s hospital. ‘I need you here. You’ve got to come and get me out. It’s happening. It stinks of rotten eggs. We’re all going to drown. You, me, everyone!’ How did she get my number? There is a noise in the background. Bethany says ‘oh Jesus’ and hangs up abruptly. Two psychiatric nurses will be supervising her round the clock. The rules allow her one phone call. I suppose I should feel flattered she has designated me her buddy.
The next message kicks in before I have time to absorb Bethany’s call. But in the split second before the physicist speaks, I know it’s him. I flinch. Then flare. Flight-fight. I’ll opt for fight, every time — but only after a lurch.
‘We have to talk. Something’s come up. We’ll need to rethink things. Just call me right away, can you.’
His voice is low, apologetic, but with a delicate catch, an undercurrent of excitement. So the physicist has had some proper sex, with a woman who can wrap her legs round his back. Whose sudden presence in his life has led to a need to ‘rethink’ things. Good for him. Water deltas down my neck and pools in the hollows of my collarbones. For a moment I am convinced I can’t move, that the paraplegia has spread, that my body has calcified, that I am now a tetraplegic, a floating brain and no more. In the silence that follows his voice, the physicist’s absence throbs in the air, as florid as pain. I press delete.
There’s another message, but I can’t cope with the possibility of further torture just now, so I call the hospital. The process of getting through to the right department is labyrinthine. When I finally speak to the nurse on duty, she tells me Bethany’s condition is stable. She will be kept in for a few more days and then transferred to Kiddup Manor. The paperwork is underway. No, they have no knowledge of her having made any phone calls last night. Yes, she has two Oxsmith nurses with her. She’s heavily sedated and on painkillers. She has second-degree burns on her hands and arms from the electrocution. She has got hold of my phone number, and tried to electrocute herself — but the situation is at least stable, I decide. And she isn’t going anywhere for now. I finish drying my hair and laboriously dress. Twice I speed-dial the physicist’s number, but flip my mobile shut before it starts to ring.
‘Wake up and smell the coffee, Gabrielle Fox,’ I tell the mirror. I’m applying waterproof mascara and a 24-hour lipstick called Cinnamon Kiss, which like a ship’s hull requires a phased application of paint and varnish. ‘Breathe in deep and inhale the bitter aroma of reality.’ I stop and consider my reflection, and the daily waste of time that is the application of cosmetics, especially those which demand a minute’s drying-time between layers, and Bethany’s astute comment when we first met: why bother with make-up when no one’s going to look at you, unless they’re some kind of perv? ‘Then go for a swim. And if you drown, don’t say Bethany didn’t warn you.’
Ten minutes later, preparing to leave, I notice that the answer-phone light is still winking. I hesitate. A vivid imagination can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. Today it is all curse. My brain has spent the night conjuring a thousand graphic images and I know that if I hear the physicist’s voice again now, twenty lengths of the pool will not be enough for me to process the way his tone has changed to a mixture of apprehension, guilt and excitement brought on by the thrill of another woman’s internal muscles flexing around his penis.
I press play.
‘I didn’t finish what I needed to tell you the other night,’ Joy McConey blurts. I could kiss her. ‘My husband thinks I’m mad. But I’m not. I need to see you. I have to warn you what’ll happen.’ She leaves her mobile number. ‘Ring me when you get this. There’s something you have to know about Bethany. It’ll change your mind about her.’ I recall Joy McConey’s paleness as she turned to face us in the doorway of the restaurant. Like those round white paper plates you use for picnics. Blank and honest. She’s not just predicting things. She’s making them happen.
If humans disappeared from the face of Hadport tomorrow, the botanical species which would most quickly assert itself would be the Australian eucalyptus, a tree which has already made an impressive bid for dominance in the local park where I have suggested to Joy that we meet. Breezes shuffle through their waving silver-green canopies, littering the paths beneath with narrow tongues of leaves. If I push hard, I can get there in nine minutes. But today it’s seven.
I cross the footbridge of a sluggish stream flanked with burst-open bulrushes, their cottony innards tugged at by the wind. Incongruously, an adult figure is perched on the top of a pyramid-shaped climbing frame in the enclosed children’s play area. She sits like a lonely beacon, her pale red hair shining. As I approach and fumble with the gate, she signals hello, then begins to negotiate her way down the wire ropes with a laboriousness that makes me wonder why she climbed up there in the first place. The play area’s surface is rubberised: noting its pleasantly soft squish under my wheels I add the sensation to my secret list of life’s tiny compensations for all the shit.
‘I take the kids here a lot,’ Joy says, descending the last three metres. She squats opposite me on one of the lower metal rungs but makes no attempt to shake hands, which is fine by me because for psychological reasons, I want to keep my gloves on. Before I ask she says, ‘I have three. Two girls and a boy.’ She is dressed in jeans and a khaki T-shirt. On her feet, hiking boots. As though she’s planning a trip into the jungle, like a modern-day Tintin. ‘I need to keep fit,’ she says, brushing something invisible off her knees. ‘Take care of myself. For the kids’ sake. Ronan’s only seven. Lots of vitamins, good food, low stress.’ Her hair swings about her shoulders, glinting with an ethereal, otherworldly shine that belies the combat gear. Her round face is pretty in an understated way, but ghost-pale. Apart from a couple of mothers with toddlers over by the sandpit, and the odd dog-walker in the distance, we are the only people here. ‘I can’t stay long. I had to sneak out. It’s not Nick’s fault. He thinks he’s doing the right thing. Protecting me from myself, etcetera. He doesn’t realise.’ The words are tumbling out. She could be a teenager exchanging confidences. ‘My husband’s one of those people who have to see things with their own eyes before they’ll believe it. And then when they do, they go straight into denial.’
The curse of the therapist: reflexively analysing the behaviour of others.
‘So tell me what’s on your mind, Joy.’ How I hate the conventions of shrink-speak. But how unavoidable they are. I can imagine Bethany snorting in contempt.
‘When I worked at Oxsmith she wanted something from me that I wasn’t prepared to give. I’ve paid the price and I’ll keep paying it for the rest of my life. I’ve accepted that.’ I suggested the park, but the playground was her choice. An interesting one: regression as safety. Joy is clearly in another place — a place so far away from her sane starting point that one must marvel at and respect the journey made. ‘But I don’t want you to be in that situation. That’s why I’ve been following you, and why I rang you. I don’t want anyone to go through what I have. Especially not you. You look like you’ve been through enough.’ With a sharp twist of irritation I think: it’s not for her to make those judgments. ‘Bethany’s dangerous. Her father knew all about it. I should have realised, it was all there in the notes. Staring at me in black and white. But I had to learn it the hard way, didn’t I.’
I ask, ‘So when Leonard Krall suggests that Bethany’s possessed by the Devil, you agree?’
‘Some kind of force. I don’t know what to call it. I was like you once. Not so long ago, I didn’t believe in evil. But I do now.’ Her eyes grow rounder. She seems out of breath, as though her words are exacting a heavy physical price.
‘What did Bethany want so badly?’
‘She wanted me to help her to escape. I wouldn’t, of course. Even though I believed in her. She lost faith in me. And I got scared, and I left.’
‘You left with nine stars. She liked you. You got along. So what made you scared?’
‘When I refused to get her out, she said something terrible would happen to me. It wasn’t a prediction. It was a threat.’
‘What did she say would happen?’
With a single swift movement she raises her hand to her head and, as though removing a hat, lifts off her hair. I stare at the stark white dome of her baldness. Flesh as architecture. I am too shocked to speak. Nor can I think of a single word to say.
She clasps the pale red wig in her hand, its locks trailing like the delicate tendrils of a jellyfish. Her crowning glory. ‘Cancer.’
She tosses the hair to the ground, as if it is of no relevance to her. It lies between us. A piece of evidence, a statement of fact. With extreme reluctance, I pick it up. It’s heavier than it looks, and hot inside. I offer it back but she rejects it distractedly. ‘The doctors have done what they can. But it’s terminal.’
From the sandpit, a child has materialised. He is about three. He stares at the egg-bald woman on the climbing frame, at my wheelchair, and then at the mass of red hair curled in my lap, and angles his mouth to form a terrible wail.
For which I do not, for one microsecond, blame him.
I make it back to the corner of my street in six minutes, shaken to the bone.
I might be forgiven for believing that right now things can’t get worse. But then they do. Because in the driveway, chatting to my landlady, dressed in the same crumpled linen suit he wore last night for his blonde visitor, stands the very last person I want to see. I approach warily, greet my landlady and salute the physicist with a curt nod.
He asks, ‘Where’ve you been?’
‘I was at the park. Not that it’s your business.’
Mrs Zarnac’s smile falters but her eyes blaze with avid life. Registering tension, and perhaps an upcoming clash whose details she can later recount to a gentleman friend, it’s with extreme reluctance that, prompted by my pointed goodbye, she withdraws into the pickle-scented recesses of her home. The physicist and I stay where we are, in psychic checkmate. I have no intention of inviting him in. The next move is his.
When it comes, it surprises me. He says, ‘I need to see Bethany.’
‘You can’t. She’s in hospital with burns.’ Telling him this gives me a perverse satisfaction, as though it is an element of some elaborate punishment that will be meted out to him across the course of his entire life. ‘She electrocuted herself yesterday. As soon as she’s well enough to be transferred, she’ll go to another hospital. With a different ethos. Where they’ll blast her with every drug known to man. Not the kind of place anyone tends to emerge from.’
‘Christ,’ he murmurs. ‘That’s bad news.’
‘I tried to get hold of you last night to tell you. But I couldn’t reach you on the phone. How come?’
He pretends to look puzzled, but when it comes to faking, he is an amateur. His freckles show up like grains of brown sugar, and a little pulse sets up on his left temple.
‘I worked late at the office. The switchboard doesn’t operate after five. And I must have turned my mobile off.’ His left temple is a place that I have often kissed. ‘I was there till midnight.’
I swallow. ‘And what were you working on, so late, at the office?’ I sound like a nagging wife.
‘Gabrielle, can you explain why you’re interrogating me?’ He has not squatted to be at my level, as he usually does. Like a mountain range on the far horizon, or North Korea, he is keeping a strategic distance. I have never heard this coolness in his voice before and I never want to hear it again. If he just bent down now and took me in his arms—
Then I would succumb, and loathe myself even more.
‘I don’t like being lied to.’ Folding my arms in unashamed hostility, I let this idea settle.
‘I worked late. End of story. I’m sorry I missed your call.’ Surely I am worth more than this. He looks at me with aggression. ‘Can I ask what the hell’s got into you?’
‘For Christ’s sake, just tell me the truth. Don’t you think I deserve it?’ This notion makes him shut his eyes. Perhaps he is hoping I will disappear. Perhaps I am hoping so too. But I am the pig-headed interrogator. ‘Well?’
He looks down and flushes. ‘Yes. But you have to trust me.’ Oh please. I cannot believe that someone I care about — cared about — could allow such verbal dross to pass his lips. How could I ever have — ‘Anyway, I still need to see Bethany.’
‘Why?’ I snap.
He looks at me levelly. ‘Take me to her and you’ll find out.’ I’m trying to work out how I could have misread him so badly. He presented himself as being sexually insecure in the wake of his failed marriage. Was that so I would feel I was doing something for him, too? ‘And where have you been all this time? You’re not the only one who hasn’t been able to get through on the phone,’ he accuses.
Apparently I am a therapist to my marrow because I note, almost with detachment: anger as a mask for guilt. ‘I told you. I was at the park.’
‘At a time like this? At the park doing what?’
I roll back further. ‘Meeting Joy McConey.’
‘Oh Jesus,’ he says, lifting his arms in a gesture of dismay. ‘All on your own? Why on earth — ?’
I flare. ‘Because she asked me to. And I came back in one piece, didn’t I?’ One broken piece. ‘Anyway, she’s harmless.’ Why am I suddenly the one defending my actions?
‘I don’t know why we’re arguing like this,’ he says, finally squatting so that our faces are level. ‘Look, just tell me what Joy said. It’s clearly shaken you up.’
If I can’t tell him, who can I tell? I feel horribly alone. And by extension, weak and unloved. I hate myself for caving in to it. ‘She’s got cancer, and she thinks Bethany visited it on her as some kind of… retribution. For not helping her escape.’
He makes an exasperated noise. ‘Right. All the more reason to prove there’s a scientific explanation for what’s happening with Bethany, rather than some pseudo-religious bullshit. come on,’ he says, jerking his head at the road. ‘Let’s take your car.’
Co-operate with a man who has just betrayed me, and lied to my face, and has as good as admitted it? Help him? But Joy’s bald head and the feel of her sweaty wig in my lap has disturbed me in a way I can’t allow myself to process without coming to some very sick conclusions. It’s eating at me. What if she’s right? Despite my rage at the physicist’s pathetic, clod-hopping, undignified charade, I find myself wanting — vehemently — to find an explanation for all this that does not involve a word as dogmatic and lazy as ‘evil’. What the physicist needs from Bethany, I need too. If only to prove that Joy’s reading of Bethany’s motivation is as categorically wrong as it is possible to be.
The self-harm ward of St Swithin’s hospital is an environment of complex despair, of extreme and conclusive failure. Here is where you end up, locally, if you can’t even get suicide right. Chastened by its significance, and forced into a shaky concord that I can safely bet will not last the hour, the physicist and I enter with due reverence.
In one bed, there’s an old man with a mane of white hair who sports a bloody, stitched-up scar across his throat of the variety that only an old-fashioned razor blade or a Stanley knife, brutally applied, will achieve for you. When we enter he sits up as though expecting visitors, then realises he doesn’t know us and swings his majestic head towards the wall. There’s a teenage girl not much older than Bethany whose skin is the blunt grey you get when you mix black and white paint. I recognise the most visible symptom of irreversible liver damage, caused by an overdose of paraceta-mol — which will prove fatal within a couple of weeks, unless she is offered a fresh organ. If she isn’t, she will turn bright yellow and then she’ll die. Her parents sit at their daughter’s beside with a tearful boy of about thirteen. They are blank with disbelief. Or concentration. If they are praying, it’s for deliverance in the form of another person’s sudden death and a freak stroke of luck with the transplant list. The kid brother is too young for this. They all are. September must be a cruel month because the ward is almost full. In other beds, there are the hunched shapes of people whose eyes are turned inward. The silence of their stoppered, un-screamed pain waltzes around us in invisible currents, fleeting as the shape of wind on water.
The staff nurse is on the phone. ‘I need the defibrillator,’ she says. ‘The new one. Yes. No. Yes. Hold on.’ Registering our presence, she smothers the mouthpiece with her palm and offers us the valiant half-smile of someone doing their best, but basically pissing into the wind. Quickly, I introduce myself as a therapist from Oxsmith, and my companion as a colleague from Kiddup Manor. We’re on a short assessment visit: Bethany’s two psychiatric nurses can take a short break while we’re with her. Perhaps they can be paged, and told to come back in ten minutes? When people are embattled in the way she is, they don’t have time to suspect others of lying, especially from the moral throne of a wheelchair. The nurse nods, sends a page text, and indicates a door at the far end of the ward, before returning to her call. For the first time in my life, as I watch the two Oxsmith nurses leave, I am grateful for the understaffing of the NHS.
Bethany has the room to herself. She lies with her eyes closed, a negligible mound under the bedclothes, a handful of assembled bones hunched oddly in the manner of an archaeological find. Her newly shaved head barely dents the pillow. Her scalp is a ghoulish white, with a webbing of blue veins pulsing at her temples like a flesh-and-blood section of the Underground map.
The physicist locates a plastic chair and takes it round to the other side of the bed. ‘Wheels,’ Bethany croaks, her eyes still closed. Then she opens them blearily, blinks them into focus and flashes an exhausted smile. There’s a whiff of chemicals, ointment, sweat. She glances at the physicist, who is now searching in his briefcase for something. She doesn’t seem to recognise him. ‘I heard the nurse say they’re transferring me. You can’t let them do that. You know what’ll happen. I’ll kill myself. Unless they give me some volts. Hey, you. Will they give me volts at Kiddup?’ she asks the physicist. ‘I need volts.’
‘I’m not from Kiddup. I’m Frazer Melville. We met before. You showed me your drawings.’
She is wearing a hospital gown. Her arms are wrapped in bandages to well above the elbow. Her hands are bound more elaborately, the splayed fingers separated from each other with a thinner gauze, like the webbing of a water-bird.
‘He’s got quite a sex drive, hasn’t he?’ she murmurs, nodding to indicate the physicist. ‘You can smell it on people.’ Then she sighs, as though the observation has over-exerted her. I flush to the roots of my hair. Frazer Melville’s eyes meet mine and his mouth twitches in what looks like a small, proud smile, and then he reddens too. The moment is so exquisitely appalling that it could be bottled and sold as a generic life-deterrent. Finally, he breaks the sick spell.
‘Bethany, you made some drawings that interest me.’ He fishes some papers from his briefcase and holds one out in front of her. ‘I’d like to decipher this image. Find out what it signifies.’
But Bethany turns her head away as though unnerved by it. Her bandaged hands twitch and scrabble around on the white hospital sheet as though they have an agenda of their own.
‘This vertical line,’ he says, pointing. ‘Can you tell me what it is?’
Bethany glances at it reluctantly and hesitates. ‘It’s hollow,’ she mumbles.
‘What I need to know is, where does it go to?’ The physicist’s eyes are intense. What is he getting at? What does he know that I don’t?’
‘Underground. All the way in, like right under the skin.’ Her eyes seem to turn inward. ‘It digs its way inside and then explodes and the whole thing cracks open and boom.’ I flinch and picture Leonard Krall: his canine eyes, his energy, his creepy charisma.
‘And if you follow it upwards, instead of down, where does it go to?’
‘Just up,’ says Bethany sulkily. From outside comes the piercing wail of a car alarm, the buzz of traffic, the faint keen of hungry gulls. When I look back at the physicist, I see frustration. He’s trying to hide it, but can’t. I’m torn. I am anxious that this line of questioning is stirring up difficult memories for Bethany. But having come this far, I need to hear something significant: something that will tip the balance back to the rational — and as far from the Joy McConey model of interpretation as can be reached. And I’m aware of the time constraint. The two Oxsmith nurses will return from their break any minute.
‘OK, Bethany, listen to me,’ I say, to break the impasse. ‘Imagine you’re at the point where the vertical line meets the ground and then just follow it.’ She grimaces, as though she is contemplating an open wound. ‘What do you see?’
She looks puzzled, then aghast. ‘Fuck, it’s water! Everywhere!’ Behind her, through the window, the tops of silver birch trees thrash in the breeze, their leaves shimmering like shoals of fish.
‘It’s OK, Bethany,’ I say. I nod at the physicist to continue. We seem to have reached a grudging accord, a temporary modus vivendi that will see us through our joint task but no further.
‘So this whole thing is underwater?’ he asks. ‘Not on land?’
‘I guess it must be. I guess it must be at the bottom of the sea.’
‘What’s the temperature like?’
She shivers and looks scared. ‘It’s freezing. Like there’s ice.’
‘And if you look up?’ asks the physicist, scanning Bethany’s features urgently. ‘If you look up towards the sky?’ Something seems to have excited him. Even though I don’t know what it is, it excites me too and I feel a kind of hope.
‘There’s something like scaffolding. It’s huge.’ She seems to find the image distasteful.
‘What colour is it?’
The question throws her for a second. ‘It’s made of iron. It’s dripping.’
‘What else?’
‘A crane.’
‘What colour’s the crane?’
‘Yellow.’
‘YOU are sure?’
‘For fuck’s sake. I said yellow.’
‘OK. Yellow.’
‘And it stinks. Rotten eggs. Dead jellyfish. It’s gross.’
I associate a rotten-egg smell with sulphur. But the physicist’s face gives nothing away. ‘And did you see anything else?’
‘Just the scaffolding stuff and a crane on it and some, like, buildings on the platform and some kind of… spire. I need some more volts.’ The physicist is blinking.
‘You’re sure? Just the crane and the platform and a spire?’ She nods. ‘And the smell?’ His face has gone as pale and translucent as skimmed milk. We sit in silence for a moment. In the distance, a phone rings. ‘Well, in that case I’ll be leaving you,’ the physicist says abruptly. And he stands up to go. ‘Thank you both. You’ve been a great help.’
‘What about my volts?’ says Bethany.
He shrugs. ‘How long will they keep you in here?’
‘Until the people in white coats come and take me away.’
He looks at her sharply, as if she has read something going on in his head.
I turn to face him full-on. ‘Aren’t you going to tell us what this all means?’
He heads for the door and opens it. ‘I will. But just now, I’m afraid I can’t.’
Does he think I’ll let him walk away that easily?
‘So what now?’ I ask. I have followed him out to the corridor but he doesn’t stop walking.
‘I’m going to south-east Asia. I’ll be out of circulation for a while.’ He glances at me sideways, uneasy. Now that he has got what he wanted, it seems he can’t get away fast enough.
‘South-east Asia? What sort of trip is this? You never mentioned it.’
We reach the double doors to the main ward, where he indicates that this is where we part ways. ‘I’m taking time out. A field trip. Botanical photos. That’s all you know. About anything. Today never happened. None of it. Next time you see me, you’ll understand.’
‘What do you mean, today never happened?’
He looks at me with an odd thoughtfulness. I am lured in by the green shard. ‘Do you trust me?’
A wash of bitterness. I laugh uneasily. When in doubt, joke. ‘Do you think I’m stupid?’
‘No. You’re clever, and imaginative, and capable of thinking on your feet. All of which I’m absolutely depending on, Gabrielle.
Now go home, and I’ll see you when I see you.’ He sounds almost flippant — as though he too has the right to approach this thing humorously. He does not. Then, sickeningly, he leans as though to kiss me. I swivel sharply away, out of his reach. What kind of kiss was he planning? A friendly peck on the cheek? Or something more intimate, for old times’ sake, the very morning after he has stuck his tongue down a blonde’s throat?
‘How can you do this to me?’ I whisper. I can feel my whole torso shuddering. The new expression on his face — pity — is as unmistakable as it is appalling.
He says, ‘Because I have to.’
And he pushes his way through the doors and he is gone and my soul shrivels.
No, he doesn’t have to. He has a choice.
‘What were you thinking, when you put that fork in that socket?’ I hurl at Bethany on my return. I am transferring my rage with the physicist on to her and so what. ‘You could have died. Look at you.’
‘I sense negative emotions.’ She flashes me a metallic grin.
‘Swap roles then.’
‘OK, as your therapist, I’d say you need to steady on. But first I need to get out of here. You have to help me escape.’
Izgoy, izgoy. ‘You will leave. But only when it’s time.’
‘To Kiddup, right? come on. Everyone knows about that place. They’ll test anything on you there. It’s a fucking pharmaceuticals laboratory. If I don’t drown first, I’ll die in there, you know that. You can’t let them do it. And it’s happening soon, this thing, I told you. October the twelfth. Maybe sooner. After the thunder comes. It’s building up, I saw it. Nothing can stop it.’
I take a deep breath. ‘So why didn’t you tell Frazer Melville?’ I can barely say his name.
She shrugs. ‘No point. He already knows.’
I flush. Of course he does. I feel dumb, muddled, coshed. ‘How could you tell?’
‘I felt it in his blood. He and that woman ’
‘What woman?’ My sharpness betrays me but I’m past caring.
She smiles her mean smile. ‘I could smell her on him. So could you.’ I feel a queasy inner slide, like the yawn of a trombone. ‘They’ve got something going together. And you’re out of the picture.’ Unsummoned, a graphic image rears: the woman’s legs high in the air, his torso above her, his pelvis plunging into hers. Then they roll over, his buttocks working, still doing it. Buttocks I have grasped. Her astride him, rocking. Bethany grimaces theatrically. ‘Woah, steady on, Wheels. Porn city.’
I blink the image away. ‘OK, so what’s happening at this place you drew?’
‘I don’t know. Ask him. But we have to get somewhere safe.’
‘Where would that be?’
‘I dunno. Up a mountain. You’ve got to help me.’
‘I’m going to find out more. I’m doing what I can.’
‘Alone? Look at you. You’re a spaz. You don’t know anyone. And no one will believe you anyway. It’s Joy McConey all over again.’
Is there menace in her voice, or am I imagining it?
‘I’m not alone. Frazer Melville’s working on it too,’ I say. It’s as hopeless as it sounds. And his name still sticks in my throat, like something I once ordered in a restaurant and regretted deeply. ‘You have to trust him.’ That phrase again. So half-baked you could cry. And soon I will. She looks at me and snorts in derision.
‘Jesus, Wheels. You’re becoming totally fucking unhinged. Why should I trust him, if you don’t?’
I have no response to that. Except to acknowledge that a nai’ve and stubborn part of me is in militant denial. A horrible truth is staring me in the face. And all I can say to it is, no. Go away. I don’t believe you. I can’t. I won’t.
Dr Sulieman once gave me a piece of advice which was as powerful as it was simple: when in doubt, be practical. Deciding to heed this, because it has worked for me in the past, I arrive home with a mission.
The evening the physicist carried me up to his office up two flights of stairs like a sack of veg and we looked at Bethany’s notebooks, I saw her Moonscape with Machinery through the prism of Freud. But I recall now that the physicist was thinking along altogether different lines. He said: Some kind of mining operation. What if that interpretation is closer to the truth than my own, instinctive one? It’s as well to bear in mind that therapists operate within the same matrix as people who write soap operas. As Freud is supposed to have said, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. What if the sketch that I interpreted as a penis invading and ejaculating inside a horizontal, submissive body turned out to be something else altogether? Bethany mentioned icy temperatures, and scaffolding, and a platform, and the seabed, and a bad smell. What can you mine for underwater that’s frozen cold?
I make coffee and switch on my laptop. Within a few minutes I have encountered the word clathrate. Clathrate meaning cage. A clathrate, also known as a gas hydrate, is a thin coating of ice that has developed around a gas molecule, forming a shell. But it isn’t the unfamiliar word, so much as the accompanying diagram that snares me. Because unlike most cages you think of, this one, which is associated with ocean-bed mining operations, bears a shape familiar to me from Bethany’s artwork.
A hexagon.
When I learn what is trapped inside these ice hexagons, I put my hand to my neck and note its heat.
Methane.
At what point did the physicist make the connection between Bethany’s drawings and the most dangerous greenhouse gas of all? Many times more powerful than carbon, I learn that there are millions of square kilometres of it locked frozen on to the sea floor, all around the world, in the form of a crust. I imagine vast swathes of dirty sub-zero champagne. Water pressure and cold temperatures are what keep it down there. Without those, it would shoot to the surface in huge sheets, like polystyrene, and burst into flame. It is so volatile that until recently, there was no serious discussion about harvesting it for energy purposes. It was too dangerous. I type in ‘methane’ again, but this time — on a hunch — team it with ‘catastrophe’.
There are thousands of references.
I take a sip of coffee.
Choosing the most easily decipherable headings, I swiftly discover that a massive cataclysm involving sudden sub-oceanic methane gas is not just a theoretical possibility, but a dramatic part of geological history. Twice in the distant past, the planet’s atmosphere has been microwaved — resulting in the devastation of most of life on Earth. One of the main culprits was methane. The first, and worst, event took place two hundred and fifty-one million years ago, at the end of the Permian era. The second extreme warming disaster heralded the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. Following a vague instinct, perhaps to do with its relative closeness in prehistoric time, I type this abstruse era in, and add the word ‘research’.
At which point, after scrolling through hundreds of links, I come across an image that startles me. It shows a geo-palaeontol-ogist, a specialist in the so-called PETM, who has worked extensively analysing foraminifera, fossilised micro-crustacea in mud cores hauled from the deep. In the photo the geo-palaeon-tologist, who is bundled in a thick anorak and red woolly hat, is proffering, in a gloved hand, a large white lump that resembles a snowball. The snowball is on fire. The flame is pure and orange, blue at the edges. The caption reads, Frozen methane is known as the ice that burns. The woolly hat, out of which blonde strands of hair emerge, is partially covering the left side of the geo-palaeon-tologist’s face, but you can tell that the sight of the flaming white lump delights her. She could be in love with it.
The geo-palaeontologist’s name is Dr Kristin Jons dottir. She is Icelandic.
When I consider Iceland, which I seldom do, I think of geysers, financial meltdown and fishing crises. But from now on I will think of other things, closer to home.
Because the blonde-haired Kristin Jons dottir, PhD, expert on the contents of prehistoric oceanic mud, has a bone structure, and a tilt to the head, and in particular a pair of legs that I recognise.
I take another sip of coffee, and note that my hands are shaking. I lay them flat on the table and wait for them to calm. When in doubt, be practical. Returning my attention to my laptop, I shift the focus of my research to the personal. I begin with a potted biography that tells me that the woman I now fervently hate was born in Iceland, has a first-class degree from Edinburgh University and another from Reykjavik, and has worked in the United States, South America, Indonesia, Namibia and Russia.
Evidence of high intelligence, and virulent ambition.
The night I first met Dr Frazer Melville, he emerged from the banqueting hall of the Armada Hotel in Hadport, wiping his face with a napkin because he was hot. He saw I was struggling to reach the guest-list on the wall, and he came and helped me. It seemed an innocent coincidence: here was a scientist with whom I might discuss Bethany’s case. We abandoned the reception and went for a quiet dinner. And I talked about Bethany. Later, I introduced him to her. But looking back, what if he already knew about Bethany, and sought me out as a conduit to her?
What if his lover, Kristin Jons dottir, had sent him?
I skim through the titles of her publications, which include the riveting ‘Abiotic Forcing of Plankton Evolution in the Cenozoic’, ‘Biogeographic Sedimentology and Chemostratiagraphic Recognition of Third-Order Sequences in Resedimented Carbonate’, ‘Recovery after the Cretaceous-Tertiary Boundary Extinction Event’ and ‘Size Distribution of Holocene Planktic Foraminifer Assemblages’. Her interests are listed as ‘Foraminifers and their influence on the global carbon cycle, ocean acidification as a tool to investigate cryptic species, and biotic recovery after extreme events’. I don’t understand half the vocabulary, or know what I am looking for, so perhaps it is no surprise that after printing out one of Kristin Jons dottir’s contributions to Micropaleontology Today and absorbing four tightly written pages about the pitfalls of sediment assessment, I decide to take the bull by the horns.
It doesn’t take long to trace her, via a friendly man in a research laboratory in Reykjavik. He tells me that his colleague Kristin is currently on a field trip in the UK. Sure, he can give me a mobile number. And he does. I must say hi to her from him. I promise I will.
The phone rings four times before she picks up. The connection isn’t good. She says something in Icelandic which sounds like a question. Politely, I apologise for speaking English, and introduce myself as Gabrielle Fox, a friend of Frazer Melville’s. But I do not keep the upper hand for long. Her accent is lilting, her tone gently regretful.
‘I’m sorry, Gabrielle. I know exactly who you are. I have heard about you from Frazer. But I have nothing to say to you.’
‘But I need to know—’
She says bluntly, ‘Forgive me for doing this, but goodbye, Gabrielle.’ And she hangs up. The blood rushes to my face. When I call back, the phone has been switched off. I feel more humiliated than I have ever felt in my life.
But I feel other things too. Because a sick, insistent part of me is visiting a place I thought I would never visit again.
Over the next two days frustration, depression, anger, self-pity and self-loathing dominate. In the evenings I imbibe excessive quantities of alcohol and in the mornings I feel even more terrible. One night I call Lily. She recounts her love woes and I make friend-and-also-therapist suggestions but don’t talk about what is happening with me, because I am not ready, and I am not ready because I am too proud, and I am too proud because I am me. The loss is mine and I know it, and so does Frida Kahlo, at whom I throw a balled-up pair of socks and miss, which compounds my rage. The person I hate most of course is myself.
I, too, have been the other woman. Alex always said his wife didn’t suspect our affair. She was too trusting, too complacent about her role in his life, too busy with her career and the kids to spot the telltale signs: the late nights at the office, the work trips abroad where alien time-zones colluded in the alibi, the scent of fresh soap after a long day. But if she had, and she had telephoned me and introduced herself, I have no doubt about what I would have done. I too would have said, ‘I’m sorry. I know who you are. But I have nothing to say to you.’ And I too would have hung up.
Bethany remains in St Swithin’s under observation, with two psychiatric nurses with her at all times. To take my mind off what has happened, I work extra hours because five staff are off sick. The physicist does not call me, but why should he, now that he has what he really wants, and wanted all along: the information he was after, and a fellow-scientist he can fuck? I go to Oxsmith at seven in the morning and come home twelve hours later, exhausted. When I have a spare moment, I sleep. One day, slightly drunk, I call the physicist’s numbers — all three — but get no reply. His mobile is switched off. I do not leave messages. I feel abandoned.
But somehow, a tiny twist of hope remains, like a persistent virus I can’t shake off. Today never happened.
What did he mean?
I’m emptying my dishwasher when the phone rings. It’s a terse and furious Dr Sheldon-Gray. I picture him in his righteous pink shirt, the phone clamped to his ear. ‘Bethany Krall has disappeared,’ he announces. ‘From the hospital. Last night.’ Something inside me changes pressure at great speed. When I ask for details, the word he uses is abducted. ‘As in, someone got her out.’
Today never happened. I close my eyes to steady the vertigo.
‘How?’
‘Whoever took her caught the nurses off guard. Kelly was having a cigarette, Mike claimed he was using the bathroom but was in fact making a long phone call. Someone dressed as a surgeon walked in, woke her up, put her in an overall with a cap and a mask, and off they went. Two bloody doctors, one a child, strolling out to the car park cool as you please. I’ve seen the CCTV footage. Bethany even turns and gives the camera the finger. It’s a disgrace. Any clues?’
I am shocked, but there’s a curious heave of excitement too: even a kind of skewed triumph. Bethany must surely be better off with people whose motivation is altruistic, than at the end-station that is Kiddup Manor. I tell my boss that I am horrified, but that I know nothing — and nor can I imagine who might be behind it, short of somebody as demented as Bethany herself. Apparently fobbed off for now, Sheldon-Gray says he has more calls to make, and hangs up without saying goodbye.
But I have not escaped scrutiny that lightly. Ten minutes later, the doorbell rings and I open it to find a young policeman, his fiercely accessorised car parked next to mine. Mrs Zarnac is leaning out of the upper window in what might be her notion of an erotic nightdress, unable to contain her glee. ‘I heard it on the radio!’ she calls down. ‘That Oxsmith loony girl, she yours? You hear she run away?’
‘Let me give you five minutes to get ready,’ says the policeman. ‘And we’ll head down to the station for some paperwork and an interview with one of the detectives on the case. If that’s OK with you, madam.’
Somehow, the madam makes it a more serious matter.
A field trip to south-east Asia. Capable of thinking on your feet.
With the young policeman hovering in the doorway, I search in my handbag for my lipstick. It’s one thing to lie — blithely — to one’s boss, but perjury and the perversion of justice are a somewhat tougher call, given that they can you get slapped in jail for it. In the hall mirror, I apply the first coat, and check my teeth for smudges. But if I report my suspicion that Frazer Melville is involved, how would the hollow triumph of putting my ex-lover behind bars affect Bethany’s fate, and that of a world threatened by methane gas? I apply a second coat.
‘You ready there, madam?’
Five minutes is never five minutes.
And less than five minutes — I reckon two — is not a long time in which to make a very crucial decision.
But it’s long enough.
There are certain people who, despite being relatively young, convey the knowingness of a nonagenarian without ever being charmed or moved to tears by anything the world has to offer. Detective Trevor Kavanagh, thirty-something, sits with his legs spread apart, because the thickness of his thighs ordains it. I am helping the police with their enquiries in a bare room with a tiny digital tape machine which is recording our conversation for legal posterity.
The story of Bethany’s abduction has been on the local radio news all morning. Have I heard it? No: unlike my landlady, I do not listen to Sunshine FM or BBC Southern Counties from morning till night. In that case, for my benefit, Detective Kavanagh will recap. A teenage girl known publicly as Child B, a psychotic minor, was left unattended in hospital for a period of four minutes. The system failure that led to this is an issue which falls in another category and is being ‘indexed separately’. In that crucial period, CCTV footage shows a figure — probably male, age unclear — in green surgeon’s overalls and face-mask, freeing Bethany Krall. That Bethany left the hospital with this ‘individual’ without a struggle would seem attributable to either collusion or — can I comment on this? — a random symptom of her mental unbalance. Kavanagh does not add that as Bethany’s most recent therapist, I am an inherent part of this procedural shambles. But the thought hangs between us.
Detective Kavanagh’s hands, laid on the desk, are as strong and clean as an orthopaedic surgeon’s. You could put your life in them. He tells me there were no signs of a struggle, so the likelihood is that Bethany’s abductor was somebody known to her.
‘Can I ask, how long have you been, er, confined to…’ he nods at it. I roll a millimetre back.
‘One year, ten months and three days. And it’s permanent. I can’t walk, if that’s what you’re getting at. As for where I was last night,’ I tell him, anticipating where this is going, ‘I don’t have an alibi. At least, not one I can prove. I was at home, alone. Just me and my titanium friend here.’ I pat a wheel.
The detective tells me that Dr Frazer Melville’s name appears in the visitors’ log at Oxsmith. He has taken time off work at very short notice. What is our relationship, what was his interest in Bethany, and where has he gone?
‘We’re acquaintances rather than close friends. As far as I know he’s away on a field trip.’
‘Well, he has gone abroad,’ Kavanagh says. He presents the information like it’s a poker stake. Responding in kind, I do not allow my features to move. ‘And we’re concerned, naturally, at the coincidence.’
‘Where is he?’
‘We have a record of his having arrived in Thailand yesterday.’
The detective is reading my face, so I try to keep my shock hidden while I work out the maths, and the implications, of what he has just said. If Bethany was taken early this morning, Frazer Melville didn’t do it. He was in Thailand. Nothing fits. So who took Bethany? Is it possible that he has actually done what he said he was going to do, and is currently taking nature photographs in south-east Asia? With a methane disaster unleashing itself in five days?
Today never happened. And nor did Kristin Jons dottir. I will grit my teeth and play my part in the game. But not for her sake.
‘You are acquaintances with Dr Melville, you say? Rather than close friends? According to Dr Sheldon-Gray, you met at a charity function here in Hadport. Which you both left early, missing the buffet and the prize raffle.’ It’s clear where this is heading.
‘I always get indigestion the next day with those buffets. And I’m never lucky with raffles. Dr Melville showed an interest in Bethany.’
‘So you told him all about her?’
‘I didn’t breach patient confidentiality, if that’s what you mean.’ This is not strictly speaking the truth. ‘He met her once, that’s all. At my suggestion. He wanted to encourage her interest in natural science. I didn’t realise what it would lead to.’ I am not much of an actress: my experience as the religiously-confused Penny showed me that much. But I tell him anxiously that I want to help find Bethany, and that he can — he must — ask me anything.
‘Are you aware that Dr Melville took Bethany’s psychotic visions seriously enough to contact scientist colleagues about them, and this caused his superiors alarm on his behalf?’
I nod in shame, and tell him I blame myself for that. I should have spotted that Frazer’s preoccupation with Bethany’s ideas was unhealthy. Especially because my predecessor Joy McConey fell into the same… here I search for the word, and come up with ‘trap’. ‘Bethany’s very convincing,’ I insist. ‘Her delusions seem to be infectious. It’s easy to over-identify with a case like hers.’ I study the floor and take my time before looking up. It feels as though we are both caught in a bell-jar. ‘Dr Sheldon-Gray thinks I’ve succumbed to that too.’ He looks interested. ‘Though that’s something I’d deny.’ He can’t have been expecting this. I wait for him to absorb my flood of honesty, my fervent desire to help the police unravel the mystery of the rogue physicist. ‘Dr Melville was going through a very tough time, personally,’ I venture. ‘His mother died not long ago, and it distressed him more than he let on. Things got out of hand. And psychologists don’t always see the obvious. Even when it’s staring them in the face.’
‘So how do you account for his taking off, just before Bethany was abducted? Coincidence?’
‘Well, certainly it’s no surprise. He needed a complete break. He said something about wanting to go on a field trip. His mother died, he got frozen out of his job, he was confused about Bethany. I said, for God’s sake, go. I’m glad he took my advice.’
‘So have you any idea what Dr Melville is actually doing in Thailand? On this field trip?’
I concentrate on the table. It’s wood-laminate. They take a photograph of wood and project it on to plastic. The realism is heartbreaking. The detective shifts impatiently. Men of action do not like being trapped behind desks.
‘I’m sorry to say this. But guessing at Frazer’s… proclivities, I’m afraid that "field trip" might be something of a euphemism.’ The detective’s eyebrows shoot upward. I am savouring my small act of revenge. ‘Your field is crime, and mine is the psyche,’ I continue. ‘Unhealthy impulses are part of the territory we both inhabit. Personally, I don’t like a lot of what I encounter in the human condition. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.’
‘Can you clarify that for me, Ms Fox?’
‘Come on, do I need to?’ I accuse. Calling my bluff, he thrusts his chin up in affirmation. ‘OK. Frazer Melville is a lonely, overweight, middle-aged single man who is going through a difficult phase in the wake of his mother’s death.’
‘Mrs Zarnac, your landlady, seemed to think…’
I laugh and shake my head. ‘Mrs Zarnac has too much time on her hands and a rampant romantic imagination. She’s a devoted subscriber to True Life magazine. Which as you know specialises in stories of the fiscally and physically disadvantaged overcoming the mountainous odds stacked against them, and discovering eternal love. I’m sorry to disappoint her. Do I honestly look like I’d have a sex life?’
This seems to stump him. ‘Dr Melville was married once,’ he warns, as if I’m about to attempt what he might call ‘some funny business’.
‘To a lesbian. You can check it.’
With interesting predictability, this seems to put a lid on that line of questioning. Together, in the silence that follows, we picture Frazer Melville buying a ladyboy a fruity cocktail in a Bangkok bar. Do we both see a frangipani flower in her hair, and the sadness of a pair of tilted underage eyes? I make a regretful face, and we allow ourselves a knowing quirk of the mouth, silently agreeing that it takes all sorts but we do not approve. Perhaps we are both regretful, too, that I count a man like Dr Frazer Melville among my acquaintances — but then I am a cripple and probably can’t be choosy. The detective shrugs, shaking off the distaste conjured by our Thai vision.
‘What about Bethany’s father?’ I ask, shifting gear. ‘I presume he was informed about the electrocution, and he would have known she was in hospital?’
Detective Kavanagh scrutinises his hands, as though they are beings more intelligent than he, which require consultation. ‘Dr Sheldon-Gray has told me about your unusual intervention with Leonard Krall.’ He waits for me to speak, but the wood-laminate has regained my attention. ‘As it happens, the reverend has an alibi. But let’s discuss your meeting with him. Do you normally visit the parents of your patients, incognito?’
‘No.’
‘So why on this occasion?’
‘Because Bethany Krall is a highly unusual case. I suppose I thought that her father might hold some sort of clue to her recovery.’
He studies his hands again. I can picture them flexed around some weights in a gym. ‘And did he?’
He looks up sharply and I meet his stare. The flush that spreads upwards from my chest and ignites my face is the real thing because it reflects my definitive and absolute failure. ‘He didn’t.
No.’
When I get home, there is a letter from the Regional Authority on the mat along with a huge sprawl of junk mail. Its contents come as no surprise, but I still feel a sharp tug of professional indignation when I read the careful paragraphs of sub-divisional personnel administrator Ms Stephanie Buckton. It reminds me of the school reports I used to get from the convent: Gabrielle is a skilled and insightful pupil but she has a tendency to make life difficult for herself. Is that what’s happened now? Have I pushed things too far yet again?
Apparently I have.
I have been suspended from my post. With immediate effect.
Indignation swiftly gives way to anger. If Ms Stephanie Buck-ton were here, she would meet my thunder egg at close range.
I fling the letter in the bin and wheel myself into the kitchen to splash my face with cold water. A moment later I’m throwing out the junk mail with extra fury when I see the postcard. I almost miss it. No one I know sends postcards: they belong to a bygone era of great-aunts, paper doilies, coffee-thermoses. But there it is, a colourful rectangle. It shows Edinburgh Castle with a kilted and sporraned bagpiper in the foreground, his knees proud and hairy, his cheeks bulging comically for the big push. I flip it. On the back, familiar handwriting. Handwriting I first saw in my office, on Joy McConey’s leaving card.
Hi Wheels
Looks like I had to leave without saying goodbye. But stay chilled, I’m doing fine.
Yours electrically,
Child B.
Sometimes, an instinct makes you swerve. Blink and it’s done. Upon which a new map of the world unveils itself before you, with roads you didn’t know about. Roads you might have to stake your life on.
Trusting that my instinct is the right one, I drive to the police station — where having handed the card to a duty officer, I wait for half an hour to see Detective Kavanagh in a poky cubicle decorated with posters about crime figures, fraud hotlines and victim support. Far from being relieved at the new development, he seems annoyed, almost to the point of gracelessness. Bethany’s postcard from Edinburgh has ‘thrown a spanner in the works,’ he tells me severely. ‘It may be a false lead.’
‘I suppose in your line of business you are hard-wired for mistrust.’
‘You’re sure it’s Bethany’s handwriting?’
‘Positive. But you can have it verified.’
His look is withering: clearly that process is already underway. ‘Did she ever mention friends or relatives in Scotland?’
‘Bethany isn’t a friends-and-relatives kind of girl. Scotland never cropped up.’
‘Do you sense there might be some kind of message encoded in this?’
I tell him that ‘yours electrically’ is a humorous reference to her ECT, and Wheels is her typically tasteless nickname for me, and Child B speaks for itself. Apart from that, no. But tell me. How can I help?
He sighs. ‘I suggest that you just go home, and wait. If there’s any other contact from her, ring this number.’
He hands me a card. ‘If you leave Hadport for any reason, call me first, and let me know where you’ll be. If she turns up, we may need you again at short notice.’
Back home, the phone is ringing. I reach it too late to answer, but I can see there have been ten missed calls, all from the same number. Clearly, some hard-core psychopathology is at work. But whose? Seconds later, it rings again. It’s Joy. She is frantic. She has heard the news about Bethany’s abduction. But the word she uses is escape.
‘If you helped her get out, you don’t know what you’ve done. I warned you.’
‘I didn’t help her.’
‘Don’t you see, the whole world’s in danger now? Don’t you get it?’ Her agitation is palpable. ‘I was like you once. I didn’t believe people could be evil. But I do now. She’d destroy the whole planet if she could.’ Joy’s need to cling to a notion that eliminates the random stirs a weary pity in me. But I can do nothing to help her. ‘If you know where she is ’
I interrupt her and snap, ‘I wish I did. But the fact is, I don’t. Then a man’s voice — sharp — can be heard in the background, appealing to her. A second later Joy yells, ‘Get off me!’ There’s a clatter in my ear, as though the phone has been dropped to the floor. I can still hear her raging. ‘Hello?’ says the man. Her poor husband. ‘Who is this I’m speaking to?’
‘Gabrielle Fox. We met at the restaurant.’
‘Oh God. I must apologise for Joy. The drugs she’s on—’
I tell him there’s no need to explain. Or apologise. That I completely understand. That Joy is blessed to have him. And that I wish him luck.
He will be needing enormous quantities of it.
After the car smash upended my life, I made the assumption that my thoughts would forever revolve around the aftermath and constraints of my injury, that no outside factor would diminish my enforced solipsism, and that this exhausting preoccupation with myself would carry on, like the low-level hum of tinnitus, ad nauseam, until the day I died. That I would continue to wake every morning to the reality of a life chopped down. But now — It seems I am living in times so charged with grotesque momentum, that there are whole minutes in which I forget the mess that I am — and when I remember, can forgive it. When a text message signals itself on my mobile as I prepare for bed, I know that I have been waiting for it. It’s from an unknown caller.
THORNHILL STATION CAR PARK
TEN AM TOMORROW. NOTHING TO POLICE. WG.
Who is WG? Wary, stirred, and paradoxically elated, I swiftly pack a large suitcase: clothes, make-up, toothbrush, medical and wheelchair accessories, painkillers, shampoo. What am I doing?
But I don’t stop myself.
When the blood is in charge, logic doesn’t get a word in. But hope does. And it’s the fiercest imperative I have felt in a long time.
When I finally fall asleep I dream of whirling black birds.