Altered Life

by Keith Dixon

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  WHEN I LEFT MELISSA Ball I went home. I felt I needed a shower and a change of clothes after all the innuendo I’d heard in the last two days.

  I started to read some of the book that Mal O’Donovan had given me. In it Eric Berne described his theory of how personality was created. His ideas seemed obvious and simplistic, but I could see their attraction to consultants working in management training.

  He said that people’s personalities depended on what they’d seen and heard in their childhood. If they were treated well they developed ‘nurturing’ behaviour that they copied and used themselves when they grew up. But if they were treated badly they developed ‘critical’ or ‘controlling’ behaviour, which they could also copy and perpetuate themselves. The kinds of behaviour that grown people then exhibited, according to Berne, might depend on the way others interacted with them—so if someone used ‘critical parent’ behaviour towards me, telling me what to do, pointing at me or raising their voice, I might react as I did when I was a kid going through the same experience for the first time. What I might demonstrate could be either ‘adapted’ or ‘natural’ child behaviour—that is, willing to give in and let things slide, or likely to be argumentative and emotional.

  The way out of these parental or child-like reactions was to be in ‘adult’—which Berne described as a condition that’s more interested in gathering information and being rational than playing out ‘games’ learned in childhood.

  I thought of how this had worked with my own dad. I recognised that most of the time he behaved in an adult state: rational and logical and apparently open-minded. He could appear very reasonable. At other times, perhaps because of something I’d done or said, he’d get really angry and eventually he would slap me, which made me angry too. It was interesting to think that the way we dealt with each other might have been the result of these shifts between us—that we brought out the worst in each other, as well as, sometimes, the best.

  I thought Berne’s ideas were superficially plausible in a pop-psychology way. After all, I recognised my own behaviour in some of the games that he described.

  It was dark outside when I stopped reading. I took half a pound of mince from the fridge, fried it with onions and added tomatoes, peppers, paprika and chilli powder. I put some brown rice on a low heat and forty minutes later I ate while watching the television news. I was washing up when the door bell rang. I went downstairs and looked through the spy hole in the door. A man in his sixties with short grey hair, hollow cheeks and a prominent nose stood absolutely still, looking back at me as though he knew I were inspecting him. He was familiar but I couldn’t put a name to him. I opened the door.

  ‘Well, Samuel,’ he said, ‘I’ve tracked you down at last.’

  Realisation came to me. ‘Major Hoyt, come in.’

  I stood back and let Tara’s father into my house.

  Like many men I’ve met from the forces, Hoyt was only average in height but squatly built. His shoulders almost brushed the walls as I guided him towards the kitchen. He wore an extravagant waxed raincoat with extra shoulder panels like something Sherlock Holmes might have affected, and before we reached the kitchen he stopped and began to shrug himself out of it, folding it neatly down its spine, pulling out the arms and levelling them together before collapsing it flat over his forearm. Composed, he then walked into the kitchen.

  We sat facing each other across the kitchen table. When Tara – Debbie – and I had married, the Major was the chief architect of the wedding. Her pregnancy drew out of him all the middle-class resentment towards youth and change that he sublimated, I presumed, in the Army. He stood for no argument while making the wedding arrangements, and while it was painful for his wife—a long-suffering, almost mute partner in this shotgun wedding—to do without a church ceremony, we were guided towards the registry office with martial efficiency. Tara and I had shifted the axis that the Major’s world rested on, so it was important to put it back in balance again as quickly as possible.

  After Tara left for London, I hadn’t seen him again until today.

  I knew the Major didn’t think much of small talk, so I got straight into it.

  ‘Not the best set of circumstances for us to meet again,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry it happened like this.’

  It was as though I hadn’t spoken. The Major ignored my attempt at ice-breaking and went directly to what was uppermost in his mind.

  ‘Samuel, I’m told you were there on the night Deborah went missing,’ he said. ‘I have several things to say about that. There are some thoughts going round in my head. Primarily, it seems you’re always in the wrong place—especially where my daughter is concerned. You seem to have brought me nothing but grief for the last twenty years. Why do you think that is? What have you got against me and my family?’

  The notion of ‘family’ was strange coming from him. Tara had told me that throughout her childhood and adolescence he’d been no more than a distant provider—someone she saw at Christmas and possibly on her birthday, carrying gifts but with little enthusiasm in his eyes. Maybe it was guilt that made him cling to the idea that they’d been a family in anything but name.

  I was irritated by his sudden aspiration towards a kind of moral high ground.

  ‘I’m working as an investigator these days. I was following up on the murder of her husband.’

  ‘I know her husband,’ he said, casually dismissing Rory with a small gesture of his hand. ‘She had very little luck with men. Meeting his family at their wedding was the most dispiriting thing I’ve ever done. I counted my fingers after shaking hands with his father. Nothing I’ve met in the Arab countries could outdo them.’ He shook his head. ‘So you were hired as an investigator to look into his murder, but it seems you didn’t know who was actually paying the bills. That’s to say, Deborah.’

  ‘I was asked by Mr Brand to investigate a private matter. If I’d known he was married to your daughter I would have refused to take him as a client in the first place. Then I wouldn’t have become involved at all.’

  ‘But you did become involved, and you went to her house. And when you left, someone kidnapped her.’

  ‘I was attacked from behind. I didn’t see a thing. Major—’

  ‘Oh for goodness’ sake don’t call me that. That’s what Deborah called me, in fun, but I was never a Major. Of course you never talked to me long enough to find that out. You had no idea what I did.’

  ‘I was a young man. You were quite intimidating.’

  ‘Rubbish. I’ve never met such a backward youth as you were. You jumped at your own shadow. My wife and I used to despair of you and Deborah making a go of it.’

  ‘How is your wife? She was very kind to me.’

  He looked away, his eyes taking in the details of the room.

  ‘She died five years ago,’ he said. ‘She suffered terribly from cancer.’ He drew a breath and turned back to me. ‘But never mind that. I want to know more about what’s happening with this so-called investigation. I’ve talked to Inspector Howard, but he’s less use than a condom on a porcupine. What can you do?’

  ‘As an investigator I have to look at things in a different way to the police. They have access to forensics that I don’t. So I look at motives, relationships, the reasons behind the crime. The police usually assume the murderer was known to the victim. They start by thinking the murderer’s a member of the family. Then it’s a question of elimination. I’ve got more of an open mind.’

  ‘Any results?’

  ‘Nothing concrete yet.’

  ‘Excellent work,’ he said, standing up and beginning the long process of unfolding his raincoat so that he could put it on again. ‘Much as I expected, given your track record. Now I have a train to catch. I just wanted to see you before I left. You know, Samuel, that was a very strange time in all of our lives. Deborah was very unhappy, very confused. Marrying you, leaving for London, changing her name—I wouldn’t say it was typical of the girl her mother and I
brought up.’

  ‘From what I saw of her, she’d changed quite a bit. She seemed more in control of what she wanted.’

  ‘You didn’t know her particularly well. She was quite a serious and ambitious child, which is why she was beginning to do well with this man Brand and his consultants.’ He paused a moment. ‘I’m a consultant now, you know. I left the army after my wife died. Couldn’t stand it any more. But they ask me back from time to time for some specialised jobs. I’ve been in the Middle East until two days ago, which is why I’m only just getting involved in this. You can expect to hear from me again.’

  He was now fully armoured once more, his raincoat with its shoulder panels and waxy surfaces ready to repel all attacks. He stood looking up at me, a somewhat lonely and wistful presence that he tried to play down with a show of military bluffness.

  ‘Incidentally,’ he said, ‘I suppose there’s something else you should know. When Deborah went to London, she was still pregnant.’

  I had been opening the door for him. Now I stood with my hand on the door knob, staring at him.

  ‘What did you say?’

  His demeanour became even more brusque, as though he didn’t want to get involved in a discussion of this topic, but had to transmit the message. ‘She told you she’d had a miscarriage, didn’t she? Well, she very nearly did. But in fact the baby survived. That’s why she asked you not to visit when she was in hospital, if you remember. Didn’t want you finding out the baby was still alive. Then she went to London because she didn’t want you to be the father. Once she’d had the child, she gave it away for adoption. A boy. I think she called it Daniel. He doesn’t know who his real mother is. I don’t even think he knows he’s adopted. I’d like you to keep that to yourself. Now, which way do I go to the train station?’

  That night I dreamed I was lost in a desert, searching for water. My mouth was parched, my legs as heavy as pig-iron. A pitiless sun burned down on the top of my uncovered head, and sweat ran down my face in rivulets. Wherever I looked, all I could see was turquoise sky and yellow sand.

  I fell repeatedly into an oasis—the same oasis each time, and each time it was dry, its bed yielding only more sand to my grasping fingers. I stood up and stumbled away to keep looking, and every time I stood I was suddenly surrounded by hundreds of women who encircled me and observed me calmly. I knew that the women had red hair, though they wore veils to hide their features. That didn’t fool me: I knew that beneath the veil every one of them was Tara. I turned and ran away, my feet sinking in the sand, trying to escape the stares of these women.

  Then in my dream I stopped and turned to face them. They stopped running too, and in unison reached beneath their desert robes to pull out a small, silent child, whom they threw pitilessly to the ground. There was a moment of terrible silence, then they all began to laugh with gaping mouths, the sound of their laughter like fingernails being scraped down a thousand blackboards.

  I woke sweating in my cold bedroom, seeing blood and red hair floating in my vision until I rubbed my eyes and brought myself back into focus.

  My subconscious mind obviously didn’t like surprises. The next day brought another.