by Mel McGrath
Stretching herself she rubbed the damp cold from her legs and took the call. Bill had spoken with a bargee friend named Alex Penney who might be able to offer a place on a boat down at the Harbourside in exchange for maintenance work.
‘It’s not his boat. He’s watching it for some friends, said he’d need to check with them. If you drop by the Helene tomorrow morning he said he might be able to sort something out. She’s in the Floating Harbour near the Arnolfini Theatre. They call them longboats in that part of the country, by the way, but you probably already know that.’
‘Yeah. Got caught out by that when I bought the Kingfisher.’ She’d answered the advert for a longboat in the local press in Ludlow when the money from Zoe’s will had come through and asked Mike, the Kingfisher’s previous owner, if she was a narrowboat as well as being long. Mike had had a good time with that. ‘Thanks Bill, you’re all the aces.’
There’s a pause before a hopeful sounding voice says, ‘I am?’
They’ve been round the houses on this over the years. ‘My brilliant friend,’ Honor says.
‘Ah yes,’ Bill says, sounding crestfallen. ‘Of course.’
She checks the time on her phone. It is 6.45 p.m. Nothing from Nevis. She taps out Any news? An answer comes back. Texted N&B twice at 15:12 and 18:23. No reply yet.
It’s hard to imagine how Narinder and Bikram must be feeling. Your own daughter, your darling child. The thought brings a sickening churn of the stomach. Doing her best to shake it off Honor makes her way round to the driver’s cabin, turns the key in the ignition, fires up Gerry and, making a three-point turn in the street, heads off in the direction of the city. Though it’s not quite sunset yet and she drives with the last gloaming in the rear-view mirror, the only bright light comes from the lamps strung across the span of the gorge.
Now here she is, in the middle of the hospital car park, fumbling for coins to feed the parking meter. The time on the bridge has left her with more questions than answers. For the second time that day she walks through the swing doors into the warm fug of the Bristol Royal Infirmary, following the signs to the lifts and from there up to the second floor, left down the corridor towards the ICU. It is quiet now, in that soft, certain way that hospitals at night always are. Over at the nurses’ station a group of nurses and orderlies in various uniforms mill about attending to banks of screens and papers. There’s no one she recognises from the morning but that’s not surprising given that more than twelve hours have passed and the staff must have changed shift. Approaching the desk she waits, hoping to catch someone’s eye. A young woman with her hair pinned into a ponytail turns and smiles and comes over.
‘Can I help?’
Honor explains who she is and asks to look in on Satnam. She watches as the young woman’s face closes up like the petals of a daylily once the dusk sets in.
‘A minute or two is all I need.’
‘And you are?’
‘Yes, I’m sorry. I’m a friend. The mother of a friend.’
Honor watches the young woman bustle off to the nursing station and return moments later. ‘I’m sorry, but the family have said no visitors except immediate family and representatives from the university.’
‘Not even for a few seconds?’
The young woman shakes her head softly.
‘Can you at least tell me how she is?’ Alive, evidently.
‘I’m really sorry.’
‘Please give her a message then. Please tell her that Honor and Nevis…’ she stops, thinking that the nurse will never remember that ‘…will you tell her that the crew of the Kingfisher is looking forward to welcoming her on board again?’
‘The crew of the Kingfisher.’
‘You will tell her, won’t you?’
The young woman smiles softly and turns away.
In the lift on the way down Honor resolves to call Narinder and ask her to change her mind. The two spoke briefly last summer, when Satnam was staying on the Kingfisher. The exchange was tense but civil. Narinder wanted her daughter home and was hoping Honor might persuade her. She also wanted to be sure that Satnam and Luke weren’t sleeping together. They were, of course, but Honor didn’t see it was her business to say one way or another. Satnam was an adult, entitled to do whatever she wanted.
A few weeks later, at the beginning of the academic year, when Nevis and Satnam were moving into the flat, the two women had another encounter. Narinder wanted to know from Honor whether Nevis went out with boys.
‘Not that I know of,’ Honor said.
‘Well at least that’s something. Satnam tells me she’s a very good mathematician. We are expecting her to help Satnam with her coursework.’
They haven’t spoken since.
Honor steps out of the lift at the ground floor and makes her way back to the entrance hall. The smell of food from the cafe is a reminder that she hasn’t eaten since the very early morning breakfast with Nevis what seems like days ago now. Checking her watch, she sees that there is still time on her ticket in the hospital car park. Might as well be now.
At the food counter she orders a baked potato from a small, round woman with her hair in a hygiene net.
‘Long day?’ asks the woman.
She goes over to the same table where she found Nevis and Sondra sitting more than twelve hours ago. The potato is microwaved not baked, though not bad. Tomorrow is her appointment with Dr Keane at the university. She will raise the question of whether Satnam is allowed visits from friends with Dr Keane. Maybe she has some sway.
She dials the Manns’ home number. Narinder answers the call. ‘Hello Honor. I thought you would phone me.’
‘Yes. I’m so sorry about Satnam.’
‘A terrible accident.’
Accident. That word again. There were some people who believed what happened to Zoe was an accident. Zoe’s own parents. In the face of all the evidence that a crime had been committed and the perpetrator remained at large, Dan and Judy continued to insist that Zoe’s death was a simple tragedy. As if any tragedy could be simple.
‘How are you and Bikram holding up? You’ve both been in my thoughts.’
‘We are praying. Prayers are bigger than thoughts.’
‘Yes.’ She pauses. ‘I’m at the infirmary. I was hoping to see Satnam.’
Silence. A few excruciating moments pass before Narinder says, ‘We don’t want anyone to see her. Only family.’
‘I understand, but…’
‘What do you understand?’
‘Nevis and I would really love to see Satnam. It might bring her a little comfort.’
‘Daughters are supposed to be the comfort. Where is our comfort? The boy we found for her has gone away. He was an extremely suitable boy from a very good family. Now they don’t want anything to do with us.’
‘That’s unfortunate.’
‘You understand nothing of any of this. When our daughter is better we will never speak of her accident. Or of you or your daughter. I want you to go away now and not bother me again.’
Honor is left with a blank screen in the palm of one hand, the other pressing her forehead. Narinder’s hostility has come at her like a dark tornado. It’s a shame about Satnam, unfair on her and Nevis, but perhaps Dr Keane will be able to talk her round. She starts Gerry and pulls out of the infirmary car park. At the exit she hesitates then makes a left. The drive to Nevis’s flat takes only a few minutes from here. She won’t call. Nevis doesn’t like surprises. But it will reassure her to see Nevis safely at home.
She pulls into a space opposite the flat and cuts the engine. In the living room window a light shines through the cheap curtains. Two figures mill about, both silhouetted but one is recognisably her daughter, the other someone taller and with a man’s gait. A friend or perhaps even a lover. For a few minutes she watches as the two figures cross the room then settle before she starts her engine once more and moves back out into the traffic and away.
Chapter 14
Nevis
; ‘I can’t get my head around it.’ Luke flips the ring pull from a can of Stella. Nevis had seen him earlier, when he’d come into the chippy anxious and keen to talk. She was glad he’d reached out. It had been on her mind to contact him. She’d told him to come to the flat after her shift. Now here he was.
‘What the hell got into her?’
‘I was going to ask you the same question,’ Nevis says. She moves over to the curtains, peers outside at the dying light and draws them closed.
‘I haven’t seen her to speak to in months,’ he says, his voice agitated and tremulous. In the months since he and Satnam split Luke has grown a goatee and he’s lost weight. His skin has taken on a strange pallor.
‘I’ve got her phone. I was hoping you might know her passcode.’
He picks up the can and begins bobbing his legs. ‘Isn’t that a bit, I don’t know, invasive?’
‘It might give us some answers.’
‘Maybe it was just, like, a spur of the moment thing?’ Luke asks, taking another swig from the can. She can tell he is genuinely upset. His hand is shaking as he raises and lowers the can. ‘I can’t get my head around it to be honest.’
‘There was an empty vodka bottle on her bedside table. If that had been there for long, I’m sure I would have seen it. We were always in and out of one another’s rooms.’
‘I remember.’
Nevis had burst in on Satnam and Luke in a private moment once. After that Nevis didn’t go in when Luke was around.
‘The hospital says she’d taken Ritalin. That’s why she collapsed before she could jump. I was just wondering if you ever saw her using.’
‘Not really. I mean, I saw her take something a couple of times, last year, when she was struggling with her coursework but everyone does Ritalin or speed or whatever from time to time. It’s no big deal. She must have taken a shedload to O/D on it. I didn’t even know you could get addicted to that stuff.’ He shakes his head.
‘She said she was working really hard and her grades were much better. When they were bad, she was scared her parents would make her drop out.’
‘Have you spoken to them?’ Luke puts down his beer and blinks hard. ‘I thought about getting in touch with them but they hate me. I mean, they don’t know me, but they hate the fact that I slept with their daughter.’
‘I think they had someone in mind that they were hoping she’d marry.’
‘Maybe that’s why she wanted to kill herself then. She always told me she didn’t want an arranged marriage.’
‘The family are saying it was an accident apparently.’ She’d been on Satnam’s social, seen a post her brother had left asking for the Sikh community to say prayers for Satnam’s recovery.
‘Maybe it was. If the stuff was mixed with something, you know, weird or, like, toxic,’ Luke says.
‘No one drinks a bottle of vodka by accident. Or takes that many pills. You got any idea where she might have got them from?’
Luke frowns and blinks and shakes his head. ‘Why would I know?’
‘She told me there are things I didn’t know about her.’
‘Things? What things? Did you ask her?’
Nevis shakes her head. How she wishes she had.
‘It’s all so fucked up,’ Luke says.
Silence falls. Then bringing up the picture of Satnam she’d found on her feed, the one taken on Valentine’s Day, Nevis says, ‘Luke, can I show you something?’
Luke stares blankly at the photo.
‘Satnam’s unhappy.’
Luke peers more closely.
‘Really? She looks OK to me.’
‘The smile doesn’t go all the way up to her eyes. The morning after I found her in the kitchen crying but she wouldn’t tell me what was wrong.’ Nevis relays the encounter with Natasha in the library. ‘What did she mean, “You know, don’t you?” Know what?’
Luke shrugs, ‘Maybe they had a few words. Natasha’s a hothead. Drinks too much, comes out with a lot of shit. But if you think she knows something, why don’t you go and have it out with her?’
‘I thought, maybe, since you know her…?’
‘Who, Tash?’ Luke raises his hands in a gesture of surrender. ‘Look, Nevis, I’m gutted about Satnam, I really am, but a part of me thinks I shouldn’t really get involved. It’s a bit weird even being here to be honest.’ He gazes into his can as if studying something there and a mottled redness spreads up from his neck. ‘She dumped me, remember?’
‘She dumped you?’ Satnam had always told Nevis it was the other way around. She watches his lips press together tightly, and the redness finds its way to his eyes. He coughs. ‘Uh yeah. She cheated on me then said she couldn’t live with herself or something.’
Nevis is winded by this news. Satnam cheating?
‘I know. Doesn’t seem like her at all,’ Luke said, off Nevis’s expression. ‘But I swear that’s what she told me.’
‘You don’t know who with?’
‘What fucking difference does it make?’ He looks up at Nevis from under his eyelids. The effect is faintly menacing. ‘I didn’t mean… I’m upset.’
‘No, I’m sorry. It was a stupid question. It’s all a lot to take in.’ A day ago she would have sworn that Satnam had never lied to her or kept secrets. And now, it’s become evident she’s done both.
Luke drains the can and bites his lip. Then putting his hands on the table in a gesture of finality, he says, ‘Look, I should be going. But, you know, keep me posted, OK? And if there’s anything I can do, just ask.’
Later, after Luke has left, and Nevis is in her room getting ready for bed, an email pings into Nevis’s inbox. Thinking it’s from Luke, she picks up her phone, taps through and sees Tash’s name and below it her message:
So which of us is next?
Chapter 15
Cullen
On his way home Cullen very nearly runs over a fox. He’s not his usual self at all. Turning into his road he spots a man walking out of his front gate and manages to pull the car to the kerb and turn off the lights without being seen. He waits until the man has got into his own vehicle further down the road and driven off. The same joker who was round earlier, no doubt. He dodged a bullet there. For a while anyway. He had hoped to be able to sit on his own in the living room and empty a generous four fingers of scotch into his belly but he can see now that the living room lights are still on. Not only is Veronica awake, she’s lying in wait, determined to get her claws into him before he’ll be allowed to get some sleep.
‘How was your mother?’ she says, the silk of her dressing gown sliding across the polished surface of her thigh as she turns to look at him from her place on the sofa.
‘Oh you know, annoying.’
She’s not listening. She says, ‘That man just came round again, the one who was on the driveway before.’
‘Did you speak to him?’
‘Of course not! I didn’t even open the door. He was quite persistent though.’ She swivels her neck and shoots him a narrow-eyed stare. ‘You’re not in any trouble are you, darling?’
Cullen wonders if he can get away with ignoring Veronica’s ban on hard drink while ‘they’ try to get pregnant and decides against it. He helps himself to a bottle of wine lying opened on the coffee table. ‘No. It’s just a…’ Cullen roots around in his mind ‘…new broadband service. He doesn’t seem to want to take no for an answer.’
‘OK,’ she says, unfurling her long legs, the soft blonde down on her upper thigh just visible in the lamplight.
He takes another gulp of the wine then sniffs it. ‘What the hell is this?’
‘That clever non-alcoholic stuff,’ Veronica says. ‘We don’t want to put the troops off, do we?’
Afterwards Cullen drifts off to sleep and dreams about being alone on the bridge. He wakes with his heart ticking and his mind first on Satnam then remembering a conversation with Ratner not long ago when Mark admitted to sneaking out for early morning trysts under the guise of marathon training
while his wife was fast asleep. Cullen doesn’t trust the bastard one bit. The sly look on his face when Cullen asked him to be more discreet. He thinks about how the fucker lied to him. It takes a bold man to do that to another man’s face when they both know that’s what he’s doing. Cullen wishes he’d read him the riot act when they last spoke. Why was he so moderate, so polite? What a dickhead I’ve been, he thinks. A man like Ratner needs dealing with.
Beside him Veronica sleeps on. He edges out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife lest she demand another tour of duty, grabs yesterday’s clothes from the chair and slips out of the room. By four thirty he’s in the Volvo.
In a moment of inattention, he narrowly avoids zooming through a red light then finds himself speeding across a junction without looking, a truck driver angrily sounding his horn as he jams on the air brakes. Something dark and dormant is awakening in him. The old death wish blinking itself out of hibernation, he thinks, the seed of self-destruction pushing out a thin white shoot. For the remainder of the journey he does his best to focus his energies on driving.
I need a drink, he thinks, leaning over the passenger seat and opening the glove box. Pressing the mess of envelopes and bills to one side, he feels around for the quarter of Famous Grouse he always keeps for just such emergencies and, finding it, closes his fingers around it, rotating the metal screw-top between his teeth until it comes away and he can spit it out and hold the neck of the bottle to his mouth. A single drip makes its way onto his tongue. He holds the bottle out and shakes it, as if by doing that he could fill it up, but it remains empty. At a traffic light stop, he presses the window button and heaves the bottle out onto the pavement, finding solace in the crash of the glass as it splinters on the tarmac.
Sometimes, he thinks, I’d like to smash the whole fucking world.
Two men walk by, drunk, holding on to one another.
What the hell am I doing here, in the middle of the night? Then the light turns green and his foot jams the accelerator, leaving the question stranded at the lights for the next poor bugger to ask himself.