Donor, The

by FitzGerald, Helen

  The idea was genius – why not follow people who needed to be followed?

  The name – The Hunters and Collectors – came to him one night when he was rifling through his mother’s bedroom cupboard (not for any reason, just because he liked to rifle). In a small shoe box, his mother also kept keepsakes, but only of her electrocuted husband. One was a CD of an Australian band, The Hunters and Collectors. Preston didn’t even listen to it, but the name was perfect.

  The agency brought together all the skills he’d honed over his teenage years – he was a capable and thorough researcher, an able computer hacker, excellent at sifting through people’s rubbish, genius at hiding behind trees, shrubs or fences while looking through windows with or without binoculars, and he was accomplished at breaking into houses. Mostly, though, he was dedicated. Once he set his sights on someone, he did not give up.

  So far, he had successfully found a missing teenager and brought her home to her worried-to-the-point-of-pissed-out-of-her-mind mother (he kept one of her fake eyelashes); he had captured photographic evidence of a gay love affair for a distraught wife (kept a used condom); and exonerated a man who was not having an affair but watching his choice of televisual entertainment in a rented flat as far away as possible from his nagging partner (the remote control).

  The first message from William Marion read thus:

  Hello, I wonder if you can help me. My estranged wife, Cynthia Marion, left for India a little over one year ago. Her address before this was Flat 1a, Digby Crescent, Finsbury Park, London. I urgently need to find her. Our two teenage daughters are ill and both need kidney transplants. Can you please contact me via email or on my mobile.

  Kind regards,

  Will Marion.

  In his cupboard office, where he was supposed to be revising chemistry (Did his mother not realise he had learnt it all months earlier? That he would blitz his exams without so much as revising a single page?), Preston emailed back immediately.

  I am happy to help. I am highly skilled in this area, and have a 100% success rate in tracing missing persons. Due to the highly delicate and confidential nature of my assignments, I prefer to communicate via email and ask that you delete all messages from your hard drive once the information has been passed on. My fee is £500 per week plus travel expenses (you say she may be in India, which means I will probably need to travel there and will require an emergency contingency fund to cover the costs involved). One week’s fee is a non-refundable deposit. This should be paid into my PayPal account using this email address. If you would like me to take the case, please do this immediately and provide me with the following details:

  – your full name and address

  – your estranged wife’s full name, any aliases, her date of birth, old and recent photographs, bank account details, friends, boyfriends, offending history, psychiatric or medical history, and any other information you feel may be helpful. The more information I have, the easier it will be for me to find her.

  Once I have received the initial payment and these details, I will get to work without delay.

  Yours,

  The Hunters and Collectors

  Will got back to him at once, depositing the first payment into his PayPal account and giving him all the information he could think of, including Heath’s details, Janet’s address, Meredith’s address, a brief summary of what he knew about Cynthia’s addiction issues, and the name of her band.

  Just as Preston had promised, he set to work straight away.

  17

  Zzzzz. Cynthia unzipped the tent. The sound didn’t wake the Peter man she’d shagged and sang at.

  ‘Who’s asking?’ she said, squinting at the teenager before her. The sun stabbed her hung-over eyes. As they adjusted, she noticed that he looked like a young James Dean. How young is too young? she wondered.

  ‘Delivery boy,’ Preston said. ‘Can we get a coffee?’

  ‘Depends what you’re delivering.’

  ‘News from a loved one,’ he said. ‘Meet you down the beach in ten.’

  Cynthia immediately assumed the boy had come with news of Heath. Perhaps he’d gotten out – but that couldn’t be right, he wasn’t eligible for parole for another month at least. Unless he’d escaped. Heath had considered this before. The last time she visited him, in fact.

  ‘I can’t do this any more,’ she’d said. ‘If they reject you again, I can’t sit around and wait.’

  He got that look in his eye he only got with Cynthia. A little-boy look, pleading.

  ‘I’ll wait for you, Heath, just not here. You understand?’

  ‘I’ll break out,’ he said, grasping her hand, begging her not to leave him.

  ‘Heath, promise me you won’t do that. You’ve got another year at most – you’ll get parole next time! Don’t try anything daft or you’ll get another ten years and my tits’ll be doubling for my slippers.’

  Maybe he hadn’t listened to her, Cynthia thought as she exited the tent. Maybe he’d packed himself into a large cardboard box and posted himself out the jail. Maybe he’d paid someone to fly a helicopter over the exercise yard and grabbed onto the feet of it, dangling his way to freedom. Cynthia’s imagination was racing as she brushed her teeth and had a pee in the communal bathroom. She started running towards the beach, but was out of breath within seconds, so walked as fast as she could.

  He was sitting, sunglasses on, at the first cafe in the strip. He’d undone two buttons to reveal several fine blond chest hairs. If he’s over sixteen it’s not illegal, Cynthia thought to herself, wetting her dry lips before sitting down beside him.

  ‘I took the liberty of ordering for you,’ the boy said. ‘Sugar?’

  ‘Cheers,’ she said, adding three spoonfuls to her cup of coffee and stirring.

  ‘My name is Jonathan,’ he lied. ‘Your ex-husband asked me to find you.’

  Cynthia choked on her first sip. It sprayed in Preston’s face. He wiped it off with a serviette.

  ‘What does he want?’

  ‘Your kidney,’ he said, which caused a second, far heavier, spraying.

  *

  The woman didn’t look like Georgie at all, Preston thought. She had a touch of the substance-addled witch about her – frizzy unkempt hair, overtanned undernourished skin, red cannabis eyes. No, Georgie was entirely different from her mother. Brown eyes, not blue, light brown hair not dark, and – even though she was seriously ill – Georgie looked a whole lot healthier than her mother. As Preston wiped recycled coffee from his face for the second time, he wondered what use this woman’s organs would be anyway.

  *

  He’d started the search with the postcard from Goa. Once Will had deposited travel expenses into his account, he told his mum he was off to his friend’s holiday house in the Highlands to cram for exams. She was an alcoholic and thick as two bricks, his mum. Preston often wondered how he wound up being so gifted. Maybe his dead dad had been a genius, but he doubted this – he’d electrocuted himself changing a light bulb, which didn’t sound too clever to Preston. So maybe it was being somewhere on the autistic spectrum that made him a genius. He found this latter fact quite hilarious, imagined himself balancing, arms out, on a long wire beside loads of other window lickers, yelling at people in the real world below … ‘Hey, you down there! Look at me! Here! Up here! On the spectrum!’

  The flight to Mumbai gave him time to learn some Hindi and Urdu, which was helpful when it came to booking and finding the bus to Goa. He boarded it three hours after landing in Mumbai. In that time, Preston came to understand the saying, ‘The British invented bureaucracy and the Indians perfected it.’ He had to stand at four different counters to buy his bus ticket. Unlike several other white travellers, he didn’t let the laboriousness of the process get him down. How would impatience help? With one hour to spare after buying his ticket, he asked a taxi driver to show him as much of the city as possible. Heavy traffic meant he saw only a very Westernised shopping street, including McDonald’s – where he b
ought a chicken burger – and other taxis. He boarded the bus with five minutes to spare, placing himself on an aisle seat in the middle and putting a bag on the window seat so no one would sit next to him. Luckily, no one did. He would have hated it, especially if a Westerner had taken the seat. ‘Where do you come from?’ they would have asked before bombarding him with tales of their own lives, expecting eye contact and head nodding.

  On the screen at the front of the bus, Bollywood videos played on a loop for the sixteen-hour journey. Bright people danced to loud screeching. Preston could imagine liking it for an hour or so, but sixteen was utter hell. A large sign was pinned onto the driver’s cabin: ‘Our introduction you. Cabin in the only for.’ Preston spent a while trying to decipher the translation, and many hours looking out the window at the blackness of this strange night world, illuminated only by occasional advertisements: ‘I drink Limca because I like it!’ ‘Help eradicate malaria!’ and ‘People with dignity eat Nepalese sausage!’

  Somehow, Preston managed to fall asleep and when he woke, tropical lushness had coloured the landscape. He disembarked in Mapusa. Perhaps if he’d been on holiday, he’d have taken more notice of this vibrant, happy city, its unpaved streets filled with colourful markets and roaming cows. But he was too excited about finding this woman, this Cynthia woman, who held the lives of her children somewhere underneath her skin.

  The blue-striped bus to Chapora was cheap, but there was a good reason for this. It carried more passengers than three Scottish buses would. Passengers held on to the door for dear life as the sardines inside wriggled to shove them off. Preston was used to queuing, and had naively waited his turn to get on. By the time everyone else had managed to squash their way in, bar three locals with less vigorous elbows, the bus was impossible to enter and no amount of Excuse me, but I have a ticket for this bus! assisted his embarkation. As the bus was about to leave, one of the locals standing beside him walked around to the back and climbed a ladder onto the roof. The other two followed. ‘Come on!’ said the last. A minute later, Preston found himself sitting on the roof of a bus with a small railing around the side. It was liberating, Preston thought, to be on the roof of a bus. No one seemed to mind, and – apart from having to duck for electrical cables and low bridges – it was wonderful to see the world from up there. Such a different world too, one where rows of men squatted together in fields and where women sold bright coloured powders in street stalls.

  As soon as he arrived in the relaxed seaside village of Chapora, Preston began walking along the dirt-track of a main street, lined with small kiosks selling food and drink, asking shopkeepers and restaurant owners if they had seen Cynthia Marion, offering them several photographs to jog their memories. The fact that most people spoke English did not deter him from using his newfound linguistic skills.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ the thirty-third person he spoke to said. ‘She stayed up in the red house off the beach track. Left a few weeks back. You can’t miss it. It’s bright red with a green roof.’

  The owner of the red house, an Indian man in his fifties, recognised the image in the photograph immediately. ‘She headed to Egypt,’ he said. ‘Ronny keeps in touch, I think.’

  Ronny was on the loo out the back. Preston had been directed there so he walked down the side of the red house to find a small shed in the middle of the back yard. It was on stilts. Underneath it, three pigs, noses in the air, chomped noisily on something dark and hearty. Preston moved towards the pigs – they looked so cute eating hungrily at the foot of the shed. Suddenly, something appeared from a hole in the floor of the shed. The pigs pointed their noses up towards it, nibbling at the end before it had separated from wherever it came. When it fell to the ground, they gobbled greedily. A few moments later, a man aged around thirty-five exited the shed doing up his fly.

  ‘Takes a while to get used to,’ the man said, watching Preston watch the pigs eat the shit that he had just squeezed out. ‘The little buggers have it in their gobs before it’s out your arsehole. G’day, I’m Ronny.’

  Preston didn’t shake his hand. He followed him onto the veranda of the house, where Ronny had obviously taken up residence, and showed him the photograph of Cynthia.

  ‘Yeah, Cynth. I was supposed to meet up with her, actually. Haven’t quite gotten round to it. Party girl! Last time I saw her she was communicating with the moon on the beach in Anjuna.’

  ‘How was she communicating with the moon?’ Preston asked.

  ‘There are ways here,’ Ronny said. ‘Usually involve tiny white tabs! One time, we got a lift back here after a party on an ice van. Most surreal journey of my life. Some guy with a really big face was sitting on the block of ice across from us. We couldn’t stop laughing at how big it was. So bloody big! The van delivered ice to twenty-three beach cafes before we made it home. Our bums were numb.’

  ‘How big was his face exactly?’ Preston asked.

  ‘I dunno. Probably not big at all. I’m going to a party tonight. I’ll ask the moon for you.’

  ‘I really don’t think there’d be any point doing that,’ Preston said.

  ‘Right.’ Ronny was staring at the young man in front of him. He was even weirder than the guy with the enormous face on the ice truck. ‘She went to a place called Dahab in Egypt,’ he said, hoping this news would be enough to make him go away immediately.

  Unwilling to endure hours of Bollywood movies on the bus from Mapusa to Mumbai, Preston decided to pay a taxi driver to take him back to the airport. The haggling process went like this:

  5,000 rupees. (Preston)

  30,000 no less. (Taxi driver)

  5,000 is my final offer. (Preston)

  This price is (blows a raspberry). My taxi has a CD player. (Taxi driver)

  5,000 is my final offer. (Preston)

  I have to come all the way back again! This is good price for you! I will show you things tourists don’t get to see. (Taxi driver)

  5,000. I am not interested in things tourists don’t get to see. (Preston)

  My wife is dead and I have three children to support. (Taxi driver)

  I am in a hurry. (Preston)

  7,000, with music, and I show you two things tourists don’t get to see. (Taxi driver)

  6,000 and it’s a deal. (Preston)

  The drive was interminable, interrupted only by two lengthy stops at carpet shops which tourists don’t get to see, apparently. The carpets were of such high quality and so cheap that Preston bought four with the money he’d saved from previous assignments. The carpets were to be posted to his home address the following week.

  So easy, this job, Preston thought to himself, as he boarded his next plane. A piece of cake.

  18

  Cynthia had searched her soul many times in the past. Always successfully, she believed. And always, without exception, with the help of class-A drugs.

  For over one year she had managed on a diet of cannabis and alcohol, bar the occasional hallucinogenic on the beaches of Southern India, but as soon as this young James Dean – who she would one day have, oh yes she would; Heath would like the story – as soon as this young thing told her that her children might die unless she sacrificed a piece of herself, the first thing that sprung to Cynthia’s squidgy mind was heroin.

  ‘What’s in it for me?’ she asked. Little did Preston know, Cynthia was already planning on returning home. Heath would be eligible for parole again any time and she had no intention of breaking her promise to him. She’d even started busking to save money for the ticket. So far, she had ten pounds.

  ‘You’ll save the life of one of your daughters.’

  ‘Of course …’ This guy was an idiot.

  ‘And … I assume you want to see your boyfriend? I can pay for the ticket home.’ He was becoming less of an idiot.

  ‘Pay for the ticket and promise me something else,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t promise till I know what it is.’

  ‘I want two bags of heroin within an hour of reaching Glasgow.’
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br />   Preston picked the skin around his thumb. A neat line peeled off, which he placed in his tissue and folded. ‘Make it two hours.’

  ‘I’ll pack my things,’ Cynthia said, returning to her tent, imagining a syringe in every tall thin thing she spotted en route. Peter was still asleep inside the tent. His feet seemed pinprick pointy. She didn’t wake him.

  *

  The unlikely pair retraced the last part of Preston’s inbound journey, catching a bus to Cairo, where they booked a ticket to Glasgow via London.

  Unfortunately, this meant waiting twelve hours in Cairo.

  They used the time well.

  Preston phoned his client in Glasgow. ‘I have some good news,’ he said into Will Marion’s voicemail. ‘I’ve found your wife.’

  Cynthia phoned HMP Manchester. ‘So he is still there?’ she asked.

  ‘Where else would he be?’ came the predictably gruff officer.

  She breathed a sigh of relief. He hadn’t tried some dumb-arsed escape. ‘Can I talk to him?’

  ‘Oh, hang on a moment, I’ll just lock up here and walk all the way over to his hall and up to the second floor and knock on his cell to see if he minds being interrupted.’