by Flynn Berry
“It’ll be good, it’ll be a change of scene.”
“Robbie, just try a night at Penbridge, you can leave if you want.”
“I need this job.”
“They won’t fire you for taking medical leave. You don’t have to tell them why.”
“I can’t. Bye, Claire.”
I call Robbie’s mobile, which he’s switched off, then the hospital. A receptionist connects me to his unit, and another one puts me on hold. I stare at the clock on the wall of my consulting room. Six minutes on hold, then nine. She says, “Sorry for the wait. How can I help?”
“Can I speak to Robbie Alden, please? This is his sister.”
She sets the phone down. I wait, tapping my pen on the desk. The nurse says, “He’s just discharged himself.”
I fold in half, staring at the carpet, my arms wrapped around my waist. I think of Robbie at the hospital yesterday, reading intently, as he has since he was little, a shock of hair falling over his forehead. I try to remember it clearly, in case it’s the last time I’ll see him.
* * *
—
FOR MONTHS AFTER the murder, every morning when I left for school, I expected to see my father on the other side of the road. I expected him to hold his finger to his mouth, telling me to be quiet, and for us to walk down the road into the park. He’d look different. A rougher coat. A beard. Thinner. He would say, There’s been a terrible mistake. He would call me by my old name. My father always said my name differently than anyone else. He made it sound like a longer word, or a more significant one, as though it had more syllables.
It took me a long time to stop loving him. I worry that a part of me still does, and that I only want to find him to say that I’m not angry, that he doesn’t have to stay away.
I see him standing in the shallows off the coast of Dorset, tightening the strap on a snorkel mask before handing it to me and saying, “Try it now, does that fit?”
Him holding up two scarves at a stall in a Christmas market. “Right, which would your mum like?”
Mum answering the phone and laughing, her hand pressed to her chest, saying, “Oh, thank god, I thought you’d had an accident.”
Him holding Robbie in our garden and pointing up at a line of migrating geese.
All of it happened, and yet it somehow ended here. A few months before he injured his knee, before he took tramadol for the first time, Robbie turned to me on the tube and said, “Are you tired of thinking about him? I’m so tired of thinking about him.”
* * *
—
I CROSS ONTO Alice’s street on Thursday in a warm spring twilight. She lives in Chelsea, near the border of Fulham. I’ve never been here before. The sky is marbled with pink clouds, and there’s so much of it, since all the buildings are low enough to leave an open view. Under the clouds are rows of houses with glossy front doors, two churches, and a pub with wicker chairs in front. The houses, which are square with flat roofs and painted trims, seem ordinary and achievable, except they’re in Chelsea, so are neither.
I ring her bell, then straighten my clothes and hair. I’m wearing jeans, ankle boots, and a new slate-gray cashmere jumper purchased for the occasion. A bee comes to hover around me, and I’m brushing it away when the bolts slide back and the door creaks on its hinges. Alice is wearing a striped shirt and jeans cuffed above her bare feet.
“Hello,” she says, leaning forward to kiss my cheek. A small shepherd dog sniffs my legs. “This is Stella. Sorry, I forgot to ask if you’re all right with dogs.”
“Of course. She must smell mine,” I say, as people always do. I follow Alice down the hall to the kitchen, which has large windows, polished counters, and an old-fashioned oven with brass dials.
“Would you like some tea? Coffee?”
“Tea, thanks.” Alice fills a kettle and sets it to boil. I recognize the oven from the picture she posted on Sunday of a roast chicken with charred lemons.
“Did you enjoy the event last week?” she asks.
I nod. “It’s my favorite theater.”
“Mine too. Did you see Hangmen?”
“I loved it.” While she reaches onto a shelf for two mugs, we talk about the play. I tell her that it struck me so much that I walked the four miles home after seeing it, which is true, and Alice says she went back the next night for a second performance.
She screws the lids on a few jars of flour and sugar. “Sorry for the mess.”
“Not at all.” On the counter are stone mixing bowls, with open shelves stacked with glasses and plates above them. Every bit of the kitchen is artful, even the dish liquid. The brass dials on the oven are spoked, like a ship’s wheel. It’s so different from my flat, and my friends’. No stained takeaway menus, or half-eaten Mars bars, and I doubt she shoved any into the drawers just before I arrived.
She clears a space for us at the dining table, pushing aside a laptop and appointment diary, and flips to a clean page in a notebook. “So, tell me about your event.”
“It’s my parents’ anniversary.”
“Oh, yes, you said. How long have they been married?”
“Forty years. The party’s going to be a surprise.” Our accents are similar, I tried to change mine when we moved north, but couldn’t entirely.
She asks me about the date and the venue. While she takes down notes, I look out at the flowers and herbs in the garden. We could be in the countryside. A tennis racquet leans against the fence, and a fringed cotton hammock is strung between two trees. I think it’s the one she bought on a trip to Hydra.
The doorbell rings, and Stella barks at the sound. She’s a gorgeous dog, like a miniature husky, with patches of cream and gray fur and different-colored eyes. “Just a minute,” says Alice.
I can hear her open the door, her bright voice as she signs for a delivery. I turn her planner towards me and read through a scrawl of meetings and appointments. When her footsteps come down the hall, I return the planner to its position. “Sorry,” she says. “Right. Do your parents have any favorite foods?”
“My mum loves crepes.” She made brown-butter crepes for us on special occasions.
“And your father?”
“He likes the classics, steaks, chips, roasts.” He also liked rabbit mousse terrine. There must be something wrong with a person who likes that.
Alice nods. She has a dent above her eyebrow, a small white scar, from chicken pox, maybe. You can’t see it in her pictures, only at this distance. She tells me about some of her past events, asks about my budget, explains the terms of the contract, offers to send me a sample menu. Once we’ve gone through all the details, I thank her and push back my chair.
“What about you?” she asks as she walks me out. “What do you do?”
“I’m a GP.” I stand on her front step and Alice leans in the doorway while asking about my practice. We talk for long enough that the dog comes outside and sits on her haunches next to us.
Alice seems kind. I noticed that at the event last week, and again tonight. If it’s genuine, all of this might be unnecessary. I didn’t need to make up an event, or lie to her. If I tell her who I am, she might help me.
Alice kneels to pull a burr from the dog’s coat. I’ll tell her the next time we see each other, I think, after I’ve figured out how to begin. “Right, I should get home,” I say.
“Yes, sorry to keep you. I’ll talk to you soon.”
From the corner, I turn back to see Alice on her doorstep, her arm out, waving the dog inside.
On my way to the tube, I call Robbie’s mobile. He texted me yesterday that he’d arrived in Lancashire but was too busy to talk.
He’s a contract worker. Most of the time he’s on his own, viewing the damaged homes, conducting interviews, filling in the stacks of paperwork for every claim. No one at the firm knows that he’s taking six hundred milligrams o
f tramadol a day. It’s not like alcohol, you can’t see or smell it on him, unless you know what to look for. It must be exhausting for him, keeping it hidden.
He was off it for three days in hospital, maybe he hasn’t started again. He’s still young. This might be how it is for the rest of his life, or he might stop. Some people do stop.
I turn onto Fulham Road as the call goes to his voicemail. A few minutes later, I’m moving through a crowd outside Tesco when my phone rings. “Hi, Claire,” says Robbie, and I smile, my head tilting towards his voice.
“Hey. How’s Lancashire?”
“Good,” he says. “Well, sort of, parts of it are under four feet of water.” His tone is light, but I know. There’s something just slightly artificial in his voice, like he’s performing a very close imitation of the conversations we used to have. As soon as I hear it, my skin turns cold.
Robbie tells me about one of the houses he’s already assessed, and its owners, and I stop to listen, the heel of my hand pressed against my forehead.
“I should go,” he says. “I’m outside the next house.”
“How does it look?” I ask, stalling.
“It’s by a river,” he says, “so not good.”
I walk the rest of the way to the station, swipe my travel card, and go down the escalator to the platform. When the train arrives, my carriage is nearly empty. I find a seat and close my eyes.
At home, I research addiction treatments, old ones and new ones. I read about electro-acupuncture, methadone, eye desensitization, equine therapy, ayahuasca ceremonies.
The ayahuasca ceremonies are interesting. You fly to Peru or Mexico, to a shamanic retreat, and drink a tea made from ayahuasca leaves, you purge for hours, vomiting and feverish, then begin to hallucinate. You return changed, according to the dozens of people whose accounts I’ve read, who arrived addicted to heroin, painkillers, alcohol, and have been sober since the ceremony.
The trouble is Robbie doesn’t want to go. I wish I could do it for him. I’d do the unpleasant part, the purge, every hour for a year if it would help him. It’s not fair, that he has this and I don’t. I’m seven years older than my brother. Maybe that’s why I’m doing better than he is now, like being loved by Mum was an incubator that was switched off too early for him.
* * *
—
I’M AT WORK when a message from Alice comes through with a menu, budget, and contract. She’s included a cake made of layers of crepes, for Mum, presumably. I sign the contract and follow the directions for wiring her a deposit. Telling the truth and asking for her help seemed so reasonable at her house on Thursday, but she’s close with her parents, she will have grown up with their version of events. She has no reason to believe me instead of them.
The deposit has just gone through when a man appears in the doorway of my consulting room. “Gil, come in, how are you?”
He leans his walking stick against a chair. “I’ve caught a head cold, I think.”
“Any fever?”
“No.”
“Will you stand for me? I’ll just have a listen to your lungs.”
During my morning appointments, I examine a baby’s rash and prescribe a steroid cream, I write a sick note for a man who pulled a muscle in his back, I talk to a student about her panic attacks and give her the number for counseling. I check a man’s prostate, which is swollen, and refer him to the hospital for screening, I look inside a toddler’s reddened ear and write a prescription for an antibiotic.
Maeve is my last patient of the morning. She sits upright, with her hands in her lap and her lips pressed hard enough to turn them white. Her eyes haven’t left my face since she came in, since she sat down. She’s wearing a gold ring shaped like a hare, and I wonder if she put it on this morning for luck.
“It’s good news, Maeve, it’s benign.” Her eyes water. I smile, handing her the tissues, and fiddle with her paperwork to give her a moment to absorb the news. “If you want to have the cyst removed because it bothers you, we can talk about that, but it isn’t anything worrying.”
After Maeve leaves, I carry my phone into the staff kitchen and check my messages while making coffee. Robbie hasn’t called, but Alice has. It seems impossible to talk to her here, like some rule would prevent it, but then I’ve dialed and she’s saying hello. “I got your contract,” she says. “You’re happy with the menu?”
“I did think of one thing. My dad likes the cream doughnuts at St. John, could you do something similar?”
“Sure,” she says, and I can hear a pen scratching, “though I haven’t had those, I’ve still never been to St. John.”
I already knew that, of course, I read it in a comment under one of her pictures. “It’s right by my flat, do you want to go sometime?”
“I’d love to,” says Alice. “What about lunch this weekend?”
As we’re saying goodbye, Laila and Anton come into the room. I slip my phone into the pocket of my cardigan and sit at the table with them, talking, until the idea of seeing Alice seems distant, nothing to make me nervous.
• • •
At half past noon on Saturday, I walk down St. John Street. It ends at Smithfield Market, the old slaughterhouse, now a vast butchery. Alice is waiting outside the restaurant in sandals and a red cotton dress. The restaurant’s sign, white tin streaked with rust, hangs above her. We kiss hello. “Is there a wait?”
“No, they have a table.”
The dining room has whitewashed brick walls and black Cold War–era lamps. A skylight high above us is held closed with metal chains. Alice looks around with appreciation. “Are you drinking?” she asks.
I shrug. “I’m not on call.”
“Let’s get a bottle of wine, then,” she says, and her voice is so relaxed that I wonder if part of her does remember me. She can’t have much of a memory of me, but maybe I’m still familiar. While waiting for our food to arrive, we talk about my neighborhood, and hers. “Have you been in Chelsea long?”
“Only a year. I used to live in California.”
I tear a piece of bread, and remind myself that I’m not supposed to already know this. “Really? What part?”
“San Francisco.” She tells me how much she misses Northern California, and being able to camp on the coast or in the mountains. I tell her about camping in Glen Coe in the Highlands, which Nell and I have done every summer since we were seventeen.
“Why did you come back?” I ask.
“To be near my parents. It was hard to be so far away.” She lifts her wineglass. “And last spring my mum got sick.”
“Oh, I’m so sorry. How is she now?”
“Good, we think. She had breast cancer, but her last two tests were clear.”
My stomach drops. I imagine Rose during and after chemotherapy sessions, I imagine how scared Alice must have been, must still be. I think of Maeve and my other patients, waiting to hear their biopsy results, their backs straight, their knuckles whitening. I look at my lap, at the skylight, at Alice. “That must have been difficult.”
“She’s back at work now,” says Alice. “That was the worst part for her, having to stay home.”
“What does she do?”
“She’s a barrister.”
I once sat on a bench across from her chambers in Inner Temple and watched Rose carry a box file to her desk. She was wearing a pressed white shirt and tortoiseshell reading glasses, and I stayed while she lifted papers from the box and began to annotate them.
“Did you always want to be a doctor?” asks Alice.
“No,” I say, “it was more of a sudden decision.” We talk about medical school and university. She asks me about friends of hers who were at the University of Edinburgh in my year.
“No, but I’m better with faces than names.” I would have avoided her friends. I avoided the Eton students, the Harrow and Bedales and Ch
eltenham students. Not that it was difficult, they only wanted to spend time with one another anyway.
She asks about siblings, and I tell her I have a younger brother who’s working in Lancashire now, which feels like another lie, even though it’s all I’d tell most people about him.
We order two cream doughnuts, and after tasting one, Alice nods. “We can make these.”
“Oh, good.”
She yawns. “Sorry. I was up early for a Pilates class.”
I ask if she likes Pilates and she says, “No, it’s awful, I miss exercising outdoors.”
I remember the racquet leaning against her fence and say, “Me too, I used to play tennis, but all of my friends seem to have given it up.”
“There’s a court by my parents’ house,” she says. “Do you want to play sometime?”
“I would, actually.”
We say goodbye outside the restaurant, the damp air carrying a ferrous smell up the road from Smithfield’s. Alice has her back to the butcher’s, and behind her, a man in rubber boots is hosing down the pavement.
On the walk back to my flat, I wonder if Alice has seen the documentary about my father that was broadcast two years ago. Rose appeared in it, in old news footage, leaving the coroner’s court in a tweed skirt and silk blouse, her hair pinned up with a gold clip. Alice must have been curious, she must have wanted to know why her parents were involved.
It took me a long time to finish the documentary. I had to take a lot of breaks. The worst part was seeing the crime scene picture of Emma. She was lying on her back with her head turned, and the floor around her was smeared with black stains. Some of the stains were small and regular. I’d made them, I realized. They were my footprints.
18
THERE WAS NEVER a trial for my father—he’d vanished, and you can’t try a man in his absence—but there was a coroner’s inquest, held to determine the circumstances of Emma’s death. During my second year at university, I requested a transcript of the inquest from the public records office in London. It arrived in my postbox at the student center on a cold, sleeting day in February. I brought the envelope to my lectures, then carried it into an empty classroom to read.