by GJ Minett
She gave a grim smile as she realised that Colin, not content with taking over her duties for a few days, had also made use of her parking space. Pulling into the one for the deputy manager, which he’d left vacant, she leapt from the car without bothering to lock it and headed for the Reception area. Angela looked up in surprise and started to get up from her seat but Ellen waved her back down and marched off to her office, which she was pleased to find empty. A half-drunk cup of coffee, which had been left on the desk, suggested Colin had moved in here too but at least she didn’t need to deal with him just yet.
Putting her coat next to his on the stand in the corner, she sat down at her desk and logged on to her computer. Angela buzzed to ask if everything was OK and she took the opportunity to check with her on the easiest way to access the employment records. Angela walked her through it and, bless her heart, offered nothing in the way of condolences, other than to ask if she wanted a drink. Ellen said yes to a coffee and clicked her way through the various options until she found what she wanted.
Even now she expected one side of the equation to collapse. Something wouldn’t add up somewhere – after all the morning’s speculation and frantic chasing, she’d be left grabbing at thin air and looking foolish. For every number that was falling into place, and there were now quite a few, she couldn’t quite bring herself to accept the sum of the parts. This sort of thing didn’t happen in real life . . . not to someone like her.
But the moment she called the relevant page up onto the screen, read through the details and did a few rapid calculations, the fantastic bubble her imagination had blown that morning was still hovering there in front of her and she was running out of explanations that might burst it. She knew that at some stage she’d need to decide whether this was something to be welcomed or dreaded but not now. Her thoughts were in such turmoil, she felt her instincts were all she could rely on.
When Angela brought the coffee in, there was just one more thing to check.
‘He’s not in today,’ was the reply. ‘Called in sick this morning. Not like him at all.’
Ellen held her breath for a moment, then checked the screen in front of her. Tearing a sheet from the pad on the desk, she scribbled down an address, then grabbed her coat, almost pulling the stand over in the process. The cup of coffee stayed where Angela had left it, untouched.
February 2008: John Michael
He read this book once. The Dice Man by Luke someone or other. About this psychiatrist who relies on the roll of the dice for every decision he makes. To spice things up he makes sure he always throws in a couple of options that are way out there – things he’d never dream of doing normally. And whatever the dice tell him, he forces himself to go through with it. Backing out would defeat the object.
Reading it was the professor’s idea – all part of the ongoing training, preparation for the real world outside. This is what happens if you don’t accept responsibility. Don’t let yourself be influenced by outside factors you can’t control. He thinks dice would be overkill the way things are right now. Feels like a coin would be more appropriate – heads you leave, tails you stay. End of.
Last night he was all but out of there. No dice or coin, just a fit of blind panic. When he heard the knock on the door, his first thought was that’s it. That late at night, it’s never good news. His hand was actually shaking as he opened up and when he saw it was just old Mrs Anderson from down the hall, asking everyone in the block if they’d seen her cat lately, the relief . . .
He took it as some sort of message from the gods, like he’d been granted a second chance or something. No time at all he had everything packed and waiting there for him on the bed. Quarter of an hour was all it took. All those years crammed into just fifteen minutes, two suitcases and a holdall. Can’t get much sadder than that.
Maybe that’s what made him take a step back in the end. No one wants to look in the mirror each morning and see the word loser stamped across his forehead and his first thought, when he saw the cases was, Is that it? Is that all there is? They’re the same ones he’d brought with him. He remembers the professor picking them up at a car boot sale nearly twenty years ago. So the only difference between now and when he first moved in is one scruffy black holdall instead of two Sainsbury’s bags, otherwise it’s the same depressing snapshot. If that’s what he’s got to show for it all . . .
So he decided to sleep on it and first thing he saw when he opened his eyes this morning was the sun, streaming in through the window and lighting up the room like it was the middle of June not February. That seemed at least as significant an omen as the old lady last night. And all through breakfast he’s been gradually talking himself back down from the window ledge. The cases are still there by the front door, packed, ready to go at a moment’s notice, but he doesn’t see it happening just yet. Not now the initial panic’s over.
He needs to put all that training into practice now: sit down, write it all out and make an informed decision, while he’s holding things pretty much together. So he’s called in sick at work, which is a first, and he’s grabbed a sheet of paper and is ready to go as soon as he manages to track down a biro. Pros and cons of baling out and starting again somewhere else. The professor’s boy after all.
Twenty minutes in and it’s all down on paper but he’s still none the wiser. He knows now he can express it any way he chooses, two plus two is always going to make four and there’s not a thing he can do about it. He doesn’t want to go but he’s afraid to stay.
If he could be one hundred per cent sure it was safe, there’s more than enough to keep him here . . . things you can’t cram into a couple of battered old cases. But he knows how bad it could get if things go against him. Ellen knows about Eudora Nash. Two days later she disappears off to the Cotswolds of all places for the weekend and that’s a coincidence? Right. And then there’s Barbara – he remembers when the professor died there were all sorts of things that came out of the woodwork. Death’s like that. Doors that have been slammed shut for years spring open and suddenly everything’s up in the air. If he could just be sure, one hundred per cent certain, about how much Barbara knew and what she’s passed on to Ellen, there wouldn’t be the same sense of urgency. But he can’t and at almost any other time in his life, that would have been more than enough to make him go. He’d have left skid marks.
But this is not any other time in his life. It’s now. Two days ago he celebrated his fifty-third birthday and, just like the others since the professor died, he spent it on his own. No one knew a thing about it. And if he gets on his bike now and runs away like he’s done so many times before, then fifteen, twenty, thirty years from now he’ll still be doing the same. The professor used to say something about people who don’t learn from their mistakes being doomed to repeat them. Something like that anyway. Isn’t that what will happen if he gives up on any chance of settling here?
And he’s still batting the same thoughts back and forth in his head when old Mrs Anderson knocks at the door again and he’s trying not to show his irritation as he lifts the latch because he understands the cat’s all she’s got in her life and, God, doesn’t that sound depressingly familiar? How about that for an omen? But when he pulls the door back, it’s not Mrs Anderson standing there and all of a sudden he knows it’s neither heads nor tails because this time someone’s snatched the coin away before he even had time to toss it.
PART FOUR:
THE DECISION
11
February 2008: Ellen
In the six and a half years she’d known Alan Wharton, Ellen had rarely given any thought to his life away from Langmere. He was her go-to man for anything involving landscaping and increasingly her saviour whenever the network crashed. Beyond that she barely gave him a moment’s thought.
She’d known many of the staff at Langmere since she was a child, especially those who used to work with Barbara in the supermarket or, in later years, on Reception, and although she’d never show
n any great interest in their private lives, somehow the odd detail had seeped into her consciousness, as if through some form of social osmosis. Even though Alan was still a relative newcomer, she’d have expected to pick up the occasional anecdote or snippet of information about him. That had never happened though. And now she understood why.
If there’d ever been any mention of close friends or a romantic attachment of any kind, she was sure it would have registered, if only because it would have struck her as incongruous. She’d have been prepared to wager a tidy sum that he lived alone, had very little in the way of a social life and compensated by snapping up the latest iPod, iPad, iPed and iPud the moment it came onto the market. And no, she wasn’t blind to the irony – she was well aware that if children were substituted for gadgets, this was a more than passable description of her own day-to-day existence.
But at least one preconceived notion was dispelled the moment she stepped into the flat. She’d been expecting some sort of homage to geekdom, a dismal breaker’s yard of discarded keyboards and disused monitors with half-dismantled computers competing for limited space with a tangled undergrowth of cables and wires, all groping their way towards the corners of the room like tree roots in search of water. What she found instead was a light, airy room with gleaming windows, polished shelves and not a speck of dust to be seen anywhere. The furniture, faded to the point of drabness, looked as if it had come with the flat but even here an effort had been made with brightly coloured cushions and throws designed to catch the eye. It looked cared for and lived in, with more than a nod to the 1950s maybe but none the worse for that.
She took the seat she was offered, straightening the armrest cover as she did so – the flaw in the diamond, apparently. She accepted his offer of coffee, not so much because she wanted it but because she thought it might buy her a little time. Having been in such a rush to get here from Langmere, she’d barely had a chance to think things through and wasn’t really sure how she felt about everything just yet.
He said nothing while they waited for the kettle to boil, merely stood there in the tiny raised kitchen area, tapping the fingers of his ungloved hand on the work surface. She’d come prepared for prolonged bouts of silence. Most of her previous conversations with him had been pretty much one-way traffic. She assumed the fact she was his employer accounted for some of it but even here, on home territory, he seemed almost crippled by shyness, doling out every sentence like marked currency.
She took another look around the room and her gaze fell on the suitcases by the door, with the holdall propped up against them. ‘Thinking of going somewhere?’ she asked, one eyebrow raised in surprise. He didn’t answer, simply shrugged his shoulders and turned back to the kettle. Without actually looking at her, he held up the milk and sugar and she asked for white without. Then, when the kettle had boiled, he brought her drink over to her and sat on the far edge of the sofa. He’d made nothing for himself.
‘I’m sorry about your mother,’ he said eventually, so quietly she could easily have missed it.
‘Thank you.’
‘She was always very kind to me.’
‘Is that why you arranged for those parcels to be sent to Calder Vale?’ she asked. ‘The little treats?’ Mr Webster’s description had been very detailed. The hoodie, jeans and trainers might not have been conclusive on their own but the moment he mentioned a baseball cap worn back to front, she was pretty sure who it was. And the black glove on one hand was the clincher. A work accident back in Ballymena was what he’d told everyone at Langmere but she knew better now.
She was having difficulty in putting together the boy she’d been reading about in bed just a few hours earlier and the diffident man almost twenty years her senior who was sitting just feet away from her. How on earth was she supposed to get her head around the idea that this was John Michael Adams?
It dawned on her that she was staring at his gloved hand – she looked away quickly, hoping he hadn’t noticed.
‘I’m not going anywhere,’ he said, nodding at the cases. ‘I mean, I was . . . sort of. Not now.’
A calypso tune started up inside Ellen’s bag – she reached inside for her mobile and switched it off without checking it.
‘You were thinking of leaving. Just like that?’ she asked.
‘It doesn’t matter now.’
‘Is that your answer to everything . . . running away?’
Even as the words left her mouth it occurred to her how unfair and pointless it was to judge him by normal standards. Of course his response when threatened would be to disappear. What other options were open to someone in his situation? Why did she have to sound so judgemental all the time?
‘You’re worried I’m going to tell everyone who you really are? Is that it?’
Again the shrug of the shoulders, which seemed to be his fallback position for any question he found remotely challenging.
‘Jesus,’ she said, getting up from her seat and carrying the cup over to the window. ‘You’re my own brother and I don’t even know what to call you, you realise that? Is it Alan or John Michael?’
‘Alan,’ he said quietly.
‘So think about it, Alan. How am I going to tell anyone? The moment I say anything there’s not a camera or microphone in the world that won’t be pointing at my family. You think I want my kids to be at the centre of a freak show for the rest of their lives?’
He offered no response and she cursed herself for not being a little more tactful. The situation was difficult enough as it was – insensitive comments weren’t likely to help things along at all.
‘How did you know?’ he asked eventually. ‘I suppose she told you?’
‘She?’
‘Your mother.’
‘Barbara?’ This was something she hadn’t anticipated. ‘Are you telling me she knew who you were?’
‘I think so.’
‘What do you mean, you think so?’
‘Maybe. I don’t know for sure. She never said. Not in so many words.’
‘So what makes you think she might have?’
He shook his head, as if disclaiming any responsibility for the plausibility or otherwise of what he was about to say. ‘It was just . . . she used to sit and talk with me. In the canteen. She was part-time when I knew her, so she wasn’t in all that often but when she was she always seemed to pick me out.’ There was a lengthy pause and Ellen wondered for a moment if that was it. She had to resist the urge to hurry him along.
‘She’d ask me what sort of a morning I’d had, whether I enjoyed my work – things like that. Then she’d tell me about her day so far. It was nice, you know? She didn’t have to do that.’
‘That doesn’t mean she knew who you were,’ objected Ellen. ‘She was probably just being sociable.’
‘Maybe. But this one time she’d been telling me what a good job I’d done on that area of waste ground – you know, the one the other side of the pool that we landscaped a few years ago? Said she used to have this friend, back when she was a lot younger, who did that sort of thing. Worked for her father. Good with his hands. She said he’d have been really proud to produce something like that . . . and she looked at me like she was testing me or something.’
‘So what did you say to her?’
‘I didn’t say anything. I just sat there until she smiled and said something about having to get back to work, couldn’t sit there all day, and I thought it was all over. But as she got to her feet she said she often found herself thinking about this friend of hers, even all these years later. Thing was, he had a son, only he hardly ever got to see him for some reason. Very sad about it, he was. And she put her hand on mine and said That boy meant such a lot to Peter. Then she smiled and walked away.’
‘Dammit,’ said Ellen, rolling her eyes and flopping back into the confines of the chair. ‘She knew.’
‘I wasn’t sure.’
‘She knew. Of course she knew. God . . .’ She bit her lip and worked hard to fig
ht back the tears she could feel gathering.
‘It was only that one time. She never mentioned any of it again.’
‘She didn’t need to. She was sounding you out. You’d already given her the confirmation she needed.’
‘But I didn’t say anything.’
‘You didn’t need to.’
He got up from the sofa and walked over to the chest of drawers. Taking a handful of tissues from a box which was resting on it, he handed them to her and returned to his seat.
‘She didn’t say anything to you, then?’ he asked at length.
‘No,’ she laughed, dabbing at the corner of one eye. ‘No, she didn’t.’ Maybe that’s what ought to go on her gravestone, she thought grimly. The ultimate epitaph – she never said a sodding word.
‘So if it wasn’t from her, how did you find out who I was?’
Ellen blew her nose and tucked the tissue into the cuff of her sweater before answering.
‘Where to begin,’ she said, puffing out her cheeks. ‘Did you know she went to see Carl Holmbach just before he died?’
He didn’t. And if appearances were anything to go by, he was stunned to hear it.
‘He didn’t say anything to me about it.’
‘I think he was worried you might get ideas – from what I can gather, he wanted you to concentrate on the here and now rather than chasing the past.’
‘But she knew my father. He knew I’d want to meet her.’
‘That’s what I meant.’
He said nothing in response to this but she could see him turning it over in his mind, recalibrating his relationship with the professor. Welcome to the club, she thought.
And as the morning drew on she took him through it, retracing her own journey step by step. It seemed surreal to be sitting there discussing something so momentous – she could still hardly believe how far her efforts had brought her.