The Scorched Earth

by Rachael Blok

  Has he heard? It’s not as though there’s anything concrete to know. There’s been no mention of Leo Fenton, or of anything that happened two years ago. But it’s so close to home. She knows Ben watches TV there. Has it been on the news?

  Dante’s jaw, locked and still, draws her back in. She’s heard of the firm: PharmaCreate. She keeps nodding and smiling. Their main office is in London, their research facility positioned further out, north of the M25.

  The technical terms she doesn’t understand she jots down as she goes, to look them up later. Her pad fills with numbers, staff. She leans forward, speaking. ‘Can we discuss the synergies…’

  Has Ben heard?

  Her work life has been separate until now, her safe space. Uncluttered by the trial, two years ago, that nearly broke her.

  She just wants Ben back.

  ‘Early results for the drug look promising. We’re in phase two, the staff size will need to increase for the next round…’ Dante is saying.

  Leith taps the table with the end of his pen and smiles round at his team. Ana is included in this beam, like a headlight. She blinks. The main part is over.

  ‘…absolutely, I feel confident about the deadline. Let us speak to the other side and hopefully we’ll get this wrapped up quickly. Ana, can you make a start on this? Ana is one of our brightest lawyers.’

  The woman who is in charge now speaks, suggesting a meeting time; her voice is deep and warm. Dates are scribbled. Dante, of the stilled top jaw, concludes a few points and Ana, jolted by Leith’s praise, leans in to begin with her questions. ‘I’d like to go over the timescale for the trial currently taking place…’

  Has he heard? Has he heard?

  *

  ‘Well done in there,’ Leith says, once the handshakes are finished and they are walking past indoor foliage and the small fountain in Reception, back to the lift and up to their floor.

  Ana nods, struggles to think of a reply, as Leith walks into the lift first and they stand alongside each other. The door slides slowly.

  ‘I’ll head there first thing tomorrow,’ Ana says. ‘Research facility, then head office.’

  ‘Great, it won’t hurt to get a feel for it all.’ His mild Australian accent softens the business tone. ‘I’ll come too. Email me the details when it’s set up?’

  He had been on her interviewing panel. He had been the friendliest, asking her about her hobbies, and she’d worried she’d talked too much, telling them of sailing with Ben, the race she’d been in with Leo. She hadn’t realised he’d been the most important person in the room until later, but she’d got the job.

  He smells like lemons and pepper. Not overpowering, but like an Italian meal outside, al fresco. Makes her think of rolling hills and olive groves.

  ‘You’re from Sydney?’ she asks after a beat, the lift pausing at a floor, doors opening, but no one gets in. It’s a scratchy silence. The doors glide shut.

  ‘I worked at the Sydney office before coming over here.’ He smiles at her quickly, glancing at his watch. His eyes are so blue they look like a child has coloured them with the brightest sky blue in the crayon pot.

  The door slides back at their floor, and he leaves first, without comment. Rolling her eyes, she checks her reflection in the mirrored interior of the lift before exiting. Nothing in her teeth.

  There’s a package on her desk. It has been delivered by courier, with the usual stamp on the front. Fran has left for a meeting, but there’s a Post-it Note on Ana’s screen: Text from Jack812!!! Buy a hat xxx

  Smiling, Ana checks her emails first, then rips the top of the package.

  Her teeth clench. She feels her pulse quicken; her blood races as though in full flight.

  It contains a photo, nothing else. Turning it face down quickly, she holds her breath. This is not a work package, and yet she’s at work. She is not dressed for this, she is not ready. She touches her desk, something solid. Glancing round, she checks no one is looking her way.

  Slowly, she turns it back over. The photo, stiff and sharp at the edges, is slightly blurry, but nevertheless, she is there. She traces the outline of her face with her finger. She is smiling. She can’t drag her eyes away, or bring herself to look at the rest of the image. She knows what it contains.

  And now someone else knows. But how…

  Why has it come to her? Why now? And who…? How could they possibly have this photo?

  There’s a prickle on her skin, a metallic taste in her mouth.

  The chair beneath her tilts back slightly and swings to the right. The windows before her still show the tip of St Paul’s. The glare of the sun is bright, bouncing off the City windows in flashes.

  There is no sign of the sender. No words on a note. No return address.

  An anonymous package. Here at her place of work.

  Her mind stalls, curls. Avenues of thought circle and loop.

  What could anyone gain? It makes no sense.

  The dread, like a sleeping beast awoken before its time, rises from the grave.

  5

  Wednesday 13th June

  MAARTEN

  Lister Hospital is always busy. But… His hands shake. He needs to park. His eyes stream tight, small, salty tears. They blur his vision, make his face itchy. Trying to read the signs explaining how the payment system works is a torture, cruel and slow.

  Swinging the car right again, round and round. There is a multistorey but the sign says it’s full. Cars are parked in bays all the way down the sides of the road that lead round the edge of the hospital. He circles the whole thing twice; there aren’t many spaces. A car flies past him and he glares.

  But reverse lights switch on nearby, and he holds his breath as he waits for the slow, careful exit ahead of him; willing them faster; willing himself inside.

  Running into A & E, he finds a short queue for the reception desk, but his patience is gone. He can judge how badly he is behaving by the reaction of others. He attempts to curtail himself, to lower his voice, to calm his movements, but he is frantic. His height causes eyes to swivel. His voice, louder than he intends, makes a few step aside.

  The blue plastic seats are filled with people. A mother with children seated nearby averts her gaze gently, and even he can hear the catch in his voice, the panic. Everyone is in shorts, T-shirts. Blood and scratches are out for all to see; tattoos, flesh in various hues of pink to brown. Bare skin peels off plastic chairs and sweat marks are left on seats recently vacated.

  The woman sitting behind the desk stares patiently, tapping carefully on her computer, calming, organising as others in the queue step forward, anxious not to be ignored, that he shouldn’t jump the queue; but an older nurse moves quickly towards him. His hair is thinning and he’s tall and lean, coming up to Maarten’s shoulder. His eyes are set quite far apart, and they’re piercing blue. It gives him a striking quality: authority.

  ‘Mr Jansen? Maarten? I’m Staff Nurse Edwards. We spoke on the phone. Please come with me.’ The smile is steadying but still Maarten can’t stop himself from grabbing the man’s arm.

  ‘Please, are they OK, is Liv… Is she alive?’

  ‘Yes, they’re all alive. But it’s a complicated situation with your wife. Please, Maarten, follow me.’

  The mother smiles at him as he passes and people move aside. His voice had cracked when he’d spoken. Life and death top and tail here.

  They pass through a door, and the room balloons with colour. Children’s A & E is a far brighter place to be. There is a Disney film playing to one side, and coloured tables covered with pens and paper.

  They move into a curtained cubicle. Inside, the space is slightly darker.

  Sanne lies on the bed in the centre, and Nic sits next to her, holding her hand. A nurse who has been sitting with them smiles as he enters, then slips out.

  Maarten heads towards them, to sweep them up, to hold them.

  Sanne’s arm is held in a sling, immobile. Her face shines with sweat and tears.

  Nic
has a dressing on her head. Both of them cry, calling for him, like he’s still miles away: Papa, Papa. The cries gain volume the closer he gets, and they sob as he strokes their hair, holds their hands.

  He wants to cry too. He keeps it back only by swallowing the ball of panic stuck in his throat. He almost chokes on it.

  ‘Nic, Sanne, you’re OK. I was so worried, here, I’m here.’ He’s thankful for their tears, their realness – the proof of life.

  ‘Papa,’ Nic says, folding into his arm.

  He strokes Sanne’s face with the other hand, unwilling to disturb her sling, his eyes drawn to it, asking quietly if it hurts, how she feels.

  His children, alive; their hair is soft under his fingers, their faces dirtied with streaks of blood, tear-stained.

  A moment of déjà vu: his face wet with tears, childish and raw. He had sat on a plastic seat. Doctors had taken him to where his parents had lain. He shakes his head. He hasn’t thought of that for years. A confrontation with death, too early. He hadn’t been twelve years old.

  ‘Sanne needs a cast setting on her arm. We’d like to put her under a general anaesthetic. She’s been very upset.’ The nurse’s voice is quiet but firm. ‘If you’d like to step outside, the consultant is here. She’s been very brave, they both have. You should be very proud of them. They looked after their mum, sat by her until the ambulance arrived.’

  Maarten can feel Sanne trembling under his hand as she cries.

  ‘Obviously, there are risks with the small operation here, and I’ll talk to you about those in a minute. The consultant will explain it all to you.’

  He nods. His tiny six-year-old, with a broken arm. He doesn’t want to ask about Liv here, when the children can hear. But he asks with his eyes, and Edwards nods to outside the cubicle.

  ‘Papa is just going to check on Mama. Can you both stay here? I’m not going anywhere. I’ll be right outside.’ He crouches so he looks into both their eyes, brushes tears with his thumb. ‘I’m not going anywhere, girls. I’m staying right here.’

  Nic looks all of her ten years as he smiles at them before letting the curtain fall. She’s getting older but is still so fragile. She had sat with her mother senseless and her sister with a broken arm.

  He had sat on his own, waiting to be told.

  ‘She’s unconscious, Maarten. She’s being scanned at the moment, but she hasn’t woken since the accident. She was unconscious at the scene.’

  ‘What happened?’ His mind buzzes with the imagined sound of a crash, of Liv’s scream. He thinks of her hand flying to protect her face, of the windows on the car shattering. An image of the crumpled bonnet keeps appearing in front of his eyes, crushing Liv within it.

  He needs the facts so that he can focus on them, understand what is happening. He just wants to hold her. But he knows they’d be taking him to her if they could.

  ‘We don’t know for certain. There was a jogger nearby at the scene who saw another car, but the vehicle didn’t stop. The paramedics said a witness has given a statement to the police reporting they saw a car drive off. It was on one of the roads outside St Albans, leading to Redbourn. Your wife’s car was found in a ditch. The girls were bumped in the back, but Olivia seems to have taken the force as the car nosedived. The airbag deployed, but even with that, she has taken quite a blow to the head. The witness called 999. A number of other cars stopped at the scene after the crash. Luckily, there was a doctor in one of them. Olivia has been looked after well.’

  Maarten opens his mouth to speak, but there’s nothing he can think of to say. His head echoes with the sound of a squeal of brakes, of tyres screaming on the road; the thud of the impact.

  It’s a sound he’s often thought of. The last sound his parents heard – it’s rung loudly in his head for years.

  ‘Is there anyone else we can call? A parent? A friend?’

  ‘Her parents. We need to call Liv’s parents. Her father’s away, I think… I’ll do it now. And she has a sister who lives abroad – that’s right, her father’s staying there for a week. But what do I say? What do I tell them? What shall I tell her mum? Can I tell her she’ll be OK?’

  ‘Tell them she’s in very good hands. But tell her, if she can, to come now. If she is able.’

  *

  The doctor is kind, and Maarten is ushered up towards the anaesthetic room with Sanne. She lies on the bed as they wheel her through the hospital.

  ‘Look at the monkeys on the ceiling!’ one of the nurses says.

  Sanne’s eyes are wide as she looks up, and the colours of the corridors on the children’s ward whizz by. Maarten tries to stay in her view, tries to stay out of the way of the bed, tries not to bump into other patients walking slowly past them.

  He wants to speak to Liv. They’d asked if anyone in their family had ever had a reaction to anaesthetic. He wants to check with her. He wants Liv to say it was the right thing that he’d agreed. He wants Liv.

  ‘Papa!’ she cries quickly as a tall doctor slips the cannula into her right hand. ‘Ow, ow, ow!’ Maarten bends his head low, kisses her hot brow, holds her other hand, whispers about milkshakes afterwards, chocolate when she wakes.

  They secure the edges of the cannula with two plasters backed with teddy bears.

  ‘Watch, the teddy bears are going to have their milk,’ the nurse says quietly, smiling at Sanne.

  Maarten smiles at her too and prays a silent thanks to the NHS and the kindness of its staff. Their strength is all that’s holding him up right now.

  White fluid, looking thick like glue, is pushed into her hand, and then a mask is slipped over Sanne’s face.

  ‘Now give her a kiss, Dad,’ the anaesthesiologist says. ‘We’ll take her now and call you when she wakes.’ She smiles at him, her voice urging him through the steps and pushing him into acting.

  Bending to kiss Sanne’s damp brow, warm under his lips, he wants to lift her and hold her close. Her eyes are falling closed as he stands up, and the anaesthesiologist smiles at him. ‘We’ll call you once she’s out of theatre.’

  ‘Won’t be too long,’ the nurse says, smiling. ‘You did very well, Dad.’

  He’s led out of the room, and they wheel the bed forward, away from him.

  He cracks, immobilised for a moment. She has never looked so small.

  But Nic waits downstairs. She needs him too.

  6

  Two Years Earlier

  June

  LEO

  In a million shades between white and black, clouds hang down over Blakeney Point, thick and bulbous. There is one patch of blue – it’s luminous – and Leo can feel in his gut that the day will be good.

  Leaning, he pushes on the tiller and then ducks as the boom swings quickly; the mainsail catches the wind and fills, taking shape and lifting the bow up to cut through the water. He races forward, the salt spray familiar. He’s been coming here since he was a baby. Nowhere else on earth smells so close to home.

  ‘Why so slow?’ Ben shouts.

  Leo laughs, watching his brother. They race out together, past the seals that lie slick and wet in shiny mounds on their islands. The tourist boats out to see the seals are turning, chugging their way back into harbour, and Leo leaves them behind, leaves it all behind.

  Work has been crazy busy. But finally the deal is closed and he has some vacation before he needs to head back. The new company owners have retained him on an advisory basis for the next two years, but only part-time. He wants to enjoy some of the proceeds. Fleeta moved out of his apartment a few months ago, and he still delights in waking to peace in the morning. The close of their relationship had been tense.

  ‘Life in her yet!’ Ben calls, tacking over towards him. The open sea lies ahead, offering an empty horizon, and the wind chases them. They’d had these two old Lasers moored up in Norfolk for years. They’d talked about trading them in, but Leo loves them. They are part of the family. Ben usually comes up with Ana every few weekends.

  The sea opens up, as does the
blue in the sky. The waves wash him as he bounces over the water.

  It’s June. Their race is traditional. And because it’s June, he knows he also races against himself. If Fleeta had been on her way out, he’d known she’d be gone by June. It’s when he finds relationships the hardest, when he’s most likely to let women down. Like learned behaviour, his actions years ago had indented a groove into the year, in which he finds himself dipping.

  Tucking his feet into the toe strap, he leans out and back over the sea, letting his weight fall back, the adrenaline lifting him; as the boat picks up speed, they race. Outrunning the memories. Drowning them before they drown him.

  7

  Wednesday 13th June

  BEN

  Ben fills his mind to block out the noise; noise like an attack. He fills it with whatever he can cling on to. And it’s mainly Ana. Ana comes to him in gusts of air. This heat hangs and won’t leave. Pushes the nerves of the guards, the inmates. Makes it harder to eat the food. It’s usually a struggle. But in this heat…

  He’s thinner than ever. The nurse had looked sharply at him when his chest had been checked.

  Ana arrives like a breeze.

  The smell of her. Sometimes he panics he can’t remember it, but then it comes back to him. And her skin – soft, groggy with sleep in the morning. He hasn’t had a chance to have a private conversation with her since before he went camping with Leo. All he has of her is snippets of news, of the threads of who they were. So many things are unsaid. There are no private telephone rooms in here. Mobiles are banned. Each conversation over the phone is filled with echoes of shouts from inmates; echoes of what he hasn’t told her; Leo’s voice, what he’d said that last weekend.