After my physio session with the Viking I lay back, exhausted, feeling the burning pain in my knee and spine and feeling something that might have been gratitude. Contentment even. It was wrong, I knew. I was in hospital, with a long recovery ahead. My mind was playing hide-and-seek with my memories and I was still avoiding calling Pat and Dylan to tell them where I was. I had rationalised that I needed to get much better first, so that I didn’t worry them, but that wasn’t the whole truth. It was habit. I might have lost half my mind, but I remembered that much. I knew I wasn’t a good daughter.
The gratitude fled and I was left with the more familiar feelings of guilt and panic. How could I be feeling sneakily happy? I hadn’t reached Geraint yet. I didn’t know what was wrong and I needed to help him. True, it would have to be help that could be offered from the confines of a hospital bed, but I had at least to try.
I reached for the mobile, hidden in my nightstand drawer, and pressed redial. As I listened to it ring, I tried to remember when I’d last seen Ger. Had he been worried then? The fear I remembered hearing in his voice . . . Was that a new thing? An ongoing issue?
Frustratingly, my mind delivered nothing recent, nothing helpful. I switched the phone off and hid it again. I didn’t want Mark to see it and for us to have an argument about it. He seemed so protective of me and would want to know where I had got it and who I was calling. I didn’t have time to worry about what that said about my relationship with him, because the action of holding the phone had brought another memory flashing back.
Another phone call from Ger. I didn’t know how recently it had been, how close to my accident, but I remembered that he’d asked me to meet him. He’d said he couldn’t talk on the phone and I’d felt a jolt of anxiety that he’d taken something that had made him paranoid. Of course, he’d always had a flair for the dramatic and I’d comforted myself with that. I was sure he was fine.
I had driven to meet him, I remembered that, which meant it had to have been in the last three or four years. Before then, I didn’t have a car. I probed the memory, trying to extract every detail, until I could relive it.
The air was cool and clear. High above, geese drew giant arrows in the morning sky. I was nervy, expecting to see something untoward out of the corner of my eye. A bird on my dashboard, perhaps, or one sitting calmly on the bonnet of the car while I cruised the motorway. Something that suggested Ger was about to drop some unwanted bombshell. I didn’t know why I felt so anxious, only that it wasn’t unusual, that worrying about Geraint had become habitual.
I arrived before Ger and found a table at the back of the café. I sat facing the door and straightened up every time the door opened. He was twenty-five minutes late, which was standard Geraint-time, and I watched him walk in and look around. He spotted me and smiled the usual tight-lipped Geraint smile. I did a half-wave and watched him walk over. He was wearing a coat over a hooded sweatshirt. I studied his face, trying to work out if he was more than usually gaunt. Ger caught me looking and the corners of his mouth pulled down.
‘Sorry,’ I said.
Geraint slid into the seat opposite. ‘Is that man looking at me?’ He addressed the sugar bowl.
‘Which man?’ I moved my head to look behind him.
‘Don’t look,’ he said. ‘Jesus.’
I stopped. ‘No. Nobody is looking at you. Except the waitress. She’s probably planning out the name of your first born.’
Geraint smiled and leaned back in his chair, visibly relaxing. ‘Long time no see.’
‘Yep.’ I was about to ask him what was so urgent but he beat me to it.
‘So what have you done this time?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Pat’s going mental; she called me, like, three times yesterday.’
‘Oh, her.’ I took the lid off the pot and jiggled the teabags with a spoon. ‘Do you want some?’
He nodded. ‘Black.’
‘I know.’ I concentrated on pouring the tea. Ger watched the ritual and then wrapped his fingers around the cup. His hands looked ridiculously large on the end of his narrow wrists and they were so thin that every knot stood out. They were an anatomical drawing of a pair of hands. No X-ray needed.
‘So.’ I decided to get it over with. ‘What does she say I’ve done this time?’
‘The usual,’ Ger said. ‘Broken her heart.’
‘Is that all?’ I was shooting for funny, but Ger didn’t smile. I changed tack. ‘Did you lose your phone?’
‘What?’
‘New number. Your texts were freaking me out. You should’ve signed them.’
‘I did.’
‘Just the last one.’ I smiled. ‘I was beginning to think I had a stalker.’
Geraint sat forward so fast his knees banged the underside of the table. ‘You, too?’
‘No,’ I said, worried by the sudden intensity in his voice. ‘Not really. I was joking.’
‘Oh.’ He shook his head slightly as if dislodging something. ‘I’ve been working a lot. I thought—’ He stopped abruptly. ‘It’s nothing. I’m sure it’s nothing. But I got a new phone.’
‘Okay.’ I paused. ‘So, what did you need me for? You sounded really freaked out in that message. I’ve driven all this way—’ I stopped. ‘It wasn’t because of Pat, was it? Because that’s all I need. If she wants to talk to me, she can call me. It’s not fair to go through you.’
‘She says you don’t answer when she calls. She thinks you screen her.’
I shrugged. ‘Of course I screen. Everyone screens.’
‘But you don’t call her back.’
‘I do,’ I said. ‘Usually. Not always super-quickly, but I do call eventually.’
‘Well, if you could do it a bit more often she’ll stop hassling me to pass on messages.’ He had his work bag with him, a giant khaki messenger bag with a slogan that read ‘To err is human, but to really fuck things up you need a computer’ on the side. He started rummaging about in one of the pockets, pulling out handfuls of data sticks until he found the one he was looking for.
‘What’s that?’
‘Picture. Don’t save it to your computer. Just open the file from the stick. Then get rid of it.’
‘What’s going on?’
‘Probably nothing. I’m imagining things. Most likely.’
‘You got me to drive all the way here so that you could give me this.’ I waved the stick at him. ‘You ever heard of email? The postal service?’
‘This is safer. Don’t save it to your computer, mind.’
‘Fine.’ I was annoyed now. ‘I heard you the first time.’
Ger pulled a face.
‘Why don’t you just tell me?’
Geraint shook his head again. ‘This is better. Honestly. You won’t believe me if I try to tell you . . . Just look at it.’
‘Fine.’ I took the stick and shoved it into the pocket of my jeans. I found his secrecy infuriating but I didn’t want to fight with Ger. So I asked him about his current obsession and settled in for the long haul, drinking tea and letting his description of particle systems wash over me. Ger became animated. His hands were still, cradling the warm cup, but energy radiated from him. It wasn’t as if he smiled much, but he seemed happy, totally focused and in the moment. Zen.
‘What?’ Ger was frowning at me and I realised I was half smiling.
‘Zen and the art of particle systems,’ I said. I smiled properly at him, the familiar rush of love and concern and frustration.
I asked after Katya, his live-in girlfriend of the moment. Ger had never had any trouble finding a girlfriend. He attracted the kind of woman who wanted to save a man, to look after him, and that was fine with me. In my opinion, he needed looking after and wouldn’t let me close enough to do it.
He shrugged, looking deep into his tea.
‘Oh, no, Ger.’
‘It’s fine. It was never serious.’
‘She moved from Russia to be with you.’
Ger looked blankl
y at me. ‘She was studying.’
‘I thought she worked in the Co-op?’
‘Yeah . . . She did that, too. She was out a lot, anyway.’
I could see the goodbye scene as clearly as if I’d been there. Katya frustrated and tearful, Ger oblivious. When he was deep into his work he didn’t hear you. Katya could’ve been talking to him for days and he might not have even noticed. She could’ve been hanging from a sex swing stark naked and it wouldn’t have made any difference.
We said goodbye outside on the street. The temperature had dropped again and I hunched my shoulders up inside my jacket. Geraint grabbed me for a quick, unexpected hug and for a moment we clung together. I breathed in the smell of his hoodie and tried not to notice how skinny he felt.
‘Are you sure you’re okay?’ I said, and watched him brush off the comment like it was an irritating insect.
‘You need to call Pat,’ he told me.
‘I will.’
‘Today,’ Ger said, mock seriously.
‘Could you run interference? Tell her I’m away on a research trip. That I’ll call her in a couple of weeks.’
‘That’ll never do it. I’ll tell her I split up with Katya.’
Pat went through phases of worrying about us each in turn, never at the same time. When it was Geraint’s turn for the laser beam of her focus, I’d call her, lie for him, distract her. It was the perfect system.
‘Be good.’ Geraint gave me his crooked smile and turned away. I watched him lope across the road and disappear down a side street before I turned away myself.
The sun was low in the sky, shining into my eyes on the drive home. After a while it dipped to the horizon, blazing red through a line of black trees. It looked like the wood was on fire. I tried hard not to picture Geraint alone in his flat, lit from the glow of his computer screen.
The data stick from Geraint turned out to have one, very blurry photograph on it. I stared at the picture, trying to work out what was so terrible that he couldn’t have just emailed it to me. After several minutes of squinting and using the zoom function, I worked out that it was a person. Probably a man, but that was far from certain. No matter how much I looked, though, I couldn’t see anything shocking or incriminating.
I knew that I should call Geraint, check that he was okay, but I didn’t. I didn’t want to talk about the picture, to find out that he had constructed some kind of story to go along with it. I didn’t want to think that he was getting anxious or paranoid, the way he used to when he was little or when he drank too much caffeine and stopped sleeping. I wanted to pretend that everything was fine. That he was fine. So I did.
I managed to bury my worries over Geraint and the incident I had privately labelled ‘the nothing picture’. It was easy. Life was busy. Between working on my degree, reading books and watching films and living the single life with nights in clubs and the occasional one-night stand, time passed at a rate I would’ve found alarming had I been paying more attention. Then I had a phone call from a number I didn’t recognise. It was Katya. ‘I’m worried about your brother. I didn’t know who else to call.’
‘Are you still an item?’ I was surprised.
‘No. Not for ages. I care for him, though.’
Geraint had that effect on people. He treated them like total crap and they came away caring. When I was feeling resentful and childish I hated that. If I made one little mistake it felt like the whole world was coming down on me.
‘I think you should go and see him. He needs you.’
‘I can’t just drop everything here.’ I was thinking about my dissertation viva and the flat-hunting I still hadn’t begun. And I was annoyed with her for presuming to know what my brother needed better than I did. ‘Why don’t you pop in and see him? You still live in Cheltenham, right?’
‘I can’t,’ Katya said, her voice cracking a little. ‘It’s too painful. I thought I could be his friend, but I can’t.’
‘Okay, fine.’ I knew that I sounded narky and that it wasn’t fair. I forced myself to thank her for calling me, for her concern.
‘Has he said anything. About me?’
I closed my eyes. How many more times was I going to have to clear up the emotional wreckage from Geraint’s life? ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, you know what he’s like.’
‘He was so keen to start with,’ she said.
‘He just got distracted. It’s nothing personal.’ I was about to add ‘He does this all the time’, but I managed to stop myself. I was working on not being cruel.
‘But he asked me to move in, why did he do that if he didn’t want me around?’
That was just Geraint, I wanted to tell her. He was very efficient. He put in the exact amount of energy – no more and no less – required to get the result he wanted. Then, once his attention had wandered, he didn’t expend any further time. ‘I don’t know how to put this, but it would’ve been a logical decision. He probably thought it made sense for you to be in the flat.’ Then he wouldn’t have to waste time and energy travelling to see you.
‘Your brother is a sociopath,’ Katya said.
‘No. He’s just busy,’ I said, defending him even though I’d just been thinking the same thing.
I could hear snuffling noises. Katya was crying, now, and the horrible part of me was glad. It meant the excruciating phone call was almost over. ‘I’m truly sorry,’ I said, trying to sound like a normal, caring human being. ‘He’s always been this way and I swear he liked you. He didn’t mean to hurt you.’
‘He wasn’t eating,’ she said, and I could practically hear her wringing her hands. ‘I just thought I should let someone know. He doesn’t deserve my help, but—’
‘Thank you,’ I said, again. ‘I’ll take care of it.’
But I didn’t. I called and didn’t get an answer, but I didn’t go and visit. I emailed and sent text messages and, eventually, got a terse reply: Working. Tired. Like I said, when Geraint didn’t want to engage, nothing on this planet could make him do so. At least that’s what I told myself as I threw myself into my own work.
GRACE
It was December and ice had formed on the inside of the windows in the nurses’ quarters. Grace barely noticed as she had reached a pitch of tiredness that no longer felt like being properly alive. She fell into bed at night, her feet and calves on fire and the rest of her body already asleep, and woke up only with the morning nurse shaking her shoulder and shouting into her face, ‘Nurse! You’ll be late for breakfast.’
Looking back on these months, Grace wasn’t at all sure what had stopped her from simply turning over and refusing to leave the scratchy warmth of her single bed. Knee-jerk obedience, she supposed. She’d been trained to do as she was told by her parents and by school and the habit was ingrained. It was this habit of obedience that made her body rise to a sitting position, her still-aching feet finding the cold floor. Still, though, she wondered at how she’d carried on. Her eyes burned from tiredness before the day had begun, not recovered from the days before. She stood in the sluice, running water over bedpans, or pushed the tea trolley down the ward, or hefted sheets in the laundry, or any of the other menial, dogsbody tasks that occupied her in her position as the ward junior, the lowest of the low, and felt that at any moment she would simply fall down dead. But she didn’t. She hadn’t.
Grace walked as fast as she could from the sluice to the women’s ward. She buttoned her cuffs as she went, her numb fingers struggling to fix the fiddly little buttons. Some of the other juniors complained about the cuffs, very quietly of course. Characteristically, Evie had ranted about them just the night before. How silly it was that they had to take them on and off all day long. How ridiculous they were at all. ‘They’re simply not practical,’ she’d said, daringly smoking, even though smoking in the bedrooms was strictly forbidden. Along with most other things.
But Grace liked the cuffs. Without them, she was just a girl in a dress. Up to her elbows in soapy water and getting everything wrong, as she
had at home. When she put the cuffs on, she felt transformed.
Over the months, Grace had grown accustomed to the patients and their bodies. In addition to cleaning floors and bed frames, wrestling with dirty sheets for the laundry and slicing endless rounds of bread, she was slapping poultices on to chests, washing backs and smearing cream on to bedsores. When a man old enough to be her grandfather called for her to look at his whatsit, she didn’t even consider blushing.
‘It’s awful sore,’ he said. He had a thick Scots brogue, which Grace had difficulty understanding, although she tried. Nurse Barnes just shook her head at him and shouted, ‘Can’t understand a word, duck.’ He had a heavily pitted complexion and red-rimmed eyes now turned beseechingly upwards as he held the covers away from himself. Grace peered at the whatsit, coddled gently on a bed of cotton wool, and wished, for a single, exhausted moment, that she could swap places with the strange male part. A bed of cotton wool seemed like heaven and Grace suddenly realised why the pictures of it always involved fluffy white clouds. Soft puffy clouds to rest upon, to drift blissfully asleep on . . .
‘Nurse?’ The man, whose name wasn’t Jock, though everybody called him that just the same, looked more worried than ever and Grace realised that her silence was being misinterpreted. ‘It looks fine, Jock,’ she said.
He replaced the covers, wincing elaborately as they made contact. Grace put her hands on her hips. ‘Is it truly that bad?’
Jock nodded his head mutely.
Grace turned on her heel. ‘I’ll tell the sister and she can take a look.’
There was no time for Jock’s whatsit, however, as the rounds were due and the frenzy that preceded the grand visitation of the doctor was in full swing. Cabinets that had been dusted only that morning were re-dusted, beds were straightened and sheets and blankets were tucked in with such ferocity that patients had difficulty breathing, let alone moving. The ward sister always barked orders with increasing fury up until the moment the doors opened and the great man arrived, when her voice turned to honey, and cuffs were most certainly on.
In the Light of What We See Page 10