by Peter James
‘No!’
‘Oh please!’ The boy punched his mother’s chest and she shushed him, giving Charley an embarrassed glance.
‘No!’
‘My friend Billy’s got a four-foot willy —’
‘That’s vulgar.’
The boy giggled and looked across at Charley for approval. But she only noticed him dimly, her thoughts closing around her like a cocoon. She felt grungy, still in the same clothes she had put on early on Sunday morning. She had not been home. Her jeans felt heavy and prickly and stuck to her legs.
She had stayed at the nursing home all Sunday, too drained to drive back home, to face the emptiness of the house; to face whatever it was that was in her mind.
Or in the house.
She had to go back, she knew that. She had to be strong right now if she wanted Tom back. He hadn’t gone just because they only slept together once a month at the moment; maybe that was part of it, but there were other parts as important. Probably the most important was that he thought she was going nuts.
Her regressions irritated him, all her alternative treatments for infertility. Seeing the ghost of Viola Letters’s husband had tipped him further over the edge. The stables. The car in the barn. The locket. He even felt her increasing mental instability was in some way contributory to Viola’s dog being scalded to death.
If she moved out now and did not supervise the workmen it would be the last straw for him. Sorry, Tom, had to move out, check into a hotel, because there’s a ghost in the house which tried to hang me.
She had to go back, stay there and brazen it out. She had to prove it to herself as well as Tom.
The receptionist called in the child and his mother. The staff at the nursing home had been good about Ben, hadn’t minded him coming in, and the nurse had brought up a water bowl, then later some biscuits and a tin of food for him.
In the evening the night nurse had brought a camp bed into the room. It had been strange sleeping in the room, comforted by her mother’s breathing; she could have been a child again.
She had wondered, all yesterday and all last night, whether Laura had been telling the truth. If Tom and Laura were not together, somehow it made Tom’s leaving her easier to accept.
She was glad he had not been in Laura’s flat when she had turned up, glad in retrospect. It had been a stupid, dumb thing to do. Wanting to seem strong to him, to show him you did not care — and then turn up on his doorstep in the middle of the night. She was going to be strong, however tough that would be. She felt almost more bitter at Laura than at Tom.
Outside in the hallway Tony Ross was saying goodbye to the boy and his mother, his rich caring voice inflected with interest and enthusiasm; he put much effort into making his patients feel a little bit special.
‘Charley! Great to see you! Come on in!’
He was wearing a grey Prince of Wales check suit, a tie with crossed squash racquets, and Adidas trainers on his feet. He had a lean face with twinkling grey-blue eyes and a mouth that almost permanently smiled. His hair was grizzly grey, cropped neat and short at the sides and almost bald on top, except for a light fuzz. He exuded fitness, energy, bonhomie.
‘How are you?’ He held her hand firmly for several seconds. ‘Good to see you! It’s really good! How’s Tom?’
‘Fine.’ She swallowed.
‘Great!’
She followed him across to his tiny office.
‘Thanks for seeing me,’ she said.
‘It’s been a while,’ he said.
‘We’ve moved to Sussex.’
‘Yes, I got your note. Country life, eh? Lucky you.’
‘We still want you to be our doctor.’
‘Of course, I’d be delighted to carry on — although you should register with someone local for emergencies. So Tom’s a squire now and you’re lady of the manor? How are you finding it?’
She shrugged. ‘OK.’
‘Only OK?’ His forehead crinkled and one eyebrow lifted.
‘What’s the problem?’
‘There are several things.’ She looked down at her lap. ‘One is that I keep noticing a couple of smells, either a very strong smell of perfume — as if someone’s come into a room wearing it — or a smell of burning, a really horrible smell of burning.’ She frowned. ‘I read somewhere smelling burning is a symptom of a brain tumour.’
His eyes studied her, giving her no hints. ‘Any particular times when you smell these things?’
‘It varies.’
‘Do you get any dizziness? Blurred vision? Headaches?’
‘Headaches.’
‘Sharp or dull?’
‘Dull. My head sort of stings.’
He took a silver fountain pen from his breast pocket and scribbled on an index card. ‘What else?’
‘It feels like my thermostat’s gone haywire. I’m freezing cold one moment, then boiling hot the next. It doesn’t seem to matter what the temperature is.’
He made a note.
‘I also feel queasy a lot of the time.’
‘Anything else?’
‘I’ve had some very odd feelings of déjà vu.’
‘Thinking you’ve been somewhere before?’
‘Yes.’ He had noticed the marks on her neck, and was leaning forward a fraction, studying them. ‘It’s quite strange. I’ve also been sleepwalking.’
‘Have you had any change of diet?’ he asked.
‘Not really.’
‘You haven’t wanted to eat different foods to normal?’
The raw steak she had taken a bite out of.
The Chinese box. Why yes, Tony. I wanted to bury a tin full of maggots and to dig it up in two weeks’ time and find one big maggot left. Yummy.
‘Not especially. I go on and off tea and coffee a bit, I suppose.’
He made another note. His silver fountain pen glinted and a tiny white ball of reflected sunlight danced around the walls. ‘How often have you done this sleepwalking, Charley?’
‘I’m not sure. Three times, I think.’
‘And do you wake up?’
‘No.’
‘Does it wake Tom up?’
She hesitated. ‘No.’
He was silent for a moment. ‘It’s not in your imagination?’
‘No. Definitely not.’
‘How are you sleeping otherwise?’
‘Badly.’
‘Do you feel tired when you wake in the morning?’
She nodded.
‘Afraid?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you feel afraid in the daytime too?’
‘Yes.’
‘How are your bowels? Are they normal?’
‘They’re OK.’
‘Are you urinating any more than usual?’
She shrugged. ‘I’m not really sure.’
‘How about your weight?’
‘I’ve put on a little since we moved down. I haven’t been going to my exercise classes, and I haven’t bicycled at all.’
He smiled reassuringly at her. ‘How are your periods?’
‘The same.’
‘Still as irregular?’
‘Yes.’
‘When did you last have one?’
Charley tried to think back. ‘About a month ago.’
‘Weren’t you on pills at one time to regularise your periods?’
‘My acupuncturist wanted me to stop those.’
‘You’ve been having acupuncture?’
‘Yes.’ She blushed.
Ross smiled. ‘Why not, Charley? Try everything. I’ve heard some very good reports about acupuncture.’ He glanced through her notes. ‘How many periods have you had over the last six months?’
‘I’m not sure. Two — maybe three.’
‘Are you and Tom still trying to start a family?’
Tom. Tom. The mention of the name was like a sting. ‘Yes.’
‘Are you going to try an in vitro implant again?’
‘I don’t know. I don’t think I could b
ear the thought of another ectopic.’
‘You were unlucky, Charley. The chances of a second ectopic pregnancy are small.’
‘But I only have one tube left.’
‘You’ve got some time still; you don’t have to rush into any decisions.’ He put his pen down and pushed his sleeves up his hairy wrists.
‘You’ve been through a lot over the past few years, haven’t you?’ he said.
She felt weepy, suddenly, struggling to hold back her tears. She stared out of the window at the small garden, a lawn with a rose bed border beneath a high brick wall and the fire escape of the building beyond. It was quiet and she could barely hear the traffic.
Ross was looking at her neck again.
Tell him. Tell him.
Tom, it’s Tony Ross here. Thought you ought to know that Charley’s gone nuts; tried to hang herself.
‘Moving home is a very traumatic thing, Charley. It’s likely that these symptoms you are having could just be down to stress, but I’d like to have a few tests done. I’ll take some blood and urine, and I think it would be sensible for you to see a neurologist and have a electro encephlogram — and EEG scan.’
‘Tony,’ she said, ‘could I ask you something?’
‘Sure, of course.’
She reddened. ‘Have you ever had any patients who — who think they have been reincarnated?’
‘Yes, I’ve had several over the years,’ he said, replacing his pen in his pocket. ‘I have a woman at the moment — bit of a fruitcake — who has back pains for no apparent reason. She’s convinced it’s because she was in a stagecoach accident in a previous life.’
‘Do you believe her?’
‘I’m a doctor of medicine, Charley, not a parapsychologist. I think it’s a load of phooey. Why do you ask?’
‘I — I’m just curious. Do you think there’s something that could explain — medically — all these things I’m getting?’
‘Yes, indeed, and a lot more convincingly than a past life.’ He smiled confidently. ‘It’s not a brain tumour, you don’t need to worry about that, but there’s one possibility I’d like to eliminate. You wouldn’t know if you have any history of epilepsy in your family, would you?’
‘Epilepsy? No.’
‘Of course not, you poor thing. These bloody adoption laws are so stupid. There are so many hereditary things which it might be helpful to know about.’
‘Epilepsy,’ she repeated.
‘Trust me, Charley. You don’t have anything serious to worry about.’
‘Isn’t epilepsy serious?’
‘Not these days. I don’t want to worry you, Charley. All your symptoms are consistent with stress and that’s by far the most likely cause, but I have to eliminate other possibilities. You’ve always suffered from stress and moving house is bound to have made that worse. I think that’s almost certainly all that’s wrong with you, but some of your symptoms are also consistent with a very mild form of epilepsy — temporal lobe epilepsy. Temperature changes in the body, sensory delusions, olfactorial illusions — the perfume, the burning — déjà vu, your feelings of fear, depression, sleepwalking. Temporal lobe epileptics often carry out functions unconsiously, either sleepwalking or doing things when they are awake without realising it.’
Charley stared at him, her mind churning. ‘Doing things without realising it?’
‘We do things without realising it all the time. Haven’t you ever driven down a motorway and suddenly found you’ve gone ten or fifteen miles without being in the slightest bit aware of it?’
She wiped some stray strands of hair off her forehead. ‘Could you do something harmful to yourself without realising it?’
The corners of his eyes crinkled and he shook his head. ‘The human body has a strong sense of self-preservation. If they’re heading into danger, sleepwalkers usually wake up.’
‘But not always?’
‘There have been the odd instances of people falling down staircases or off balconies. There’s no guarantee people won’t hurt themselves. But it doesn’t happen very often.’
‘Have you ever heard of’ — she hesitated — ‘of anyone trying to kill themselves in their sleep?’
Their eyes met, his kind grey-blue eyes crystal clear, as if he took them out and polished them.
‘No,’ he said.
‘Do you think it’s possible somebody could do that?’
‘No, I don’t.’ He looked at her neck, more obviously this time. ‘Why are you asking me this?’
‘No reason. I was just curious.’
He stood up. ‘Let’s go to the examination room and do those tests.’ He came round the desk and rested his arm on her shoulder. ‘Is there anything wrong, Charley? You’ve got some nasty marks on your neck.’
‘Oh —’ she shrugged. ‘I got it caught — a trunk — I was unpacking some stuff and the lid came down —’
He squeezed her shoulder gently. ‘You’d tell me if there was something wrong, wouldn’t you?’
She nodded but was unable to look him in the face, was unable to speak for a moment in case the tears exploded. She could feel his eyes on her neck again; she could feel them as if he were probing the marks with his fingers.
Chapter Thirty
Charley followed Ernest Gibbon upstairs, his feet plodding, the stairs creaking and smelling of boiled cabbage and scented air freshener. She looked at the familiar Artexed walls and the wooden plates with scenes of Switzerland whilst he paused to get his breath back on the first floor landing.
His skin hung slackly from his face, and his eyes, behind the thick lenses of his glasses, had sunk a little further into their sockets. He breathed in short wheezy gasps like a punctured squeeze box, walked across to his mother’s room, rapped on the door and went in. ‘Got a client, mother. I’ve put the lunch on, and locked the front door.’
They went on up, and Charley lay down on the couch in the attic room under the microphone. ‘Thank you for seeing me so quickly.’ she said.
He lowered himself into his chair, leaned over and checked his recording equipment, then made Charley do a brief voice test which he played back. ‘How have you been?’ he said.
‘Not good.’
‘Do you feel up to going through with it — all the way?’
‘I need to.’
‘Yes. You do.’ He looked at her as if he knew exactly what had happened. ‘You’re going to have to be strong. When you start screaming, that’s when I’ve always brought you out before. I shan’t bring you out this time. Are you happy with that?’
She tore at the skin above one of her nails, and felt a lump in her throat.
Gibbon switched out the overhead light.
She stopped, hot, tired and thirsty from her long journey, leaned against the brick parapet of the roaring weir, and gazed down at the house in the hollow, a hundred yards away below her. The house of the woman who had ruined her life.
She wiped the perspiration off her brow with the back of her hand and was grateful for the cooling spray that rose up from the weir as she scoured the property with her tear-blurred eyes for signs of life. She looked at the disused watermill, at the stable block, and warily at the barn with its silent empty kennel outside, and the brass ring beside it.
The black sports car was parked in the drive. Good. He was here. Somewhere. She slipped her hand inside her bag and felt the cold steel blade of the knife.
Talk. Just want to talk. That’s all.
She stared again at the house, looking for movement in the mullioned windows, for faces, for the twitch of a curtain.
‘Do you recognise where you are?’ she heard a voice say, a flat distant voice.
The sun was setting directly behind the house, the rays of light stinging her eyes, making it hard to see, throwing long black shadows up the bank towards her.
‘Are you in the same place as before?’ The voice was faint, a distant echo. She vaguely wondered where it came from as she walked slowly through the gateposts on to the scrun
ching gravel of the driveway. The unborn child inside her kicked sharply, as if it could sense her fear, as if it were trying to warn her not to go on; she pressed her hand against her swollen belly, and patted it. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘Talk. Just want to talk. That’s all.’
She stopped at the bottom of the steps to the front door, and dabbed the perspiration on her forehead with the back of her hand. The house seemed much larger from here, forbidding. She looked up at each of the small dark windows in turn, and listened, trying to hear a sound in the motionless air of the warm summer evening that was not her own panting or the roaring of water.
She looked across the mill race at the stables, down at the barn, at the mill; and then at the car again. A thrush took off with a worm trailing from its beak. She heard the distant bang of a shotgun, then another, the bleat of a sheep, the barking of a dog.
She climbed the steps up to the front door and paused, nervously eyeing the shiny lion’s head knocker which glared menacingly back at her. The door was slightly ajar and she pushed it further open and peered into the hallway.
There was no sign of anyone. She hesitated, then walked in, stopped and listened again. Her shadowy reflection stared back through the gloom from a spangled mirror on the wall. There was a staircase ahead with a passageway beside it, and doors to the left and right of her. The house smelled of furniture polish and a rich musky perfume; it felt feminine, elegant, alien.
There was a creak upstairs and she froze.
She stood for a full minute in silence, listening, but heard nothing more other than the tick of a clock and her own heavy breathing. She lifted the iron latch handle on the door on her left and pushed it open.
The room was empty. The diffused rays of the setting sunlight through the French windows bathed the soft eau de nil and peach colourings. It felt so sumptuous, so beautiful; it almost made her turn and run out in hopelessness. The furniture was grand, graceful Art Deco, the pictures on the walls were mostly of elegant women in fine clothes, the lamps seemed to be ornamental. It was another world.