A Trick of the Mind

by Penny Hancock

  I could lie here and weaken and slowly expire, and let Pepper suffocate in his bubble wrap bag, or I could show Patrick I’d had enough once and for all. That he wasn’t going to get away with this, however much he felt the world owed him. The anger that had begun to erupt before, when I first learnt how Aunty May had blamed me and then again when I found out Patrick had strung me along, started to simmer again within me. I’d done all I could to help him, when he knew all along I was not to blame!

  It was time to take action.

  I tested my right arm to see if it hurt to lift it. Not too bad. I shifted so I was sitting up. My head was throbbing, but I got onto my knees and hauled myself up, ignoring the pain that shot up my left arm and chest and shoulder as I did so.

  I pushed at the door. It wouldn’t budge. I swore at the metal containers, remembered again the fleeting sense I’d had when Patrick gave me this workspace for nothing – that I was like a commodity in this metal box.

  I considered my situation again. I could make a racket. It was unlikely anyone would hear, but it was all I could do. And so I began to thump against the walls, with my hands at first, then with my feet. It didn’t make any impact at all. I might as well have been hitting solid concrete with a wet rag. I needed a tool, something heavy to bash against the steel walls if I was to make any sound at all.

  Then I remembered the magnets which I’d used to attach my painting to the wall. In my fear of piercing or spoiling my canvases with frames that jarred, I only ever used magnets to mount my pictures. The practical rationale had, as it often did with me, turned into an irrational compulsion – I had started to depend on these magnets to stop someone I loved coming to harm. Another silly superstition. But perhaps it would come in useful now.

  The magnets were heavy and so powerful when held near anything metal, it was said they could make a blood blister if you put a finger between them. Now I lifted one of them high and walloped it against the steel wall, causing an almighty clanking sound that reverberated through my over-sensitised eardrums, but of course the magnet stuck fast and it took all my strength to pull it off again.

  It was a relief to vent some rage. I began to shout as loud as I could, straining the muscles in my throat to scream, letting out all my anger and hurt and sense of injustice.

  After several minutes of this I knew it was hopeless.

  Then I realised. It wasn’t impatience and rage that was going to get me out. If I stood any chance at all of saving myself from dying of dehydration, I would have to think carefully. I had these giant magnets at my disposal – surely I could put them to better use than simply bashing the walls with them?

  The bolt was fitted at waist height outside: I should be able to manoeuvre it into position and open the door. I held the magnet to the steel door. Slid it up and down until I heard the rattle where the bolt handle must be, shook it until I could hear the bolt loosening. I moved the magnet up the wall, knowing by the weight that it was pulling the bolt with it.

  The difficulty would be holding it up once I’d got it to the right position. I knew on one level it was a crazy idea. But I wasn’t going to give in.

  Persistence would pay.

  It took several attempts. But then at last the door shifted. I pushed against it. It opened a crack and the bolt fell back into place with a clang.

  Fighting the temptation to rush, I started again to work the bolt up.

  This time, it happened more quickly than I had anticipated. The bolt slid into place, the door clicked, and when I pushed it hard, it swung open.

  I gulped in lungfuls of warm night air.

  Then I heard something that made my heart lift. A distant, muffled yap coming from the base of the lightship.

  Pepper.

  The tide was about halfway out, the ladder on the wall exposed.

  I didn’t wait. I got to the ladder and climbed down the steps into the hull, followed the sound of the yapping until I could make out the bundle of bubble wrap stuffed into a corner. I picked him up, felt Pepper wriggle against me. Luckily one end of the bag had been left open allowing Pepper some air. It took me a few minutes to peel open the tape and clasp Pepper to me. His breath rasped in and out as he gulped in more air, his tongue hanging out.

  We sat, Pepper and I, in the lightship for some time. I was weak, and exhausted, and afraid that if I moved and Patrick hadn’t gone he would spot me. I was desperate for something to drink. The lights of the city were all around us, thousands of beacons glowing in the dark, yet Pepper and I were completely alone, no one knowing what we had just gone through. But Pepper needed water too. I had to do something, for him. At last I stood up.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  Climbing back up the ladder was awkward with Pepper under my right arm, and with the pain in my left one, onto the wharf. I summoned the strength from somewhere, however, and at last we reached the top of the ladder and I stumbled across to the containers. My studio door was swinging open.

  My painting lay wrecked on the floor, my mobile in pieces scattered about the place. There wasn’t time to register the sense of despair I knew I would have to acknowledge later at the sight of all my hard work destroyed.

  ‘Come on, Pepper. Let’s get out of here.’

  I clutched him to my chest, and moved through the shadows of the buildings around the wharf, still wary of alerting Patrick to our whereabouts in case he hadn’t gone off, as he had boasted he was going to, to Malta. I had no idea what time it was. The river was silent, no more boats running over its surface, and although the skies were lit up as usual, there was less noise, less vibration in the ground. Was it past midnight? I had no idea. I edged my way past the other steel containers, and then across to the little lighthouse Patrick had shown me that first day we’d come down here when I thought I was so in love. Its door was unlocked. I was so tired, I had an urge to push it open, to go in, to lie down and sleep there, letting the eternal music play around my ears, soothing me. But I had to keep going, get to my car, that was parked around the other side of the Buoy Store at the end of the wharf. I was about to step out of the shadow of the lighthouse when a movement caught my eye back near towards the steel containers and I ducked into the doorway. Pepper yelped and I put my hand over his muzzle to silence him.

  My legs went to jelly as I moved swiftly with Pepper under my arm into the darkness of the lighthouse and up the stairs. I didn’t think, just pulled myself, clutching the banisters with one hand, up to its dark chambers where the endless music played. And where, I half-imagined, I would have a better chance of protecting myself, since at least I would be able to see where Patrick was, if he was out there, through the small window that overlooked the wharf, while he couldn’t see me.

  I found a corner, squatted there and listened.

  It was dark, and cool and protective, and the music, the endless music supposed to play for a thousand years without a break or repetition, played on. My eyelids drooped and I was afraid I would fall asleep to the soothing sound.

  I would have to make a run for it soon, get to my car, get to Dad’s or, perhaps better, drive out of town up to Cambridge. Take refuge at Mum’s until my flight tomorrow. Then it hit me. What flight? What was the point in New York when there was no painting any more? Still I couldn’t afford to let the full horror of what Patrick had done to my painting – my future – hit me. I shut off the sense of grief that threatened to well up, and focused on my situtation here and now.

  I moved over to the window. I could see nobody out there. The wharf was empty and silent. There was nothing, only the distant rattle of a train, the low purr of a single launch out on the river. I would make one more supreme effort to get to my car. I hugged Pepper to me and crept back down the stairs, to a half landing where there was another window, and moved across to it.

  The lights around the wharf lit up a tall figure moving towards the containers where my studio was.

  Patrick.

  I was weak with terror. He hadn’t gone after all! He must hav
e known I would get out somehow, or feared that someone would come for me. And he’d waited, especially.

  He was barely limping, no crutches, his bad leg hardly perceptible. I thought back to all the times he’d seemed so capable on his prosthetic. What a fool I had been. He had only been in hospital a week, why hadn’t I clocked that he would never have recovered so quickly if he had really lost a leg on the road that night? For some reason the evening Ben and Caroline had come to the pub came back to me. No wonder Patrick had left, afraid Caroline would recognise the little boy with a leg missing, and give his game away. And the way he’d grown cold when I’d wanted to look at his childhood photos – he was afraid I’d see he’d always had his disability. That if I knew I hadn’t caused it I would walk away from him. Yet at that time I had been in thrall to him, so convinced I loved him I would have stayed anyway.

  As I crouched at the window, watching him, I thought how Patrick’s true disability wasn’t physical, it was emotional. It was the way he had been abandoned, by his mother, by my aunt, by Stef and perhaps countless others, and now, as he saw it, by me. In spite of everything, watching him moving back across the wharf to find me, I experienced a surge of the feelings I’d had for him before I knew how very damaged he was. I had believed I might change him, heal him in some way. I had failed.

  And in the process look what other damage I had done! I had neglected Timothy. I had lost my friends. And Patrick had nearly killed Pepper. He had vandalised my painting! Destroyed my future.

  I watched him walk towards the containers. He was coming back for me. But to free me?

  Or to kill me?

  He was at the containers now. Walking round the front, the riverside. I saw him take a step back as he found the door unlocked. Then turn round and start to jog back. I shrank away into the darkness, but then saw he was heading towards the entrance to the wharf, assuming no doubt, I had left, was on the road. He had his mobile to his ear, probably calling a cab to follow me.

  I would make a run for my car now, while he was head ing the other way, out of the wharf. I ran down the stairs and out into the yard again. But as I arrived in the open air, a deafening revving sound startled me. Pepper began to yap.

  ‘Sshhh, Pepper!’

  I could see Patrick across the wharf, he had stopped too. He turned, staring around confused.

  The car – my car – came so fast around the back of the containers, there wasn’t time for anyone to move. The blazing headlights caught Patrick full on, lit him up, dazzling him. I saw his hands go to his eyes. He stepped out, waving his arms, trying to stop the car – trying to stop the driver who he must have assumed was me.

  And I could see it all.

  I began to run, out onto and across the yard.

  ‘NO!’

  My throat was parched, I couldn’t make a sound. ‘Watch out, stop!’

  A faint ridiculous croaking sound. I had to stop the car before the cycle was completed. The cycle I realised with a horrible inevitability I had begun the night I became obsessed with the hit-and-run.

  The thump was louder than anything I might have imagined that night on my journey to the cottage.

  Patrick’s body flew up, up, arms spread like a seagull in flight, flipping in the air, his prosthetic detaching from his body, just like a branch broken in a gale from a tree.

  I still couldn’t scream, the sound in my throat was nothing more than a hoarse whimper.

  My vocal cords silenced by the hands of the man who now fell to the ground, and by the shock of recognition.

  I ran to Patrick. His head was buckled beneath him. One arm splayed out to the side.

  Without thinking, I placed Pepper on the ground, sat beside this man who had caused me so much terror and cradled his head as he faded away. It wasn’t the man I was comforting, I thought, but the abandoned boy.

  I knew he saw me.

  I bowed my head over Patrick’s and wept.

  The car, my car, had disappeared up the street away from the wharf. I watched the tail lights fade and sat for a while longer.

  The cable cars continued to move on their thread-like wires above the river. I watched them, thinking how everything happens without us being able to see it, unless we are far enough away and can look back upon ourselves and see where all the joins are. A small boy on a beach yearning for a family, a little girl blamed for a drowning that had made her think she had to check on things all her life. A fear of causing damage, and in an attempt to stop it, to atone for it, making it happen anyway. It had, after all, as Finn had joked, been like a soothsayer’s prophecy from the ancient Greeks, Patrick would die in a hit-and-run. Whatever I did to avoid it, it would happen anyway.

  I sat there, Pepper under one arm, Patrick’s head in my lap as the lights over the river flickered, and the beacon on Canary Wharf flashed on and off and the tide began to turn.

  EPILOGUE

  My New York buyers were informed that my painting had been vandalised, and agreed to commission another for the autumn.

  I returned Pepper to Frank and the two were so happy to be reunited it made tearing myself from the little dog easier to bear.

  Finn had turned back after the accident, helped me call an ambulance, though we both knew it was too late.

  He had come down to find me that night, he told me later.

  ‘I saw the words you hid in the painting,’ he said. ‘The day I came down with the beer and crisps and you were so determined to keep me at bay.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes. You’d put “I’m afraid”.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘You were too frightened to tell me out loud though, so you used our old messaging system.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And earlier, after you came and found me with Louise, I knew something was up. I sensed it. I tried and tried your mobile and when you didn’t answer all evening I knew to come and see what had happened. You’d left your keys in the ignition of your car.’

  ‘Because I had no idea I wouldn’t be coming straight back to it when I returned to the studio to put the lights off.’

  Finn was charged with reckless driving, and in court, where I was a witness, I tried to argue that I’d seen Patrick step in front of the car – and that if I’d never got involved with him in the first place Finn would never have driven into him, but it didn’t hold up and Finn was given a six month sentence.

  Louise gave up on him, but I wrote to him regularly, reminding him that I was the real culprit, not him.

  But in the end we can trace everyone’s actions back to another source, Patrick’s, Aunty May’s, my own, Finn’s.

  In the end we only have ourselves.

  I decided to sell the blue clapboard house, when I returned from a two-year sabbatical painting in New York. Just as my mother always thought I should.

  It was summer again when I went down to see the house for one last time.

  Having my daughter Rebecca here brought my own childhood slap-bang up in my face. Aunty May’s back, only slightly stooped, moving down the rickety jetty in sun hat and bare feet, jeans and a checkered blouse, my certainty that she would return with treats – chocolate-covered raisins or ice-cream cones. The sting of the salt wind as it must have felt on my newer, tender skin. Images: a child, only a little older than Rebecca, a green nylon fishing net lying beside her on the boards of the jetty, hauling out crabs on a string. A little boy, in the corner of my eye, looking on.

  I came out of the house for the last time, ready to set off, with the last bits and pieces packed in the car,

  I shut and locked the door with the big brass key and Rebecca ran out onto the sand. I dropped everything and ran after her, resisting the urge to tap the gatepost three times, because if she kept on running she would come to the sea, where riptides could grab a human body – especially one so small – and carry it away in seconds and then there was no knowing how things would twist about and take us back around again on some perpetual loop. I knew now that the obsessive
compulsions I had always performed to keep myself and others safe were the opposite. They tricked you and veiled you from the truth and sometimes they caused the very accidents you were trying to prevent.

  I caught up with Rebecca and scooped her compact weight up in my arms and put my nose into her impossibly soft hair, and the wind lifted a lock and it brushed my cheek and then blew for a moment in front of my eyes, blurring with the bleached sea grass beyond.

  The beach was empty but for the tiny squirming figures – rather like the sperm-like marks on a Miro – of a dog and its owner at the sea’s edge. We stood and listened. To the waves slamming on the shore, to the plaintive mewl of the gulls, and the beginnings of the church bell pealing up in the town. Beyond that – beyond that was the massive, unsettling silence of East Anglia, miles of woodland and field and hedgerow between us and our new home in London.

  I rubbed my nose on Rebecca’s cheek, and turned back to the car.

  ‘She your daughter?’

  It was Larry on his bike, pointing at my child.

  ‘She got that man’s face,’ he said. ‘Same face as the man with one leg.’ And then he turned and wobbled away on his bike towards the town.

  I fastened Rebecca into her car seat and got in. Glanced round to check she was comfortable. She was engrossed with the pop-up toy I’d rescued from May’s, her head down, her feet crossed over, humming gently to herself. I set off over the shingle, towards the road. I glanced in my rear-view mirror, and saw my Aunty May’s house.

  A blue clapboard house, stark against the grey evening sky, diminishing in size as I drove away, a beacon of my past, my childhood, growing smaller by the minute until it was just a dot on the horizon. I imagined all the children who had come and gone inside its walls.

  And I vowed that I would give Rebecca, Patrick’s little daughter, with his cheeky blue eyes and his long child’s lashes, the childhood he should have had.

  And then I looked ahead and drove into the magic hour.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS