Loss of Separation

by Conrad Williams

  Keble was pulling up the collar of his raincoat. Water sluiced from the brim of his hat. I heard him say, 'This better be good,' before they went inside.

  I couldn't risk being seen, but I needed to be there in case they found Tamara in the cellar. The only drawback was that if Tamara wasn't down there, the police would be on the look-out for me, which meant arrest for wasting police time and bureaucratic longueurs that I could ill afford.

  The storm came on and on. I kept expecting to hear screams as the horrors were peeled back in that rotting onionskin house. I kept expecting the JCBs to turn up, and the white tents and the cordon. But it was just me and the forked lightning and the mushroom clouds obscuring the visible sky.

  Eventually the police came out of the house. I heard Keble talking to Jake on the threshold and Jake's voice: 'No bother. I understand. Quite welcome.' He closed the door and the police got back into their cars. I heard laughter. I felt myself deflate. They couldn't possibly have searched the entire house, let alone investigated my suspicions regarding the cellar. I toyed with the idea of confronting Jake, trying to force my way into his house and searching it top to bottom, but I was not the man I used to be. What physical presence I once boasted had been battered out of me.

  I headed back towards the village. The cold and the damp were in my bones now, it seemed; blue fire danced along my limbs. It felt as though a huge poker was being ground into the gaps beneath my shoulder blades, its tip sheathed in ice chips for millennia. I could feel myself seizing up. I'd had my hands balled in anger and helplessness for hours; now my fingers refused to straighten. I was like an acute case of rheumatoid arthritis. I was someone whose flesh was calcifying minute by minute.

  An age later, as rain from the storm raced along the roads, I found myself traipsing into the centre of the village. The rain was so hard and thick here, it was almost impossible to see the edges of buildings. Rain hit the ground so forcefully that it produced spray coming in the opposite direction. There was a kind of fog out to sea. I could make out figures behind windows, warm and dry, perhaps gazing out at this shambling idiot coming up the road and wondering what form of madness - drink or pure insanity - was driving his heels. There were no buses to be seen.

  I ended up flagging a cab and I was vexed to find it being driven by the same driver who had taken me to Ipswich hospital on my previous visit. He seemed too concerned by the weather to recognise me, thankfully. Nor my voice, as I asked him to repeat the same journey.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Brace for Impact

  It took longer than it ought, but maybe that was down to the foul weather, or to the anxiety chewing at my nerves. I had to keep checking the glowing green figures on the taxi's clock to remind myself it was still daytime. The sky had been shut down by the storm. The only suggestion that there was a sun shining beyond those clouds came at the horizon, where a thin line of light was scored. The taxi driver kept muttering about wanting to go off duty; he wasn't happy about driving in these conditions. The road was being erased. Driving had become an act of faith. Heavy goods vehicles on the near side were producing great plumes of spray despite the heavy aprons that skirted their wheels. The central reservation was the only indication we were on course, yet even that was warping and smearing in the runnels forming on the windows. There was no sense of individual spots of rain: it was bucketing.

  Lightning forked across the black widescreen sky. Thunder fell from the gap it created, instantaneous, cataclysmic. The driver said: 'Jesus Christ.' It was like the end of the world. He could get no reception on his radio, only a tsunami of static that grew or faded depending on the strength of the monumental charge that was escalating above us. The buildings were dissolved. Nothing had any edge, apart from our voices as we attempted conversation. Though he was reluctant, the driver was making progress. I couldn't work out how he remembered the route. Maybe it was down to habit alone; his SatNav was dead, the screen full of question marks, unable to detect a signal. After what felt like hours, we pulled up in front of the hospital in Ipswich. I peeled myself from my seat, slick with a sweat of nerves and exhaustion. The driver didn't look much better.

  'I'm going straight home,' he said. 'This is madness. There'll be deaths at the end of this day, you mind my words.'

  I gave him a tip this time and waved him off. I was being slaughtered by the rain but I didn't want to get inside just yet. This was the calm before my own storm, I thought, no matter how messed up that sounded with the world apparently splitting apart around me. I imagined Tamara walking around in bad weather, a child growing inside her. I agonised over the reasons she couldn't tell me. I'd been such an idiot. Short of holding up my hand and telling her to shut it, I'd closed the door on even the most light-hearted debate on the pros and cons of starting a family by simply changing the subject at every opportunity. I whisked her past the displays of buggies in the department store. I ignored her as she turned her head to watch the children playing in the playground of our local school. I could always see that unspoken question on her lips, the ache to be able to give voice to it so obvious in her eyes.

  But I was a driven man back then. I wanted to be a success in my profession. I wanted to be a captain flying big jets into and out of the major cities of the world. I didn't want to be obstructed by nappies and sick and infantile chats about horsies and doggies and puss-cats. Perversely, I didn't want a child mainly because I wouldn't be around to watch it grow up. Which was kind of positive, but I knew Tamara wouldn't see it that way. She thought I was one of those people who just doesn't want to pass on his genes, whereas it was more a not yet than a not ever. But I couldn't tell her that. I didn't want to build up her hopes. I knew it was risky, that she was younger than me and might not want to run the risk of waiting until she was in her forties to conceive.

  So many things get in the way. Time passes. Accidents happen. People go missing. Now, when it might be too late, my eyes had been opened and I could see what was important. It wasn't about pips on a uniform or flying hours or bringing the best part of a ton of aluminum, flesh and blood safely down on to a slick airstrip during a storm. I wished Tamara was here so I could tell her. I wished so hard, I believed I could pull a muscle.

  Before I realised what I was doing, I was halfway to the maternity unit, my head down, not wanting to catch the eye of anybody who might have operated on me, or provided intensive care for me while I was here. The maternity unit was set apart from the main part of the hospital. It was accessed through a door near the café, but you had to walk a long corridor to reach it, to the northernmost point of the hospital, like some outpost discovered at the end of a spit of land. I wondered if it had been designed like that so that nobody would be able to hear the animalistic howls that came from it at all hours of the day and night. Maybe the hospital executives didn't want the people in the café, or the other patients, to be affected by those torture sounds.

  I had to lean on a security buzzer for some time before a receptionist deigned to speak to me. I told them I needed to speak to someone, but they wouldn't let me in. Security, they explained. I could be anybody.

  I told her it was my wife.

  'Is she booked in?' she asked.

  'No.' I closed my eyes, placed my fingers against the grille as if it could conceal this pathetic picture of me thinking, thinking hard.

  'She... I think she's pregnant, but I'm not sure.' I shook my head. I started walking away. How crazy was I sounding these days? Then I saw a woman, heavily pregnant, waddling around in a gown, her face grey. She was speaking into a mobile phone. She was saying that she just wanted it out of her, it was taking the piss.

  'It's not my fucking fault I can't produce progestin. They know that. So why don't they induce me? But no. Have a walk around, they said. Have a fucking walk. Fuck's sake...'

  She keyed a code into the door and I slipped through after her. She didn't notice, but I was pretty sure the CCTV camera positioned in the wall would. I hoped nobody was keeping tabs on it a
t that moment. I followed the woman down the long corridor to the doors that led through to the maternity unit proper. She was tutting and swearing even more now, having lost her telephone signal. She rushed through into another corridor. I didn't know where to go, or what to do. I could hear babies crying. I could hear the lowing of gravid mothers-to-be. There was a woman behind a desk writing in a file. She might have been the voice that had forbidden entry, but I had to start somewhere. She smiled when I approached the booth.

  In a sudden change of tack, I told her the truth. It blurted out of me. I told her about my accident and how Tamara had been by my side for much of it. I could feel the prickle of tears that would never come, by the time I'd relayed the details of the trip to Amsterdam. 'I don't even know if the pregnancy test was hers. But I need to know. I want to tell her it's all right, if she's going to have a baby. She thought I didn't want kids. But I do.'

  My voice broke. The woman stood up and came around the side of the booth, opening the door and placing her hand gently on my arm.

  'Come and sit down,' she said. 'I'll make you a cup of tea.'

  I was shaking. I felt nervous about what I needed to do and frustrated that I couldn't find the woman I was desperate to be with. The idea of a blue flash on a small piece of cardboard was tricking around my head, as eye-catching as the feathers of a jay flitting through undergrowth. It could have been a pregnancy test belonging to a friend. They could have been sharing a bottle of wine waiting for the result, and then congratulations or commiserations. But if it was Tamara, and she was not safe...

  Bright pain flashed through my palms and wrists and I looked down, appalled, as blood drizzled out from beneath the gouging white Us of my fingernails. I jammed my hands in my pockets and felt the thin cardboard lip of the photograph wallet I'd stolen from Jake's tin. I rescued it now and teased it open. Old photographs, some of them black and white. The usual stuff. Forced smiles and mugging for the camera. Lots of people I didn't recognise.

  I paused over one of them. Charlie and Ruth leaning against the flank of an unidentified black car. It was a big one, boxy. Could easily have been a 4x4. Could easily have been a Defender. I wondered where that car was now. Sold on, quickly? Destroyed?

  And here was a batch of photographs of children. Lots of them, candid snaps of them eating ice cream at a café bench, or playing on the beach. Was this Kieran, perhaps? Was this Harry?

  I stuffed the photographs back in my pocket and spent the next minute or two wiping at my palms, cursing over and over. What the fuck? What the fuck?

  I could see through the hatch that the nurse hadn't even made it to the staff room. She was talking to a colleague, someone with a clipboard containing a huge wedge of notes. She had it cradled in her arm like any one of the newborns being ejected into life in that suite of delivery rooms. Her computer was asleep. A screensaver had activated: streams of blue and pink text scrolling across an otherwise black monitor. It's a boy! It's a girl! I nudged the mouse, expecting a password prompt, but the screensaver blinked off to reveal a desktop littered with folders. One of them said ADMISSIONS. I opened it. My heart was on fire. A list of names, organised alphabetically. No Dziuba, T. I checked under ROAN: nothing. Thank God our names weren't Smith or Jones or Williams.

  I closed the folder and frantically searched for anything else that might contain references to Tamara. My eyes were jagging all over the screen. Slow down. Relax. My host was still being grilled by the woman with the clipboard. Now she was peeling off sheets and handing them over. I saw the nurse glance my way, but she either couldn't see where I was positioned or hadn't really registered anything; she was looking for an escape route. I took a deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then reassessed the desktop and waited for her to come to me.

  There. Another folder. APPOINTMENTS. It had been partially hidden under the ADMISSIONS folder. I dragged it clear then double-clicked on its icon. Another list of names. I stared at Tamara's for a long time, thinking, no, it must be somebody else, despite the chances of another Dziuba living within a thousand miles of this village being virtually nil.

  I clicked on her name and a dialogue box opened. It showed me that Tamara had visited the hospital on half a dozen occasions before I had suffered my accident. One of the appointments had a little paper clip icon appended to it. I clicked on that. Another dialogue box. This one said: 12-week scan: 17/6/10. There was a host of jargon, stuff I couldn't for the life of me decipher, other than one word that I homed in on: Healthy.

  Tamara Dziuba had been here for a scan on the seventeenth of May last year. The maternity unit. And someone - not just her - was found to be healthy.

  It took a while to put the pieces together in my head. And then the nurse was back with my tea and she saw me staring at the screen and she swore and put the mug down and tea sloshed over the side on to my knee. I didn't even feel it.

  'She's pregnant,' I said.

  I didn't get to drink my tea. I was asked to leave. It didn't get any nastier than that, presumably because the nurse who had taken pity on me didn't want to lose her job.

  I meandered through the corridors, not knowing where I was going, just content to keep moving. The chemical tang of the wards and the brisk shushing of starchy uniforms, the sunken bodies pushed around on trolleys, the sense of purpose everywhere, was reassuring.

  But I couldn't stay for ever. I was no longer a patient here, and my purpose was beyond these walls. And I realised my progress through the hospital was anything but meandering when I found myself outside the tiny shared office that Ruth used. There was nobody inside. The door was unlocked.

  All of the computers in this room were off, but a residual heat, and the smell of used toner from the printer, suggested that they'd been used recently. Three office chairs were in varying stages of decomposition, fabric worn or bare; stuffing poked through like frozen smoke. The tables were a mass of files and folders and cold, stained coffee cups. A shredder was packed to the lid with tapeworms of text.

  I'd spent a couple of weeks in an office like this, during a summer job before going to university. A friend of the family who worked at University College London's haematology department. They were clearing out their archives, readying them for a digital makeover. They needed someone to go in and dig out years' worth of folders from dozens of filing cabinets and sort them into piles. I did all that and then watched a couple of doctors come in to trash about three-quarters of them, each folder flying towards an incineration pile along with a weary, barely varying phrase that seemed to go on for hours: 'He's dead, he's dying, she's dead, she's as good as dead...'

  I'd left that office a couple of hundred pounds better off but appalled by the disaffected way of those people charged with saving life, and convinced that I was riddled with cancer. I felt for a long time less like a person with dreams and feelings and fears and more a sack of meat and offal that was staving off time somehow before it dirtied up a gurney for a few hours while someone sawed it open to see why it had stopped working. And then, of course, I started my pilot training and I was no more attached to the objects I forced through the air than the people who had worked for years studying blood and its deformities and diseases. The doctors and nurses couldn't afford to become attached; they'd never get through a single working day. They were untouched, but they were trying to save lives, and sometimes, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, they managed it.

  Now time had slowed down for me, I could see all of this. Previously I hadn't noticed, or hadn't thought a great deal about it. I had an opinion, that was it, like a footprint trapped in cement. But I was prepared to be a bit more fluid about people these days. The only thing was, you saw every colour in the spectrum. Every portrait had its light tones but also its sombre shades, its cross-hatchings, its black.

  Me, Amy, Charlie, Jake. DI Keble. There was darkness there, there was plenty of rust undermining the shiny, polished surfaces. I thought of Ruth straddling me in that dark room, the sweat wicking off her on
to my torso, the tight swelling of her abdomen, like an angry, hot infection, drumming against my skin. She'd exorcised the violence of that rape by channelling it into me. I could still feel her in the tender ache at the tops of my thighs, and feel the ghost of those ropes at my wrist.

  I thought of Tamara growing heavy with the baby and felt another stab of panic. Maybe she hadn't talked to me about it because it wasn't mine. Did you think about that, First Officer Roan? Did you consider the possibility? In her loneliness, she'd turned to someone else, or perhaps the rapist - that random Dad - had unwittingly forced another bastard upon the world.

  The panic lessened as I began stroking the edges of paper folders, looking for ways in: names, references I might recognise, something to undo this tricky stopper knot: the monkey's fist that was tied tightly and prettily around the hard secret at its centre. It must be mine. She was devoted to me. We spent so much time together, especially after I walked away from flying, and there was no time to make new friendships, let alone intimate ones with other men. All of our thought had gone into the new venture. We'd spent hours, well into the night, talking and making notes and writing up a business plan, poring over maps of the British coastline, working out where would be the perfect spot to reinvent ourselves.

  I felt a sting at not being with her to watch her change. It hit me how rare it was to see a woman come to terms, grow into, her pregnancy. There was Ruth, but I could think of nobody else. She was always moving, always sighing and wincing and shifting around, like a feverish cat trying to find a comfortable position. She didn't seem happy in this skin of hers. I got the impression she wanted the baby out as soon as possible. I imagined Tamara growing into the role, like an actor born to a particular part. I imagined her sexy with that bump, carrying it athletically, as if she were meant for nothing else. In the airline industry, the female flight attendants I saw on the jets either didn't get pregnant or, if they did, then that was it. You didn't come huffing into work with a burgeoning lump. You didn't fly if you were pregnant; the attendant health problems were unknown, but the kind of stresses the body felt in a pressurised cabin could not be good if experienced on a regular basis. And anyway, the aisles were too narrow.