Tamara's belly distending. My hand on the stretched, hot skin, feeling a hand or a foot press against mine through mere centimetres of flesh. Listening hard for a tiny, rapid heartbeat, hidden beneath its louder, stronger, slower counterpart;
(that shiver of something almost remembered again... that tip-of-the-tongue moment)
the tender jealousy that a baby would be a part of her and not a part of you.
The desk was locked. I jemmied it open with a paper knife and a screwdriver from a pen pot. I didn't care any more. Catch me, fine me, throw me in jail. I was making things happen, at least.
Ruth's work diary was in there, her name on a label stuck to the top right-hand corner. I went through it. Nothing beyond references to meetings, courses to attend, occasional after-work committee business. I didn't know if I should be concerned about that or relieved. I didn't know what I was expecting to find.
I checked the drawer beneath and found two more diaries, for the preceding years. I leafed through 2010, my fingers pausing on the page where my life had been suspended. There was an asterisk on the corresponding date. A telephone rang in the distance. I heard a voice call out for someone called Martin, telling him that he'd have to move his car or risk someone emptying the wet waste-bins all over it. Someone walked past the door, her perfume strong enough to make its way through the jamb and scour my nostrils.
Prior to the date of my accident, I spotted handwritten marks at weekly intervals. A single letter: 'T', and a time, and a place, away from here. The names of pubs. If that was Tamara, then she was talking to Ruth about the baby outside of her professional capacity. I thought: is that good? I thought: was she asking Ruth's advice on an abortion? Then why have a 12-week scan? I pictured her confused and frustrated, not knowing what to do. Is that why she went AWOL? I found myself grasping for that, because it would mean she wouldn't be raped and dead and cooling in some waterlogged marsh.
I closed the drawer and staggered out of the room. I wondered if Ruth was all right. I tried calling her from the hospital but nobody was answering. The world had disappeared when I reached the exit.
My back was grinding and flaring like something in a forge. Perhaps the weather had something to do with it. There was nothing but sky: the whole world was being smothered by a great dark grey blanket. Rain was its stitching, coming loose all over. Here and there were bodkins of lightning. The fabric tore in thunderous rents.
I got outside and the wind ripped at my clothes. The smell of the sea was thick around me. There were no taxis, no buses, no cars. I saw one other person bent against the storm, fighting his way into it. My foot charged against the kerb and I yelled out against the pain that tore through my spine, but I couldn't hear myself in the midst of all this howling. Slates fled a roof as easily as autumn leaves. The wind shaped the rain like ropes being weaved in a fishing yard. I was instantly drenched. I was close to screaming, feeling the untapped fury that had layered up inside me begin to crack and warp. There was plenty more beneath that. Rage and panic and fear and frustration.
And then I saw a flash of lightning and I was suddenly back at the harbour in Southwick, standing in the cold. Staring out to the mill with its denuded sails, its collapsed roof. The line of sheds along the harbour path, squalid and black. The tired decorations, the fishing nets and buoys, the oxidised anchors, the chalked signs. Colchester oysters. Brancaster mussels. Crab claws.
'You work here?' I asked.
He nodded. 'Work here. And harbour. Sell fish. Got hut.'
I knew where I would find her.
69
I heard something break. I think it was this morning. Early. There was sound of glass breaking. And then someone walking around. Someone soft and going in circles at first, as if they were pottery (is that the right word?), as I used to in kitchens of people I meet for first time. I like to peek in the cupboards and check the spice racks while they are busy pouring drinks or putting on CD. The footsteps went away and I didn't hear them again for long time, but then they came back. These were different, though. They were footsteps with something on their mind. It was different person; it must have been. I thought maybe the first set of footsteps were Paul's. I was sure of it. He was like that, soft and pottery sometimes, especially in mornings at breakfast, and when he came back from long-haul. Like he was getting rid of locked energy from himself as he potter from bread bin to fridge to stove to table. But how would I know, now, for sure? He was so small and thin in his hospital bed, so weak and battered. How could his feet make any kind of weight or noise again? He must be in wheelchair. He might be dead. He might still be lying in bed, becoming like sculpture, like fossil, like foetus.
She's diminished, despite the good food and the regular supplies of drinking water, the portable heater and the Mozart. Gnawing dread will do that to a person, no matter how well cared for they are physically. The not knowing will cause the disintegration to begin, like an old rope with a poorly whipped end, unreaving, losing its shape, its purpose. Her earlier belief that The Man wore a mask because he wanted to protect his identity from her, thus negating the fear of murder, no longer rang true. She feared she might die here, whether purposefully, at his hand, or otherwise. She could begin to understand how people simply gave up. No matter how much the body clung on to life, the instinct that raged in us like fire, the intellect could overthrow it. If there were enough black marks in the AGAINST column, it was possible to find that internal switch and throw it. The lifelong sweethearts separated by death: how often did the partner follow soon after? Tamara had remembered reading about a serial rapist and murderer from her own country - the Wolf, did they call him? - a man who had terrorised Odessa during the 1980s and whose final victim, a seventeen-year-old student, was found a week after the killer was captured. She had been kept prisoner in a drain on the grounds of a disused factory by the railway in Malynivs'kyi. Her hands were tied behind her back. In this drain, which was filled with water almost to the grille, there was a ledge that she had been perched upon. If she remained on tiptoe, her face was just above the surface. If she lowered her heels, her nose and mouth were submerged. If she were to move forward she would drop off the ledge and sink. When she was found, dead, the Wolf finally deigning to give the police her whereabouts, it was broadly believed that drowning was the cause of death. But a post-mortem found no water in her lungs. There was no obvious answer to the question of what had killed her. It was thought that her body had simply given up; the severity of her depression had caused her to shut down. At the time Tamara had been shocked by the reports, had simply not believed them, thinking that youth was its own fuel, that its spirit was indomitable. The thought of death, to a teenager, was as far away as the faintest star in the night sky. It had been her first inkling of mortality. She never considered that her own body might come so close to following a similar path.
Those footsteps. Something is going on. I hope it's something to do with all water that's coming down steps. Even through walls I can hear thunder. It's been going on for days, it seems. Going away, coming back, like dogs in the street that can't leave their own mess alone. Maybe they're getting ready to move me somewhere else. The amount of walking around makes me think that they live in street where there are lots of houses. They are putting together plan, maybe. How to do it without someone seeing. How to make it look normal. What if they roll me up inside carpet? Or put me in suitcase? I don't think I would be able to cope with that. I'll fight. As soon as they remove handcuffs, I'll fight.
The footsteps finished their busy little circuits above then began, slowly, to descend. Little impact splashes, and the water coming a shade faster through the gap at the bottom of the door. What was chasing it pushed that barrier open and stood for a moment assessing Tamara in her bed. For a moment, she thought it was Paul, that the footsteps had been the choreography of violence, the skip and shuffle of cut and thrust and counter; that he had bested the evil that kept her here. But then the figure came out of the shadows, flicking on the light,
and it was The Man in his orange fish mask, that snorkel hood with its matted lining of fur pulled over his head. Something was different. She could hear his breathing, fast and ragged, and this she had never heard before. And why that pause, where there had never been one before? As if he were gathering himself. She felt her heart jolt and a voice inside her tell her that this was it. There was to be no release from these cuffs, no moonlight flit between hideaways. She'd take the roll of carpet now. She'd gladly leap into the open mouth of a suitcase. She fought against the shackles, her voice in her chest shocked from her at each jerk of the chains. Whimpers and wails. She was able to snatch enough breath to try to scream but it wouldn't form in her throat and the pathetic sound fell dead in the room, unable to get beyond the metres of packed soil, and the churn of falling water. The Man came to her and reached behind her. An extendable lamp on a mobile base, like nothing she'd ever seen before, was raised over her head. It was alien-looking. Five dimpled glass circles were punched into a flattened plastic sphere. He flicked a switch and it was as if the sun had exploded into the room. She flinched from it. The light was almost physical. She could feel it scouring every wrinkle and crease of her skin. It opened up the squalid little room in which she had spent so much time and turned it into a different place. All shadow had been excoriated. The Man became something more than he had been. It was as if all that had gone before was mere figment; that her true nightmare was beginning just now. She noticed fresh detail. The unstitched thread in the seams of his coat. The spores of blue mould on the back of his gloves, like slow explosions of ink on blotting paper. The stain of something recently eaten, drying to an ochre smear on the sleeve of his arm.
'Bud'laska,' she said to The Man. 'Please. Ni... ni, bud'laska.'
The Man ignored her and moved to the curtain. The fight went out of her. She was frozen now, needing to see what was behind it in order to be able to go on, to decide how next to lose her mind. The Man struggled to draw it back; mould caused the plastic ties to hitch along the rail, but eventually he dragged it to one side and she could see a trolley beneath, covered with a dirty teacloth. The Man kicked off a brake on its castors and began to wheel it towards her. There were no smells of good food now. No warming cup of tea, or hot milk.
He set the trolley next to her and picked up the white board from the end of the bed. He scribbled on it for a moment, then held it up for her to see.
I'm sorry.
He peeled back the teacloth, and now she was able to scream after all. She screamed long and hard until the cold fire from the needle he'd jammed in her arm seized her brain and started switching it off. She was falling into oblivion trying to remember what she'd seen on the trolley, the most dismaying version of Kim's Game she had ever played.
scalpel
clamps
bone saw
pliers
cable cutter?!?
But it was what was missing that scared her most. She tried to ask, but it was beyond her. The question drifted in her mind while darkness closed around it.
No needles. No catgut. Nothing to sew me back together...
Chapter Seventeen
The Surge
I stole an ambulance. I don't suppose it matters what kind I took, but in the end I plumped for one of the rapid response vehicles - a Zafira - the ones with yellow and green checks on their side. There were two of them parked askew in the parking zone reserved for emergencies. The keys had been left in one of them. I switched on the sirens and the lights and I sliced through the roads of Ipswich until I hit the A-road that would take me home. It felt less bad, somehow, stealing that car, rather than one of the proper ambulances, despite the mass of state-of-the-art kit, the life-saving gear in the back. What made me feel worse was the unopened sandwich on the passenger seat; something no doubt grabbed by the driver to tide him over until the end of his shift. I didn't improve my guilt by raking it open and wolfing it down. I didn't even like cheese and pickle, but I was hungry beyond tasting. I drove through what I thought was the Suffolk countryside, but it could have been a world of water. Rain beat against the roof and the windscreen, trying to get in. Across exposed bridges the wind felt as if it were lifting the car. I couldn't see well enough to dispel the fear that was exactly what was happening. Only the occasional sign, lit up through the slashing rain, and the cats' eyes in the road kept me from going off in the wrong direction, or leaving the road entirely. I missed the junction, shrouded by trees on the right, that would have taken me on to the B road to the village and had to do a blind U-turn in the carriageway. If anything was coming the other way I'd be dead meat. But there were few people out this evening. Only the idiots and the desperate.
I did take the car off the road down here. Right at the point where I had been maimed by the Defender. It was nothing serious. I was doing maybe 25 and misjudged the bend in the road. Both front tyres bounced into the kerb and I stalled it, mashing the bonnet into a hedge. I was able to reverse back on to the road without any problem, but it brought back memories of the hit-and-run and I was barely able to summon the strength to sink the accelerator once I'd got the engine going again. I concentrated hard - one of the headlights had been smashed in - and took the car steadily along the dipping, swerving road, past the school, past Breydon, and on to the mini-roundabout that marked the beginning of Southwick proper. Before reaching the main access route into the village, I turned right and drove past a pub and a junk shop, on to a more narrow road that led through the golf course. There was a sudden flurry of movement within the ribboning rain, avocets perhaps, and then it was just the rain again, and the futile sweep of the wipers trying to shift it from the glass.
You can't access the harbour by car at this point. There's a barrier blocking the way. Once I saw the gleam of the padlock I killed the lights and the engine and tried to fasten the shape of the old mill to the uneven black mattress of the marshes stretching out beyond the sunken lines of the river and the illuminated rise of the village. But there was no way through the white noise. I got out of the car and braced myself against the assault of the weather. The lighthouse was sending a pathetic beam out to sea. Lightning arced across the clenched fists of cloud, as if some diabolical being were throwing up a great enclosure of barbed wire to hem in the village. I spotted the mill within that flash, like a twisted, rusting bolt jammed into a rotten plank of wood. I'd begun to suspect it existed only in my mind. I opened the boot and sifted through the cases of medical supplies. I pocketed syringes, needles and two phials of morphine. I took some scalpels too, although they felt grossly unwieldy in the meaty traps of my hands. I took a waterproof LED torch from the glove box. There seemed to be nothing else that might help me, either to save life or to snuff it out. Stretchers, bandages, splints. A defibrillator. Fastened down with straps was a white tank of oxygen and, but for its green diamond warning sticker, it looked like my leg after I'd woken up from coma: pale, inflexible and swollen.
I ducked carefully under the barrier and struck out along a cindered path. The river had silted up over time, choking the waterway and limiting the traffic that could use it, but the high tides had swollen it to the point where it was close to breaking the banks. It trembled, right on the brink. I could hear the crash of the surf as it tore up and down the beach. This place was like a strange, landlocked island. I felt both exposed and isolated; the creeks, marshes and reed beds stretched out around me for miles, but there was nowhere to go if it flooded. You'd have to rush to get in a boat or face a drowning out in the wilderness.
From a distance, the fish huts were invisible against the night. The only clue to something standing there was the slight dip in the strength of the wind as the conglomeration of old wooden walls and roofs acted as a break against the weather. I squinted into the night, training the torch on the path, and tried to remember where Charlie's fish hut was. If I found that, there might be a clue as to where Jake's hut was positioned. Intermittent pulses of lightning helped. Here was a stack of yellow trays bearing Charlie's
initials, punched into the plastic with a bradawl. A rusted horse shoe nailed side on to make a C above the door. His boat flashed at me alongside a wooden landing stage. There's Gratitude for you. His stamp everywhere.
I knocked on the door. It was locked from the outside, a padlock hanging from a bolt. Music was playing inside, but the sound was all wrong. With my ear pressed up against the wood, the melody sounded far off, though indisputably from somewhere within. Muffled by a blanket, perhaps? He must have forgotten to turn off his radio before leaving.
I was about to move further along in what would no doubt prove to be a protracted bid to identify Jake's hut when the lightning came again and I saw my shadow cast against the wall. But my shadow was carrying a torch, not something long and thin, like a spear. I switched off the torch. Back in darkness, I could feel my ears tingle as I strained for something beneath the rage of wind and rain. I pressed myself against the wall of the hut and gripped the torch. I shifted to my left and heard a strange sound, something I'd never heard before. There was a kind of pneumatic socking noise, and a shrill, high-impact concussion of metal against stone, maybe centimetres away, where I had been standing not seconds before. Had I been shot at? I felt my bladder give way at the thought, and I staggered further to my left. The sound of something being forced against resistance, something catching. Loaded. I kept moving. At one point the wind fell away for a moment, perhaps because I was shielded in this position from the worst of it. I heard footsteps, slow and deliberate, and I watched the gleam of a harpoon dart slide out from the edge of the wall, followed by its long, silver shaft. I waited until I saw the gloved hand gripping the stock and, ducking underneath the point, switched on the torch and shone it into the face of my pursuer.
Loss of Separation Page 24