If He Wakes

by If He Wakes (retail) (epub)

  She slammed the door as she left, a line of waiting customers gawking at her. For a brief moment she wanted to shout at them all, to tell them to stop staring, and then she regained control. This was exactly the kind of thing Adam hated about banks, the way they made you feel so small. This was why they used them the way they did, this is why they took advantage and why she’d be closing her account here as soon as she could. She took a deep breath and checked her phone once more as she walked out to the high street. Where was he?

  6

  Rachel

  It was about the size of a fifty pence piece.

  I stared at the earring as if I had telepathic powers, as if concentration alone would tell me who it belonged to and what it was doing in the pocket of my husband’s jacket, or between the sheets of our bed. I turned it over as my throat went dry, held it close and studied it, could it belong to a friend of Katie's? Was it a lost earring from a school friend of hers that she'd asked Phil to keep safe? Or Jessica, could it be from one of her friends? And if it was, why was it in Phil’s jacket? It looked extravagant, not the type of thing the girls would want, too ‘bling’ for their friends. This was a woman’s earring, a woman who had excessive tastes and it was in my husband’s pocket.

  I looked at Phil's coat, half hanging off the bed, and picked it up. It was his dark brown overcoat, the one he wore in the week over his suit. Part of his working uniform, it was the one he'd had slung over his arm when he came to the hospital.

  It was probably the one I'd seen behind the wheel of the black BMW.

  The hit and run suddenly played out in my mind, a body rising and falling, the screech of tyres. The woman's scream. I squeezed my eyes against it, feeling weak, as if I could faint at any moment. My heart rattled and panic overtook me. Was it him? Did my husband do that? Was I just pretending to myself that I saw someone else?

  I took a deep breath; it took a moment for the feeling of dizziness to pass. And then, once I'd managed to regain some level of control, I reminded myself of him handing over his train tickets to the police and his explanation of where he was. Did the person who stole his car have the same jacket that was in my hands? Could I have imagined seeing it? I was shaking as I looked at it. I dug my hand into a pocket and brought out an elastic band, a used tissue. I went to the next pocket. A wrapper from a mint and then, surprisingly, one of Katie’s novelty keyrings, a small colourful parrot. That was it. Nothing else.

  I swallowed, dropped his jacket back on the bed, wiped the sweat from my hairline then went again to the woman's earring. I looked at it from different angles, held it up to the light. Smelled it.

  Phil had explained it all. I'd heard him tell the police where he was, made him repeat it several times to me; his train ticket said he was at the station, not at the retail park. My chest was tight and I remembered the message on Twitter: Room booked. I'll bring champagne.

  I leaned forward, trying to get some air into my lungs, trying to calm down. I'd never experienced a full on panic attack, but I'd come very close over the years. Since the episode with Jessica’s biological father, I'd had more than my share of white-hot terror onslaughts and knew the signs.

  Once when she was a baby, before I'd met Phil, I started to hyperventilate in Tesco's. They took me to the customer service aisle and someone medically trained (or so I was led to believe) informed me I was suffering from asthma. I told them I didn't have asthma, my eyes wide, my breathing thin, it was then someone said the words ‘panic attack’. I'd never heard the expression before. As I breathed into a paper bag that had been brought up from the bakery department, she asked me if there was anything stressful going on in my life. I looked at Jessica, a chubby one-year-old that the check-out ladies were keeping amused and then at my meagre shopping which was all I could afford and had started to laugh at the absurdity of the question. It was the laughing that stopped me from going to A&E.

  I knew anxiety – I was a mother. I was on good terms with irrational worries, the waking in the night kind, concerned for what might go wrong. I knew what it was to care about the future and fear the worst, like many of us do, but this was different. This wasn't the usual panicky feeling, this was a deep dread, a heavy loaded rock in the base of my chest whilst my heart knocked as if it were about to stop altogether and my body shook. The room wouldn't steady itself, the dizzy feeling continued and the sensation was extreme. I closed my eyes and started to count, as slowly as I could, until it passed a little. I decided the trick wasn't to think about the whole thing, just a little bit of it. I opened my eyes and looked at the earring. Bite size pieces.

  I gripped my crutch, my hand slick with sweat and for the first time was glad of the grey rubber around the handle. Once standing, the hoop held tight in my other fist, I looked over to Phil's drawers. The flotsam that lay there. The crumpled bits of paper from his previous day. Without a thought of my cast or the risk of falling again, I headed toward them. I used the edge of the bed as a makeshift low rail, with that and my crutch, I felt relatively steady.

  Phil's drawers are tall and thin, bought from an antique seller in Liverpool and in perfect keeping with the decor of the room. They stand like a mini skyscraper, nestled in the corner. They're full of stuff he doesn't really need but can't dispose of, like skincare and aftershave. I ridicule him about periodically. He argues that it's similar to my vanity station, filled with stuff I don't use and his is a male version, but I still like to poke fun.

  When he gets Christmas presents of toiletries, sent from his mother in France, I like to comment how it'll be going in his ‘drawers’. He takes it in good humour and I never find out if he does put the shower gel and aftershave tonic in his drawers because apart from making fun about them, they don't interest me at all. I have nothing to do with them, which is why, as I made my way up to them, panting, sweating and wiping the hair out of my face, I realised I would never have paid attention to what he left on top of them behind the lamp. The few crumpled receipts I was about to investigate could have been there for days; they might not be useful at all.

  I reached for the first bit of paper. It was illegible, I could only just make out a few numbers, a receipt for something. I threw it on the bed and reached my arm back up, it came across various coins, tissues and then, something hard. It was thick paper or card. I pulled it out, a small sightseeing map of Chester. I absently stared at the points of interest, the Cathedral, the Rows, the City Walls, the Amphitheatre, the blue wavy line that represented the River Dee, and it dawned on me that I'd seen this map before, recently.

  I unfolded it and looked at it clearly, and it suddenly came back to me, I'd seen this map yesterday. I'd seen it at the hotel. When I'd been sitting with my ankle propped up waiting for the ambulance, the man in reception had been pointing out the location of the Roman Tours to a group of Spanish tourists. He'd been doing it on a map exactly like this one.

  The young girl I'd crashed into used one of these maps to write down my insurance details when she'd been on the phone to Della, they’d had a stack of them piled on the reception desk. The other side of the card was split into four; it was a voucher scheme. In each quarter page, an advert for a hotel. It entitled the owner to a free lunch in the cafe at either the Chester Museum or Cathedral when presented with a booking receipt from one of the participating hotels.

  I ran my finger along the names of the hotels that were taking part. They were all budget hotels, not somewhere that I could imagine Phil staying. But Phil had to have visited one to get this map and I couldn't think of a single reason why.

  He did no corporate entertaining in Chester; he worked as a branding manager for a large pharmaceutical company. The main body of clients with whom Phil was dealing at the moment were all London based. That's why for the last eighteen months he'd been spending half of his working week in London. There were no clients in Chester, all of his time spent at the local office was management based. I studied the map that had come out of Phil's pockets, looking for notes, writing, anything t
hat he'd used it for, but there was nothing. It made no sense. Phil knew Chester as well as I did, so what good was a map of it to him?

  Room booked. I'll bring champagne. Can't wait to see your hot body.

  I looked back at the drawers and stood up, leaving the map on the bed. My fingers felt the dusty surface and then another bit of paper. It was a receipt for coffee. One espresso, bought at Crewe train station the previous day, paid in cash. I let out a laugh at the sight of it. Felt a small cooling wave of relief wash over me. The weighty dread in my stomach shifted a little. Crewe train station. Exactly where Phil said he was and here was the proof. I breathed deep, revelling in the confirmation that my husband hadn't been at the retail park, he'd been at the station, he'd been where he said he was.

  I swung my arm back to see if there was anything else. I felt a few more coins, a mint wrapper and then just as I was about to abandon my search, my fingers felt the edge of something. It was small, right at the back, a tight little ball of paper.

  I brought it down and sat on the bed with it. It was stuck together, it was tacky and hard. It was printed on sticky paper, making it difficult to unwrap. I carefully picked away at a loose edge of the tight little ball, slowly starting to release a small corner. I tried to read the print, but it was hard, the ink wasn't clear and the way it had been screwed up made it almost impossible to read. I stared at what I'd managed to pull away and suddenly I recognised what it was. A parking ticket. The pay and display kind, the ones issued from a machine on sticky paper so as to enable the driver to stick it to their car window as proof that they're entitled to park.

  I took a moment, then picked it back up, trying desperately to read more of it, to pull at more of it, but it was useless. All I could make out was the beginning of yesterday's date and the word Crewe, the rest was unobtainable. I stared at it, trying to make sense of why a parking ticket from Crewe, which as far as I could make out was for yesterday, would be on top of Phil's drawers. I studied the print, making sure it was Crewe and not Chester, trying to read the date, to be certain it was for this year, this month. He'd told the police that his car had been stolen in Chester, I'd seen him hand over his train tickets to them as proof of where he was at the time of the hit and run, so why would he have a car parking ticket from Crewe? And if the car had been stolen, how did he have the parking ticket at all? Wouldn’t it have still been in the car?

  I looked at the earring in my hand, the map of Chester from the hotel and the illegible car parking ticket and began to howl.

  7

  Suzie

  She left the bank and walked out into the high street. The familiar, overpowering scents of perfume and traffic fumes combined with food drifted towards her. It was cold, rain threatened and Suzie remembered the weather report mentioning snow, so she pulled her jacket tight. Ignoring the wind, she went over to the nearest bollard and leaned against it, the cold iron biting though the material of her pants while she thought hard.

  Even though it was still relatively early, Christmas shoppers were swarming the streets. The buskers had set up in force, a man walking a tightrope dressed as Charlie Chaplin was playing a violin, a choir were gathering to start carol singing, and somewhere, further down Eastgate Street, a man was shouting religious phrases, but Suzie was oblivious to it all. Shoppers bustled past her, buggies banged into her ankles, foreign tourists offered their apologies, but she was blind to it, lost in the paperwork before her.

  Suzie had been working in an admin job when she met Adam, her days spent in stuffy council offices typing up reports and filing neverending paperwork. She'd been alone for almost a year by then and had found herself in the frustrating situation of being over thirty with no real friends and no way of making new ones. It had been a harsh realisation, when she split from Carl, that her social circle consisted entirely of Carl's friends and their partners. They dropped off, gradually losing contact one by one as Suzie moved out of Carl's life and Tina, his new girlfriend, moved in. She couldn't blame them. Who wanted to go out with the awkward ex-girlfriend? What did they have in common any longer now she was single and they were thinking about marriage and children? Suzie had lost not only her boyfriend and her hopes of starting a family, but vast parts of her social life and she found herself obsessing over it. Thinking unhealthily over Carl and what he was doing, and Tina, who, in another devastating blow, Suzie had recently found out was pregnant.

  On more than one occasion she'd taken weekend walks revisiting her old turf, going deliberately past Carl's house in the hope of seeing Tina fat and bloated and Carl miserable, but she never did. What she did see, however, was her lonely reflection in the window of their sitting room and she didn't like the image, so after one particularly long weekend of gym workouts, visiting her parents and then a trip alone to a night club which sounded reckless but turned out to be mortifying, she decided enough was enough and went to get herself a hobby.

  She checked through the night courses being held at the local high school and settled on ‘Beginners Photography’, because it sounded slightly glamorous and because it was held on a Friday night, the loneliest night of the week. She invested in the best camera she could afford and went with the hope of going forward with her life. The reality was a group of pensioners reminiscing about dark rooms and film and bemoaning the digital age, but it did have a good tutor who showed her the basics of composition and photo editing and within two weeks, she was hooked. She found she was quite skilled at being a photographer, directing groups of people, instructing them how to stand, how to look, how to feel. And the more photographs Suzie took, the more she fell in love with the freedom that the camera gave her. She no longer felt pitiful when she was out alone, with a camera hanging around her neck she felt empowered, and most of her free time was spent squinting through her lens and recording images.

  Suzie had long since moved past ‘Beginners Photography’ when she met Adam. By then she'd taken hundreds of images of the city, from the Roman street performers re-enacting history to the architecture of the Cathedral and the landscapes of the city walls. She'd photographed shoppers in the cobbled streets, animals at the zoo and two colleagues from the council offices had asked her to do portraits of their children. She had looked at investing in a portable studio and when she spoke to old friends she rarely saw since splitting from Carl, she could avoid any awkwardness by talking about photography. It saved her.

  ‘That's a nice bit of kit,’ were the first words Adam said to her.

  She was at the races, standing by the fence looking at the crowds hoping to get some images of drunken women. She had an idea she might sell them to the local paper as they always did a story on how debauched Ladies’ Day turned out to be. She turned around at his comment, ready to tell whoever it was to do one, but when she saw him the words never came.

  The majority of good looking men are usually described as handsome or clean cut, or athletic, or some other roundabout adjective that conjures the image of virile masculinity, rarely are they described as beautiful, but when Suzie looked at Adam, that’s exactly what she thought. Adam was beautiful. He had thick brown hair falling in slight curls over his forehead, giving him a wild, untamed look. He had high cheekbones, dancing blue eyes, and when he smiled, his whole face lit up. He was tall, so much so that she had to crane her neck to look up at him. And he was older than her too, in his mid-forties she guessed, which seemed to provide him with a real sense of sophistication and maturity. She took in his broad chest, wide shoulders and all at once felt childlike and vulnerable in his presence.

  ‘Are you a professional?’ he'd asked and the awkwardness vanished. Suzie had found herself answering. He was like that, Adam. He had a way about him. As well as his good looks, he had the ability to make you feel instantly at ease.

  ‘Who d'you work for that lets you use the automatic setting?’ he'd continued leaning down so he was close to her and as Suzie caught his scent and felt the electric-like current at his proximity, she'd told him she worked for he
rself and it went from there.

  In less than four weeks they were a couple and two months later she quit her job at the council and started working for him, under his training. It was intoxicating, the time she spent with him. It was everything that she didn’t have with Carl, an exciting, overwhelming, romantic love. It was all-consuming and although Suzie had always scoffed whenever anyone had previously mentioned the words ‘soul mates’, after meeting Adam, and the months that they’d spent together, Suzie knew she’d found hers.

  It was Adam that suggested she start up on her own, create her own business with its own bank account. He operated several and explained how it was the clever thing to do if you wanted to take advantage of the interest-free loans and overdrafts the banks were offering.

  ‘Practically giving money away to new customers,’ he'd told her, and he was right, the offers to start-up businesses were unbelievable.

  ‘We make minimal repayments back,’ he'd explained after she'd opened the account, ‘use the money they've given us to invest in some new equipment, and then in three years,’ he'd clicked his fingers, ‘close the account and the business. HMRC thinks you've made nothing because you've been running the business at a loss, so you don't pay any tax, when all you've done is kept your declared incomings low and closed one business to start up another. Basically, it's as easy as changing your business name. You just tell your customers you're expanding, and then, hey presto, you've got all the offers of a new business open up to you again. We could take out another interest-free loan then if we like. Get a house, go on holiday. The money's there for the taking. How about we put this one toward our wedding?’

  It was a ‘whirlwind romance’ as her mother liked to call it. Seven months after meeting Adam they were engaged and they’d be married the following year. People found it shocking, she knew Rachel did, particularly as she’d never had the chance to meet Adam yet, but as Suzie said, ‘Why wait?’ She was in love; she knew he was the man she’d been waiting for and she wasn’t getting any younger.