‘It’s Monday. Late morning. Do you want some coffee?”
He’s still unwell, not feeling like drinking coffee, he says.
‘You know there’s fresh soap and clean towels in the shower room if you want them, don’t you? There’s all the music equipment. Books, the radio. And you’ve got me, right here, to wait on you hand and foot. I’m happy to do that for you, Jez, you know that.’
‘Mmm.’ He’s still poorly, but his breathing is better. He’s barely able to open his eyes and he’s shivering again.
‘There’s a pain, in my back,’ he says. ‘Between my shoulder blades.’
‘Yes, well you must rest. And you need a wash and to clean your teeth.’
I bring him a flannel and a toothbrush and clean him up as best I can. He’s so weak I allow him to get up and go to the bathroom to relieve himself and then he stumbles back to bed and lies down with a sigh.
‘I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle.’
‘Yes, yes please. It’s so cold. The ice has frozen my fingers. Look! My fingers have gone thin!’
I tuck the bottle under the sheets and wonder as I do so whether, since he is clearly delirious, I might lean across and kiss him without startling him. But his lips look dry after his illness, and he gives off an acrid scent. This worries me, he may lapse again.
Downstairs I go to Greg’s computer in the hallway that blocks the front door onto the street. The door we never use. I feed Jez’s symptoms into Google. The most likely diagnosis is pneumonia. It means he will be ill for quite a while, his strength diminished. It explains his cough and the pain in his shoulder blades. However, although it sounds serious, it seems that if I take special care of him, as I of course intend to do, there should be no need for medical intervention.
Having made my diagnosis, I spend a little longer on Google, searching various sites, losing myself. I browse Nadia’s sculptures, and follow the link to the site where she got the Modroc for the pregnant torsos Helen told me about. On impulse I order some for myself. Then I find the Facebook page Mick and Maria have set up for Jez. His face, plumper, shinier, smiles out at me, with friends, with adults I’ve never seen, with a guitar and with a bunch of girls. I can’t bear to see these images of Jez with other people, in another life, and I click off quickly.
When I next go up to see him, Jez is in a peaceful sleep, lying on his side. The roll of duct tape lies on the landing so I fetch it, rip off a length, and stretch it round and round his wrists until they are held securely together behind his back. I go downstairs and double-check the locks, the bars on the windows. I make sure the front door is bolted. The door on the river side is also Chubblocked and bolted. I’ve taken the extra precaution of closing the curtains, something I rarely bother with since we only look out onto the path and the river, and drawing down the blinds in the kitchen. From the outside, the house must look closed up, as if we’ve gone away. I stash the Rohypnol Greg prescribed for me in the kitchen drawer, handy for dropping into Jez’s glass if the need arises.
Jez is awake when I return to him. He complains that he still aches all over.
‘What’s happened to my hands?’ he asks, a look of alarm on his wan face. I wonder whether the illness along with the cocktail of drugs I’ve had to feed him have played havoc with his memory. Perhaps he doesn’t recall anything about being strapped up in the garage. If that’s the case it’s a good thing. Neither of us wants to remember that.
I sit down on the bed and look at him with all the compassion I feel in my heart.
‘Jez, I think I trust you. But this first time you come downstairs, I’m taking a small extra precaution. When you’ve shown me you aren’t going to try anything foolish, you can come down, hands free. I promise.’
‘I’m coming down? Where to?’
I smile. ‘To the kitchen. Please don’t look so frightened. We’re going to spend the afternoon together. I’ll cook and you can talk to me.’
‘I’m still here?’
‘In the River House, yes. You’re still here. It’s alright.’
‘But I’m going home, aren’t I? You’re going to let me go. You said so.’
I stroke the hair off his forehead.
‘Of course you’re going home,’ I say. ‘Soon now, I think. Very soon.’
CHAPTER THIRTY
Monday
Sonia
The afternoon is near perfect. Jez sits at the table, his hands behind the kitchen chair, while I cook. I put the green and white blanket around him to keep him warm. Refill his hot-water bottle, which I rest on his lap under the blanket. I put Jeff Buckley on the CD player and we listen to ‘Hallelujah’.
I make him a hot toddy: whisky with lemon, honey and hot water. I take the precaution of giving him a plastic tumbler instead of a glass, even though he can’t hold it and has to take sips as I put it to his lips. I don’t think he’ll do anything impulsive now. Something’s changed between us. He understands that I am nursing him back to health. That I really do not want any harm to befall him.
I turn pieces of chicken over in flour for a casserole we’ll share if he has an appetite later. I slice shallots, fry them in olive oil, add bacon. I glance over at him while I cook. I suppose I was expecting to see him as he was that first day, relaxed, his feet lolling against the table leg as he drank his wine. So it’s a shock to see the tears rolling silently down his face and plopping into the plastic beaker. His nose is running too, long glistening threads dripping off his upper lip, and, when he sees me looking at him, his chest starts to heave.
‘Oh Jez,’ I say, and I move towards him.
I wipe his nose and bathe his face with a clean flannel and give him water to drink.
‘Jez, look, you’ve been very unwell. But you’re getting better now. Please don’t cry. I’m here to look after you. To make everything right.’
Eventually his sobs subside, he takes a huge breath and gives me a weak, sheepish smile.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s just, I feel so ill.’
It’s getting warm in the kitchen. Now he starts to writhe about a bit, saying he feels hot. He shakes off the rug I’ve put round him then asks me to take off his hoodie. This isn’t easy with his hands tied up as they are. I tell him I’ll roll up his sleeves instead. I’m aware of everything about him as I turn back the cuffs. His broad wrists with the prominent wrist bones. A spearhead of light along the valley between the radius and the ulna. There’s a veil of sweat on his forehead. Beads of perspiration in the crease of his elbows.
‘You can’t just take it off? I’m really hot. Burning.’
I’d love to undo his wrists, lift his hoodie off his head. But even though he’s so weak and compliant, I daren’t risk it.
When I’ve rolled up his sleeves I continue to stir sauce, grind pepper.
‘Are you OK now, Jez?’
‘Yes, that’s better.’
After a long while he asks, ‘What’s in all those jars?’
I follow his gaze. ‘Marmalade,’ I tell him.
‘That’s what you were making the day I came here.’
‘Yes. I make it every February, as my mother did. It’s traditional. The smell . . . it’s a smell I love, though it makes me feel sad too.’
‘Some of my memories feel sad sometimes. Not because they were sad, but because the time’s gone. It’s not being able to go back.’
I turn and look at him. At last he’s talking more like he did that first day. We’re getting somewhere again.
‘What is your earliest memory?’
He thinks for a while. I examine his face as he does so. It’s thinner, no doubt about it. But there’s something else, something wary in his expression that was never there before. His eyes dart about. It’s as if he daren’t miss a thing, as if he has to stay alert every second. I don’t like it. I want him to relax.
‘Swans on the river. My dad used to bring me in a pushchair, I guess. We used to throw bread to the swans. He told me they belong to the Queen. Do they?’
‘Only unmarked mute swans. And only those who live here on the Thames. Or on its tributaries.’
‘And the smell of Marmite on the breeze. When I smell Marmite even now, it reminds me of here. The river. Before everything changed.’
‘It’s not really Marmite. It’s yeast from the brewery. But that smell is one of my earliest memories too. Some people object to it. I like it. And the swans are still here of course. They disappear sometimes. But they always come back.’
‘Yes. But it’s not how it was then. Mum and Dad will never be together again. I’ll never be that little kid again. Some things are gone for ever.’ Tears well up in his eyes once more.
‘That’s not true, Jez.’ I put down my knife, and lean on the table, looking into his eyes. ‘I used to think that, but I don’t any more. Things don’t go, the past isn’t gone, time is not linear as we imagine it to be. It loops and spirals and plays amazing tricks on us. It’s something I’ve come to know recently. I wish I’d always understood.’
I move around the table to his side. I lean over him and I look right into his lovely, pale face, into the eyes that have sunken during his illness but that are beginning to brighten again now, and I whisper, putting all the passion I feel into my words.
‘You came to me. You came just when I needed to know that the past was not gone. You showed me that I had a second chance and that I need never go through that kind of loss again.’
He doesn’t reply, just stares back at me, and for a while he seems to look deep into my soul. We are as one.
There’s a peaceful calm, as the light fades outside and I return to my cooking. Jez and I are quiet in each other’s company. We do not need to talk.
Later, I’m not sure how much later, because time has started to play tricks again and the day to have slipped away in seconds, Jez says, ‘I feel shit again. I need to lie down.’
‘Let’s go through there. I’ll light the fire and you can lie on the sofa.’
I roll down the sleeves of his hoodie. Wrap the rug round him and lead him to the living room. He lies on the sofa and I begin to build a fire in the grate, with none of the sense of forboding this room usually evokes. As if, now Jez is with me, I believe that all those aspects of the past that haunted me, however indefinable, have been erased. But something, perhaps his feet lolling on the sofa, the awareness I have of his body supine and inert, ignites it all. Not just the feeling, but every little detail, the picture in the corner of my eye that usually slides aside each time I try to focus on it.
It is illuminated as I put a match to the kindling in the grate, and it brightens as the flames take hold.
An early spring day, the light failing outside. I pushed open the door. There was some kind of table in the centre of the room. Candles throwing enormous shadows up against the walls. Grown-ups in black, their heads bent. I knew what was on the table, they did not need to move apart. I could see between them the shiny wooden box with its polished brass handles. But I could not go closer. And no one asked me to. No one spoke to me. I stood alone in the doorway waiting for something, a movement, a word. The heads stayed turned away from me. The smell was enough. They had not lit the fire. The room was colder than the river itself.
The phone starts to ring. It’s on the table next to the sofa where Jez lies half asleep. Or at least I thought he was half asleep. He sits up so abruptly at the sound, I wonder now whether he was only pretending. I’m on the other side of the room. It takes a couple of seconds to come out of my reverie, to register that he is using his chin to knock the handset off its cradle, that he’s speaking into the mouthpiece, ‘It’s me, Jez!’ he shouts.
I’m across the room, my finger ramming down the mute button before he’s completed the three little words that could take him away from me for ever.
‘How could you?’
‘What?’
He cowers back away from me on the sofa.
‘Jez! I brought you downstairs. Now you do this to me.’
‘I don’t understand. What did I do?’
‘You were going to try and leave me.’
‘No! I picked up the phone without thinking.’
I take a long, deep inhalation, walk once around the room, my hand running through my hair. This must not turn nasty. I sigh. Sit down next to him on the sofa. Put my hand gently on his knee. ‘OK. I’ll overlook it this once. Let’s forget it for now. But it’s time for you to go back to the music room. You can’t stay down here any longer. Come on. Up.’
I’m trembling as he goes ahead of me out of the room. Shocked that he continues to fear me. But whether it’s because he is still feeble, or because he is sorry for upsetting me, he goes forlornly, his hands taped securely behind his back, his head bowed and does not confront me as we climb the stairs.
Once he’s locked in again I hurry straight to the answer machine to listen to the message. I need to see if there’s any indication that they’ve detected Jez’s voice.
It’s Helen.
‘Sonia, you won’t believe this . . .’
I pick up the phone and dial Helen’s number. She answers immediately.
‘Can I come over?’ she asks.
For a few seconds I can’t speak. Did she hear Jez’s voice? Is this a trick?
‘Sonia? Are you there? Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, sorry. Hi.’
‘I need to talk to you. Could I come to yours?’
‘No.’ It’s too abrupt. I try again more softly. ‘No. Sorry, Helen, not a good moment.’
‘Please, Sonia. I’m so alone in this . . .’
Her voice sounds sincere. Recognizing a false note is something I’ve learnt in my line of work and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. Of course she could come over. I could tell her the same as I told Simon, that the music-room staircase has to be cordoned off while the floorboards are up. But Helen would never leave. It’s different with Simon and my other clients. They pay for their time. Helen could talk for hours. She has no deadline to meet. And the blanket’s still in the kitchen. The plastic cup in which I gave him his hot toddy. The casserole I made for us, uneaten in the oven.
‘What? Have you got clients, Sonia? When can I see you? I do need to talk.’
‘I’m sorry Helen, I . . .’
Then she says something that makes me change my mind.
‘Alicia wants to meet you too. Jez’s girlfriend. She’s got information about Jez. I think she’s on the brink of discovering what’s happened to him.’
‘What’s it got to do with me? Why does she want to meet me?’
‘I’m sorry if this is a nuisance for you. But we both think you can help. Please don’t get angry.’
‘I’m not angry, Helen. I just asked, why me? What’s it got to do with me?
‘You are, you’re irritable. I’m sorry. I know it’s a nuisance to you, this business, but she found something of Jez’s near your house, and she’s sure you might have seen him without realizing it, the day he went missing. She really needs to talk to you, Sonia. And so do I.’
I take a deep breath. Did I sound angry? I am usually so careful to control my voice.
‘Where would you like to meet?’ I say. ‘I could give you an hour. But you can’t come here. I’ve people coming.’
‘The Anchor? It’s not far for you so it won’t cut into your evening too much. I could be there in ten minutes. How about you?’
‘OK. I suppose sooner is better than later for me,’ I say. ‘See you there.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Monday evening
Sonia
The Anchor, that would once have been stuffy with smoke and cramped with men in grey suits bumping into each others’ beer bellies at this time, early on a Monday evening, is instead bare and chilly and smells strongly of antibacterial cleaning fluids. The men, though their faces look roughly the same as they always have, seem to have flatter stomachs. I miss the smoke. The illicit atmosphere it lent to after-work pubs. The fog. The sense that even the
most jaded of us could walk out of our responsible jobs into the promise of a freer world. Why the smoking ban? Look where it’s left pubs. Scrubbed. Sanitized.
I can’t see Helen in the bar and wonder whether she’s gone through to the dining area that overlooks the river. What she told me about Alicia has made me feel unreal, out of my body. But sometimes this heightened state induces clarity of thought. I’ll use what they say to make practical decisions about whether, when, and how to release Jez.
Helen’s not in the dining area either and I begin to feel impatient. I wonder why she isn’t at work today. I go back to the bar and order a double whisky. I never normally drink spirits but I feel I’m going to need it.
‘You’re drinking!’
I turn. ‘Helen!’
‘This is Alicia.’
Next to Helen is a skinny, dark-haired, nose-ringed girl, with a gap between her front teeth. Although she’s young there’s a world-weary look about her. She wears, in spite of the weather, a T-shirt with the image from Tim Buckley’s album ‘Works in Progress’ on the front. I recognize it instantly because it’s the same as the image on the badge Jez wears on his hoodie. The image on the album he’d come over to borrow from Greg.
‘My right-hand girl and source of emotional comfort. Even though she’s been going through hell herself, as you can imagine. What a stalwart she has proven to be. While you’re at the bar, get me a large Sauvignon, will you darling. I’ll buy the next round. What’ll you have, Alicia?’
The girl shrugs.
‘Go on. No one’s going to ID you if you’re with us,’ says Helen, which I think is doubtful since the girl who I dimly remember is fifteen, looks about twelve.
‘I don’t drink.’ The girl shrugs and pulls a sulky expression.
‘Then have something non-alcoholic. J2O? 7 Up? Coke? Got to keep your strength up, hasn’t she, Sonia?’
‘Sure,’ I say.
‘I’ll get a grapefruit juice with slimline tonic and a packet of Worcester Sauce crisps,’ she says sullenly, without looking at me. I’d like to correct her Americanism. She is not going to get a grapefruit juice, she would like one if Sonia wouldn’t mind, please, and thank you very much.
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