I have no idea – nobody does – as to what Kara’s real name was. Maybe it was Olivia Rawle. Maybe it was something Blythe. If she was his big sister, then she certainly wasn’t around when I had been on the scene.
All the police had found on him, other than the knife, was one of Gemma’s diaries from the year in which she killed herself, and a battered black journal filled with notes he had made about her, and about me. His dark little promises and oaths. The police let me have a look, and I read the first few lines – It might be sunny outside, but to us there’s shadows and rain all over the fucking place. Me ma came in just now and asked us what I wanted for me tea. I goes shepherd’s pie, peas, chips, bread and butter. She said right, buckethead, that’s your starters sorted, what do you want for your mains? Least, I wish that’s what happened. I can make them come to me, the daydreams, if I close me eyes and I’m alone in a silent room. – and quickly handed it back. That kind of thing is interesting only to ghouls and psychiatrists. It was over now for me and him.
The photograph was in there, too, with the faces of the three girls he had killed obscured by the adhesive gold stars that teachers give out to kids who’ve done well in class. Their crime was to have reported Gemma to the headmaster after she came in smelling of booze one morning, and fell asleep at her desk. She had been given her marching orders not long after. So the boy had got a revenge of some sort, out of it all, even if it wasn’t the blue-riband event he wanted.
Mawker didn’t stay long. After giving me his information, he told me to keep my beak out of his seed tray, or he’d make it his ambition to be sacked from the Force for police harassment of me.
I hadn’t thought about Gemma for fifteen years. Well, maybe I had, but not while I was awake. Not while I could avoid it. That was one very black mark against my name, one that I had tried to turn into a white-chalked tick against the word EXPERIENCE. But who was I kidding? It was a fuck-up, plain and simple, but at least I’d learned that early enough to save myself. We were kids then, we knew no better, and I got out. Only one of thousands, hundreds of thousands, who have done the same thing.
I had plenty of time to think now. I tried hard, but I couldn’t remember much about Gemma Blythe. I had met her at some party in Hatton, a tiny little place near Daresbury, while I was at college. She had already been teaching at primary school for a year, having graduated from teacher training in Nottingham the previous summer. I remember getting pissed and striding up to her, thinking she was all right, and sticking my tongue down her throat in a spur-of-the-moment bit of madness. We went out together a bit after that. Cinema, pub, walks in the park, and suddenly things were serious. Well, they were for her. The only serious things in my life were playing football, buying records by The Cure and trying to develop my abs into a six-pack.
Women, or rather shagging, made it into the top five – but relationships? I always used to think that I met the girls I liked the most at the wrong time. When I wasn’t ready for them, or them for me. That was the reason things didn’t work out. Wrong. Things didn’t work out because we were fundamentally mismatched. It was like trying to marry a Lego brick to a jigsaw piece. It was never going to happen. At the time, I’d been what, seventeen? She was twenty-two but seemed older, perhaps because of her kid. Hard work for a single mum. But I thought I’d hit pay dirt: my first woman. My first grown-up woman. Time to shut the drawer marked Girls and delve into the one marked Adult Relationships. What a bollockhead I was.
Things hadn’t changed too much meanwhile. I’d long given up on the hope of a chiselled gut, and I’d rather listen to people in a cave making sounds with a pair of emu bones rattled against a bucket than to A Forest. But the relationship problem remained. Rebecca had been killed, but things weren’t going brilliantly there beforehand, partly because she said she couldn’t get access to my head. It was best that she didn’t: I don’t like what’s in there very much, so it was for her own protection, but she seemed to think such familiarity was an intrinsic part of any long-term hook-up. And now I had yet another dark file of secrets to lock in that sad cabinet in the basement of my brain; another barrier between me and the world, and all the sweet, loving people who moved through it.
Talking of which, the day before I got out:
‘You’re looking better,’ I lied.
‘I wish I could say the same for you.’
I reached out to touch her hand, but she withdrew it. That was painful for any number of reasons, not least because she looked so fragile. Her days of being locked naked in the storeroom, without a scrap or a drop, had eaten away at her. She had lost, was still losing, pounds. The skin around her hairline had peeled away, leaving it pink and tender. She had since dyed her hair black, which only served to highlight the ravaged flesh. Her mouth was dry, her eyes puffed up; shadows filled the hollows of her cheeks with grey cross-hatchings. She couldn’t, or wouldn’t, meet my eye.
‘I came to say goodbye,’ she said. I made to protest but she held up a hand. Her voice was tired and resigned, and I wondered how long it might be, if ever, before it regained some of its sass and sexiness. ‘I can’t do it. I can’t stay. The city… it’s too big now, too many people. Too many people I don’t know and don’t know about. I’m going home.’
Home was now Salcombe, Devon. She was selling her flat and returning to the family-run veterinarian practice.
‘Maybe I could come to see you, when you feel all right. I’d like to–’
‘No,’ she said, and stood up. She turned to leave, but quickly leaned over me and gently brushed her lip against my cheek.
Three hours after she had gone, I could still smell her perfume poised in the air near my bed.
It took an age, racked as I was with aches in parts of the body that science had yet to discover, and it also took a while to get used to the crutches, but I picked up Mengele, lean as a whip after his time scampering through the labyrinthine passages at Keepsies, and tottered back to the flat in Homer Street, feeling as if I’d been away for years. I picked up the Eiger of post behind the door and started cleaning the flat. The pain was too great to get much done, however, so I sat on the sofa with a cup of tea and sifted through those depressingly brown, formal envelopes. There was one envelope stiffer than the rest, with a pleasingly handwritten address. I tore it open and a cream card slipped into my hand, an invitation to a photography exhibition by Neville Whitby. It was that same evening. I hadn’t RSVP’d, but I doubted it would matter if I just turned up. I fancied an hour or two in the real world, even if my real world wouldn’t have a canapé within about three thousand miles of it.
I had a long bath, and a couple of martinis to put me in the mood. Then I treated Mengele to a tin of tuna and left him to patrol the assault course of the flat, while I went out and hailed a cab on Crawford Street.
By a coincidence that I wasn’t too happy about, the exhibition was in a place called the Spitz Gallery, on Commercial Road, part of Spitalfields Market. It seemed a completely different place to the one I had left just over a week before, although I noticed the police cordon around the Elegant House was still in effect.
Neville greeted me warmly – there were only a handful of other guests so far – and we talked. The tabloids loved the story of my escapades and had come back for seconds and thirds. The hospital had needed to put security on my ward to prevent hacks trying to take pictures of me and offering me huge sums of money for my side of the events. The money would have been good, but I’d have rather chewed my own face off than pocket a penny of it. I just wanted to forget. I wanted anything and everything associated with the last few weeks scoured from my head, like a stain scrubbed from a sink. In time, I thought it might happen, but on every occasion I imagined this, Gemma Blythe’s impaled head would swim out of my thoughts and give me a smile with its greasy, cherry-coloured, corrugated mouth.
‘What’s going on here, then?’ I asked Neville. ‘You gone all Tate Gallery on me?’
‘Remember that night,’ he said, ‘whe
n I found you licking the pavement in Archway? After I packed you off to hospital, I went back to the squat just in time for the mother and father of all barnies to kick off. There were crusties chucking stones at the police, and the police piling in with horses and shields and batons. Pure theatre, it was. I must have shot fifteen rolls. Anyway, a couple of galleries saw my pictures in the papers and one thing led to another, and here you go.’ He was smiling like the Joker with wind. ‘I’m up for an award next week. For photo-journalism. News Picture of the Year. Editor of the Independent asked me to go to Syria.’
‘What did you say?’
‘I said fuck off. I said “You go to Syria”.’
I had a couple of glasses of wine and felt myself slowly relaxing. It had felt for a while as though I might never know what relaxation felt like again. It seemed the past fortnight had seen me only in different postures of stress and pain. More guests arrived. A couple of them looked at me as if I was someone who shouldn’t really be there, but nobody said anything. I wouldn’t say anything to a man who had a foot-long scar on his face, either.
I decided to have a look at the pictures and get home to bed before a real crowd formed. I didn’t want to risk being jostled. Enough people had arrived and were milling in what was quite a small space to have me sweating up already. I decided I would get out of the city as soon as I had mended sufficiently. I needed some time off, time to mend properly, and try to deal with the upset of losing Melanie. A quiet coastline and a rented caravan. Me and Mengele and a bottle of vodka. A bit of fishing. A lot of sleep.
All of the photographs were in matt black and white. Some of them had been manipulated in the darkroom to give the sky a more forbidding look. The physicality spilling out of the images was impressive, and the inherent threat of violence oppressive. The heat and the smoke and the noise of the throng around me was already getting to be too much. I thrashed about, trying to see Neville in order to say goodbye, but he was lost among such numbers.
I shambled through the crowd on my crutches, towards the exit, and found myself having to take a detour past another wall decked with pictures. I said no as politely as I could to a woman with a wine bottle, and twisted violently aside when it looked as though she was determined to freshen my glass anyway.
That put me just an inch away from the photograph. In the foreground, a lone police helmet. In front of him, a dozen baying protestors in grungy clothing, all dreadlocks, beards and piercings. A girl was standing off to the side of the main pack, flipping the finger at the police. She wore a cropped top bearing the number 69. A bolt of silver gleamed in her navel. She wore torn hipsters and trainers. The noise and heat were suddenly sucked away down a long corridor that I doubted I’d be able to find my way out of for a long time.
‘Sarah,’ I said, as she disintegrated before my eyes. ‘Sarah, I found you.’
DO NOT RESUSCITATE
There’s a monster in St Josephine’s hospital, Paddington, by all accounts. I haven’t been back there since Sarah’s birth, but I know Jen, one of the midwives. Her ex, Graham, and I sometimes took in a football match at Craven Cottage back when Fulham were flailing around the third division and the crowd could be counted in the tens. But what can you do? It’s a mate. It’s football. After a fashion. You go to be nice, to fit in. You go because to not go leads you back to a corner of a room where things that ought to remain still continue to flex and twitch like a spider sensing dinner. So we’d watch Fulham get tonked by Torquay or Mansfield or Northampton or whatever small fish was finning around the depths of the English football league back then, and at full time we’d have a pint or two at the Golden Lion on the Fulham High Street before heading back to their pad in Barnes for a proper homemade curry that Jen and my wife – my girlfriend at the time – Rebecca, would have been crafting all afternoon while they drank cava and listened to 80s music. I quite miss that. The curry, I mean. Not the football.
After Jen and Graham split up – this would have been back in the early Noughties (he wanted children, she didn’t) – she fell into the rabbit hole of work and didn’t resurface for what felt like years. Friends took her out for drinks and dinner, but she found it difficult to make connections that had come so easily previously. She felt like a potential source of disappointment to everyone she met. Nobody matched up to Graham, with whom she’d felt a special, rare compatibility shattered only because of their differing bloodline desires. Our friendship kind of petered out after that, partly because they were in Barnes – diametrically opposite to our first London flat in Wood Green – but more importantly because Becks and I were on the cusp of committing to each other, an acknowledgment that this was really it and we didn’t want to feel jinxed in any way.
I met Jen on a cold February afternoon. Wind was thrusting up Praed Street like a fist, making all bow before it. I was sitting in a coffee shop watching these comma men and women and wondering how many of them were monsters, or had been monstrous. Or were capable of monstrosity. The things we’d do if we could get away with it. What divides us? What prevents those who merely entertain the dark thoughts from those who make them concrete? Are we any less monstrous for having those thoughts in the first place? I touched the scar on my cheek, only just healing properly two months on, and tried to not think about the monster who had delivered it. I really needed a break from the monsters.
* * *
Jen came in like a piece of that wind torn off at the edge, her hand fretting at her hair though it was so short it remained unspoilt by the weather. She was wearing long brown suede boots over faded jeans, a white blouse and a short tan leather jacket. I kissed her cheek and squeezed her shoulder. She looked nice. The short hair and the high cheekbones were as I remembered. She seemed hunted, though that might just have been the gale, or my imagination. Everyone I meet doing this job seems to wear a version of that look. The lost, the desperate, the last-gaspers. I’m sure I wear it myself half the time. I thought to myself, she’s in her early forties now. The clock was ticking and she didn’t even hear it. She had put it under the pillow. She had turned it to face the wall.
‘Sounds like a police matter,’ I managed to say, through my tightening throat, over my squirming guts, once she’d given me the gist of it. ‘I can give you the number of a pukka guy at New Scotland Yard. Name of Ian Mawker. I say “pukka”, but he has all the charm of an undescended testicle. He’s tenacious though, and he’ll look into it.’
‘I’m asking you, Joel,’ she said, and I heard the fracture in her voice. It was the sound of someone who has been tightrope-walking over an abyss for too long. ‘It’s just a suspicion of mine and I haven’t mentioned it to anybody at work yet. I can’t go to the police.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because–’ She checked in her bag for something that was not there. She closed her eyes and worms of moisture glistened at the join. Agony trembled just beneath the skin. ‘Because I’m involved with the guy I think is doing this.’
Doing this. You really don’t want to know. Suffice to say there every department of a hospital that poses the risk of death: A&E, for example. Oncology. Neonatal. In a way that, say, ophthalmology doesn’t. These substations are where the bodies – or the parts of bodies – end up prior to their delivery to the morgue, or the incinerator. Jen was involved with a guy called Renfrew who was a hospital porter. Part of his job description involved the transferral of dead matter – bodies, limbs, stillbirths, what-have-you – from ward to morgue or incinerator depending on the what and the why. Only, this matter was not arriving, or not all of it was. He was saving titbits and taking them home with him, or so Jen believed.
‘You see him do this?’ I asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘But in the delivery rooms things were going missing. Placentae. Blood bags. A child, almost, once.’
‘A child?’
‘Yes. You might have read about it in the news. Gael Miller. The security doors failed. Power loss. Nobody knows how or why, but while the power was out – there wa
sn’t that big a panic in the delivery rooms because it wasn’t hugely busy and we had back up – someone took a baby. But whoever did it must have been disturbed, because Gael was found an hour later in the rubbish bin of the gents toilets.’
‘It wasn’t just an opportunist thing? A freak off the street?’
‘No. I mean yes, it was opportunist. But it wasn’t an outsider. How much of a coincidence would it be for a chancer to be lurking around the doors at the exact time the power knocked off?’
‘It could have been set up. Someone could have seen to it that the power was cut.’
‘No. There was no sabotage involved. It was a genuine failure. But someone took advantage of it. Someone waiting for the chance.’
‘Your man.’
‘I think so.’
‘So the police must have been involved there.’
‘Yes, but they didn’t make any arrests. Like you, they reckoned it was an opportunist and made most of their enquiries outside of the hospital.’
‘What about the other departments? Paediatrics? A&E? Gynaecology? Anything going on there?’
‘Stuff is vanishing all over the place.’
‘Stuff. What kind of stuff, exactly?’
She sighed, closed her eyes, steepled her fingers and rested her forehead against them. ‘Little pieces of children,’ she said. I stared at her. My coffee had gone cold. Hers too. I wanted something much stronger. I thought about what I was going to ask her for quite a while, weighing up the tact of it, wondering if it was too upsetting. And then I went ahead and asked her anyway.
Dust and Desire Page 27