by Marc Scott
Chapter Two
It is often said, yet never proven, that when a man is drowning, his whole life flashes before him – images of the path he chose to follow and the world he is about to leave behind.
Dean Jarvis was drowning, he was sinking fast in a turbulent sea of his own self-pity. He would not have liked most of the scenes that were playing out before his eyes, but whether he would have changed any of them or not would be highly debatable. He had spent the best part of his sixty-four years on this earth caring for no one other than himself. And now, as he approached an age where most men would be looking forward to a happy retirement, he had become a bitter and twisted old man.
He looked down at the sodden streets from the window of the warm hospital room, watching intently as the torrential downpour caused havoc below. The heavy rains and strong winds had been ceaseless that night, bringing chaos to the streets of South London. The weather forecasters had, not for the first time, underestimated the severity of the oncoming storm, leaving many people stranded in their homes. The screaming sirens of ambulances had been coming and going for at least four hours. The paramedics would certainly be earning their crust on this awful night.
Through the quagmire below Dean could make out the figures of two nurses braving the appalling conditions to visit the mini-mart opposite. They were armed with nothing more than a cheap-looking umbrella. Their makeshift shield lasted less than ten seconds before a strong gust of wind rendered it useless, leaving them to face the elements unprotected.
‘She always wanted to be a nurse, you know, Poppy, she always wanted to be a nurse,’ Dean said, his comment aimed at a motionless figure in the bed behind him. ‘She was always dressing up her bloody dolls with bandages and sticky plasters when she was little, the silly mare,’ he added.
Looking down at his wristwatch, he adjusted the fake alligator skin strap that was beginning to itch away at his skin. Checking the time, he peered up at the large silver clock on the wall to confirm that it was nearly twenty past eleven. Dean sighed as he peered through the misting windows to see if the nurses had completed their mission. ‘I have been coming here months now, bloody months!’ he said. The man snuggled up in the warm bedsheets said nothing. ‘Got better bloody things to do than be here every night,’ Dean added, but his words once again seemed to fall on deaf ears.
The downpour continued outside. Small streams were forming at both sides of the kerb. The pavements were now in danger of flooding. There was no respite. These atrocious conditions seemed, if anything, to be getting worse. Catching a glimpse of himself in the glass of the window, Dean’s image portrayed the stark reality of forty years of hard drinking. His wayward lifestyle had not been kind to his features. The dark shadows under his eyes told their own story. His hair had turned a silvery shade of grey and his eyesight was fading. He had long lost the battle with his ageing years. He sighed again as his reflection became clearer. ‘I get so bloody tired these days,’ he said. ‘So bloody tired.’
Dean had spent so much time in this hospital room it had become like a second home to him. This comfortable setting, however, was a vast improvement on his registered address. Time stood still for him within the confines of these four bright white walls, as if he somehow belonged there. He glanced down at the figure wrapped up in the fresh bedsheets. He looked so peaceful. Despite the array of tubes and brightly coloured machines surrounding him, he looked as if he didn’t have a care in the world. There were no pictures on his bedside cabinet, no token bowl of decaying fruit by his side. All he had for company was the constant bleeping noise of a small white monitor to his side and of course the man that stood over him. Dean knew the limited number of features in this room so well he could have made his way around blindfolded. But he had to be here, every day, every night, hoping that the silent figure in the bed would wake up. He needed to speak to him, there were so many important things he needed to tell him before it was too late.
The drowning man looked back up at the clock on the wall, as if the minute or so that had passed would have made a difference. It didn’t of course. He sighed again and continued to share his woes. ‘I tried to contact her, you know, Poppy, I tried to contact her.’ His words were still lost on the statue-like figure in the bed, but he carried on regardless. ‘I got her mobile number from that black guy in the probation office. He said it would be a good idea for me to make contact, you know, to support her, after everything that happened. He was a nice fella, I liked him.’ Dean looked down at his watch again. He started to scratch away at his itching wrist. ‘I must have tried her a hundred times or more, phone calls, texts, you know, at least a hundred times.’ His well-practised voice of self-pity kicked back into action. ‘Never wanted to speak to me, blocked my number in the end. Don’t suppose I can blame her, left it too long really.’ He wasn’t finished, despite the lack of an audience. ‘The black fella says she was doing OK for herself, got off the drugs and everything while she was inside. Learned to drive as well, on some bloody rehab scheme they have. Can’t imagine my little Poppy driving, all grown up, you know, driving her own car.’
A sudden burst of thunder roared above the rooftops causing Dean to turn his attention back down to the mayhem below. There were no pedestrians to be seen now and the flow of traffic was sparse. ‘I tried to see her, when she was inside. I wrote a couple of times, you know, when she first went in there. But she wouldn’t send me a visitor pass. Couldn’t do anything without that! I was so pissed off with that newspaper, you know, all that shit they wrote about her. They made her out to be some sort of devil, like she was possessed or something. I went there, to the Gazette, told them, I did, told them I would burn their fucking place down if they carried on writing all those bad things about her.’
It was not unusual to hear Dean use bad language, it was however unusual to hear him talking with such passion about his troubled daughter. They were strong words indeed from the man whose waterfall of self-despair was slowly filling up around him. But if Poppy Jarvis was here now she would not entertain this show of belated remorse, she would tell it as it is, that he was talking bullshit! She would certainly not shy away from letting her estranged father know exactly what she thought of him.
It is strange how Dean’s memory could be so selective, now that he was cast adrift, destined to end up at the bottom of his ocean of fake tears. He was desperate to find some consolation on this dark and dismal journey. Maybe that man in the bed could help him make sense of his life, maybe he would understand that it wasn’t all his fault, despite what Poppy might think. Dean was still hoping for salvation, hoping that someone would throw him a life jacket to help him through these stormy waters.
The lights below were becoming dimmer by the minute. The atrocious weather conditions were winning the battle of the streets below. Dean felt an unusual chill run through his body, almost as if an ice cube had found its way into his veins. He continued with his tales of woe. ‘I wish I had never found out about the boy,’ he said. ‘I should never have typed her bloody name into the computer. I should have left the past in the past. Damn that bloody Facebook thing! I would have been better off not knowing.’ The man in the bed would probably agree with him on that point, feeling that Dean had already tormented enough lives over the past two decades. The drowning man would, however, never get to play out a scene with the boy he was talking about. He didn’t know it that time, but it was too late for that now, far too late. His ramblings took him back to the child he did manage to spend time with, some would say quality time, others, who knew Dean, would say time of convenience. ‘No, it wasn’t a nurse, it was a vet, Poppy always wanted to be a vet,’ he said.
His comment had no impact whatsoever on the man wrapped up in the bed. He was past caring. As another crack of thunder rumbled overhead, Dean’s thoughts turned to a happier time in his life. For some reason it was a place he frequently visited in his head, it was a place where he could escape the gritty sewer of his life
, a place where he felt safe from the depths of the dark and gloomy sea of his destiny. Maybe his curiosity had finally got the better of him that day he had typed her name in to the search engine on the computer at the internet café. His selective memory would take him back more than twenty years, to a time when he had a chance to feel more alive than he had felt at any other time in his life. ‘She was beautiful, you know, she was so perfect. The most beautiful creature I ever saw in my life. I knew from the first time I saw her that I loved her.’
It would be a testament to a doting father to think that Dean might be thinking of his daughter at this time, but Poppy was far from his thoughts. Ask Dean Jarvis to remember when his daughter’s birthday was or the date his wife left him, he would probably struggle to find an answer. But he could always remember that day when he first met Krista. He could never forget the moment no matter how close he was to his final calling.
It was the middle of April. It was warm, very warm. It was unusually humid for that month. He didn’t want to wear a tie when he went to the Imediacom offices in Neasden, but he knew that the company’s owner, George Penning, was best friends with his own boss. He thought it best not to give anyone a chance to bad-mouth him. Reluctantly, he buttoned up his shirt and tied an angry knot in his tie, cursing the sweltering heat as he left his vehicle in the car park. Maria, the pretty young receptionist, did not like him, in fact she really disliked him. Not just for his brash manner and his sexist remarks, but she also cared little for the cheap aftershave he wore. So they were at it again, him and the feisty receptionist, arguing about the collection of sample alarm systems he was expecting to pick up that day. He was shouting, as was Dean’s way. She was more controlled, but rapidly losing her composure. Halfway through this heated encounter he felt the presence of another person standing behind him. He turned to find the petite figure of a woman, a well-dressed blonde woman holding a pale blue folder. She was staring up at him, a look of contempt etched on her face. He wanted to speak, to carry on his rant, but before he could open his mouth he was brought crashing down to earth by the tiny creature in front of him.
‘You need to calm down,’ the woman said, in a broken kind of English that he immediately found enchanting. ‘You need to calm down or I will ask security to escort you from the building.’
His mouth became dry. He struggled to speak for a few seconds before he retaliated. ‘Do you know who I am?’ he asked. ‘Do you know who you are talking to?’
The fresh-faced woman below his line of vision seemed unperturbed. ‘I neither know, nor care, who you are. If you can’t control your temper with the staff you will be thrown out of here, is that clear?’
Dean wanted to do so many things at that point. He wanted to throw his paperwork across the reception area and storm out, he wanted to shout back, much louder than this tiny girl could ever shout, but when he looked deeply into her smouldering eyes, all that Dean wanted to do was to grab her tiny frame and kiss her soft lips.
He did his best to fight his urges and found some words, hoping to get his point across. ‘These samples were ordered three days ago, they should be ready for me. You shouldn’t keep me waiting.’ The expression on the woman’s face remained unchanged as he continued his rant. ‘My company spend a lot of money with you lot, we should take priority.’
As she looked upwards, a small smile cracked across her face as she addressed the unruly visitor. ‘Three things,’ she said. There were those beautiful tones again, Dean thought. ‘Three things you need to know.’ He wanted to respond at that moment, but his brain just stopped working. ‘One,’ she said, ‘you don’t own your company, you are just one of their salesmen and a very rude one at that.’ His facial expression began to change to one of surprise. ‘Two,’ she continued, ‘if you had phoned ahead and spoken to the product department, you would have found your sample units waiting for you. You didn’t call, because if you had, you would have spoken to me and I certainly would have remembered speaking to someone as ill-mannered and pig-ignorant as yourself.’
Maria released a small laugh from behind the reception desk, which took Dean’s attention away from the beautiful vision in front of him, but not for long. He was soon back staring into her eyes, those piercing spheres of enchantment, full of danger, like a burning wildfire. ‘And three,’ she said, ‘brown shoes with a grey suit! Do you not look in the mirror before you set off for work in the morning?’ The receptionist could not contain herself anymore and let out a huge roar of laughter.
He was angry now. His face had started to turn red, both through embarrassment and rage. ‘And who the hell do you think you are?’ he asked.
The beautiful creature brushed back her silky blonde shoulder-length hair before calmly pointing at her name tag. ‘I am Krista, Krista Nylund, the new head of production here.’ With that she turned and walked slowly along the corridor, moving gently away, her hips swaying, her head held high. She had serenity in her stride, as if a hundred ancient slaves were throwing flowers in her path as she was leaving.
Dean was mesmerised, rooted to the spot as if the sight of her had turned him to stone. He hardly heard Maria’s voice calling out to him, ‘The samples are here now, Mr Jarvis, your samples are here.’
And that’s where it began, the fantasy, on that hot spring day in 1995. He would remember that moment forever. But it was a moment he should have taken back to his car and thrown out of the window on his way home. It was a meeting of two people that should never have been, it was a destiny that would be the start of a journey where the tides of the sea that surrounded his existence would start to rise
* * *
The drowning man looked down from the hospital window. He could see that the lights in the mini-mart windows had been turned off now. Only the craziest of drivers were brave enough to run the gauntlet of the stream running through the soaking streets below. His temporary reflection on a better time in his life had been short-lived, but the wry smile on his ageing face told its own story. He may be sinking fast, but he knew that he could always go back to that place in his mind, to that sanctuary, to that fantasy.
He felt a chill run through his bones again as he turned to check on the figure behind him. He wasn’t sure what he expected to see, the bedridden man was unlikely to be performing cartwheels. Suddenly, a thought crossed his mind, a dark thought. Maybe it was that thought that had sent that chill down his spine. ‘No! It wasn’t a vet,’ he said. ‘I knew that Poppy would never have been a vet, not after what she did to poor Snowball. Why would a little girl do that to a tiny rabbit?’
Chapter Three
Joseph Manning had, in layman’s terms, been around the block more than a few times with his delinquent clientele. Nothing they ever told him seemed to shock him these days. But there was something he found very unsettling about Poppy Jarvis. He was never quite sure what it was, but it gave him constant cause for concern. Despite his many years of dealing with convicted criminals from all walks of life, this had been the first time he genuinely felt uncomfortable during his one-on-one sessions.
A tall and softly spoken black gentleman in his late fifties, Manning had a real passion for fine dining, a fact that was borne out by his portly figure. He wore smart designer suits and spoke with an educated and authoritative voice, a gift he acquired from his days at Oxford University. Some people said he more resembled a banker or a high-flying accountant than a probation officer.
Manning enjoyed his role within the court service though and had built up a real rapport with most of his visitors. In the seven years he had spent working at the court in South London, he had been physically assaulted just once. Even then the larger-than-life official made valid excuses for his assailant and refused to have him prosecuted. He was a firm believer that every person had the chance to redeem themselves, his statistics certainly confirmed that. During his lengthy career in this sphere of work he had successfully steered many habitual offenders onto a path leading
to a stable and crime-free life.
Manning preferred his visitors to call him ‘Joe’. He felt it made things easier for them to discuss their day-to-day issues, as if they were talking to an uncle or a friend. The only negative observation that any of his clientele ever made was about his overbearing references to the Bible. He really did take his religious beliefs to the extreme sometimes.
Poppy treated these meetings as a real chore, an hour stolen from her life each week, as part of the deal that saw her gain an early release from prison. She would consciously look up at the large clock on the wall each time she entered his office, mentally counting down the minutes until her ordeal was over. She didn’t really feel uneasy in Manning’s presence but found herself very much ‘going through the motions’ during their sessions. Poppy would avoid eye contact with her would-be mentor during these arduos meetings and would only speak when she had to. The less she said, the better she would feel when each dreaded hour was over.
She often found these sessions confusing, one minute, Manning would be discussing her previous criminal actions, the next he would be reciting quotations from the bible. She found this extremely irritating to say the least. She often referred to him as ‘The Reverend Joe’, feeling that he would be better suited to reading a sermon in the local church. In truth, she was probably right. He would not have looked out of place at the head of a large gospel choir, spreading his ideas of righteousness to a colourful, all-singing, all-dancing congregation.
The clock indicated it was three minutes past ten when the session began. ‘Good morning, Poppy, how has the week been for you?’ Manning asked, the same introduction he had greeted her with for the past thirty-odd weeks.
‘Not too bad,’ she replied, probably the same response she had given over that time. Small talk over with, time for him to start prodding, Poppy thought.