‘According to Bruno, my Parkinson’s is a bonus. It creates an assumption of sincerity.’
‘Don’t talk like that,’ she says, crossly. ‘You’re the most sincere man I’ve ever known.’
‘It was a joke.’
‘Well, it’s not funny. This Bruno sounds cynical and sarcastic. I don’t know whether I like him.’
‘He can be very charming. You’ll see.’
She’s not convinced. I change the subject. ‘So how was your trip?’
‘Busy.’
She begins telling me about how her company is negotiating to buy a string of radio stations in Italy on behalf of a company in Germany. There must be something interesting about this but I turn off well before she reaches that point. After nine months, I still can’t remember the names of her colleagues or her boss. Worse still, I can never imagine remembering them.
The car pulls into a parking space outside a house in Wellow. I decide to put on my shoes.
‘I phoned Mrs Logan and told her we’d be late,’ Julianne says.
‘How did she sound?’
‘Same as ever.’
‘I’m sure she thinks we’re the worst parents in the world. You’re an uber-career woman and I’m a… I’m a…’
‘A man?’
‘That’ll do it.’
We both laugh.
Mrs Logan looks after Emma, our three year old, on Tuesdays and Fridays. Now that I’m lecturing at the university we need a full-time nanny. I’m interviewing on Monday.
Emma charges to the door and wraps her arms around my leg. Mrs Logan is in the hallway. Her XL T-shirt hangs straight from her breasts covering a bump of uncertainty. I can never work out if she’s pregnant or fat so I keep my mouth shut.
‘I’m sorry we’re late,’ I explain. ‘An emergency. It won’t happen again.’
She takes Emma’s coat from a hook and thrusts her bag into my arms. The silent treatment is pretty normal. I lift Emma onto my hip. She’s clutching a crayon drawing- a scribble of lines and blotches.
‘For you, Daddy.’
‘It’s wonderful. What is it?’
‘A drawing.’
‘I know that. What is it a drawing of?’
‘It’s just a drawing.’
She has her mother’s ability to state the obvious and make me look foolish.
Julianne takes her from me, giving her a cuddle. ‘You’ve grown in four days.’
‘I’m three.’
‘Indeed you are.’
‘Charlie?’
‘She’s at home, sweetheart.’
Charlie is our eldest. She’s twelve going on twenty-one.
Julianne straps Emma in her car seat and I put on her favourite CD, which features four middle-aged Australian men in Teletubbie-coloured tops. She babbles from the back seat, pulling off her socks because she likes to go native.
I guess we’ve all gone a little native since we moved out of London. It was Julianne’s idea. She said it would be less stressful for me, which is true. Cheaper houses. Good schools. More room for the girls. The usual arguments.
Our friends thought we were crazy. Somerset? You can’t be serious. It’s full of Aga louts and the green wellie brigade who go to Pony Club meetings and drive four-by-fours towing heated horse floats.
Charlie didn’t want to leave her friends but came round when she saw the possibility of owning a horse, which is still under negotiation. So now we’re living here, in the wilds of the West Country, being treated like blow-ins by locals who will never entirely trust us until four generations of O’Loughlins are buried in the village churchyard.
The cottage is lit up like a uni dormitory. Charlie is yet to equate her desire to save the planet with turning off the lights when she leaves a room. Now she’s standing at the front gate with her hands on hips.
‘I saw Dad on TV. Just now… on the news.’
‘You never watch the news,’ says Julianne.
‘Sometimes I do. A woman jumped off a bridge.’
‘Your father doesn’t want to be reminded…’
I lift Emma from the car. She immediately wraps her arms around my neck like a koala clinging to a tree.
Charlie continues telling Julianne about the news report. Why are children so fascinated by death? Dead birds. Dead animals. Dead insects.
‘How was school?’ I ask, trying to change the subject.
‘Good.’
‘Learn anything?’
Charlie rolls her eyes. I have asked her this same question every afternoon of every school day since she started kindergarten. She gave up answering long ago.
The house is suddenly filled with noise and industry. Julianne starts dinner while I bath Emma and spend ten minutes looking for her pyjamas while she runs naked in and out of Charlie’s room.
I call downstairs, ‘I can’t find Emma’s pyjamas.’
‘In her top drawer.’
‘I looked.’
‘Under her pillow.’
‘No.’
I know what’s going to happen. Julianne will come all the way upstairs and discover the pyjamas sitting right in front of me. It’s called ‘domestic blindness’. She yells to Charlie. ‘Help your father find Emma’s pyjamas.’
Emma wants a bedtime story. I have to make one up involving a princess, a fairy and a talking donkey. That’s what happens when you give a three-year-old creative control. I kiss her goodnight and leave her door partly open.
Supper. A glass of wine. I do the dishes. Julianne falls asleep on the sofa and apologises dreamily as I coax her upstairs and run her a bath.
These are our best nights, when we haven’t seen one another for a few days; touching, brushing against each other, almost unable to wait until Charlie is in bed.
‘Do you know why she jumped?’ asks Julianne, slipping into the bath. I sit on the edge of the tub, trying to keep contact with her eyes. My gaze wants to drift lower to where her nipples are poking through the bubbles.
‘She wouldn’t talk to me.’
‘She must have been very sad.’
‘Yes, she must have been.’
3
Midnight. It is raining again. Water gurgles in the downpipes outside our bedroom window, sliding down the hill into a stream that has become a river and covered the causeway and stone bridge.
I used to love being awake when my girls were sleeping. It made me feel like a guardian, watching over them, keeping them safe. Tonight is different. Every time I shut my eyes I see images of a tumbling body and the ground opens up beneath me.
Julianne wakes once and slides her hand across the sheets and onto my chest, as if trying to still my heart.
‘It’s all right,’ she whispers. ‘You’re here with me.’
Her eyes haven’t opened. Her hand slides away.
At six in the morning I take a small white pill. My leg is twitching like a dog in the midst of a dream, chasing rabbits in its sleep. Slowly it becomes still. In Parkinson’s parlance, I am now ‘on’. The medication has kicked in.
It is four years since my left hand gave me the message. It wasn’t written down, or typed or printed on fancy paper. It was an unconscious, random flicker of my fingers, a twitch, a ghost movement, a shadow made real. Unknown to me then, working in secret, my brain had begun divorcing my mind. It has been a long drawn-out separation with no legal argument over division of assets- who gets the CD collection and Aunt Grace’s antique sideboard?
The divorce began with my left hand and spread to my arm and my leg and my head. Now it feels as if my body is being owned and operated by someone else who looks like me only less familiar.
When I look at old home movies I can see the changes even two years before the diagnosis. I’m on the sidelines, watching Charlie play football. My shoulders are canted forwards, as though I’m braced against a cold wind. Is it the beginning of a stoop?
I have been through the five stages of grief and mourning. I have denied it, ranted at the unfairness, made pacts with Go
d, crawled into a dark hole and finally accepted my fate. I have a progressive, degenerative neurological disorder. I will not use the word incurable. There is a cure. They just haven’t found it yet. In the meantime, the divorce continues.
I wish I could tell you that I’ve come to terms with it now; that I’m happier than ever before; that I have embraced life, made new friends and become spiritual and fulfilled. I wish.
We have a falling-down cottage, a cat, a duck and two hamsters, Bill and Ben, who may in fact be girls. (The pet shop owner didn’t seem exactly sure.)
‘It’s important,’ I told him.
‘Why?’
‘I have enough women in my house.’
According to our neighbour, Mrs Nutall (if ever a name suited…) we also have a resident ghost, a past occupant who apparently fell down the stairs after hearing her husband had died in the Great War.
I’m always amazed by that term: The Great War. What was so great about it? Eight million soldiers died and a similar number of civilians. It’s like the Great Depression. Can’t we call it something else?
We live in a village called Wellow, five and a half miles from Bath Spa. It’s one of those quaint, postcard-sized clusters of buildings, which barely seem big enough to hold their own history. The village pub, the Fox amp; Badger, is two hundred years old and has a resident dwarf. How rustic is that?
We no longer have learner drivers reversing into our drive or dogs crapping on the footpath or car alarms blaring in the street. We have neighbours now. In London we had them too but pretended they didn’t exist. Here they drop by to borrow garden tools and cups of flour. They even share their political opinions, which is a total anathema to anyone living in London unless you’re a cab driver or a politician.
I don’t know what I expected of Somerset but this will do. And if I sound sentimental, please forgive me. Mr Parkinson is to blame. Some people think sentimentality is an unearned emotion. Not mine. I pay for it every day.
The rain has eased to a drizzle. The world is wet enough. Holding a jacket over my head I open the back gate and head up the footpath. Mrs Nutall is unblocking a drain in her garden. She’s wearing her hair in curlers and her feet in Wellingtons.
‘Good morning,’ I say.
‘Drop dead.’
‘Rain might be clearing.’
‘Fuck off and die.’
According to Hector, the publican at the Fox amp; Badger, Mrs Nutall has nothing against me personally. Apparently, a previous owner of our cottage promised to marry her but ran off instead with the postmaster’s wife. That was forty-five years ago and Mrs Nutall hasn’t forgiven or forgotten. Whoever owns the cottage owns the blame.
Dodging the puddles, I follow the footpath to the village store, trying not to drip on the stacks of newspapers inside the door. Starting with the broadsheets, I flick through the pages, looking for a mention of what happened yesterday. There are photographs, but the story makes only a few paragraphs. Suicides make poor headlines because editors fear a contagion of copycats.
‘If you’re going to read ’em here I’ll bring you a comfy chair and a cup of tea,’ says Eric Vaile, the shopkeeper, peering up from a copy of the Sunday Mirror spread beneath his tattooed forearms.
‘I was just looking for something,’ I explain, apologetically.
‘Your wallet, perhaps.’
Eric looks like he should be running a dockside pub rather than a village shop. His wife Gina, a nervous woman who flinches whenever Eric moves too suddenly, emerges from the storeroom. She’s carrying a tray of soft drinks, almost buckling under the weight. Eric steps back to let her pass before planting his elbows on the counter again.
‘Saw you on the TV,’ he grunts. ‘Could’ve told you she was gonna jump. I could see it coming.’
I don’t answer. It won’t make any difference. He’s not going to stop.
‘Tell me this, eh? If people are going to top themselves, why don’t they have the decency to do it somewhere private, instead of blocking traffic and costing taxpayers money?’
‘She was obviously very troubled,’ I mumble.
‘Gutless, you mean.’
‘It takes a lot of courage to jump off a bridge.’
‘Courage,’ he scoffs.
I glance at Gina. ‘And it takes even more courage to ask for help.’
She looks away.
Mid morning I call Bristol Police Headquarters and ask for Sergeant Abernathy. The rain has finally stopped. I can see a patch of blue above the tree-line and the faint traces of a rainbow.
Gravel and phlegm down the phone: ‘What do you want, Professor?’
‘I apologise for yesterday- leaving so suddenly. I wasn’t feeling well.’
‘Must be catching.’
Abernathy doesn’t like me. He thinks I’m unprofessional or inept. I’ve met coppers like him before- warrior types who think they’re separate from normal society, above it.
‘We need a statement,’ he says. ‘There’ll be an inquest.’
‘You’ve identified her?’
‘Not yet.’
There’s a pause. My silence irritates him.
‘In case it escaped your attention, Professor, she wasn’t wearing any clothes, which means she wasn’t carrying any identification.’
‘Of course. I understand. It’s just-.’
‘What?’
‘I thought somebody would have reported her missing by now. She was so well groomed: her hair, her eyebrows, her bikini-line; her fingernails were manicured. She spent time and money on herself. She’s likely to have friends, a job, people who care about her.’
Abernathy must be taking notes. I can hear him scribbling. ‘What else can you tell me?’
‘She had a Caesarean scar, which means children. Given her age, they’re probably school age by now. Primary or secondary.’
‘Did she say anything to you?’
‘She was talking to someone on a mobile phone- pleading with them.’
‘Pleading for what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And that’s all she said?’
‘She said I wouldn’t understand.’
‘Well, she got that much right.’
This case annoys Abernathy because it isn’t straightforward. Until he has a name, he can’t gather the required statements and hand it over to the coroner.
‘When do you want me to come in?’
‘Today.’
‘Can’t it wait?’
‘If I’m working Saturday, so can you.’
Avon and Somerset Police Headquarters is in Portishead on the Severn Estuary, nine miles west of Bristol. The architects and planners were perhaps labouring under the misapprehension that if they built a police headquarters a long way from the crime-ridden pockets of inner-city Bristol, the perpetrators might relocate and join them. If we build it- they will come.
The skies have cleared, but the fields are still flooded and fence posts stick out of the brackish water like the masts of sunken ships. On the outskirts of Saltford, on the Bath Road, I see a dozen cows huddling on an island of grass surrounded by water. A broken bale of hay is scattered beneath their hooves.
Elsewhere waves of water, mud and debris are trapped against fences, trees and bridges. Thousands of farm animals have drowned and machinery lies abandoned on low ground, caked in mud like tarnished bronze sculptures.
Abernathy has a civilian secretary, a small grey woman whose clothes are more colourful than her personality. She rises grudgingly from her chair and ushers me into his office.
The sergeant, a large, freckled man, is seated at a desk. His sleeves are buttoned down and starched resolutely with a sharp crease running from his wrists to his shoulders.
He speaks in a low rumble. ‘I take it you can write your own statement.’ A foolscap pad is pushed towards me.
I glance down at his desk and notice a dozen manila folders and bundles of photographs. It’s remarkable how much paperwork has been generated in such a short s
pace of time. One of the files is marked ‘Post Mortem’.
‘Do you mind if I take a look?’
Abernathy glances at me like I’m a nosebleed and slides it over.
AVON amp; SOMERSET CORONER
Post-Mortem Report No: DX-56 312
Date and time of death: 28/09/2007. 1707 hours.
The body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished Caucasian female. The irises are brown. The corneas are clear. The pupils are fixed and dilated.
The body is cool to the touch and there is posterior lividity and partial rigidity. There are no tattoos, deformities or amputations. The victim has a linear 5” surgical scar on her abdomen at the bikini line, indicating a prior Caesarean section.
Her right and left earlobes are pierced. Her hair is approximately sixteen inches in length, brown, with a wave. Her teeth are natural and in good condition. Her fingernails are short, neatly rounded with polish present. Pink polish is also present on her toenails.
The abdomen and back show evidence of significant soft tissue abrasions and heavy bruising caused by blunt force trauma. These markings are consistent with an impact such as a fall.
The external and internal genitalia show no evidence of sexual assault or penetration.
The facts have a stark cruelty about them. A human being with a lifetime of experiences is labelled like a piece of furniture in a catalogue. The pathologist has weighed her organs, examined her stomach contents, taken tissue samples and tested her blood. There is no privacy in death.
‘What about the toxicology report?’ I ask.
‘It won’t be ready until Monday,’ he says. ‘You thinking drugs?’
‘It’s possible.’
Abernathy is on the way to saying something and changes his mind. He takes a satellite map from a cardboard tube and unrolls it across his desk. Clifton Suspension Bridge is at the centre, flattened of its perspective until it appears to be lying on top of the water instead of seventy-five metres above it.
‘This is Leigh Woods,’ he says, pointing to an expanse of dark green on the western side of Avon Gorge. ‘At 13.40 on Friday afternoon a man walking his dog on the Ashton Nature Reserve saw a near-naked woman in a yellow raincoat. When he approached her, the woman ran away. She was talking on a mobile and he thought it might be some sort of TV stunt.
Shatter jo-3 Page 3