The Water Clock

by The Water Clock

  The inevitable request for a picture, made a month after the accident, caused a wave of nausea and a hot spit of self-loathing for his trade. But he knew the pressures: news editors were tired of Laura’s fight for life and bored with the reality of a colourless and featureless coma. The story was changing from hope to tragedy and the lifeless picture exclusive was the next inexorable step. If he refused he knew the consequences: the super-telephoto lenses, the bribes to hospital staff, the invasion of his own privacy, the unpeeling of their lives. And, despite Laura’s deepening coma, he felt a bond with the hacks out in the cold. He had been there too, on Fleet Street, desperate for the story.

  When the picture of Laura finally appeared he was stupidly thankful that they had all chosen the most lifelike and appealing of the set he had provided. Laura’s parents, on the first of several flying visits from retirement in Umbria, asked for a copy: a request which strangely disturbed him – perhaps with its hint of family surrender – so that he sank his face into Laura’s pillow and cried for the first and only time at what the accident had done to him.

  The newspapers dropped the story relatively quickly after that. Laura had been written out of Clyde Circus with ease; her character, GP’s-nurse-turned-drug-addict Jane Corby, flew without notice to Australia in answer to a telegram from her long-lost father Bill. With each episode, postcards, read to the locals at the Palm Tree, told of suburban happiness with Bill’s family and lurid tales of romance on Bondi Beach. It was increasingly clear that Jane would not be returning home and that if she did few would remember what she had looked like when she left.

  Medical interest in the case was more enduring. The newly diagnosed condition of ‘locked-in syndrome’, or LIS, was attracting large private sector and government research funding. LIS had a brief but spectacular history. First diagnosed in a Cape Town road traffic victim in 1985 it had quickly become verified by a string of similar cases from around the world. A conference at Berkeley in 1992 had set down the basic criteria for clinical diagnosis: the trauma which triggered the condition had to be both physical and mental – a combination of severe physical shock and intense stress. The Cape Town road traffic victim had been trapped in the back of a burning minibus, unable to break the windows or brave the flames which had engulfed the engine. The clinical symptoms were simple: the patient became comatose physically while all basic bodily functions operated as normal. The crucial difference between LIS and other comas was a high level of brain activity, a symptom only traceable with modern equipment. The victims remained aware of their surroundings, in some degree, throughout the ‘coma’. The result was what Second World War submariners would have called ‘silent running’ – vital systems only, vigilance, but otherwise no signs of life.

  The number of cases was still small enough to secure Laura a kind of minor medical celebrity. Doctors came, professed themselves fascinated, made their examinations, took their readings, and left. Their professional objectivity led them to visit the illness rather than the patient, and they offered increasingly perfunctory sympathies for the victim. Dryden had negotiated anonymity through the British Medical Association and Laura appeared only as Case X – a device which protected her privacy but relegated her to the status of a forensic exhibit, pickled in a theoretical jar. The doctors who bothered to talk to Dryden rarely met his eye: in the thirty-four cases of LIS so far officially diagnosed only four had returned to normal life. All had said they recalled varying forms of consciousness while in the coma, ranging from almost total recall to a surreal remembrance of passing dreams.

  Dryden had his doubts. He suspected he’d lost Laura for ever on the night of the accident. The nurses at the Tower preserved a professional optimism. They threw open the windows on fine days, used Laura’s room to chat and work in, and encouraged him to surround her with stimulating reminders of the life her mind continued to reject.

  There was little doubt exactly what Laura’s mind was seeking to evade: the memory of the crash in Harrimere Drain. Three hours trapped in a car beneath the black water of the ditch. Three hours in which she could have had no choice but to blame him, as she struggled to understand why he wasn’t there, slowly retreating into a coma which denied the unacceptable reality that she had been abandoned to die. He had driven the car but escaped without her: as a bald statement of guilt it was as seemingly inescapable as the black water through which he had swum towards the moonlight.

  He wanted her back so that he could tell her what really happened. What he didn’t want was a recovery which was incomplete. She was the perfect patient as she was: he wanted her back as she had been. What he feared most was a lifetime spent caring for someone who hated him, or worse despised him secretly. He had to be able to tell Laura exactly what happened that night at Harrimere Drain – and know that she believed him.

  She had to know that it wasn’t his fear of water that stopped him going back.

  Scared of water, or just scared? Cowardice born in the single image of the criss-cross pattern of his skates in ice seen above his drowning ten-year-old head.

  Meanwhile the insurance company went on paying the bills – an unavoidable act of grace after Dryden had dropped the good name of the Mid-Anglian Mutual into every interview he had given in the months following Laura’s accident. One day they would resort to the small print on the policy and withdraw the funding, or at least take it to the courts. But he was prepared to move on to their savings, such as they were, and Laura’s parents had offered as well, willing to see their dreams of retirement modified, then abandoned. But the alternative was unspeakable – or at least unspoken. A steel bedstead in some tucked away ante-room in a hospital which would resent her consumption of scarce resources. Or worse, doctors willing to end it without pain.

  Dryden began his ritual visit.

  He threw the black greatcoat over a chair and unpacked the fresh food he had brought. Laura’s parents had owned a small Italian café in north London. He had used it as home when he was on the News. From the street it had looked like a sandwich bar but down a long dim corridor was a small dining room, lit by coloured Victorian skylights, with red-checked tablecloths on a dozen tables. Laura had introduced herself by spilling a plate of fresh tortellini into his lap. Clearing it up had been oddly erotic.

  Laura was short, compact, and olive brown. Her eyes were liquid brown and huge, her mouth was full – largely with gleaming teeth. Her hair was that particular coppery brown reserved for the Mediterranean. Laura projected a sense of humour, and a slight cast to one eye added a sexy nonconformism. She had the personality to fill a room and overwhelmed Dryden in the time it took to reorder the tortellini. In many ways she was his opposite: sensual, emotional, and a natural actor. She sprang from a family which had never failed to support her, which had never withheld its love, and she placed complete trust in those she loved as a result. Within a month Dryden had slipped effortlessly into this group assuming, unawares, a terrible responsibility.

  Her father, a miniature Italian bandit perpetually dressed in a white cook’s apron, specialized in home-made pasta, fresh figs, and fruity sparkling wine for a small, but plump, group of expatriates. Laura never weighed more than seven stone, harbouring a morbid fear of ending up like the tribe of aunts which ate at the café on Sundays: black widows who brushed both sides of the corridor as they struggled out after a light meal that had taken two hours to eat. Her four younger brothers were slim and fit and Laura’s teenage life as a surrogate mother, while her own worked in the café, had left her little room for indulgence. She concentrated, instead, on the smell and texture of food. She would sit and wait for others to start a meal, taking in the flavours by scent. She breathed food and broke it, like good bread, to enjoy the physical sensations of eating. She filled their flat with fragrances of food, crushing coffee beans and pounding peppercorns, getting Dryden to make a larder below the stairs with a mesh window to let the aromas of cheeses, vegetables and herbs permeate their home.

  So each day he brought
fresh food. He poured two glasses of wine, always the light Frascati she loved, a little ceremony of hope. He brought music too and set the timer on the CD player to bring the sound on for a few hours each day – at dusk, and in mid-morning when he knew that if Laura was listening she would want the company of Motown and Verdi.

  He always made himself look once at Laura’s face. A deathmask: quite unlike the real thing, but more compelling than a favourite snapshot. He always thought she looked frosted: dusted perhaps with a light covering of caster sugar, a perfect face set on the surface of a wedding cake.

  Then he turned the lights down and sat looking out into the gardens. Tonight the frost was already white on the trees. The effects of the alcohol were fading fast. It was late but the sounds of the hospital continued: a trolley squeaked past in the corridor, somewhere teacups clinked, and a nurse’s sensible shoes tapped past on the lino outside the door. In the room above Roy Barnett was sleeping off his beer while his heart tip-tapped to an irregular beat.

  Dryden’s routine started with reading out the cards, the letters, or sometimes just a newspaper. The doctors said from the start that he should talk to Laura. At first he had taken her hand and constructed animated one-way conversations. He’d almost believed them himself in those first weeks, desperately misunderstanding every facial tick as a subtle appeal to understanding. But with time his speeches had become soliloquies, delivered with no real conviction that they were ever heard.

  But he never lied. He told her often that he had not deserted her that night. That he had been powerless to help. But he feared she couldn’t hear, and if she couldn’t hear then she must still believe he had put his life before hers. That was the thought which brought him back each night to talk to her. The first sentence was always awkward: like the opening line of a bad play delivered to a half-empty theatre. Stagy, inappropriate, and inevitably feeble. Before delivering it he allowed himself a single cigarette – the only one of the day. Greek, acrid, and cinder hot. He projected the smoke out now into the still air of the room for Laura to smell.

  ‘And I thought it was going to be a Tesco trolley – shows how wrong I can be.’

  He glanced at the bed. The coppery hair was lifeless and artificial. Laura’s breathing whistled slightly like a cat’s.

  ‘A great story – at last. They’d even be interested in this one on the News. The body of a man found dumped in the boot of a car and then run into the river. Neck broken – snapped – his head nearly severed. The river freezes and wraps him in an ice cube. There’s only one set of tyre marks leading to the spot. The ice stops the river traffic so it could have been there for weeks – anyway there’s virtually none in winter – but kids spotted it skating.’

  Dryden stubbed the cigarette, disliking the habit as he did at the end of every smoke.

  ‘Now DS Stubbs thinks, according to the local radio news, that this is a London job. Nasty, vicious crimes being a typical capital offence.’

  He enjoyed the weak witticism and missed Laura for not spotting it.

  ‘The regional crime squad has been contacted but the script is written: south London thugs decapitate their victim and drive into the Fens to dump the body. By the time some weekend Captain Pugwash had banged his cruiser into it the body would have been fishmeal. Gangland is hardly weatherwise – so they can be forgiven for overlooking the possibility of the ice. And it’s a good spot – lonely even by Fen standards. You get winter croppers in the fields but they never stray far from the shelter of the picking machines. The pub, the Five Miles from Anywhere – you remember it, we sat by the river in the summer – it hardly opens in the winter.

  ‘But a gangland killing? If you’ve got the presence of mind to drive the victim’s body here in the first place, why dump it in a river in a car that can be traced – the police have the registration number, even the tax disc. OK, it’s almost certainly stolen but it still represents an additional risk. It gives the police somewhere to start. And these are supposed to be professionals?

  ‘And then they’ve deliberately stranded themselves in the middle of the fen. It’s night, presumably, and by this point well below freezing. The police now say that there are no unaccounted-for tyre tracks within half a mile of the dumped car on any of the drove roads. So he, she, or they, have to walk to a second vehicle, or several miles to the nearest main road. The police are starting house-to-house in the morning. To walk to the nearest rail station would have taken three hours.’

  Out in the dark garden the moon rose through the branches of a monkey-puzzle tree.

  Somewhere in the Tower the gentle sob of someone in pain punctured the thick luxurious silence.

  ‘So my guess is that if they were outsiders they panicked for some reason – were forced to dump the car – and then set off across the fen on foot. In which case there must be a chance they’re still out there – and if they’ve been unable to find shelter they must be in bad shape. If they have found shelter then somebody else could be in bad shape, especially with the coppers blundering around doing house-to-house.’

  Dryden stood and pressed his nose against the ice-cold window. In the walled garden the monkey-puzzle tree cast bizarre Byzantine patterns of shadow – tangled limbs of deeper shadow in which it was easy to imagine the shape of a figure standing watch.

  ‘So I think it’s much more likely they’re local. In which case their victim is likely to be local too.’

  He heard the cathedral bell toll midnight. Under the monkey-puzzle tree he thought he saw the shadows move. A tiny pin-point of red, which he had mistaken for the reflection of his own cigarette, fell to the ground. Out on to the frosted grass strolled a security guard, an Alsatian loping behind.

  He took Laura’s hand, lifting it like an exhibit from the unruffled linen sheet. He fought back the guilt that always rose when he left – the result of his own self-pity. And he fought off a cynical laugh – a sign, he knew, that he no longer really felt this lifeless form was his wife.

  If this was a charade, who was it for?

  ‘I’d better get back to the boat,’ he said too loud. ‘The ice is breaking up and I’d better get the pumps going. Your parents have written – a long letter. I’ll read it tomorrow. And there’s some pictures, I’ll bring those too.’

  He placed the dead weight back on the sheet. At the door he forced himself to complete the ritual parting.

  ‘Goodnight, Laura.’

  He closed the door and in the silence listened. Sometimes he wished so hard to hear her call his name that he conjured up her voice. It was an illusion so strong there was a danger that one day he would miss the real thing.

  Sometimes, just before dawn, he would lie in the dark trying to see behind the headlights, and the glare of the two fog lamps, straining beyond the dazzle to see a face behind the wheel But there never had been time. A second? Two? No sooner had the car pulled out than it was slewed across his path. The two seconds that changed his life.

  It wasn’t his fault. Nobody ever said it was. But he had been daydreaming, he’d admitted that much. They said it didn’t matter. The tyre marks told the story.

  They’d been to dinner at New Farm. 1999. Winter. A Friday evening in late November. Dryden and his mother had left Burnt Fen in ‘79, two years after his father’s sudden death. A local farmer let the land while the old house crumbled. They moved to London and his mother taught full-time in a comprehensive in the featureless suburb where they lived. The dream was over then.

  His parents had met at Cambridge. His father, a physical scientist, wanted to run an organic farm. His mother, a teacher, married him and the life he wanted to lead. They bought Burnt Fen in 1965 at auction. His mother provided the cheap labour they needed to pay the bills. Dryden, born within a year, was taught at home after a brief bureaucratic battle with the local education authority.

  But his father’s death broke the slender thread of reason which had kept them on the land. The ten years in London were stable, streetwise and not unhappy. His mother
retired in ‘98 and New Farm was ready by then. It stood within sight of Burnt Fen, across Sandy’s Cut. Close but unreachable. That’s how his mother wanted the past.

  After dinner Dryden and Laura had talked about moving back There was room. But for him it was still too early. Perhaps if children came.

  They’d waited too long before setting out, wanting to postpone the dismal journey back to London through the grey suburbs with their shambling Friday drunks. Laura was asleep in the back of the two-door Vauxhall. Hour and a half to London. Forecast: fog patches, ice later. Concentrate.

  But the mind wanders on the railway-straight roads of the Fens. And then the headlights. They’d swung on to the Soham Road from a side track. The police had retraced the journey. A local, they said, cutting across country at speed. Zig-zagging on the drove roads. It was reckless, swinging out across both carriageways, meeting him head-on. He’d swerved right and felt the car bump over the low verge and then, for what can only have been hundredths of a second, it flew in a shallow flight between grass and water. He had always thought of water as being soft and yielding, even if it inspired in him an absolute fear. Since childhood and his fall through the ice he’d held its touch in his memory – clinging and soft, deadly but yielding. But the car met it with a juddering thump, its speed suddenly halted, and he felt the pain across his shoulders as the seat belt cut in, breaking first the collarbone and then a rib.

  Until that impact he could recollect no noise: then it came in a distorted rush only to be muffled, swallowed by the enfolding water. He heard Laura scream, just once, as she strained against her seat belt. Through his body he heard another rib break. The engine raced and then with a backfire died. The dashboard lights flickered out. Shock, physical and mental, froze the world around him.