by Rob McCarthy
‘Maybe we’re wrong,’ Noble said. ‘And in all likelihood, we’ll never know. So maybe that’s a good way to think about it.’
Harry finished his drink. He wasn’t sure how firmly he held that conviction, though he’d said it with strength and sureness. He suspected, with time, he’d change his views. That was the temporal nature of relationships, after all. Lahiri was a man whom he’d alternately loved, hated, befriended and betrayed. When he’d been alive, Harry’s last act had been to accuse him, and since he’d died, all he’d done was defend him.
‘I should go,’ Noble said, standing up. She offered up her empty glass, and Harry moved over to take it from her. When he did, he stood between her and the door.
‘You shouldn’t,’ he said. ‘Not if you don’t want to.’
He stood up, and she kissed him, and he led her to his room, and outside, the city kept on going.
Sunday, 27 January
Harry woke up alone in his bed at about half-past ten and dragged himself to the shower. The side of the bed that was usually neat was a mess, and held the smell of a woman for the first time. She’d not woken him leaving. Neither of them had cried this time, but the sick feeling in his stomach wouldn’t go away, despite the fact it was the second night in a row that he had slept properly. He wasn’t sure what it was: the sex, the alcohol, or the events of the past week. He spent half an hour or so sitting on the shower floor, letting lukewarm water wash down over him, cleansing, baptismal. Then he toasted a couple of bagels and scrambled some eggs, washing the breakfast down with half a carton of stale orange juice and coffee. The harsh winter sun lit the apartment as if he was on stage, so bad that it hurt his eyes.
The service was at one, at Lahiri’s old school, just south of Guildford. He took care to dress himself well, putting on his only black suit and a neatly pressed white shirt, ironed as only a soldier can, not a crease in sight. The man himself would have been proud of that one, Harry thought as he pulled the warm fabric over his body, doing up the buttons, selecting a sombre tie from the rack in his wardrobe. Their colleagues who still served would turn up in dress uniform, and it was likely Lahiri would get the full works, right down to the coffin draped in the Union flag. His school were sending pall-bearers from the Combined Cadet Force. The man was a war hero, after all.
He looked at the mirror, running a hand over the scar on his face. The scabbing had evened away, but the line where a splinter of Lahiri’s boat had sliced into his flesh remained, a constant reminder of what had happened. His eyes looked less worn now, his hair something approaching even. In the dark suit he could almost pass for someone normal.
The location worked out conveniently, as Kingston-upon-Thames was on the way. The drive took an hour or so, some of the lunchtime traffic holding him up. He took a diversion, going through the park, slowing to look at the deer standing in the snow, a herd of them fleeing as a family walked dogs. One of the deer ran behind the group, stumbling on an injured leg. The runt of the litter, Harry thought. He’d been trying for most of the morning to pin down the feeling that was itching at him, the lingering suspicions. He wondered if it was entirely selfish, his agony over Lahiri’s guilt or innocence. Because if it turned out that his friend was a child molester and a party to murder, it made what Harry had done to him somehow more acceptable?
Lahiri had made phone calls to a guilty man. And his computer log-in had made a change that had almost been a death sentence to a victim of horrendous abuse. As he’d said to Frankie, that wasn’t enough to convict someone alive. But he couldn’t shake the thought.
Tammas picked up Harry’s turmoil but said nothing. They had a portable ventilator at Marigold House with a battery life of eight or so hours, enough time for the service, the wake and the return journey. But by a quarter past twelve, they still hadn’t left.
‘We’ll be late,’ Harry said.
‘Then go. Without me,’ Tammas spat in reply. He was already hooked up to the machine, sitting in a wheelchair with the ventilator at his side on a trolley, wearing full No. 1 dress complete with medal bars. Tammas had never officially been discharged, and as a lieutenant colonel he would possibly be the highest-ranking officer at the service. Their delay had been due to his objection to the mode of transport Marigold House had arranged.
‘I’m not going. Anywhere. In the back. Of an ambulance. Unless you’re. Taking me. To the bloody. Hospital.’
‘Boss, please—’
‘Put me in. The back of. A Transit. I’m not. Going in that. Thing.’
The private ambulance drivers had refused to leave until they’d been paid, and with the care home refusing to shell out Harry had paid them himself, before arranging for a taxi large enough to accommodate Tammas, a nurse, his wheelchair and the portable ventilator. When they finally left, Harry had followed behind in his own car.
They made it to the service by five to one. It didn’t look like a school at all, more like a country estate; the grand memorial chapel constructed from huge sandstone pillars, bounded by snow-covered fields and skeletal, anorexic trees. Harry shivered as he wheeled Tammas into the chapel, the ventilator humming among the gathered crowd. He recognised plenty of faces, a handful of friends from medical school, and others in military dress, former army colleagues, both from the medical corps and the Royal Anglians. Georgia Henderson was somewhere in the mix, standing with a couple of her dead husband’s comrades-in-arms. There were faces from A&E as well, and Harry nodded to Kinirons, her sharp features accentuated by her black dress. He recognised a few more, some of the other junior doctors. George Traubert, looking up at the masonry in a charcoal suit, not black. And the other doctors and youth workers from the Saviour Project, filling two pews on the other side, the forlorn figure of Duncan Whitacre among them, head bowed.
To his left, Tammas was trying to speak, so Harry leaned close.
‘Go up. The front. Don’t sit here. And babysit me.’
Tammas had lost the ability to whisper, and the rear two rows of the congregation turned to see what was making the bizarre rattling noise that sounded something like speech.
‘I’m fine here, don’t you worry,’ Harry said. He’d rather be at the front – it would make the walk to the pulpit less conspicuous for his reading – but the figure he’d spotted in the second row made him wish he wasn’t there. She still did her hair the same way, hanging over the right shoulder. Alice and James Lahiri had never divorced, even though they’d been about as separated as it was possible to be, so it was still her husband’s funeral that she’d flown halfway around the world to attend.
Harry thought of the beds they’d shared and felt the space under his ribcage empty again. He looked across at Tammas as the vicar began the welcome, and remembered the conversation they’d had waiting for the taxi.
‘You look like. Death. Harry.’
‘I’ve had a rough few days.’
‘You. Got the. Bastard. Who did it. Didn’t. You?’
Harry explained about Ambrose, that he was now in limbo. He’d mentioned eighty per cent burns, and Tammas had looked up at the sky and smiled. Tammas had seen enough burns patients during his career to know what it meant.
‘I hope. He pulls. Through. And spends. The rest. Of his. Miserable. Life just like. Me.’
Harry had spent the drive over trying to work out whether to tell Tammas about what the police thought about Lahiri. The man had little left to live for: a distant family, and two surrogate sons, one of whom had been brutally murdered, whether it had been deserved or not. Now, as they sat listening to the bidding prayer, he was unable to stop the tears.
Tammas asked him what was wrong.
‘I treated him like shit, boss,’ Harry said. ‘He gave everything to me, he loved me so much, and I threw it all back in his face. Why? Why the fuck did I do that?’
Tammas moved his head with great difficulty to answer the question.
‘You hated him. For treating. You. Instead of. Me. You hate. Him. For saving. Your life.’
The sentiment hung in the air like the smell of cordite after a battle. Harry felt a deep pain swell in his chest and burst upwards, into the place he thought his soul might be. He remembered saying those words himself, but still, the verbalisation of them by someone else, by the only man in the world he unshakeably respected, was a new condemnation. The vicar finished the prayer, and the organ struck up the first hymn. ‘Nearer, My God, to Thee’. Harry tried to sing out the words, the tune’s rhythm disrupted by the rotation of the ventilator to his left. The second verse came around, and through the noise Harry could make out Tammas, vainly hoping only Harry would hear his words.
‘Wasn’t this. What they played. As the Titanic. Went down?’
They formed a line heading out of the chapel, each visitor shaking hands with Lahiri’s parents. He didn’t have any other immediate family, and the others were all back in West Bengal, so it was just the two of them thanking the mourners, faces sombre. His mother wore a blank, lifeless smile that Harry suspected was the result of sedatives. His father had his back ramrod straight, and was looking everyone in the eye and shaking their hand, trying his best to be as British as possible. Everyone except one person, Harry observed. When Alice came to the front of the chapel, her black hair like a veil over her face, they turned aside and looked at the ground. Harry watched her slink away, hiding in the throng of mourners, and felt an urge to vomit.
It was the worst thing he had ever done, and he would never get the chance to get anywhere close to reconciliation. The line of people moved forward, and Harry pushed Tammas closer to the huge oakwood chapel doors. The Lahiris would be faced now with two men, one who had made their son the man he was, another whose actions had meant he’d lived the last year of his truncated life bitter and alone.
Harry was fighting back tears when he reached the front. He knew Lahiri’s parents well, having spent a few summers during medical school at their house in Sussex. Football and tennis in the garden, excursions on the sailing boat, swimming in their heated pool. Harry’s mother had died when he was nineteen, and in the years that followed Lahiri’s parents had gone out of their way to look after him. As Lahiri’s father stooped to shake Tammas’s limp, lifeless hand, his mother threw her arms around Harry, weeping openly into his shoulder. Harry wept, too.
As he held his dead friend’s mother, Harry realised that Lahiri must never have told them who Alice had embarked on her affair with. That guilt swelled in him, pushing against his lungs. He didn’t know how long it had been when the vicar moved him on, pointing him down the stairs, and towards the long gravel drive that led back towards the school, filled with the 4x4s and Aston Martins of Lahiri’s friends, waiting to drive them onwards.
Harry drove over to the wake, while Lahiri’s parents escorted their son to the crematorium. They’d asked him if he wanted to come along, but he’d said he had to look after Tammas. A couple were turning their only son to ash, and that was something which Harry couldn’t bear to witness.
They’d hired out a function room at a pub in a countryside village not far from the school, the kind of place where all the farmhouses were owned by CEOs and hedge fund managers who commuted into London and used the stables for their daughters’ ponies, and the barns for their swimming pools. Harry got a Glenmorangie for Tammas and a Coke for himself, and asked for a straw, and the barman put the straw in the Coke, so he asked for another one and put it in the whisky.
There was a trio of officers from the RAMC standing with Tammas and his nurse, medics who’d gone through Sandhurst with Harry and Lahiri. They were making war talk and telling stories about Lahiri, so Harry joined them for a while, allowing his thoughts to wander. He’d come to a decision, while he’d been holding Lahiri’s mother, that today was about grieving for Lahiri as the best man they all knew, and judgement, if it came at all, could come later. He cursed the fact that he would have to drive home, that he couldn’t participate in what seemed to be a fairly heavy session among several sections of the crowd. Doctors drank a lot. People at wakes drank a lot. Two plus two made five.
Harry wandered between groups of old friends from medical school, asking them how their husbands and wives were, where they were working. Most were consultants or GPs, and all talked about how close he had been to Lahiri, and how hard it must be for him, which just made it worse. A few of Lahiri’s friends from school who Harry had met at birthday parties and nights out tried to speak to him, but after a few sentences they got the message and left him alone. Stooped over the bar with his head in his hands, like a figure in an Edward Hopper painting.
Fuck it, he thought, and ordered a Jameson’s. By the time it came there was someone beside him, a delicate hand on his shoulder.
‘Hey, Harry,’ said Alice. ‘That was a nice reading you did.’
A touch of Kiwi in her voice now, even though she’d been there only a few months. That was her in a nutshell, though; the ultimate shapeshifter. All things to all men.
‘Yeah,’ Harry said. He’d read the poem If, words about fortitude, strength of character, an unbreakable spirit. Things which James Lahiri had had in spades, which he might well have used to become an even greater man. Transforming the lives of young men. As he’d read it, his stomach had swollen with horror. The fleeting thought, however improbable, that instead those traits had helped him become a monster.
Harry always remembered names. It was a skill he’d had forever and never appreciated. Now he repeated in his head the ones Noble had said the previous night. Solomon Idris. Keisha Best. Jerome Vincent. Olujide Okiniye. And they were the ones who the police knew about. The phone calls to Charlie Ambrose. Harry couldn’t explain those. Not with the information he had. He realised then that it was possible he would never know what James Lahiri had been. That he might question it for the rest of his life. Maybe Solomon Idris would wake up, and tell all. Point the finger. But maybe he wouldn’t.
‘That poem was in our downstairs toilet,’ Alice said. ‘In the old house, I mean.’
The old house where he’d held her and kissed her so many times, each one a betrayal. Oh, you self-righteous prick, Harry thought. Trying to denigrate your best friend’s memory just so you can feel less guilty about screwing his wife. He opened his mouth, about to utter some platitude about how Lahiri had been a good man, better than both of them, but there was no point. She would hear, but not listen. She might cry, so that a man would comfort her, and people would talk about her, and then she would fly back to New Zealand and carry on with her hollow life.
‘Go fuck yourself, Alice,’ Harry said. Saw his whiskey off in one, turned and searched for the first face he recognised that wasn’t Alice.
It was Bernadette Kinirons, standing with Traubert, the two consultants concealed in a corner of the pub, she nursing a glass of wine, he a bottle of sparkling water. Harry made eye contact with them and headed over. Kinirons gave his arm a squeeze, and smiled at him.
‘You did well, Harry,’ Kinirons said. ‘We’ve all lost a good man, you know. The world has.’
Harry said nothing and nodded. Kinirons’s eyes were misting, genuine, and Harry held them for a while. He remembered the fury in her voice as she’d led the effort to resuscitate Solomon Idris, and knew that she would have done the same for Charlie Ambrose, and that she was the kind of doctor everybody wished to become. The antithesis to that stood beside her, and he leant forward and put a condescending hand on Harry’s shoulder.
‘I happened to be having lunch yesterday with the medical school sub-dean,’ Traubert said. ‘We’re going to set up a memorial award in Lahiri’s name. A bursary for a disadvantaged student who upholds the values that James stood for. I’m sure you’d be a welcome addition to the awarding committee.’
Harry mumbled something in response.
‘Maybe later, eh, George?’ Kinirons said, sliding her arm around Harry’s back. ‘You’re doing really well, Harry. I know you feel like you have to keep it all together at moments like this, but you’re a young man. You sho
uldn’t be burying your friends. It’s alright to let it out sometimes.’
‘Thanks,’ Harry said, and meant it. Beside them, Traubert shuffled awkwardly to one side.
‘Well, you’re doing better than he is, at any rate,’ Kinirons continued. Harry followed her gaze and found a group of GPs from the Burgess Park Practice sitting around a table, eating finger food. Whitacre had at least three empty pint glasses in front of him, and another three-quarters full of Guinness, some of which had been spilled down his shirt. A woman whom Harry presumed to be his wife was trying to get the stain out with a handkerchief, while Duncan shouted at her to leave him alone, and someone else begged them not to make a scene.
‘He’s taking it hard,’ Traubert said. ‘Poor man. I’ll go over once things have calmed down.’
A phone rang loudly, and Traubert dug into his trouser pocket, making his apologies.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he said. ‘I’m on call this weekend; I’d hoped they wouldn’t bother me.’
Harry watched him leave. On his way out, he headed over to Whitacre’s side and embraced him warmly, two good friends consoling each other. Harry watched him, trying his best to conceal his contempt. Kinirons read his look, though, and laughed.
‘I know you hate him, Harry,’ said Kinirons. ‘I would, too, if I was his registrar. But he likes you. He was singing your praises on the drive down here. It’d do you good to make friends, alright? Think about the future, eh? You’re not going to be a registrar forever . . .’
Harry thought about that for the first time in a long while. It was one of those small-talk questions that junior doctors asked each other in quiet moments on call, at parties and conferences. What their career plans were, whether they wanted to specialise or not, which training programmes at which deaneries they were applying to. Most people had a plan, did research to get the places that they wanted, but Harry had just been bumping between registrar jobs for years now. The future was a distant place, out of his reach. After this week, there were lots of people who didn’t have much of a future.