St Aeltha’s didn’t normally deal with cancer patients – it was all set up for hip replacements and knee ops – but it meant Barbara didn’t have to come off the drip prematurely, as she’d threatened them she would do in order to go home. She’d have a private room with remote-control curtains and proper armchairs for visitors. More importantly, there was no staff crossover between the two hospitals and a very switched-on head of security – they were home to the orthopaedic surgeons of choice for the professional footballers from Manchester and Liverpool.
Barbara travelled by ambulance, with Helen following along behind. Whilst she was in the car, she realised she’d got a voicemail from Christine: a two-minute guilt trip full of understanding about how difficult everything must be for her at the moment and how Darren only wanted to help. And so did she and Adam. They all wanted the best; Helen just had to stop freezing them out, apparently. She deleted it.
When they arrived at St Aeltha’s, the receptionist waved the elaborately written daily menu in front of them – clearly it was a source of some pride – but Barbara’s arrival was too late for her to be able to select from it and she ended up with a slightly limp-looking chicken salad. Neil turned up with Barney and Alys about five minutes later.
‘It reminds me of the time we flew business-class,’ Barbara said, prodding at the salad. ‘Much promised, but what arrives doesn’t quite merit the fanfare.’
‘Well, I’m just thankful to see you’ve perked up enough to complain about it,’ said Neil. ‘And anyway, it might not be gourmet, but it looks a hell of a lot better than the rubbish they’ve got in economy.’
‘Or in this case down the road in the General,’ Helen added.
‘Exactly. Plus …’ Neil carried on, picking a knife off Barbara’s tray and waggling it for emphasis, ‘you don’t have to pay for parking here.’
‘Well, that’s typical,’ said Barbara. ‘The people in here are the buggers who can afford to pay for parking!’
The kids laughed along, with no idea about what they were laughing at. The room was decorated in a deep rose colour, every touch thought through to conceal or diminish the resemblance to a hospital and make you believe you were in a boutique hotel. If Helen squinted through half-closed eyes, she could almost imagine that nothing was wrong; they were just a family crammed into a small, plush living room, enjoying each other’s company.
There was no chaperone. Helen didn’t know if that would change if she or Neil visited alone, but there was also no nurses’ station, no drugs trolley that might be left unattended for a moment or two, no opportunity. She wondered briefly whether it was only Barbara that the hospital had considered in agreeing to the move, or whether they were also happy to have her and Neil off the premises and no longer their responsibility.
‘You’ve been up almost the whole night,’ Neil said, interrupting her thoughts. ‘Why don’t you go home and get some rest. I’ll bring these two along later.’
Helen was missing the kids. It seemed like too long since she’d been able to have a lazy snuggle on the sofa with her babies, but she also knew she was running on empty.
‘Okay, Dad,’ she agreed, ‘don’t keep them for too long.’
‘Course not.’
She did her round of farewells and hugs and walked slowly out to her car.
All the way home she racked her brains about what else she could do to try to track down whoever was behind the notes. She would scour the internet for every Jennifer in the district. She would call her friend, Amy, who was still in CID. She would call Barbara’s old editor. After all that she would call Darren and tell him exactly what she thought about his mother’s interference and his own lack of responsibility in bringing the kids home unfed. She would stop at Tesco and buy a chicken to roast so that when Neil brought the kids back from the hospital they would come through the door and find the air filled with the scent of everything-is-okay.
In the end, she missed the exit for Tesco on the roundabout, and by the time she realised, she couldn’t summon the energy to go back. When she got home, the thundercloud of a migraine was quickly descending. It was all she could do to open the front door, choke down some paracetamol and crawl under the duvet.
Barbara
Finally alone in the plush nest of her new room, Barbara lay back and allowed her broken body to be cradled by the thick mattress and luxurious sheets. Without her glasses, and feeling tired and headachy, the pink and crimson shades of the room bled and blurred into each other. The fabrics deadened the noise, especially after the busy clatter of the General, and the air freshener had a heavy floral scent, which seemed studiedly non-clinical. Overall, she had the impression that she was nestled in the heart of an enormous flower. It gave her a welcome feeling of being small and hidden; able to deceive herself that what she did now – whatever she had done in the past – none of it really mattered.
Her mind wandered. She thought of her cutting kit – odd, as she hadn’t needed it in years – not since the first time Helen brought Barney to see them. When she was younger, using it had made her feel clean. The flow of blood had swept away her faults and flaws, and with it her anxiety, even if it only lasted an hour or two. She had the same feeling lying here.
If only she wasn’t so tired, though. Her usually sharp mind felt fuzzy and hazed; she couldn’t trust it. But alongside the haze there was a new sense of clarity too, somehow, a distance or a disconnect that let her mind travel into places she’d kept sealed off for years. She let her thoughts run, unfettered by time or inhibition.
Over fifty years ago a butterfly had flapped its wings; now there was a hurricane to be reaped.
June 1963
Katy
They stopped after an hour or so, at a roadside pub. Miss Silver went in and returned ten minutes later with some sandwiches wrapped in paper. ‘It took a bit of persuading,’ she told them. They all ate in the car, but Mr Robertson wouldn’t drive and eat at the same time, so they stayed in the parking area.
The sandwiches were roast beef – from the carvery, Miss Silver had said. Katy didn’t know what a carvery was and didn’t want to ask. The smell of the beef was wonderful and her mouth watered fiercely, but the meat itself was tough and the bread and juices soon melted away in her mouth, leaving tasteless, leathery wodges that were painful to gulp down.
Once they were moving again, Miss Silver passed back a slim bottle of lemonade with a smile. ‘Here’s a rare treat,’ she said.
Katy tried to return the smile, but the other woman had turned away already.
She sipped the lemonade, watching the scenery whip by. It was rugged now. There were stone walls and grey blobs of sheep with faces she couldn’t make out. It was late afternoon and the sun had dipped slightly, but the heat through the glass was still intense, and the atmosphere in the car was sticky. Katy tried to ignore her fuzzy head and the growing restlessness in her stomach, but eventually she could no longer pretend to herself that it was settling.
‘Stop, Mr Robertson! Please, I think I’m going to be ill.’
It took a minute or two to come, and for that she was grateful, because she’d have been mortified to sully his pride and joy. She hung her head between her knees, a couple of gorse bushes shielding the sight of her from any passing traffic, and Miss Silver held her hair back and muttered softly. The air was much cooler outside than it was in the car, and briefly Katy thought she might get away with it, but just as she was allowing herself to be hopeful, it came. The spew was brown and pink from the beef – the last beef she’d likely see in a while, she thought, as she stepped carefully away from it.
There was no wall along this part of the road. The tarmac just gave way to scrubby moorland, offering nothing to sit on. Miss Silver manoeuvred her to lean against the wheel arch at the back of the car – Katy wouldn’t have dared otherwise, but she sank against it gratefully, taking a moment to steady herself in the fresh air, before swilling out her rancid mouth with the last of the lemonade. A few minutes later, Mr R
obertson was tapping at his watch and she knew she had to get back in.
‘Try to sleep, Katy,’ called Miss Silver from the front. ‘We’ll be back at Ashdown before you know it.’
And wasn’t that the rub? Katy thought to herself, saying nothing.
No matter how unwelcome, sleep came, brought by the steady purr of the Austin’s engine and the thrum of tarmac under the wheels. Her sleep, for once, was dreamless. Unless the blurry memory of Eric Robertson carrying her through the corridors of Ashdown, murmuring a lullaby and tucking her under the thread-worn sheets and thin blue prison blanket was itself a figment of Katy’s weary imagination.
August 2017
Helen
Helen woke up in the middle of the afternoon befuddled and disorientated, imagining herself in her own home and struggling to make the fuzzy details of the room fit her expectations. Her mobile was ringing, and she answered it automatically, before her spinning mind had had chance to fully right itself.
‘We need to talk,’ he demanded.
She screwed up her face into the phone like Alys might. Darren was not a person she wanted to be dealing with at that moment.
‘I’ve been up all hours, Darren. They’ve moved Mum, and …’
‘You’re not returning my calls. It’s already Friday and I need to be back in London by Monday. I’ve got a right to see my kids, Helen, and that’s where they live, remember?’
‘You saw them yesterday. You didn’t feed them dinner, remember?’
He sighed. ‘It’d be nice if you could let something go, just for once in your life. Anyway, I can’t hang around up here on the off chance it suits you for me to see them for the day. We need a plan, Helen, we need to talk like adults about this.’
Eventually she agreed to meet in a Starbucks at an out-of-town shopping place. Best to get it over with whilst the kids were still with Neil at the hospital, she reasoned, and sent Neil a text to tell him she’d pick up some supermarket pizzas whilst she was there. Before she went, she put in a call to Amy, but it went straight to voicemail. A dig around the internet for anything about psycho-shoplifter-Jennifer was equally unfruitful. The local newspaper’s online archive only went back to 2002. They obviously hadn’t got round to uploading the back catalogue. Beyond that, the details she had were too vague to produce anything meaningful via Google.
As she drove, she wondered whether Darren really had to go back for work, or whether it had more to do with Lauren. Helen pictured her calling him from the bedroom of the maisonette he’d rented, toying with her designer heels and purring at him to come ‘home’.
By the time she arrived, he was already at a table, with two mugs steaming in front of him. He looked rough, she thought, with a flash of surprise. His hair was flat and in need of a cut and he had a couple of spots on his forehead. Helen knew that she was hardly going to be winning grooming awards herself any time soon, but at least she had good reason to look awful.
He nodded towards the coffees. ‘Flat white, yeah?’
She nodded back.
‘Funny,’ he said, ‘I only come to Starbucks when there’s nothing else on offer, but it always tastes better than I expect it to.’ He looked around but didn’t pause long enough to give her time to speak. ‘All this used to be fields, didn’t it? And wasn’t that old flooded quarry round here somewhere?’
‘Still there.’ She pointed across the car park, where a narrow turning led to a lane, which looped around the back of Next. ‘It’s a canoeing centre now.’ As she spoke, she remembered Tuesday night when he came to the house. Had the pair of them fallen together into that easy intimacy just out of habit and circumstance, or had Darren orchestrated it all along? Well it wouldn’t happen again.
‘But we’re not here to talk about canoeing,’ she said, in deliberately flat tones.
‘No. The thing is, Hels, I’ve got to be back in work next week, like I said. I’m not happy just leaving Barney and Alys here. It’s not their home; it’s not what they’re used to. I want to know when you’re planning on bringing them back.’
‘I don’t know. I told you on the phone, Mum had a scare. She’s had to move hospital. It’s all up in the air at the moment.’
‘Then let me take the kids back to London.’
Her mind was flying. He was going back to work – he’d said as much. He worked fifty-hour weeks. For God’s sake, he’d forgotten to feed them the other night.
He was still speaking, though. ‘Mum’s going to come with me for a couple of weeks and I’ve made some calls. Paola from nursery is interested in a nanny job. I’d rather they came with me to the rented place, but if you want me to move back into the house whilst you’re still up here then that might work too …’
‘They’re not going.’
‘That’s not a discussion, Helen; you’ve got to be rational.’
‘I never offered to have a discussion. They’re not fucking going.’ She might have known bloody Chris was cheerleading him on in this; that must have been what her voicemail had been leading up to. Helen could cheerfully string up the pair of them given half a chance. Instead, she banged her mug down on its saucer. The coffee slopped over the edge and Darren reached across one of the blatantly eavesdropping retirees at the next table to grab a handful of paper serviettes, which he then handed to Helen with an extravagant sigh.
‘I don’t want to start getting lawyers involved, Helen.’
‘So don’t then.’
He sighed again. She was trying to sound confident but her insides were somersaulting and she felt sure he’d guess that too. Forcing herself to take a deep breath, she scrabbled for a way to defuse things.
‘Look,’ she stalled, ‘when are you actually going back? Is it settled?’
‘I’ll go Sunday night,’ he said. Two days’ time.
‘You can see them tomorrow, take them out again – they enjoyed it.’ As she spoke, he was nodding. ‘Try to give them dinner this time,’ she continued. Perhaps she should have bitten her tongue, but she couldn’t quite manage it. ‘Mum’s full pathology reports are due back from the lab on Monday. We’ll have much more information about the prognosis by then. I’ll drive back with the kids on Tuesday – maybe Monday night if Mum and Daddon’t need me. We can speak on Tuesday night, talk about what’s going to happen going forward. You can see them on Wednesday whatever happens.’ She paused. ‘If you can get the time off, of course.’
‘And if you’re coming back up here, then you’ll leave them with me?’
Not a chance in hell, she thought. ‘Maybe,’ she said. ‘I’ll think about how it might work. Do you have a number for Paola? I’d need to speak to her before you firmed anything up.’
‘Of course.’ He was eager now. ‘We could interview her together when you’re back in town.’
‘Maybe.’
*
Neil and the kids were back from the hospital by the time Helen got home. Barney and Alys were making Neil give them donkey rides around the living room. He rubbed at his knees a bit after he stood up, but it struck Helen that he looked happier than she’d seen him at any time since Barbara’s illness had begun. She settled the kids down at the kitchen table with the pizzas she’d brought back, and while they ate, she and Neil washed and dried the few dishes that had accumulated by the sink.
‘It seems like a great place in there, Hels. I mean, I’m all for the NHS, but she’s going to get properly looked after now, like a film star or something. It can only do her good, can’t it? When the food’s nice and you’re not being woken up in the night by someone raving with dementia three beds down?’
‘I suppose so, Dad.’ Helen was concerned about how the small private hospital would cope with a real emergency, especially if it happened out of hours, but she knew it was a worry she’d have to live with. She had no intention of breaking her promise and telling him about the notes, nor did she want to put in his mind the worry that the heparin incident might happen again.
She sat down at the table, helping Aly
s scrape the last bits of food onto her fork and listening to Barney chatter about what name they might give to the pet dog he was convinced he was going to get for his birthday.
‘Right, then,’ she said as they finished their yoghurts. ‘We’ve had supper quite early tonight and you’ve done a lot of watching telly over the past couple of days. Who wants to do some painting?’
They both cheered. It was their favourite thing and normally something Helen tried to avoid because of the mess, but she’d been determined to have a nice time with them this afternoon. They were used to having the best of her and now, just when they found themselves in a strange place under unsettling circumstances, she’d simply been plonking them in front of DVDs or waving them off with other people.
Helen had to wipe the purple paint off her fingers when the doorbell went; she knew that Neil had gone for a shower. She opened the front door to a large woman, about Barbara’s age, wielding an exuberant bunch of flowers.
‘Jackie!’
‘Helen, love, it’s great to see you.’
Jackie Miller was a senior reporter on the local paper that Barbara had worked for since Helen was a child. She and Barbara had known each other for donkey’s years, and for as long as Helen could remember, Jackie was the closest thing Barbara had to a friend. She stepped into the hallway, handing over the flowers and asking about Barbara. Helen dealt with it on autopilot, suddenly realising that this could be her chance to put her mind at ease about the notes. Jackie was exactly the person who might have some answers, and here she was on the doorstep. Thankfully, the note from the hospital was still in her handbag, hanging up right next to them.
She could hear the hum of the hot water booster – Neil was still in the shower. Quickly, she retrieved the scrap of paper and handed it over.
If They Knew Page 9