Herring Girl

by Debbie Taylor

  So then Ian has a go and waves his BBC ID at her, and she smiles and asks him to wait while she picks up the phone to call someone. But Paul’s seen where she looked first, how her eyes flicked towards some double doors – so he charges off through them. And he’s in a wide corridor, with trolleys and that all down it, covered with medical stuff, and drip stands and wheelchairs, and cubicles either side.

  He zigzags down the corridor, half running, looking in each cubicle. A nurse tries to talk to him, but he ignores her. Everyone’s trying to keep him away from his son and he’s fucking not having it.

  Then he’s reached the end of the corridor, and there’s an RAF bloke taking off his jacket, and he’s really sweating – why is he sweating? Great dark stains under his arms and down his back – and some bloke in a white coat’s bending over Ben and punching his chest with both hands, then counting, then punching his chest again. And someone’s sliced into Ben’s wetsuit, to get it open, so it’s peeled away like a black skin, and inside it there’s Ben’s narrow flat chest, and his chicken ribs, which look so fragile Paul’s worried that doctor bloke’s going to crack them.

  And Ben’s face – the doctor’s pinching his little nose now and angling his head back, and blowing into his mouth, and his throat’s so pale, the skin seems transparent. And his eyes; you can see the blue veins on his eyelids, and his hair’s all matted into salty curls on his forehead.

  He looks like a child that’s been cut from the belly of a fish. He looks like he’s asleep and they’re trying to wake him. He looks—

  He looks— Sobs crowd into Paul’s chest until he can’t breathe—

  He looks like a girl.

  The nurse who tried to stop him before catches Paul by the arm. ‘Come away now, sir, let the doctors do their work.’

  He lets her pull him back outside the room, but he can’t leave. He’s fucking not leaving.

  They do that thing with wires and clamps he’s seen on TV, holding them against Ben’s little chicken ribs, and shouting, ‘Clear!’, making his skinny little body jerk like a baby Frankenstein’s monster; and again, ‘Clear!’; and again, ‘Clear!’.

  Then it all stops: the punching, the shouting. The doctor looks at his watch. Why is he looking at his watch?

  In the silence Paul can hear a whirring sound behind him. He spins round and there’s Ian with his fucking camera: pointing it at Ben, at the doctor looking at his watch – then slowly up to focus on Paul’s face.

  ‌Chapter Sixty-Three

  2007

  Mary watches helplessly as Ian rushes through the swing doors after Paul, ripping open the Velcro on his backpack. She turns to the startled receptionist. ‘I’m sorry—’ she begins, then wonders why on earth she’s apologizing. As Miss Turnbull so aptly pointed out, there’s a time to be Mary, and there’s a time to be Martha – and if ever there was a time to be Martha, this was surely it.

  Hurtling after the two men, she spies Ian standing in an open doorway near the end of a long corridor with his camera on his shoulder. As she comes to a halt behind him, a terrible slow-motion tableau comes into view: Ben lying pale and motionless on a trolley, a doctor turning away from him – and Paul, his face a mask of anguish, lunging at Ian and punching him in the stomach.

  Ian crumples to his knees, shielding his damn camera with his body. Paul stands over him, fists clenched, tears pouring down his face, obviously straining every sinew to prevent himself from kicking him. Mary feels like kicking him too.

  Then he turns back to Ben and starts to gather the boy into his arms.

  ‘I’m sorry, sir. We can’t let you take him,’ says a uniformed man Mary hadn’t noticed before.

  ‘But we’ve just finished his room,’ Paul says brokenly. ‘The blinds are being fitted tomorrow.’

  ‘I’m very sorry, sir. There will have to be a post-mortem.’

  Mary leans against the door and takes a long shuddering breath. Ben’s dead. She can’t take it in. He can’t be dead. Not Ben, not her Ben; with his jiggling knees and bony shoulders, his apple-scented hair.

  But they’re talking about a post-mortem, so he must be.

  Eyes burning with tears, Mary stares at the body – ‘the body’, when does it become ‘the body’? She sidles into the room, past Ian scrambling to his feet and backing into the corridor, past the doctor filling in some kind of form. Her need is sudden, desperate, visceral. She has to get closer; she has to touch the boy one last time.

  Stealthy and quick as a pick-pocket, she slips around to the far side of the trolley and picks up one of Ben’s hands. It’s colder than her hand; even through her gloves she can sense that. So she peels them off and chafes his cold hand between her warmer ones.

  ‘Get away from him,’ growls Paul. ‘Haven’t you done enough?’

  She replaces Ben’s hand and looks up. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I was only trying to—’

  ‘Just get out, OK? You and your fucking BBC man. Just leave my lad alone.’

  Touching Ben’s hand once more – a quick tap, a quick goodbye – Mary turns to leave. And there’s Ian again in the doorway, with his camera whirring.

  ‘Turn that fucking thing off!’ she screams through her tears. And this time she does kick him: on his shin, where it really hurts, as hard as she can.

  The adrenaline from her assault on Ian propels her back into the reception area. She glances around wildly at the quiet rows of waiting patients, aware suddenly how she must appear: windswept, tear-stained, distraught. Not knowing what to do next, she blunders into the disabled toilet and locks herself in, then sits down and surrenders to a storm of sobbing so violent it has her retching into the hand basin.

  As it abates, and she splashes cold water on her face – marvelling with a numb kind of detachment at how the mind rations the ebbing and flowing of strong emotion – she suddenly remembers poor old Mr Skipper.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she says to the bemused receptionist when she emerges, ‘I’d like to enquire about the old gentleman that was brought in by the helicopter with Ben Dixon.’

  ‘Can you tell me his name?’

  Mary thinks for a moment. ‘Everyone refers to him as old Skip, so I’ve always assumed his name was Mr Skipper.’

  The receptionist peers at a computer screen. ‘You’re not next of kin, then.’

  ‘I’m his doctor – well more of a friend than a doctor. I don’t think he has any relatives.’

  ‘There’s no Mr Skipper here. You must mean Mr Simpson. Funny sort of friend if you don’t know his name.’

  ‘Is he all right?’

  ‘Do you know who his next of kin might be?’

  Mary squares her shoulders. ‘I’m his therapist,’ she says firmly. ‘Can I see him?’

  ‘I suppose it’s OK. He’s been admitted to the medical ward for observation. It says here that he’s suffering from hypothermia and it looks like he might have had a slight stroke. They’re going to give him a scan.’

  The old man’s sitting up in bed in a hospital gown. He looks thin and frail without his usual bulky layers of vest, shirt, jumper, anorak; his arms are pale and sinewy, slightly freckled; there are straggly grey hairs at the base of his throat.

  ‘Howay, Doctor,’ he says in a slurred voice – the effects of the stroke? ‘How’s the lad? They won’t tell me.’

  Mary pulls up a chair. ‘He’s dead, Mr Skipper.’ She hears herself saying the words, but she still can’t believe it. ‘I’m sorry. I’m sure you did what you could.’

  ‘Oh,’ he says, and his whole body seems to sag, like a puppet with its strings cut. ‘I went in after him, but I can’t swim, see? I never learnt.’ He raises a hand in a helpless gesture, then looks down at the other, lying motionless in his lap. ‘My arm’s not working,’ he says, seeming confused. ‘And my tongue, or something. I can’t get my words out properly.’

  Oh dear, Mary thinks: left-sided paralysis as well as dysarthria. All the signs of a right hemisphere stroke. ‘Have you had your scan yet?’ she asks.<
br />
  ‘They just gave me some pills and left me in here,’ he says. ‘They’ve put my clothes in a bag in that cupboard. They’re all wet.’

  ‘Are those your keys?’ Mary asks, though they obviously are. ‘Do you want me to fetch you something dry? And some pyjamas, perhaps?’

  ‘How’s the patient?’ Ian asks, materializing at the foot of the bed. He drags a chair over from beside the startled-looking young man in the next bed. ‘You don’t mind, mate, do you?’ he asks.

  ‘Mr Skipper’s had a serious shock,’ says Mary heavily, scowling at Ian. ‘The doctors are going to give him a scan.’

  ‘Has he told you what happened?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s relevant at the moment.’

  ‘No, you’re all right,’ slurs the old man. He tries to heave himself up on the pillows, but collapses sideways onto his useless left arm. ‘Bloody arm’s stopped working,’ he says apologetically.

  ‘Are you OK for me to film this?’ Ian asks. ‘We need to know what Ben was—’

  ‘Ian!’ Mary rounds on him. This really is the limit.

  ‘It’s OK, doctor. If it’s about the lad, I don’t mind. What do you want to know?’

  ‘Just tell me the whole story in your own words.’

  ‘Well, we’d gone to look for that lass’s body. The lad was worried you wouldn’t— um— I mean—’ He breaks off uncomfortably. ‘He thought it would be better to go in with the dinghy. He was doing that breathing thing so he could stay down longer, so I wasn’t that bothered to begin with. Then when he didn’t come up, I started hauling on the line. But he’d tied it to that kist he was after, hadn’t he? I thought it was him I was hauling up, but it was the kist with that lass’s body in.’

  ‘So what did you do?’

  ‘Well, soon as I saw it weren’t him, I went to drop it back down. But then I thought, what if it lands on the lad? So I hauled it on the boat – damn near killed me, it were that heavy, all crusted with weed and what have you. Then I took off my boots and jumped in after him.

  ‘I didn’t know what to do.’ He looks pleadingly at Mary. ‘I never learnt to swim, see, and I didn’t have them goggle things, so I couldn’t see properly, and my clothes were dragging me down. So I sort of dived, best I could, and felt around a bit. But it was hopeless, so I came up again and grabbed a hold of the boat and pulled Ben’s bag over and got out his phone to call Paul.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘I was going to dial 999 for the Coastguard, but I dropped the phone in the bottom of the boat and I couldn’t reach it. I tried and tried.’ He starts crying then: rough, ragged sobs, shaking his old body like a fit of coughing. He grabs Mary’s arm with his good hand. ‘Tell Paul, will you, Doctor? Tell him I was only trying to look out for the lad.’

  At this point a solidly built senior nurse bustles over and ushers Ian and his camera out of the ward, explaining firmly that, BBC or not, he will have to speak to the Trust Manager. Mary shakes out a clean handkerchief and hands it to the old man.

  ‘If I hadn’t taken him, he’d have gone on his own, see?’ he says in his strange new slurred voice. ‘Only I couldn’t have that, could I? Not after what she done to that Annie.’

  Mary tries to focus on what he’s saying. ‘What do you mean?’ she asks gently.

  ‘She done it, didn’t she? That Flo. That’s what I wanted to tell you. It was Annie’s blood on her skirt she were trying to clean off. That’s what I were seeing that time.’

  ‘Where are you going now?’ Ian asks as they make their way out of the hospital.

  ‘I said I’d fetch him some dry clothes.’ She shakes the bunch of keys at him. She feels wrung out and numb, slightly nauseous, slightly faint. When was the last time she had a cigarette?

  ‘Let me call a taxi. I’ll come with you.’

  ‘Don’t be silly.’

  ‘You shouldn’t be on your own.’

  I’m fine on my own, Mary starts to say, then stops herself. Of course she’s ‘fine’ on her own. But that’s not the point, is it? She’s been ‘fine on her own’ for the last thirty-odd years and where has it got her? ‘Thank you,’ she says instead.

  In the taxi he gets out his black phone thingie and makes a series of curt calls about boat charters and coastguards and permissions – to retrieve Mr Skipper’s dinghy, presumably, and gain possession of the kist and its contents. As though it’s just another logistical problem for him to deal with. As though Ben’s death—

  Ben’s death – the words don’t make sense. How can he be dead? She thinks of his guileless blue eyes squinting in the sunlight that first time she hypnotized him; of his breathless pink-cheeked grin as he plonked a bacon roll in her lap; of the poignant narrowness of his shoulders as she wrapped her Indian rug around him. When the taxi windows seem to mist, she realizes she’s welling up again. She gets out a fresh hanky to wipe her eyes, but the tears keep on coming: she can’t stop them. She blows her nose and Ian looks up.

  ‘Sorry, got to go,’ he barks into his phone, then: ‘Poor, poor, little Mimi,’ he says in a softer voice. ‘Come here.’ And he gathers her into his arms.

  Mary subsides against him and tries to let herself cry properly, but she’s too inhibited – or maybe it’s too late. And she realizes that the moment has passed – if there ever was a moment – and that she can’t possibly consider opening herself up to a man who’s prepared to point his camera at a father grieving over his newly dead son. So after a while she disentangles herself and sits up.

  Immediately his phone rings; he puts it to his ear without thinking. ‘Hold on, I’ll pass you over,’ he says and hands the phone to Mary.

  ‘Who is this?’ she asks.

  ‘I thought you’d be with Ian.’ It’s Laura.

  ‘How did you get this number?’

  ‘He phoned me once and my phone remembered his number,’ says Laura. ‘Amazing, these modern contraptions n’est ce pas? Have you heard from Ben? He’s still not returning my calls and—’

  ‘Laura, listen. Something terrible’s happened. There’s been an accident. Ben’s dead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘He went diving for Annie’s kist and he drowned. Mr Skipper was with him and he’s had a stroke, but I gather the doctors think he might recover.’

  ‘Say that again. I’m not sure I heard you. Did you say that Ben’s dead?’

  ‘They couldn’t revive him. We’ve just come from the hospital.’

  ‘Oh God.’

  ‘I know. I still can’t believe it.’

  ‘But it’s my fault. If I hadn’t said where the body was—’

  ‘Assigning blame isn’t helpful, Laura,’ Mary cuts her off impatiently. ‘If anything, it’s my fault for letting him witness the session, then allowing him to run off afterwards. You were right; we should have gone after him.’

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘On the way to Mr Skipper’s place to pick up some clothes.’

  ‘I’ll meet you there.’

  ‘We’ll only be a few minutes.’

  ‘Where then?’

  ‘I’ll call you when I know.’

  The taxi comes to a halt outside 60 Seymour Street and they get out. Ian pulls out his wallet while Mary sorts through Mr Skipper’s bunch of keys for likely candidates. Trying them one by one, she succeeds on her third attempt and pushes the door open over the inevitable heap of special offers and takeaway menus.

  They walk through to Mr Skipper’s part of the flat. It’s very quiet, very still. Feeling like an intruder, Mary goes into his bedroom and starts going through the old man’s meagre possessions: a drawer of neatly balled, carefully darned socks – had he darned them himself? – greyish threadbare Y-fronts, string vests, long johns. As she starts laying out a few things on the bed, a wave of sadness sweeps over her so suddenly and powerfully that she falls to her knees and starts sobbing and keening, clutching a striped pyjama top to her chest.

  After a while she looks up, and finds Ian standing in the
doorway watching her. ‘You’re right not to trust me,’ he says.

  ‘Let’s just get these things, shall we?’ she says, pulling out her hanky again.

  ‘I did go to bed with Hester.’

  ‘Ben’s dead, Ian,’ she says tiredly, blowing her nose again. ‘Can’t we talk about this another time?’ But she knows they won’t, because it doesn’t matter any more. Hester doesn’t matter any more. Ian doesn’t matter any more. Ben’s was the soul she really cared for all along.

  Later, when she’s packed the clothes into a plastic bag and is en route to the bathroom on a quest for toiletries, Ian calls Mary into the conservatory.

  ‘Hey, come and look at this,’ he says. ‘It’s quite extraordinary.’

  He’s staring at the easel with an unfinished portrait of a young woman on it. Looking into the woman’s eyes, Mary gets the strongest sense of déjà vu she has ever experienced.

  ‘It’s Peggy,’ she whispers, drawing closer. ‘Peggy Simpson. That’s her scarf. And that lipstick, and the way she’s plucked her eyebrows. Every detail – how could he possibly know?’

  ‘So who’s Peggy Simpson when she’s at home?’ Ian asks, then: ‘Oh, right. I remember. One of your previous incarnations. And old Skip just happens to have caught her exact likeness, without nicking any photos from those open access filing cabinets at the local library.’

  Mary stands back and looks at the painting from a distance. Is it possible she’s mistaken? But how can she be, when she’s seen that face so many times in the mirror, applying that red lipstick again and again – three, four, five times a day – every time some strange mouth wiped it off? No, it’s definitely Peggy – how very peculiar. She resolves to ask Mr Skipper about it. But first things first: she has to find where he keeps his razor and toothbrush.

  ‘Can you call a taxi on that magic gizmo of yours?’ she asks, coming out of the bathroom a few minutes later. Then: ‘What on earth are you doing now?’ She sighs with exasperation as Ian points his camera at the painting. Really the man is incorrigible.