Chris Collett - [Tom Mariner 01]

by The Worm in The Bud (txt)

  ‘I can’t go back to that. I should, but I can’t.’

  Mariner watched a single tear escape in a wet trail down her cheek, before she turned away from him, pretending to be fascinated by the view from the window that she saw many times each day. But he could see from the movement of her shoulders that the battle had been lost. Mariner felt he ought to do something, but he wasn’t sure what. He’d never been much good at this stuff.

  Prepared for rejection, he went over to her and rested his hands lightly on her shoulders. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘I really didn’t mean to…’

  But the rest was left unsaid as she turned and clutched at him, all the pent-up stress and emotion of the past days pouring out in great wrenching sobs, her head pushing into his chest, while Mariner held her, breathing her in. Sod professionalism, he thought.

  After a while her crying subsided and she stepped back from him, rubbing angrily at her eyes. ‘Oh God, I’m so sorry, that was stupid.’

  Mariner could think of several words to describe the experience, but stupid wasn’t one of them. ‘It’s been a tough time,’ he said, inadequately.

  She managed a short, staccato laugh. ‘You can say that again.’ She took a gulp of air. ‘The irony is,’ she went on, ‘that this is the last thing in the world Mum and Dad would have wanted. They knew first hand what hard work Jamie is. They never intended for either Eddie or me to have to take care of him. Look out for him, yes, of course, but not wash him, dress him, feed him, clean his teeth, day in, day out. They didn’t expect that of us. It’s always people on the outside who make the judgements.’

  ‘I wasn’t judging you,’ said Mariner truthfully.

  ‘Oh, it’s not your fault…’ She tailed off, exhausted and spent. ‘Sorry, I’ve made your shirt wet.’ She patted the damp patch and Mariner thought her touch would burn a hole in his chest.

  ‘That’s all right, I’ve got another one at home,’ he said casually, stepping away so that she wouldn’t notice the effect she was having on him.

  ‘Not in that colour I hope.’ Mariner took the weak attempt at humour as a good sign.

  ‘’Fraid so,’ he said. ‘Do you keep any brandy?’ She told him where and Mariner found it and poured her a generous measure.

  ‘I was wrong about what I said before,’ she said, taking it from him and leaning back against the kitchen units.

  ‘What?’ Mariner sat down again, finding that he couldn’t quite trust his knees to support him.

  ‘About Eddie being a martyr. It wasn’t his problem, it’s mine. I was the one who felt guilty, about leaving him to cope with Jamie. At first I could use my marriage as an excuse. By the time it was over I’d convinced myself that Eddie didn’t need my help, he had it taped. He and Jamie were a team.’ She fixed her gaze on the glass she slowly turned over in her hand. ‘When Jamie was born, Eddie was old enough not to mind,’ she said. ‘He was the grown-up, responsible one who helped out whenever he could. Jamie responded to that. He’d do things for Eddie that he wouldn’t do for anyone else. I suppose in a funny sort of way I was jealous of their special relationship. I’d always resented Jamie like hell, because until he came along and wrecked everything, I was Daddy’s sweet little girl. That’s why I was determined that it wasn’t going to happen all over again. Perhaps I still am. I’m the selfish one. I’ve had enough of autism and what it does to you. I just want a normal life.’

  ‘Nobody can blame you for that.’

  She looked up at him, her eyes shining brightly. ‘No. But it doesn’t stop me from blaming myself.’

  To his considerable relief, Knox and Jenny had already retired when Mariner got home. So, safely alone, Mariner got out the dictionary and looked up PSTIs in the abbreviations section. It wasn’t listed. He tried the word potent, ‘cogent and strong’ it said, so little to be learned there.

  Then, almost unconsciously, his eye slid down the page to ‘impotent’. It didn’t make for comforting reading.

  ‘Powerless; helpless, decrepit; wholly lacking in sexual power, unable to copulate or reach orgasm.’ Hmm. Not all bad then. He didn’t have any problem with reaching orgasm, just as long as no one else was involved. With the right woman, at the right time it would be resolved. It was just a question of finding the right woman. He refused to allow himself to speculate on whether he already had. God he’d wanted to kiss Anna Barham so badly tonight, and that was a new and worrying experience. Never before had he been tempted to overstep that particular professional line.

  And there had been no shortage of opportunity. Right from his first week in the job on his first solo call-out when he’d been asked to attend a domestic, and the door had been answered by a young woman in a negligee so sheer it needn’t have been there. Only when she insisted on encouraging his attentions had he realised it was a set-up. His initiation into the squad, that no one would let him forget for months. Since then, unlike Tony Knox, he’d kept everything well under control, until now. This deprivation was beginning to impact on everything.

  Crawling up to bed, Mariner passed the small hours in a restless sleep and by the time the birds began singing, he’d resolved to at least phone the doctor. He wouldn’t be offered an appointment for weeks anyway, so he’d have time to prepare.

  ‘If you can you pop down to surgery in about twenty minutes, Mr Mariner, we’ve just had a cancellation.’ The receptionist’s response the following morning wasn’t the one that she’d given during his nocturnal rehearsal, and he almost bottled out. But surely it couldn’t be that big a deal.

  In his head it had all gone pretty smoothly. A brief chat with the Asian guy he’d seen last time But things weren’t going Mariner’s way. Dr Suliman was on holiday, and in his place was a young female locum, fresh out of sixth form, judging from her youthful appearance, and a fully paid-up member of the Spanish Inquisition to boot. ‘How can I help?’ she asked.

  Her innocent gaze fixed earnestly on him, and all of Mariner’s careful, mentally prepared descriptions of the problem deserted him. ‘I can’t get it up,’ he blurted out, with rather less eloquence than he’d intended.

  ‘Is the problem erection, ejaculation, or both?’ she asked, as if she was offering him a choice of pizza toppings.

  ‘Erection,’ Mariner said, shrivelling inside.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘About a year.’

  She looked up. ‘You’ve waited a long time before seeking help.’

  ‘I thought it would get better.’

  ‘Mm.’ Despite her youth she seemed to have heard that one before. ‘Take off your jacket and roll up your sleeve, would you?’

  It seemed a novel approach, but Mariner did as he was told.

  ‘How old are you, Mr Mariner?’ she asked, slapping a strip of inner tube around his exposed bicep and pumping it up until all circulation to his lower arm had been staunched.

  ‘Forty-three.’ Compressed air escaped with a hiss.

  ‘I see. That’s fine.’ He took that as a comment on his blood pressure and not his age. ‘Any other health problems?’

  ‘Not that I’m aware of.’

  ‘You’re not on any medication?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘How’s your peeing?’

  Mariner looked blank.

  ‘Bladder control okay, steady stream and all that?’ the doctor prompted.

  ‘It’s fine,’ said Mariner, not knowing what else to say.

  ‘And is your difficulty in achieving an erection, or maintaining it?’

  ‘Maintaining it.’

  ‘Okay then, let’s have a look.’ A look?? ‘Take off your things and get up on the couch please.’ Mariner wanted to ask if this was strictly necessary, but presumably she wasn’t just doing this for fun. Presumably. Feeling vulnerable, with only his shirttails to protect his dignity, Mariner hoisted himself on to the couch, praying that he wasn’t about to be caught in a lie. He needn’t have worried. Her cool, latex-sheathed fingers had an intimidating effect.

>   ‘Well physically everything seems in order,’ she assured him. ‘We’ll need a urine sample to rule out diabetes, but that’s unlikely if you’re getting no other symptoms. You can get dressed.’

  But after he’d pulled on his clothes there were further questions. They started innocuously enough. What was his occupation? Was it often stressful? Had he felt particularly stressed during the last year or so? No more than usual.

  That seemed to disappoint her, so she tried a different, more intimate tack. Did he masturbate successfully? Well, yes. Was there a pattern to when he lost his erection, was it always at the same point during intercourse? Yes, just prior to penetration, he just—collapsed.

  Ah. Was he in a stable relationship? No, his last one finished just over a year ago.

  ‘Tell me about that,’ she said.

  Despite reservations about the relevance of this line of questioning, Mariner found himself pouring out the whole sorry tale about Greta. It had started off so well until she moved in with him and started holding him to account for every minute of his day. He felt physically sick, even just thinking about it, as the memory of that final evening replayed itself in his mind.

  ‘Dinner won’t be long,’ Greta had chirped from the kitchen the second he’d walked in the door. He groaned inwardly. After a harrowing day spent interviewing a seventy-two-year-old woman who’d been brutally beaten in her own home, he needed space to get normal again. To this end he’d retreated to the bathroom, but he hadn’t yet got around to fitting a lock and Greta had pursued him there, wrapping her arms around him as he leaned over the washbasin.

  ‘Who’s a clever boy then?’ She smiled enigmatically back at him from the mirror, a hand straying down over his groin.

  Mariner wished she wouldn’t talk in riddles all the time.

  ‘What?’ he asked irritably.

  ‘You’re going to be a daddy.’

  Mariner had almost passed out. Horror wasn’t the desired response, he could tell immediately from Greta’s face, but he couldn’t help it, he was horrified.

  ‘I thought we wanted a family,’ she wailed, her misery equal to his. And maybe he did, somewhere in the safe and distant future, in an abstract kind of way, but not now.

  Occasionally since then he’d wondered if he could have compromised. But he couldn’t, not over something so big.

  And the experience had shaken him, because up until that point he’d always considered his mother and himself to be the wronged parties, when they’d been abandoned by his own father. But now, for the first time he could see it from the opposite perspective. Had his mother sprung the same unwelcome surprise on his dad?

  Greta was distraught, and later that night Mariner had tried to make it up to her but had failed dismally, as he had done ever since.

  ‘So it’s since then that this problem has developed?’ asked the doctor, bringing Mariner back to the present.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And have you had further contact with your girlfriend?

  Did she go ahead with the pregnancy?’

  ‘I assume so, yes.’ Even though he’d tried contacting her to offer financial support, Greta had completely stonewalled him. It wasn’t enough she said. She didn’t want his money. She wanted a husband and father for her child.

  After a while he’d just given up.

  ‘Well,’ said the doctor, after a considered pause. ‘I think this is all in your mind. You’re feeling guilty.’

  ‘Guilty about what??’ Mariner was indignant. He wasn’t the one who’d walked out.

  ‘Well, you must surely have thought from time to time that you might be a father, that there could be some small being out there who’s your responsibility?’

  ‘My partner made it very clear. Whatever she chose to do, she didn’t want me involved. She was going to take care of it.’ But the doctor was right. It hadn’t stopped him from wondering. Rarely a day went by when he didn’t consider the possibility of a small child out there going through life under the same cloud of uncertainty that he had.

  The doctor looked at him. ‘I would suggest you look for a resolution, because at the moment your body is telling you loud and clear that it won’t risk getting into that kind of trouble again.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘Yes. It’s saying “don’t have sex, it leads to unwanted pregnancies”. Sort things out with your ex and I think you’ll find that this is just a passing phase. I’ll prescribe you a couple of Viagra though, just in case. That ought to be enough to kick-start you again.’ Mariner winced at the choice of phrase. ‘There might be side effects of course, including headaches and nausea. But see how you go.

  You’ll need to weigh those against the benefits.’ His own line coming back at him.

  Taking the prescription, Mariner tucked it into his wallet where it kept ironic company with a packet of three, purchased six months before but still unopened.

  Chapter Fifteen

  DI Mariner was astute, Anna thought as she waited for Jamie to wrestle into his T-shirt. They were getting used to this. For some weird reason she’d woken up this morning thinking about the detective. She liked him. She liked him a lot. After he’d gone, she’d tried to remember the last time she’d been held by a man, not as a precursor to sex, but just held. She couldn’t, not even by her dad. Despite the emotional turmoil going on inside it had felt good. She could still recall that musky smell of a man who’s put in an honest day’s graft, sweetened by the faintest hint of aftershave.

  It came as something of a surprise to her that she could be even remotely attracted to a man like Mariner. She unfailingly went for ‘dark and classically handsome’, never for ‘pale and interesting’, however blue the eyes. Mariner was thin to the point of skinny too, and older than the men she generally fancied, he must be well into his forties. But there was something about his quiet dependability that she found somehow warm and reassuring.

  Jamie could have a complete change of clothes today; the new ones she’d bought for him. The rest could go in the wash, including those he’d worn a couple of nights ago. But as Anna turned them inside out something heavy dropped out of the pocket. Jamie pounced on it and she had to wrest it from him. It was a mobile phone. Not hers, but Jonathan’s. She had to smile at that. He’d be lost without it, but too proud to contact her to get it back—if he even knew where it was. Just out of curiosity she had a look at the stored numbers. Hers was the third in the list, probably about what she’d expect. And Melanie? In at number eight and climbing steadily.

  In the hall, the letterbox snapped shut. A couple of bills and a package had dropped on to the mat. Anna went to pick them up, turning her attention to the large padded envelope first. Clearly one of the postal service’s sorting office disasters, it was battered and crumpled and somewhere along the way one edge had been repaired with adhesive tape. But reading the address made her shiver.

  ‘It’s Eddie’s writing,’ she murmured in disbelief.

  ‘Eddie,’ Jamie echoed meaninglessly, continuing to shovel cereal into his mouth, some of the milk not quite making it and running down his chin. Anna had drawn the line at Hula Hoops for breakfast, and after several mornings of scraping various glutinous substances off the walls, had finally found a cereal that he liked.

  Anna’s hands trembled slightly as she took the thick envelope into the lounge. It was postmarked a week ago last Friday, so it had taken a long time to get here, literally caught up in the system judging by its battered condition.

  But why was Eddie sending her things through the post, and why now? Had he known then that his time was running out, or was it just an unhappy coincidence? Tearing open the flap she slid out a blue envelope folder. It contained a sheaf of papers held together with a paper-clip. There was no explanatory note, just a series of computer printouts that looked as if they’d been taken from the Internet.

  It took Anna several moments to work out that they represented information on medication, the kind used to control autistic behaviours and su
ddenly Anna got the message. Eddie was helping her out. He’d have known that if anything happened to him, one of the first things she would do was to try and find a residential place for Jamie, and that she would come up against the same insistence on medication as he had. So he was sharing his knowledge with her. Perhaps it was even his way of saying it was all right, he’d had to consider it too.

  Not for the first time, Anna wondered what Eddie could possibly have been involved in that would put him in such danger, and experienced a stinging guilt that she hadn’t been able to help. All she could do now was accept and make use of what he’d given her. There wasn’t time to read it all now, and at first glance she wasn’t even sure if she would understand it anyway, so she slid the papers back into the folder envelope and put them in a drawer for when she could set aside more time.

  The journey to the day centre was becoming routine and Anna no longer had to make a conscious effort to steer the car in the right direction.

  ‘Wow, look at you today,’ said Francine, to Jamie when she saw him.

  ‘I thought he could do with a new wardrobe,’ Anna said.

  ‘We didn’t have too bad a night either, he was only up a couple of times.’

  ‘That’s great.’

  Yes, it was. And in a strange way Anna was beginning to feel like an old hand. She’d planned on going back to the office today, if only to touch base, but the package had brought Eddie back to the forefront of her thoughts. After the funeral, she had requested that his ashes be buried in the garden of remembrance, along with a small commemorative plaque. The crematorium official had told her that it would take at least forty-eight hours to arrange, and now she felt a sudden desire to check that the task had been done. Leaving the day centre she took a diversion to Lodge Hill.

  It had rained during the night and as she crossed the damp grass, a layer of early morning mist hung suspended over the ground. Combined with the noise of several rooks cawing in the trees it lent the crematorium the quality of a Gothic horror film, and it was almost a relief to Anna to find that she was not quite alone. As she approached the area where Eddie’s plaque should have been planted, she saw another woman, dressed, not in the black hooded cloak that would have sustained the illusion, but in jeans and a leather jacket. As Anna came nearer, she realised that the woman was crouching directly in front of Eddie’s newly planted memorial, arranging a small bunch of carnations, and unaware of Anna’s presence, until she spoke.