Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  When she came on to the ward she was surprised to see Cassells in the nurses’ office talking to Tim. Tim had his head in his hands. Tiredness? Tears? Anna guessed he was trying to contain anger. If she were in a room with Cassells that would be what she would have to work on. Cassells was leaning forward in what nurses called the empathy pose: open posture, head tilted, arm ready to reach out and touch in a meaningless way. And so she didn’t go any further. She turned around and went home.

  For Adam, the walk to the hospital always began quickly. For one thing it was cold. It was after eleven now, and October brought a chill to the air that prevented his body from opening itself to the late evening warmth of a summer month, instead tensing itself slightly and heading off with purpose. Anyway, the hospital was out of sight when he started, so he could fool himself into thinking he was going somewhere else. He liked the cool air. He would lift his chest as he walked, look up at the scattered clouds visible against the near-full moon and try to imagine he was small, or at least smaller than the sense of eternal consequence he carried around with him made him feel.

  The streets were relatively empty: a few stragglers staggered home after turning out time; two drunks were trying to do something hilarious with a traffic cone but falling over and laughing loudly on the damp grass verge. They shouted something at him as he walked past on the other side of the road. He felt nothing: no anxiety, no sense of risk. He unconsciously slowed his walk slightly, turning his head slowly and stared evenly at them. One of them shut up. The one on the floor began to shout something about queers, but shouting and standing up proved too much for him and he fell over again, and they both started laughing at themselves or the grass or gravity.

  As Adam drew near the hospital he could see three people standing at the top of the main drive, talking; one of them looked familiar. He crossed the road and instantly felt more furtive than he liked to, or had before. He had come here at night many times and he had emboldened himself with a sense of legitimacy, of belonging. This was his place, to come and go as he wanted: a nonsense, but he clung to it anyway. The moonlight showed him the shapes of the three men—no, two men and a woman—but not their faces. He walked down a side street, pausing, turning round and looking round the corner. One of them looked like Cassells: confident stance, expensive-looking coat, floppy hair and talking with his body, moving his shoulders and torso in rhythm to whatever he was saying. That was Cassells, which made the skinny woman Tandy. Adam turned and walked down the side street, dark and residential with muted street lighting and no noise. At the end of the road he turned left, crossed over two more streets and turned left again. This took him back to the main road but further along, near the annexe. He could get into the hospital that way.

  He thought about Anna and a baby. Babies existed in another universe. He didn’t know anybody with a baby. He and Catherine had never talked about them, beyond musing on how pointless and noisy they appeared to be. He had never imagined himself holding a child, let alone fathering one, but of course this may not be anything to do with him. She wanted him to know but not to care. She wanted him to respond with generosity to her need to tell, but was relying on the fact that he wouldn’t be able to muster enough of a sense of responsibility to engage. And she had a fall-back plan just in case he turned out to be more interested than she had hoped: it might not be his. 50/50. Quite clever really.

  Or of course she might be less manipulative and controlling than that. She may just be a woman on her own trying to meet her needs without being compromised. She might hold the so-called conventional route to things in the same sort of contempt that he did. She may just want a baby without a husband. Adam’s father had left his mother when Adam was four, and died three years later. He hadn’t missed what he had never had and his mother had never remarried. She didn’t need a man either. ‘Drank all the sherry and made the place smell’ was her summary. Adam, of all people, should not be quick to judge Anna. But that didn’t mean he should be quick to trust either.

  There was a side gate that opened on to a pathway to the annexe. Adam went through it and walked round the building. At the side was the small car park he had come through earlier: it was unlit, apart from the half glow of the street lights some fifty yards away, back on the main street. At the end of the car park was another gate, higher than the others, with a stiffer catch, but he slipped through and began walking toward the side entrance of the asylum. As soon as he lifted his head and breathed out an unconscious silent sigh he could see something hanging from the large oak tree in front of him. It didn’t occur to him that it could be anything other than a person.

  Adam ran forward. All he could hear was his own breathing. He nearly stumbled, caught himself. The body looked familiar. Was it moving or was it swaying slightly? He grabbed it and lifted the weight, heavy. His face pressed against a jacket. It felt like wool; there was no smell, no sweat or pee or cigarettes. He couldn’t feel any movement but chose to imagine there might be some. He pushed the body weight up slightly more, taking more weight in his back, relieving the tension in the rope, taking the weight off of the neck. Panting and watching the breath turn to condensation he said: ‘Great, what do I do now?’ And then, directing his voice upwards: ‘Are you conscious? Can you hear me? Can you move?’ Nothing. He wondered if there was a twitch in the leg, a gentle kick of acknowledgement. He shifted the weight again and glanced up. Saw the waistcoat under the jacket, the pudgy hands hanging loosely from dropped shoulders. ‘Tim. Bollocks, Tim. Can you hear me? Tim? I’m not letting go.’ Defiant. Angry. And he wondered: ‘How long can I hold a twelve stone man who is dangling from a tree?’

  The road was quiet now, no cars. There were always cars. Not that cars were of any use. He looked toward the hospital door he had been heading for. There were no open wards in that wing. The annexe was the nearest place with people in it, maybe fifty or sixty yards away. He tried to focus on his breathing. He closed his eyes and concentrated on pushing his legs into the ground. ‘Make a foundation,’ he thought, and he muttered those words to himself over and over.

  Adam glanced up at the sky. The clouds were moving faster now, wispy and brown, flying across the moon just in his eyeline. ‘Someone will come,’ he thought, still staring at the sky. ‘Someone is bound to come.’

  His neck was stiff. He moved it and looked down; the grass was thick and damp, clumped together in tufts. He began to count to himself, three numbers for every inhalation. He got to 140. He thought about his hands: they were gripping Tim’s thighs, wasting his energy, he thought. He needed to relax the muscles he wasn’t using. His back hurt. He looked at the sky again. The clouds were getting thinner, more pink.

  ‘I’m calling for help,’ he said out loud. ‘I can’t hold you forever.’ He heard a noise coming from the hospital door. ‘Help! I need help here,’ he called, not as loud as he had thought he would. His whole body was hurting and his shoulder was numb where he was leaning into Tim’s deadweight body. He called again, louder this time, and he heard a twig. He turned his head, leaning it into Tim’s soft stomach.

  It was the young man he had seen here earlier, as bright-eyed as before, calm but attentive. He stepped toward Adam. ‘Let me’. He wrapped his arms around Tim’s other leg and hip and instantly relieved Adam of the weight. Adam exhaled loudly. ‘How long have you been holding him?’

  ‘I don’t know. You need to get help.’

  ‘No, you have been here a long time.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Adam was uncertain. He had no sense of how long he had been standing there, holding Tim up against the world.

  ‘You must have been. It’s so late it’s early. I’m out here for the dew. I can hold him while you get help.’ The young man seemed strong: he was shorter than Adam, slim, athletic. The way he held himself, the way he spread his weight on the grass as he bore more of the load, Adam knew that the young man was taking more of the weight.

  ‘OK. OK,’ he said.
‘I’ll go to the annexe and get help. I’ll be straight back, I’ll be less than two minutes, I’ll bring help.’ The young man nodded. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘Is now the time for introductions?’ he smiled.

  ‘I’m Adam.’

  ‘I know,’ the young man said. ‘I’m Jonathan.’

  ‘You got him?’ asked Adam.

  ‘Yeah. Go.’

  Adam eased down the weight he was still holding and Jonathan took it comfortably. Adam hesitated for a moment and then ran toward the annexe.

  The door was locked. He pressed every buzzer there was. It was mainly offices but there were two small specialist units, one for eating disorders and one for people with personality disorders who the therapists thought would benefit from intensive work. It seemed to take an age but he kept buzzing.

  Finally an angry tired voice said: ‘What do you want?’

  ‘I need help. There is a man hanging from a tree out here, a doctor, I need you to call an ambulance and I need some help to get him down.’

  ‘What are you talking about? I will call the police…’

  ‘Yes, call the police and an ambulance. My name is Adam Sands. I am the charge nurse on ward 6. I swear this is the truth. I need help.’

  There was a pause and then: ‘Wait a minute’.

  Two nurses came down to the door, one a middle-aged black man, the other a middle-aged Asian woman. Adam recognized the man and knew that he would recognize him too.

  ‘Have you called the ambulance?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  He pointed at the woman. ‘You call the ambulance, you come and help me. There is someone holding him.’ Adam turned and ran back across the car park toward the tree. He could hear the man trotting along behind him. When Adam got there Tim was still hanging, motionless. Dead. Jonathan was nowhere to be seen. Adam ran forward and grabbed Tim again, looking down at the grass as he did so, noticing the single footprints in the mud and the trail in the dew behind him. The single trail.

  ‘Where is your friend?’ And: ‘Oh my, that’s Dr Leith.’ The nurse stepped forward and took some of the weight but not much. Adam held on tightly but now, he knew, it was a different kind of holding.

  The ambulance arrived just before the police. They pronounced him dead almost immediately. They cut the rope and eased the body to the ground. And Adam gave a statement.

  ‘How long were you holding him for?’

  ‘I don’t know. What time is it now?’

  The policeman looked at his watch. ‘5.20.’

  ‘Really? You sure?’

  The policeman nodded. ‘Your colleague says you rang the buzzer to his ward at 4.47. How long do you think you held him for?’

  ‘Longer than I thought,’ Adam said quietly.

  ‘When did you get here?’

  Adam shrugged ‘Before midnight.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Adam nodded and swallowed hard. ‘Yeah, a little before twelve, I think. When I let go, when I went to get help, was he already dead?’

  The policeman, a thickset man with a big nose and unexpressive eyes nodded once. ‘Yes. Ambulance man says six hours or more. Couldn’t you tell?’

  Adam stared at the ambulance as they put Tim in the back. He looked again at the grass all around the tree. There was no trail coming from the hospital door, no sign of anyone else having been there at all. He turned his head toward the policeman a little, not enough to look him in the eye. His neck hurt, his back hurt. He was cold and waiting for someone to ask what on earth he was doing here at midnight anyway. He shook his head. ‘No,’ he said quietly. ‘I couldn’t tell.’

  PART 2

  September 17th 2013

  Adam closed the shop at 4.30pm, secure in the knowledge that he wasn’t risking too much prospective business. He looked behind him after locking the door—towards the collection of shops that included an Iceland, a Poundstretcher and somewhere that sold such garish handbags and leather goods that he had always assumed it was a front for drug trafficking—to see if anyone was sprinting toward him waving a book token over their heads, desperate for a late-afternoon browse, but there was nobody. He slipped the shop keys into his pocket and walked in the other direction from the shops, toward the sea. It took less than five minutes to get to the old harbour. He was carrying a small nylon bag and wearing baggy linen trousers and a black cotton jacket; he had a pork pie hat on his head. He was 6 ft 2 and looked mostly downward as he walked.

  The concrete harbour had a small wooden jetty attached to it. Adam walked along the jetty to his scuffed brown rowing boat. It had the word ‘Iris’ painted on the side and a flaking picture of a flower beside it. He hadn’t named the boat, he’d simply bought it.

  He threw his bag in and climbed down into the boat. He removed the oars from under a stained and seemingly discarded piece of green canvas and slid them into their oarlocks. He untied the mooring and, with barely a pause, navigated his way from the jetty into the centre of the harbour and began to pull his way outward. An old man in a captain’s hat waved to him. Adam nodded and smiled in acknowledgement. He had no idea who the man was. He could have been Captain Birdseye for all he knew, but Adam valued good manners and anyway he knew that someone is meant to notice when you head out to sea, just in case you don’t come back and anyone ever asks ‘Whatever happened to the bloke who ran that bookshop? The one in the stupid hat.’ At least now someone would be able to say dramatically: ‘I saw him going out, I never saw him back.’ Perhaps followed by: ‘Would you like some breaded cod?’

  When he was out of the harbour he felt himself relax; his rowing became slower, longer. He felt a cool breeze as he left the shelter and let the boat drift for a few seconds to get a clearer sense of the waves, which were small and half-hearted, and the current, which was coming from the west and not too strong. He turned the boat so that he could see the beach that curled along the seafront and rowed in a straight line away from land.

  After about five minutes he stopped. He was far enough away from the beach not to be able to make out discernible shapes, and there were no other boats out. He was alone. He stripped down to his swimming shorts, took some goggles from the nylon bag and put them around his neck. He drew the oars in and took the anchor from the bow of the boat and lowered it into the water. He looked at the land, maybe a mile away, maybe less, and he looked out to sea. No ships on the horizon; nothing but grey chopping channel. All he could hear was the water lapping the side of the boat and his own breathing. He took two weights from the back of the boat and one from the front and moved them all to the side of the rowing boat he was not now sitting on. The boat rocked a little and he took that opportunity to slip into the water. It was cold. It took his breath away. The temperature had dropped since two days ago. It had been a cold summer: the sea had not banked much heat to lose and was quickly giving up what it had. He took a moment to steady his breathing, slipped the goggles on, turned away from the boat, put his face down into the water and began to swim a gentle front crawl. The cold stung his face a little but he knew that would pass. He concentrated on breathing slowly, to the right, turning his body to ensure he was using his back muscles to pull him through the water, stretching his spine as he did so. He thought about his fingers reaching out beyond themselves into the water, trying to find the rhythm of the sea. He tried to glide, letting his stroke complete itself and nearly touching his front hand with his active hand before pulling on the water again. He didn’t look behind himself when he breathed, watching only the horizon. The water was cold, he could feel it in his fingers and his feet and so he kicked, which made him move faster and a little higher in the water. The swimming was easy, he could have gone for miles; on noticing that, he slowed down, glided to a halt and turned on to his back to look behind him. He was maybe 200 metres from the boat. He trod water for a moment, noticed that he wasn’t so cold as to be uncomfortable, not
iced he was breathing more easily now. He slipped the goggles up and looked around: nothing to see but sea.

  He pulled the goggles back down, flipped on to his front again and swam. Long languid strokes, pulling his arm through and touching the side of his hip, feeling himself push the water away from him, tasting the thick salt on his lips when he breathed. He didn’t stop until he noticed the water had become colder and even then he didn’t look behind him. He just rested his head back and felt for the waves. The grey had a denser blue to it now; he knew he was in deeper water. Slowly he turned around; the boat was some way away, maybe a mile, maybe more.

  He felt the water lap around him. He felt beautifully small. He tried to imagine what could go wrong, what fear would be like here in a fading light as the sea cooled around him. He couldn’t think of anything. He felt nothing at all.

  9. Who Knows Where The Time Goes

  ‘Could be hormones?’ a friend had said over a glass of wine and a takeaway a week or so previously, but Anna didn’t really take it seriously. That was the sort of thing people said when they couldn’t be bothered to talk. It could be something a bit more existential, Anna had thought: Tom had finished his degree and decided to stay on and do his Masters. To her, that simply put off whether or not he would move back home to London or stay in Manchester, where he had a life, friends, an affordable flat, perhaps a significant other she had never met, but not his mum.

  Not that she was a clingy mum, she wasn’t. She bordered on obsessive in her non-clinginess, aware that as a lone parent she might be prone to a reliance on his existence that could smother him. She made a point of phoning him only when it was her turn and always after the same amount of time that he had left it since her previous call. She had been able to help him financially, having saved up for his education since he was six, and had been quite proud of his reasoning that Manchester was both a good university and also more affordable than London or Paris or Madrid. She hadn’t said that it might have proved cheaper if he had stayed in London and not moved out of their flat in Stoke Newington, because she knew that going to University was about growing up. And anyway, Manchester didn’t feel as rejecting as Madrid would have.