by Tim Weaver
The cinema wasn’t there any more, so how could she know? I started to wonder if Derryn had had a sister she hadn’t told me about, some close relative – a cousin perhaps – who looked a little like her. But that would have meant that she’d deliberately lied to me for the entire time that we were together and that her family had done the same, that they were all in on some secret that they’d decided to keep back from me, and I knew that wasn’t the case. I’d got on so well with her parents, and when her brother was home I’d got on well with him too, it was just none of them was around to ask now: her parents had died within a year of each other in the late nineties, and her brother had been killed in Basra in 2004 when an IED went off under his truck. There were no nieces, no nephews, no cousins. It had just been her and me.
‘David says you’re not Derryn,’ Field told her.
‘I don’t understand why he’s doing this to –’
But then she stopped; and a second later something sparked in her face, as if a light had snapped on.
‘Wait,’ she said, ‘he’s had these moments before.’
Field leaned closer. ‘Moments?’
‘These moments of denial.’ She turned to the camera again, her lips pressed together; saddened. ‘He’s needed medical help before. He must be confused again. That’s why he drove off and left me there. It’s come back.’
‘What’s come back?’
‘He had a nervous breakdown.’
‘This is bullshit,’ I said into the monitor, but the only reaction I got was from the officer at the door, who turned and looked in at me.
‘You’re saying David’s ill?’ Field asked.
‘He might try to deny it,’ the woman replied, ‘or might have forgotten entirely. But it’s his sickness talking. It’s returned.’ She put a hand to her mouth and started to cry properly. ‘Please don’t let it be this,’ she whimpered, her words barely audible now. ‘Please don’t let his mind have gone again.’
6
‘I’m not sick,’ I said, my words lost in the silence of the room.
Onscreen, the woman blinked, saying nothing else, her eyes wet, her face pale, and then Field came forward at the table, a deep frown on her face. She glanced at the notes she’d made. ‘David says his wife died of breast cancer in 2009.’
‘It’s his sickness,’ the woman told Field. ‘It must be.’
No. No, it’s not a sickness, it’s the truth.
Field, pencil poised above her pad, glanced at the camera, as if waiting for an answer. What? I thought, looking back at her. Are you seriously asking me this? I glanced over my shoulder, towards the door, anger humming beneath my skin. I didn’t want to be in here, in this cramped, overheated room, listening to all of these lies on headphones. I wanted to be inside that interview suite. I wanted to know what the hell was going on.
‘Everything that happened,’ the woman said, ‘it just destroyed him.’
I stared Field down as she looked at the camera again, even though I didn’t blame her for any of this: she was only asking the same questions I’d asked myself. Across the table from her, the woman sniffed, wiping her nose with a crumpled tissue, and as the audio feed became quiet, I closed my eyes and repeated what I knew to be true: On 26 November 2009, I woke up and Derryn was lying next to me in bed. She’d died in her sleep. I was due to take her to the hospice that day, because the doctor said she only had a week, maybe two at the most. I opened my eyes again. I felt tears coming. I tried to blink them away, tried to find some measure of control. She was so ill I didn’t know what to do for her. I couldn’t make her comfortable. She was in so much pain, it was … I was just … I …
‘David says his wife died in 2009.’
My thoughts fell away as Field started speaking again.
‘That’s not what happened,’ the woman said in a low voice. She gathered herself for a few seconds longer and, more controlled now, looked across the table at Field: ‘I was diagnosed for the first time in March 2007. I went through chemotherapy and it was successful – really successful – and I was given the all clear in October that year. After that, David moved to the States, to LA. The paper wanted him to cover the run-up to the election, first from the West Coast and then from Washington. He didn’t want to go, and the paper said he didn’t have to, but then I told him I would quit my job at the hospital and come with him, so I flew out to join him in November. I’d always wanted to go to America, especially Los Angeles. I’d barely been further than Europe.’
I realized I was holding my breath.
All of this was true.
‘We lived in Santa Monica,’ she went on, turning in her chair and looking up at the camera, as if she knew I was watching. ‘David will remember that. That place we rented just off Wilshire Boulevard, D?’ She glanced at Field. ‘It was a couple of blocks from the clinic that I worked in. It took me time to adjust to LA, but I loved it eventually.’
Field looked sideways at the camera. I’d given her a brief history of my marriage, of the time Derryn and I had spent abroad – and this was it. This was what I’d told her – more than what I’d told her. The woman knew everything.
‘How do you know all of that?’ Field asked the woman, echoing my thoughts.
‘Because I was there.’
‘David says you can’t have been.’
‘Because I’m not his wife?’
‘Right.’
‘This is crazy,’ she replied. ‘He knows I was. I came out to the States with him and we loved it. We were so happy. Then, in March 2008, the cancer came back a second time.’ She paused, swallowed; looked at Field. ‘I got my treatment in America for that, because the oncologist where I worked – Leon Singer, a man who went on to become a great friend of ours – pulled some strings and did the treatment for virtually nothing – and, again, I beat it. We moved to Washington in late September, early October, so that David could cover the elections from there, and then – after the elections were over – we moved back home to the UK, in late November.’
Silence.
Field looked sideways at the camera again and I saw conflict in her eyes, a mirror image of how she’d looked in the moments before leaving me to go into the interview suite. There were clear signs of doubt now as she started to wonder if it was the woman telling the truth, not me.
‘The cancer came back in April 2009,’ the woman said softly, looking down at the table, the fingers of one hand gripped at the edge of it. ‘It had spread. Things were a lot worse this time. I didn’t know if I could go through another round of treatment. I told D I wasn’t sure I could face it. I was so tired.’ She looked up, tears glistening in her eyes. ‘He kept saying I should do it, over and over: “You should do it, you should do it.” We sat in the bedroom, on the edge of the bed, and he took my hand and he begged me to do it. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to live, it was just I was so tired of it all. The doctors, the hospital visits, the sickness, the recovery, the constant fear that it would come back again. It had hollowed me out. I loved David more than anything in the world, but I was so tired.’ She wiped at an eye. ‘So I started it, but then I changed my mind. I told him I loved him, but I couldn’t go through it all again. I just couldn’t do it.’
I could hardly rip my gaze away from the woman. How was this possible? I looked at her in the monitor, my throat tremoring. How the hell did she know all of this? There was no way she should have been able to recite this stuff. Most of it had been private conversations.
Unless she’d known Derryn somehow.
Onscreen, she turned and looked up at me.
‘See?’ she said. ‘It’s me, D. It’s Derryn. It’s time to take me home again.’
I tried not to cry. I tried not to let her get to me. However she was doing this, I didn’t want it to work. I knew she wasn’t the woman I loved – I could see that, I could feel it – and yet I couldn’t stop myself. She looked enough like Derryn, seemed to speak enough like her – she knew everything we’d done together; the things we�
�d said – that finally, reluctantly, it became too much: I felt a tear break from my eye.
‘I know why he thinks I died,’ she said.
‘Because he’s sick again?’ Field asked, a hint of scepticism lingering in her voice.
‘Yes. Even now, he can still get confused sometimes.’
‘About what?’
‘About everything. I didn’t die. It’s true, I stopped the treatment for a short time, but then I started it again when I saw how it was destroying him, just like he wanted me to. And it worked this time. It really worked. The cancer hasn’t come back.’
‘He says that’s not true,’ Field said.
‘It is.’
I felt more tears falling.
‘After that third time, after I told him I wasn’t going to carry on with the treatment, that I couldn’t face any more of it, he had a breakdown – and by the time I started the chemo again it was too late. I thought I would be saving us both, but he was already too far gone. He was already in treatment himself by that time and spent the next fifteen months being seen at St Augustine’s. Do you know where that is?’
‘No,’ Field replied.
‘It’s on the river,’ the woman said.
‘The river? Do you mean the Thames?’
‘Yes. About a mile from where the planes take off.’
There was only one airport by the Thames: London City.
I shook my head, trying to clear my eyes, impotent in front of the monitor, unable to affect the direction or flow of the conversation. She doesn’t know the name of the river or the name of the airport, I wanted to tell Field. How can you trust her?
‘He saw a doctor there.’
‘A doctor?’
‘Yes. Erik McMillan. Erik with a k.’
The scepticism was gone now: the naming of the hospital, the doctor – Field’s doubts were back and they were absolutely real.
‘Over time, it got so bad that he stopped recognizing me. He kept telling me that I wasn’t his wife, that his wife had died. I begged him to stop it, tried to tell him I’d decided to have the treatment after all and it had worked, but he wouldn’t have it.’
‘You’re lying,’ I said, my fingernails digging into the desk.
‘He kept saying I was dead.’
I stared at Field, willed her to hear me. She’s lying. It’s all lies.
‘David’s records will still be at St Augustine’s,’ she said to Field, ‘so you’ll be able to see I’m not making this up.’ She looked at the camera again, her head tilted to one side as if she could actually see me; as if she felt sorry for who I’d become. ‘He had his breakdown, and he stopped recognizing me. When I was around him, he would say I wasn’t his wife, I wasn’t Derryn. He would say I was an impostor. He wouldn’t sleep in the same bed as me. He used to scream at me sometimes, asking me who I was and what I was doing in his home. It was only after working with Dr McMillan that he got better.’
None of this is true.
‘All of it’s true,’ she said, as if she’d actually heard me, and then she repeated herself more forcefully, ‘all of it’s true. In the years since his treatment, ninety-nine per cent of the time he’s been fine. But, occasionally, he has lapses. Occasionally, he’ll still have these terrible, hurtful moments. I walk into a room sometimes and he goes a little crazy. He starts shouting and screaming at me for no reason.’
She held up her bandaged wrist.
This was who I’d become, according to her.
This was her evidence.
‘Sometimes he still says I’m not Derryn.’
7
Field took me to an interview suite.
It was large and cold, the walls plain, the heating yet to kick in. She got a uniformed constable to make me a coffee and then asked if I was okay to wait. I could have walked away and gone home, I wasn’t under arrest, but there seemed little point. I needed to find out who this woman was, why she was lying, and how she knew so much about my life with Derryn – and the best way for me to do that was by quizzing Field.
As I waited, I tried to get my thinking straight.
If the woman genuinely believed that she was Derryn, for whatever reason, that suggested some kind of mental health problem. It was possible the woman had spent all, or part, of the eight years that she claimed to have been living with me being treated at a facility somewhere. It was possible it had been St Augustine’s, the place she’d mentioned to Field, and this was why she’d brought it up. Or it could be much simpler than that: she could be a liar and all her lies were to serve some other purpose. For now, I couldn’t imagine what.
There was so much about her that I found disconcerting, and not just the fact that her resemblance to Derryn was genuine and striking. Grief had turned the memories of my wife into a sort of photograph album, individual moments pinned in my mind; clear snapshots of occasions and the way the two of us had felt about them. After so long, I didn’t recall where every freckle on Derryn’s cheeks had been; rather, what I remembered of our marriage were things like the two of us going to Brighton one summer and laughing so hard that Derryn accidentally snorted candyfloss up her nose. I remembered, as a journalist, working all night on a story about corruption in the Home Office and thinking it was so important, then meeting Derryn for breakfast the next morning and finding out that she’d had four children die in A&E overnight. Seeing the anguish on her face, I realized my story didn’t matter at all, not compared to that, and even now I could recall the sadness of that breakfast, like a prickle in my skin. I had no memory of what she looked like that morning, though she would have been in her uniform and probably had her hair up, but I’d never forget the way it felt, the sadness of it, the helplessness that came with knowing I could do nothing to comfort her.
When I’d looked at the woman in the interview suite, I’d seen an echo of my wife. It was why, at first, my legs had almost given way, why my heart had felt like it was escaping my chest. But it wasn’t her. I’d seen the differences physically – they were minor, but they were there in the lips, in the shape of the nose, in the jaw – but I’d felt them too. None of the memories of my wife reverberated back to me when I heard the woman speak; I didn’t feel the tingle in my skin, the unspoken, automatic charge of electricity that Derryn and I had shared for the sixteen years we’d been together. And that, as much as the physical disparities, was why I knew. That was why I knew I’d shared nothing with this woman – not a single memory; nothing like that day in Brighton, or the heartache of that breakfast. I knew it in my blood.
So who was she?
She knew about conversations Derryn and I had had, the pet name my wife had given me, the things I’d said in private. She knew all about Derryn’s illness, when it had happened and where, even the name of Leon Singer, the oncologist we’d become friends with in the US. The account that she gave of our time in America, Derryn’s work at the Santa Monica clinic, the way – four months after we got back to the UK – the cancer returned for a third time and I begged her to go through the chemo again, it was all true. And if she knew that much, it was a fair bet that she knew more.
Perturbed, I checked my watch.
I’d been inside the room almost an hour. The constable came back and offered me a second cup of coffee, which I accepted, and as he walked away, I removed my phone and put in a search for St Augustine’s.
The official website was conventional, just a huge photograph of the front of the hospital building – stark, white, modern. On the left of the homepage was a series of links – Home, What We Do, Foundation, History, Support Us and Contact – but nothing had been optimized for mobile and none of the links worked.
A few moments later, Field entered.
‘Well, this is a bit of a mess,’ she said, and handed me a coffee.
‘Only if you actually believe what she’s telling you.’
Field didn’t respond.
‘Do you believe what she’s telling you?’
Field pulled the chair out from under
the table, its legs making a dull scratching sound on the carpet.
‘All I know for sure is that one of you is lying to me.’
8
She placed her jacket on the back of the chair and sat down, retrieving her notebook and pencil. I tried to get a sense of what she’d written while she’d been interviewing the woman, but could only make out a few words: account, illness.
She took a deep breath.
‘It’s not Derryn,’ I said.
‘Does she look like Derryn?’
She waited for my response, eyeing me.
‘Does she look like Derryn?’ she repeated.
‘There are some obvious similarities.’
‘But, to your mind, not enough?’
‘No.’
‘She’s adamant she’s your wife.’
She looked up again, her grey eyes like wet pebbles. Under the pale glow of the strip lights, the clip in her hair – a plain metal V – glinted slightly as she shifted position in the seat. She watched me for a second, tapping her pencil against the pad.
‘Her story doesn’t stack up,’ I said. ‘You know it doesn’t.’
Field didn’t say anything.
‘She goes all the way out to Woolwich to try and find a pharmacy, then comes into Charing Cross because she wants the police to call me? Why choose this police station? Why bother involving you at all? I mean, wouldn’t it have been easier for her to have just gone back to the home we apparently share? Except, of course, she can’t because she doesn’t know where Ealing is – in fact, she doesn’t know London at all.’
Field leaned back, crossing her arms.
‘Should I be worried that you’re silent?’
‘I’m maintaining an open mind,’ she said.
‘You really think she’s telling the truth?’
‘I think she might be ill.’
‘Well, you’ve got that right.’
‘Physically ill, I mean.’