The vigour I felt was considerable, yet held in reserve. There seemed no need to exert myself, only to tend my garden. I was going nowhere, but felt a curious pleasure in busily doing nothing – watching music videos in tee-shirt and track-pants, dipping into Elle and Marie Claire between sessions with Radiguet and Lautréamont. My old Forrest-impetus, the former knife-sharpness in my head, had been traded for a curiously diffuse sensation: the world felt turned inside out – melancholy had a new face and a new name – but I experienced a new interest too in the things around me – concepts, behaviours. It seemed I could better make out the light falling on the edges of things. And this began to feel like the true prize for which I’d sold myself, a means by which I could forget the recent ordeals, reap the grace I had bargained for, before whatever reckoning fell due.
One morning I threw open the window and a light freshening air pervaded the room. Until then I’d paid only cursory attention, a man’s disregard, to the flowers in the clear vase on the sill: heavily fragrant honeysuckle, violet, tuberose, lilies a perfect white with perfect yellow pistils, not perfectly fresh but un-wilted yet on their tall stalks. At the touch of one petal, though, my sense of Eloise’s relationship with Leon Worrell became precise and vivid. (My sense of ‘Robert Forrest’, how I had treated her, came bundled in the same, and made a sour reproach.) But the flowers directed me to hunt out a letter kept folded in her bedside. Here, then, was my protector. And for the first time in my bargained-for out-of-body state, I felt a pull that was not quite voluntary – a proper residual instinct or urging of the former host. I hadn’t thought Eloise contained such strength of will. But I had the strangest conviction now that this was a door to which I had been led.
* * *
Watching and waiting from the seat by my window, it occurred to me that Eloise might need glasses. Maybe it was the Indian-summer heat that made a haze before my eyes, but then as I saw Leon’s hip-rolling stroll up the Blakedene drive – visibly not quite at ease yet focused, expectant – I felt an unaccountable cloggy drowsiness come over me, a sort of sensuous inanition. I had to steel myself for this meeting I’d requested, since it seemed to me that whether I could function in his presence would determine whether I had any hold over – any stake in – this life I’d so presumptuously robbed.
Seated in the wainscoted library I knew we were being watched, but Leon’s eyes were fixed on me, possibly the most solicitous gaze I’d felt in years. I heard myself asking after Clyde, his son, how things were for him at school. Leon sighed, meaningfully.
‘Ah he’s bright, so bright. But it’s a problem, see. My boy’s got a sweet way, sweet manners – I’d like him to keep ’em – but I just don’t think they’re gonna let him.’ (‘They’, I discerned, were the rough boys, the bane of Leon’s life, males like his brother.) ‘I was done with all that bad-boy shit time I was fourteen, man. Lynval, he still thinks he’s the bwai, and I’m the broke-joke, coconut boy. Good job he’s not so tough.’
I enquired after the state of his business: he sounded a little defensive, for all that his order-book was full. He asked how my treatment had gone, eyes a tad clouded by suspicion. I gathered he found the Blakedene techniques (and tariff ) outlandish. I had to agree, but also felt bound to persuade him my cure had taken. ‘My shrink, he’s a sound man, Leon. He’s shown me I’ve only got one life to live, can’t let it be defined by somebody else – what happened in the past …’
He wasn’t wholly mollified. So what was I going to do now? What did he want me to do? He shook his head, said that was ‘typical me’, happy-go-lucky, not to be trusted, my time with him just an optional accessory. His face was only rueful as he chided me: I intuited that his tongue could get a good deal closer to sandpaper. But in truth I was more involved in the sense of how beautiful this man was, how much bigger than me he now seemed. Something shifted me nearer to him, urged me to tell him I would like for ‘us’ to try a new start, a proper being-together. He absorbed this, rubbed his chin, weighed me in the balance.
‘I got to be who I am, Elle, got to speak my mind. Don’t want to have to brush off the life I already got. Can’t shed my skin, y’know?’
I assured him that nor could I – that such integrity was vital.
‘And Clyde, he’s gotta to have structure round him, Ellie, that means more than just being his buddy in the playground.’
I told him I knew as much. His smile remained on the edge. He looked aside, shaking his head mildly. ‘Well, you know how it is … We both got troubles enough, now we’re gonna get shit off people all day.’
‘Fuck ’em,’ I said, smiled, laced his fingers in mine.
He laughed, properly, heartily, truly amused by me. ‘Hey, this is good, Elle. Straight talking. How come we never talk properly?’
‘De quoi voulez-vous parler, mon chéri?’
‘Uh, la poésie …?’ he deadpanned. Now my turn to laugh. He came over earnest. ‘Means a lot to me you wore my earrings, girl. And that dress – does mad things for your eyes.’
No such intent to please had been in my head at the time I put my clothes on; but, clearly, a charm had been over me. In the easy hush between us I suggested we could have a furlough out in the grounds, unsupervised. Behind our smiles was a clear seriousness. I was a little light-headed, in the pit of my stomach a tremble, within my hips a distinct hollowness – familiar and yet radically new.
We walked between the beds, hand in hand, very purposely to the outer limit of the estate, under cover of those copious lilacs. By now I knew what I would do. He kissed me, my lips slightly parted, and he took the invitation. Blood was shooting through my body now, the warmth radiating to my face. He murmured that he had ‘no protection’, I professed I was myself unprotected, but wanted him to know this was simply no hindrance to the abandon I was feeling; and this he seemed to appreciate.
I helped him free of his jeans, braced myself against a pine trunk and took him in my arms – he most concerned, most touchingly, for my comfort. I helped him inside, the crown of him first insistent and then pressing home – before the novel sense of hosting him, a startlingly alien invasion under my skin. It felt an indignity of sorts, but one I had to get past; and, indeed, other feelings were taking me over. I got my thighs round his hips, I was internally pliant, his motions were considerate and careful not to hurt me. I was surprised by a few words that fell from my mouth in urgent, exhortative whispers – ‘passion words’, industrial strength. If I decided it was right, this was because there was a voice in my head, probing like a tongue, light and whispery, telling me so. And for all that the new sensation was consuming me quite brainlessly, I should have listened more closely, since the voice was no longer mine.
* * *
In our post-coital erotic banality – as he courteously produced tissue paper so that I might wipe myself – something settled me in my resolve: I was going to leave here, go free, with him.
It was not, you understand, a passing fancy – not that my brains were screwed loose, I wasn’t fooled by an afterglow, for I’d known higher ecstasies. No, rather, it was a wholly unprecedented form of gravity’s pull I felt acting upon me. As a man – at best – I only ever toyed with the notion of assuming the onus of fatherhood. On occasions when tough decisions had arisen, each time I closed the book mentally, had three children aborted in the womb – and ‘children’, I must culpably admit, they surely were. Now, in Eloise’s body, I had begun to want to feel bonds, ties to ground, the true weight and seriousness of the world. I believed I had some inkling of ‘the biological clock’. I was entertaining what it would mean to be so profoundly, parturiently heavy.
That said … conscious of the wild-mercury element in my mental state, my volatile physical being, I opened two sets of accounts on the matter. With Leon we made plans as lovers do – the broad essentials agreed, the traps and vagaries all to come. Steven folded into my scheme when I shared it with him, as I had known he would. I told neither of them it was my intention to keep the terrib
le Sir James on board somehow, win him round on the far shore of this indiscretion. There were material needs to consider. I would emerge, I believed, as a more dutiful daughter, ditch the clubs and the bang-bang music, do something with my life that befitted my brain. I wondered suddenly about opportunities in surgery. The aptitude was alive in my hands. And that world would scarcely have seen the like of ‘me’.
Tregaskis posed me a minor inconvenience the night before my departure. After all, I’d kept him sweet with pledges that the hour was nigh. These he now, understandably, ceased to accept. I visited his room intending to calm him. He got hold of my wrist very tightly. But I got my nails to his throat, made him painfully aware of my intimate knowledge of the major veins of the neck. That proved the end of his rebellion. Before I swept out, I shoved his awful clay bust off his desk and to the floor, where it broke – a careless revolt of my own.
He got his revenge, of course, put his evil eye on Leon’s and my escape by taking a lunatic leap from the Blakedene veranda. Leon was inevitably thrown by the gruesome sight of the open fracture. For me there was only fury – fury I was forced to fight down. But as we drove away and out toward Oxfordshire, our first night à deux, I saw a different sort of clenched grimness in Leon’s features. It was jealousy, simply. He had decided, somehow, that there had been ‘something between’ Tregaskis and me.
The hotel proved to have been a false inspiration, a chimera. In the corridors of that place were ghosts for me, ghosts of myself and Malena. Leon and I dressed smartly for dinner but in silence. Inevitably, once we were seated and the wine poured, he brushed aside my toast, since he had an urgent question: ‘Who’ve you been here with before?’
I heard myself arguing, in the lowest, most decorous possible voice, that Robert Forrest was nothing to me now, that he had no reason to be envious or insecure. This only riled him further.
‘That’s not it, Elle. I know it’s him was envious of me, everything about me intimidates him …’
I could not tell him that this had never occurred to me, that Dr Forrest had barely registered his existence. What I knew, heart sinking, was that I had undone much ‘good’ work. And this only the least of it, as we endured the meal. I knew, too, how much finer a partner, a lover he could have been to her. I understood truly now – that hope, that wellbeing I had been feeling, it was Eloise’s by right: at a point where she had begun to contemplate living again, living fully, I had destroyed her life.
That night we slept coldly beside one another. He, I knew, was only turning over old doubts, prodding some poorly healed wounds to his pride. For me, the dream, the illusion, was over. I was in mounting dread – dread of Her, Her hated reappearance, grinning like the harbinger of the end, ‘the host unstable’, time to move on …
* * *
We were out on the motorway back to London before noon. Our relations remained arctic. I was counting the miles. Some music on the radio seemed to abate the tension. I was tapping my fingers idly on the window when I looked up and glimpsed Her behind me – reflected in his driver’s mirror.
She was there and then was not, still I heard Her behind my eyes.
Where are you running to now, doctor …?
No, no, you say – why are you with me?
To witness for myself. Your stunning departure? You have been most inventive. Sadly for you, this cannot continue.
Why? What business is it of yours?
All mine, doctor, entirely mine. And this, I will not accept. It is disreputable. Aberrant. By any standard. What made you think you could carry out a violation of this order?
You— you let me do it.
Fool. You are beyond my control. You are responsible.
No, I felt you there, always.
You wished it so. But I had no part of it. And now I require that you move on …
Leon was watching me as I muttered to myself – riled, at first, like a lover in a mood, then baffled, then actively alarmed. He grasped my arm, I reeled from him, suddenly fighting for my breath, demanding that he get us off the road, seek help. As he protested, I was gripped once again by parasitic pain all over and right through me – those abysmal sensations that seemed to signal my end. And as before, there was nothing in my head but the need to save my life, prolong the nightmare-cycle, by any means necessary.
The lie came quickly to me – that we were being followed. My distress Leon could only have read as authentic. Manfully he bossed the crisis, sought an exit from the motorway, tried to calm me though I was climbing up the seat in agony, at one point quite recklessly grabbing the wheel. He got us off-road, down country lanes, headed deep into autumnal forest. I was ebbing away, I knew, even as I urged him deeper, deeper, and we rattled down a rutted track adjacent to a ridge, a steep drop off to the left, down a bank to a ravine.
There he stopped. I begged him to go to the car boot: did he have a weapon, anything to defend us? He was dumbfounded, clearly, but as fast as he ducked out, I was ransacking Eloise’s luggage, found my leather bag, located my scalpel. He hauled himself back in beside me, crook-lock in hand, his face was pure and frantic ‘care’. I saw the pulse in his strong left carotid artery and I thrust the blade – made my sightless dive into the tunnel.
* * *
I emerged shaken, swooning, seated, my hands – black-skinned hands – grasping the air before me like Lazarus. I was he, and she quite prone in the passenger seat, head slumped. The sight of her, lifeless, knifed me to the heart in a way I couldn’t have anticipated. Gently as I could, I touched her face, lifted her chin with a finger – and saw that her throat was a bloody rift, lacerated, a slash there mapping the wound I would have left on Leon were I not now within his skin.
Devilry. In an instant my heart was hammering, I forced my way out of the vehicle – the daylight all around was a horror to me, the seclusion couldn’t shield me for long but I had to fight an impulse to shout at the sky, protest this new punishment, this latest treachery.
I thought fast, reckless. No right solution came – the bulk of the car and what it held was the size of my predicament, rising by the second. All I could think to do was to try to eradicate it, burn it down.
I removed my bag from within her luggage. Seeing Leon’s nestled by it, I chose in a stroke to swap my crisp shirt and jeans – my ‘country wear’ – for khaki combats and a bruise-blue hooded top. I could feel power in my new trunk and legs, in the grasp of my hands, and yet I knew I was fundamentally helpless.
I freed the car’s handbrake, got out and shoved, slipping and staggering, but succeeded in pushing it over the crest of the slope. Once it had struck a tree and halted, I made my stumbling descent, unscrewed the petrol cap, tore a strip of shirt-cloth and soaked it, then tied it to the driver’s seat and set it alight. I jammed another strip into the cap-hole, ignited that for good measure. Then I crashed my way on down through the trees, grabbing branches for support en route to the ravine floor, my footing hazardous. At my back I heard the crackle of fire, smelled smoke, then heard bangs resonant as gunfire. Within moments I knew, behind me was an inferno.
Pounding through the clinging tangle of the wood, adrenalin driving me forward, I was sure – at last – that the scales were gone from my eyes. She was willing me to fail, I was sport for Her, there was no bargain, no rules, only ever-deepening, widening torment. Had I really imagined it could be otherwise? Yes – for a span of days I’d let myself believe I had, as part of our business, been loaned some share of Her powers. The word is hubris; it has special and forceful application to those so foolish as to solicit the devil.
There would be no easy escape from the artfully made fall-out of my latest outrage. Hell to pay, I knew – this was news, the world would know of it, though never know the half of it – the ruination I’d already caused, the madness I’d set in train. Police would soon be attending, an exclusion zone thrown out, how swiftly I could only guess, but for sure I was now a fugitive with a face, name and number. Once again I would have to hide my face. First
among the frantic notions flaring in my head, I thought about burrowing myself down somewhere in this very wood – lodging in the hollow of a trunk like some parasite. But to sit in the dirt, trembling, awaiting capture? No, I had to get back to the city, lose myself, diffuse myself there, in that sprawl. London was not so far away.
There was money in Leon’s wallet. I broke out of the woods into a stretch of meek grey suburb, dashed across a motorway, boarded a commuter train at Denham – mine the lowest head in the carriage. At Northolt I switched underground. By now I was devising the story I would tell, improving on what I-as-Eloise had babbled to Leon while gripped by the convulsions of oncoming death. Half-satisfied, I allowed myself to slump back in my seat awhile, near to sleep, under my clothes my various scrapes and bruises stinging sorely. What kept me awake was the whiff of gasoline off my hands. I was on dangerous ground.
Worse, I was feeling sick, physically sick – in no way renewed by fresh, younger flesh as I’d been previously. But this was not the all-consuming nausea of The End; rather, a flat, dull wretchedness that leached right through me. How long, I wondered, would be my lease on this body? It felt inherently ‘unstable’. Would I be running forever now, in permanent flux, a succession of temporary, vulnerable physical shells?
The train hammered its way in and out of central London, carried me out east to Bethnal Green. Hackney was my turf, my hood – in the parlance I knew Leon disdained. My dilemma had been whose door I would knock up, whom I could rely on, given what was liable to fall on my head and, by association, theirs. My default choice would have been my car-dealer pal Curtis, but then it was his pride and joy I’d abandoned in flames on a woodland slope, a woman’s body inside it. I could count on Alvin, Rufus, Spike – my subcontractors – to buy my story, give me shelter. Police were not widely reckoned a force for good round Dalston and Stoke Newington. But tracking any of these men down in the time I had felt impossible. Conceivably my ex-partner Sheanna could give me an hour or so’s grace. Yet at this notion, an image of ‘my’ son surged into my mind … and I felt some immovable piety there – a powerful residual refusal to bring my contamination into that house.
The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Page 32