by G. Brailey
“Okay, so let’s make a start, shall we?”
“How do you know Zack Fortune?” Jason demanded.
“We know each other through work,” said Tracy, fully aware that Jason did not believe her. “And how do you know him?”
“Mind your own business,” said Jason.
Half an hour later, as Zack sat down at his desk in his office he noticed a list of names and numbers that had been placed bang in front of him. It was headed: ‘People who might be able to help’. Someone else might have used the more obvious title like, ‘Psychiatrists’ or ‘Psychoanalysts’ or ‘Psychologists’ (what was the difference? Zack could never remember), but not Rose, Rose was discretion itself.
When she came in a few moments later she made no mention of this, she just went through his diary and suggested coffee because Rose had reverted to work mode. All the easy smiles and gentle humour from their dinner date had been replaced by her usual professional distance. He picked the list up and waved it at her.
“Thanks for this, Rose. The best one first, is that it?”
“From what I can gather…” said Rose, just before she left the room.
Zack imagined Rose slaving away at her computer until the early hours, surrounded by books, copies of The Lancet and Internet printouts, digging around for the shrink with the most kudos and the most scalps on their belt. The idea confirmed Rose’s standing in his eyes. How many other assistants would be bothered, or care enough, or be motivated enough? Rose Crawford was still captain of his ship as far as Zack was concerned, and consequently, all was right with the world.
However, all was not right with Veronica’s world. She had driven back from Hertfordshire the night before in a state of panic. Miriam was working on a hotel refurbishment in Copenhagen so she couldn’t get Miriam’s take on things over a heart to heart, although following the dinner at Bellini’s she didn’t really want to confide in her sister anyway as she got the impression that Miriam thought Zack Fortune to be more trouble than he was worth.
Veronica had left all Zack’s calls unanswered because she needed time to reflect. She suspected that if she responded to his request to see her she would blurt everything out and that would provide yet another hurdle of ‘strange things that have happened’ for them to struggle over.
Back home in Thornhill Square she had consumed a fair amount of Southern Comfort and gone to bed. Things would surely look better in the morning. But they didn’t. She went in to the gallery, carried out a few finishing touches to a commission, pumped out the basement that had flooded again and generally kept herself busy, but despite all this the conversation she had endured with Barbara Quinn hung over her like an albatross. She was still on edge when she saw Zack come in, a little after one.
“Are you okay?” he said, picking up on the strange look she gave him straight away.
“Sorry I didn’t get back to you last night… just, you know, work and stuff.”
He knew it wasn’t ‘work and stuff’ but he didn’t push it. Her dismissal of the Italian had convinced him he had nothing to fear from that bastard so he could deal with everything else.
A couple of punters were roaming round the gallery examining various pieces of bewildering junk with learned eyes. Zack suspected they didn’t have a clue what they were looking at but they put on a good show. He took Veronica’s hand and pulled her close, inhaling her musky French perfume that always wafted after her wherever she went. He stifled a desire to rip her clothes off there and then and instead ran a heavy hand through her hair.
“Let’s go downstairs,” he said.
“What if they run off with the Italian sculptures?” said Veronica as they grabbed each other a few moments later up against the cellar wall.
“Then job done I’d say,” said Zack, making Veronica smile.
“Hello?” a disembodied voice shouted out tentatively, ten minutes later.
“Yes?” Veronica called back, still out of breath, and pulling her clothes back on.
“I was wondering about the price for the bronze….”
“I’ll be straight up!” Veronica called back, “hang on…”
Zack was watching her, head cocked on one side.
“Stop it, Zack.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop taking the Michael.”
Zack gave her one of his ‘who me?’ looks as she darted from the room and clattered up the stairs in her bright red sixties sling backs. He could hear her now, putting on her selling voice as he filled a kettle and looked up through a tiny window over the sink at all the feet walking to and fro outside. A little later he heard Veronica’s heels stalking back across the floor and coming to rest at the top of the stairs.
“They’ve gone!” she shouted out, “couldn’t get out quick enough when they heard the price!”
At Veronica’s cluttered desk in the gallery they talked over mugs of tea, Zack reporting back what Rose had said during dinner.
“That was Sam’s line too wasn’t it,” said Veronica, “and you dismissed it, and anyway, I thought you dismissed everything to do with psychiatry as a matter of course.”
“Well, yes I do, but I am interested to know if I’m the only one.”
“You mean there might be a name for it,” said Veronica, with a little smile, “it might be a condition?”
“Or the symptom of a condition…”
“Er… wouldn’t we have heard about it by now?” she said, carefully.
Zack looked defensive. “Not necessarily,” he said.
In the end Veronica agreed that it was worth a try, although there was a reservation in her tone of voice that Zack picked up on. All Veronica would say was that psychiatric treatment was complex and lengthy and she wondered whether Zack was suited to it all things considered. Of course Veronica was right and Zack knew she was, psychiatry and Zack Fortune were uneasy bedfellows.
At Cambridge, Zack used to keep himself amused by complaining to Justin Dunsmore of various imagined psychiatric conditions, and poor Justin had done his best to provide Zack with possible explanations, even though his ‘symptoms’ got more and more preposterous each time.
Zack confessed to him once, in very hushed tones, that he was unable to ejaculate unless he had within his sights three full pots of Marmite standing in a row, and as Sam ate Marmite at the rate of knots, and as the local shop was frequently running out, Zack was at his wit’s end to clear the matter up.
After considerable thought Justin told Zack that although numerology was not his field, he felt his need for three pots of Marmite as against one or two was telling. He suggested that the problem Zack was experiencing could be with his perceived notion of the nuclear family. What were his views on being an only child for instance, and had his mother insisted on him eating Marmite at times of stress? Zack pretended to be fired up by Justin’s elucidations, and announced that following their talk he had decided to confront his mother and have it out with her.
When Zack relayed the conversation back to Sam he laughed so much there was a moment when he honestly thought he would end up in Casualty with serious internal injuries. And so deciding to see just how far they could push it, each day they would think up more and more outlandish symptoms to put to Justin, until finally he realised what Zack was doing, (about the same time he refused to make him any more acid), and vowed never to speak to him again.
Zack knew that Veronica’s take on things was that he had suffered some kind of mental crisis probably as a result of drug abuse, but that as the deaths had stopped he should forget about it and move on. And as much as he wanted to subscribe to this theory too, his conversation with Rose had made him face up to the fact that his continuing paranoid state was to do with a real fear that the deaths had not stopped at all but were simply on pause.
Zack just wanted someone to say…’Oh that old thing… the deaths!’ and laugh at him for letting them get to him. Maybe a psychiatrist could do just that. Zack was also confused about the suicide’s boyfriend. Why ha
d he plucked him out of the air? Had he seen him in the neighbourhood and just plonked him in Brunswick Street for good measure? What was that all about? Zack was mighty relieved that the deaths were imaginary but it still begged the question as to why he had conjured them up in the first place. If a few visits to an expert could cut through the swathes of theories that he had come up with and other people had come up with, Zack felt he had to give it a go.
Back in his office he called Tracy and for once she picked up.
“You weren’t kidding were you?”
“I did warn you.”
“He’s impossible.”
“He’s instructed you though?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but I’m working on it.”
“He’s covering for someone, there’s no other explanation.”
“That’s what I think too but he won’t have it.”
“He’s got no family to speak of… no one to help him through all this.”
“So he said. Did he tell you about his mother?”
“No, what?”
“She was hacked to death last year apparently and now his father’s doing time for killing the man who did it.”
“Changing the subject for a moment,” said Zack, suddenly irritated by Jason’s fantasies, “Susan has made allegations of rape before.”
Tracy went quiet then she said: “Who told you this?”
“Never mind, but it needs to be checked out.”
“It would have been checked out, no question, and the cops have said nothing to me… unless…”
“Unless?”
“Well… it could be that she made other allegations under a different name. Any ideas?”
“Try Allen, Susan Allen, and she used to live in the Clifton area of Bristol, I know that much.”
“Was she married then?”
“Couldn’t tell you but I sometimes noticed mail in her flat addressed to a Susan Allen… so you never know…”
“And it’s not just a hunch all this?”
“No, it’s not.”
Tracy said she would see what she could dig up but she was suspicious of this new information and Zack knew she was.
CHAPTER 21
Elizabeth Frisk had agreed to see Zack that afternoon. Luckily someone had cancelled otherwise it would have been a bit of a wait. But now Zack sat across from her in a very comfortable consulting room on the edge of Hampstead Heath he felt a complete dope. He hated asking for help from anyone - to Zack it constituted weakness, and he was many things but he was not weak. It also suggested he had faith in this sort of thing when he didn’t. He was desperate that’s all. He sensed that Elizabeth had picked up on all this as she threw him a rather icy smile, flourished a Parker pen and opened a large note book, her gold charm bracelet jangling at her wrist.
Elizabeth was in her forties, with long blonde hair and translucent skin. She had a full figure, to some an overweight figure but at almost six foot she carried it off. Today she was wearing a long purple velvet skirt, a lilac blouse and over it a mushroom tailored jacket. She looked the part all right thought Zack, glancing at him over her gold rimmed spectacles with quizzical candour. Elizabeth was an attractive woman, certainly, but utterly sexless. It was rather like she had been offered her quota of sex appeal at some historic date but with a thin smile had declined.
“So let’s jump in at the deep end shall we, Zack… is it all right to call you that?”
Zack shrugged as though it was a stupid question. Then he noticed her jot something down in a large sprawling hand.
“What brings you here today?”
There was nothing for it, if he felt a dope already no doubt in an hour’s time he would feel even worse but what was the point in taking part in this charade if he held back?
“I keep seeing people,” he began, “strangers who call out to me by name just before they die.”
Elizabeth shot him a glance, it was brief but it told him everything he needed to know and that was that he was alone in this, which is what he had suspected all along. Elizabeth allowed herself a small, barely perceptible frown and Zack could tell she wanted to ask a question but she held back. That’s what shrinks did apparently, they gave you a bit of rope and watched you hang yourself.
“Like a human magnet I feel drawn to a place, to a person, and I can’t resist. The first time it was a suicide, a girl jumped from a roof, she asked me to catch her, they all ask me for help, and they all seem pleased to see me, then they die and I find mobility again, and I move away. These things, whatever they are - visions, wild imaginings - they are so real. They are just so real.”
By this time it looked as though Elizabeth had written a page. She continued writing for a while, then looked up.
“How many of these incidents?” she said.
“I’ve told you about the first, the second was a heart attack I think, the third was a traffic accident, and the fourth was a young black guy, he’d been stabbed – but of course he hadn’t.”
“When did they start?”
“A few weeks ago…”
“Does anything precipitate these events?”
“Not really, I know when they are about to happen though, the atmosphere gets heavy and I can’t breathe.”
“You have a sensation of not breathing,” said Elizabeth, correcting him like she would a child.
“No, I don’t take a breath, literally, it’s as though something else is keeping me alive. I move towards the dying people with an inevitability but I also feel misplaced, as though I shouldn’t be there. Then I freeze - no movement at all. Just as my mobility comes back my breathing returns and when I first hear it pumping in and out of me, it’s deafening.”
Elizabeth leant back in her chair and looked at him. “Can you remind me what you do? I think you did tell me when we spoke on the phone.”
“I’m a corporate lawyer with Nyman Holder and Drew, you might have heard of them.”
Elizabeth made no comment but wrote down the name. “Would you consider your job rewarding?”
“Not remotely, but it pays well, and when most people ask I say I’ve sold out so I might as well say that to you.”
“Can you explain what you mean by that?”
“I used to do legal aid, criminal defence, but I moved on, I climbed the money tree.”
“Do you regret that?”
“Yes and no, both have their downsides.”
“Would you say your work is stressful?”
“Yes, but I don’t mine for gold in South Africa which I imagine is a whole lot more stressful. I get well paid, I enjoy the fruits of my labour.”
“How about family life?” she asked, pleasantly.
“I’m single, but before you ask, no, I’m a confirmed heterosexual.”
“Promiscuous?”
“Not at all, just a serial monogamist, there’s lots of us around.”
“Are you in a relationship at this present time?”
“Yes.”
“Did you meet this woman before the deaths or after?”
“In between…”
“Are you happy would you say, generally?”
“I was very happy and Veronica makes me happy, but an ex-girlfriend has accused me of rape. She’s out for revenge, but obviously not everyone sees it that way.”
“So you have denied the accusation?”
“Yes.”
Elizabeth seemed to think about this for a short time, then dismissed it and moved on.
“What about your parents, do you still see them?”
“They’re dead.”
“Were you close?”
“No, I hated them both.” Elizabeth stopped writing and waited patiently for him to continue. “They were both extremely weak, with my father it was drink, and with my mother it was sex. My father left when I was quite young, I didn’t see much of him after that.”
“And how do you feel about weakness?”
“I despise it.”
“For what reason?”
“It’s lazy, it’s the easy option, fortitude isn’t a gift, it’s an achievement.”
“Brothers, sisters?”
“No, I was enough of an inconvenience, once bitten as they say…”
“Stepfathers?” said Elizabeth, scribbling furiously again.
“Hundreds of them…”
“And were those relationships successful?”
“Not remotely, I tried to kill one or two.”
“But you didn’t succeed?” asked Elizabeth, with a smug grin.
“Not through want of trying,” said Zack, enjoying his private joke.
“Do you want to talk about those experiences?”
“No, not really, I’m sure you’ve heard it all before. It wasn’t imaginative, just the mundane torment of a child.”
Elizabeth’s pen stopped just for a second then she turned a page. “So looking back, did anything happen that was out of the ordinary that could have sparked these incidents, do you think?”
Did he tell her about the regression? Was that a good idea? Elizabeth waited, sensing something else, guessing what it might be.
“I took part in past life regression.”
Elizabeth looked up at him as though he had just confessed to drowning a litter of kittens. “And?” she asked.
“I saw a man dying and he too asked me to help him, and for a while I was convinced the visions were real… sorry, I’m not explaining this very well.”
“So the visions you now see are similar to what you saw during the regression, is that it?”
“Well yes, there’s a format, certainly.”
“A format?”
“A common denominator if you like… I don’t know who they are, these people, and yet they all seem to know me.”
Elizabeth stopped writing for a moment, whisked her specs off and frowned then the specs went on again. “How about drugs?”
“I took a fair bit of acid at one time and some other stuff, speed, heroin, although I never mainlined, and I had the foresight to steer clear of crack, but for the past ten years or so nothing to speak of. Coke of course, now and again, but who doesn’t do coke - now and again? Generally speaking my years of stimulants are behind me.”