by Huw Thomas
7. Disturb My Natural Emotions
Tuesday, 10.10am:
Harper sat staring out of the window. Yesterday’s clear skies were gone, replaced by a low February overcast to match his mood. A blanket of grey sat above the city and the occasional rattle of hard, sleety rain pattered against the glass.
When they returned to Brendan’s place the previous evening, Harper did not expect to sleep. But the combination of physical and mental exhaustion, several pints of Guinness and a few whiskies worked their magic. He was unconscious within minutes of his head hitting the sofa in Brendan’s cramped front room. His sleep was mostly sound, only plagued in the early hours by flickering dream images that left a sense of unease but nothing concrete.
The next morning, Brendan left just after six. The photographer was on the newspaper’s early shift and Harper did not even hear him go. Instead, he found a note stuck under a near-cold mug of tea when he woke a little after seven.
Sleep as much as you want. Think of a plan.
I’ll tell them you’ve been in an accident and are signed off until at least next week.
If the phone rings don’t answer. I’ll be back by two. BE HERE.
Brendan.
As instructed, Harper took his time. Contrary to Brendan’s advice, he tried not to think. Instead, he drank the tea and dozed for another hour or so, by which time he could no longer ignore the pressure on his bladder. After a long shower, he dressed gingerly. He pulled the same clothes back on again, hiding the array of bruises that decorated most of his left side. Later, still limping, he went in search of food.
Now, munching on a slice of toast and marmalade and drinking another, fresher mug of tea, he sat on Brendan’s kitchen table. Trying to ignore the aches in both body and mind, he gazed blankly around the room, looking for familiarity in a world he did not want to understand.
On the surface, Brendan’s flat seemed almost the same: typical refuge of an unreconstructed permanent bachelor. In the main room, the furniture was unchanged: battered and so far out of date it was almost retro fashion. A litter of books and magazines lay in drifts in all the corners. On the mantelpiece, a struggling spider plant fought for space amongst a collection of bottled beers from obscure microbreweries. A pile of videos was heaped like a discarded Jenga puzzle underneath the ancient analogue television. On the G-plan coffee table, a familiar chess set sat next to a pub ashtray.
But, although familiar, the room was the one Harper had known when he first met Brendan. It was not the same room he had been in only last week. It lacked the touches that came after Rebecca appeared on the scene. The walls were still the original dingy mud colour. There was no sign of the cushions she gave Brendan for his last birthday or the shelves put up for his books and beer bottles.
Harper glanced around the kitchen. He smiled as he saw the bottle of Bushmills sitting next to the cornflakes. At least there were some advantages to being single and having the freedom of applying male logic to the contents of kitchen cupboards.
Thoughts of solitary living turned Harper’s mind back to his own domestic arrangements. When he first woke, his initial reaction to consciousness was to hope yesterday’s nightmare would turn out to have been just that: an over-realistic delusion that could, once the shock had subsided, be laughed away.
As he stumbled around after his shower, the idea brought a swell of optimism. From the outset, though, underlying that burgeoning hope lay a gritty, nagging fear. It would have been easy to dismiss everything that happened after waking in hospital the previous day as some temporary psychosis brought on by the accident. But everything had been too coherent and too detailed for Harper to really believe it was only a bizarre dream. Besides which, if he had only dreamt up his altered reality, he could not work out why, particularly considering all his bruises, he would stay the night on Brendan’s couch rather than in the comfort of his own bed. Even if he were suffering some kind of delusion, Brendan would have known better and posted him back to Rebecca.
Harper finally plucked up the courage to resolve the dilemma by getting out his mobile and dialling what should have been his home number. It came up as unrecognised. Rebecca’s mobile number, which should have been programmed into his phone, also failed to work.
With resignation but no real surprise, Harper came to the conclusion that a night’s sleep had done nothing to erase yesterday’s delusions. Either that or the nightmare was still not over.
Accepting this as reality in the absence of any alternative, at least Harper now knew where he was supposed to live. Brendan had told him he rented a gloomy attic flat on a street overlooking the railway station. Harper even remembered the flat. He had looked at it when he first moved here to take up a job on the city’s daily paper. He had thought about taking the place. It was cheap and convenient. But also noisy. In the end, he opted for a place in a shared house in a village a few miles out of the city. He stayed there until moving into Rebecca’s flat shortly after proposing to her. A couple of months later, they moved into the place in William Street.
But, in Brendan’s version of the world, that was where Harper lived and he was in no position to argue. Not much he knew seemed to be right, so maybe he did live in the flat. The choice of accommodation would appear to match his clothes: scruffy and down-at-heel but practical and cheap.
Sometime, Harper knew he would have to go to the flat even if just for fresh clothes. But the thought hardly filled him with joy. Who knows what else he might discover? There could be all manner of clues: things about which he would much rather remain oblivious.
Like his fingers. And the cravings.
Harper stared at the faint yellow stain around his thumb and forefinger. He had seen worse but it was still there. And although his mind denied it, his body did not. He was a smoker. Had been for years. Never given up. The hacking cough when he woke and the thick phlegm was a sure giveaway too. Last night, even while his mind was telling him he did not want one, part of him was desperate to grab a roll-up off Brendan.
And it could so easily have been true. Because he had smoked: he started when still a kid. At school, smoking gave you credibility with your peers, or so he thought back then. Cigarettes were a way of trying to impress girls he was too shy to actually talk to, as well of trying to keep up with his cousins and their older friends. As a youngster, Danny Harper was keen to prove himself one of the lads. And, as he got old enough to drink, the habit lasted. It was the thing to do. And after the pub it was the spliffs. That was one of the benefits of growing up in a backwater like Cornwall; all those fishing boats and empty coves meant a ready supply of wacky baccy: as much part of the culture as pasties and clotted cream. And in those days, anything that went against his parents’ strictures was embraced.
But then he moved away, started to grow up and get a little bit more mature. Giving up smoking had been hard though; he still remembered how long it took. Even years on, sitting in a pub with other smokers brought the odd twinge. He had cut down on drinking too, continued saying no to cigarettes and only smoking joints on the odd night out. Now he was in his thirties, his body was clean compared with a decade earlier.
Harper set his mug down on the table and stared at his fingers. The nicotine stain was still there. And he had Brendan’s word for it too.
Perhaps he was mad. That was one answer. It certainly made sense.
Harper gave a bitter laugh. But if he was mad then fuck, was this delusion realistic or what!
He closed his eyes and blinked back tears.
In truth, it was terrifying. Not only had the logic gone out of his life, he had lost the most important thing in it. He had been sure he loved Rebecca; that was why he asked her to marry him. Now she had been taken from him, though, he was starting to realise what love really meant. It was more than just fondness and fellow feeling. It was need, security and comfort. It was completeness.
Without her, a hollow space existed inside him. He was lost and frightened and his instinct was to turn to her. It
was not something he even needed to stop and think about. In a crisis, she was his touchstone. But. But. But…
Harper screwed his hands into his hair and groaned. The thing he most wanted to do was go in search of Rebecca. He wanted to return to their flat: the one with the new door and no buddleia growing from the steps. He wanted to crawl into bed, their bed, and curl up with her body tight against his, her arms around him, her hair across his face, her words whispering soothing nothings into his ear. He wanted her to tell him it was all a bad dream, a reaction to the accident. She would show him his cycling clothes, the battered but repairable bike: the life they shared. And, afterwards, when everything was calm and normal, this nightmare would seem an odd and distant memory, a vague nothing subsiding into the mists of the past.
Oh, he wanted her so badly.
Harper was only conscious of his tears when he tasted the salt trickling down onto his lips. He wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and levered himself stiffly off the table. Like Brendan said, he needed a plan.
8. Manor Of Dreams
Tuesday, 2.55pm:
The powder blue VW Beetle roared down the slip road and swung hard left to make the turn onto the B-road. Fields flicked by on either side as the road climbed gently. Through gaps in the hedge came glimpses of sheep dotted across the hillside sloping up to the left. In the early spring sunshine, their coats looked bright white against the grass.
‘Heaven, heaven is a place. A place where nothing ever happens.’
Rebecca lifted her voice to accompany David Byrne’s deadpan delivery, tapping her hands against the steering wheel to match the song’s measured beat. As the line repeated, she glanced at the pastoral idyll outside then slung the car around another tight bend before accelerating into the straight.
‘There is a party. Everyone is there. Everyone will leave at exactly the same time.’
Approaching a belt of trees, the road kinked again and Rebecca was forced to slow. A slight dip followed as the road passed through the trees and then it started climbing again.
‘It’s hard to imagine that nothing at all could be so exciting, could be so much fun.’
Coming back into the open, she suddenly spotted the sign on her right. Rebecca braked sharply. She paused at the junction, turned off the CD and checked the road. Then she swung the car into the long drive.
Ahead, the gravelled track ran across sheep-cropped ground. A small humpbacked bridge led over a stream before the drive turned back into the same belt of trees Rebecca had just driven through on the road. On the other side, the drive reached the crest of a small hill. Rebecca slowed, taking in the view and summoning her courage.
A few hundred yards below lay her destination. Haworth Manor. All twisted chimneys and mullioned windows, venerable and very English: the sort of place for cream teas and National Trust membership. Except Haworth Manor was not owned by any heritage organisation. The self-appointed lord of the manor was Paul Cash: prolific artist, eccentric bon viveur and unrepentant Lothario.
Cash liked titles. He was only ever granted one: a CBE for his services to the British art world. But the painter never bothered to collect the genuine gong, preferring to create his own awards. After buying Haworth Manor, he began calling himself the ‘Lord of the Manor’ as a joke. One stuffy neighbour took it seriously and made the mistake of snubbing Cash in public. Sir James Manville was a real blue blood and proud of his ancestry. He regarded Cash as little more than a jumped-up tradesman. As a baronet, Manville was entitled to call himself ‘Sir’. Uninhibited by the restraints of convention, Cash felt free to call himself whatever he felt like.
Amused by Manville’s reaction, the new owner of Haworth Manor decided to see how far he could push things. Cash ordered cards and signs printed proclaiming himself ‘Lord’ and used the title on the publicity material for all his work. The name soon stuck and the media began forgetting to put the title into inverted commas. Manville’s protests were ignored and he could only fume as his neighbour became increasingly known as Lord Cash.
Meanwhile, Cash took a liking to life at Haworth and started throwing extravagant parties for select invitees. The events became notorious and he revelled in the scandal, denying nothing. Then came a tabloid exposé — based as much on speculation as fact — describing him as the ‘Lord of Misrule’.
Cash was delighted by the new epithet and painted a self-portrait to commemorate the occasion. This showed him in velvet tiger-striped robes and jester’s hat, sprawled across the laps of three naked girls, one holding grapes, the second with a glass of champagne and the third with what looked suspiciously like a box of dried magic mushrooms.
A year or so later, he wrote a letter to The Times about freedom of expression, signing himself “Secretary of State for Artistic Licence”. Other self-awarded titles included “Father of the Arts”, based not so much on his prestige as a painter but on the number of children he was reputed to have fathered. Married five times and divorced as many, Cash’s bedpost notches were legendary. Nearly all of his portraits were of women and people said he slept with everyone he had painted — some claiming that included the men as well.
Now, although approaching sixty, Paul Cash’s reputation was undulled. His fires had burnt for decades, but no one was suggesting Paul Cash was anywhere near running out of fuel.
Rebecca parked in front of the house, took one last deep breath and marched towards the heavy front door. A wrought iron pull sent bells jangling somewhere deep inside the ancient hall.
The echoing discordance matched her nerves.
On the surface, she was fine. She knew she looked the part: cool, calm and professional, ready for her first meeting with one of the Hamilton Agency’s most prestigious, if notorious, clients. In reality, she did not feel so steady. Meeting Paul Cash was only part of what disturbed her equilibrium. All morning she had been feeling odd: out of sorts and over-reacting to any stimulus.
At lunchtime, she had sneaked half-an-hour out of the office and walked with Sarah along by the river. It was hard to explain exactly what bothered her. Things had seemed out of kilter for a day or so.
Sarah’s seemed to think Rebecca had pinned more of her hopes on last Tuesday night’s blind date than she was willing to admit. Rebecca was nowhere near so positive. It was true that it had been her first foray off the shelf in several months but she had approached the event with mixed emotions. Certainly not with any real expectations. More a case of being seen to be doing something about her single status.
A few weeks earlier, Rebecca had moaned to Sarah about never meeting any attractive men. Her last serious relationship had ended a couple of years earlier and no prospects had appeared on the horizon since. Sarah responded by challenging Rebecca to do something about it; pointing out she could hardly expect to meet the love of her life from the comfort of a sofa. Rebecca had signed up with a dating agency mostly to keep Sarah happy. The result was Rebecca’s first — and possibly last — venture into the world of the lonely hearts: the date with the eligible bachelor with the nice car and mother fixation.
But Rebecca could not quite bring herself to believe disappointment over one blind date was what had left her feeling so unsettled. She had first been conscious of a sense of something wrong in the world the same afternoon that Christine Hamilton sprang the Paul Cash job on her. Then on her way home came the uncomfortable confrontation in the High Street.
Rebecca was still unable to work out what to make of that. The man’s behaviour had seemed like that of someone on drugs. But he had seemed so sincere, so genuinely certain Rebecca should know him. The distress in his eyes could hardly have been faked; the expression on his face as she fled still haunted her.
Now, as the door to Haworth Manor swung open, Rebecca steeled herself. Time to forget her mixed emotions. This was her moment to perform, pretend not to be intimidated by the prospect of diving in the deep end with a man whose reputation as a lascivious roué was matched only by his reputation as a ruthless businessman a
nd fearsome taskmaster for those minions entrusted with promoting his interests.
9. Traces Of A Life
Tuesday, 3.15pm:
Harper was depressed. He sat on a bench in the park near Brendan’s flat watching a Polish nanny walking an over-fed golden retriever. As the girl dragged the reluctant animal in a circuit of the duck pond’s opaque waters, he slumped further into his jacket and deeper into despondency.
Most of the day had now gone but he was no closer to finding any kind of solution or understanding.
He had eventually forced himself to leave the safety of Brendan’s place at around eleven. It would have been easier to stay there until his friend returned but Harper knew that burying his head was a form of surrender. He had to do something and confronting the situation required information: finding out more about who he was and the life he appeared to lead.
The obvious first step was to go home, find his flat, and investigate the possessions it contained for clues.
Walking there, Harper felt determined, more in control. A sense of purpose, however minor, made the fundamental craziness of the situation less over-whelming. The walk also helped relax him, to gain a new perspective. In a way, he was not so bothered about his job or lifestyle. Careers could be remade and habits changed. What shook him to his core was Rebecca. She had become essential to his life. Taking that foundation away ripped at his sense of who he was. To reclaim it, he needed to reclaim her.
Thoughts of Rebecca had flooded Harper’s mind as he made his way across the city. Memories of her, everyday images of domestic life, flitted through his thoughts: Rebecca glancing at him over her shoulder; Rebecca ripping old wallpaper from the bedroom in their flat; Rebecca staring into space at the breakfast table; Rebecca lying on the lounge rug with a beaming smile after too many glasses of wine; Rebecca flicking paint at him; Rebecca coming home from work and kicking her shoes the length of the hall; Rebecca asleep with her head in his lap.