Keep Me Close

by Francis, Clare

  “But they can’t say what the effects will be, not yet ‘

  “Can’t say or won’t say?”

  “Can’t say. It’s a bit complicated, but I can take a shot at explaining it if you like. After I got the information I went and checked it out with a doctor friend of mine. I think I’ve got it straight.”

  Terry made an effort to clear his mind. “Okay go ahead.”

  There was the leafing of paper as Fergal looked at his notes. “The spine is damaged in two places, in the neck and in the thoracic region.

  The injury in the neck, at what they call C5/6, is a simple fracture of

  the vertebra a hairline crack to you or me. It isn’t likely to be a

  problem. The bone should mend itself over time and the scans suggest

  the spinal cord is undamaged. Just suggest, mind you, because here’s

  where the uncertainty comes in they won’t know for sure about any

  effects until the body gets over the trauma and the swelling goes down

  and any natural healing has taken place. Then ‘

  “Healing? I thought you said .. .”

  “I didn’t say there wasn’t any healing,” Fergal replied in his patient way. “Just that damage to the spinal cord itself can’t be mended.”

  Terry hadn’t entirely followed, but let it pass.

  “Now the second injury is at the point known as T9. Here the vertebra suffered a comminuted transverse fracture. This means the bone was shattered and the spine was partially dislocated I’m not sure that’s the right word put out of alignment, if you like. The operation fused the spine with screws and metal plates, so no further injury can occur. It’s here that the scans show damage to the spinal cord, but again the doctors can’t tell what the effects will be until the swelling goes down and the body has had a chance to recover generally. And that takes months, sometimes many months. There are different types of damage to the spinal cord, like to the front of it, the back of it, the side of it, and different degrees of damage, partial, complete, etcetera, and only time will tell what’s what. Oh, they’ll be transferring her to a spinal unit as soon as it’s safe to move her, by the way. No date yet, but in two weeks, something like that.”

  “But the outcome? What are they saying? What do they think?”

  That’s what I mean it’s too early to say yet, they have no way of knowing.”

  “Come on,” Terry protested. “They must have their views. I mean, privately.”

  “Privately?” echoed Fergal with soft irony, as if the information he’d already obtained hadn’t been exclusive enough. “The only opinion I got was sort of third-hand,” he said reluctantly, ‘a junior source, if you follow me. Not to be taken as totally reliable.”

  “Yes, yes and?”

  “There’ll be some degree of paralysis.”

  “She won’t walk again?”

  “They can’t know, Terry that’s what I’m trying to say.”

  “But it’s probable?”

  Fergal didn’t answer and Terry took his silence to be an answer in itself.

  After a moment, Fergal said, “I’m still working on the police side of things. That might take a bit longer. Starting from scratch there, if you understand me.”

  “Of course.” Terry added, “You’ve done fine. Thank you. And Fergal?

  I want to extend the brief. Can we have a look at Ben Galitza?”

  “When you say a look, are we talking surveillance or general intelligence?”

  “General intelligence. For the moment anyway.”

  Terry had only the vaguest idea of how Fergal obtained his information, and took care not to get any the wiser. Fergal had come from Cintel, a corporate intelligence agency Terry used from time to time. One day he had simply presented himself to Terry and asked to work for him on ‘a one to one’ basis because, as Fergal had put it, he wasn’t really a corporate man, thereby implying that he didn’t regard Terry as much of a one either. By degrees Terry had gathered that in Fergal’s more misty past, before a flirtation with the priesthood, a short-lived marriage and what might have been a breakdown, he had been a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin.

  By any standards he had done an outstanding job this time round, and Terry said again, “Thank you.”

  “Have you had any more thoughts about the best way to play it with the police?” Fergal asked.

  “I’ve thought.”

  “You want to leave things as they are?”

  “I do.”

  Fergal made no comment on this, but the very fact that he’d asked was enough to send a small wedge of doubt into Terry’s mind, and as soon as he’d put the phone down he sat staring out into the garden, raking over the pros and cons until he had satisfied himself once more that he had made the right decision.

  Hearing a movement upstairs, he roused himself to go and see Maeve. He wondered how it would be with her this evening: whether her day would have been good or bad, whether she would eat more than a token mouthful for supper. Most of all, he wondered how he would present the day’s news to her without giving himself away. He poured himself two fingers of Jameson’s and, downing them in one, poured another smaller measure and polished that off as well. As he started up the stairs he made a conscious effort to relax his features so that when Maeve looked into his face she shouldn’t read too many of his troubles there.

  He met her coming out of her room, and went to embrace her.

  “How’s my darling girl?”

  She came into his arms and said, “Better today, thanks, Dadda.”

  “There’s my girl.”

  “The iron seems to be doing some good.”

  “Your mother had the anaemia too. Runs in the family.” He shook his head. “They should have spotted it before.”

  He held her at arm’s length. She did look a little better. He thought he could see a touch more colour in her cheeks, though the flesh itself was still drawn against the bones, her upper arms were still little more than matchsticks under his hands. For once he tried not to dwell on the doctors’ incompetence, on the terrible hours when he thought he had lost her, and keep his anger focused on more worthy targets.

  “Shall we go to Morne at the weekend then?” he said in a cheerful tone. “Get some air into our lungs, take a walk or two in the garden. What do you say, my darling?”

  Her face wore the exhausted look that had become so achingly familiar to him over the last four months. Sometimes he wondered if he would ever see her eyes bright again.

  “If you like,” she said.

  “Oh, I think a little walking would do us both good, wouldn’t it? Your father most of all!” He tapped the bulge of his belly, which was something of a joke between them. “What does the nurse say?”

  She dropped her head abruptly, and his heart sank when he realised that

  in his thoughtless way he had said the wrong thing. “Not too late to

  go back to college,” he said coaxingly. “They’re keeping your place

  ‘

  “I won’t go back, Dadda. I won’t.”

  “But you were made to be a nurse, darling girl. You’d be the best nurse in the world.”

  “No.”

  “Is it England that’s the problem? We could always find you a college

  in Dublin, so you could live at home ‘

  She raised her head and her eyes were brimming. “No.”

  He managed a smile. “If that’s what you want.”

  He linked her arm through his and, covering her hand where it lay on his arm, walked her downstairs.

  “Is there news?” she asked.

  “News?”

  “Of Catherine:

  “Indeed! I was going to tell you the minute we got downstairs. She’s

  regained consciousness. I just heard a moment ago ‘

  With a gasp Maeve stopped and turned to him, and for a moment her face came alive. “She’s going to be all right then?”

  “Well, she’s talking and
hearing and seeing, so it’s all looking good from that point of view.”

  “What else?” she demanded hungrily.

  “Well.. . she’s off the danger list.”

  “But what are they saying?”

  “It’s early days yet. You know very early days. They need to wait and see.”

  Instantly her mood plunged. “What do you mean, they need to wait and see? There’s something wrong, isn’t there? Tell me.”

  “Darling girl, they’re investigating. You know better than anyone that sometimes they don’t always find the problem straight away.”

  “So there is something wrong! What is it? Tell me!”

  She was taking great gulps of air and he hastened to calm her. “Remember, darling, the fall was a terrible thing. Her body needs time to mend. Quite a while. There’ll be rehabilitation, physiotherapy all the usual things.”

  Maeve shook her head and murmured, “No, no .. .”

  He persuaded her to continue down the stairs. She moved jerkily.

  “I must go and see her,” she said.

  “When you’re better, darling girl. When you’re better.”

  “I can’t bear it. I can’t bear it. She was so kind to me, Dadda. So kind.”

  Flashes of memory came to him from the long summer at Morne four years ago: a glimpse of Catherine taking Maeve off to show her something, a dress or it might have been shoes; then a picnic in the walled garden, Catherine and Maeve sitting on the grass talking companionably as though they were of an age, not eight years apart. Inevitably more painful and personal memories followed, of the weeks of his folly and the mortifying letter, but he shut these firmly from his mind.

  He walked Maeve into the small sitting room, to her favourite chair facing the TV. She pressed herself into a corner of the chair and drew her legs up under her. “She was so very good to me. So good, Dadda.”

  Terry heard the crack in her voice and thought: Dear Lord, please don’t let there be tears tonight.

  “If they’re talking of rehab and physio, there must be something seriously wrong,” Maeve cried. “I know it. I know it!”

  “Hand on heart, darling, they really don’t know.”

  “But she fell! She fell!”

  “We have to wait and see. That’s all we can do.”

  “I can’t bear it, Dadda.”

  “You can’t take all the worries of the world on your shoulders, darling girl. You must think of yourself. That’s your first duty.”

  But there was no soothing her during these periodic plunges into despondency and Terry wondered if he should cancel his meeting with Galitza. He asked, “You have been taking all your pills, darling, haven’t you?”

  But she had turned her face away from him, her head was pressed into the back of the chair, and he knew he must attempt to cajole her out of this mood or lose her to anxiety for the rest of the evening. Sometimes he wondered if he shouldn’t try to shake her out of it, literally take her by the shoulders, if it wouldn’t be a kindness, but he couldn’t bring himself to do such a thing, not when she had been so dreadfully ill, not when he could still remember in every terrible detail the night in the hospital when she had almost slipped away. Instead, he perched on the side of the chair and, threading an arm clumsily round her shoulders, rocked her gently, whispering softly, “There, there, my darling girl. It’ll all be fine, you wait and see.”

  She murmured, “I’m so sorry, Dadda, I’m such a nuisance to you.”

  “A nuisance? That you could never be. Never!” Saying this, he remembered with a surge of emotion the only time he had felt truly frustrated by Maeve’s dependence, the only time she had actually prevented him from doing anything he dearly wanted to do, and that was four days ago when he had longed with every instinct in his body to go to London and find out what had happened to Catherine and, while he was about it, to take Ben Galitza apart with his bare hands.

  She was quieter now and he dared to hope that the worst might be over. He talked about the summer ahead, about the things they would do together, how he was going to take time off, a month or more, and spend it with her at Morne, how she was to invite friends, as many or as few as she wanted. When he finally ran short of words, he hummed softly to her, a poor rendering of “Some Enchanted Evening’.

  The thin summer light began to deepen imperceptibly, bringing the brilliant yellows and blues and golds that dominated the room into glaring focus. In keeping with his schizophrenic existence one inconsequential corner of Terry’s mind was deciding that he really must ask Dinah to tone the colours down a bit, while another colder and more determined part was rehearsing the conversation he would have with Ben Galitza, speculating not only on how much money Ben would dare to ask for, but how much Terry would agree to give him and the heavy price that he would force him to pay.

  At seven thirty he said quietly to Maeve, “Now I have to go out for a while, just an hour or so. But you’ll have to promise me you’ll eat something while I’m gone. Will you? Otherwise I’ll worry about you the whole time I’m away.”

  She turned her face to him and fixing him with a beseeching gaze asked, “You’ll make sure Catherine’s all right, won’t you, Dadda?”

  “Why, yes .. .” He hardly knew what to say. “Of course I will.”

  The light in her eyes faded as quickly as it had come.

  Terry bent down to embrace her and felt the chill breath of uncertainty and doubt on his cheek.

  Before leaving he turned the television on for her and commanded Conn to stay beside her chair. When he paused at the door to say goodbye Maeve was already staring dully at the screen.

  Chapter Three

  “IF YOU wouldn’t mind.” Simon indicated the unlit cigarette poised between Emma Russell’s fingers.

  “Oh.” She looked around her with a show of exaggerated puzzlement as if a car was a perfectly natural receptacle for cigarette fumes. Then, in a tone of sudden understanding: “Oh, it’s new, is it?”

  “No, I just don’t want it smelling of cigarettes.”

  She made a face and, closing her lighter with a snap, dropped the cigarette back into the packet. “You must work incredibly hard to keep it this way.”

  “I’m sorry?” They were crawling through the unlovely end of Earl’s Court in a slow line of early-morning traffic that promised to last all the way to Notting Hill. The rain had stopped in the night but the sky was still heavy, and a dankness hung in the air. “I’m sorry?” he said again.

  “Do you ban feet?”

  He glanced across at her, not quite sure of the spirit in which this remark was intended. “I get it vale ted every week.”

  Her mouth twitched in a small knowing smile, as if he had just confirmed an accurate and rather unflattering picture of himself.

  Irritated by this, and by the fact that he’d put himself to considerable inconvenience by offering to pick her up and drive her to the police station on what was going to be an extremely busy morning, he said, “I get a man to look after it for me, if you really want to know. I have to. I simply don’t have the time for that sort of thing. I run three companies. Three very demanding companies.”

  “Aha.” She was in the midst of an enormous yawn.

  “And while we’re on the subject of getting things straight,” he said in the slow steady voice he used to explain things to people who weren’t too quick on the uptake, “I don’t work for Ben the two of us are partners in a company that trades with Eastern Europe. We set up the company together. As partners.”

  “Oh ... right.”

  He wanted to add crossly: And moreover there is no ballerina gear in my flat, there is nothing faintly outrageous in my closet, only the costume my mother once wore when she danced with the Rambert, which Ben just happened to see hanging in the spare room when he invited himself to stay three years ago, when, having been kicked out by his then girlfriend at two in the morning, he was partaking of my hospitality, the shit.

  He wanted to say all this and more, but he’d lea
rnt from bitter experience that it would do him no good. If you tried to explain something like that, something that had grown into a huge joke, people weren’t interested in the truth, they only wanted to roar with laughter and say how brilliant it was to be a cross-dresser, particularly such a cultured one ah, the quips came thick and fast when people were having fun and that he wasn’t to be ashamed, not for a moment, not when it was so fantastically amusing to picture him in pink tulle. These people were shits as well, just like Ben. The secret was not to let it rankle, not to give anything away, but to rise effortlessly above it.

  He did this now, saying smoothly, “I know DS Wilson will appreciate this very much.”

  “I still don’t see why it can’t wait,” Emma said peevishly, stifling another enormous yawn. “I’m desperately jet lagged My body’s screaming: Three in the morning!”

  Simon felt no remorse for having dragged her out. It served her right. She had started grousing as soon as he’d called and told her the police wanted to see her, had griped about having only just got to sleep a few hours before, had demanded to know why they couldn’t come to her later in the day, for Christ’s sake. Simon had bitten back the impulse to say that nobody was getting much sleep at the moment certainly not him: four hours last night? five? and that when it came to Catherine surely nothing could be too much trouble. Instead he had explained very firmly that everything of the remotest importance to the investigation had to be followed up immediately, that DS Wilson couldn’t get away from the police station to see her, and in an effort to humour her that her information could be immensely valuable. Emma had finally agreed, though not without a series of resentful sighs that had caused him to grit his teeth. Devoted to Catherine? She had no idea what devotion meant.

  Emma’s litany of complaint was bringing an unattractive shrillness to her voice. “Well, I hope they’re not expecting a statement,” she said. “I’m not going to hang around all day.”

  “They just want to hear what you have to say.”

  “But that’s the point I haven’t got anything to say, have I? Not really. Why can’t they talk to Ben, for heaven’s sake? He’d be able to tell them much better than me.”