by Rod Madocks
I took my opportunity and moved through the guests and appeared at her elbow. She gave a little start when she saw me and said, “I’m sorry Jack that it’s like this but Aidan saw the invitation and insisted on coming … you must go now, it is very difficult at the moment … I’ll call you as soon as I can.”
I found myself wanting to make a declaration, “Irina I can’t go on, I love you, want to be with you.”
Her face looked rigid and angry in the flickering disco light and she leaned over and hissed in my ear as the music thudded on.
“Please, not you as well. I keep hearing the word ‘love’ and I no longer know what it means.”
I walked away from her as Bill Ponds gestured to me to join him as he sung, karaoke-style, “Dock of the Bay”.
I stood in the vestibule of the building telling myself to leave when I heard a loud voice yelling, “Where is he?”
Aidan pushed his way towards me, a large powerful shape cleaving through the guests. His face was twisted by a desperate rage.
“Are you fucking my wife? I just want to know.”
He yelled this at close range and I could see Irina behind him trying to pull him back and crying out, “No, Aidan, please.”
“I just demand an answer, are you fucking my wife?” He pushed me in the chest, “Can’t you have the decency to tell me?”
“I’ve nothing to say to you,” I replied.
He swung at me and missed as I swayed back then he tried to grab at me and succeeded in clawing a hot weal down the side of my neck. I looked down to see the silvery fleck of my Madonna medallion and its chain fall to the parquet flooring where he had wrenched it off. Ignoring the threat from him, I leaned down to pick it up. As my hand closed on the tiny emblem he punched me in the face. Other guests seized Aidan at that point and wrestled him back. I stood and stared at him, clutching the Madonna tightly, with my mouth throbbing from where he had hit me.
I heard Bartram’s voice in my ear saying, “Time to leave now I think, spring-heeled Jack.”
I went out into the night, spitting out a clot of blood, checking to see if any teeth had loosened. Inside, after a pause, the music restarted.
I crept back to my flat and lay on the bed and pressed Radza to me, feeling her little bones move under the fur. I assembled a hope that Irina would ring in the night and tell me that everything would be alright. I woke with a start in the pre-dawn light and lay there moving my tongue over my swollen lips thinking of another moment four years before, a much more shocking and more dangerous event than my tangle with Aidan. This event that I carried with me as marks on my body, had burst upon me one April dawn at five a.m.
I awoke in bed with Louie after we had got together again following a year’s gap. We had both been asleep when a noise woke me up. I was conscious of a light shining into my eyes and I sat up in bed and made out a dark shape behind the light. A male voice then grated out, “Up you fucker … get up!”
I had begun to swing out of bed as the blows began to fall.
Louie and I had met up one night four years previously. She had rung me after a long gap, catching me on an evening when I had felt lonely and washed-out from trawling the hospital and I was happy to hear from her once more. I agreed to go for a drink. We met in town and she was nervy from the beginning, glancing about her as she talked, choosing to sit in corners of the quiet bars she picked. She looked thinner. There were finger bruises on her pale arms. Her hair was slicked back tightly with gel into a blonde casque. It gleamed in the light as she twisted her head this way and that, scanning the other bar guests. She talked of wanting to see me for a long time. “We should have been together — made a go of it,” she said as her eyes skittered across the room. We arrived back at my place, both of us a little drunk and she stripped as if it was expected of her. I drew my fingers over her rounded belly she told me that she was pregnant, three months gone.
“Wish it were yours,” she said then fell asleep on my bed.
I crawled in beside her and moved my hands over her for a while, smelling her skin as she lay there breathing softly. Her body seemed both familiar and very strange, a familiar field all ploughed over. I fell asleep without possessing her. I awoke with the light shining on me. Neville was there standing over my bed. I knew at once that it was Neville, Louie’s gangster boyfriend, although I had only seen him in that photo she had showed me long before. I also realised at once that I was in a lot of trouble. I began to sit up and found myself stammering out a weak denial, trying to make him out behind the light, seeing only a large dark shape and just the gleam of his shirt buttons and a belt buckle.
“It’s not like it seems,” I muttered before he hit me on the left side of the head with something very hard. I began to fight, grasping his neck with both my hands then locking my arm around him like a naked cowboy wrestling with a steer as he rampaged around the unlit room, raining blows and kicks on me and barging me against the furniture. But he was clamped too close to do severe damage. He eventually began to tire as I hung on his neck and tightened my grip. His breathing grew laboured and then he just stopped and fell to his knees with a crash. Still I hung on.
We remained like that for an age it seemed, both of us heaving for breath, with his aftershave smelling sweet and sharp. I felt no pain although I found later he had lacerated my scalp and broken some toes. Desperation brought new strength. I pulled and twisted at him and managed to fling him away from me and against one wall. He remained crouching, looking at me and I could make him out clearly for we must have torn down a curtain in our struggles. Dawn light illuminated the scene. He was bulky and dressed entirely in black with a beanie hat pulled low on his forehead.
A lull followed while he remained crouching by the wall issuing a stream of threats. I spied my trousers lying on the floor and he made no movement as I pulled them on over my bloodied and battered feet and legs. Then, once I had covered myself, he began to move and he clacked out a large lock knife, holding it low and coming toward me. I pulled off the bed sheets to catch and parry the blade. As I did so I saw Louie on the bed, curled in a foetal position with a pillow over her head. She might have been screaming throughout the fight but I have no memory of a single sound from her. He jabbed at me and I caught a few of the blows in my sheet-wrapped hands but he managed to cut me many times although I did not realise it at the time. At last I managed to grab his wrist and again we were wrestling and tumbling together with my right hand gripping his wrist. We rolled right out of the bedroom and crashed into the bathroom and I remember my feet skidding about on the blood-smeared tiles as I shook his arm. Eventually the knife went clattering away into the shower recess. Things were different after that, as I was no longer afraid of him stabbing me and perhaps he had become frightened of me in turn for he retreated into a back bedroom. I kicked, pummelled and pushed him along until we reached a window that hung open and which I assumed was where he had entered. Then I charged at him, got him by the waist and began to heave him over the sill. Then in the bizarre courtesy of our battle he said to me, “No, not the window, I came in through the door!”
I paused for a moment then shoved him once more. He fell out the window and dropped twenty feet into the shadowy flowerbeds below with a crack and a thump.
I went back into the bedroom on suddenly shaky legs and found Louie dressing. She simply nodded when I asked if she was OK. I picked up Neville’s heavy torch, which he had left among the debris on the bedroom floor, and went cautiously downstairs hefting it in my bruised hand. The front door was open and the prying bar he had used to force it still lay in the entry. Thank goodness he had not hit me with that. I peered out into the garden and could detect no sound or movement from him. I was leaking some blood but still not really hurting as I hobbled into my sitting room. Louie crept out and began dabbing at my cuts with wads of cotton wool. The police turned up, having been called by the long-suffering Mrs Mullender next door. Louie murmured how sorry she was and how much she regretted getting me mixed up
in her troubles. The police took me to casualty to receive stitches in the scalp and chest. I declined to make a statement. Neville turned up in the same hospital a little later after being brought in by friends, having sustained a fracture to his leg in the fall from the window. I considered that we were quits. Louie rang me a few days later to ask how I was but we did not meet after that. I think she went back to Neville
Wounds and losses, and I was to gain more. Irina, who once at the beginning of our affair had run her fingers over the ridges and welts left by Neville’s blade asking me how I had got them, now dealt me further wounds herself. Soon after Bartram’s wedding she rang me on my departmental phone asking to see me. We met at Heaton Camp, near the hospital, a clutch of wartime temporary buildings thrown up as a temporary prisoner of war camp. We wandered around the old guard houses and prisoner blocks as an autumnal wind rattled the peeling, tar paper roofs and the shrivelled banks of nettle. She spoke of the disaster at the wedding reception, and Aidan’s shame at his behaviour and the effect of all the upset on Anton. She felt confused and heart-broken and wanted to do the right thing. She and Aidan were taking sabbaticals and they were going to live in France for a while.
“I know I cannot be happy now, not after everything... but I must do the right thing for my family. You will help me in that won’t you Jack? I know I can depend on you to help me do that by letting me go.”
And I acquiesced to it, somehow thinking that I could serve her by not making things difficult although it was a deathly blow to hear her say that. The wind tore at her words as she spoke, driving the leaves down the rutted old camp road as I watched her little Micra go bumping away from me.
It was strange that the reality of her departure did not immediately hit me then, even though I had clung to her like no other lover before. Perhaps I treated her leaving me like one of those waiting periods where I was put on hold until her husband went away on one of his trips and I would be summoned back once more at some time. But weeks turned to months with no news of her. Still, I clung to an idea that she would call but it was not to be until that following autumn when I saw her walking across the hospital car parks, looking thinner than ever, hurrying along with a preoccupied air. She slowed for a moment as I passed her, just looked at me and then walked on without further acknowledgement. She had left the hospital to take up a post at another hospital, returning only on the last Thursday of every month to attend the regional forensic psychology meetings. Those twelve Thursdays a year became my secret markers and I would look forward to those afternoons when she would be near me somewhere in the hospital. I could not resist standing quietly under the shadow of the rook-inhabited poplars to watch her drive in and go hurrying up the lodge house steps. Sometimes, I would draw comfort from touching the warm bonnet of her car, once I even plucked a dandelion flower from the paving and left it on the car door handle as a token. On one occasion, I picked up and kept a shredded piece of tissue that she had dropped on the pathway still retaining a trace of her scent and which I held on to for a while until it rubbed away to dust.
Another year turned and holding Radza one day, I found a little lump which grew into a rosy cancer in no time. The vet told me after tests that it was an undifferentiated fibrosarcoma, and that the prognosis was poor. Radza was doomed and the young cat thinned and weakened. I discovered her one November morning shuddering on my sitting room floor and that was the end. I found myself weeping over that scrap of fur as I had never done for Rachel, Irina, or for all my losses. I built a backyard bonfire from all that summer’s clippings and sent Radza off on a funeral pyre, onto which I also tossed Irina’s notes to me, drawings by Anton, and the sheaf of dried out grasses she had given me, keeping back only her black doll picture.
With so many scars it was hard to really want anything new and it was easier to remove myself from all wanting entirely. Max’s death that autumn, after the long summer seeing him at Haven Lodge seemed like another blow. I heard the news of it with a sense of regret. He had died two days after I last saw him, expiring in his sister’s arms in Haven Lodge.
“He slipped away peaceful like,” she told me later.
I drove out to the crematorium in the town where Theresa lived. Gulls drifted on the plough lines and lines of lapwing took crooked, hobbled flight over the salt-grey road. There was a sparse group at the crem. Theresa tall, composed and stately came forward to greet me. There was a small knot of relatives and one long-standing staff nurse from the villas — for the hospital rarely forgets its own. I was surprised to find that Max was nominally a Catholic. The priest gave a brief eulogy discreetly acknowledging a painful journey and sins now accounted for. One hymn was sung without accompaniment. We read the words from slips of paper carefully copied out in Theresa’s hand. She had chosen well, I thought. The coffin jerked away to dissolution surrounded by a few sprays of bronze and cream chrysanthemums.
As I walked away in the drizzle, Theresa called to me and said, “Just wanted to thank you for all you did for him. I know he wanted me to thank you on his behalf. He wrote me such a lovely letter. He left me instructions. He wanted you to have these. He asked if you could go see Maeve and tell her that he’s gone.”
“Leanne!” She called to her daughter, who came forward with a supermarket carrier bag which she handed to me. I held the heavy bag and bid farewell to Theresa, thinking how her eyes were dark like Max’s. I sat in my car with the heater going and looked in the bag. Inside, I found three bulky scrapbooks with pieces of string dangling from them, full of clippings, photos and jottings in Maxie’s crabbed hand and a blue and chrome MP3 player, an unfamiliar gadget which I turned over in my hands, unsure what to make of it.
*
I did not know it at the time, but Hobman was already putting his long-hatched plans into motion as I returned from Max’s funeral and hurried to the women’s blocks to speak to Maeve. The security men chattered among themselves as they unhurriedly issued the keys and the smell of meat and cabbage from the canteen percolated down through the blocks. The patients’ artwork glowed in the wall cabinets on each side of me as I went down the block main corridor. Out on the yards, the chill gate latch stung the hand and a column of patients came tramping past under guard. One patient made mooing sounds, then another hooted like an ape and the whole column laughed and the key-twirling, muffled escorts grinned at the fun. In the women’s villa nursing station cigarette smoke burned the throat, tea trays rattled and staff radios clicked and hissed. I waited as the team leader briefed her staff, then she escorted me to the review room, telling me that Maeve was due for review and it was best if I spoke to her with familiar staff present.
I rarely had reason to go to the women’s blocks. I found it hard to muster the same feelings for them that I had for the male offenders. Whatever they had done they did not appear to be as dangerous as the men and it seemed wrong to see women treated like that. The women’s quarters had a softer feminine feel with plastic flowers, heaps of cuddly toys and homely pictures of rustic landscapes in glassless frames. The inmates milled around the smoking rooms, stocky women in track suits and Nike designer tops. Their arms, necks and faces showed marks, wheals and scars from where they had sliced and scratched at themselves for self-harm ran like an epidemic in these units.
I was ushered into the review room as a clinical interloper, and was gruffly acknowledged by the irritable male psychiatrist chairing the meetings. There was huge Maria who waddled in, escorted by two staff. She had been in seclusion for the previous two weeks after she had attacked female staff by squeezing and twisting their breasts with her dirty, longnailed fingers. She had managed to secrete a biro into the seclusion room and had inserted it into a vein in her arm and infected the wound with her faeces. So savage had been her attacks on staff that she had to be fed, and have her wounds sutured, through a gap between the protective riot shields of the triple 4 squad. Now her frenzy had abated and her face was slack and apathetic. She listened to the psychiatrist advising on medication c
hanges.
I sat on in the review through a succession of other patients. I probably had been deliberately made to wait, because the women’s service staff resented my presence as a rival clinician from another service. At last Maeve tramped into the room and plonked herself down with an audible thud. She was an arsonist with an Irish name, for somewhere in her background her family had been travelling folk but she spoke with a soft, Norfolk accent. Her thick, dark hair was cut into a bob and she sat regarding us with pursed lips and occasionally pushed her spectacles back on her broad nose.
“Hello doctors,” she said, “I’m not a low grade I am.”
“No, we know that, Maeve,” answered the consultant.
“Coming to see me about Maxie are you?”
“It’s bad news I’m afraid, Maeve,” I announced.
“Bad?”
I told her he was dead in as simple and a gentle way as I could.
She pressed her specs back onto her nose and scratched at her dark hair that pressed like a tilted wig onto her brow. Seamed scars writhed with white, corded striations on her wrists as she scratched and scratched. Then she opened her mouth, showing small, white teeth, wedged back, as if having received a great blow in the past at some time, “So, Maxie’s not coming back then?”
“No, not coming back,” I said.
She sat a little longer with her thighs set apart on the chair then she announced, “Have ter find another boyfriend then won’t I?”
“Yes Maeve.” We responded in chorus.
Afterwards, I trudged back across the yards, wondering what Max had seen in Maeve. I passed the barred windows of the day units and did not realise that Lynch and Gorman were probably in there, attending the same occupational therapy session and secretly agreeing upon their final plans. We have no idea now how Lynch was to be rewarded, or what Hobman promised him. It could have been by credits, by baccy supplies or a suck in the unit latrines, or by something much more metaphysical. Maybe it was going to be Lynch’s way of getting back at me at last — a year after I had fixed his lengthy stay in the hospital — we will never know.