No Way to Say Goodbye

by Rod Madocks

  At some stage she moved to the city. When did she meet Max? We do not know. What can be determined is that Peggy took out a council tenancy in a dreary estate on the outskirts of the city at the beginning of the decade. Max must have met her and moved in shortly after completing his prison sentence for the first sex offences. What did he see in her? He was drawn to children himself and to the girlish and the vulnerable, yet he had yoked himself to this blocky, dominating lump. Their combination seemed to be one of lethal, mutual subjugation and a melding of a common belligerence. They both possessed a boredom with everyday life. Their bond had perhaps been sealed by thrill-seeking. We think that they began by stealing. They crept into houses, at first contenting themselves with burglary, then staying longer in the homes. Then they cooked food there or lay in the owner’s beds, waiting for the people to return before slipping away at the last moment. There were pictures of houses in Max’s scrapbook.

  They probably felt more alive when taking risks. Sex games also probably pleased them — bondage, subjugation, humiliation. I think of Max passing the time waiting for the home owners to return by endlessly knotting his ligatures. They were savagely resentful of more ordered, happier lives and gradually the idea of playing out their fantasies on a person must have evolved. There were a few clippings from newspaper personal columns in Max’s scrapbooks, and we can speculate that they experimented with luring people or perhaps they sent each other out on dates. We will never really understand the mechanics of their phantasy and when I think of Pegs and Max I am reminded of that old nineteenth century definition of psychopathy, a manie sans delirium, madness without frenzy, a madness without the excuse of frenzy.

  The police had found her name on the council records and had tracked down the estate house that she shared with Max. I went there, after the initial press interest had died down, still on leave from the hospital, and with all the time in the world. It was early summer. A pewter sky radiated a muggy heat and sirens whooped and twittered on the horizons of sound. The estate was maybe five miles from Rachel’s old flat, an expanse of cheap, family homes built in the 60s. The houses were beginning to sag and crack, the trees outgrowing their little plots and now hacked back to truncated stumps. Their old house could be distinguished from the others by the blue and white banded tape that sealed it off. It seemed to be vacant, the windows sealed with plastic and the front door standing open. A white vehicle from the police forensic service was positioned outside and a single, bored policeman leaned against the gate post. I peered over the front hedge thinking that Max’s works van must have once been parked on that weed-clotted drive. Now a rusting child’s tricycle lay toppled there next to a broken splayed folding umbrella. Beyond the back gate I could see heaps of freshly dug earth in the rear garden. A group of young mothers came past pushing prams, smoking and talking loudly. They began to chaff with the policeman.

  “Antcha got anything better to do?”

  “Found any bodies like?”

  “You can dig up my garden anytime you can!”

  I walked away to a row of nearby shops, trying to imagine Maxie going out to buy his rolling tobacco. There was the usual Asian corner shop with its wary owner in the doorway, a place for tanning booths, a credit shop and one or two boarded up properties. Lounging youths watched me, their high-crowned baseball caps set at an angle sideways. Some began to whiz past me on roller blades giving me a hostile stare. Swarms of winged ants were massing on the cracked pavements and beginning to take flight in the hot air. I noticed a graffito scratched on a wall — “dream wiv open eyes” and I turned away, feeling desolate. This place was rubbed clean by time. There was nothing left to find.

  Nothing was left of Peggy either, we know that from the only records we have of her — her last medical notes. She evidently used to have fits of impulsive rage — there are hints of these in Max’s writings. At these times she would hit out at him or she would run away and disappear for a while. She used to slash and cut herself and her wrists were whealed with white scars. It was a year after Rachel disappeared and Max must have done something — we do not know what — an argument, a refusal, a minor betrayal of some sort perhaps. Whatever it was, she took an overdose of paracetomol tablets, probably a whole bottle. She slugged it down with brandy from the Asian corner shop. That would teach him. That would show him. He found her curled asleep on the sofa. She roused a little when he shook her awake. She cried and railed at him then she nodded off again. He left her to sleep it off. She had done it before but had never taken so many pills as this time. Anyway, he was too fearful of attracting attention from the authorities to seek help.

  It had all seemed to have blown over when she awoke in the morning. He tried to get her to eat something, but she was still nauseous and had a terrible thirst and headache. She even became amorous and attentive to him after asserting her power to damage herself. As the day wore on, she felt a little better and was almost back to her old self but she had a disturbed night of vivid, frightening dreams The next morning the malaise got gradually worse. She found it hard to concentrate and couldn’t tell the time right. She became anxious and called on Max for reassurance. The fear and agitation grew worse through the day. He was concerned to see her so muddled in her thoughts and suggested that she lie down and get some rest. He shut her in the spare bedroom and she woke him in the dawn of the next morning calling out, “Maxie, Maxie, where are you?”

  He was shocked at last into doing something for she was obviously ill, sweaty and frightened, her skin yellowing. He took her to Casualty in the work van and the triage nurse whisked her into the IC unit as soon as she saw her, calling to Max, “Why have you waited so long?”

  The doctors crowded round her and someone wrote, “fulminant hepatitis” on her notes. She had acute liver failure from paracetomol poisoning. In intensive care she was intubated, oxygenated and they filled her with Vit K, but jaundice had set in and she began to slide away. Her eyes darkened to brown holes in a yellow face as bilirubin flooded her body. She developed metabolic acidosis, pressure mounted in her skull and her consciousness wavered. Her mother came weeping to see her strange daughter. Max paced Casualty, unable to cope and yelling at the doctors. She was dead by next morning of cerebral oedema. Her face dark and shiny on the hospital bolster like her childhood doll. There was a brief service at the crem in her home town and her ashes were emptied out from a plastic urn onto the tea roses in the garden of remembrance.

  Max had kept his pact with me and had given me a way back to the truth, although there were no survivors from that particular past. The police worked on his scrap books and followed his spidery markings to find that lakeside grave by the poplars on Clouds Hill. Thereafter they worked quickly. It was not DNA that identified her, though they sought it. No, an old-fashioned dental chart brought a match. I first saw the news on a billboard outside a newsagent shop in the city. Victim Identified ran the headlines. I had been waiting nearly twenty years for that moment. I stood behind a gaggle of schoolchildren as the bangled wrist of the Sikh newsagent doled out penny sweets into their impatient hands. I carried the heavy, rolled newspaper outside and unfurled it while the morning commuter traffic thundered in my ears. I took a deep breath and began to read.

  It was Jayney Kirkman, the fifteen year old papergirl who had gone a year before Rachel. Poor little Jayney, curled in that slot in the pebbly field on Clouds Hill by the lake water. I watched her bewildered parents later on TV. Ordinary people, who held hands in front of the popping cameras. Jayney’s sister spoke for the family at the press conference and asked for privacy and understanding. She had lived on, to be nibbled at by the years, while her kid sister remained forever young with her puffed-out eighties hair and big fringe; her room left just as it had been when she disappeared. Her bed was still neatly made up with two dolls propped on the pillow, posters of Wham and Duran Duran on the wall and, on a side table, a domed paperweight that contained a ballerina pirouetting in a snowstorm. The TV news showed the nettle-choked
alley from where she had disappeared and original newsreel shots of the police combing the countryside. Then they showed pictures of Tuxford Water. A funeral followed and life rearranged itself while I kept watching.

  The police continued to go through Peg’s old house in the estate which I had visited. In fact they erected screens and virtually took it to bits after moving out the immigrant family who now inhabited it. They wrenched up the floorboards, pulled out all the fittings down to the plaster walls and probed down to the foundations as well as excavating the garden. They did not find much that corresponded to Max and Peg’s tenure although the few items they did find were telling. Some plastic phone cables ties and lengths of flex with distinctive half-hitch knots were found in an outhouse and were similar to those found at Clouds Hill. Examination of the skirting board tack heads revealed carpet fibres that also matched samples collected by the police from the grave. Apart from that nothing much, except the skeleton of a young dog in the garden with the remnant of a studded collar. Oh yes, they also went through the things that Max had given to his sister. One of these items was a small, cheap jewellery box. It contained rings, silver studs, one leaf-shaped earring and a bracelet.

  We have no real idea how many more were left to find. Max’s scrap book contained a number of pictures of fields and woodland and the jewellery box contained objects that were never matched. The police returned to Tuxford Water a few times and probed here and there, but nothing more was found. Perhaps the lake had crept up over time and covered the sites.

  There remained now for me only a night-time scene like a recovered memory. Perhaps I had really known it since Mrs Durrand, the medium’s message for me all those years ago. A white Ford Transit with rust-dimpled sides on the boulevard under the street lights, parked up beyond the Paradise Stores and the bus stop with its metal canopy. Fly posters for student club nights flap and stir as the occasional car runs homeward on the wet boulevard. The rear doors of the van are open and inside the shadowed interior you can just glimpse a tartan blanket, an unzipped sleeping bag, some old sacking and a tangle of flex and cable ties. Max in a white tee shirt by the doors watching the street with his quick, dark eyes. His scalp gleams under the lights and he grinds out a nub end under his foot. LeeLee with the cowed Doberman puppy, scuffling among the fallen plane tree leaves on the pavement, her blunt face moves under the street lights as the shop door jingles its bell. Then she is approaching, her flats going slip-slap on the pavement. Her jeans making a slight lisping sound as they drag, then leaning down to pet the dog — she could not pass an animal without making a fuss of it.

  I went back to the lake in September and paced the long shore, thinking of that vortex in my life around which everything revolved — that absence of Rachel and how it had affected all my relations with women. How I had stumbled on through life with my companion, the unknowable self, or rather the self that could not endure examination. I had clung to women and I had driven them away. My life had been filled with victims and perpetrators. Sometimes it had been hard to tell one from the other. The pity of it was that I had snatched at love, but my heart had been too full of coldness and regret to make it a lasting thing. I had been such a fool about everything. And yet, what remained with me now were tender thoughts about Rachel, thinking of her as a soft love, an accepting love. If she had a voice I wondered what she would say to me now.

  I walked down to the lake shore past the dinghies and their trailers, all covered up for the winter, with leaves beginning to collect in the hollows of their canvas shrouds. A few hardy souls were about, dog walkers, a family playing football on the parched grass. Thistle seeds blew in on the wind across the lake and the young gulls mewled as I went along the edge of the lake that had taken so long to fill. Now, after a dry summer, the level had dropped by thirty feet leaving a long strand of sticky, drying clay. This, that once had been plough land, was now a featureless, flat place apart from where the water had dropped back so far to reveal a tree stump, twenty years drowned, perhaps one of those ash trees under which Rachel and I sheltered all that time ago.

  I collected some autumn flowers from the lake verges and boarded The Tuxford Belle, a rusty forty seater offering a last end of season cruise around the lake. A crewman took my money as the wind rattled the canvas canopy on the viewing deck. Out in the middle of the lake, they cut the engines for a while and we drifted in silence. I looked out to the tan slope of Clouds Hill and the woodland fringe where Jayney was found then peered down over the rail into the Lethean dark. I leaned over the rail to see my reflection wavering there as the calls of the gulls and terns echoed over the water. It sounded to me if they were calling Come … come … come. I tossed my wreath with its sprigs of elder berries and flowers of yellow charlock bound with grasses. It floated for a while, then went down in our wake as they restarted the motors and we went pattering back. As we returned I looked back to watch the silvery, flittering shape of a tern, calling and circling over that place in the water.

  *

  I went back to the hospital. Where else had I to go? I had an interview with security and received a new key induction for there had been a complete revamp after Hobman’s escape. It was comforting to make the long drive once more at the end of summer, passing the shorn fields with the last harvesters grinding up their spumes of dust. The hospital was quiet with many staff still on holiday. No one seemed to take much notice as I walked up the drive, past the red brown scar in the earth where Hobman’s hedge had once grown. As I came in, I looked up at the wind vane in the medical superintendent’s garden showing St George spearing a writhing dragon and I thought of Heinie’s Lambton Worm.

  The entrance gate approached and I felt a sense of unease for a moment. Then I turned to go up the steps and once more enter the world of rules and procedures, of magnetic locks, screens and searches. It was a place where I knew that the other staff were talking about me behind my back but I felt that Bartram’s power protected me and, besides, I was also sheltered by my new talismans. These were my new tattoos which itched under my shirt. I had gone into the back street place a week before returning to the hospital. The tattooist considered my designs for a while then pronounced, “Cool. No problem.”

  I watched the marking on his upper arms as he moved his machine over me and the room filled with the smell of hot ink. I admired particularly the legend No Fear and the image of a laughing skull with stars shooting out of the eye sockets. His fingers pulled and stretched the skin on my arms. I enjoyed being touched like that as he marked out on my left arm triceps, a sun and moon with winking faces conjoined, with a scroll underneath carrying the words Omnia Mutantur Nihil Interit. On my right arm he drew the planetary symbol of Pluto with the letters merged in a helical design and below that the legend Adsum. The pain felt sweet as the needle clicked in its silvery snout. Another customer, who had been slouching over image catalogues, came over and squinted at the emerging work. “What’s that then?” he asked. The tattooist leant back and slotted in another charge of ink into the chromed instrument and said, “That’s Latin. Very popular now.”

  “An old poet’s words. From his book The Metamorphoses — everything changes, nothing is truly lost,” I said.

  They both regarded me in silence for a moment then the customer tilted his head and looked at my right arm, “I get it. It’s Pluto, the new planet. Death and rebirth man — transformation!”

  “That’s right, mate. Transformation.” I nodded assent.

  My office looked much as I had last left it when I had received that phone call from Irina in December all those months before. There were heaps of mail and clinical circulars. Some of the drawers were disarranged, probably by Poynton’s searchers. I sat at my desk and wondered how I was to work there now and I realised that I would have to find a new way of being in the hospital.

  In time I would take up a fresh case load — mainly men but also a few women patients, well-bedded in to the slow stream of the villas. It was soothing to hear the clinking of the ke
ys and to feel the dragging touch of the key chain on the thigh as I walked the corridors. The riprap of locks and the dull boom of heavy doors sounded comfortingly familiar, like returning to a childhood home. Staff greeted me in the directorate rooms. Dr Reed put down a canapé from the lunchtime buffet, unselfconsciously wiping her hand on her sleeve then shaking mine, murmuring in her slurred voice, “Good to see you back, Jack.” Even the chilly clinical director, Dr Davidson, turned his heavy head as I entered the meeting room and said, “Well, of all people — welcome — and now down to business, colleagues,” as he distributed another list of the new admissions and hospital transfers.

  It was almost as if nothing had changed. The patients were accepting of me, and somehow I now felt that I had more in common with them than with those on the outside.