If I Die Before I Wake

by Emily Koch

  Rosie drove me to the hospital. I couldn’t talk. I was in shock.

  When I saw Alex, he was in intensive care. He was hooked up to machines, a ventilator breathing for him. I threw up.

  The doctors gave me a sedative, and I slept on a chair in the family room until the next morning.

  I saw it all with her. Watching myself being wheeled in and out of theatre, I realised that looked different, now that I was the victim of a crime. Anger flushed my face with heat.

  Bea stopped tapping on the keys. The rain had stopped too now, leaving behind it a series of persistent drips outside my window.

  ‘I showed the letter to the police.’ She spoke louder, addressing me. ‘I told them it must be her.’

  Was it PC Halliwell again?

  ‘They were so patronising. I thought they’d be interested. They said they would look into it, but …’

  Wankers.

  It sounded like Halliwell’s style. This was him all over. He was dismissing Bea just like he and his buddies had dismissed Ormond’s family. Like they’d tried to dismiss me as a troublemaker. Were they treating her like this because of her link to me? She’d had nothing to do with my reporting of the Holly King case.

  The pillow behind my head felt wet with my sweat and my mouth was dry. It was all too much – the new information, the uncertainty, my inability to do anything about it all.

  Bea dropped her head onto my bed and it nudged against the sheet covering my thigh, still damp from her wet coat. The only good thing to come of this news was that she seemed to have returned to me. She hadn’t pulled the chair to the end of the bed. She wasn’t as angry with me now. She was touching me again. I felt a flash of hope drive through me, from my thigh, where I felt her contact, up through my abdomen, chest and heart.

  Had she forgiven me for my ‘affair’? Or was it simply that this turn of events made it pale into insignificance?

  It was good to be close to her again.

  Let me win you back.

  ‘I don’t know why they want me to bother giving another witness statement – they don’t value anything I say,’ Bea murmured into the bed. ‘My stalker. The letter.’

  In all the drama of the last hour or so, I’d forgotten about Bea’s stalker. The truth about my fall – and my theories about who might have had it in for me – made this significantly more sinister.

  What if it’s the same person?

  Images of Holly King forced themselves into my mind. Her battered semi-naked body lying by a gravestone. All that blood.

  That can’t happen to Bea.

  The police would take more notice of her being followed, now that they were investigating my attempted murder. They would see the link, and protect her. Wouldn’t they?

  Be careful. Please be careful.

  It was a busy afternoon – Bea stayed for the whole of it, as I willed her to stay close to me and not leave the safety of my room. After a couple of hours, Dad showed up with Philippa.

  ‘Hi, Graham. Philippa.’ Bea sounded formal.

  ‘Bea,’ Dad said. There were muffled noises of him hugging her, coins jangling in his pockets. ‘The police came to see you, too?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bea. ‘They didn’t explain much. Did they tell you what this new information they have is?’

  ‘Nothing.’ Philippa’s voice, curt and unfriendly. She never managed to hide her dislike of my girlfriend.

  ‘What’re we going to do?’ Bea asked, her voice coming from my left-hand side.

  ‘Not a lot we can do,’ Dad said. ‘Let the police do their job. Answer their questions.’ His words were weary.

  ‘Did they tell you who they thought …’ Bea trailed off.

  ‘No,’ Dad said. He started stroking my face, his hands smelling of copper and leather, and a hint of the alcohol in his aftershave. ‘They must be talking to Eleanor, I suppose. Tom, Alberto, maybe? But I can’t believe they would know anything.’

  It couldn’t have been Tom or Alberto. They were climbing a different route when I fell, I was sure Tom had told me that on one of his visits.

  But Eleanor?

  Would the police really look at her?

  Why would she want to hurt me, if she had feelings for me?

  She couldn’t’ve done it. She had no reason to want me dead.

  ‘Just goes to show, you can’t trust anyone,’ said Philippa, coldly.

  Can I really trust you, Eleanor?

  What if we’d had an argument while we were climbing, that I couldn’t remember? Could she have done something to make me fall, in the heat of the moment? Distracted me, or startled me somehow? Made me lose my footing? It seemed so unlikely. We never argued; certainly not while climbing.

  Philippa’s clipped steps moved towards the left-hand side of my bed. ‘These flowers are dead.’ The familiar scrunching thump, as she tossed them into the bin. ‘I won’t bring any more until my next visit now,’ she said to no one in particular. ‘He’ll have to do without.’

  ‘I showed the police Alex’s letter – the one I found,’ Bea said.

  ‘The …?’ Dad sounded confused for a moment. ‘Oh, yes. I suppose they need to see it. You never got to the bottom of it?’

  ‘No.’

  Dad’s hand disappeared from my face. He blew his nose loudly.

  ‘It felt like the right thing to do, to come down here and be with him.’ He was on the verge of tears. ‘Do you think he – who knows.’

  ‘Think he what?’ Bea asked.

  ‘Do you think he knew what was happening, when he fell?’

  No one answered.

  ‘I didn’t think it could get worse than it already was.’ Dad swallowed his last words and Philippa clipped round to his side.

  ‘Hey, now. Dad,’ she soothed. All her affection was reserved for him. Daddy’s girl.

  ‘Nothing changes with his condition as a result of this, I suppose,’ Bea said. ‘It doesn’t make it better. Or worse.’

  ‘Of course it’s worse,’ Philippa snapped. ‘There’s a murderer out there.’

  In the middle of that night, I woke up as I often did, disorientated and sweating.

  Where am I?

  You’d think I’d know by now.

  I’d been dreaming, vividly, about Bea walking on Lydeard Hill. It didn’t feel like I was with her, but more like I was in her body. I saw the mouse on the bank, felt the sun on my skin. But in my version, her phone wasn’t turned off. It rang in her pocket, and when I pulled it out to answer, I saw that it was attached to a portable charging pack. I tried to take the call but the ringing wouldn’t stop – and the noise forced me out of the dream.

  There was an alarm faintly sounding in the ward, I realised, once I worked out where I was. I couldn’t get back to sleep. The dream had bothered me, but why?

  It wasn’t until I began to drift back off, what felt like hours later, that I jolted awake again with the answer. Bea never switched her phone off – she made a point of it, especially after that incident where I had forgotten mine when I went to the Gower. She had bought us each one of those charging packs, so we would always have enough battery if we went out for the day. We should never have a reason to be out of contact, unless we had no signal. Why had she turned it off when she went up Lydeard Hill?

  It was also unusual for her to have gone hiking on her own. Running, yes. But a long walk like that? Never. What had been going on with her that day? There had been too many moments like this in recent weeks, when I felt like I didn’t understand her. When I felt a distance growing between us.

  She wasn’t telling me something.

  19

  WAKING UP? NO.

  Getting dressed? No.

  Saying goodbye to Bea? No.

  Meeting Eleanor? No.

  Climbing? No.

  Falling? No.

  I couldn’t remember a single thing from the day my life changed, which made it hard for me to believe, at times, that any of this ever happened. There had to be a picture in my mind somewhere
. I tried to retrace my steps, to trigger a memory of what went wrong.

  It was almost as impossible to order my memories of the week leading up to it, but at least I had scraps to play with. I went climbing on Saturday – I knew that much. My memories seemed to go back to Wednesday, although even those gaped with holes. On Wednesday night I played five-a-side with the boys from work, as we did every week. I remembered jogging over to the pitches at Clifton College – it stuck in my mind because I was halfway there before I discovered I’d forgotten the single pair of putrid goalkeeping gloves that we all shared. It was a hot night – which probably contributed to the fight that broke out between the court reporter Michael and our newest trainee, Jacob. Two of the most placid men in the office disagreed over the legality of a tackle and ended up rolling around on the ground in a blur of punches, and I had to pull them apart.

  On Thursday we’d run the first of our series of articles about William Ormond. My editor, Louise, had decided to go big on it: she stuck it on the front, gave me four pages inside to fill, wrote that day’s leader about it. I’d used the space to go over the details of the murder – how, while I was still young enough to be at school, twenty-year-old Holly was attacked in the grounds of Arnos Vale Cemetery in her lunch break. How police believed she had been sexually assaulted. How she had been bludgeoned to death with a heavy object, believed to be a spade – but which had never been found. How nineteen-year-old Ormond was the prime suspect, because he worked as a gardener at the cemetery and was found covered in her blood, cradling her head in his lap. Even though he told the officers who found him – one of them being Halliwell – that he had been trying to resuscitate her. Even though he had learning difficulties and no record, he was arrested and questioned without a lawyer present and made to sign a confession. At trial he pleaded not guilty, but the jury didn’t buy it.

  A few days before – Monday? Tuesday? – one of the newsdesk secretaries had taken a call from a man who refused to give his name, instead repeating four words over and over. ‘Drop the Ormond story. Drop the Ormond story.’

  Bill was on newsdesk that day, and had laughed it off. ‘What’s the best way to guarantee that we run a story? Tell us not to.’

  I agreed. I was fired up, ready to fight the injustice of Ormond’s incarceration, ready to expose the failure of the police. I had assumed – I think we all had – that it was one of the detectives or a police press officer who had called, trying to scare us. They’d really been putting the heat on, talking to Louise when I wouldn’t back down. It hadn’t occurred to me that the real murderer might know we were running the piece; not before anything had been in the paper. How could he have known? It never crossed my mind that the call might have been from him. I didn’t remember having spoken to Bea much about the case, though that was strange as I would normally talk to her about important things at work. Had Bill asked me to keep quiet about it? Possibly. Would he remember the call now and realise it could have been the real killer? Would that help put the police on the right track?

  On the Friday, I went to a care home in Downend and interviewed a man who was about to celebrate his one hundredth birthday. Larry Thomson. God knows how his name has stuck in my head. It was small fry compared to the Holly King investigation, and I was knee-deep in that, but Bill liked to make sure everyone knew they weren’t above the bread-and-butter stories. It was the kind of interview that never made the front page, never won you any prizes, but, despite my reluctance, I knew readers would like it. Larry had flown with the RAF in the Second World War, outlived three wives, had five children and twenty-one grandchildren. He’d worked as a milkman, a car salesman and then bought a corner shop. ‘What’s your secret?’ I’d asked him. ‘How do you know about that?’ he’d replied, aghast. ‘No,’ I assured him (although I wanted to know more), ‘what I meant was, what’s your secret for living to such a ripe old age?’ He laughed. ‘Whisky,’ he said. ‘And a decent steak, every now and then.’ Ignoring calls from the office wondering where I was, I stayed for a few hours chatting to him, helped him change a dud light bulb, and made us both some lunch from what I could find in his cupboards (beans on toast was the best I could do). He had grabbed my hand as I got up to leave. ‘Send me a copy of the paper, will you, lad?’ I promised I would. But I never got the chance. I never saw the story in print. Good old Larry Thomson – he probably wasn’t around any more. One hundred was one thing – he looked fit and healthy, with massive ears and cheeky eyes. But one hundred and two? I didn’t think he would’ve made it that far.

  I must have filed a page lead on Larry, but I couldn’t recall the rest of that afternoon, no matter how hard I tried. Presumably I just sat at my desk, working? But I couldn’t be sure about anything. Had something happened in those lost hours to make someone want to hurt me?

  At the end of the day I would’ve caught the number eight bus. I didn’t remember the journey, but I remembered getting home to Bea. I walked into the flat desperate for a shower, and kissed her on the head. I definitely remembered feeling unhappy – or perhaps uneasy? – about something. I didn’t breeze in; I didn’t remember feeling excited about the arrival of another weekend. Bea was bent over her desk, sketching. The windows gaped open, and the blind tapped against the wooden frame every so often when a breeze caught it.

  She had said hello without looking up. Engrossed in her work. There was nothing particularly unusual about that, but it troubled me now. I couldn’t pin down the cause of my disquiet.

  Later that evening, less than twenty-four hours away from the moment that everything fell apart, I went to a barbecue at Tom and Rosie’s place in Redland. Bea wasn’t with me, but I couldn’t remember why not. It was a clear night, and as darkness fell and Tom and I finished off the last overcooked burgers and sausages, I looked up and was surprised to see so many stars. Now, I wondered, was my attacker looking up at those same stars and planning to kill me the next day?

  20

  ‘LET’S LIFT YOUR chin a little, hmm?’ Pauline said loudly into my ear. She pulled my jaw up and away from my chest. I felt the blade drag down against the skin and stubble on my neck; breathed in the cheap lemony scent of the foam. Once I got over the fear of her holding a sharp piece of metal to my throat, I had found that I quite enjoyed this occasional treat. Thankfully Connie never bothered with the added extras like this. ‘I’m not a fucking beautician,’ she told me once.

  ‘My husband, God rest his soul, he used to say you should go with the grain.’ Pauline swilled the blade in water with a slosh, before bringing it back to my neck.

  I didn’t know your husband was dead.

  This small piece of news struck me. I didn’t like to think of Pauline having sadness in her life.

  ‘A bit more here and here. And we’re done.’

  Gently under her breath she hummed a tune I didn’t recognise as she moved around me.

  ‘Now let’s cream your skin a bit.’ She spoke loudly again, with the usual exaggeration for my benefit. There was the sound of a cap being unscrewed, and the undeniable, though faint, smell of lard reached my nostrils – the charming fragrance of the moisturiser they used all over me. Very carefully – even tenderly – she rubbed the cool cream into my face and neck. ‘That’s better, isn’t it, my love?’

  Much better. Human contact felt remarkable, when I spent so much of my life untouched. I looked forward to these moments with Pauline, and the regular visits from my physio, Sarah. Her job was to keep my joints moving and stop me seizing up. Carefully, she’d lift each arm, each leg. She’d move them side to side, up and down. Bend them at the knee, the hip. The wrist, elbow, shoulder. Each movement made my hairs stand on end. She never spoke to me; she was in the camp of people who didn’t think I was listening. But I didn’t care. The time she spent with me – half an hour? an hour? – was the most intense human contact I ever got.

  When Pauline had time to shave and pamper me like this it was a luxurious and heavenly bonus. It wasn’t a sexual thing. When I talk ab
out being ‘touched’, I’m not saying it with a raised eyebrow and an elbow nudge. It was much more basic than that. My skin came alive under her hands. The slightest stroke of my face equated in satisfaction to a full-body massage in my previous life.

  What would I do without you?

  ‘Now. I have five minutes, I reckon. Shall I take a look at those fingers of yours?’

  I heard the clatter of metal next to me. Like cutlery. Instruments, or tools.

  ‘Think I could have a new career as a manicurist, hmm?’ She chuckled, and took hold of my left hand. I felt a tug and then heard a clip as she cut my nails, finger by finger.

  The squeak of the door hinges in the corner of the room interrupted her.

  ‘Sorry, I can come back.’ Bea’s voice.

  ‘No, you’re all right, my love. We’re nearly done here, aren’t we, Alex?’

  I heard the rattle of her nail scissors, creams, razor blades as she collected them up.

  ‘Thank you,’ Bea said. The door clicked shut.

  She stayed down the far end of the bed, near my feet.

  ‘Al,’ she said. But before she could continue, the door slammed open again and immediately more voices filled the room.

  ‘How dare you.’

  ‘Eleanor.’

  ‘Why are you defending her?’

  Rosie and Eleanor were talking over each other. Would Eleanor keep visiting me if she had been the one who put me here? Wouldn’t she be more likely to stay away?

  ‘What’s going on?’ I smelled cigarette smoke as Bea moved towards me, and vanilla.

  ‘What’s going on?’ Eleanor mimicked, then dropped to an angry hiss. ‘You want to pretend that nothing is happening here?’

  A feeling of dread washed through me.

  ‘Rosie? What’s she talking about?’ Bea seemed genuinely confused.

  ‘We saw you,’ Rosie said. ‘Downstairs.’

  I felt Bea place a hand lightly on my chest, and the hairs on my arms stood on end in response to her unexpected touch. I was even more confused.