by Gayle, Mike
‘I’m OK.’ I pointed to his head. ‘And your hair’s back. Or is that another one of your wigs?’
‘My hair hasn’t gone anywhere,’ said Van, confused. ‘It’s always been like this. Are you really OK, mate?’
‘Sorry, my mistake,’ I replied, feeling like every single one of the circuits inside my head was crossed.
‘No worries,’ said Van. ‘When we found you lying there, we thought you were a goner for sure. Didn’t we guys?’
Van turned to look to his left. The sound of footsteps across the linoleum flooring then Paul’s face loomed into view followed by Stewart’s.
‘We’re just glad you’re all right,’ said Paul.
‘Definitely,’ added Stewart. ‘The shoot was such a laugh. I’m just sorry it ended like this.’
‘We all got on so well that we decided to grab a beer after the shoot,’ continued Van. ‘We were on the way to the pub near the studio when we found you.’
I looked over at Penny. ‘How long have I been here?’
‘About three hours.’
‘What time is it now?’
Penny checked her watch. ‘Just coming up to midnight.’
‘That can’t be right,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t even midday when I left mine.’
‘Left your what?’
‘My house.’
‘Don’t you mean our house? You live with me and the kids, Joe.’
‘But I remember you leaving,’ I replied. ‘You, and the kids, you left. I thought you were never going to come back.’
Tears formed in the corners of Penny’s eyes but she quickly blinked them away. ‘The doctors said this might happen, sweetheart,’ said Penny. ‘It’s just the painkillers, they’re making you groggy.’ She kissed my cheek and I breathed in the wonderful scent of her. ‘You don’t have to worry,’ she continued. ‘Everything’s going to be fine.’
I felt momentarily soothed even though very little seemed to be making any kind of sense right now. ‘It will won’t it?’ I replied.
‘Of course.’
I started to close my eyes. Being conscious even for such a small amount of time seemed draining, but I reopened them as I thought about the kids.
‘What about the kids?’
‘They’re fine, they’re with Mum and Tony. They don’t know what’s happened yet and I didn’t know how to tell them.’
‘They don’t need to know, do they?’ I replied.
Penny shook her head. ‘No, they don’t.’
‘They’re good kids, aren’t they?’
Penny nodded. ‘The best.’
‘And we love them, don’t we?’
‘Yes,’ said Penny patiently, ‘more than anything.’
I tried to squeeze her hand again. ‘And you love me, don’t you?’
She nodded again and leaned in closer. ‘Yes, I do, babe, I love you with my whole heart.’ She kissed my forehead. ‘Now, you just close your eyes and rest. Don’t worry about a thing.’
I didn’t manage to get much in the way of sleep because just as I began to doze off the nurse arrived with a doctor in tow and the room was cleared of all visitors including Penny while various checks were made.
‘How are you feeling?’ asked the doctor, a plumpish, middle-aged man with a beard. ‘You gave your wife quite a scare for a while earlier this evening.’
‘I feel OK,’ I replied. ‘A bit groggy though.’
‘That’s to be expected. The CAT scans we took earlier came back normal but we like to keep an eye on things when they involve head injuries. How would you say your vision is?’
‘Fine,’ I replied. ‘A bit blurry every now and again, but fine.’
The doctor held up his right hand. ‘How many fingers am I holding up?’
I counted them all, twice, just to be on the safe side.
‘Three?’
‘Good.’
He held out his hand and asked me to squeeze it as hard as I could. I doubt that I could have crushed a grape.
‘How was that?’ I asked.
‘Not brilliant, but I’m sure it’ll improve with time. ‘Now I need you to follow my finger with your eyes without moving your head.’
I did as requested as he moved his finger from side to side and then up and down in the air. ‘That’s excellent,’ he said. ‘You can rest now. I’m done bothering you for the time being.’
‘So does that mean I can go home?’
The doctor smiled. ‘No, it means we’re not worried about there being any lasting damage. You’ve had quite a nasty blow, Mr Clarke. If your assailant had hit you any harder we’d be looking at a completely different scenario but as it is, thankfully the worst you’ll have in the morning is a very sore head. We’ve had to put in a few stitches to close the wound which will leave a permanent scar, I’m afraid. As I’ve already said we’ve scanned you and while there is a small amount of swelling it’s nothing to be too worried about but I think it’s sensible that you remain under observation for the night at least. How does that sound?’
It didn’t sound great. I just wanted to be with Penny and the kids.
‘Are you sure there’s no way I can go home?’
‘Not tonight I’m afraid but we’ll definitely talk tomorrow and if everything’s looking shipshape you could be discharged by teatime.’ He picked up the chart from the end of my bed. ‘In the meantime try and get as must rest as you can.’ He walked towards the door.
‘Doctor, can I ask you a question?’
‘By all means.’
‘It’s a bit of a weird one . . . I was just wondering, is it normal for people knocked unconscious to suffer from hallucinations?’
‘Hallucinations?’
‘Or maybe really vivid dreams? I mean really vivid, with full-on HD detailing, smells, sensations, the lot.’
The doctor came and stood at the side of the bed.
‘Is that what you’re having now?’
‘No,’ I replied hurriedly, not wanting to give him a reason to keep me here any longer. ‘It’s just, while I was unconscious I . . . I mean, I keep remembering things that happened and they feel real, as real as you and I talking right now.’
‘It’s actually an incredibly interesting field,’ replied the doctor. ‘In fact only a few weeks ago I was reading a study by some researchers in Belgium who discovered that patients in a minimally conscious state showed sleep patterns very similar to those of a normal healthy subject and also the non-rapid eye movement of slow wave sleep as well as the rapid eye movement of regular sleep.’
I looked at him blankly.
‘It means that while not exactly conclusive there’s every chance that those patients were dreaming.’
There was a knock at the door and Penny came in. ‘Oh, I’m sorry. The nurse told me you were done. I’ll come back later.’
‘No, that’s fine,’ said the doctor. ‘Your husband and I were just finishing up. I suppose what I’m saying, Mr Clarke, is that given we’re still learning so much about the inner workings of the human brain, anything is possible.’
39
Despite assurances that I’d be allowed home the next day it was in fact three days before the doctor finally gave me permission to leave hospital. During this time I received numerous visits from work colleagues including Camilla and even Carl and his assistant who were mortified that they’d been in the pub getting hammered while I’d been lying unconscious less than two hundred metres away. Grateful as I was for their visits, their presence at my bedside only served to remind me that at some point I would have to go back to work, and while work itself wasn’t a problem, the fact that Bella was still interning at the paper was a very big problem indeed.
I’d been doing a great deal of thinking about Bella over the past few days, most of which had left me feeling like I’d had my insides sucked out. If, as the doctor had suggested, it was possible to have dreams so real that a year could happen in the space of a few hours then the only conclusion I could come to was that nothing I thou
ght had happened to me from the moment I was mugged through to the moment Fiona pushed me off the edge of the car-park roof had actually occurred. It was all just a dream, the extended Technicolor vision of a troubled mind, and something that I would find extremely difficult to explain to anyone else. But while this news meant that there was a great deal to be happy about – my marriage being intact and my kids still living at home with me being chief amongst them – it also meant that the last contact I’d had with Bella was when I’d agreed by text to meet her in Soho.
I felt sick at the thought of it. If I hadn’t been mugged, there was every chance I would have jumped in a cab and met up with this woman. To what end? At the time I’d managed to convince myself that there was nothing in it. I was simply going for a drink. But in the harsh light of day and several hours spent thinking while lying in a hospital bed, not even I bought the idea that our meeting might have remained innocent. I wasn’t at all certain now that my resolution to have ‘just the one drink’ wouldn’t have melted instantaneously in the company of that face, those lips and that body. Add into the mix a handful of those ‘Oh, you’re so talented,’-type comments she’d doled out over coffee on the day I met her and I strongly suspect I’d have had trouble recalling my own name, let alone the fact that I was a married man.
So where did that leave me now? On the one hand I was a man who definitely, one hundred per cent hadn’t cheated on his wife, which was clearly a good thing. On the other there had been a time when I had seriously considered it, which obviously wasn’t quite so great. Would I have gone through with it had I not been mugged? As much as I had been drunk that night and as low in spirits as I’d felt, I wanted to believe that I still had a conscience but even if I had managed to stay strong that night who was to say I wouldn’t have succumbed to temptation on some other occasion?
To complicate matters further, regardless of the fact that my separation and divorce from Penny had been nothing more than a dream, the sense of dread that it had left me with felt very real indeed. It was like a warning: go near Bella and this dream will come true. Not that I wanted it to for a second of course, because having lived through the worst year of my life, even in a dream, had left me a completely changed man. The hopelessness and insecurity I’d felt leading up to that night had vanished without trace. I wasn’t the same person any more. I no more felt the need to prop up my ego with the attentions of someone like Bella than I did to get a tattoo or buy a motorcycle. I was cured. Or at least that was what I hoped.
If drug and gambling addicts could relapse after weeks of intensive therapy then surely I could too. How long would the power of the lessons I’d learned in my dream life last? And with Bella’s internship not due to finish for another three months, I was terrified that a moment of weakness would lead me to make as big a mess of things in real life as I had in my dreams. If it wasn’t going to happen again, I needed to do something daring, something drastic: I needed to come clean to Penny.
It was a little after four when Penny arrived to take me home. Despite my protests she refused to let me help pack and so while I sat in the armchair next to the bed feeling completely impotent she emptied get-well cards, toiletries and spare clothes into the holdall she’d brought with her.
‘Right, I think that’s everything.’ She set the bulging bag down on the bed and zipped it up. ‘Are you ready to go?’
I looked at Penny and realised that this was my moment to talk things over with her. Apart from anything it would be virtually impossible to have a proper conversation with her when we were back home with the kids and somehow it seemed right that if I was going home – a home which in my dream world at least hadn’t existed for over a year – we should start this new chapter of our lives together on a clean page. No secrets, no lies, just the truth.
‘Actually, Pen, before we go is there any chance we can talk for a minute?’
‘Of course,’ she said, looking worried as she sat down on the bed. ‘What is it?’
I stood up from the chair and sat next to her. ‘I just need to tell you a few things.’
‘About what?’
‘About that night,’ I replied. ‘The night I got mugged.’
Penny nodded. Her whole body seemed to tense as though she were bracing herself for a blow. ‘OK, go on.’
‘It’s hard to know where to begin,’ I said, taking her hand in mine. ‘I think the truth is for a while I’d felt like I was invisible to everyone around me. You were busy getting back into work, the kids missed you so much that they barely noticed me and as for work, well, it seemed like I’d become part of the furniture there. I just couldn’t seem to shake the feeling that I didn’t matter very much any more to anyone.’
‘That’s not true, Joe. Things have been crazy since I went back to work but we always knew it would be hard.’
‘I know we did. I just never really understood quite how hard.’
Penny nodded. ‘I think if I’m honest I knew something was wrong. I haven’t felt like you’ve been yourself for the longest time but between work and the kids there hasn’t been any time to talk to you about it. I should’ve been there for you.’
‘It’s not your fault,’ I said. ‘It’s just life, isn’t it? It gets busy with kids, with work, with a million and one things that constantly need our attention and before you know it everything else gets drowned out by the noise of family life. Anyway, this is going to sound weird but I was coping with everything until Fiona’s death sort of tipped me over the edge. She was our age, Pen. She was our age and she thought she had her whole life ahead of her and it wasn’t true. It felt like a warning: don’t sleepwalk through the only life you’re ever going to get.’
Penny withdrew her hand from mine and turned to face me. Her gaze seemed to be trying to penetrate my very soul. ‘What is it that you’ve done, Joe?’
‘I didn’t do anything,’ I replied. ‘But that’s not the point. The point is . . .’ I stopped and corrected myself. ‘The point was that I nearly did.’
‘With who?’
‘An intern at work.’
‘But nothing happened?’
‘No,’ I replied, ‘but it—’
‘Stop,’ she said suddenly. ‘I don’t want to hear any more.’ She closed her eyes and drew a long, deep breath. My whole future, our whole future, was riding on whatever came out of Penny’s mouth next.
She opened her eyes and looked straight at me.
‘Do you love me?’ she asked.
‘You’re everything I’ve ever wanted,’ I replied.
‘And you swear that nothing happened.’
‘I swear.’
‘And you promise that whatever this problem is you’ll let me help you get to the bottom of it?’
‘I promise you, it’s dealt with, it’s done. It’ll never happen again.’
‘And what about this intern? Will she still be working with you?’
I nodded. ‘It’s difficult. It’s sort of out of my hands.’
‘But you don’t have feelings for her any more?’
‘I never did,’ I replied.
There was a long silence.
‘So what now?’ I asked, fearful that the answer would mark the beginning of the end.
‘I’m tired, and right now all I want to do is take my husband home and be with the kids who I haven’t seen properly in days and forget that any of this ever happened.’ She took my hand. ‘Come on,’ she said, ‘let’s go home.’
The kids had flung themselves at me before I’d even managed to get properly out of the car but as pleased as they were to see me I was infinitely more pleased to see them safe and happy. Every time I kissed or hugged them I was reminded of that day in my dream life where I’d told them I was moving out and the pain that had caused them. If they had been in the market for new toys, clothes or exotic school trips it would have been the perfect moment to make their requests but as it was all they wanted was a kiss and a cuddle followed by a promise that I would make them their favouri
te tea of eggs, beans and potato waffles.
‘I’m so glad you’re back, Daddy,’ Jack told me that evening as I tucked him into bed after reading him stories. ‘I felt sick yesterday because I missed you so much.’
Rosie was, in her own way, equally effusive. ‘I don’t like it when you’re not here, Dad,’ she said when I poked my head into her room to say goodnight. ‘Nothing felt right without you.’
‘I think that’s a good thing,’ I replied, kissing her on the forehead. ‘It shows that we belong together.’
For the next few days I didn’t do a great deal of anything at all. Penny insisted that I had to rest and so while she busied herself holding the fort I had no choice but to look on helplessly. Eventually however even she had to agree with my GP that I had fully recovered and was ready to resume my normal duties.
‘Are you sure you’re going to be OK?’ she asked anxiously as we stood on the doorstep on my first morning back at work.
‘I’ll be fine,’ I replied. ‘There’s absolutely nothing to worry about.’
‘I know,’ said Penny. ‘But to be on the safe side I’ll carry on worrying just the same.’
As I waved my pass in front of the security barrier I was reminded of the fateful day when I’d first met Bella. I recalled all the tasks I’d had on my mind that morning as I’d squeezed into the lift heading for the sixteenth floor: interviews, meetings, last-minute preparations for the shoot, and how I had been completely oblivious to the existence of the woman who if my dream world was to be believed had the power to completely knock my world off its axis. Today, however, I had only one thought as I edged my way on to the lift: where was Bella and how would I deal with her when we finally came face to face?
She wasn’t in the lift and it was all I could do to breathe as I anticipated the doors opening on the Correspondent’s floor. Would she be waiting for me? It seemed a crazy thought given that in the real world our relationship so far consisted of an extended coffee break and the exchange of a handful of admittedly flirty text messages. Our affair had never happened. I’d never broken her heart by avoiding her the day we’d slept together. I hadn’t waited in the pouring rain months later to try and rekindle what we had between us and I hadn’t turned down her advances a second time because I’d discovered that I was still in love with my wife. Everything I felt about her, our entire history together, was imagined, a fiction, and yet the remembrance of the dream was so vivid, it was hard to take comfort in this fact.