by Stef Penney
Now the doctor is about to tell us something, and I wish he would hurry up.
“You are Christopher’s half brother?”
The doctor, whose very long name I am never going to remember, looks at me.
Mum and me both nod. I was warned about this. I don’t know what they’ve said to the hospital to bring them around, but it probably helps if they think that. Ironically (I try not to dwell on this), it might actually be true.
“We think we are making progress toward a diagnosis of Christopher’s condition. But before we’ll know for sure, we have to send his test results to a hospital in the Netherlands. They are more experienced in this field. We think that it is an X-linked recessive genetic disorder, so the more information you can give us about the health of your family, the more we can narrow it down.”
Mum looks puzzled and worried. I imagine I look puzzled and worried, too.
“A what? What’s that?”
“It means that it is a type of hereditary disease. Females can carry the disease, and they can pass it on to their sons. Only males are actually affected by it.”
“Pass it on, like . . . ?”
Mum stares at me, horrified.
“There is no need for you to be alarmed.”
He looks from her to me.
“It is most likely that the onset of the disease would be seen very early, in infancy. So your son is not at all likely to be affected. However, it would be best to take blood samples from you both—in fact, from as many family members as we can, so that we can build up as full a picture as possible.”
“Blood . . . from us?”
Mum’s voice is a squeak.
“It is a very quick procedure. It doesn’t hurt at all. It will be very helpful for Christopher. And for you, too.”
“Well . . . we want to help, of course.”
She sounds doubtful.
“You can go to your own GP, or you can do it here.”
He seems to have finished, without getting to the main point at all, as I see it.
“But can you cure him?”
The doctor looks at me and smiles. It’s not a hopeful smile, and I wish he hadn’t bothered.
“With genetic disorders it is very difficult or impossible to actually effect a cure. It would be like curing the color of your eyes. But we may be able to alleviate some, even many, of Christopher’s symptoms. It is to be hoped we can give him a good quality of life, certainly better than he has now. But until we know what it is, we cannot say for certain.”
“So then . . . maybe you could cure him? If you don’t know yet, maybe when you do . . .”
The doctor glances from Mum to me, and back to Mum.
“Well, this is true, what you say. But . . . I would not get your hopes up too high about a complete cure.”
. . .
When we go back to Christo’s ward, there is someone sitting beside his bed. Aunt Lulu has arrived. When she sees us, she jumps to her feet, her face changes, and she holds up a piece of paper in front of us.
“A nurse just brought this,” she says in a hiss-whisper. I realize that she’s talking like this because she’s furious.
“You won’t bloody believe it—it’s a letter from bloody Ivo!”
This is what the letter says:
MY DARLING CHRISTO
IM SO SORRY I HAD TO GO AWAY I
DIDNT WANT TO I HAD TO I KNOW SANDRA
AND YOUR CUZIN JJ WILL LOOK AFTER
YOU RITE AS YOU DISERVE BETER
THAN ME SO DONT WORRY I LOVE
YOU ALWAYS WITH ALL MY HART DEAREST
BOY YOUR EVER LOVING PAIRENT
XOXO
PS SORRY
What do you say to that? That’s all there is. Ivo’s farewell letter to Christo. Lulu pushes it into Mum’s hand, and she reads it, me looking over Mum’s shoulder. I recognize Ivo’s writing—the way he prints the letters, and his spelling and so on.
“Is it really from him?”
We both nod. The envelope is addressed to Christo at the hospital. It was posted in Southeast London three days ago.
“Are we supposed to read this to him? It’s . . . cruel. It’s . . .”
Mum sounds horrified. Lulu sighs.
“But it’s what we suspected, isn’t it? At least now we know. And you have his blessing.”
She adds a frosty smile to this, because, as we all know, Ivo’s blessing isn’t really what matters anymore.
“The fucking nerve. Oh . . .”
Mum is shaking with anger. We’re all still jammed into the doorway of Christo’s room, so that supposedly he can’t hear us. We look at him. He looks back at us with a calm, watchful air. I wonder if he already knows what’s in the letter. He was the last person to see Ivo—he must have been. I wonder what Ivo said to him when he went away—maybe he told him the whole truth, and Christo knows more than any of us.
I go over to his bed and take his hand, the ends of my fingers interlocking with his little fingers, and say, “All right?”
And he says, almost totally recognizably, “All right.”
53.
Ray
For the next couple days I stick to my desk, the phone glued to my ear, checking records, making inquiries, begging for favors. We have offered a reward for information—without much hope that it will lead to anything. I talk to all sorts of people in the Traveling community—relatives of mine I haven’t seen for years; distant members of Rose’s family; even, awkwardly, my brother. People promise to think about it. Ask around. Some of them even call me back. My brother mentions a possible visit, when the selling of vacuum cleaners permits. But at the end of it all, I have not found one suitable candidate for Christo’s mother. No girl in the Traveler community mysteriously vanished. No girl of the right age went missing from that part of the country. Realistically, Christo’s mother could be anyone—a local gorjio who didn’t want to or couldn’t take care of a child. There are too many possibilities—too many puzzles jostling for space: the identity of Christo’s mother, the body of the Gypsy girl . . . or, at least, the girl mourned by Gypsies. And there is one more mysterious woman, very much alive, who, until now, I have pushed to the back of my mind.
When I ask Hen if I am missing something obvious, he shakes his head.
“When it comes to the boy’s mother, I’d be inclined to look closer to home. The cousin who lives there . . . What’s her name?”
“Sandra Smith. I did consider her, but . . . I really don’t think so.” “Assume for a minute that the person at the Black Patch is totally unconnected. Sandra really seems to be the strongest candidate. She’s the right sort of age, they definitely know each other, she may well carry this family disease . . . You even said she might have some, I don’t know, feeling for him, didn’t you? That could be based on their history.”
“Yes. Yes, but . . .”
I shake my head. But what?
“I know I got that impression, I know, but somehow it just doesn’t ring true.”
“Why not?”
“Because . . . it wasn’t her.”
“But you don’t know that.”
“I don’t mean about Christo. I mean it wasn’t her that . . .”
I sigh.
“There was something else, something I didn’t tell you about that night. When I was poisoned. It was all so confused, and it doesn’t make sense . . .”
I stop. Because I don’t know how to go on.
“And you were tripping out of your tree.”
“Yes. But despite that, I am pretty sure that . . . I had sex that night.” Hen raises his eyebrows.
“You didn’t say that before.”
“I know. Well, you know. It all sounds so . . . crazy.”
“What makes you so sure that it wasn’t another of your hallucinations?” “I’ve thought about this a lot, believe me. It was a very different feeling from any of the visions. I know I saw some crazy things, but I always knew, on some level, that they weren’t real. And this was . .
. It was different— totally different from the monsters and the flames and . . . so on.”
Hen looks worried.
“I know that doesn’t make a lot of sense,” I say, and attempt a laugh. “I mean, who could it have been?”
“I don’t know, Ray. Maybe you should be talking to a doctor about this stuff. Maybe they could help you sort it out.”
“So you don’t think there’s anything in it?”
“I don’t know. I really can’t say. Do you remember what she looked like?”
“No. I think . . . she may have covered my face.”
“Covered your face?”
He stares at me; he looks like he’s about to laugh, then thinks better of it.
“Why on earth?”
I shrug.
“But despite being off your face, and not being able to see a thing, you somehow know that it wasn’t Sandra Smith?”
“Yes.”
“Ray, you can’t possibly know that.”
“She gave no sign of it. We’ve talked since, and . . . I’m just sure.”
“That holds no water at all. As you know. And after what Rose said, well . . . couldn’t it have been Ivo?”
I have thought of this. I have. I have scraped away at my memory of that night, the peculiar details, the sensations.
“I’ve considered it. And no, I think I would have noticed.”
Hen studies me. I try not to look away. At length he throws his hands in the air in exasperation.
“Either way; I mean, whether it was a . . . real person or not, whatever . . . it doesn’t help us with the things we’re concerned with, does it? It’s not . . . evidence of anything.”
We look at each other in silence, then I find I have to look out the window. There is a thick, cloying feeling in the room. I wish I hadn’t mentioned it.
At home, after work, staring at planes climbing into the gilded sky, listening to trains rumbling past—how is it that other people are constantly in motion?—I tell myself that it must have been a hallucination. I should never have told anyone. Why do I have the conviction that it is relevant?
The thing is, I don’t believe it. That tumble of sensations, the smell of smoke, the ashy taste . . . God, surely it wasn’t a man!—no, the slippery hot cleft of her, the thrust of her hips, it had to be a woman, had to be . . . Despite myself, the memory arouses me. It was real. And it is then, for the first time, that I think of Lulu. Why didn’t I think of this before? Surely that is what kissing her would taste like? And she likes men helpless, immobile—I saw that for myself. I confessed to spying on her—a terrible thing to do. Ivo was staying with her that night; she kept that quiet. Were they in cahoots from the beginning? Was this her peculiar, twisted revenge?
At home, after work, putting a steak pie in the oven with shaking hands, I tell myself that I am going mad.
I am in limbo—have been for the last few months. I have run aground. I don’t seem to be functioning well, or even normally. It’s obvious to Hen, who tries teasing me. He tries discussion; he asks me what the problem is—after all, we have solved the case of Rose Wood, aka Rena Hart. And we’ve been paid. Leon Wood rings and apologizes for his former trucu-lence; his newfound daughter has rung him, and he is hopeful for a meeting in the not-too-distant future. He calls her Rose, then corrects himself and says “Rena.” A happy customer.
Hen takes to scolding: I am being self-indulgent, morbid, and weird.
My partner is right—we have achieved what counts as a success in our book. But between the lines, I have made a hopeless cock-up of things. I have never, professionally, been so convinced of something that was wrong, and that shakes me. Never gone so far down a dead end. Even now, I wake up in the night wondering if the guests at Rose’s wedding were lying, if the date on the license was faked. Actually, it’s not quite true that I’ve got nowhere this summer—I am now divorced, and I have lost most of the feeling in my right hand.
One of the new cases—a suspicious wife—turns out to be more interesting than it at first appeared, involving both of us uncovering a positive harem of other women and a web of financial wrongdoing. Andrea petitions for a raise, which Hen and I agree to—knowing we should have offered one, unprompted, months ago. She brings in a homemade cake to thank us, about which neither of us tells the truth.
Then Lulu rings me.
“I suppose I should tell you,” she begins, without waiting for any awkward pleasantries. “There’s been a letter from Ivo. It came to the hospital. It says he isn’t coming back.”
Andrea is working in the front office. She has a vase of yellow flowers on her desk, which catch the last of what sun can penetrate two layers of dusty windows. Hen is out. I clutch the phone to my ear, in that state of heightened sensory awareness that fear and love hurtle you into, indistinguishable.
“What else does he say? Does he give a reason?”
“No reason. He just says he had to go. It’s a letter for Christo, saying that he’s sorry and he’ll always love him. It was posted in Plumstead on the fourteenth.” Her voice is terse. “Can you beat that?”
“Can you tell it’s definitely from Ivo?”
“I couldn’t, but Sandra and JJ say that it’s his writing. So, yeah. And he said he wants Sandra to take care of Christo, so obviously he’s not coming back.”
“Right . . . Well . . . thanks for telling me. I don’t suppose . . . Could I see it? Do you still have it?”
“Sandra has it.”
“Right. Of course. Did you get any impression from the letter—about why he was doing this?”
“No. He didn’t say.”
“Did it . . . seem like a suicide note?”
I hear her intake of breath.
“Suicide? I don’t know . . . He didn’t say anything like that. I suppose it could be . . . He said he was very sorry but he had to go away—he didn’t want to, but he had to. Is that a suicide note? That’s not what any of us thought.”
“I don’t know. I just wondered if you got a particular feeling about it.”
“It just makes me angry. That he could dump on everyone like this and not explain himself—that was the only feeling I got. But then, I don’t really know him.”
It wasn’t her, I think. All this elaborate charade cannot be her doing.
I say, “And Sandra—how did she react? She does know him well, doesn’t she?”
“I suppose. She was angry. And upset. On account of Christo.”
“What about your brother?”
“I haven’t seen him. He’s not been well.”
“No. All this must have hit him pretty hard.”
“I suppose.”
“Can you remember how the letter was signed?”
“I can remember all of it. It was signed ‘Your ever loving parent.’ And underneath was the word ‘sorry,’ again, on its own.”
“Thanks very much. I appreciate you telling me about this.”
“Yeah, well. Have you found out any more?”
“No. No news.”
“Oh.”
She sighs.
“Thanks for answering my questions, Lulu.”
“That’s all right.”
There is a pause.
“Are you going to keep looking for him?”
“For Ivo? Yes. I will.”
“Okay, then.”
She rings off before I say anything else.
Just then Andrea looks around and, seeing me turned toward her, smiles. She has seemed so cheerful recently—more, surely, than can be accounted for by the paltry raise. Perhaps she’s in love. Perhaps someone is in love with her. I’ve never asked.
Perhaps I have always been too reticent.
54.
JJ
Today the hospital lets us take Christo out for a trip to the zoo. He seems really well now. They still don’t know what’s wrong with him, but they have started giving him exercises to make him stronger. He practices walking in a special gym for children with lots of special equipment. He
has a nurse from Israel called Rahel who gives him his exercises. Christo loves her because he gets a lollipop after he’s done them. But she’s nice, anyway. She thinks we’re brothers. I suppose she thinks Mum is his mum. We’ve stopped talking about it.
The hospital arranges a taxi to take us, even though it’s not very far away—it’s right in the middle of London. But when you get there, there are trees everywhere, and a hill, and there’s a canal that goes around it like a moat goes around a castle. I suppose they did that to stop the animals from escaping. The sun shines down on us. Christo is in a really good mood; he laughs at the giraffes and the penguins, and is fascinated by the snakes, but his favorites are the monkeys. I like them, too. Even Mum, although she was moaning beforehand and worrying about him getting germs from the animals, seems to be enjoying herself. The hospital gave us a wheelchair for him, although they said it would be good for him to try to walk a bit, to get used to it. He’s still too weak to walk, really, but they say he’ll get better with practice. That’s so good to hear. He’ll get better! They actually said that. But for now, having the chair makes life a lot easier. We eat ice cream and get cups of tea and sit outside in the sun with the other families. There are lots of other kids running around and enjoying themselves, and several of the parents smile at us, or at Christo when they see he’s not very well. It’s nice. I barely think about Ivo at all.
The zoo’s much more interesting than I thought it was going to be. We spend the whole day there, and leave only because we have to take Christo back to the hospital by four. And we’ve still got to drive home afterward. It’s weird to think we won’t be there much longer. Lulu has been helping to sort out a house for us. Apparently, she’s found one to rent that’s quite near her, just inside the M25—so that we aren’t too far from the hospital up in London. And there is a school I can go to that’s nearby. I thought all of this would be so difficult, but it seems quite easy. I can even think about living in a house without getting in a panic. I wonder whether anyone from school will miss me—like Stella or Katie. I bet they won’t. Maybe Stella, a little bit. I don’t know, though.