by Dylan Young
A few cyclists and two dog walkers are all I come across. It’s getting late to be out walking and the viaduct is not lit. But something about this piece of remarkable engineering calls to me. An echo of the enthusiasm I’m supposed to have exuded when I was younger? Or of how Emma and I had laughed here?
Benches and historical interpretive artwork adorn alcoves along the way. I read them all, but nothing triggers a response. I walk the whole length and then turn to walk back, warm in the jacket. Too warm. I hear rather than feel the rain stop so I slide off my hood and am met with a sudden rush of traffic noise from the M3 close by on the other side of the viaduct. There’s a signal tower on the viaduct path, recognisable from a recall of the snaps I’d studied at a point at which Emma and I took photos. I walk back and read the dedication to railway workers.
I wait to see if something comes. Nothing does.
A little further on is another viewpoint. I go to it and gaze down toward the River Itchen beneath.
I spot a figure in the trees. Looks like he’s holding binoculars up to his face. A birdwatcher in the water meadows. I let my gaze drift up to the west to a line of gold where the grey clouds end. Without warning, the red brick of the arches below glow bronze in the rays beaming horizontally from the almost setting sun. A beautiful sight. I realise I’m alone on the viaduct. I want desperately to remember something, but all I can sense here is emptiness and this tranquil moment.
What did we do when we left here, Emma and I?
Did we go to a pub?
Did we visit Winchester and go to a gallery? Something Emma was fond of doing. No point considering that now. Far too late on a Saturday afternoon for galleries. They’d be closing if not already closed. Besides, some of them had put the shutters up in response to the government’s precautionary request that all non-essential businesses shut up shop.
I close my eyes and lift my face. Setting sunlight filters through my shut lids and turns the world orange. A promise of summer at the end of a damp, dismal day.
Still, I can’t remember.
‘Sorry, Emma,’ I say. ‘Rest in peace.’
Perhaps the warmth of the jacket combined with the buzz of traffic is what lulls me. Perhaps the delicious caress of the evening spring sun on my face. Whatever the trigger, I’m transported, and, without warning, Emma answers me.
45
She’s not on the viaduct, and neither is Cam. They’re on the rooftop bar, and for once alone. At the point in Cam’s fugue narrative where they stand near the edge. Cam looks over. The river and the meadow are gone. In their place he sees the rocks and the whitecaps of the breaking waves at the northern end of the beach in Cirali.
‘We don’t need to be here,’ he says. ‘We could walk back into Winchester.’
Faceless Emma smiles. Only her mouth is visible. The rest, as always, is featureless.
‘If only we could, silly. We can’t stop this, Cameron.’
She takes a step back, a step towards oblivion. Cam puts out a hand to stop her. She tilts her face down towards the sea.
‘It’s not me you need to stop,’ she says, smiling. ‘It’s them.’
Cam half turns, sensing someone else. The someone whose hand will push Emma off in this iteration of the fugue. The hand that causes her to plummet to her death. The hand he’s come to believe might be his own. He sees, right behind him, the decimated face of the sandblasted statue and behind her a shadowy figure that is black smoke coiling and uncoiling, pushing out two arms like some monstrous amoeba that melds with those of the statue’s. Cam takes a step back. He still has hold of Emma, but she is leaning out, accepting her fate.
‘You don’t have to,’ he says, but all the while the statue’s hand is reaching forwards, driven on by the coiling smoke.
Cam shouts. ‘You don’t have to, Emma!’
A whistle brings me back. Harsh, urgent and just in time. I’m not standing on the path of the viaduct. Instead, I’m four feet up on the wall, nearly fifty feet off the ground. I waver and sway, buffeted by a strong breeze, panic threatening as I wonder if this is still a part of the fugue. But my feet are on a solid surface and my lower leg meets resistance. I glance down and to either side, trying to grasp what this is. There is no six-foot viaduct wall here. The upper two feet of bricks are missing, replaced by a single metal rail. Still a barrier, but one that you can look over to the meadow and the landscape.
I’ve clambered up onto the brick. One leg in front, one leg behind the rail. Standing with my arms out, balancing. Or rather, swaying. I rock forward. The only thing between me and emptiness is my left leg behind the rail. My right leg has stepped over. I sway again as the wind gusts, vertigo threatening to send me head first down into the meadow below. Resistance makes me bend my knee and brings my weight back. But I overcompensate and topple backwards, barely escaping snapping my shin with a foot trapped under the railing. I tumble onto hard ground. My back hits first. There’s a jarring pain but then my head follows. Somehow the ruffled hood of my jacket cushions the blow.
I’m winded, but only slightly. Hardly a bruise as I get to my knees and pull myself up. Who whistled? I scramble up and look down. The light is fading quickly but I can make out a shape beneath the trees. Is it the birdwatcher? I raise a hand. A feeble gesture but something moves below in response. A black shape that reminds me of coiling smoke.
I’m not hurt, but adrenaline is pumping, accelerating the shock of my backwards tumble, feeding the frisson of fear that grips me. What if the birdwatcher is not a birdwatcher? What if, instead, the same roiling shadow I’m seeing in my fugue is now here with me in Hockley?
Stupid. Illogical. But I can’t shake the weird conviction. Nor can I now dismiss the fact that I am losing control. I clutch the rail to steady myself, let the trembling in my arms and legs diminish.
A fall from this height might have killed me. If I’d landed on my feet, my pelvis and spine would’ve snapped. I might live but I’d be in a wheelchair again. This time permanently.
But what if I landed head first?
What if I made sure I landed head first?
For a moment I contemplate the notion. Let the ramifications permeate.
My demise would put an end to things. I wouldn’t be a bother to anyone after that. Not to Rachel, or Josh, or Adam.
No one would miss me.
I squeeze my eyes shut. That’s not true. Nicole would. So would Rachel and Josh.
And Vanessa. I mustn’t forget Vanessa.
Besides, it’s the coward’s way out.
I get up and hurry off the viaduct. The birdwatcher was on the other side of the river which means he has to come up that side. Whoever or whatever he is, I don’t give him the chance. I half jog back to the car though my shin, where it leaned so heavily against the rail, hurts. I ought to be grateful it didn’t snap. Within ten minutes I’m back on the M3 and heading towards London, wondering just what I was doing in coming down here alone.
Experiential triggering.
There is a strong argument for revisiting these places with someone else, I realise. Someone to give a different perspective. Someone who could stop me from doing something very, very silly. I’ll ask Nicole to come with me next time.
Next time.
She’s leaving Aaron this weekend. Breaking it all off. I won’t call her though. Not now. She’ll be at the wedding listening to speeches. Maybe getting drunk. I wonder if she’s thinking about me.
About her damaged liaison.
Night closes in around me as I drive. I shiver for a good fifteen minutes. Adrenaline, not the cold. Terror does that to you.
But I’m annoyed too. Not only because the fugue might have killed me but the realisation that what just happened is exactly what Keely accused me of – losing control. The lines are blurring. And badly. For a moment, a gut-wrenching second, I’m convinced the sandblasted maid-statue and the coiling smoke figure are sitting in the back seat of the car. I sense a thrill of real fear brushing the hairs in the nape o
f my neck. I peer into the rear-view mirror but there is no one in the back seat. The maid’s sandblasted face is only in my mind’s eye. I’m getting more and more certain that only in the fugue do the real answers lie. And I need answers now Haldane has rekindled my fears.
Of how what happened to Emma was my fault.
From my conversations with her, Keely has not dismissed that same idea either. I want to believe I could not have done it. But my tenuous certainty needs backing up with facts if I’m going to somehow put all this behind me.
Unless it was me all along.
The closer I get to London, the more the need to unburden myself of these poisonous thoughts grows.
46
I drive straight to Greenwich. It’s almost eight by the time I get to Heathfield. Vanessa is in her room watching TV. She’s surprised to see me.
‘Is it Sunday? If it is someone will pay for me missing a roast dinner,’ she slurs.
‘Not Sunday. I wanted to talk to you.’
‘Been expecting something. Rachel’s been telling me all about you.’ She delivers this pronouncement immediately as I sit down.
I wince. ‘Telling you what, exactly?’
‘She thinks you’ve gone rogue.’
I try to fob this off with a joke. ‘The only rogue I’ve been anywhere near is a rogan josh. With Josh. That’ll be me the rogue and Josh, another rogue, having a rogan josh. Works on so many levels.’
‘With your linguistic skills this is very thin ice.’
‘Give me some credit.’
‘Rogan josh doesn’t work at all, and you know it.’ She mutes the TV with the remote. ‘You in trouble, Cam?’
I’m sitting on the edge of Vanessa’s bed. She’s in a powered wheelchair wearing a neck collar. Better than the bloody great metal halo screwed to her skull, but both designed to stabilise her vertebra so that, in her words, ‘My wobbly head doesn’t fall right off and roll under a bed.’ And she’s asking me if I’m in trouble. I suddenly feel about an inch high.
‘Come on. Spillthembeans.’ Vanessa manoeuvres her chair with an elegant thumb and forefinger on the armrest joystick so she’s facing me. ‘Still waters run full of effluent, Cameron. Time to flush.’
‘Did you ever consider becoming a poet?’
She ignores me and tilts her head. ‘The oracle awaits.’
Vanessa’s chair stops moving and with her hair backlit by a lamp on a shelving unit, she looks like some sort of sci-fi queen on a throne waiting for the ambassador of a far-flung planet to present to her.
‘You know about my fugues, don’t you?’
‘Do bears…?’
‘I’ll take that as a yes, then.’
On the silent TV a DC hero is battling supervillains in soundless scenes of mayhem. I drag my gaze back to Vanessa. I tell her all about Keely and Stamford and Harriet and Nicole and end up with my visit to Hockley.
‘My fugues are constant. Identical for months. You know what they’re like. I’m on a rooftop somewhere warm. Always evening, always a girl–’
‘The lovely faceless Emma.’
‘Bingo. The other people are the same too. And the fugue always ends with me and Emma falling off the roof.’
‘I love these kids’ cartoons.’ Vanessa’s delivery is poker-faced.
‘But now, everything has changed.’
‘How?’
‘I still can’t see Emma’s face. Previously she always fell, but now a hand pushes her off. And today… today even stranger things were going on in fugue-ville.’
‘Like?’
‘A statue. Female, a maid of some sort, and a figure made of smoke. They’re the ones who push Emma off and, I suppose, me.’
Now I realise how much I want to believe those words are true. To rid myself of the nagging, sapping alternative. The possibility that the pusher is me.
Vanesa blinks. ‘If it’s changing, isn’t that a good thing?’
The same thought has occurred to me in one of many grasping-at-straws moments. But I haven’t told her everything. So I add, ‘I think the fugue has my memory locked up in it. But somehow it’s become twisted and abstract.’
‘That’s deep.’
I wait for her to add, ‘Like a well full of shit,’ but she doesn’t. ‘It sounds mad, doesn’t it?’ I say.
‘Does it? I thought the head doctors had an explanation for your little mental awaydays?’
‘They do. I’m their prime specimen. But…’ I swallow, let the words trickle out. ‘Today, when I came out of my fugue I was standing on the parapet of a viaduct.’
‘Okay.’ Vanessa’s blinking increases.
‘See, I told you it’s mad.’
‘You’re not mad. There’s a reason for this. You told me yourself you’ve been a lot more proactive.’
‘So you think this is my memory working itself out?’
‘Like the enigma code.’
‘Nice analogy.’
‘Not convinced?’
‘I’m not a big fan of this development, the physical theatre side of it. Viaducts and roofs are both capable of tipping me off. If my fugue wants re-enactments I’d rather dress up in a tunic with a red cross and wield a wooden broad sword with the Sealed Knot.’
On TV, a caped hero throws a fire truck at an eight-armed monster who bats it away like a fly.
‘Are you frightened?’
‘No.’ A lie. ‘But when I was standing on that parapet, I saw a figure in the trees. At first, I thought it was a birdwatcher. But later I wondered if it was something else.’
‘Like what?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Something from the fugue?’
‘Maybe.’ Another hesitation before I take the plunge. ‘And when I came back to myself, I did toy with the idea of jumping. As a convenient answer.’
‘To what?’
‘Everything.’
There’s a slight but perceptible shake of Vanessa’s head. ‘We’ve talked about this.’
‘Yes, we have.’
In fact, we made a pact, Vanessa and me. We promised not to let one another suffer if push comes to shove. She laughed when I said that, given my fugue circumstances. She made me promise how, if she ever ended up unable to move at all, if the multiple surgeries on her spine go wrong, I’d help her find a way out. Smuggle her to Switzerland and a nice end-of-life clinic. And I made her promise me the same. Except my situation would be more mental than physical. If I lost it all, and they threatened to lock me away in some secure unit somewhere, I made Vanessa promise she’d engineer an escape and a syringe full of insulin for me.
All theoretical and maudlin. But we’ve both stared the Grim Reaper in the face and lived to tell the tale. We’re allowed to share things way too dark to share with anyone else.
‘We agreed that you can’t go anywhere or do anything… permanent until I’m out of this place,’ Vanessa says.
‘By anywhere, you mean mentally AWOL?’
‘Yup.’
I don’t answer.
‘Agreed?’ Vanessa stares me down, demanding I speak the words.
‘Agreed. But what do I do about the fugues?’
‘Exorcism?’
I laugh. Vanessa doesn’t.
‘You’re kidding, right?’
Vanessa shakes a pair of wobbly jazz hands and hoots out a ‘Wooo’ before making eyes at the ceiling and adding, ‘I don’t mean the holy water and green vomit kind. I mean laying your ghosts.’
‘As in finding out what happened?’
‘Yes. Stamford sounds as if he’s onto something. And Nicole sounds amazing. Get her to help you. You’re not mad, Cam.’
‘That’s not what Rachel would say. Nor the police.’
‘You’re not asking them.’
This is exactly what I needed to hear. I grin. ‘You’d like Nicole.’
‘I’m looking forward to meeting her.’ Vanessa smiles. Though still a little lopsided and not as broad as Leon’s, it’s just as bright.
&nbs
p; 47
The kitchen clock says 9.57pm when I get back to the flat and I haven’t eaten or taken my teatime meds. On the way home I fix the first part by calling in to Thai Spice – my go-to takeaway. I crack open a beer and eat pla kapong neung in the kitchen and check my messages. I finally reply to Rachel and text to tell her I’ve been out for a meal. A small white lie since I am eating – so what if it’s takeout – and that I’m tired and off to bed.
She answers in capitals with:
WHAT ABOUT SOCIAL DISTANCING?
I don’t bother answering. Instead, I wash down some quetiapine (I can’t be arsed with modafinil now) with what’s left of the beer. I’m sure these damned tablets get bigger by the day. Is this particular cocktail helping or hindering my fugues, I wonder? I could try stopping the lot… I can just imagine what Rachel would say.
I try watching a little TV but end up flicking through the channels because I know I won’t be able to settle. I make the mistake of ending up on Sky News.
People have not been listening to government advice. After months of miserable winter and dank and dark weekends, the weather has turned. In the western part of the country the sun is out and, though hardly balmy, the masses have made for beaches and beauty spots, desperate to get out after the dismal February. Like caged animals sensing freedom. But the scientists and politicians warn there’ll be a heavy price to pay. Now they’re threatening to close parks and put up roadblocks.
It’s insane.
I’m Brad Pitt in World War Z watching chaos unfold from a distance. Helpless to stop any of it. I resist the urge to look out of the window to check if any undead are loitering in sleep mode, twitching, head down, waiting for a noise or a smell to signal their next victim. Oh yes, I know all the clichés. I’m becoming an expert. Zombieland, 28 Days Later, The Girl With All the Gifts, Shaun of the Dead (Josh’s number one, needless to say), I’ve seen them all now.