Faith

by Peter James

  A previous version of herself, the Faith Ransome of a year back, would have reacted differently. She would probably, lamely, have given him a detailed explanation. But right at this moment she wasn't frightened of him. She was as close as she had ever come to attacking him with her bare hands.

  'You're taping my calls?'

  'With good reason.'

  'What the hell gives you the right to think you can do that? Is that why you hit our child, you coward? You hit our child because it was easier than hitting me?'

  He stood up violently, sending his chair rolling back across the room on its castors. 'I don't have any problem about hitting you, you bitch.'

  'Why did you hit Alec? How dare you hit him?'

  'You're not fucking doing your job as a mother.'

  'Don't swear at me.'

  'You're letting him leave his fucking toys all over the place, while you're out fucking your lovers.' He took a menacing stride towards her. 'Someone's going to discipline that child, Faith, and if you haven't time to do it because you're too busy servicing your men friends, fine.' He stabbed his chest with his finger. 'I'm going to do it, and I'll do it my way, in the language he understands. You're too soft with him, he needs some discipline.'

  'Discipline? After the things you've said to me about your father?'

  Out of the corner of her eye she could see him clenching his fists and braced herself, certain that she was going to be struck.

  'Is he a good fuck, this Doctor Cabot, Faith? Has he got a big dick? Tell me about his dick. Eight-inch? Ten-inch? Cut or uncut? What do you like him to do with it?' His face was contorted in a sneer. 'Where do you like him to put it, Faith?'

  Raising her voice, but keeping calm, she said, 'For God's sake, Ross, he's a doctor. I went to see him because he's a doctor. In case you've forgotten, I've been feeling like death for the past fortnight. I went to your friend, Jules Ritterman, Dr Essence of Bedside Manner, OK? I went to see him over a week ago, and he patronised me, as he always does, and he's done absolutely nothing since then. I went to see Dr Cabot because I was desperate, Ross.'

  'What were you desperate for? A fuck?'

  'I went to see him because he's a doctor.'

  'He's not a doctor, he's a quack. A New Age creep.'

  'Actually, he's a doctor of medicine.'

  'He's a fucking snake-oil salesman.'

  'He's a doctor of medicine who happens to look beyond the horizons of the narrow little boxes most doctors keep themselves in. OK? I may be married to you but you don't own me, and if I want to see a doctor of my choice, I'm going to do that, and if you don't like it, then divorce me.'

  Backing off a fraction, he said, in a cracking voice that sounded more hurt than angry, 'Why didn't you discuss it with me?'

  'Because you wouldn't have agreed.'

  * * *

  He stared at the Bitch Queen From Hell through a mist of tears. You made me mad. You made me hit the son I adore more than anything in the world, and now you are daring to answer me back.

  You made me mad, bitch. You made me so mad I lost my temper with him. See what you are doing to me? Do you see? Do you see?

  He wanted to hit her, wanted to smash her so damned hard right in the middle of her smug face, punch those lips, stove those teeth in, see how Dr Oliver Cabot would feel having a split-open lip and buckled teeth clamped around his eight-inch dick.

  This answering-back was so out of character. Was this coming from Dr Oliver Cabot? Was this man poisoning her against him? Faith had never answered him back before. And she wouldn't be answering him back now if she knew the truth about what was wrong with her.

  Tommy Pearman had come back to him with a ton of information about Lendt's disease. Twenty per cent of people diagnosed with it were still alive a year after diagnosis. Eighty people died, twenty lived. That eighty were going to die anyway. Negative people. You only died if you wanted to die, you died if you were told you were going to die. Faith was not going to die because no one was going to tell her. She wasn't going to know, therefore she was going to be fine.

  Taking a step towards her and changing his tone he said, 'I love you, Faith. I love you more than anything in the world. You know that, don't you?' He put his arms on her shoulders and it hurt him to see her flinch. 'Christ, don't you realise how much I love you? I want to love you, not harm you. I want to make you better and I'm going to make you better. Can't you see that's what I want to do?'

  'See what?'

  Cold as ice.

  He tried to pull her closer to him, to hug her, but she resisted, kept a space like a block of wood wedged between them.

  'Do you think I'd have sent you to Jules Ritterman if I didn't believe he's the best doctor in this country?'

  'I don't like him and I don't intend seeing him again.'

  The way she was staring at him, that look of defiance, as if she believed she was scoring some kind of triumph over him. A triumph like the first spores of cancer in a biopsy. It had to be excised now.

  He slapped her cheek so hard she staggered sideways, cracked her head on the corner of a bookcase, flailed with her hands, then went down, sprawling on the carpet, and lay still.

  Motionless. Blood dribbling from her lip, staring at him with one glassy, motionless eye, like a fish.

  It seemed as if some valve inside him had been wrenched open and his blood was draining out.

  'Oh, Christ,' he said, kneeling down. 'Faith. Oh, sweet Jesus. Oh, Christ.'

  31

  The smell of that first cigarette of the evening always tantalised Ross. He watched his father, in his armchair, in his sharply polished shoes, jacket and carefully knotted tie, Sporting Life open on his lap, holding that tiny cigarette in his massive fingers and drawing deeply. The end glowed and, like some fiery caterpillar, ate away a quarter-inch of paper and tobacco, leaving behind a neat cast of ash.

  A storm of blue smoke blew around him as he exhaled, then quieted into wispy strands and curls as it drifted out across the room. Ross, reading the Eagle, breathed it in. He loved that sweet smell.

  His father made a mark on a page with a ballpoint pen and said, 'Three thirty at Chepstow. River Beat. Does River Beat sound like the name of a horse that's going to win a race tomorrow, boy?'

  Ross had long learned that the only way to survive his father's unpredictable temper was to steer a middling course, and to try to come up with an open-ended answer to any question. When he had been asked to give opinions previously, if he had been wrong and the horse lost, it would be deducted from his pocket money. But no bonuses had ever been added for the times he had been right.

  'How long is the race, Daddy?'

  'Two miles.'

  'Jumps or flat?'

  Joe Ransome gave his son a withering look. 'This is summer, boy. The flat season.'

  'How long is a beat on a river?' Ross asked.

  Irritably his father said, 'How do I know? Depends on the bloody river. Or else it depends on how big the estate is, or the syndicate, or whatever. How long is a piece of string? Eh?'

  'Depends how many strands go into making it.'

  'Don't get smart with me, boy.'

  Ross returned to his comic. His father drank some beer from his pewter tankard, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then gripping the smouldering stub of the cigarette between his lips, concentrated again on the paper.

  Suddenly he said, 'It's of no consequence, but your mother's had an accident. They don't know if she'll live.'

  She was still alive? Ross glanced up, but his father was looking at the paper again. For three days he had been waiting for news. He'd looked in newspapers in a shop near his school but had seen nothing. There was a local paper, but that was only weekly and it was still another two days before it came out.

  For three days he had been afraid every time a car had driven down the street that it was a policeman coming for him.

  She was still alive, and he had wanted her dead. It was a terrible anticlimax to learn that she was still
alive, that he had failed.

  They don't know if she will live. Maybe she won't.

  'What happened?'

  Unhurriedly, his father removed the cigarette from his mouth and crushed it out in the ash-tray. 'I said it was of no interest.' He turned the page of his paper and began scouring another race field. After some moments he said, 'Fire.'

  It took a supreme effort of will for Ross to turn back to Dan Dare and read. He knew from previous experience that his mother was a no-go area with his father. Whenever he had tried to find out about her, his father had gone berserk. After several minutes had passed, Ross looked up. 'What happened to Mummy?'

  Joe Ransome lit another cigarette, stuck it in his mouth and squinted at the paper through the smoke. 'God punished her for leaving you.' Then, quietly but even more bitterly, he added, 'And for being a whore.'

  'What's a whore?'

  His father made another mark on his form. 'A woman who does things with men.'

  Ross thought of the naked man in the hall engulfed in flames, and the terrible screams. The man whose naked buttocks had been hammering up and down between his mother's thighs. He hoped this man who had done things with his mother had remained in agony until he had died.

  As his father turned the page, he said, 'What kind of fire, Daddy?'

  'You're asking too many questions. Do you want to fetch the cane?'

  'No, Daddy.'

  'Then sod off up to your room.'

  The following day, two police officers came to the house. They stayed, talking to his father in the living room, for over an hour. Ross crept up to the door and tried to hear what they were saying, but the voices were too muffled.

  32

  'Tell me what it feels like when you eat.'

  Kylie Spalding was just about as nice a person as any member of the human species he'd yet met, Oliver Cabot reckoned. She was nineteen, with long brown hair and a pre-Raphaelite face that, despite her painfully emaciated body, was simply gorgeous.

  She was lying on the wood-framed couch in his office in a roll-neck sweater, jeans and socks, eyes shut, bony hands by her sides. When he'd first met her, just three weeks ago, suffering cardiac arrhythmia and showing early stages of renal failure, she had been close to dying. Now she was close to living again.

  'Eat?' Her voice was slurred and slow.

  Sitting beside her, he said, in the calm, steady voice he used in hypnotherapy, 'You like bananas, don't you, Kylie?'

  A long pause and then, 'Uh.'

  Kylie had bulimia, which had been preceded by anorexia nervosa. Her body was depleted in essential minerals, and her teeth were pitted and discoloured by gastric acid. Her parents had brought her here in desperation, and already, after just two sessions, there was improvement — slight, but significant.

  'I want you to imagine you're eating a banana, OK? Just hold this banana in your hands and take a real hard look at it. This is some banana, right?' No reaction, and that was fine, she was thinking about it, absorbing it. 'It's in great condition this banana, just how it should be for eating. There's some green streaking on the skin, in the bright yellow. I want you — just go very slowly — I want you to peel off the skin and take a look inside, take a look at the flesh… It's firm, hard but sweet, you've never seen a banana this good before. Now I want you to put it in your mouth, Kylie, and take a bite.'

  She mimed taking a bite.

  Her throat constricted then expanded.

  'Terrific! Now tell me, how does it feel as you start to eat it?'

  She sat bolt upright, her eyes wide, and began to retch into her cupped hands.

  He didn't move.

  She stared at him, terror in her eyes. After some moments she pulled out her handkerchief and wiped her mouth.

  'I — I'm sorry.'

  He handed her a glass of water and, his voice unruffled, said, 'Drink a little.'

  She drank, gratefully, then he took the glass.

  'I'm really sorry.'

  'You don't have to be sorry, Kylie. I want you to close your eyes and try again now. I want you to think about the banana. You like bananas, right?'

  She nodded, then closed her eyes.

  'Now you have a new banana…' and Oliver continued as before, soothing and relaxing, but his mind drifted away from his patient.

  Faith Ransome, you are the most adorable woman I've ever met. My God I could fall in love with you, but you are married. I know you are not happy, but I can't start messing with your marriage. I can try to help you with your health, but I have to stop these thoughts I'm having about you. Somehow I have to put a stop to them.

  And it's so damned hard.

  'This is great, Kylie, I'm really proud of you. I'm going to wake you in a few moments and you are going to go home, and when you get home the first thing you are going to do is eat a banana. You understand that?'

  'Uh.'

  He looked up at the photograph of Jake, and thought about how he and Marcy had felt as they'd watched him slowly slip away from them, and he stared at Kylie Spalding and thought about her parents sitting downstairs in the waiting area right now, thought about the helpless desperation in their faces when they'd first come to him, and thought, Kylie Spalding, there is no way in hell I'm letting you do that to yourself or to your parents. There's no way in hell anyone's going to lose you.

  And then he tried not to think it, but the thought just bullied its way into his head anyway. And there's no way, Faith Ransome, that I'm going to lose you, either.

  33

  He was on his knees, crying, touching her face with his hands. 'Darling? I love you. Darling? Are you OK?'

  Ross pressed his face against Faith's, breathed in the smell of her hair, whispered, 'Darling, I love you, oh, my God, I love you.'

  Then he reached down, held her slender wrist, feeling for a pulse. The solitary blink told him, yes, she was OK, she went down hard but she was OK, on the floor, not moving, but OK.

  This thing she did, this not-moving business, playing possum. Animals played possum to deceive predators, but Faith was doing it to panic him, to make him think he'd hurt her more than he really had. She was doing it to make him think she was dead. Her sad little way of trying to get back at him.

  Well, you're not dead, you bitch. When I want you dead, then you'll be dead.

  He kissed her forehead and she moaned softly.

  Cradling her face in his hands now, he whispered, 'I love you, darling. Faith, I love you so much.'

  Droplets of blood stained the beige carpet — there was a whole damned pool of blood — and a contact lens lying beside it. 'Hey!' he said. 'Hey, Faith, careful.' He lifted her face a little, dabbed at her lip with his handkerchief, stemming the blood, then saw the gash on the left side of her head, where she must have struck the bookshelf. It was one hell of a gash, he could see raw white bone exposed inside it. Jesus. It needed stitches.

  You hit the bookcase, you stupid bitch. Karmic revenge. You fuck Dr Oliver Cabot, then the bookshelf pays you back. Bad karma.

  Have to get you off the carpet, you're making a stain.

  He dropped the contact lens into his shirt pocket, lifted her on to her feet, then half carried, half dragged her out into the hallway, edging past Rasputin, then took her into the kitchen and propped her in a chair. She was limp, but conscious, not saying anything. That was her style: she often did this after she'd angered him, just stayed motionless, tracking him with her eyes.

  You think it bothers me when you do this silence bit, don't you, bitch? Well, I'll let you in on a secret, shall I? It doesn't bother me at all.

  He cleaned the wound, then froze it with a local anaesthetic and, with painstaking care, began to suture it. 'You're lucky it's me doing this, darling — this is the kind of gash that could leave you with a nasty scar if it's sewn by some Johnny-come-lately houseman in A and E.'

  Carefully he pricked the skin, pressed the needle through. 'Three weeks and there won't be a mark.' He tried to look her in the eye, but each time her pupils swu
ng away, looking anywhere but at him. 'You're probably not appreciating it now,' he said, 'but you will.'

  When he had finished, he covered the gash with a strip of flesh-coloured Elastoplast. 'There, all set.'

  Still she refused to meet his eye.

  Ross put his medical box away in his study, then came back into the kitchen to get water and a cloth to clean up the bloodstains from his carpet. His eye fell on a bone in front of the Aga. 'Rasputin been eating a bone in here?'

  She ignored him.

  He raised his voice. 'Faith, has the dog been eating a bone in here? In my kitchen?'

  Her head was beating some rhythm totally out of synch with the rest of her body. A deep bass thump that sent shock-waves through the core of her skull.

  'Faith, I'm talking to you.'

  The nausea was back now with a fury. She put her hands on the edges of her chair, gripping with her fingers, scared she was going to overbalance and fall off it.

  Ross's voice softened. The anger was replaced with reproach. 'Darling — Faith, darling, you do realise you've put blood on my carpet? I'm going to clean it up for you — would you like me to?'

  Her eyes were still averted.

  'Faith, I know you can hear me. I'm going to say this to you once,' he said, 'and then I'm not going to say it again. I'm deeply hurt. All the years that you've had credit cards, you've never ever once thanked me for them. You know that? Not once. But the moment I stop them all hell breaks loose. You're like a spoiled child sometimes.'

  He went out of the room, ran up the stairs and opened Alec's bedroom door. He could hear his son sobbing.

  Even though the curtains were drawn it was still light in the room. Alec was facing away from him, thumb in mouth. Ross knelt by the bed, put his hand on Alec's shoulder and, to his horror, his son flinched.

  'Hey, big guy!' he said softly. 'You didn't tell me if you scored any goals today. Did you?'

  Alec continued to sob.

  Ross leaned over and kissed his cheek. 'I love you. You've got to learn to be a little tidier, that's all, OK?' Ross bit his lip. This was him and his father all over again. He didn't want it to be that way, did not want Alec to go through the kind of hell he'd been through as a child, had promised himself that he would never let that happen. And yet…