The Thief of Time

by John Boyne

  She may have been a fictionalist – she may have been a downright liar -but she managed to do something that neither God nor man had been able to do for one hundred and fourteen years before that or one hundred and twelve years since: she killed me off.

  Chapter 21

  October 1999

  On 12 October, at four O’clock in the morning, I took a taxi to the City Hospital where my nephew Tommy lay in a coma, following a drugs overdose. He had been brought in by an anonymous friend towards midnight the night before, and Andrea – Tommy’s pregnant girlfriend – had been contacted an hour later by the hospital, following a phone call made to his apartment, the number of which was in his wallet. Shortly after that, she phoned me, waking me up with a sense of dead vu, for it had been a similar late night phone call which had alerted me to James Hocknell’s death a few months earlier.

  I arrived, tired and bleary eyed, at the front reception desk, asked for directions to my nephew’s room and was sent upstairs and towards intensive care, where I found him hooked up to a heart monitor with an intravenous tube inserted into a vein on his needle-marked arms. He looked perfectly peaceful, he even had a slight smile hovering about his lips, but I could see that his breathing was laboured and a little less than regular due to the uncertain movements of his chest. His heart rate and blood pressure were being constantly monitored and the sight of him lying there, a picture typically seen on a television medical show, was depressing but somehow inevitable.

  While walking towards his room, I had noticed a small group of nurses hovering outside the window, staring in at him excitedly and I even heard one wonder how ‘Tina’ would take the news if he died. ‘Perhaps she’d go straight back to Carl,’ said another. ‘Them two were made for each other.’

  ‘He’d never forgive her. After what she did with his brother? Forget it,’ said a third, but they all walked away when they saw me approach. I sighed. Such was the life my unfortunate nephew had set out for himself and such was the one he was damned to continue living.

  A short history of the DuMarques: they have been an unfortunate line. Every one of them has had his life cut short, either by his own stupidity or by the machinations of the times. My own brother Tomas had a son, Tom, who died in the French Revolution; his son Tommy was shot during a card game for stealing aces; his unlucky son Thomas died when a jealous husband tried to run me through with a sword in Rome and ran him through instead; his son Tom caught malaria in Thailand; his son Thorn was killed in the Boer War; his son Tom was crushed by a speeding motor car in the Hollywood Hills; his son Thomas died at the end of the Second World War; his son Tomas was killed in a gangland riot; his son Tommy is a soap opera actor, lying in a coma following a drugs overdose.

  I stood by the window myself for some time and watched him. Although I had been warning Tommy for so long about the chances of his ending up in this very condition, it shocked me to see him finally laid so low. Gone was the handsome, self-assured, bright young man who was recognised wherever he went, the celebrity, the star, the fashion plate; replaced by a mere body in a bed, breathing with the help of a machine, unable to turn away now from the prying eyes. I should have done more, I thought. This time, I should have done more.

  I met Andrea for the first time in the waiting room a few minutes later. She was sitting there alone, drinking a cup of hospital coffee, in the typically sterile atmosphere which hardly encourages relaxation. The stench of disinfectant surrounded us and there was only one window, which didn’t open and was in need of cleaning. Although I had never met Tommy’s girlfriend before, I guessed it was her by her obvious pregnancy and the fact that she was shaking and staring at the ground.

  ‘Andrea?’ I asked, leaning in towards her and touching her gently on the shoulder. ‘Are you Andrea?’

  ‘Yes ...’ she said, looking at me as if I might be a doctor come to bring her the bad news.

  ‘I’m Matthieu Zéla,’ I explained quickly. ‘We spoke earlier on the phone.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said, looking both relieved and disappointed at once. ‘Of course. We meet at last,’ she added with an attempt at a smile. ‘Of all the places. Would you like some coffee? I could ...’

  Her voice trailed off as I shook my head and sat down opposite her. She was wearing clothes that looked like they had been lying beside her bed before she’d crawled out of it. Dirty jeans, a T-shirt, running shoes without socks. Her dark blonde hair was curly but needed a wash and as she wore no make-up, her face had a natural beauty which appealed.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to him,’ she said, shaking her head miserably. ‘I wasn’t even with him when it happened. Some friend of his brought him here and then disappeared. One of those hangers-on that are always lurking, hanging out of his coat, getting into clubs for free, trying to get a part or pick up girls.’ She paused and looked suitably angry. ‘I can’t believe he OD’d,’ she said. ‘He’s always so careful. He’s supposed to know what he’s doing.’

  ‘It’s difficult to remain careful when you’re high on drugs all the time,’ I replied irritably. I find myself increasingly irritated by the young; the older I grow, the more distance that exists between myself and the current generation, the more maddening I find them. I had thought that the previous one – the generation born around the 1940s -was bad enough but everyone that I had ever encountered connected to my nephew, all of those born in the 1970s, seemed oblivious to the dangers the world presented them. It was as if they all believed they could live to be my age.

  ‘It was never all the time,’ she retorted, and I noticed that she was already using the past tense in reference to him. ‘He liked a little something socially, that was all. No more than everyone else does.’

  ‘I don’t,’ I said and I didn’t have the first clue why I was behaving so puritanically; now I was irritating myself as well.

  ‘Well, then, you’re a fucking saint, aren’t you?’ she shot back immediately. ‘You’re not in an incredibly stressful job, working eighteen hour days, being stared at wherever you go and always having to put on this ... this display for millions of people who don’t even know you.’

  ‘I realise that. I’m -’

  ‘You don’t know what it’s -’

  ‘Andrea, I realise that,’ I repeated firmly, silencing her with my tone. ‘I’m sorry. I know that my nephew leads a bizarre existence. I know it can’t be easy for him. My God, I’ve heard him talk about it often enough. For now, though, I feel we should be thinking about his recovery and how we can prevent this from happening again, assuming he survives. Has a doctor spoken to you yet?’

  She nodded. ‘Just before you got here,’ she said, quieter now. ‘He said that the next twenty-four hours will be crucial, but I think they just train them to say that at medical school no matter what the situation is. It seems to me the next twenty-four hours are always crucial, whatever’s going on. Either he’ll wake up, in which case he’ll be all right after a few days, or he could be brain damaged, or he’ll stay like that. Lying there. In that bed. For God knows how long.’ I nodded. In other words, the doctor had said nothing that a fool couldn’t have diagnosed.

  ‘You’re shaking,’ I said after a reasonable pause, leaning across to take her hand. ‘And you’re freezing cold. Shouldn’t you get a jacket or something? The baby ...’ I muttered, not quite sure what I was trying to say but feeling that there was a good chance she shouldn’t be sitting around catching pneumonia when she was six months pregnant.

  ‘I’m all right,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘I just want him to wake up. I love him, Mr Zéla,’ she offered, almost apologetically.

  ‘Matthieu, please.’

  ‘I love him and I need him. That’s all there is to it.’

  I stared at her and wondered. My problem with Andrea was this: firstly, I didn’t know the girl so I didn’t know what her qualities were, what her position at work was, who her family were, what kind of money she earned, where she lived in London and how many people she shared with
. I didn’t know the first thing about her so it was perfectly reasonable of me to be suspicious.

  On the other hand, I could have misjudged her. She could love him. Simple as that. She could know the sickening, aching pain that goes with love. She could know how it feels to be aware of someone’s presence in a building, even when you’re not together; she could know how it feels to be hurt and damaged and crucified by someone and still be unable to shake them from your head, no matter how hard you try, no matter how many years you are apart; she could know that, even years later, all it would take would be one phone call and you would go to them, drop everything, desert everyone, put the world on hold. She could feel those things for Tommy and I could be denying her that right.

  ‘The baby,’ she said after a while. ‘He has to live for the baby’s sake. That’s what will make him hold on, isn’t it? Well? Isn’t it?’

  I shrugged. I doubted it. I know a little about the Thomases and their lack of resilience.

  The lift opened on the ground floor of the hospital and I stepped outside, surprised by the number of people waiting near the main reception desk. I gave them a cursory glance – old men, sitting and rocking back and forth catatonically through some internal rhythm, young women in cheap clothes with greasy hair and tired faces yawning and drinking from murky plastic cups of tea, children buzzing around the floor noisily, alternating between tears and screams – and made for the doorway. They opened automatically as I approached them and the second I stepped outside I took a long, deep breath of fresh air and felt it recharge my body from within. The day was breaking, it was bright now but it would still be an hour or so before full service was restored, and the wind bit through me as I wrapped my coat closer around my body.

  I was about to hail a taxi when, like a moment of revelation, I spun around and stared back at the hospital. I thought about it and shook my head – it couldn’t be. After a moment, I walked back quickly through the doors and looked at the mass of seats once again, scanning the faces carefully this time, aiming directly for where I had seen him, but now he had been replaced by an old woman breathing from an inhaler. I looked around, my mouth open, and I had the sudden impression that I was in a film. The scene before me was opening up like a wide angle shot and I was carefully moving around the reception area before my eyes focused on the drinks machine where he stood, a finger hovering over the choices as he made his decision. I walked towards him, grabbed him by the collar and pulled him around. A fifty pence coin fell to the floor and he almost tripped over himself with surprise. I was right; I stared at him and shook my head.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I demanded. ‘How the hell did you find out?’

  The irony of watching a report of my nephew’s overdose and currently comatose condition on my own broadcasting station’s breakfast news show was not lost on me. I didn’t sleep much when I got home; instead I collapsed into a comfortable armchair which could easily fit two average sized people and closed my eyes for a while, dozing fitfully before I realised that the night’s sleep was lost to me. Afterwards, I took a long, hot shower, applying exotic shower gels with intriguing fragrances to my body and shampoos with heavy scents of coconut to my hair before emerging in a thick bathrobe a half hour later into the kitchen. It was refreshing and gave me a new energy for the day that I would have otherwise lacked. I prepared a light breakfast – a tall glass of cold orange juice, a toasted muffin with sliced kiwi – and ate it in front of the television as the coffee brewed.

  A reporter named Roach Henderson was standing outside the hospital and he looked as if he would rather be almost anywhere else in the world than standing there in the freezing cold, worrying that his hairpiece might blow away in the middle of his broadcast. I knew Roach only slightly; his real name was Ernest but for some reason he had decided in his early twenties to call himself ‘Roach’. I think he had been heavily influenced by the anchormen of the American news shows and believed that an exotic first name would lend him both credibility and a desk job in a warm studio. He had achieved neither in the twenty odd years since. It was interesting that he had chosen a bug’s name for his own.

  ‘Roach,’ asked the real anchorman, Colin Molton, his brow furrowed in trademarked worry, a biro tapping against his lips as he himself stared at the television screen containing the reporter’s image. ‘What can you tell us of Tommy DuMarque’s condition? Roach,’ he added once again to indicate that it was his turn to speak now.

  ‘Well, as most of you know,’ began Roach, ignoring the question and launching into his prepared speech anyway, ‘Tommy DuMarque is one of the nation’s most recognisable actors.’ Stress on the ‘recognisable’. ‘He began his career eight years ago, playing Sam Cutler on leading soap opera -’ Photographs and a brief scene from a few years ago were quickly played. ‘Having also launched himself into the worlds of pop music as well as modelling, it’s fair to say that Tommy DuMarque’s condition is one which will be monitored by the general public as well as entertainment insiders. Colin.’ It was like saying ‘over’ at the end of every sentence on a walkie-talkie.

  ‘So what is his condition then? Roach,’ Colin repeated his question.

  ‘Doctors say that he is critical but stable. We’re still not quite sure what exactly happened to Tommy DuMarque but reports are coming in to us that he collapsed at a fashionable night-club in London just after one O’clock this morning’ – wrong, I thought – ‘and was rushed here shortly after that. Although he was apparently conscious when he arrived here, he slipped into a coma soon afterwards and has remained in that condition since then. Colin.

  Colin looked incredibly upset now, as if this was his own son lying in the hospital. ‘He’s a young man, isn’t he, Roach?’

  ‘He’s twenty-two, Colin.’

  ‘And would you say that drugs played a part in these events? Roach.’

  ‘Hard to say for definite right now, Colin, but it is well known that Tommy DuMarque leads an extravagant lifestyle. He’s photographed at clubs seven nights a week and I have heard reports that producers at the BBC wanted to put him through a rehabilitation course as his life was spinning out of control. He’s been in trouble for continued lateness and also for an article written by a prominent newspaper columnist; he was widely believed to be the subject of a column detailing his wild lifestyle and sexual habits. Colin.’ I noticed that his head twitched with every stressed word.

  ‘And I assume his family are gathered around his bedside this morning, Roach?’

  ‘Unfortunately, both of Tommy DuMarque’s parents are dead but his girlfriend is here at the moment and I believe his uncle spent several hours in the hospital early this morning. No word yet on whether Sarah Jensen, who plays love interest and sister-in-law Tina Cutler on the show and whose television affair with DuMarque has captivated millions over the last few months, has come to visit him but we’ll let you know as soon as she gets here. Colin.’

  Without so much as a goodbye, Colin’s chair swivelled back round to face the camera and Roach’s image vanished. Colin promised to keep us all in touch with the story throughout the day as it developed before his face changed entirely to tell us of a panda named Muffy which had just been born in London Zoo. I considered getting dressed and going out for the papers but I knew that Tommy’s state would be front page stuff and couldn’t be bothered. Instead I put on some music and closed my eyes, allowing my mind to drift away from these current problems, if only for a little while.

  Lee Hocknell opened and closed his mouth like a fish as he stood before me, unsure what to say. His surprise at seeing me was typical of his stupidity for surely he would have known that I would arrive at the hospital as soon as I heard the news. I mean I might have had a lot of nephews in my time but Tommy was the only one of them who was still alive. Lee was dressed quite fashionably and I noticed that he had undergone a severe haircut since I had last seen him at his father’s funeral. It was cut close to the scalp and stood out in tufted bunches, a definite improvemen
t on the hippie look he had sported for the funeral.

  ‘Mr Zéla,’ he said when I let him go and stood staring at him furiously, ‘I didn’t see you -’

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ I repeated, edging closer towards him. ‘How long have you been here? How did you find out about this?’

  He stood back in surprise as if it should be obvious how he had found out about Tommy’s overdose and in a moment, of course, it was. ‘It was me who brought him in here,’ he explained. ‘We were at a club, you see, and he suddenly started to act weird. Collapsed on the floor. I thought he was dead. I called an ambulance and brought him here. He woke up on the way so then I thought he must be all right but now they say he’s gone into a coma. Is that right?’

  ‘Well, yes,’ I said quietly, wondering why on earth Lee Hocknell had been in a club with my nephew in the first place. I looked around and saw a quiet corner of the reception area and led him firmly towards it, sitting him down beside me with as threatening an expression on my face as I could muster. ‘Now,’ I said, ‘I want to know what you were doing with him in the first place. You don’t know each other, do you?’

  He looked at the ground and sighed. For a moment, he was like a little boy who had been caught doing something he shouldn’t and was trying to think of how to lie his way out of it. When he looked back up at me, he was biting his lip and I could tell that he was nervous. Whatever they had been doing, it had clearly got out of hand.

  ‘I phoned him, you see,’ he explained, ‘about the script. Somehow I thought I’d have a better chance with him than with you. I told the people at the studio my name and said that he’d take my call. And he did too.’

  ‘Of course he did,’ I said sternly. ‘We both received your letters and the script.’