Come Again

by Robert Webb

  Kate boggled. ‘They whipped it out?’

  ‘They did, yes. Whatever it was, it’s gone. Anyway, they’ve put in a kind of mesh to help his skull heal. Should be right as rain in a few months.’

  Kate looked at the young man in the bandage. This was how she remembered Luke – a person who could reasonably expect to live all the way into old age. Except this time it was true. This time there was no lurking menace. Luke had a piece of metal in his head and would need weeks of care; but at the same time, he was healthier than she’d ever known him. She felt relief and euphoria knocking on the door but couldn’t quite let them in just yet. She had a question. ‘Did the doctors talk to Luke about the tumour? I mean, before the operation, did they tell him about the … abnormality?’

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Barbara replacing her glasses. ‘That was the queer thing. Luke was adamant that they should take it out. I mean, the poor lamb was concussed so we all took it with a pinch of salt. But then he was saying, “She was right, she was right. Tell Kate she was right.”’ Barbara fixed the younger woman with a look that put Kate in mind of a lioness who didn’t care for the way a hyena had just looked at her cub. ‘Does that mean anything to you, Kate?’

  Kate had her own big-cat tendencies when it came to her husband but she swallowed her indignation. She’d never needed to fight her lovely, canny mother-in-law and this would be a hell of a time to start. She had to think quickly. ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I told him something about my past and he didn’t believe me. I got quite angry and we were arguing when he fell down the stairs.’

  ‘He said that he’d had too much to drink and he just slipped.’

  ‘It’s true that it was an accident, but he wasn’t drunk. He was arguing with me at the time. I tried to save him, but he was already falling.’

  Barbara looked to her sleeping son, her brow crumpling in sympathy as her imagination raced along with the new information.

  Kate continued: ‘So it was partly my fault. We were so cross with each other and he took a misstep. I’m sorry.’

  Barbara reached across and placed a hand on Kate’s forearm. ‘The doctors said that you’d done well – stopping the bleeding and calling the ambulance so quickly. Thank you, love. Thank you for looking after my boy.’

  Kate took Barbara’s hand. ‘He’s going to be okay, Mrs Fairbright.’

  ‘It’s going to take time.’

  ‘He’s got you.’

  ‘There might be side-effects,’ Barbara muttered in a monotone.

  ‘What?’

  Barbara straightened up again. ‘The doctors said there might be side-effects. Any bang on the head like that … they say he might forget things that most people remember. And he might remember things that most people forget. But they’re not expecting it to be severe. We’ll just have to wait and see.’

  ‘Don’t we always.’

  Barbara smiled to herself at the teenage wisdom and stood. Smoothing down her skirt, she said, ‘They’ve got a bed for me along the corridor. I might need to take a nap.’

  ‘Oh yes, do get some sleep, Barbara. I’ll stay with him till they chuck me out.’

  Barbara smiled and offered her hand. ‘It was nice to meet you, Kate.’

  Kate stood and very nearly curtseyed. ‘Nice to meet you too.’

  Luke’s mum leant over her son and gave him a kiss on the bandage, smoothing one of his eyebrows with a thumb. She left, drawing the curtain behind her.

  Kate pulled her chair closer to the bedside and sat gazing at Luke.

  ‘Hello,’ she said quietly. ‘Stuck with me again, I’m afraid. Y’know – the crazy lady who thinks she’s your wife. Trouble is, I am. Or at least I was.’ She listened for approaching footsteps but there was just the low-level snoring and farting from Luke’s wardmates. She went on. ‘Thing is, Lukey … I thought I’d let you down. I thought it was all my fault. And that you should have been with someone more sensible. You know, some nice blonde girl who understood about high heels and casseroles. “Anne” maybe. Someone normal called “Anne”. I thought Anne would have done a better job looking after you. But I was wrong. It wasn’t my fault. None of it was my fault. Anyway … there’s something I didn’t get a chance to say.’ She found one of his hands under the bedsheet. ‘I love you, Luke. I always will.’

  She was about to lean across and kiss his cheek when Luke stirred. She sprang back guiltily and had to concentrate hard to realise she had nothing to be ashamed of. Luke muttered something like ‘llollol-stan’.

  He opened his eyes and turned his head fractionally towards her. Kate stood so he could see her better. ‘What did you say, sweetheart?’

  Luke swallowed painfully and said in a hoarse whisper, ‘Bollocks to Anne. She pushed me down the stairs.’

  Kate rubbed his shoulder tenderly. ‘Sorry, that wasn’t Anne, that was me. To be fair, I didn’t actually—’

  ‘I don’t know who you are.’ He was only half-conscious and heavily stoned from the anaesthetic.

  ‘My name’s Kate.’

  ‘Mmm,’ he said. ‘The girl from the future.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘That’s right. Look, don’t worry about it right now—’

  ‘And I was … your shit husband.’

  ‘No! No, you were lovely.’

  He blinked slowly. For a moment she recognised him. ‘I’m tired,’ he said.

  ‘Go back to sleep, Lukey.’

  His eyelids drooped and then opened again with a thought. He slurred, ‘I was all right till I met you.’

  Kate absorbed this as she watched him drift back to sleep.

  She said it for herself, simply and quietly: ‘No, you weren’t.’

  Kate walked back to Benedict, grateful for the rain that hid her tears.

  The husband was gone. But the boy was safe.

  In her student room, she ditched her contact lenses, took off her wet clothes and climbed into bed.

  She thought of what her dad had said.

  You’ve always got to do your bit.

  And one other voice – the sweet voice that she’d last heard on a dance floor. What had he said?

  I’ll be waiting.

  Part Three

  COME AGAIN

  Chapter 19

  She woke with her mouth forming a single word. ‘Gross.’

  The bedroom stank of beer.

  Woah! What the hell is this? Wrong bed. Double bed. On bed not in bed. Sweaty but dry, dressed not naked, hair unwet, curtains unorange. Not curtains. Window. Light, day, home. HOME! London home, body home, body old. Old body alive! Home and safe.

  Safe. Recovered. Back from the dead.

  Second chance … Charles! Memory stick. Fetch! Dog? Retriever. Fetch stick. Fetch memory stick. Retrieve memory stick from Charles. Stick between teeth. Bit between teeth. Many bits. 16GB’s of bits. Do your bit. Do your bit.

  Kate sat up in the bedroom of her Clapham home, breathing heavily, her heart thumping in her ribcage like a crazed mouse. Like Mighty Mouse – the muscle-bound opera-singing cartoon mouse. Not like … Wallace! The mouse in the kitchen. The disaster kitchen. The 10,000-day kitchen. Alive. Still alive! Her scalp was venting an icy sweat. She scrambled to the side-table and found her phone. Ha! iPhone! Hello, again! Dead. Dead battery. Siri had missed the do-yourself-in alarm because the battery had died in the night. Up yours, Siri!

  God bless my disorganised alcoholic self!

  She plugged the phone in and waited to check the time. 10.23 a.m. Wednesday. Exactly twenty-four hours since she first shuffled into the kitchen. She jumped off the bed and immediately staggered back onto it. Okay. Heavy again. Not wrong-heavy – normal-heavy. Body acting its age. She stood more carefully, like an old pirate remembering her sea legs. She looked around the room and sank to her knees, weeping with gratitude. Huge, heaving sobs of hope and regret. The dream. It couldn’t have been a dream. But there was a second chance. Presently, she blew her nose on the duvet, making a mental promise that thi
s was the last revolting thing she would do to this lovely mess of a room. She stood and rushed downstairs to the bathroom mirror.

  Oh … mate. There you are. Home.

  Forty-five but every line herself, every wrinkle earned. Rings within were keeping count but the tree was in flower. Weathered and renewed.

  ‘Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.’

  Where did that come from? Philip Larkin. What made her think of Larkin? She headed to the kitchen.

  She’d never been so pleased to see the place. Just look at this shithole! In what previous life had it been a good idea to live like such a tramp? Even Toby’s guerrilla clear-up couldn’t remove the stench of surrender and fungal Pop Tarts. Kate placed a hand on a hip and leant on the kitchen island for a moment, trying to give herself a break. She had been ill. An illness that’s as much a part of life as twisting an ankle or getting the flu. It’s just that this particular mental illness had nearly killed her. ‘Well, fuck that,’ she murmured to herself. There was plenty to live for. There always had been. She saw the plain-papered gift that Toby had left for her.

  Oh yes. And now there’s even something else. Maybe.

  She picked at the Sellotape and was immediately exasperated by Toby’s meticulous wrapping. ‘Only men with no children have the time to get good at this shit,’ she muttered. ‘There again, that made no difference to Luke.’ She scanned the table for a sharp edge and found a pair of nail scissors buried point-down in a derelict brownie. Every Christmas, birthday and wedding anniversary, her husband had faithfully presented her with gifts that looked like they’d been wrapped by elves on crack. She remembered Luke’s self-deprecating shrug. She remembered how she had found it endearing and how, as the years went by, that fondness had given way to disappointment, then sadness, then anger. Lazy, shrugging git couldn’t even summon the basic respect to competently wrap a bloody prezzie.

  But now, as she carefully snipped along the short edge of the book, something miraculous happened in the mind of Kate Marsden. She held the two ideas in balance: her delight in Luke and her anger; her love and her grief. Standing there in the kitchen – and without noticing – she began the long delayed process of integrating the lost past with the new present. Something in her imagination finally began the quiet work of mourning.

  She pulled the book free of the brown paper.

  It was a slim volume of poetry – High Windows by Philip Larkin.

  Okay, what voodoo is this, then?

  Only just now, upstairs, she’d thought of a line from this very writer. She stood motionless and tried to retrace the steps. What did she know? Well, she had been elated to be back home – geographically, physically, temporally – right place, right body, right time. She knew that she felt renewed. In fact, she felt wonderful. She knew Larkin had a not entirely unfair reputation as a miserable bastard but was also capable of sudden leaps into the sublime. And … ah, there you are … she knew Toby liked Larkin. She associated Toby with Larkin and Larkin with new life. But what did this book mean to Toby?

  Caressing the edges, she found a top corner turned down. Even in her elation Kate frowned because she didn’t really approve of ear-marking new books. It was a poem called ‘Sad Steps’. She frowned again as she saw Toby had made a pencil annotation in the margin of the last verse – she didn’t approve of that either. His neat handwriting had pressed lightly with a hard 2H:

  I’m lucky to be your friend but to be honest I’m still looking at the moon. Tell me this is absurd and I’ll never bring it up again.

  She read the poem. She didn’t know this one and she forced herself to read carefully before she got to the last two verses – the part Toby had highlighted. He couldn’t make it simple, could he?

  Kate remembered a favourite phrase of her beloved school English teacher, Miss Benjamin: ‘What’s going on here, then?’

  The poet had got up in the night for a piss, and then noticed through the window the bright moon in all its romantic glamour. Did it inspire in him epic thoughts of all-conquering love? No, he wrote:

  … No,

  One shivers slightly, looking up there.

  The hardness and the brightness and the plain

  Far-reaching singleness of that wide stare

  Is a reminder of the strength and pain

  Of being young; that it can’t come again,

  But is for others undiminished somewhere.

  She read and re-read the last verse and tried to see it through Toby’s eyes.

  Oh boy. Oh, Toby! He was undiminished – he was the ‘others’. She was the one whose youth could not come again but Toby was still staring at the moon. Toby was still in love. Her heart raced along with her thoughts. She couldn’t organise them – she needed words. She scrambled to her laptop and typed like a maniac into her diary.

  Oh, but Toby! It’s much better than that! I HAVE come again. I’m here again now. I had a dream of youth but in the dream I wasn’t young. I’ve never been as young as I am in this moment. No one is.

  But in my dream – if it was a dream – you were truly young and … I shouldn’t be feeling romantic, should I? I shouldn’t be looking at the bright moon and thinking that it’s doing its beautiful thing for me.

  He died, you see. My sweet husband died. And I wanted to follow him. That was something of an error.

  But let me tell you: right now I’m come again and ready for adventure, my dear Toby. I don’t know if that incudes you. I like the way you kiss.

  But I’ve got something to do first. You have to do your bit, right? Give me a couple of hours, you amazing man. I just need to see another old friend. He’ll be in a police cell by sundown or my name’s not Kate Marsden.

  Chapter 20

  Afresh, Kate literally went to work.

  The journey to BelTech reminded her of what had just happened in 1992: the familiar now crackling with unexpected energy. Who knew that taking the overland from Clapham Junction to West Brompton for the four-thousandth time could feel so invested with purpose?

  She had decided to call her recent experience ‘The Experience’. She had a powerful intimation that it had affected her but no one else. It was real but it was false. There was no chance that the memory was just a dream and also no chance that anything had actually occurred. It was like a play or a novel or a poem – it was real while it lasted; it would park itself in her memory; it would subtly or deeply inform her view of the world … and it hadn’t happened.

  Nothing in her house had changed. Charles Hunt’s profile on LinkedIn was the same pack of lies it had been yesterday. Kate’s rescuing him from bullies had made no impact on his future corruption. Kes was still the artistic director of the Duke of York’s Theatre in the West End and he was still casting himself in leading roles. Amy was still a French and Spanish interpreter for an NGO. And as far as the rest of the world knew, Kate was still a depressed widow recently sacked from an under-achieving career by a buffoon who was in over his head with gangsters and crypto-fascists.

  She exited the tube station and strode for the office. She felt an energy this body didn’t deserve. She was forty-five again for sure. But the fit forty-five that hadn’t just spent nine months fucking itself.

  Belgravia Technologia had, naturally, nothing whatever to do with Belgravia. Charles just thought the posh-sounding name would impress potential clients and, in this, he had been proved depressingly correct. In fact, the business occupied the fourth floor of a taupe seventies office block in a quiet mews in West Brompton.

  She rounded the corner of the little cul-de-sac and noticed something out of place. Opposite the entrance to the building, a tall, powerfully-built man in a long black coat was leaning against a white Range Rover and smoking a cigarette. Kate instinctively avoided his eye.

  She walked into the building and clocked Ray, one of the two soon-to-retire security guards. As usual, he was picking his nose with his thumb and puzzling through a crossword. He glanced up. ‘Ah, Ms Marsden – just the fella.’ Ray either hadn’t
noticed that Kate had been sacked yesterday or didn’t care. She had been with BelTech from the start and was an invaluable crossword assistant.

  ‘Bit busy this morning, Ray.’

  ‘Won’t take a jiffy.’ He read from the clue list. ‘“Razor cuts clock? Phew! That was close.” Four, two, four.’

  ‘Tricky one. Give me a few minutes,’ Kate replied as she breezed past.

  She liked Ray, but he was never going to be the problem. The problem would be getting in and out of Charles’s office before anyone worked out what was going on. Assuming the post office’s next-day delivery service had worked its charm, Kate’s envelope would have been sorted by now and Charles’s secretary Janice would have respected the CONFIDENTIAL note, leaving it unopened in his room. As per the standing instruction, she would have done her best to stuff the mail into the antique toast rack on the windowsill behind his desk. Kate checked the time as she stepped into the lift. 12.34 p.m. She was counting on the fact that Charles was too much of an idle bastard to open his own post before lunch. If she got lucky, maybe he was already out trying to wank off Liam Fox over some grilled asparagus at the Ritz. She would simply wander in, take the memory stick, walk out and hail a cab to the Guardian on York Way.

  Breathing as calmly as possible, she stepped out of the lift on the fourth floor and headed for Charles’s office. She felt several heads turn in her direction but ignored her former colleagues as she made her way, swiftly but – she hoped – casually, down one side of the open-plan space. Close to Charles’s door, Janice was at her desk but thankfully masked by the ample frame of Colin, Kate’s IT deputy. He had his back to Kate and seemed to be explaining in some detail the reason why ‘Excel can sometimes be a very naughty boy’. Kate slipped past them. Charles’s door had no window and she walked in without knocking.

  Inside were three men, none of whom were Charles. To her right, two tall muscular-looking white guys standing in long black coats. In front of her, sitting across the desk from Charles’s empty chair, the back of a thinner man probably in his fifties. Close-cropped grey hair with a straight neckline an inch above the collar of his crisp, dark purple shirt. The man twisted round to look at her and Kate recognised the sleek face of Nestor Petrov.