‘I think I’ll drive us home, if you don’t mind?’ said Tom.
* * *
Whether it was the day out, or seeing her drive, or the aphrodisiac effect of a good old-fashioned ghost story, or just something that had to click over in Tom’s head in its own time, the drought broke when he and Rachel got home. She went to have a lie down and he came up later to see if she was okay, and she pulled him down beside her and said, ‘No, not yet.’
She might have been missing one hand, but she still had two good arms for clutching him close, and two strong legs for clutching him even closer, and a mouth for kissing and sucking and biting and telling him how much she loved being taken by him and being filled with him.
Smoky peered in, sniffed disdainfully, and went to find something more interesting.
When they were finished and Tom was lying beside her, Rachel traced the planes of his back and buttocks, the slope of his neck, the groove of his spine, and saw that his shoulder blades were scored with the scratch marks of her fingernails. On both sides. Far from scaring her, she found this oddly comforting. At some point in the month since her accident she’d accepted that her hand, while physically absent, wasn’t actually gone. She didn’t know where it was, but she could move it, feel with it, touch the man she loved with it, and that had to be a good thing, didn’t it?
She didn’t appreciate how wrong she was in that sentiment until later that evening.
Tom was stacking the dishwasher when there was a tremendous crash. Rachel rushed into the kitchen and found him slumped in the doorway to the utility room, shaking his head woozily, surrounded by shards of glass and crockery.
‘Tom! What happened? Are you all right?’
‘I’m not…’ he mumbled. ‘Came over dizzy all of a sudden.’
She helped him to his feet, feeling his forehead. ‘Jesus, you’re burning up.’ This close, the heat from him was palpable. ‘Let’s get you sat down.’
‘I’m fine.’ He tried to wave her away, but weakly. ‘Bit of man-flu is all.’
‘Man-flu be buggered,’ she snorted. ‘On your feet, soldier.’
She got him as far as the sofa, where he collapsed, muttering incoherently. Then she called an ambulance.
10
INFECTION
RACHEL SAT IN THE BACK OF THE AMBULANCE, helpless and almost paralysed with a crippling sense of déjà vu, as the paramedic bustled about and the vehicle swayed. Tom was slipping in and out of consciousness, and muttering in his delirium.
‘Rachel!’ he called, with sudden and shocking clarity. ‘Rache!’
She grasped his hand – it was sweat-slickened and hot. ‘Hey, honey, I’m here, shh, I’m here.’
He turned and fixed her with urgent, red-rimmed eyes in a face the colour of candle wax. ‘She’s not dead!’ he gasped.
Rachel didn’t need to ask who ‘she’ was. Mary in the Oak Tree, who had appeared to her on the path above the clearing where she had been found seventy years ago, her corpse stuffed into a hollow tree – a tree that had been cut down and burnt and yet was somehow still there, in the place where Rachel’s dead hand could still feel it, the place of dead leaves and rust and carrion beetles.
Rachel gripped Tom’s hand tighter. ‘Yes she is,’ she told him. ‘And if she’s got any sense she’ll stay that way.’
* * *
An unusually aggressive strain of Staphylococcus aureus, the doctors had said. Rachel looked at Tom, blurry through a haze of tears, as he lay in intensive care with tubes snaking in and out of him, and couldn’t get her head around how he was the casualty and she was the one watching helplessly. This wasn’t how it was supposed to be.
A nurse had sat down with her and explained how the bug often lived harmlessly on the skin and only caused problems when it got into the bloodstream; how the scratches on his back hadn’t even broken the skin and so it was extremely unlikely that she was the cause; that by the nature of his job Tom probably suffered minor cuts and abrasions every day and could have infected himself days ago without any symptoms showing until now; that it was all probably just a horrible coincidence. He was a fit, strong man in his twenties and was responding well to the IV antibiotics, his temperature was already down and there was no obvious sign of any organ damage.
Rachel didn’t believe a word of it. She knew that she was responsible – that the infection had come from her scratches, never mind whether or not they’d broken the skin. Her dead hand had brought the disease back from that other place.
She’d been twelve when her dad had died, but her memories of the hospital were few and dim because her mother, wanting to protect Rachel when she couldn’t protect herself, had left her with Auntie Bridget – one of many honorary ‘aunties’ who she only realised in her teens weren’t relatives at all but a wide circle of old friends from school, the tennis club, and antenatal classes. All Rachel knew was that Daddy was sick and had gone away to get better, that from time to time Mummy went to visit him, and that when this happened she went to stay with Auntie Bridget, who didn’t have children of her own and so treated Rachel to movies, shopping trips and let her have the run of the large manor house that she managed for the National Trust. It had priest holes and cellars and attics which were off-limits to the paying public, and Rachel was able to push the real world to one side for a few hours by exploring and pretending she was the heroine of a trashy teen horror novel. Given how depressed and angry her mother seemed to be most of the time, Rachel found herself looking forward to these visits more and more, which carried its own special kind of guilt.
She didn’t know what made her mother relent at the very end and take her to see her father for that first and last time. Maybe because it was so near the end and the only thing big enough to override the imperative of protecting her daughter was the necessity to say goodbye.
It had not gone well.
There had been a book in the waiting room: a large picture book written to help small children cope with bereavement. It had illustrations of a tired-looking but happy old woman in a bed with a comfy patchwork quilt, surrounded by her loved ones, and at the end she smiled down on her family from out of the sun.
Rachel’s father had been nothing like that. She couldn’t recall the details of the room (though she was pretty sure there hadn’t been a patchwork quilt), except for the smell: antiseptic and rubberised sheets and an underlying whiff of something sickly brown-yellow, which caught at the back of her throat. At first she thought there’d been a mistake – that they’d gone into the wrong room accidentally – because the bald, hollow-eyed old man in the bed wasn’t her father. Her father was ten feet tall, with curly brown hair and hands that could fix anything. He sang terrible songs and listened to unfunny comedy shows on Radio 4. This old scarecrow of a thing looked like it would break in two if she blew on it hard. But then he smiled faintly and spoke, and even though it was a whisper it was still his voice: ‘Hey there, Trub.’
A hand flopped out of the bedclothes in her direction; little more than a claw.
‘Go on,’ said her mother, urging her forward. ‘It’s your father.’
Rachel shook her head, mute with horror. She couldn’t touch that claw.
‘It’s okay,’ the man whispered to her mother. ‘She’s afraid. It’s natural. It’s okay.’
Her mother went over to the bedside, fussed with the sheets, stroked his brow and kissed it, murmuring to him. How can she do that? Rachel thought. Couldn’t she smell that he was sick?
‘Come and hold his hand,’ said her mother. ‘Nothing’s going to hurt you. It isn’t catching.’
Reluctantly she had approached and taken her daddy’s right hand with her left. Except it wasn’t her daddy’s hand. How could it be? Daddy’s hands had taken her sailing on Edgbaston Reservoir. They’d put up her framed poster of McFly. One time, when she’d had a bad reaction to penicillin, she’d hallucinated bugs crawling over her hands and Daddy had placed his strong hands over hers until the bugs had gone away. She knew tha
t there were no such things as cancer germs, but at the same time it had felt like the hand she was holding was full of nothing but death.
‘You said it was going to get better!’ she insisted. ‘It’s not fair! You said!’
‘I know,’ he answered. ‘And I’m sorry. But it isn’t.’ His responses were gasped and thready. The lung cancer had been stealthy and too far advanced by the time the doctors had spotted it, helped by the fact that – and here was the bitter, crushing irony of it all – her father didn’t smoke and never had. Nobody had been able to explain it beyond something vague to do with passive smoking or environmental carcinogens. Years later, when she’d tried to explain to her best friend Sandra how unfair it all was during the course of a very drunken girls’ night in, Sandra had flourished her wine glass and declaimed in an affected poetic voice, ‘Death is the bitch brood-mother of us all, and we are her wayward litter. She takes us whenever she likes and owes nobody a reason why.’
At the age of twelve all Rachel could do to express her rage and helplessness was repeat, ‘But it’s not fair!’ as if this was somehow all her parents’ fault. She cringed at the memory now, at her own unthinking childish self-centredness, and wished more than anything that she could go back and tell the little girl not to be afraid, that her dad just needed a hug.
But she had caught the death in her father’s hand; it had killed hers and left her with nothing but a stump. It had just taken a little while, that was all.
She looked at Tom, lying there waxy, pale and twitching in a troubled sleep as his body fought the illness that she knew she’d caused.
She takes us whenever she likes and owes nobody a reason why.
Rachel took his hand, disturbed by how hot his flesh was. ‘Well you’re not having this one too,’ she said with quiet venom. ‘You’ve got a fucking fight on your hands here.’
Then she went to call Charlotte and Spence to tell them that their son was in hospital.
* * *
Charlotte Cooper swept into the Intensive Care Unit’s reception area where Rachel was sitting, trying to answer all of the texts and messages and well-wishes and questions from their wide circle of friends, even though she had next to no information herself. Tom’s mother was small, with cropped iron-grey hair and a fierce no-nonsense attitude, which was the main reason why Cooper Landscaping was such a successful business. No invoice went unchased, no email unactioned, and she was equally uncompromising on the quality of the work that she expected from her husband and his men.
‘Where is he?’ Charlotte demanded. ‘Where’s my boy? You should have told us the moment it happened! The moment!’ Having delivered this she left Rachel open-mouthed and strode over to where the duty nurse was angling in to intercept her. Spence followed a few paces behind, but stopped to give Rachel a hug.
‘You all right, m’love?’ he asked. ‘Bearing up?’
Rachel just nodded, determined not to cry, but afraid that any reply would open the floodgates.
‘She’s worried,’ he said, nodding at his wife, who was interrogating the nurse. ‘Don’t take it the wrong way.’
‘I won’t.’ How could she, when she knew how cruel grief could make someone?
* * *
Rachel was allowed to see Tom again briefly that evening. Already he looked better; his skin had lost its waxy colour, but there were dark circles under his eyes, which made him look utterly exhausted.
‘Hey,’ she said, and squeezed his hand. The return squeeze was weak, but there.
‘I’ve got this really weird feeling of déjà vu,’ he replied. ‘But like, in reverse.’
‘You and me both.’
‘I’ve got this really weird feeling of déjà vu,’ he repeated, and gave her the ghost of a grin.
‘Shut up or I’ll unplug you.’
‘Yes, ma’am.’
For a while she fussed ineffectually at his bedding and his dressings, keeping up a stream of cheery, inane chatter. ‘They say I shouldn’t kiss you because your immune system is pretty rocky and I might give you something.’ She laughed. ‘That’d be ironic, wouldn’t it?’
‘Why?’
Rachel swallowed nervously, and looked away. She hadn’t been going to say anything for fear of his reaction. When their positions had been reversed she’d told him that she didn’t need his apologies, just his help, but she hadn’t considered how much he’d felt the need to apologise, even though the accident hadn’t been his fault.
‘I think I gave this to you,’ she admitted. ‘You know, on your back. When I scratched you. When we were, you know. I’m so, so sorry.’
‘Bollocks,’ Tom said. ‘You didn’t give this to me. The doctors said there are a dozen ways I could have got it. It was a freak, one-in-a-million thing.’
‘But it couldn’t just be coincidence.’
‘Listen.’ He struggled up onto one elbow. It cost him an effort and she tried to stop him but he brushed her protests aside. ‘You did not do this to me. Just like I did not do that to you.’ He nodded at her left arm. ‘And even if you did, you didn’t. Understand? We don’t do this to each other. No blame, remember?’
She nodded, sniffed, and wiped away the tears that she’d sworn not to allow. ‘No blame.’
‘So just bloody come here and kiss me.’
So she did.
* * *
That night, sleeping alone in the house, the nightmares began. If she’d thought the dreams of the hollow tree had been bad, they were nothing compared to what she dreamt of its prisoner.
11
GYPSY WITCH
ANNABEL CLAYTON STOOD ON THE HEIGHT OF BEACON Hill and watched her city burn.
Even though the centre of Birmingham was miles away she fancied she could feel the heat of it rolling towards her on the great mumbling, snarling thunder of bomber engines, explosions, and the roar of the fires themselves. So great was the inferno that it lit up the underside of the lowering cloud cover as if it were the roof of a vast cavern of hell itself, stabbed with the scrabbling fingers of searchlights and the fitful sparks of anti-aircraft fire. It was nearly midnight, and the raid had already been going for six hours.
‘All those people,’ she said to the man next to her. His name was Brian, and he was a signaller for the troops manning the barrage balloon and gun emplacements on neighbouring hills. He was a good man in his own way, even though he had sneaked away from his unit for a crafty fumble. He tried to wrap a blanket around her shoulders but she shrugged him off.
‘Come on, love,’ he protested. ‘It’s freezing.’
‘With all those fires?’ she asked. Every now and then there would be a brighter bloom as one of the German bombs found its mark on a gas main or a fuel dump.
‘That’s miles away, silly. You can’t possibly feel them from here.’
She liked him well enough for a gadjo, but didn’t take well to his calling her silly, as if she was nothing but a chavi with wide eyes and legs for a handsome face in a uniform. He didn’t believe in what she could See, but that was all right. He didn’t have to.
‘The year I was born,’ she said, ‘my family and all the other families were evicted off the Black Patch where we’d been living for half a century. The authorities didn’t want it because it was all waste from the factories, and then they decided that they did want it, so we had to go. They said they were going to turn it into a park so the children in the slums thereabouts had somewhere outside in the fresh air to play, as if that wasn’t how my ma and pa and all their brothers and sisters had grown up in the first place.’
Brian was stamping his feet and blowing on his hands but she paid him no mind.
‘The families were offered council houses in the area, and some took them. Some, like my folks, didn’t. They got back in their vardos and took to the roads like they’d always done. I was born on the road, and Ma reckons that’s why I have the Sight – because I was born living the way my people ought to live. That’s why we’re safely out this way while my cousins and thei
r kin are being blown to bits in their nice safe council houses. Of course, the children will have been evacuated to the countryside, probably moving from one place to another. So Romani becomes gadjo, and gadjo becomes Romani.’ She laughed at the irony.
‘I do wish you’d talk proper English,’ he complained.
‘I know you do.’ She turned and entwined her arms about his neck, looking up into his face, smiling and dark-eyed against the fires. ‘Except when you like me to whisper sweet gypsy nothings into your ear while you’re taking me,’ she murmured against his lips.
‘Shameless,’ he murmured back, and kissed her. For the life of her she couldn’t work out why she’d taken up with someone like Brian – he was so completely the opposite of every man in her family. Maybe that was it. It made about as much sense as anything else these days. It certainly didn’t take the Sight to see why he was besotted with her, or that the poor lamb thought he was going to be able to make a decent and respectable woman out of her when the war was over.
She pulled away and patted him on the chest. ‘Right then,’ she said. ‘You have your soldiering to get back to. I have my thieving and poaching.’
‘I never said…’ he sputtered.
‘Shh.’ She laid a finger on his lips. ‘I know. I’m only teasing. Off with you now, and keep an eye open for the laundry.’
Some of the women at her camp made a few pennies by taking in laundry for the soldiers billeted nearby; it was how she’d met Brian in the first place and provided a convenient method for sending messages back and forth, especially as how their fraternisation was likely to be frowned upon by both sides.
Annabel’s husband would certainly not approve.
‘I insist on seeing you back,’ he said. ‘It isn’t safe.’
‘That you shall not!’ she replied. ‘It would be better for me to meet robbers than be seen with you! Besides, I’ve been walking these woods since I was a child.’
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