Her luck, perhaps, that my mind was letting me down; she couldn’t have anticipated that. Which being the case, I didn’t see how she’d ever expected this scam to work, whatever its purpose; but she’d worked so hard, there must have been something. Some benefit to her in deceiving other people, perhaps, even if she couldn’t have hoped to deceive me. And then I woke up and my memory had holes in, and she thought maybe she’d have a try at the big one...
Did I believe that? No. It didn’t work. Nothing worked. I had the pieces of two separate jigsaws in my head, and try as I might they would not fit together.
But perhaps they didn’t need to. One of them was mine, and the other definitely not; I could throw that away, perhaps, and never heed it. Sue had gone, I knew not where. She might not even come back. Please? Then I could simply get on with recovering the life I knew, and not worry...
A quiet voice in my head somewhere, the whisper of reason reminded me that there were too many questions unanswered that I couldn’t very well walk away from; and it reminded me also that there was no sign of Carol here, nor any message from her. No flowers, from a long-time partner who valued all the traditional gestures: Christmas stockings and Valentine cards, Easter eggs and birthday bonks and definitely, very definitely flowers and grapes in hospital. I tried grandly to ignore that massive absence, with little success until my eyes fell again to the personal knick-knacks spread across my lap.
After the photo and the keys, it was no major surprise to find a ring also. Plain gold, the inside cut with initials, a date and a promise. JM & SCM, 29 Feb and for ever. Expensive business, setting up a scam: this was a good ring. And it fitted. They hadn’t managed to make a paler mark on my finger, where presumably I was supposed to have been wearing it, but perhaps I was supposed not to have had time to acquire one. Less than two months, after all, and only weak spring sunlight to take a tan from, even if my job ever gave me time to see the sun...
My job or my new wife, of course, they had that also to argue with.
There was other jewellery here, though I never wore any. A single long, dangling earring, cheap and attractive and undeniably female: not Carol’s, of course, but Sue would presumably claim it as her own. More verisimilitude, I supposed. A fine gold chain that might have been meant for a man or a woman, though Sue only wore silver, at least so far as I’d seen in one meeting; and if there was a message in that, this one’s yours, boy, then there was a terrifyingly subtle mind at work here. A stud and a ring also for pierced ears and in gold again, heavy enough for a bloke; but they’d fallen down there at least, because my ears weren’t pierced.
At least...
No mirror within reach, but my fumbling fingers found a little dimple in one lobe and then in the other, where they stuck out below the bandaging. I wasn’t even surprised. I’d gone beyond that, somehow, so far that only their failure in a matter of such crucial detail could possibly have surprised me. Cue the theme for The Twilight Zone, and hear me hum along.
o0o
A practical man, a dependent man in a hell of a muddle, I did what came naturally to me. There was a phone by the bed; I picked it up, and called Carol.
At work, where she should still be: I got a colleague and a mutual friend, who sounded strangely hesitant when she realised who she was speaking to. She said, “I’ll try,” not “I’ll get her”; and came back a minute later to say, “I’m sorry, Jonty, she won’t speak to you.”
I left it an hour, then tried again. Dialled our home number this time, and heard Carol’s voice recite it, as she always did; said, “It’s me,” and heard the sudden silence, and the click thereafter as she hung up on me. Dialled again, dialled many times and got nothing but the engaged signal each time.
I should phone a friend instead, I thought, see what they could tell me; but the timing was bad. People would be getting in from work, maybe dealing with fractious babies or starting to cook dinner, certainly wanting to relax. Leave it till later, I told myself, make it easier on them. I needed someone I could talk to, not someone who had one eye on a crawling kid and the other on burning toast.
A couple of hours, I thought I’d give them; but after a couple of hours The Twilight Zone was in my head again and playing so loud I could barely hear anything else, except for Sue’s voice calling me husband, lover, friend.
She had come back, contrary to hope or expectation; and when she came, she brought photographs with her.
And yes, that was me in the middle there: despite the unfamiliar suit (Issey Miyake, she told me) and the glint of an earring, that was unquestionably me. And yes, that was Nick Beatty beside me, known of course as Warren, my oldest and closest friend doing a friend’s duty here and holding me up with a hug; and yes—alas!—that was undeniably Sue beside me, her arm slipped laughingly, possessively through mine. And these to this side were my friends and family, whom I knew and could name, every one; and those to that side were hers, whom I didn’t and couldn’t. And the background might look like a warehouse but it wasn’t, she said, it was her parents’ church, Catholic Chinese; and apart from that, she said, everything was exactly what it seemed.
That was the two of us, she said, getting married; and here was another picture of the two of us setting off on our honeymoon—Hong Kong, she said, and it rained all week, so no tan; but at home she had photos of that also, which she’d bring next time to show me—and that was James the Second I was driving, the sports car I’d totalled on an empty road in the Lakes just six weeks later.
My car, she said, not hers.
Then she kissed me, and she tasted of smoke and tea and spices, alien to me.
o0o
And then, maybe seeing that this was too much, that I really couldn’t cope any longer, she changed the subject.
“I saw your friend Luke on the telly last night,” she said. “Luke the angel. Falling,” with a giggle that was more nerves than amusement. “I’m sorry, I never believed you before, not about him. Not till I saw...”
And if I’d never believed her before, I believed her then. Suddenly I believed it all, though none of it made sense yet. Luke was not exactly private, not a secret, but still he was special to me; not for sharing unless with someone who ranked also as special, a lover or a good close friend.
Two: Sights for Sore Eyes
So did I sleep that night?
Bet your sweet life I slept. No point enduring hospital food and hospital hours, no point taking up a hospital bed at all unless you take also every possible advantage of the facilities. I whimpered and fussed, I said every part of me hurt, I told them I was scared of the dark—and no lie that, I was terrified of its implications: the long sightless hours where your thoughts blunder heedlessly in circles, lost among landscapes extrapolated from known anxieties into horrorshows of anticipation—and at last they gave me a jab, if only to shut me up. One needle into the left buttock with what seemed to me unnecessary vigour, the payback for my being awkward, and I slept like a chemically-saturated log until a male nurse came to wake me at some godforsaken hour of the morning.
An insipid cup of tea clattered onto the locker; he gave me a practised smile to go with it, the promise of breakfast in an hour and in the meantime how about a blanket bath?
“Any chance of a real one instead?” I asked plaintively.
“Not a hope in hell,” and oh, he was cheerful about it. “You don’t shift from that bed till Mr Coffey says you can. Besides, I’m not replacing all your dressings for you. Settle for a bed-bath, eh? You’ll be getting nice clean sheets in a bit, shame to lie on them all mucky...”
Truly, I did feel dirty: or stale and greasy, rather, with gunk clagging in the corners of my eyes. What I wanted was a long soak in scalding water, to wash me all the way through to my bones; but we clearly weren’t operating to my agenda here and I didn’t want to make enemies to no good purpose. So, “Okay,” I said. “Better than nothing. But just give me a bowl of water and some soap and let me get on with it, yeah?”
“I wa
sn’t suggesting anything else. Any patient with one good hand gets to wash their own goolies. Even when they go private.”
A grin, more genuine this time, to acknowledge that this relationship was already headed the way he wanted it to go, two young blokes joshing together on an equal footing; and then he left me. Left me wondering and uncertain, and wanting to ask a question that was going to sound stupid, whichever way the answer went.
But hell, stupid I could manage, I could live with. God knew, I must have sounded stupid enough yesterday. “Who are you?” “I’m your wife, darling, I’m the woman you’re in love with.” Words to that effect, at least; and I’d sooner remember the effect than the words themselves. Sooner still be sitting in a barrel going over Niagara, I thought that would probably be a more comfortable experience, but one thing at a time, Jonty...
The good news, I supposed, was that I could remember all the words from yesterday, and their several effects. It wasn’t seemingly an ongoing thing, this memory loss, I wasn’t going to wake up every morning with no recollection of the day before. I could start building a life again, on this bank of the river. Though I thought I’d be spending much time, too much time, maybe all my time for the foreseeable future gazing at the further bank, and trying to build bridges.
Any information could serve as a rope, or a plank, or a concrete pile; so when the nurse came back—to fill a bowl at the basin in the corner, to lay out bowl and towel, soap and flannel on the locker where I could reach them, to add shaving gear and a small mirror because Sue hadn’t made good her threat to shave me last night, I’d been too upset, but the scabs on my face were twelve hours less fresh now and the hospital didn’t like stubble any more than she did—I asked him straight out, “Is this a private room?”
“Yes, of course,” he said, startled, smiling. “Didn’t you know?”
No, I didn’t know. I’d had to work it out. Good practice, I suspected, for a whole lot more upcoming that I’d be expected to know or to remember, that I’d have to work out on my fingers. But all my time in hospitals, whether resident or visiting, had only ever shown me two standards of accommodation: solo rooms for the rich, and wards for the hoi-polloi. I was prepared to believe that there might be provision to put NHS patients on their own, when their condition required that, but a bad head and bruises were surely not enough. Neither a lapse in memory.
Nor was one question, one answer enough. Answers breed questions, inevitably; every step forward only shows us new horizons, just as far away.
“Who’s paying for it?”
“I wouldn’t know, would I? Aren’t you?”
There at least was one answer that I knew already. No, I wasn’t. My company had offered private health insurance in my contract, but I’d turned it down in an excess of political zeal. Carol had been angry, I remembered: wanted to know what was the point of saying no to something that would cost me nothing, that would give me regular check-ups and have me high-stepping over the queues whenever I needed treatment. Me, I’d wanted to know what was the point of the company paying for something that I was entitled to for nothing; every private patient, I’d said, costs the people more than the Exchequer saves. It’s a trickle effect, I’d said: private work saps quality staff from where they’re needed more, and the more people go private the more they endanger the whole future of the NHS. What will be the need for it, after all, when the majority of the population has made other arrangements? Slippery slope, I’d said; and down at the bottom there are ambulance drivers wanting to see a credit card or a policy document before they’ll scrape you off the tarmac.
All of that I’d said; and here I was, scraped off the tarmac myself and hustled off into a private room without the chance to gainsay it, and if Sue were responsible for this she’d be in trouble next time she showed her face around the door.
The nurse was called Simon, he said, and he didn’t have any problem with the idea that I wanted to be alone while I washed, for all that he and half a dozen others had presumably had me naked under their hands often enough in the last few days. I’d been unconscious then; now I was back in my body, and not actually being foolishly modest about it, despite appearances. I wanted to rediscover it, I guess, to take possession again: to learn exactly what the damage was, and to do it unobserved.
Simon seemed to understand that, without my having to explain. At any rate, he left me to peel back the covers on my own, and check out as much as I could see for dressings.
Hadn’t felt up to this yesterday, the mental shocks had been enough. But my whirligig mind had run somewhat out of whirl, during seven or eight hours’-worth of drug-induced coma. I didn’t like it, that I had apparently total memory loss for a significant period—no, more than significant, a Richter-scale earthquake of a period—of my recent life; but acceptance had at least settled like sediment, if it hadn’t dissolved like sugar. It was a fact that inhabited my head like a tumour, like a stranger, but it was at least there and I could handle it. I could mediate all my thinking through that, not to make too great an idiot of myself hereafter.
Getting that sussed, getting—you should excuse the expression—my head around it, however temporarily (no illusions here: I could think myself perfectly in control of the situation, and five minutes later be a shrinking, whingeing wreck again for no material reason at all, only that some synapse in my brain had gone zip instead of zap, and thrown me into panic mode): even if I was only suppressing questions that would have to be confronted later, that suppression still left me free to be curious at last about my physical condition. Everything was functioning well enough, that much I’d gathered. I didn’t even have the tube in my arm any more, now that they could feed me their slops by mouth. But at the same time, everything hurt. I hadn’t been lying to the nurses and the night sister to get my sleepy-jab, only exaggerating for effect.
So I threw the covers back—or I didn’t, to be honest, I pulled them gingerly aside; and the gingerliness wasn’t only due to my sore arms and aching shoulders not wanting to work that hard, I was chicken too. And I worked off the hospital robe they’d made me wear in lieu of the pyjamas that Sue said I didn’t have, that she hadn’t wanted to shop for until I was conscious. Robes were easier for the nurses, she’d said, and if I was going to have to wear stuff in bed at least I was entitled to a choice. Cotton or silk? she’d asked; and what colours would I like? Christ, I’d said, I didn’t care. Bog-standard Marks and Sparks would do fine, I’d said, might as well keep it in the family.
No relation, she’d said, you can’t catch me that way.
Actually I hadn’t been trying to just then, but she wouldn’t believe me; and to go on from there to ask what had happened to the several pairs of pyjamas that I did indeed own, that I wore every night in bed with Carol, had seemed suddenly just too much trouble to contemplate.
But that was last night and this was still abominably early in the morning, and I was still wearing a hospital robe. Easier for the staff, and actually easier for me too, with the stiffness and pain of every movement. It fastened with bows, for God’s sake, all down the back; I rolled onto my side and worked a hand slowly along my spine, tugging them undone. Then I slipped it off my shoulders; and then I flopped flat and lay still for a couple of minutes, only my head raised up, only looking at my skin and not trying to see any deeper. Trying not to, indeed. Skin was enough, skin was plenty.
I guess my skin that morning was only showing me what a body, what any body might look like after undergoing wicked deceleration in a tumbling, tearing, buckling metal shell; except that I had a lucky body, because ordinarily you’d be looking more than skin deep and still finding damage, unless you were seeing things not skin risen to the surface, bones and wet things being worn externally for a change. Only talking bodies here, of course, not talking heads. I couldn’t see my head without picking up the mirror, and that was for later; but bodywise, no question, I was lucky.
Lucky to be all black and blue where I wasn’t fading gently towards yellow, alm
ost every visible inch of me a bruise, and no wonder I felt so sore. No little wonder if I’d blocked off the memory of its happening, either; that was a major wonder, and I was wonderfully grateful, though I’d have preferred not to have lost so much baby with the bathwater.
Looking more closely, even between the metres of sticking-plaster and cotton padding that made a patchwork man of me I could see a diagnostic pattern to the weight and colour of the bruising, and I was monkey enough—monkeypuzzle man—to work it out slowly. Black diagonal like a heraldic bar, drawn from right shoulder to left hip, two or three inches wide with a herring-bone texture and strikingly distinct edges; that must be where the seat belt had caught and held me. Bless the thing. I might apparently have been driving a fast car crazy-fast on a dangerous road, but at least I’d retained that much sense, to wear a belt. Or more likely it wasn’t sense at all, it was pure instinct: just something I did every time I got into a car, and surviving even when my famous common sense seemed to have died the death.
Blurring the centre of that strong diagonal was a massive disc of dark, which must have been the steering column slamming into me as the car folded up, in despite of the seat belt’s good retentive work. No air-bag, presumably, in this MR2. Which was yet more evidence of how wrong the story was, for all that I had to believe it; because I couldn’t believe I’d buy any car without one, let alone a car built purely for speed.
Unless you just bought it to impress, a quiet, suspicious voice murmured in the back of my mind. Like to impress a girl, maybe? Young, beautiful, and you with some kind of seven-year itch going on?
I didn’t remember any itching, I’d thought myself settled and content; but something had happened to deny that. So much was clear, undeniable.
Dispossession Page 3
