I could go to the police, but what would I tell them? That I had been on that road last night, that no, I hadn’t seen a man on the road. No, I hadn’t hit anyone, as far as I knew. But something had caught my wing mirror and I’d found blood on the door? That I was haunted by the fear I should have turned back? That I regularly had the compulsion to go back and check on things, so it was difficult to untangle what was rational, what irrational. What would they do? Keep me in for questioning? It might take all weekend. I had important buyers coming this evening. And anyway it sounded bonkers. It was bonkers.
Then how come there was a hit-and-run on the same stretch of road where something had flung my wing mirror back against the door? And the doubts started up all over again, smashing into my brain, then receding, like the waves.
CHAPTER FIVE
The first thing I did the next morning was put on the radio.
The item was not first on the local news, it came on after two or three other things about the wettest April on record, and a fishing crisis.
‘The man knocked down by a hit-and-run incident last night has been named as Patrick McIntyre. He remains in critical condition in hospital. Police continue to appeal to drivers to come forward.’ I switched it off.
I got up and dressed, and downstairs pulled my long boots on over my jeans. Louise’s lilies seemed to glow on the hall table
I didn’t want to see them. Flowers were for roadside accidents. Lilies were for death. I went outside, Pepper at my heels. Tapped the gatepost three times. The air was fresh and a wind blew in off the sea.
I knew I shouldn’t, but I couldn’t resist bending down to check the bonnet of my car where the blood had been. It had washed off in the rain. All evidence gone. As I turned to go back indoors, a voice disturbed my thoughts.
‘May’s house! You burgling May’s house.’
I looked up. The man on the bike down on the road was about fifty but was staring at me wide-mouthed – a child’s expression. I remembered him – his name was Larry, a local who’d been here forever. He lived in one of the fishing cottages along the harbour. He stood and stared at me, his lower lip trembling.
‘You burglar!’
‘I’m not a burglar, I’m May’s niece. Ellie.’
‘May gone. Girl gone. Gone. Dead. Don’t come back.’
He’d got the out-loud logic of a young child spelling out to himself something he’d been told but didn’t quite understand.
‘Yes, Larry, May’s gone. I’m sorry.’
‘Not coming back.’
‘No she’s not, I’m sorry, Larry.’
‘You killed the lady.’
I stared at him. I didn’t need this.
‘No, Larry. No. May died. I didn’t kill her.’
‘Bye-bye, lady,’ he said.
‘Bye, Larry.’
I wondered if Larry’s ‘she’s not coming back’ was his way of differentiating this from the time she had gone into hospital, leaving the house empty for several years.
I was eighteen and at art college when I heard that Aunty May was back in the blue house. I knew by then she had been sectioned, had been in and out of hospital but had been discharged at last.
I had been shocked by the change in her. She had aged terribly in the years since I’d seen her. Her hair, once lustrous and chestnut, up in a bun, was white, her eyes, once intense and full of sparkle, were haunted. She had lost weight, her skin, I thought, was the colour of the white cuttlefish we sometimes found on the shore.
It took months for her to regain her old sparkle, to start painting again. That was when we’d started meeting up, for painting weekends, quiet, creative times that we spent together and that bonded us once more.
Chiara was in the kitchen in her dressing gown, filling the kitchen with an aroma only she could produce from a packet of coffee. She’d brought Italian pastries and was warming them for everyone else in the oven of May’s old Baby Belling cooker. ‘I’m going to get Liam up now. Il mattino ha l’oro in bocca,’ she said.
‘Which means?’
‘The morning has gold in its mouth,’ she said. ‘We mustn’t waste it. How much do you need to do for tonight?’
‘I need to check all the paintings are hung properly and the price list.’
‘It’s so exciting! Aren’t you excited?’
‘I am.’ And I was.
The clouds had shifted in the night winds and the April sun was shining through the kitchen windows and outside there were tiny blue flowers in the tough sea grass. The air was translucent here, the sand looked white, the grasses a soft fringe against the pale blue of the sky.
Chiara put her pastries on the table, a burnished heap surrounded in flakes of gold leaf. They gave off a warm buttery smell. Chiara was right, the morning had gold in its mouth.
I fed Pepper with the dog food that I’d had all the time.
Louise and Guy came in.
‘We thought we’d walk up to the town along the front,’ Louise said.
‘OK, but first we need breakfast,’ Chiara said. ‘Liam doesn’t function before he’s got food in his stomach.’ Liam had come in, his fair hair standing up in spikes, his face puffy with sleep. He leant his head over and put it on Chiara’s belly.
‘He needs feeding too,’ he said.
‘Or she,’ Chiara said.
‘Are you going to find out?’ I asked. ‘I think I’d want to know.’
‘No.’ Chiara said. ‘I want a surprise!’
‘Suppose you’re tied up with the show this evening?’ Louise said, peeling herself from Guy, sitting down, pulling pieces off a pastry to pop into her mouth.
‘There’s quite a bit to do,’ I said again, though the paintings were all hung, with the special magnets I used, something that had impressed Valerie who owned the gallery.
She had said they’d sort out the refreshments. All I had to do was turn up, talk, schmooze with potential buyers, Valerie had reassured me. ‘You’ll charm them. You’re talented and you look the part, just smile a lot and answer their questions.’
‘What does she mean by my “looking the part”?’ I’d asked Chiara.
‘You’ve got the distracted arty look! And the pallor of someone who is too full of ideas to feed herself properly. A kind of young Tracey Emin. Or maybe it’s the clothes. The vintage stuff. Anyway, you’ll look great.’
‘I’ll have to pop in there this morning,’ I said now.
A thought was stirring within me, a way of putting my anxiety about the hit-and-run to rest once and for all so that I could concentrate on the weekend.
I looked at my friends, Louise with her tan and Chiara with her barely perceptible pregnancy bump, and thought how much I loved them and needed them. How although we’d all got older we hadn’t changed fundamentally, none of us dressed that differently from how we’d done as students, or changed our basic values. We had all been struggling – to raise a mortgage in Chiara and Liam’s case, to get work in the art world in mine and Louise’s, making do and dreaming that one day we could leave our part-time day jobs and become professional artists. Was it all beginning to happen at last? I couldn’t let the worry spoil it.
Louise walked to the window. Looked out past my car to the dunes. ‘It’s really atmospheric here. Inspiring for you.’
‘I knew you’d get it.’
‘I think it’s the thresholds you get here, the border between land and sea, sea and sky, life and death. The kind of themes you use in your work. A liminal landscape.’
‘Exactly! And what I want to do too, is somehow show the layers beneath what we see?’
She turned and grinned. ‘I’ve hardly done any work over the last few months. You’re way ahead of me,’ she said.
‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ I said.
‘Right! I want to get out there,’ Liam said. ‘Are you girls coming? Shall we take Pepper, if you’re busy at the gallery? A walk in this sea breeze will shift the hangover, won’t it, hey, Pepper?’ Pepper jumped up and
snaffled at Liam’s hand, his tail going madly.
‘The forecast’s good,’ said Guy, looking at his phone. ‘It’s going to warm up by lunchtime. Though what warm means here is anyone’s guess.’ He looked up at us all and grinned and Louise moved away from the window and leant over him, wrapping her arms round his chest and kissing his hair. I might be moving up in the art world but she had found love. Why was it so difficult to get all three right? – the relationship, the work, the house?
I told my friends I was popping to Ipswich to get some extra magnets to hang paintings.
‘Try not to be too long,’ Chiara said. ‘I know you’re nervous about tonight, I can see it. But everything’s going to be fine. I’ll sort everything else so that you can focus on your viewers.’
‘Thanks, Chiara.’
‘Prego!’ she said. ‘You know me, nothing I like better than an event to sort.’
I looked into her big brown concerned eyes.
I could talk to Chiara about the hit-and-run now. I could ask her, so do you think it’s possible it might have been me, and Chiara would say, ‘No, honey, don’t be daft.’ Or she would say, ‘Look, if you go to the police you’ll be wasting their time. You know this is crazy, don’t you? You would know if you’d hit someone.’
‘But there was a jolt,’ I’d say. ‘I remember a jolt on the road that I ignored! The music was on loud. I was talking to Pepper. Then there was blood on the bonnet!’
‘A body would make more than a jolt,’ she would insist. ‘You would have seen it.’
‘In the dark? While I was looking the other way?’
Instead I said I’d see them later and watched them walk away.
I knew what I was going to do. The thought had come to me, loud and clear.
I should have gone back and checked. But it isn’t too late. I can go to him and find out how bad it really is.
If he is going to die, if he’s critically injured, though God forbid, I have to tell the police I might have hit him.
It is the right thing to do.
But if he’s OK, I can forget all about it, come back, get ready for tonight, put on the new dress, go to the Private View, take the first steps into my new life as a proper working artist. Without Finn.
I didn’t give it any more thought. I locked the door, got into my car.
As I drove away from town I was overcome by envy for my friends and their freedom. I had a horrible presentiment that what I was doing was going to intefere with my plans. That it would take me away, not just from my tired old ways – the things I wanted to move on from – but from everything that was precious to me too, and that I’d never get back. My friends were walking along the shore with my dog, on their way for a lunchtime drink. The perfect spring weekend that I had planned and envisaged.
While I was about to find out whether I’d killed someone.
CHAPTER SIX
I wasn’t sure if the hospital would let me in. I didn’t know what the rules were these days, about visiting times, about who they did and didn’t allow in. And all I had was a name. Nothing to prove that I might actually know or be related to him.
I hated hospitals. The facelessness of them. The long corridors. The blue signs. I was glad this was a small one – the ones I disliked most were those vast teaching hospitals more like underground cities, with long tunnels of blank walks, and double doors and signs to departments where people must be suffering, or gasping their last breaths, with hurried harassed overworked medical staff and grieving relatives and anxiety. I even hated the car parks, the endless rows of vehicles that have carried the wretched and the bereaved to this building no one really wants to be in.
But I forced myself. If I could just do this, reassure myself the victim was alive, recovering, I’d be able to relax.
It didn’t take too long to find, on the outside of the town, and the visitors’ car park was full, it being Saturday. I prowled around the bays for a while and finally squeezed into a space at the far corner near a spinney of trees. A gaggle of people were smoking beside the entrance, under the sign saying ‘Secondary smoking – think of the people who are breathing it.’ That was something Finn and I would have laughed at once.
‘Ah. Yes. Patrick McIntyre. Came in last night,’ the receptionist, a woman with platinum-blonde hair and geek-chic glasses told me, checking her screen. She glanced up at me. ‘He’s on the trauma ward – third floor.’
I got into a lift and pushed through the double doors. My heart was thumping. I didn’t know if I’d be allowed into the ward. And I hadn’t worked out what I was going to tell the nurses about why I was here. Let alone what I’d tell the man himself, or any relatives that might be hanging around. I had a half-baked idea I could say I was a journalist, covering the incident, but I hadn’t thought it through.
All I knew was I had to prove to myself for once and for all that even if there was the tiniest chance I had knocked this man down that at least he was OK. He would live.
The ward doors were locked. I pressed the button on the intercom and a man’s voice asked who I was. I said I was here to see Patrick McIntyre and the door clicked open.
There were two nurses at the station, a man and a woman. The man barely looked up when I approached and muttered Patrick’s name.
‘He’s in recovery still,’ said the woman, who was about my mother’s age. Her blue eyes ran up and down, assessing me.
‘And you are . . .?’
‘I . . . I’m a friend.’
She smiled.
‘Tom’ll show you.’
The male nurse got up, his legs so long and spindly they barely looked as though they’d hold him, and told me to follow him. Wasn’t he going to ask my name? Any other questions?
‘How is he?’ I asked Tom’s back, as he strode ahead of me. ‘How’s he doing?’
‘He’s doing well,’ he said. He turned his head without stopping, glanced at me. I wondered if he was older than me, or younger or about my age. He still had acne and he wore lots of silver in his ear. Younger, definitely.
‘The consultant’s doing an assessment on his scans, will have the results later, but he’s comfortable. The op went well. He’s heavily sedated. You might not get much sense out of him yet.’
‘How long will it take for . . .?’
‘Hard to tell, if he continues like this he could be out in a week. But you never know, there can be complications with head injuries.’ Head injuries! ‘On top of the blood loss.’
I swallowed.
‘You’re his girlfriend then?’
I nodded. I couldn’t speak. He didn’t look round, didn’t seem to care one way or another.
He pushed open another door. ‘Don’t be shocked by all the equipment. It’s not as bad as it looks. He’s lucky, his back’s OK.’
We went into the room.
I looked over my shoulder three times, to make him be OK.
‘Please be OK. Let me not have caused you any serious harm,’ I whispered. ‘If it was me. Please though, please let it not have been me, let me get away from here. Back to my new life.’
He was on a bed under the window.
Beyond, the trees were tipped with green, just coming into leaf. The sky was blue, it was a beautiful day. I could see my car, the culprit, down below. I wanted to be in it, to get away as fast as I could.
I looked back at Patrick. There was a drip set up. His legs were hidden under the tent of hospital sheeting.
I shut my eyes, then opened them. Forced myself to look at his face.
I was shocked. Patrick McIntyre was about my age. Late twenties, I guessed. What had I imagined? In spite of the nurse’s assumption I was his girlfriend, I had been thinking of perhaps a teenager, a youth, someone a bit wayward. Not a fully grown man. Short dark hair protruded from the dressing on his head. A bronzed face, and his forearms, that were folded across his chest, strong and golden and smooth with that ridge of muscle; the thought came to me unbidden that this was a man who should never have ended
up like this. What a waste, was the thought that slid in. I forced it out again. It would be a waste, of course, whoever it was. But somehow, seeing all this health and vitality cut down like this seemed unfair, unbelievable. I thought of Guy, out there on the beach with my friends. Of my brother Ben, with his glossy golden girlfriend. Bright successful good-looking types.
Patrick looked like one of them.
‘He might be able to hear, it’s worth talking to him. He’ll be pleased to know you’re here. And it’ll help bring him round.’
I glanced up at the nurse, checking to see if he was testing me out. I could be anyone, couldn’t I? I wanted to ask again, is he going to be ok? But the words stuck in my throat. My hands felt light, as if they didn’t belong to me.
‘Got anything with you that might jog his memory when he comes round? Photos. Anything like that?’
Why? Why would he need his memory jogging?
‘Just in case there’s a little bit of amnesia,’ the nurse went on. ‘He had a blow to the head, the way he landed. Though it’ll be impossible to know until he’s fully conscious. He’s still under the anaesthetic. But familiarity as soon as possible is always helpful.’
I forced myself to behave as I imagined his girlfriend might in this situation. Efficient. Sensible.
‘I’ve got my phone.’
What was I doing, playing along like this? I rummaged through my bag, my hands were slippery, sweaty with nerves. I pulled things out – trying to control my movements as I did so. My diary, an appointment card for a haircut, my purse, dumping them on the bedside table until I found my phone that had slipped to the bottom.
I clicked it on. Smiled up at the nurse.
He wasn’t even looking. He was studying a chart at the end of Patrick’s bed, filling it in. After a while he left, closing the door gently behind him.
There was not much in the room apart from the beeping monitor and the drip. A trolley, out of reach of the bed, with a plastic jug of water on it. A couple of laminated signs Blu-tacked to the walls advertising patient liaison services. No flowers, no cards. It was probably too soon. Or maybe this man was far from home, and family and friends.
A Trick of the Mind Page 4
