She seemed startled by some new noise that flew in under everyone else's radar. She turned her head, haltingly - I imagined the splinter and grind of tired, ruined bone - and looked directly at me with fierce, too-white eyes.
Later I realised that she looked like that because of her injuries. She had a scar the colour of raw liver that wormed down the centre of her forehead. It was as if the vein there had escaped from the skin. I was going to leave her alone, but she came shuffling towards me. I might have moved off anyway, but her progress was so pained, so painfully slow, that I felt myself drawn towards her, if only to minimise her discomfort.
'Hi,' I said. I was nodding like a tired child, as if we were sharing some injury wavelength. I stopped immediately.
She nodded too. She didn't say anything. She seemed suspicious of me, or maybe again that was just the cruel repatterning her facial injuries had caused. It looked as though breathing was close to being too much for her.
She moved past me and headed up the beach in the direction of the pier. She hesitated and shot a look back at me. She was wearing that same slightly shocked, slightly quizzical expression. In a surprisingly clear, strong voice she said: 'Come with me.' And then, I don't know if it was the wind that spoilt them or my own gloomy demeanour that twisted her words, but as she turned back into the teeth of the weather, I thought she said, I'm sure she said: You have death crawling all over you.
Chapter Seven
Direct Thermal Assault
'I'm a diviner,' she said. 'After a fashion. A geomancer. I'm a psychogeographical sympathiser. Empathiser, rather. I'm into stains on time. Bruises in memory.'
Now I was shaking my head. 'I'm sorry. I have absolutely no idea what it is you're talking about.'
'Death, in the main,' she said. 'Death and its echoes.'
'Echoes?'
We were sitting in a booth on the pier, a little wood and plexiglass windbreak. She was drinking sparkling mineral water. I was having a pint. She kept grimacing and I couldn't be sure if it was down to the fizz in her glass, the weather, her pain, or me. After all, how pleasant can it be to sit next to someone who is crawling with death? I'd asked her to confirm that's what she said, but she wouldn't put me out of my misery. 'Don't worry about it,' she said. 'We're all branded by it to some degree or other, anyway.'
She'd said her name was Amy. Amy Slade. She was from a small village in Leicestershire where people drove 4x4s, rode horses and lived next door to international rugby players. 'I haven't been back in twenty years,' she said. 'Once your parents die, there's no pull whatsoever. At least not for me.'
I knew what she meant. My own parents had lived their whole lives, almost bloody-mindedly, in the north-west of England. My dad had been so set in his ways he gradually began to sink into the rut he'd worn away with his slippered feet. When he and my mother died in their late 70s, within months of each other, it was an awkward kind of relief to know that the drive up the M6 to the funerals would be my last.
'Do you visit their graves?' I asked. I wasn't circumspect in any way. I sensed she wouldn't appreciate it.
'No. They're dead. It's just all just stones and bones and brown flowers now. You keep them alive in your head, don't you?'
I agreed, although I hadn't told her that my own parents had passed away. It spooked me a bit, that, as if she already knew. I suppose, when you reach a certain age, you won't be too far wrong. But people were getting older, these days. I cringed inside at that. Another forty or fifty years of wearing this knackered body did not appeal one jot.
I looked down at my hand. She'd slid a card between my fingers and I hadn't even noticed. It was pale, eggshell blue, and contained only her name and telephone number and a small icon, an embossed skull in off-white. I copied the number into my phone's memory - I lose paper for fun - and raised my head to thank her.
The sun was behind her so it was difficult to scrutinise her face too closely, but I could see that, like me, she'd been through the wards. Even without my beloved Gray's to hand I could see that her face had been rebuilt. Her speech was slightly slurred, its edges blunted, as if she suffered from a cold. The scar that wormed down the centre of her forehead was thick and proud, following the path of the remains of the frontal suture, just above the nasal eminence. Not that she had much of that either. Her nose looked as though it had been broken and re-broken. If she had modelled for Gray's Anatomy, H.V. Carver would have had to get his eraser out and re-draw the whole section on the skull. Her eyes might well have been affected by whatever incident or accident ruined her, but I could picture her as being naturally wide-eyed. It was pretty intense, that stare of hers. Her irises were the kind of blue you see in the sky on frosty, pastoral mornings. So pale as to almost be another colour entirely, or no colour at all. I doubted she could express pity or sadness, especially as her eyebrows had that knitted, oblique look of someone perpetually angry. Maybe she had reason.
'Tell me,' she said. And how wrong could I be? There was a sudden softness to her face that almost slapped the breath from me. I saw how, before damage, she would have been beautiful, in her way. As beautiful as someone with piercing, werewolf eyes could be. It was obvious what she was digging for; there was no call for playing it coy.
I told her about the hit-and-run and part of that segued, rightly or wrongly, into my fears for Tamara. She showed no surprise, and maybe she was incapable: enough nerves had been severed in my own face to show me the expressions I would never pull again.
She took a sip of her drink and said: 'For me, it was fire.'
She had been working. Her pre-accident job. Interior design. She'd been working on a hotel refurbishment project in the east end of London. Hoxton's allure was on the rise and the surrounding areas were keen to get their snouts in the trough. The hotel wanted a spruce up, wanted to lean towards the boutique look. Neutral colours. Monsoon showers. As many throws and rugs and as much Egyptian cotton as possible. She had been flipping through a colour samples catalogue with the hotel manager in his office, pages of buttercream and oatmeal, when the fire alarm went off. The manager had checked his watch and assured her there was no drill planned for that time of day and asked her to show him the cobalt tiles again. It was what killed him, she reckoned.
By the time they could smell smoke, yells and shouts were already coming at them from the corridor. Both ends were blocked by flame; the fire escape was maddeningly just beyond one wall of it. The manager left it too late, bolting for the door when the fire had really started to intensify. Amy watched him become a twisting, howling fireball and calmly went back inside his office and closed the door. She drenched his coat with bottled water and wadded it against the threshold. She went to the window and opened it the inch or two that it would allow her. The streets were clogged with afternoon traffic; the rush hour was just beginning. She could hear sirens but they were a way off. The paint on the door was blistering. She would be dead before they got here.
She remembered being very calm as she lifted the heavy desk chair and rammed it through the window. She tore down a curtain and wound it around her wrist then punched out the remaining jags of glass, not wanting to tear her skin open before she jumped to her death.
She had thought about Vesna Vulovic, the flight attendant who famously survived a 33,000 foot fall after a bomb went off in the Yugoslav Airways DC-9 in which she was working. Other names. Others who fell and survived. Chisov, 22,000 feet. Magee, 20,000 feet. Alkemade, 18,000 feet. Amy had read that if you fall 2000 feet, or above, you reach a terminal velocity of 120 mph. You couldn't fall faster than that. Seven stories up. What was that? Seventy feet? It would be over before she drew breath to scream. She wouldn't reach fifty miles an hour. Piece of piss. Her father had fallen down the stairs once. A couple of flights. He was getting on, by then, but he simply got up and walked away. Not a bruise. 'I just relaxed,' he explained, when she asked him how he was. 'Tense up and you do yourself a nasty injury.'
She went to the minibar and twisted the caps off a
ll the miniatures. She didn't stop necking spirits until they were all finished. Flames were piling through the firecheck door by now. Thick smoke was making lazy, deadly, beautiful patterns across the ceiling. She clambered up onto the windowsill, closed her eyes, slackened her body and 'just let myself go'.
'Jesus Christ,' I said. My glass was in my hand; I jerked as if shoved when she finished with that line. Beer slopped on to my leg; the wind was so cold that the liquid felt warm.
'I landed on the roof of a parked car. I don't remember a thing, of course, but apparently it's better than landing on concrete. What saved me, other than being completely relaxed, was that it didn't have a sun roof. I don't need to tell you the rest. You know it all. Operations. I had to have my pancreas removed. I'm a full-time diabetic now. Depression. Coming back. Hopefully coming back. Physio. Blah.'
'How could you be completely relaxed?' I asked. 'You could have died.'
'I would definitely have died if I'd tensed up. Impact forces transfer directly to the internal organs in such circumstances. I'd have been a sack of jelly. And anyway, in the moment before I left the building, I wasn't afraid of death. This just seemed like the most desirable way to check out. Better than choking, being torched to a cinder in the corner of a hotel room. For a few moments, I was flying.'
She'd moved away from London as soon as she was able. She couldn't deal with the high rises and the traffic any more. Hotel work was out for good. Getting in a lift caused her to sweat and grey out.
'So why here?'
She gave me a look. I'd seen it before. It was the look a stranger gives you that says: Do I trust this person? Are we going to be friends? Am I about to make a big mistake?
'I'm working,' she said, at last.
'But I thought you said -- '
'This is a new job. A hobby, really. But it keeps me busy. It gets my mind off other things.'
'Like what?'
'Dreams of falling. Of being pushed.'
I swallowed hard. 'This business, what was it you said, divining?'
She nodded. It was an unpleasant movement. Her hair twitched as if she were being manoeuvred, a poorly produced glove puppet. I wasn't enjoying my beer. The scar on her forehead made her look as if her face had been turned inside out. I had a crazed urge to pull off her beanie but knew, somehow, that to do so would mean tearing the flesh from her scalp at the same time.
I wasn't sure I wanted to know what it was, but she took a sip of her water and pointed out to sea.
'There's death shot through those tides,' she said. 'Things that happened across the centuries that have left their mark. It doesn't matter how long ago, how big a gap between then and now, you can always pull the lips of the wound together and stitch it shut. Study the scar for clues.'
'You lost me at "There's",' I said. I was fidgeting. I was overdue some pain relief and my pills were back in my room. I didn't want to invite Amy back because there might be a box waiting for me and I didn't want to have to explain it. And I didn't like where this conversation was heading. She was clearly some kind of nut; an afterlife groupie or an emo who had overdone it on goths and self-harm. But then if that was true, what was I? She was a mirror. You didn't cheat death without it getting some of the filth from under its nails into your skin.
'And how do you do that?'
She shrugged, made a bow of her lips. 'I don't know. I couldn't do it before the accident... or rather, I wasn't aware of being able to do it before the accident. Now I can.'
'Do what?'
'Have you been listening to me?'
'Yes,' I said, exasperated. 'I'm trying to understand, but -'
'It's all over you,' she hissed.
'What is?' People were turning around to look though I hadn't realised I'd raised my voice.
'Death,' she said, her voice collapsing, her face collapsing, tears in her eyes. 'Death.'
I left her then. I didn't mean to be so abrupt, but it was either leave or faint or scream my head off. Pain's spiked glove was squeezing my spine at its base, lazily, recreationally, like one of those power clamp wrist-exercisers. She made to follow me, and for a while it was the world's most pathetic chase sequence; two close-to-crippled people trying to top three miles per hour on the slanting road back up to the centre of the village. But when, after a while, I checked back, she'd given up to resume her usual posture, boots planted firmly in the sand, staring straight out to sea. I thought of skulls in fishing nets, polished white by the dab and suck of pan-eyed fish and prawns, those good old sea maggots. I wondered what those eyes, surrounded by so much chaos, could see.
Up on Cannon Point, the culverins - six Elizabethan siege guns pointing out to sea - gleamed under a sky of dirty milk. Birds' nests in nude trees were shadows in a lung X-ray. I heard the distant breath of engines, a long exhalation, but did not look up.
I got back to the shop - no boxes waiting for me - locked the door and stumbled through the narrow hall of books to my room. It felt like a black corridor narrowing around me. I felt water on the back of my hand as I lifted it to jerk open the door, and I frowned at the ceiling, but then I remembered it had not rained for days. It was sweat drizzling off my forehead. That sound, like an old boiler overworking, was my breath. Everything at the base of my back felt loose and disordered, like the bottom of a canvas bag of individual iron tools.
I made it to the bed and kind of collapsed against it; I resembled some old punter at a bar who's had far too much to drink but is trying to maintain some semblance of sobriety. I said 'Thank You' to Tamara as she handed over the plastic wallet in which I kept all my drugs and then swore at her because she hadn't unzipped it for me. I took some pills, dry-swallowing them because I couldn't turn the tap, and then tried to find a position that was bearable while I waited for the bastard things to take hold.
'Where are you?' I asked her, but she wasn't falling for that one. I looked up to the spot where she had been standing and tried to make her re-materialise there, but she was just memory dust clogging up my mind. I couldn't picture her without that lovely, cheeky half-smile. She seemed so close sometimes that I could smell her.
I must have fallen asleep, although it seemed only seconds later that I opened my eyes to find the light gone and the sounds of female footsteps scratching and clacking on the road outside the window. I very carefully got myself upright, pausing every now and then for the lances and jags and bolts, but they never came. The worst ache was in my chest; I must have pulled a muscle breathing so harshly. I checked my watch. Early evening. I'd been asleep for four hours.
I shuffled through to the bathroom and now I had no trouble getting the taps on. Steam leapt up. The mirror fogged instantly. I cracked open the window and started the long, arduous chore that was undressing. I pushed my focus back, purposefully blurred my eyes and thought of something else - Tamara, of course - to prevent myself from sucking up the detail of all these bruises and bumps and snakes of scar tissue. I turned off the taps and silence came rushing back. I could still hear footsteps, but they were far away, maybe not even those made by the same person. Unreliable echoes. Just the muffled, tricksy sounds of night time, now.
I got in the bath. Closed my eyes. Too hot in here. I could feel my heartbeat assaulting my insides. The surface tension, if I checked, would be shivering, as if something unspeakably large were closing in. Heat. I thought of what Amy had told me. I tried to put myself in her position. An impossible position. I tried to imagine what was worse, smothering and burning, or falling from a great height. Both were horribly violent deaths, and the irony was not lost on me that I had spend fifteen years poking a stick into the eye of both possibilities. It was amazing now to think that I had never given a moment's thought to an aeroplane disintegrating at 30,000 feet, or an engine catching fire, or the inferno following a crash. But then I supposed if we all succumbed to fear of occupational hazards, little would get done every day.
I soaked a flannel and draped it over my face. It moulded quickly to my features and the air
I sucked in was hot and tasted faintly of soap. A brief dance of cold air came through the gap in the window. I felt drowsy with the temperature and the morphine in my bloodstream. At such moments I felt as near as I was likely to being comfortable. I could consider Tamara, and her actions, with a detachment that simply was not there during the hourly struggle to cope with this new body and the itinerary of pains, fresh and old, that it brought with it.
I put myself behind her eyes. I imagined her getting the phone call and imagining her putting down her book, or her cup of tea, and calling a taxi (she didn't drive) to take her to the hospital. She was gregarious, but I imagined she'd repel any chatty overtures from the cab driver. Rain on the windows, maybe. She rubbed her hands together when she was anxious. Were you anxious? Did you come to the hospital? Or did you decide to start packing straight away?
I stayed with the loyal Tamara. I saw her hurrying through the rain to the A&E entrance. Pol, she'd say. Where's Pol?
The confusion. Ukrainian words slipping through. The receptionist stoically asking her to calm down. Gradually making herself understood. Close to tears. Hysteria. Will he... is he all right? Can I see him?
The long wait sitting in a plastic moulded chair in a room where everyone wants to be a million miles away. Blistering coffee that tastes nothing like coffee, but nobody cares. A TV on with the sound turned down and everyone watching and nobody seeing. The edges of the waiting room blacking out and everyone falling into the gap without a sound. I couldn't hold up the foundations of a reconstruction of something that had not happened. Loyal Tamara? No such character was listed in the credits. The whole scenario turned to ash.
The bath had cooled slightly. I reached out and wrenched the tap, hurting my finger on the handle. I swore. It felt good. I swore some more. Heat surged through the water. If it hadn't happened like that, then what? The phone call. We're sorry to inform you... he's in the operating theatre now... he's critical... Putting the receiver down. Calling the taxi. Where did you go?
Loss of Separation Page 9
