Off Script

by Graham Hurley

  ‘You want me to hang on?’ He nods back towards the station. ‘Check out the later trains just in case?’

  It’s a generous offer, totally out of keeping with what I know about my son, but I shake my head. If anyone’s going to spend the morning at Exmouth station it’ll be me. But then Malo comes up with another idea.

  ‘You should go to the police,’ he says. ‘They have CCTV on trains now. And on station platforms. There’ll be pictures, video. All you need is the time of the train.’

  ‘The 08.34,’ I tell him. ‘It’s written on my heart.’

  ‘Do it, then. Tell them everything.’

  I’m staring at him. For the time being, my conversation with Inspector Geraghty remains a secret, but getting hold of the CCTV is a good idea. Then Malo and I will at least know what Moonie looks like.

  ‘Carrie won’t talk to the police. That’s part of the problem. She wants no one to know. Absolutely no one.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Front up. Tell the Filth what’s gone down. If you won’t do it, I will.’

  The Filth. Very H. I pat Malo on the thigh.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ I tell him. ‘No one works on a Sunday.’

  Back at the apartment, Malo treats Carrie with what feels like genuine respect. This appears to confuse her. She doesn’t know my son well and what little she’s seen has probably confirmed her initial impressions: that my boy is too callow, too spoiled, and too selfish to merit serious attention. Now, after he’s organized an impromptu breakfast for all of us, he wants to sit her down and talk kitesurfing. At first, she says she’s too busy seeing to Pavel. Only when I insist on taking over next door does she accept a bacon sandwich and join Malo on the sofa.

  Pavel is in a very bad mood. He has a sixth sense about dramas developing beyond closed doors and it’s a tribute to this instinct of his that he’s very rarely wrong. A good screenplay, he once told me, is only real life compressed, thought hard about, and then squeezed like an orange. The clues to his trade are all around us. All you have to do is listen.

  ‘So, what’s going on?’ he whispers. ‘And why won’t anyone tell me?’

  This is a difficult question, and I fudge it as best I can. Malo has decided to stay for a bit, I tell him. He’s got very excited about learning to kitesurf and Carrie is doing her best to help him out. I’m in the process of telling him what little I know about Jean-Paul, soon to be Malo’s instructor, when Pavel orders Sesame to raise him up in bed.

  ‘They’re à deux,’ he says. ‘You know that, don’t you?’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘This Jean-Paul. And Carrie. She’s been mad about him for weeks. She’s even trying to learn French. I’ve given her a phrase or two. I’m surprised she hasn’t told you.’

  So am I. I abandon Pavel’s catheter and make myself comfortable at his bedside. The scrape of the chair on the lino puts a smile on his face. It means a proper conversation.

  ‘Tell me more,’ I say.

  ‘I’m not sure there is much more. He’s married, of course. Kids, too. Two of them. That probably gives it an extra piquancy. I gather they meet at her place.’

  ‘She tells you all this?’

  ‘She does, and you know why? There’s doing it, being part of it, taking that risk, and then there’s celebrating it. To celebrate it, you have to talk about it, boast about it, share it. Think value added. Think whatever you like. In the telling, second time round, a love affair is often even sweeter. That’s why women have girlfriends, sounding boards, people they trust. Maybe that’s my role here. I’m no threat to anyone. I’m parcelled up like a turkey. I’m totally in Carrie’s hands. She controls every moment of my waking day. I’m part of her life now, and it suits us both very nicely indeed.’

  I love Pavel in these moods, one phrase, one thought, sparking another. In the telling, second time round, a love affair is often even sweeter. I close the distance between us. I put my lips close to his ear.

  ‘So, who did you talk to about us?’

  Another smile. Nothing pleases Pavel more than the cut and thrust of a real conversation.

  ‘No one. I didn’t have to. If I talked to anyone, I talked to myself. That’s what writers do.’

  ‘Because they don’t need anyone else?’

  ‘Because they’re fascinated with their own company. You know that already. You don’t have to ask. That’s why I’m still alive.’ He nods down at the faint shape of his body, inert beneath the crisp white sheet. ‘Not kicking, alas, but alive. You must have worked that out, too. Must have.’

  ‘But why would I bother?’ I say softly. ‘What’s in it for me?’

  ‘This. This conversation. You know what happened when I got that bloody dive wrong? Wrong end of the pool? Wrong time of night? Pissed out of my head? Away with the fairies? You know what happened when I couldn’t feel my feet, my legs, my arms, anything? Time stopped. God took the deepest breath. Decided whether he could spare the time to have someone come along in the middle of the night and fish me out. As it happened, they did. Because what really interested God was what might happen later. Whether I’d pay him back, settle my debts, try and conjure something from the wreckage. Which sort of brings us full circle. You? Me? Here? This conversation? I love you for listening. Believe me, worthwhile is too small a word.’

  ‘I almost believe you.’

  ‘You should. Because it’s true.’

  I nod. He can’t see the film of tears in my eyes. I kiss him softly on the forehead. In another life, before the small-hours accident in that hotel pool, we’d have made love, stayed in bed for the rest of the day, snacked on nibbles from the fridge, shared a couple of bottles of whatever came to hand from Pavel’s cellar. But now, overwhelmed by a sudden gust of bewilderment and maybe anticipation, all I can think of is that big face across the pub table. Deko.

  NINE

  I insist that Carrie takes the rest of the day off. In return, after their chat on the sofa, she says she’s more than happy to drive Malo down to the kitesurfing shop to talk to Jean-Paul. With Felip still asleep, I make Pavel a pancake for lunch and fill it with his favourite mix of camembert spiked with chopped spring onions. He turns out to be less than hungry, so we split the pancake between us while he recounts some of Carrie’s stories from the nursing home.

  This is a rambling property in one of the roads that trail back from the seafront, a warren of corridors and assorted rooms where Carrie held the post of matron, physio, counsellor, and occasional cook before she answered our ad in the local paper. Carrie is the first to concede that the name – Second Wind – was wildly optimistic but Pavel says she enjoyed her time there, though parts of the place were falling apart, and the economics of the business were a joke. Most of the twenty or so residents came on local authority contracts and as time went by there was barely enough money to feed them and keep them warm.

  According to Pavel, she made good friends in the home. Many of these residents lived in the twilight between sanity and full-on dementia and Carrie developed an admiration for the various ways they managed to cope. One of them, a widow in her late eighties, had recently lost her husband. Her son and her daughter-in-law paid regular visits to take her out for supper in a local pub. Often they had kids in tow. The old lady’s name was Peggy. By now she was getting through a bottle of red vermouth a day, a habit that insulated her against thinking too hard about the past. She loved the trips to the pub, but vermouth costs a fortune across the counter and it was Carrie who came up with the solution. The first double, said Pavel, would be paid for. The rest would come from a new bottle hidden in a bag under the table. Safe in her wheelchair, as cheerful as ever, Peggy always returned in one piece with the same song on her lips. ‘Wish me luck as you wave me goodbye’. Word-perfect, without the faintest slur.

  It’s a nice story and Pavel recounts it beautifully. He admires resilience, grace under pressure, and the fact that Peggy had retreated into dementia by pretending that everything was better than fine simply adds to his admirati
on for this woman. Pavel has never let the truth ruin a good story, just as Carrie had no time for the stony-faced army of health and safety inspectors who occasionally descended on Second Wind. Once, she told Pavel, an unannounced visit unearthed a stash of empty bottles awaiting disposal in the back yard. Accused of violating every care rule in the book, she insisted that she’d emptied every single one of them herself. Grace under pressure, again. And a round of applause from Pavel.

  I want to know whether she’s happy working with us. Pavel says yes. H has been very generous with her contract and our money has apparently settled a number of troubling debts.

  ‘What else do you know about her?’

  ‘Not much. I don’t think she was ever married, no kids that she ever talks about, but I gather she was in a relationship for a while.’

  ‘Recently? Before Jean-Paul?’

  ‘Yes. It didn’t work out in the end and I think that upset her, but she’s never given me any details. I gather she’s got a place of her own in town now, the love nest where she trysts with her new beau.’

  I say nothing. What little I saw of Carrie’s basement flat was faintly depressing: the unpacked cardboard boxes, the stale air, the lack of natural light. Would this gloomy cave really be somewhere you’d try and nurture a new relationship?

  Either way, it doesn’t matter. Pavel settles down for his afternoon nap, and Carrie and Malo are back before he wakes up. Not only has Carrie managed to conjure a huge discount on a series of kitesurfing lessons, but she’s found a rig at the back of the shop that has only been used a couple of times and would be perfect for Malo. Better still, my son has taken his first steps towards getting afloat under Carrie’s tuition.

  ‘It was low tide, yeah? We flew the kite on the beach without a board. Body harness, helmet, the lot. You can’t believe how powerful these rigs are. Bit of wind and it’s hard not to take off. Brilliant.’

  Carrie, ever the diplomat, confirms that Malo is a natural. Next week, once he’s less busy in the shop, Jean-Paul has promised to get him on a board in the water. In a couple of days, with luck, he should be outside our window, mastering the basics in tidal shallows the locals call the Duck Pond. Malo nods. He says he can’t wait and, looking at his face, I believe him. With Carrie still in the room, he adds a tactful caveat.

  ‘But don’t think I’ve forgotten, Mum.’

  ‘About?’

  ‘Our little deal.’

  That evening, I insist that all of us – including Pavel – eat together around the table in the big lounge. We all think it’s a fine idea. Carrie volunteers to do the cooking while Malo and I sort out Pavel. Felip has taken the train to see a friend in Exeter and will be back by nine-ish.

  I’ve given Pavel an all-over wash earlier, so it only remains to get him out of bed and into his wheelchair. Thanks to Carrie’s tuition, I mastered this manoeuvre in Pavel’s early days. Malo has never helped before and I talk him through the basics: park the hoist beside the bed, slide the reinforced seat under Pavel’s skinny bum, raise him into the sitting position, gather up the webbing straps and attach to the waiting hook, then hit the button and let the electrics do the rest. Then comes an urgent whirring from the motor and Pavel begins to part company with the bed.

  He always insists he loves this routine. He calls it levitation, part magic, part miracle, but I’m watching him carefully and the expression on his face suggests he’s far from happy. He’s dangling in mid-air, his pale arms limp, his legs hanging down, his head floppy. This may have to do with the presence of Malo, who’s readying the wheelchair for touchdown, but I have another theory that the bed itself has become his cave, the one place on planet earth where he feels safe. Thanks to Sesame he has at least the illusion of control. He can listen to whatever he wants, summon help, control the room temperature, play emperor in his own tiny kingdom. Now, a parcel of skin and bone, he’s entirely in our hands.

  Malo has control of the hoist, a little hand-held panel of buttons, and apart from a rather heavy landing which Pavel, of course, can’t feel, he does a fine job. We’re in the process of disconnecting him from the hoist when Pavel asks me to take him out on to the balcony. I tell him it’s cold outside. It’s still sunny, just, but the wind has gone around to the north-west, blasting across the water.

  ‘That’s what I want,’ he whispers. ‘The wind in my face. The taste of the estuary.’

  We don’t get Pavel out of bed as often as we should. A minute or two of fresh air is the least we owe him. Pavel tells Sesame to open the balcony doors, and they do his bidding. The temperature in the bedroom is a carefully controlled twenty degrees Celsius but instantly we can feel the difference. We can hear it, too, that keening note, the voice of the wind that Pavel also adores.

  ‘You’re sure about this?’

  ‘I am.’ His head is sunk on his chest, and when he mutters something else I have to bend and ask him to say it again. ‘Just you. You and me.’ He manages to raise his head. ‘Please?’

  I push the wheelchair towards the open doors and out on to the balcony. In the early days before the move, H and I toyed with getting an electric wheelchair, but it was Carrie who pointed out that Pavel could never control it. They’re beasts, she said. And they weigh a ton. She was right. The one we finally bought is made of lightweight aluminium and there’s not much left of Pavel when it comes to weight.

  We’re on the far edge of the balcony now, beside the stainless-steel railing. The see-through glass panels give Pavel a little protection from the wind but his head is back, his mouth wide open, his tongue out, sipping at the freshness of the air, and I realize that this is our private moment, him and me and the view beyond.

  ‘Tell me,’ he says. ‘Describe it.’

  I do my best. Cloud shadows racing across the distant hills. The worm of a train on the farther bank. A yacht making its way upriver. A flurry of dunlin foraging above the tide line. The chatter of a pair of terns, darting swallow-like across the wind. A lone curlew, head down, feeding on the gleaming mudflats.

  ‘I can hear it.’ Pavel is smiling now.

  ‘The curlew?’

  ‘The train. Where is it going? Is it full? Empty? Can they see us? Are they happy?’

  The train has to be at least a mile away. I haven’t a clue where it’s going but that doesn’t seem to matter. In these moods, Pavel delights in letting his imagination off the hook. He thinks my little worm might be going down the coast. To Plymouth, maybe. Or perhaps Istanbul. The latter seems unlikely, but it doesn’t matter in the least.

  As a student, Pavel tells me, he’d jumped a series of trains heading east from Vienna, hopscotching across the Balkan badlands, flat broke but deeply content, always one step ahead of ticket inspectors, most of them enormous women who never took prisoners. He’d survived on bread rolls pilfered from the restaurant car, and the kindness of strangers. A soldier had given him plum brandy, cup after cup, while a priest had done his best to school him in elementary Bulgarian. Only on the Turkish border at three in the morning had this wild adventure threatened to come unstuck. Passengers queued on the platform for passport control. Without buying a visa, there was no chance of getting back on the train. And Pavel had no money.

  ‘So, what happened?’

  ‘My priest paid. He told me it was a gift from God.’

  All this, of course, is probably a fiction, a tribute to the richness of Pavel’s imagination. As it happens, he loves a drink, but I’ve often marvelled at the way his natural playfulness, his sheer delight in knocking up a story or two, has exactly the same effect. It juices him. It sets him free. The world – his world – becomes suddenly real again.

  Now, he’s wanting to know more about the view. I’m starting to worry about him getting cold but then it occurs to me that he can’t feel a thing anyway and so I search high and low for more fuel to toss on the giant bonfire that is Pavel’s brain.

  ‘I can see an old boy out on the cockle sands. I think he’s digging for bait. There are kids arou
nd, too. And dogs.’ I lean out over the railings, peering down. Then I freeze. Immediately below the apartment block is a walkway open to the public and standing there is someone I’ve been thinking about for most of the day. He looks like he’s just stepped off a building site. He’s wearing a pair of faded blue overalls, scabbed with plaster and white paint.

  Deko.

  We maintain eye contact for a second or two, then he blows me a kiss. Startled, I feel a sudden warmth flooding into my face. From three floors down, there’s no way he can see this, but it doesn’t matter in the slightest because already, without even knowing it, I’ve blown him a kiss back. Deko nods, grins, and turns away. Pavel must have heard my tiny gasp – surprise, delight – because he wants to know what’s going on.

  ‘Just a friend,’ I tell him lightly.

  The meal, despite my best efforts, turns out to be a bit of a trial. Pavel, after a spoonful or two of Carrie’s tomato soup, decides he’s not hungry. Malo is plainly bored. For the main course, Carrie has made a chicken risotto with a big side salad but between us we eat barely half of it. I do my best to revive my son’s passion for kitesurfing but even Carrie seems to have given up on the conversation. Before we’ve even made a start on the cheesecake, Pavel says he’s had enough. Too much excitement, he murmurs. Time for an early night. Over the rainbow, I think glumly, trying to cheer myself up.

  This time it falls to Carrie and me to get Pavel back into bed. Carrie is world-class with the hoist and within minutes I’m tucking Pavel in. It’s starting to get dark outside and before I give Carrie a hand with the washing-up, I ask Pavel whether he wants me to close the curtains.

  ‘You’ve never asked me that before,’ he says. ‘What difference would it make?’

  ‘It might keep the heat in.’

  ‘Of course. Silly me.’

  Pavel has rapier skills when it comes to irony. Decades of penning dialogue that most actors would die for have taught him exactly where to place the nuance in a sentence. Silly me means he thinks I’m lying.