by Peter James
Frannie looked at the bicycle wheel again. It was buckled like the rest of the bike, twisted and broken like some weird modern sculpture in the Tate. Bicycle on Paving Slab, she thought, her brain trying to occupy itself, to distract her, to draw her away from the body under the front wheel of the lorry.
Is that lady dead, Daddy?
Edward’s words as they had driven up to London on Sunday night came into her mind. Shards of blue light skidded across the wet pavement, across the woman lying in the road. Sparks of orange light followed intermittently from the roof light of the truck with the crane. Puffs of dark diesel smoke drifted across. The woman was in her twenties; Phoebe’s build, she thought. About Phoebe’s height. She was dressed in a kaftan and Roman sandals.
Frannie’s knees collided together. Her stomach was pitching. She did not want to look any more. The woman wasn’t moving but she might not be dead, she was not underneath the lorry herself; just had one arm pinned beneath its massive front wheel, as though she were stretching underneath it to reach something.
A shopping bag lay in the gutter beside her. A carton of yoghurt was on its side a short distance from it, its contents spilled on the tarmac; apples, a bunch of bananas; a polythene pack of fresh tagliatelle; a tube of tomato purée. A large shoulder-bag lay in the gutter also, a comb and a notebook beside it.
An ambulanceman walked towards the woman, shining a powerful lamp and taking slow, wary steps on the slick black tarmac as if he were walking on ice. The wheel of the lorry was turned at an angle and in the beam of the light she could see the woman’s hand splayed out on the far side, flat, like a dead starfish.
Blood oozed from under the tyre. Her eye caught the word ‘Pirelli’ embossed close to the rim, and she read it and reread it until it became meaningless. It gave her something to concentrate on, saved her from having to look back at the woman.
Then the beam of the ambulanceman’s lamp struck the woman’s face. It was turned forwards, eyes closed, trails of blood already congealing.
Frannie’s scream got caught in her throat and came out at first as a yammering wail of disbelief as she mouthed Phoebe’s name, then ran towards her.
‘Stand back, please! Stand well back, please!’ a policeman shouted.
Frannie ignored him, knelt and took Phoebe’s free hand, her good hand, squeezed it. ‘It’s OK, Phoebe, it’s me,’ she said, but the words came out silently, high-pitched, inaudible, like a dog whistle. Something metallic clanged above her. Someone was easing her away. A doom-laden bell clanged deep inside her. She had heard its warning knell before.
‘Have to move, please,’ a voice said. ‘We’re lifting now.’
The shadow of the lorry’s bumper quivered. Frannie shook helplessly with shock. A voice called out; an engine roared; she heard the rattle of a chain. The wheel lifted a fraction of an inch and then some more, lifted clear, and a shadow swung beneath it.
Frannie could see underneath now; could see that what had once been an arm was now a flattened pulp of flesh indistinguishable from crushed bone, obscenely printed with the zigzag tread pattern of the tyre.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
The plastic cup dropped into place: hot black coffee jetted from the nozzle; then frothing milk; there was a sharp clunk and the machine fell silent.
Frannie removed the cup carefully, trying not to slop any over the side, and carried it back to the waiting-room, which had a depressing, lifeless feel, enhanced by the dreary green paint of the walls and the smell of vinyl from the slashed and torn leatherette seat covers.
A trolley clattered past the door. Then silence. After about five minutes a flurry of footsteps came down the corridor and Frannie looked round as the door opened. A nurse whom she recognized from earlier walked in, followed by a tall bear of a man with a tired and rather belligerent expression beneath shaggy eyebrows. He was wearing a grey suit which fitted him sloppily, the top button of his shirt was undone and his tie was loose.
‘This is Miss Monsanto,’ the nurse said. ‘Mr Gower has been operating on your friend.’
When Frannie stood up, the surgeon gestured for her to sit and perched himself on the edge of a chair. ‘We haven’t been able to contact Phoebe’s parents,’ he said tersely. ‘They’ll keep on trying.’ He fixed a lengthy stare on Frannie, sizing her up. ‘We couldn’t save her arm, I’m afraid; the bones were too badly crushed.’
Frannie heard the words one at a time, in slow motion. She felt as if something had been injected into her stomach, numbing it, and the numbness was spreading through her, up her chest, her neck, into her brain. She shook her head in dismay as the words kept on coming, each resonating, made noisier by the buzz of the faulty fluorescent above her.
‘We had to amputate above the elbow. But at least she’s alive.’
‘Yes,’ Frannie said, blankly.
‘Did you see the accident happen?’
‘No – I was –’ She suddenly noticed the bottle of Valpolicella on the chair beside her, still wrapped in the off-licence’s green tissue. ‘Just going round to have supper with her.’ She touched the bottle; it felt hard and cold. ‘When can I visit her?’
‘She’ll be conscious enough to talk a bit tomorrow afternoon, but she’ll be rather woozy for a day or two from the painkillers.’
Frannie walked out of the front gates of the hospital shortly after half past ten, turning her collar up and bowing her head against the worsening weather.
She was shivering, wanted someone to hold her, to put their arms around her, to tell her that she was going to be all right, that she was silly to be worried, that it was just a series of appalling coincidences, that was all.
She entered the tube station and bought a ticket. Just saying the name of the station seemed oddly comforting.
‘Bethnal Green,’ the man behind the glass screen repeated, an Indian with a soft voice; he smiled at her, as if the destination was special to him too, a shared secret, the place for everyone in the world who needed help. He pushed her change into the metal dish beneath his glass window and a ticket fluttered from a chute.
A long, empty escalator carried her down to the platform. Phoebe Hawkins was not ill. But she was never going to get better. Something about that did not make sense; that was the hard part. The arm was never going to grow back. The same way that Meredith was never going to come back. Nor Jonathan Mount-joy. Susie Verbeeten was never going to see again. And young Dominic’s right hand would never be the same.
Rain as hard as grit stung Frannie’s face as she came out of Bethnal Green Station and hurried along the road. She enjoyed a brief respite under the twin railway bridges, running her hand along the metal railing like she used to as a child, lifting it at each join, her nostrils filled with the familiar unpleasant reek of urine.
She came out into the rain again, passed a used-car lot, a filling-station forecourt, and a grubby parade of take-away cafés and shops. There were few people around. Across the road was the playground of her school. Once, it had seemed so big you could get lost in it, now it was just a small tarmac yard with painted lines and a practice basketball net fixed to a wall; a place where a little girl she could now barely remember had once gone every day except holidays, for twelve years.
A few blocks away, set back from the main road in a backwater of quiet darkness, was the church and priory of Our Lady of Assumption. It was an old, solid church, red brick Gothic, traditional.
Frannie had gone with her parents to mass every Sunday of her childhood. Her faith had begun to dwindle during her mid-teens, but it wasn’t until she had left school for university that she had given up going altogether. There was no one thing that had changed her heart, only a gradual build-up of doubts over the years, and a need to search for answers her own way.
An old woman at a bus-stop struggled with a small umbrella. The cinema had ‘Kevin Costner’ in lights above the porch. The fish-and-chip shop was closed; the Quikburger two doors along was open, with a solitary punter slouched against the cou
nter, reading the menu. The smell of frying onions made Frannie feel queasy. Her thoughts swung around inside her head.
One by one. Chance. Coincidence. Nothing more. Please God, nothing more.
Fear was inside her bones. A bus thundered past; a truck. Her feet were sodden and her right leg ached badly. She removed her right hand from her pocket, slid it inside her mackintosh and up to her neck. Lapsed Catholic Francesca Monsanto pulled on the thin chain around her neck until she could feel the small silver crucifix, and squeezed it lightly. She had put it on this morning for the first time in ages.
It was half past eleven when she rang the bell of the door that was bounded on one side by the dark premises of Sandwich Paradiso and on the other by the dingily lit and smoky office of King Minicabs.
After a few moments a light appeared in the window above the door. She heard the stairs creak and the door juddered, once. A motor cycle caterwauled up the street behind her and a cloud of oily two-stroke fumes drifted over her; her father’s voice shouted: ‘Yes-sawhoseit?’
‘It’s me, Papa. Frannie.’
She heard the rattle of a chain; bolts sliding; then the door opened. Her father stared at her in surprise, his face heavy with stubble as it always was in the evenings. He was wearing a ragged towelling dressing-gown over striped pyjamas; his hair was tousled and she suddenly saw how grey it had become, surprised she had not noticed before.
‘Francesca! Hey! Why you here so late?’ He put his arms around her and they hugged each other, kissing both cheeks in turn, and she held him tightly, the slight, bony man who was no taller than herself. She smelled the wine and tobacco on his breath, the hair oil he still used and the laundered freshness of his pyjamas. She felt the hard bristles of his stubble against her cheek. She wished he could envelop her in his arms the way he had when she was small, wished he still felt like her father and not a stranger.
He released her gently, standing back a little, shaking his head. ‘Where you was on Sunday? Why you no phone? We was worried abou’ you.’ The bones of his face pressed through the sallow skin and his eyes were sunken, as if he had a wasting disease, but it was just the years of working long hours, the lack of exercise and fresh air that had left him with a weary air of defeat; as if he was aware that life was too big for him and he had abandoned trying to match up to it. Instead he lived vicariously through movies, to which he was addicted, spending almost all his free time in front of the television. He looked down at her leg and his face became tender with concern. ‘Was happen? You had an accident?’
She glanced down and was surprised to see a rip in the right leg of her jeans. She touched it with her finger and it hurt. ‘I – I hadn’t noticed.’
‘Where you fell?’ He touched her cheek lightly with his finger. ‘You look terrible.’ There was a sudden flash of suspicion in his eyes. ‘You had a fight? Boy kick you? Come in.’ He pressed against the wall to let her past and closed the door.
She climbed the steep stairs, still clutching the Valpolicella. She heard the television; there were loud voices, shots, an engine roared and tyres squealed. Her mother’s voice called out: ‘Chi è, Papa?’
‘Francesca. Ha avuto un incidente!’ he replied urgently.
Tyres squealed again; there were more shots; the sound of a siren. At the top of the stairs her father opened the door to the sitting-room and switched on the light. ‘Get you some stuff; bandage; antiseptic. You like coffee? Glass of wine?’ There was a faint aroma of fried garlic.
The walls were bare, but the small room with a dining alcove was cluttered by a huge three-piece suite, too many chairs, and by the china ornaments her mother collected.
‘Coffee would be nice.’ Frannie held out the wine. ‘A present,’ she said. ‘To say sorry for Sunday.’ She sat in an armchair and looked at the artificial brick fireplace. On the mantelpiece there were photographs of herself, her sister and her two brothers, as well as a vase of silk orchids, a Capo di Monte tramp on a park bench and a white plastic Virgin Mary statuette. The window faced the busy street; through the net curtains she saw the lights of a lorry that was grinding up the street, then she saw the top deck of a bus slide past, empty apart from one glum-looking man. The car chase continued on the television in her parents’ bedroom, down the landing.
‘So who kick you, who wasa it? You gotta boyfriend?’
‘No one kicked me, Papa. A friend of mine has just had a horrible accident on her bicycle. I must have got cut when I knelt down.’
‘Mamma mia! Povera Francesca!’ Frannie turned, alarmed by the hysterical high-pitched yell of her mother who ran towards her in her dressing-gown, her hair inside a bath cap and cream on her face. She knelt beside Frannie, gave her a kiss on each cheek. ‘Accident? You have accident?’ She ran a finger through Frannie’s hair, shaking her head in distress, and talking quickly in Italian, barely giving Frannie a chance to reply or explain. She left the room and came back moments later with a towel, a wet flannel, iodine and sticking-plaster, firing questions in Italian at Frannie as she helped her out of her jeans.
Her father came in with coffee on a tray and sweet biscuits, and she suddenly felt weepy at the simple kindness of her parents, feeling as if she did not deserve their pampering. She had no appetite but remembered she had skipped lunch, had had no supper and needed something to give her energy, so she managed a sandwich forced on her by her father.
‘You know what?’ her father said. ‘Saturday I went into the City to see the new building where the café was. And you know something? They don’t built it yet.’ There was astonishment in his voice; and despair. ‘They don’t start it! Poulterers’ Alley, the café, not demolished yet!’
‘Nothing at all, Papa?’
‘They is working on the demolishing – but that should have been two years ago. Is another two years we could have stayed there.’ He lit a cigarette and she saw her mother’s frown of disapproval. ‘Is probably archaeologists digging.’
‘I have a new boyfriend,’ she said, changing the subject, not wanting to rise to his bait.
Her father’s eyes widened with interest and he leaned forward further.
‘Boyfrenna?’ her mother said, her expression also changing. ‘Come si chiama?’
‘Oliver,’ Frannie said.
‘Olivier!’ her mother pronounced, boldly. ‘Un bel nome!’
‘Oliver,’ her father echoed.
Frannie smiled, feeling faintly embarrassed, wishing she hadn’t mentioned it now, afraid that it might be bad luck; they had only been going out for just over a week.
‘So what he do, this Oliver?’ her father said. ‘Archaeologist or he got a real job?’
She shook her head lamely. ‘No, he’s not an archaeologist; he’s a mathematician.’
Her father stared at her sadly. ‘Archaeologist; mathematician; what the difference? Ecco. You come here in the middle of the night in this state …’ He drew on his cigarette, pinching it between his finger and thumb, and shook his head despairingly. ‘When you gonna grow up, Francesca?’ He stroked her hair down over the back of her head. ‘When you gonna understand the real world?’
She looked back at him, the distance between them as great as ever.
Her father sighed. There was a long silence, which he finally broke. ‘You stay here tonight, OK? I clean your clothes, make them nice and dry for the morning, give you a good breakfast.’
She closed her eyes and nodded, too tired to argue, even to think. A wave of exhaustion overcame her, sapping her. She wanted to sleep.
In the morning, when Frannie woke, her clothes were laid out on the chair in the tiny spare room. It was seven o’clock and the flat was empty. She showered and dressed, then went down to the café beneath. The radio was on, playing schmaltz. Her father was cutting and buttering bread, and her mother was silently mixing tuna and onion.
‘Can I do anything?’ she said.
Her mother wiped her hands down the front of her apron and kissed her on both cheeks; her mother’s skin felt s
oft and cold.
‘You sit, I going to make you nice breakfast,’ her father said. ‘Get soma food inside you.’
‘Thanks,’ she smiled and it felt like old times, suddenly. It was a fine morning outside, and the sun shone straight in through the window. A street cleaner drove past and the rush-hour traffic was already building up, heading into London.
She sat on one of the familiar hard chairs at a narrow table, moving the ketchup and bottle of brown sauce out of the way.
‘How you sleep?’ her father asked, cracking eggs into a bowl. Butter sizzled.
She told him she had slept soundly. Not adding that it was for the first time in several days; deep, dreamless sleep. She felt more refreshed this morning; and hungry.
Her father held up an egg, then looked at her uncertainly. ‘But you was a having bad dreams, huh?’
She shook her head. ‘No.’ She smiled.
‘You give your mother and I a big fright.’ He tapped the egg gently without breaking it, then looked at her again. ‘You talking in your sleep.’
She frowned and a little of the light seemed to fade from the room. ‘What did I say?’
He shrugged, broke the egg with one hand and released the contents into the bowl. Then he beat them hard with a fork, before grinding in some black pepper. ‘Is mumbo-jumbo. No make sense. Is a foreign language.’ Her father looked worried. ‘You scared us, your mama and I.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Not like you talking. Like someone else is a talking through you.’
She saw the seriousness on both their faces, and felt her skin go clammy.
‘Something is no good, Francesca,’ he said solemnly. ‘Something no good at all.’
