Michael Robotham

by Suspect

  I look away and try to start again, but Bobby's mind has already moved on.

  "Did you know the year 1961 can be written upside down and right-way up and appear the same?" he says.

  "No I didn't."

  "That's not going to happen again until 6009."

  "I need to know about the dream, Bobby."

  /"No comprenderds todavia lo que comprenderds en el futuro."/

  "What's that mean?"

  "It's Spanish. You don't understand yet what you will understand in the end." His forehead suddenly creases as though he's forgotten something. Then his expression changes to one of complete baffle�ment. He hasn't just lost his train of thought?he's forgotten what he's doing here. He looks at his watch.

  "Why are you here, Bobby?"

  "I keep having these thoughts."

  "What thoughts?"

  "I hurt people in my dreams. That's not a crime. It's only a dream..."

  We have been here before, thirty minutes ago. He has forgotten everything in between.

  There is an interrogation method, sometimes used by the CIA, which is called the Alice in Wonderland technique. It relies upon turning the world upside down and distorting everything that is fa�miliar and logical. The interrogators begin with what sound like very ordinary questions, but in fact are totally nonsensical. If the suspect tries to answer, the second interrogator interrupts with something unrelated and equally illogical.

  They change their demeanor and patterns of speech in midsentence or from one moment to the next. They get angry when mak�ing pleasant comments and become charming when making threats. They laugh at the wrong places and speak in riddles.

  If the suspect tries to cooperate he's ignored and if he doesn't co�operate he's rewarded?never knowing why. At the same time, the interrogators manipulate the environment, turning clocks backward and forward, lights on and off, serving meals ten hours or only ten minutes apart.

  Imagine this continuing day after day. Cut off from the world and everything he knows to be normal, the suspect tries to cling to what he remembers. He may keep track of time or try to picture a face or a place. Each of these threads to his sanity is gradually torn down or worn down until he no longer knows what is real and un�real.

  Talking to Bobby is like this. The random connections, twisted rhymes and strange riddles make just enough sense for me to listen. At the same time I'm being drawn deeper into the intrigue and the lines between fact and fantasy have begun to blur.

  He won't talk about his dream again. Whenever I ask about the girl in the red dress, he ignores me. The silence has no effect. He is totally contained and unreachable.

  Bobby is slipping away from me. When I first met him I saw a highly intelligent, articulate, compassionate young man, concerned about his life. Now I see a borderline schizophrenic, with violent dreams and a possible history of mental illness.

  I thought I had a handle on him, but now he's attacked a woman in broad daylight and confessed to "hurting" people in his dreams. What about the girl with the scars? Could he possibly have known Catherine? Is she the girl in the red dress?

  Take a deep breath. Review the facts. The fact that Catherine and Bobby are both self-mutilators isn't enough to link them. One in fifteen people harm themselves at some point in their lives: that's two children in every classroom, four people on a crowded bus, twenty on a commuter train and two thousand at a Manchester United home game.

  In my career as a psychologist I have learned unequivocally not to believe in conspiracies or listen for the same voices my patients are hearing. A doctor is no good to anyone if he dies of the disease.

  I'm back in Jock's office, listening to him rattle off my results, which I don't understand. He wants to start me on medication as soon as possible.

  Clicking a stopwatch, Jock makes me walk along a line of mask�ing tape on the floor, turn and walk back again. Then I have to stand on one foot with my eyes closed.

  When he brings out the colored blocks I groan. It feels so child�ish?stacking blocks one on top of the other. First I use my right hand and then my left. My left hand is trembling before I start, but once I pick up a block it's OK.

  Putting dots in a grid is more difficult. I aim for the center of the square, but the pen has a mind of its own. /It's a stupid test anyway./

  Afterward Jock explains that patients like me who present ini�tially with tremors have a significantly better prognosis. There are lots of new drugs becoming available to lessen the symptoms.

  "You can expect to lead a full life," he says, as though reading from a script. When he sees the look of disbelief on my face he at�tempts to qualify the statement. "Well, maybe you'll lose a few years."

  He doesn't say anything about my quality of life.

  "Stem-cell research is going to provide a breakthrough," he adds, sounding upbeat. "Within five or ten years they'll have a cure."

  "What do I do until then?"

  "Take the drugs. Make love to that gorgeous wife of yours. Watch Charlie grow up."

  He gives me a prescription for selegiline. "Eventually, you'll need to take levodopa," he explains, "but hopefully we can delay that for maybe a year or more."

  "Are there any side effects?"

  "You might get a little nauseous and have trouble sleeping."

  "Great!"

  Jock ignores me. "These drugs don't stop the progression of the disease. All they do is mask the symptoms."

  "So I can keep it secret for longer."

  He smiles ruefully. "You'll face up to this sooner or later."

  "If I keep coming here maybe I'll die of passive smoke."

  "What a way to go." He lights up a cigar and pulls the scotch from his bottom drawer.

  "It's only three o'clock."

  "I'm working on British summer time."

  He doesn't ask, he simply pours me one.

  "I had a visit from Julianne last week."

  I feel myself blinking rapidly. "What did she want?"

  "She wanted to know about your condition. I couldn't tell her. Doctor-patient privilege and all that bollocks." After a pause, he says, "She also wanted to know if I thought you were having an affair."

  "Why would she ask that?"

  "She said you lied to her."

  I take a sip of scotch and feel it burn my esophagus. Jock watches through a stream of smoke, waiting for an answer. Instead of feeling angry or at fault, I have a bizarre sense of disappointment. How could Julianne have asked Jock a question like that? Why didn't she ask me directly?

  Jock is still waiting for an answer. He sees my discomfort and be�gins to laugh, shaking his head like a wet dog.

  I want to say, /Don't you look at me like that?you've been divorced twice and are still chasing after women half your age./

  "It's none of my business, of course," he says, gloating. "But if she walks out on you, I'll be there to comfort her."

  He's not joking. He'd be sniffing around Julianne in a flash.

  I quickly change the subject. "Bobby Moran?how much do you know about him?"

  Jock rocks his tumbler back and forth. "No more than you do."

  "There's no mention in the medical notes about any previous psychiatric treatment."

  "What makes you think there has been any?"

  "He quoted a question to me from a Mental Status Examination. I think he's been evaluated before."

  "Did you ask him?"

  "He wouldn't talk about it."

  Jock's face is a study of quiet contemplation, which looks as though it's been practiced in the mirror. Just when I think he might add something constructive, he shrugs. "He's an odd fucker, that's for sure."

  "Is that a professional opinion?"

  He grunts. "Most of my patients are unconscious when I spend time with them. I prefer it that way."

  **11**

  A plumber's van is parked in front of the house. The sliding door is open and inside there are trays stacked one on top of the other, with silver and brass fittings,
corners, s-bends and plastic couplings.

  The company name is attached to the side panels on magnetized mats?D. J. Morgan Plumbers and Gas Fitters. I find him in the kitchen, having a cup of tea and trying to catch a glimpse of Julianne's breasts beneath her v-neck top. His apprentice is outside in the garden showing Charlie how to juggle a football with her knees and feet.

  "This is our plumber, D.J.," says Julianne.

  Getting lazily to his feet, he nods a greeting, without taking his hands from his pockets. He's in his mid-thirties, tanned and fit, with dark wet-looking hair combed back from his forehead. He looks like one of those tradesmen you see on lifestyle shows, renovating houses or doing makeovers. I can see him asking himself what a woman like Julianne's doing with someone like me.

  "Why don't you show Joe what you showed me?"

  The plumber acknowledges her with the slightest dip of his head. I follow him to the basement door, which is secured with a bolt. Narrow wooden steps lead down to the concrete floor. A low-wattage bulb is fixed to the wall. Dark beams and bricks soak up the light.

  I have lived in this house for four years and the plumber already knows the basement better than I do. With a genial openness, he points out various pipes above our heads, explaining the gas and wa�ter system.

  I contemplate asking him a question, but I know from experi�ence not to advertise my ignorance around tradesmen. I am not a handyman; I have no interest in DIY, which is why I can still count to twenty on my fingers and toes.

  D.J. nudges the boiler with the toe of his work boot. The infer�ence is clear. It's useless, junk, a joke.

  "So how much is this going to cost?" I ask, after getting lost halfway through his briefing.

  He exhales slowly and begins listing the things that need re�placing.

  "How much for labor?"

  "Depends how long it takes."

  "How long will it take?"

  "Can't say until I check all the radiators." He casually picks up an old bag of plaster, turned solid by the damp, and tosses it to one side. It would have taken two of me to move it. Then he glances at my feet. I am standing in a puddle of water that is soaking through the stitching of my shoes.

  Mumbling something about keeping costs down, I retreat up�stairs and try not to imagine him sniggering behind my back. Julianne hands me a cup of lukewarm tea?the last of the pot.

  "Everything OK?"

  "Fine. Where did you find him?" I whisper.

  "He put a flyer through the mailbox."

  "References?"

  She rolls her eyes. "He did the Reynolds' new bathroom at num�ber 74."

  The plumbers carry their tools outside to the van and Charlie tosses her ball in the garden shed. Her hair is pulled back into a ponytail and her cheeks are flushed with the cold. Julianne scolds her for getting grass stains on her school tights.

  "They'll come out in the wash," says Charlie.

  "And how would you know?"

  "They always do."

  Charlie turns and gives me a hug. "Feel my nose."

  "Brrrrrrr! Cold nose, warm heart."

  "Can Sam stay over tonight?"

  "That depends. Is Sam a boy or a girl?"

  "Daaaad!" Charlie screws up her face.

  Julianne interrupts. "You have football tomorrow."

  "What about next weekend?"

  "Grandma and Grandpa are coming down."

  Charlie's face brightens as mine falls. I had totally forgotten. God's-personal-physician-in-waiting is giving a talk to an interna�tional medical conference. It will be a triumph, of course. He will be offered all sorts of honorary positions and part-time consultancies, which he will graciously refuse because travel wearies him. I will sit in silence through all of this, feeling as though I am thirteen again.

  My father has a brilliant medical mind. There isn't a modern medical textbook that doesn't mention his name. He has written pa�pers that have changed the way paramedics treat accident victims and altered the standard procedures of battlefield medics.

  My great-grandfather was a founding member of the General Medical Council and my grandfather its longest serving chairman. He established his reputation as an administrator rather than as a surgeon, but the name is still writ large in the history of medical ethics.

  This is where I come in?or don't come in. After having three daughters, I was the long-awaited son. As such, I was expected to carry on the medical dynasty, but instead I broke the chain. In mod�ern parlance that makes me the weakest link.

  In the four years that it took me to get my degree, my father never once missed an opportunity to call me "Mr. Psychologist" or to make cracks about couches and inkblot tests. And when my thesis on agoraphobia was published in the /British Psychological Journal/, he said nothing to me or to anyone else in the family.

  A comparable silence has greeted every stage of my career since then and my flaws have mounted steadily until he's come to regard me as his own personal failure.

  I have carried Bobby's notes home with me in a battered briefcase. Before dinner I pour myself a drink and attempt to settle down to an hour or two of work.

  With Bobby I seem to be up against something impenetrably mysterious. His paranoia and random acts of violence create broken sequences of questions and send my mind whirling. I promised Ed�die Barrett a psych report. It has to be finished before Bobby's next court appearance. At the same time, as I go over the notes again, I can feel myself looking for echoes of Catherine's life. Could they have met at some point?

  According to Bobby his father had been in the air force and trained as a mechanic. He was too young for the war, which didn't bother him because of his pacifist views. He was also a Marxist and would take Bobby on a bus from Kilbum to Hyde Park most Sun�days so he could heckle the lay preachers on their packing-crate pulpits.

  Every childhood has a mythology that materializes around it and Bobby's was no different. He told stories of riding on the handlebars of his father's bicycle and being taken to football games where he sat on his father's shoulders.

  He described getting caught in a soccer riot between rival fans, when police on horseback charged the crowd. His father wrapped him in a coat and carried him to safety.

  "I knew that nothing was ever going to knock him down, not even those horses," Bobby had said.

  "What happened to your father?"

  "It wasn't his fault," he had replied.

  "Did he abandon you?"

  Suddenly he had exploded out of his chair. "You know nothing about my father!" On his feet, sucking air between clenched teeth, he raged, "You'll never know him! People like you destroy lives. You thrive on grief and despair. First sign of trouble you're there, telling people how they should feel. What they should think. You're like vultures!"

  Just as suddenly the outburst had dissipated. He wiped away white flecks of spit from his mouth and looked at me apologetically. Then he had filled a glass with water and waited with a strange calm for my next question.

  We moved on to his mother, whom he hadn't seen in more than six years. The change in his tone had been startling.

  "Let me describe my mother to you," he had said, making it sound like a challenge. "She was a grocer's daughter. She grew up in a corner shop?having her nappies changed right next to the cash register. By the time she was four, she could tote up a basket of gro�ceries, take the cash and hand back the correct change.

  "Every morning and afternoon, as well as Saturdays and public holidays, she worked in that shop. And she read the magazines on the rack and daydreamed about escaping and living a different life. When Dad came along?dressed in his air force uniform?he said he was a pilot. It's what all the girls wanted to hear. A quick shag be�hind the social club at RAF Marham and she was pregnant with me. She found out he wasn't a pilot soon enough. I don't think she cared ... not then. Later it drove her crazy. She said she married him under false pretenses."

  "But they stayed together?"

  "Yeah. Dad left the air force
and got a job working as a mechanic fixing buses for London Transport. Later he became a conductor on the number 96 to Piccadilly Circus. He said he was a 'people person,' but I think he also liked the uniform. He used to ride his bike to the depot and home again."

  Bobby had lapsed into silence, perhaps reliving the memories. Prompted by gentle questions, he had revealed how his father was an amateur inventor, always coming up with ideas for time-saving devices and gadgets.

  "My mother said he was wasting his time and their money. One minute she'd be calling him a dreamer and laughing at all his 'stupid inventions' and the next she'd be saying he didn't dream big enough and that he lacked ambition."

  Blinking rapidly he had looked at me with his odd pale eyes as though he'd forgotten his train of thought. Then he remembered.

  "She was the /real/ dreamer, not Dad. She saw herself as a free spirit, surrounded by boring mediocrity. And no matter how hard she tried she could never live a Bohemian lifestyle in a place like Hendon. She hated the place?the flat-front houses with their pebbledash facades, the net curtains, cheap clothes, greasy spoon cafes and garden gnomes. Working-class people talk about 'looking after our own,' but she scoffed at that. She could see only smallness, in�significance and ugliness."

  "How would you describe your relationship with her?" I had asked, watching his face twist in frustration.

  "She'd get dressed up and go out most nights. I used to sit on the bed and watch her get ready. She'd try on different outfits?modeling them for me. She let me zip up the back of her skirts and smooth her stockings. She called me her Little Big Man.

  "If Dad wouldn't take her out, she went by herself?to the pub, or the club. She had the sort of wicked laugh that told everyone she was there. Men would turn their heads and look at her. They found her sexy even though she was plump. Pregnancy had added pounds that she had never managed to shed. She blamed me for that. And when she went dancing or laughed too hard she sometimes wet her pants. That was my fault too."

  This last comment had been delivered through gritted teeth. His fingers picked at the loose skin on the back of his hands, twisting it painfully, as though trying to tear it off. His body humbled, he began again.