by Neil Cross
‘Not really.’
‘Oh, come on.’
He smiled.
‘The mentally ill aren’t as much fun as they’re cracked up to be. Especially when they’re taking their medication.’
‘But you must have seen a few things in your time.’
‘I’ll give you that,’ he said. ‘But not the kind of thing you’d really want to talk about over dinner.’
‘You see? Now I’m intrigued.’
‘All right,’ he said. ‘I once had to restrain a young man who was well into the process of castrating himself with a blade he took from a safety razor.’
Anna made a gagging sound.
‘All right,’ she said. ‘I’m not intrigued any more.’
He laid his hands flat on the table.
He said, ‘Look, I’m really sorry.’
She flapped her hand at her mouth.
‘That’s all right,’ she said. ‘Honestly. I asked for it.’
He picked up the fallen napkin and flattened it on his lap.
To ease his discomfort, she said, ‘In a way, I deal with mad people too.’
‘How so?’
‘Everyday madness,’ she said. ‘The psychology of risk. People tend to exaggerate tiny little risks, and to minimize great big, whopping ones.’
‘Such as?’
‘Such as, following a train crash, the death toll increases on the roads. People are freaked out by the train crash, which is a rare occurrence and unlikely to happen again any time soon. More people die every day on British roads than die annually on the railways. But rail crashes are newsworthy. After a crash, nervous passengers take to the roads. The roads are a great deal more dangerous than the railways. And the more congested the roads are, the more dangerous they are. Simple really. But people don’t think about it like that.’
‘No,’ said Sam.
‘See?’ she said. ‘You’re bored.’
‘Not in the slightest.’
‘People worry about the rising crime rate,’ said Anna, ‘but they continue to smoke. Or they worry about what pesticides are going to do to them, and continue to eat junk food, and fail to take any exercise.’
‘And that affects the way your industry operates?’
‘Not always directly. But, of course, it’s always preferable—for us—to insure against the unlikely.’
‘That’s pretty cynical.’
‘It’s a job.’
He said, ‘You see, I think you’re underestimating people. People understand things better than your industry gives them credit for.’
Anna bit her lower lip and smiled at him.
She laid down her cutlery.
She said, ‘During the OJ Simpson trial, the defence team employed a man called Alan Dershowitz to act as consultant. In an article in the LA Times, he argued that fewer than one in a thousand women who are abused by their spouse go on to be killed by them. So it was a thousand to one against that OJ did it. This seems to have impacted on the case.’
He felt he was being effortlessly outmanoeuvred.
‘That seems fair enough,’ he said. ‘If it’s true.’
‘Aha,’ she said. ‘You see? That’s the problem. It is true. But it’s also true that, should a woman who has been spousally abused later be murdered, the chances that her spouse is the murderer is way in excess of eighty per cent. Based simply on statistical patterns, there was enough evidence to investigate Simpson, if not actually to convict him. But the jury lacked the insight to see through Dershowitz’s creative use of statistical evidence. And so did the prosecution.’
‘Blimey,’ said Sam. ‘You should’ve been a lawyer.’
‘I know.’
‘Why aren’t you?’
‘I don’t have a degree.’
He said, ‘Oh fuck. Excuse me. I assumed—’
‘People do. But no. I started at the company as a trainee. I was sixteen, straight from O-levels. I worked my way up.’
‘Then it’s quite an achievement.’
‘I worked hard.’
He looked at her with theatrical suspicion.
‘So what do you actually do?’
‘I told you,’ she said. ‘I’m in insurance.’
‘In what way?’
‘In a very boring way.’
‘Why do I think that’s not true?’
She put an elbow on the table and pointed the fork at him again.
‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Why do you think that’s not true?’
He laughed and scratched an eyebrow and saw that he would get nowhere. He chased a mushroom round his plate, ate it, then laid down his fork with a bright clatter.
He said, ‘Anyway, it’s good to talk to another Robinwood escapee.’
‘Isn’t it?’
Anna raised her glass.
‘Happy Birthday,’ she said.
He clinked his glass against hers.
‘It is,’ he said, and she glanced away, perhaps pleased.
Later, the taxi stopped outside the house and he thanked her and kissed her chastely on the cheek. She squeezed his hand. He stood on the pavement, his tie loose at his throat, as the cab pulled away, watching to see if she turned in her seat. But she didn’t.
He searched for his keys and quietly let himself in.
Mel and Jamie were waiting up. He flopped in an armchair and kicked off his shoes.
They said, ‘Well?’
Sam lit a cigarette.
‘It was good,’ he said. ‘It was good.’
Something in his tone caused Mel and Jamie to exchange a glance. Jamie yawned and stretched and said he was going to bed. As he passed, he ruffled Sam’s hair.
He said, ‘Nice one, Loverboy.’
Sam swiped at his bony arse with the back of his hand.
‘Bed,’ he said.
Mel offered to make him a coffee, which was a coded instruction to tell her about the evening in forensic detail. He thanked her, and yawned into his fist. Waiting for the coffee, he closed his eyes for a second.
He was surprised, when he opened them again, to see Justine stood in the corner behind the television. Next to her was a gaunt old man he’d never seen before.
Ignoring the old man, he told Justine, ‘It was only dinner. It was nothing.’
But her fixed expression, neither happy nor sad, didn’t change.
Sam nodded at the old man.
‘Who’s this?’ he said.
‘He lives here,’ said Justine.
Sam woke.
The house was dark. There was a cup of cold coffee on the floor next to him. At some point, Mel must have gone to bed, having decided that he was too deeply asleep to bother waking.
14
The maudlin, guilty happiness that followed Sam’s first date for twenty years was a kind of contentment, and it saw him through to the weekend. He was on earlies. He got home late on Sunday afternoon to find Mel unsteady on her feet. He wondered if she’d been drinking all afternoon, alone.
He hoped not. A few minutes later, Janet rang the doorbell. Mel hugged her and planted a smacking kiss on each cheek.
Shortly before 9 p.m., the bell rang again. The ring had a peculiar, hesitant quality that immediately worried him. He glanced at his wristwatch, then he put down his drink and went to the door. He opened it to a stranger—a middle-aged man, tidy in slacks, shirt and windcheater. He wore bifocals that made the lower half of his eyes bulge and oscillate like poaching eggs.
‘Mr Greene?’
‘Yes,’ said Sam.
The man didn’t look like a policeman.
The man swallowed.
He said, ‘It’s Jamie.’
The world went liquid beneath Sam’s feet.
‘What about him? Is he all right?’
The man put out a soft, calming hand that hung uncertainly in the air.
‘He’s fine. Don’t worry. He’s fine. But he’s in Casualty.’
Sam’s voice broke.
‘Jesus Christ,’ he said. ‘What happened? Why didn’t someone call?’
‘We tried. There was no answer.’
He was about to tell this idiot (whose name he still didn’t know—he wondered if that was as odd as it felt) quite how ridiculous that was. They’d been home all evening. Then he remembered that his landline had been unplugged for days now and his mobile was likely to be turned off in his bag.
He said, ‘Who are you?’
‘Martin Ballard.’
He seemed puzzled by Sam’s lack of response.
‘Stuart’s dad,’ he said.
Sam thought he was going to vomit.
He said, ‘My God.’
‘Look,’ said Martin Ballard. ‘Really. He’s all right. There was a dog.’
He read Sam’s expression and saw that he was doing no good.
He said, ‘Why don’t you go and get your coat? I’ll explain on the way.’
Numb, as if watching himself from some exterior vantage point, Sam stuck his head round the living-room door. He told Mel not to worry, but there’d been some trouble. Jamie was all right, but he was in hospital.
Two silent women looking at him in shock.
‘Pardon?’ said Mel.
Sam was already buttoning his coat. He realized he’d been garbling, and repeated himself, more slowly this time. His hands fumbled with the buttons, as Jamie’s frightened hands had fumbled with his shoe-laces that fearful Saturday night.
Sam didn’t want to cry.
He faced Mel with his unseasonal coat buttoned up incorrectly.
He said, ‘He’s all right. He’s in Casualty.’
Mel stood.
‘Do you want me to come?’
‘No. Stay here. I don’t want to …’ he scowled, and looked for an excuse. ‘I don’t want to cause a fuss. It might frighten him. Do you know what I mean?’
Apparently she did, which was good because he wasn’t sure that he did. He told her not to worry, they’d be home later that evening, he was sure, and he closed the door behind him.
Martin Ballard was waiting in the garden, examining the edge of the lawn with the heel of his shoe and twirling his car keys round his index finger.
Sam saw that Ballard’s car, a Vauxhall Astra estate, was double-parked with its hazard lights blinking. This connotation of urgency made his legs go weaker still. But he made it to the passenger seat.
Ballard belted himself behind the wheel. For a moment there was a businesslike silence between them. Then Ballard turned the key in the ignition, looked over his shoulder to reverse, and told Sam not to worry. They were both all right.
‘Both?’ said Sam.
‘Stuart,’ said Martin Ballard.
‘Oh, Jesus. I didn’t even ask. I’m so sorry.’
‘It’s all come as a shock, probably,’ said Ballard.
He was possibly the most careful, law-abiding driver with whom Sam had ever shared a car. At the junction with the main road, they pulled into the sparse traffic, accompanied only by the sound of the blinking indicator lights.
Ballard said, ‘Stuart’s fine.’
He nudged the brakes, adjusting the distance between him and the car in front.
‘Or he will be. He’s a bit upset and a bit frightened, but there’s no real harm done.’
The journey was short and interminable. They had to circle the car park three or four times, and finally parked on the street, at a meter. They had no change between them. Sam jogged over the road and bought a pack of cigarettes from a corner shop. He handed over a twenty-pound note, asked for the change in one-pound coins and crossed the road with fourteen of them bulging in his pocket.
He overfed the meter, then followed Ballard into the hospital grounds and followed the signs for Accident and Emergency. Perhaps two dozen people were scattered over the waiting room, reclining variously in the fixed seating. There was a group of young men in muddy sports gear, a few solitary old people, funereal and silent, an Arabic family in the far corner by the Coke machine, and a newborn baby in its mother’s arms. A happy toddler with white-blonde, blood-encrusted hair happily played call-and-response with a mad, dreadlocked tramp whose body was lost in infinite layers of greasy, grey-black clothing. A war-torn TV was bracketed in one high corner. Nurses came and went, unhurried. Never the same nurse twice.
Sam went to the desk and gave them Jamie’s name. He was directed to a curtained cubicle some way down a faded green corridor. Sam thanked Ballard.
Ballard gave him a key-jangling thumbs-up and an encouraging smile, and shook his hand.
Once Sam was through the doors, he had to double-check with a nurse which was the correct cubicle. There were so many of them. They varied only in the quantity and ethnicity of attending, anxious relatives.
The young nurse diverted himself to show Sam where he should be going. Sam found the curtained-off cubicle and paused, as he might before entering the bathroom, knowing Jamie was in there.
He said, ‘Knock, knock.’
He cringed.
‘Come in,’ said Jamie.
Sam pulled the curtain aside. He was reminded of camping, long ago, and the young child’s fear of cattle.
Jamie lay propped on a number of pillows. His jeans had been cut away. His leg was dressed from knee to hip. The frayed end of the cut-off jeans was crusty with blood. Jamie’s forearm and right hand were heavily bandaged. There was a bloody dressing on his forehead and a drip fed into his good arm.
Sam felt the world telescope away. He was balanced on a high building.
He wanted to say something, so he smiled encouragingly, but the smile wavered crazily at the corners.
Jamie was pale and there were violet half-moons beneath his eyes.
He wanted his father, but he was embarrassed by the presence of the helpful nurse.
He smiled.
‘All right, Dad?’
Sam took the chair next to the bed. He thought of Jamie’s baby skin, plump and butterscotch. The unquestioning singularity of his tiny devotion to his mother and father. The absolute knowledge that they would always protect him.
He took Jamie’s hand and pressed it to his face, kissing the palm.
The nurse saw the moment and quietly excused himself.
Perhaps because Easter was in the air, Jamie and Stuart had decided to put their mountain bikes to the test. They cycled over the fields and through Robinwood, then on to the network of muddy tracks and gullies that ran between Farmer Hazel’s land and the Robinwood Estate.
Later, Sam learnt that Martin Ballard was an amateur local historian. Ballard told him that the land which in the local imagination belonged to Farmer Hazel, now had several owners. But a Farmer Hazel had existed; in fact, generations of them had. The last of them, Jermyn Hazel, died in 1962, aged eighty-five, ten years after his long-delayed retirement. His widow promptly sold the land. So Farmer Hazel had been a spook even when Sam was a child.
The network of muddy tracks at the edge of Robinwood were a liminal territory. The miry lanes were littered with crushed lager tins and cider bottles and drug paraphernalia. There were used condoms and shit-smeared underwear. There were single shoes and rain-swollen pornographic magazines, distended to a semi-fungal state. There were the rusted-out remains of cars whose carcasses were filled with rotting leaves and stagnant water in which rippled teeming millions of mosquito larvae. These cars were never removed. They crumbled into red soil. Items of discarded clothing, rotted and beyond filthy, hung from low branches and flapped like defeated banners. There were bedframes and fridges and freezer cabinets. There was broken glass and the skeletal remains of motorcycles. Concealed
by long grass and low hedgerows, snarling at the sky, were the corpses of foxes and badgers, unzipped from the throat and stuffed with maggots as if with rice.
Sam and his friends had played there as children, if played was the right word. In that ownerless borderzone, their behaviour had been temporarily and experimentally feral. They had done things they would otherwise never have dared.
Jamie and Stuart had apparently gone in search of Sam’s stolen car, although Sam doubted that any serious effort had been made to locate it. The boys were thirsty for the kind of adventure to be had upon the wasteland between Farmer Hazel’s fields and the Robinwood Estate, and they simply required a mission to justify it. It was possible that Jamie’s stolen birthright (as it had become, for the purposes of the afternoon) might be discovered, wheelless but serviceable, and returned to his father in a symbolic act of manhood. But that wasn’t likely. The object of the quest was the quest itself.
For several hours, the two boys explored the lanes. Once in a while, they stopped off to perform stunts from the knolls and hillocks, or raced down steep embankments into great, brown puddles. They had discovered much incidental treasure: Jamie had come across an ancient, sodden copy of Moby Dick, which he had stashed in his rucksack as a possible first edition. Stuart had found a watch they thought might be a Rolex. They had intended to take it down town on Saturday, to get it valued.
Finally, wearily, they cycled back towards Robinwood, taking the main track between a field of rape and a breeze-block wall. By way of a collapsed and sagging chainlink fence, the track led to a gap in the wall. The gap led to a cul-de-sac of garages of the kind that had been incorporated into the estate by forward-thinking, mistaken architects, a generation before.
Jamie hoisted the bike on to his shoulder and manoeuvred it through the gap. He saw a car propped up on oily blocks, the remains of an old Capri. It had no wheels and the arched cavities were black with grease. It made for an ugly spectacle and was therefore of some interest. Jamie propped his bike against a garage door and waited for Stuart, who was not so lithe and whose bike was heavier.
Beneath the car there protruded a pair of dirty blue jeans and oily Nikes. Tethered to its dented bumper was a muscular tan mongrel.
