by Jo Bannister
She’d thought that running her own business would do that; and so it might, if she could get through the difficult start-up period. She hadn’t expected it to be so uncertain for quite so long. Six months. Of course, in a seaside town the winter was always going to be harder than the summer. The seasonal influx brought extra work for everyone, not just the cafes and trinket-sellers. It was March now: in two months The Lanes would be full of people, and some of them would have need of her services. Looking for Something? was a good idea, she knew she could make it work. The money situation would improve if she just kept at it.
Money! Dear God, she hadn’t until that moment wondered what to do with Mrs Doyle’s three thousand pounds. She’d already lodged it in the bank but it couldn’t stay there. It had been earned - heaven knows it had been earned! - you could argue that it had been earned honestly. But much as she needed it, Brodie knew she couldn’ t touch a penny. She could hand it over to the police. If he recovered she could offer it to Daniel Hood - and stand there while he slapped her face. If he died, or if he wouldn’t ease her conscience by accepting it, it could go to charity. She’d bankrupt herself before she’d take blood-money.
She collected Paddy from Mrs Szarabeijka upstairs and tried to put the affair to the back of her mind, at least until the child was in bed.
But Paddy Farrell was the daughter of a lawyer and a woman who made a profession of being inquisitive, and though she was only four years old she knew that something was wrong. “Bad day, Mummy?” she asked with heart-rending solicitude.
“Rotten day,” Brodie said feelingly, holding the child tight against her until they both needed to breathe. “Getting better now.”
While Paddy was there, under her feet as she did some desultary housework and prattling about her day with Marta Szarabeijka - “We went shopping and then we went to the park. There was a dog chasing the ducks. Mrs S swore at it in Polish and it ran away. Then she swore at the ducks” - it was possible to distance herself from what was already feeling like a bad dream.
Last year Brodie Farrell was so typical a middle-class housewife and mother she could have starred in the adverts. Good family, good education, satisfying but not overly demanding job, marriage to a professional man; gave up work to have her child and look after her nice house in the better part of Dimmock and go to coffee mornings and charity lunches with other women who were exactly like her.
But even then she hadn’t lived in an ivory tower. In seven years working for a solicitor she’d met every kind of criminal - and people who struck her as even less desirable, people she’d have climbed five storeys rather than share a lift with. But the sight of Daniel Hood’s injuries had shocked her to the core. She hadn’t known there were people capable of such atrocity. Now she’d seen it and still couldn’t quite believe it. While Paddy was splashing in the bath and swearing in Polish at the yellow plastic duck it was almost possible to think she’d imagined it.
When Paddy was clean, dry, bundled up in her pyjamas and tucked, improbably angelic, into her bed, still Brodie put off the moment when she would be alone with her thoughts by reading not one but two stories from the Big Book of Dragons. For the child of two essentially conventional people, Paddy Farrell had shown an early streak of individuality. Not puppies and kittens but dragons; not dolls but tractors. She knew the difference between a John Deere and a Massey Ferguson three fields away. Kind people on trains who noticed her interest in “the big twactors” were apt to get a lecture on the subject.
But whatever her mental age, her body was just four and she was asleep before the second dragon had found a way to palm the nagging princess off on a gullible knight. Brodie went into the living room and tried to watch television. Unwanted images drifted between her eyes and the screen. She went into the kitchen to make a cake. She wasn’t a serious cook but she did rather pride herself on her marmalade cake.
She weighed, she measured, she sifted, she rubbed. The necessary precision of the mundane activity occupied her mind. She scorned the mixer and buried her hands to the wrists, rubbing and blending until her shoulders ached. She made so much mixture she wasn’t sure she’d have enough baking tins. It hardly mattered. The cakes were the end-product but not in fact the purpose of her industry.
The last scrapings shoe-horned in, she began to load the oven as carefully as if the cake had been Minton going into a kiln. That was her undoing. In thinking about the logistics she forgot the fundamental rule of cooking: ovens are hot. She burned her hand.
It wasn’t a bad burn. She hissed, shoved the last tin in any old way and put her hand under the cold tap. After a minute she pulled if out to see if it was working. Heat mounted immediately in the red spot on the back of her hand. More cold water and she tried again; same result.
Then she thought of the burns on the body of Daniel Hood. All the little burns, not one of them life-threatening but each of them the source of more pain than this was giving her. And no cold running water to take the worst away; and not even the knowledge that time alone would eventually bring relief. For Daniel Hood, time had just brought more little burns - dozens of them, she hadn’t counted but there had to be dozens of them, scores of them, jostling for space on his cringing skin, spreading like a pox. And it wasn’t an accident, the unhappy result of a moment’s carelessness. Someone had done this to him: done it hour after unbearable hour.
Brodie burst into tears, sobbing into her arms on the kitchen table as if her heart would break.
When she regained control she let herself quietly out of the flat and went upstairs.
Marta Szarabeijka was watching television. A music teacher by profession, she had remarkably eclectic tastes. Sometimes when Brodie came up here she was listening to the Berlin Philharmonic, sometimes she was watching Emmerdale. Brodie suspected this was where Paddy got her taste for tractors.
Tonight it was a game-show. Beside herself with excitement, Marta waved Brodie to a chair. “Sit down, sit down - one more inflatable reindeer and he gets to go to Lappland!”
Brodie remained standing. “Marta,” she said faintly.
Marta Szarabeijka knew a real crisis from a show-biz one even in the sound of a word. She turned off the television and put her arm about Brodie’s shoulders in the same fluid movement. She was a tall, bony woman in her fifties, as strong as a mule and about as obstinate, and Brodie’s life would have been poorer with almost anyone else living upstairs. Marta was her child-minder, her signer-for-unexpected-parcels, her confidante, her friend. The generation separating them was no obstacle: they enjoyed a kind of pick-and-mix relationship that was partly that of sisters, sometimes more like mother and daughter, most often that of a couple of college girls. They laughed together, complained about men to one another, dried each other’s tears when the need arose.
Marta peered into Brodie’s red-rimmed eyes with real concern and said quietly, “What happened? Is Paddy all right?”
“Paddy’s fine,” Brodie nodded. “Though I’ll have to get back. I came to see if you’ve got anything for burns.” She held out her hand. The red spot was barely visible but the word destroyed her. She fell on her knees on the carpet, hugging herself and rocking, and crying and crying and crying.
Marta dropped beside her, folding her in long bony arms, talking softly into Brodie’s hair. “Is all right,” she crooned in her oddly gruff and accented voice, “is all right. Marta’s here. Cry as much you want. Then we go downstairs and you tell me what this is all about. A little burn like that? - I don’t think.” But before they left her flat she collected a jar from the bathroom cabinet.
Brodie had got her breath back enough to start feeling guilty. “What about the reindeers? Come down when it’s over.”
“Fock the reindeers,” said Marta Szarabeijka briskly, shutting her door.
Paddy was still asleep, dreaming of combine harvesters. They tiptoed back into the living room and Marta turned her attention to Brodie’s hand. “You want to tell me what happened?” She pronounced her Ys li
ke Js.
Brodie wanted desperately to tell her what happened. But DI Deacon’s warning echoed in her ears. She’d have trusted Marta with her life, but she’d given her word and wouldn’t break it to get a little sympathy.
“I can’t tell you much,” she mumbled. “I promised, and someone’s safety could depend on it. But I did something in good faith that helped someone else do something terrible.” She looked down at her hand, comforted by Marta’s potion. “Somebody got burned. I was trying so hard to rationalise it - I didn’t know, there was no way I could know what they intended. And then I did this, and somehow it didn’t matter who was to blame, what I knew and didn’t know, only the pain. They couldn’t have found him without me, and when they did they hurt him so much …
“Oh Marta,” she moaned, “I’m saying too much now, don’t breathe a word of this outside, only I can’t bear it. This - it’s nothing but it really hurt. And him … And I didn’t even know him. I just did it for the money. It was a job: you give me some money, I find who you’re looking for - and it’s hardly my fault if you nearly torture him to death, is it? Only it is. They couldn’t have done it without me. It’s my responsibility. And I don’t think I can bear it.”
“Listen to me, darling.” Her Gs came out like Ks. “You’re not responsible for what you can’t prevent, and if you didn’t know what they intended you couldn’t stop them. Don’t crucify yourself. There’s no need: there’s always a queue of people waiting to do it for you.
“Now tell me. Are the police involved? Do you need - what, an alibi? Tell me what I should say.”
Torn between tears and laughter, buoyed as always by the generous, anarchic nature of her friend, Brodie shook her head. “The police know all about it. I don’t need protecting from them, though thanks for the offer. I just - I needed to tell somebody -”
Marta regarded her with compassion. “Brodie - you don’t think maybe you should tell John?”
“John?” That really did take her by surprise. “Why?”
“Because he’s a lawyer. Because whoever did what to who and however little of it was your fault, the police are involved and you may need legal advice. Better he knows now than you phone him in the middle of the night with them hammering down the door.” Marta’s opinion of the police had been influenced by the circumstances in which she left Poland.
“If I need a solicitor, it won’t be John.”
“Why not? Because he fell in love with someone else? Bad taste, I grant you, but he’s not a bad man. He was always straight with you, Brodie. Be straight with him. Is best.”
She didn’t think so, but Marta was an astute woman, Brodie would always give her opinions serious consideration. “Honestly, Marta, I’m not in any trouble. Or only with my own conscience.” She took a deep breath. “Is this making any sense to you?”
“Not a lot,” confessed Marta cheerfully. “But then, you don’t want me to know what happened, do you, only how you feel about it. And I can see how you feel. Now you have to decide what to do about it.”
“Do about it? What can I do?”
“The man who got burned. He’s alive?”
Brodie hesitated. But Marta wasn’t going to betray her. “He’s in the hospital. I don’t know if he’ll recover. It wasn’t just the burns: when they’d finished with him they shot him. They dumped him in a skip.” Tears welled again.
“Not a lot of respect for human life, hm? Well, I tell you. Whether he lives or dies, what you need is to make your peace with him. Go to the hospital. Now: I’ll stay with Paddy. Tell him they tricked you, that you didn’t know. Tell him you’re sorry.”
She clearly hadn’t understood. Brodie shook her head, the dark cloud of her hair tossing like a storm. “If I thought he’d understand … But he was unconscious. He could be dead by now. Even if he isn’t, he wouldn’t know I was there.”
Marta gave a Slavic shrug. “This doesn’t matter. Him hearing it isn’t what it’s about. You saying it: that’s the reason. Confession and forgiveness.” She smiled sombrely. “This he can do with his eyes shut.”
Brodie was neither a Catholic nor a church-goer, so the question absolution that made perfect sense to Marta left her doubtful. But it was only an empty gesture, even a gesture was better than nothing. Perhaps when she’d confessed she could begin to forgive herself.
So an hour later Brodie parked her car behind the blockhouse architecture and dingy white concrete of Dimmock General and let herself in by the route Deacon had shown her.
There was a different constable outside the door, but when she gave her name he nodded her through. It was also a different nurse. Neither of them asked her business, which was as well because Brodie would have found it hard to explain.
It was twelve hours since she was here before and changes were apparent. Most of the tubes were gone so more of Daniel Hood was visible. Tentatively, Brodie walked closer and stood looking down at him.
She wouldn’t have recognised him: not from the photograph Selma Doyle had given her, not from the one the newspaper had carried. This wasn’t because his tormentors had concentrated on his face, because they hadn’t. They’d wanted to hurt him without dulling his wits. There were bruises and his lip was split, but they were minor injuries predating those under the sheet. They had achieved nothing and no one had expected they would. Whoever inflicted them knew they wouldn’t be enough and had no time to waste on self-indulgence.
But a few cuts and bruises weren’t why he looked so different. He looked different because he was different. When the photographs were taken he was a young man at the peak of his health and strength, with a career, with a future. Now he’d been through hell and emerged into a vacuum. Nothing in his life before this week was of any consequence. Nobody he knew, nobody he cared about, nothing he wanted and worked for, nothing he aspired to then had any reality this side of the event horizon. If he lived he’d have to reinvent himself, or for the rest of his days he’d be haunted by his lost persona, by the feeling that if he could just make contact with who he used to be things would go back to how they used to be, things would be all right. And they never would.
No one comes through trauma unscathed. Euphoria, depression, anger, guilt and bitterness are all hurdles to be negotiated on the way back, and a person familiar with these extremes of human emotion is not the same as one who is not. Whoever Daniel Hood was a week ago, today he was someone else, as different to the man who had yet to live his nightmare as was that man from the boy who preceded him. Already, before awareness had begun to flutter his eyelids, the change was apparent, and irreversible.
Apart from the everyday facts of his life, like his name and where he lived, Brodie Farrell knew three things about this man, and one of them might have been a lie. He liked watching the skies. He might or might not be a liar. And for that or some other sin, actual or perceived, he’d suffered unimaginably.
There was a chair by the bed. Brodie drew it uncertainly towards her and sat down.
Plainly taking Brodie for a friend or relative, perhaps even his wife, the nurse said kindly, “He’s doing better. He’ll be all right, you know.”
Brodie looked at her, hope constrained by fear. “Really?”
“Really. He’ll be awake tomorrow.” She stood up. “I’m going for a coffee. Can I bring you one?”
“Thank you.” But Brodie wanted privacy more than the drink.
“I won’t be long. If you have any problems” - she pointed - “hit that button.”
Brodie had no idea how close the nearest coffee machine was, but she couldn’t count on more than a few minutes. She bit her lip, wondering how to start.
“You don’t know me,” she said softly. “I don’t know much about you. But I’ve done you a terrible wrong. I suppose I’m here to apologise.”
Even as she said them the words sounded hollow and meaningless. If he was going to be awake tomorrow she should come back and say them then. Trying to shift her burden of guilt onto an unconscious man was an act of
cowardice. But Brodie was afraid that if she left now she’d never return. Better a flawed apology than a shirked one.
“She said you’d stolen money from her. I found you for her. I had no idea what she meant to do. If I had, I swear I’d have had no part in it. Try to believe me. I can’t offer a single good reason why you should, but if you don’t …”
She was going to say, I don’t know how I’ll live with it. She was going to say, I’m going to be stuck in a nightmare with no waking. Then she remembered who she was saying it to, what she’d seen below the sheet, and it sounded trite and self-pitying. She was asking for Daniel Hood’s help? For his understanding? Didn’t she know he’d be fully occupied managing his own emotions, living with his own ghosts? People had treated him like meat on a slab. She was worried about bad dreams? How was he ever going to shut his eyes again when people like that could be out in the darkness waiting? Her selfishness mortified her.
If there’d been anyone to see the colour rising through her cheeks she’d have covered them with her hands and made a rapid if undignified retreat. As it was she steepled her fingers in front of her mouth, her eyes wide with remorse, her breathing unsteady. “Oh Daniel,” she whispered, “I’m sorry. I’m talking about my feelings when I should be thinking about yours. You know why, of course. Because I’m ashamed. I’m ashamed of the harm I’ve done you. I’m talking about what happened to me because if I think about what happened to you I’ll break down.
“I’m not a brave person, Daniel. I’ve never had to be, I never learned how. If it’s any comfort, I have never felt so inadequate in all my life.”
She managed a shaky laugh. “I don’t think I’m cut out to be a Catholic. Confession isn’t doing my soul any good at all. I’ve done you a dreadful wrong, and there’s nothing I can do about putting it right, and the longer I sit here talking the clearer that is to me. I’m going to go now. If you woke up and found me here you’d be very, very angry and I have no right to put you through any more. Inspector Deacon knows where I am. If you want to see me when you’re feeling better, tell him and I’ll come. I can’t think why you would, unless you want to tell me what you think of me. But that’s all right. If calling me all the names under the sun will help, even just a little, do it.”
