‘About the operation? Oh, two or three weeks. New Zealand no longer expects me. Which is a pity, as I was getting somewhere with the monoflor bees.’
Dear God, the man was obsessed. Sheila thought for a moment about Lisa Compton-Milne, found herself beginning to understand the woman. She understood Gus, too. He wouldn’t want strangers visiting his hospital room, because there would be nothing to say. The man had a family, but he didn’t know them – and, by the same token, they didn’t know him. ‘Yes, I’ll do all that,’ she told him.
‘Thank you.’
Sheila swallowed. ‘Gus?’ He had invited her to call him by his abbreviated Christian name, and she had finally found the courage to do it.
‘Yes?’
She should have kept her mouth shut, should never have started this. ‘Do you . . . Do you ever feel sad?’
‘Yes.’
She thought he had decided to be monosyllabic again and was surprised when he continued after a couple of seconds. ‘When I see my son and can’t help him. My daughter should have gone to Oxford, but she stayed with him. Sometimes, I look at Lisa and wish she could have been . . . wish I could have . . . Things should have been better – different.’
Sheila nodded.
‘My mother will soon be unable to walk. I wish I could have found a cure for that. They think I see nothing, but I am well aware of the situation at home. My wife has sought consolation elsewhere, and I cannot blame her. We are mere animals, and we have our needs.’ He smiled at her. ‘You are an excellent friend, Sheila. This has been a refuge for me.’
It felt as if he were saying goodbye. She swallowed hard again. ‘Are you in pain?’
‘Yes.’
‘All the time?’
‘No.’
He had reverted to words of one syllable. She watched as he took a small piece of paper from his wallet. ‘The address and telephone number of the hospital. I shall be in room eleven. Don’t tell anyone where I am. Please?’ He placed the paper on the table. ‘Nobody must know. I am in New Zealand.’
She nodded. When he walked to the door, she did not turn to look at him. His footsteps sounded hollow in the hall, as did the crash of the outer door as it closed behind him. Cold fingers wrapped themselves around her heart, and she gasped. Everything was so loud, so empty, so bloody lonely. She picked up the scrap of paper. On the reverse he had written an instruction – she was to sell the trains in the event of his death.
As quickly as she could, Sheila Barton ran to the front of her house. For some stupid reason, she was suddenly desperate to find out about Katherina. It was a foreign-sounding name, almost Russian. But when she reached the bottom of the stone steps that led up to her house from the pavement, she saw the Mini making its way towards town. Slowly, she turned and climbed back to her door.
‘How did you know she had it?’ Craig asked. ‘How did she know?’
Harrie raised her eyes to heaven. Questions, questions. ‘She saw two of everything.’
Billy chipped in. ‘Like me dad when he’s drunk? He once said he had four twins, not two. Said he’d never touch another drop. But he did.’
Harrie served up fish fingers, oven chips and peas.
‘These aren’t proper peas,’ groaned Craig.
‘Oh yes, they are,’ replied Harrie. ‘I shelled them myself.’
Forks clattered on to plates. ‘Shelled? They’re not nuts or cockles. They’re peas. They’re frozen in a bag, or they come in a tin called marrowfats.’
Harrie shook her head. ‘They grow in pods. The freezer people take them out of their pods and put them in large refrigeration units. Or the canning factory shells them, cooks them and puts them in a tin. These are proper peas.’
Daisy didn’t seem to mind. She was too busy chasing peas across the floor every time they dropped off her fork. It didn’t appear to bother her – she ate them, anyway. ‘Playing marbles,’ she said happily before popping another green orb into her pretty little mouth.
The boys had quietened a little. Harrie found that they behaved better if she kept them divorced from sweets and other sources of sucrose. She also bought food with fewer additives, so the twins had slowed down considerably since their arrival.
‘But how did she know it was MFI?’ asked Craig.
Here they came again – more queries. ‘MS, not MFI, that’s a chain of shops. The doctor told her. She had a special scan, and they said it was multiple sclerosis.’
‘I like her,’ Billy announced. ‘She tells us some great stuff. Did you know that a duck’s quack has no echo?’
Harrie hadn’t known, and she admitted that immediately.
‘And elephants have four knees, but they can’t jump?’
‘I knew that one,’ she said.
Billy served up the opinion that it was a good job elephants couldn’t jump because, if they could jump, Africa and India would fall to bits, especially if all the elephants jumped at the same time.
Harrie kept finding herself smiling. She smiled now because she had a mental picture of synchronized elephant-jumping choreographed by Walt Disney. There was probably a saleable story in Billy’s head. He, Craig and Daisy had already provided her with an education, and the result was that she made the decision not to teach history. Instead, she would teach children. Primary school pupils had hungry minds, and she would not be confined to one subject. Yes, it was about teaching people, not history.
Daisy was making a circle of peas under the table. In the centre, she had placed two chips and a fish finger. Should a child be allowed to eat off the floor? Probably not. It was best to pretend not to have noticed.
Will entered. The fact that he seemed to have acquired a family overnight did not bother him. The boys loved him, though Hermione remained their favourite toy. Will had been deemed ‘dead interesting’ and ‘safe’. Harrie asked about ‘safe’, and was told that it used to be ‘sound’. ‘Safe’ was the new ‘sound’, then. She was learning all the time. Soon, she might acquire a fuller relationship with her native tongue.
The boys stuffed the rest of their dinner into their mouths, then rushed off to play football with Will. The dog was clearly on the tea break she had earned while looking after Hermione, so Harrie wrote ‘FOOTBALL’ at the top of her shopping list, since Alsatian and football did not make for a good marriage and the ball would no doubt be punctured in minutes.
She sat and watched Daisy who, after rearranging her dinner on the floor, was playing with her dolls. The little girl’s mother was recovering. Everyone knew she was recovering because she was reputed to be making radical changes to the National Health Service. These three wonderful, brilliant kids had come from a fabulous mother who fed them the wrong stuff, but who gave them guts, humour and imagination. Additives aside, Annie was doing a great job.
‘I’m going to be a teacher,’ she told Daisy.
‘Teacher,’ came the echo.
‘I shall teach people like you, Billy and Craig.’
‘BillyandCraig,’ was returned as one word.
Harrie was happy. She had Will, her own little house, a lovely gran, a mother beginning to see the light, and a brother who had wandered off to mend himself in his own way. And that was the only method that really worked. Counsellors and psychologists were useful, but the day had to come when a person must stand up to be counted. Or sit behind the wheel of a geriatric camper van. ‘I hope he’s all right,’ she mused.
‘All right,’ said Daisy.
The road ahead was clear for Harrie, and she hoped with all her heart that the brother she loved was coming to his senses. Ben was important. But Will was her world. For the present, so were Annie’s children.
‘Why aren’t you at work? Jimmy Nuttall, still wearing pyjamas and dressing gown, stood in the living room doorway. Sal was sitting on the sofa watching morning TV. ‘Are you ill?’
She turned, looked him up and down, then continued to stare at the screen.
‘I asked you a question.’
‘And I hea
rd you. It’s my house, my job, my choice, my aching feet. I’m having a day off. Oh, and the office window is open a bit, and he’s gone to New Zealand, so do what you must. They know I’m having the day off. I told them I had a lot of dental work needing doing.’ She had seen the piece in the newspaper and had watched the television. Mrs Annie Nuttall had been found seriously injured, and the police wanted to talk to her husband. Sal knew she should get the police, yet she didn’t dare. If he got bail, if they couldn’t prove anything – would she get the same treatment as Annie? He had to decide for himself to go. Sal didn’t want to suffer the beating that might result from a direct attempt at eviction. She’d just have to give him a bit of a push.
‘Any breakfast?’ he asked.
‘No idea. Go and look for yourself.’
‘You’d have made my breakfast a few weeks ago,’ he complained.
‘Happen I was still daft a few weeks ago.’ Loneliness, she decided, was emphasized all the more when the wrong person turned up. The most isolating condition on earth was probably that of a person locked into a bad marriage. She thanked God that Jimmy had never left his wife until now. Husbands, like cars, should be test-driven. She wanted her life back.
‘How long are you staying here?’ she asked, finally turning from the television to gaze at him. She couldn’t tell him that his kids were with Lisa. If he wanted to go into the office in the middle of the night, that was OK by her. But he must not learn about his children. They were staying with the daughter in that little wooden house, and he wouldn’t go near that unless she told him. Jimmy had lost the plot. His eyes weren’t right. He was jumpy, he looked even shiftier than usual, and his wife was in the hospital. ‘Jimmy, I can’t carry on.’
‘Has it been on the news?’ he asked.
Sal nodded.
‘It wasn’t me,’ he said. ‘I found her like that. I went for some of my stuff, and Annie was lying on the floor with her face all bloody.’
It was never him, Sal concluded. It wasn’t him who’d acquired the gun, wasn’t him who’d half-killed his wife. The whole world was guilty; he was the sole innocent member of the human race. ‘I am – what’s the word? Harbouring. I am harbouring you, and that’s a crime in itself.’
‘Not if I’m not guilty.’
‘Maybe. But they’re looking for you, so I should phone them, shouldn’t I? The longer I leave it, the more trouble I’m in. They’ve half a dozen forces out looking for you. I’m surprised they haven’t brought the army in.’ She should stop digging, or he might well push her into a hole of her own making and would fill up said hole in a trice. Knowing that she ought to shut up, Sal clamped her lips together tightly. What if he kept her here? Nobody would find her till hell had frozen over. Oh, God, she should have gone to the police station.
He walked round the sofa and stood between her and her beloved plasma TV, his arms folded tightly across his chest. ‘I never touched her, Sal.’
‘So you said.’ She could not keep her mouth shut, and she cursed herself inwardly. ‘If that’s the case, why don’t you go to the police and tell them you found her like that?’
He hesitated for a fraction of a second. ‘See, there’s the burglaries. Some of the lads under me installed several alarms, but I was the gaffer. I don’t know which one of them robbed those people, but it—’
‘It wasn’t you.’ She had noticed the pause before the explanation.
‘That’s right.’
‘Well, it’s up to you, Jimmy. I know I have to keep my mouth shut, because I’m frightened of you.’ There, it was said. ‘I’m afraid you might go berserk if I grass you up. But they’re looking.’
‘Nobody comes out here.’
Sal shivered because that was the truth. The gas and electricity men visited every few months, but no one else called. She was off the beaten path, so her postman was glad that she seldom got mail. ‘They’ll find you.’
‘How?’
She shrugged. ‘They will. They just do, don’t they?’
‘Not always. If folk keep their mouths shut, I might be all right.’
‘Then you’d best stop away from Weaver’s Warp, because that van of yours might be seen. You could be seen. They’re all over the shop looking for you.’
‘Sal, you haven’t said anything to the Compton-Milnes, have you?’
She pursed her lips before speaking. ‘Look, what do you take me for – a bloody duck egg? Why would I talk to them about you? And, if I had talked to them, why aren’t the police swarming all over these fields? Sometimes, I wonder whether you’ve sent your brain to Johnson’s for dry-cleaning. Jimmy, I’ve said nothing and I will say nothing. I am already an accessory after the whatever, aren’t I?’
‘I never touched her. I never owned a gun.’
‘Right.’
‘Do you believe me?’
‘Yes.’ She didn’t believe a single word that came out of his mouth, but she had to play it his way. Annie was getting better; his next target could end up on a slab with a ticket tied to one of its big toes. ‘On my own life, I swear I won’t grass on you. OK?’
‘Thanks.’
‘Put the kettle on,’ she said. ‘And I could murder a bacon butty.’
He hesitated for a split second. ‘Brown sauce or ketchup?’ he asked.
‘Brown, ta. And sweeteners instead of sugar.’
On the third day, Sheila visited Gus in hospital.
She found him sitting up in bed, no drips or wires, no machinery in the room, nothing complicated. It was a pleasant place, apparently clean, with en-suite bathroom, a large TV and a view across large gardens and a lake. What a silly person she was. After his last visit to her house, she had almost known that she would not see him again – so much for female intuition.
She placed a package on his bedside cabinet. ‘Towels, pyjamas and a few other bits and pieces,’ she told him. ‘All boiled and disinfected and wrapped as you asked. How are you?’
‘I am doing quite well at the moment,’ he replied.
At the moment. She wondered what that meant, but decided that he would speak when he was ready. He was, as usual, more interested in clinical matters. He made her rub gel into her hands before sitting down, advised her not to touch any surfaces in the room or on her way out of the building, and begged her to buy some gel to take home. ‘It’s everywhere now, you see,’ he explained. ‘Go to the chemist and buy this one. I had a small part to play in its manufacture.’
‘Right.’ She folded her hands in her lap and sat as still as possible.
‘The situation should all have been remedied, or at least curtailed long ago,’ he said angrily. ‘If surgeons would listen, if health authorities would stop doling out cleaning contracts to the great unwashed, if . . .’ He ran out of steam.
‘If pigs could fly?’ she suggested.
He almost smiled. ‘Quite. Months before it all got out of hand, I advised the government, but would they listen? No. They happily spend millions on bombs to drop in a totally illegal war and leave their own citizens to sit and watch while the flesh falls away from their bones.’
Sheila wondered whether he had a temperature, because he was very animated, so she decided to allow him a rest by contributing to the conversation. ‘I remember my mother telling me about when she worked in the infirmary,’ she said. ‘The surgeons, nurses and cleaners were all members of staff. It wasn’t unknown for them to pass the time of day in a corridor. They had loyalty, Gus. Mam was a cleaner. I remember she used to stink of carbolic and pine disinfectant when she came home, but the wards were clean. She took pride, you see. Just as much pride as the surgeons did.’
He nodded. Here was someone who agreed with him – yet another who knew some of the facts. But anecdotal matters were of no interest to the powers in London – people were dying because hospitals were filthy.
‘At least this place is clean,’ she said.
Gus tutted. ‘No, my dear. This place is unlikely to be truly clean. Remember the footballer’s wife
who almost died after a procedure in a private clinic? That was because of dirt, the kind of debris that is invisible to the naked eye. She contracted MRSA. Nowhere is clean. The microbes are in our houses because we have brought them home with us. They are in the curtains around ward beds; they are on the surgeon’s hands. He is busy, he forgets to gel, or something on his cuff makes a short journey south while he’s on his rounds and – whoops! Another patient dies.’
The visitor shivered. ‘You’d better get out of here as soon as possible, then,’ she said.
He agreed and asked her to prepare a room for him. ‘Am I imposing?’ he asked.
Was he imposing? Almost overcome by joy, she told him that she could prepare a room and that he was not imposing.
‘I am, of course, still in New Zealand.’
‘How’s the weather down there?’ she asked.
‘Wintry,’ was the terse reply. He went on to instruct her in minute detail of the preparation required. It would take a while to prepare his ultra-clean environment, and he apologized for that. ‘I have a wound,’ he said. ‘And I need to be careful.’
‘Yes, of course. I understand.’
‘Good,’ he said.
According to Gus, anyone with the slightest cut on a finger was in jeopardy. She remembered something he had prepared for The Lancet. It had been entitled ‘No Hiding Place’. Was he right when he said there was no need for terrorism because biological warfare was already under way? Or was he that special kind of crackers that happened only to people of superior intellect?
‘I brought your laptop, the one you keep at my house. Are you going to disinfect it?’
That half-smile reappeared. ‘Sheila, even I have my limits.’
She left and hurried home to get on with the sterilization of her second largest bedroom. It was going to be a big job, so she thanked God that schools had closed for the summer. There were cleaning materials to buy, and her washing machine would be on a boil programme for some time to come. It was worth it. At last she understood where Gus’s place was in her life. He was the brother she had never had. Until now.
Parallel Life Page 20
