You Were Gone

by Tim Weaver

  ‘How has your day been?’ you’d say.

  ‘It’s better now you’re here.’

  You’d smile. ‘You old charmer, you.’

  I think you liked it when I said those things, even though you made light of them. Sometimes I felt sure you were looking at me when I didn’t realize it. I’d turn and you’d look away, and every time you did, I felt myself drawn to you even more.

  Two weeks after I was discharged, I needed to see you again. I just needed to speak to you, to hear your voice and see your face, so I returned to the hospital. I went in and was prepared to wait for you outside the ward, for however long it took, but as it turned out, I only had to wait ten minutes. It was like you knew I was there, like we were connected somehow. You were returning from lunch, eating a tuna sandwich out of a carton, checking your phone.

  ‘Derryn,’ I said.

  You looked up from your mobile and it took a second for you to realize it was me. ‘Oh,’ you said, your mouth full. You looked slightly embarrassed. ‘Hello there.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘I’m uh … Yes, I’m good, thank you.’

  You looked up and down the corridor.

  ‘You’re not back already, are you?’ you asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, smiling.

  When I chose not to say anything else, you seemed to realize what I was driving at: I was here to see you. You finished what was in your mouth, and said, ‘Right.’ A pause. ‘Right, okay.’ A brief smile. ‘Well, it was nice to see you, anyway.’

  ‘I’ve got something for you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  I handed it to you, wrapped in plain brown paper.

  ‘Something to remember me by,’ I joked.

  You didn’t make eye contact this time and opened it in silence. I assumed it was because you were embarrassed. I wanted to tell you that you never have to be. I wanted to say, You never have to be embarrassed with me, Derryn. I’ll never make you feel small, ever. And I remember things. I remember things that are important.

  Like this.

  I just watched you as you opened it, and I thought about all the days on the ward with you. When we’d talked, it had been about books. Do you recall? We discovered we had a shared love of Eva Gainridge. You said your favourite book of hers was No One Can See the Crows at Night, which has always been my least favourite. I think Gainridge was finding her feet at the time. I don’t think it’s anywhere close to being her best work. But I never told you that. I just nodded, and smiled, and – when you asked me what I thought of the book – I said I admired it as a debut.

  ‘So which one of hers do you like best?’ you’d asked me.

  ‘The Man with the Wolf’s Head.’

  ‘Ah, the old favourite.’

  You’d said it with another smile, and I didn’t think much about it at the time, even in the immediate aftermath of leaving hospital, but – during our two weeks apart – it gradually started to come back to me; and, I’ll admit, it began to slightly bother me too. Did you mean that my choice was worth less than yours because it had been Gainridge’s most successful novel? Did you mean that, because The Man with the Wolf’s Head was studied and analysed the world over, and mentioned by academics in the same breath as The Catcher in the Rye and Lord of the Flies and To Kill a Mockingbird, it was somehow a less deserving choice? Would you have said the same thing to me if I’d chosen one of her less popular and less acclaimed novels?

  ‘Thank you.’

  I realized you’d unwrapped the gift. I’d got you a copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night – your favourite.

  ‘That’s the 1998 edition,’ I told you. ‘It’s very rare.’

  You smiled again, but it looked harder for you to form.

  ‘I didn’t mean to embarrass you,’ I said.

  ‘It’s very …’ You frowned. ‘Very kind, thank you.’

  I pointed to it. ‘There’s a message inside.’

  You tentatively opened the book and found the piece of paper I’d placed a couple of pages in. I watched you read it back, knowing exactly what I’d written.

  Derryn: Thank you for our special time together x.

  You smiled again. ‘Uh, right. Well, thank you.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  ‘I’d better be going.’

  ‘Oh. Okay.’

  ‘Thank you,’ you repeated, and held up the book.

  I nodded, watching you buzz yourself into the ward, watching you through the glass panel of the door as you headed towards the nurses’ station, book in hand.

  But something was wrong, I could tell.

  You didn’t react how I thought you would.

  Now I needed to speak to you again and find out why.

  DAY FOUR

  * * *

  34

  I woke in my bed again – on top of it, fully dressed – but this time there was no sun, no smell of cooking, no noise from anywhere else in the house. There was just a weak grey light escaping through the curtains and the soft sound of rain at the window.

  Slowly, I hauled myself up.

  My head had stopped thumping, but I felt sore and unsteady, even with my feet pressed into the carpet and both hands planted on the mattress. Next to me, on the bedside cabinet, the clock now read seven fifty-eight in the morning. I tried to make sense of it, of everything that had happened, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t hear her in the house now. I couldn’t smell the meat or the potatoes or the vegetables. Her perfume wasn’t threaded through the air and she wasn’t calling me for lunch.

  I looked around the room, checking to see if anything was out of place, and then got to my feet and opened the wardrobe. It was full of clothes – but only mine. There was nothing belonging to the woman inside. It was exactly the same in the drawers. In the bathroom cabinet, there was my deodorant and aftershave, my razor, shaving cream, moisturizer I’d bought, aspirin, throat lozenges.

  On the floor next to the bed, I spotted my phone. It was face down, as if it had spilled out of my hands. Picking it up, I saw the battery icon was flashing red. It was out of power. I dug around for a charger and plugged it in, then moved out into the hallway. The doors to the office and spare room were now open.

  Dusty light spilled in from either side, pooling in the hallway ahead of me, and when I looked inside the rooms, I found them exactly as they always were, the office a mess, the spare bedroom set up for guests I rarely had. When I reached the living room, it was light despite the rain and the curtains had been pulled open, revealing a wet garden, plants swaying in the wind. The room smelled of a scented plug-in, of wooden floors and furniture.

  The table was empty, cleared of all the food that had been on it, of the plates and the knives and the forks. There was no present. No wrapping paper. No copy of No One Can See the Crows at Night. On the clock – the one with the triskelion for a face – it said it was Sunday 31 December.

  It wasn’t my birthday.

  I’d gone to see McMillan at 9 p.m. on 29 December; now it was 8 a.m. on the 31st. I’d lost almost a day and a half, save for a tiny sliver of time in the middle when I’d woken up and found the woman in my house. Or had I? Had she really been here? Had any of it happened? For a short moment, I felt a sense of relief. If it was a dream, that meant I wasn’t really sick – because she hadn’t been here, there was no meal, there was no moment when I’d allowed my conviction to wane and held her against me. There were no tears; none of it was real. If it was a dream, I could explain it all.

  Except it hadn’t felt like a dream.

  It had felt utterly real.

  From the bedroom, I heard a series of beeps and remembered my phone was on charge. There was enough battery now for missed call and text message alerts to have begun appearing. I discovered five voicemail messages.

  The first was from Erik McMillan.

  He’d called at 7.02 a.m. on 30 December – ten hours after I’d met him at St Augustine’s and right in the middle of my first blackout.

  ‘David, it�
�s Erik McMillan. I wanted to make sure you got home safely last night, and to implore you to accept my help. I don’t know how much you remember about what happened, but you passed out here at the hospital. I looked after you until you came round and offered to pay for a taxi to take you to Queen Elizabeth Hospital, but you refused, and I’m sad to say you ended up leaving here in an angry, confused and disorientated state.’ He sighed gently. ‘You need to seek help, David. Blacking out like you are – that’s not normal. It is, to be frank, entirely abnormal. If you won’t accept my help, please at least go to see your GP. I’m concerned you’re risking the safety of not just yourself, but others too.’

  The message ended.

  What the hell had happened to me?

  Could there be any truth in his account of how I got home? Had I really refused to go to A&E? I’d blacked out, that much was true, and now I couldn’t remember anything except when I’d woken up at home and found the woman in the house, cooking dinner, talking to me, crying for me. If it had all happened as I remembered it, where was the evidence the woman had ever been here? Where were her clothes and her toiletries? Where was she now?

  The next message was from Annabel, an hour after McMillan’s call. Listening to her voice gave me a momentary buzz, a shot of hope, some respite from the discord.

  ‘I just wanted to see how you were,’ she said. She was obviously driving, her voice a little distant and echoey inside the vehicle. ‘I also wanted to say that I’m sorry. All the stuff I read about you and that woman on FeedMe, the way she looked, I realized I must have sounded like I didn’t believe you when we spoke. But I do. I really, honestly do.’

  The third and fourth messages were both from newspaper journalists asking for a comment on the FeedMe story. I deleted them immediately.

  The fifth message had come through forty minutes before I woke up.

  ‘It’s DS Field. You’re going to want to hear what I have to say.’

  35

  Field wasn’t in the office, so I tried her mobile. As soon as she answered, I could hear traffic and the murmur of a police radio. She was in a car.

  ‘I’ve been trying to get hold of you since yesterday afternoon,’ she said. ‘Where have you been?’

  ‘Nowhere.’

  ‘You’ve been at home the whole time?’

  Her voice was hard, combative.

  ‘Mostly,’ I said, deliberately trying to keep it vague. But vague answers came with the same risk as the truth: I had no idea where any of it was taking me.

  ‘Where else have you been?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because it’s not particularly helpful when I can’t get hold of you. I asked you to remain contactable.’

  ‘You only left me one message.’

  ‘But we came to your house.’

  That stopped me dead. She and Kent came here. My car had been on the driveway. Lights had been on in the house. The curtains had been pulled. They would have known that I was home – they just would have thought I’d been refusing to answer. Did that make me guiltier in their eyes?

  ‘When did you come here?’

  ‘Yesterday afternoon and yesterday evening.’

  So she and Kent had driven to the house twice yesterday. That entire period – late afternoon, evening, the whole night until almost 8 a.m. – was a blank. I wondered if, rather than being unconscious, I just couldn’t remember what had happened. Was that possible? But then why would I remember that single hour or two when I’d woken up and the woman had been in the house, and then absolutely nothing either side of it? If I wasn’t willing to entertain the idea of it being a brain abnormality, a tumour, some syndrome that switched me off like a light, then I had to believe I’d passed out because McMillan had laced my coffee with something. But why? The only time it felt like I’d got close to making him remotely uncomfortable was when I’d started asking him about who had called him from the payphone in Plumstead, and that had happened before I’d even taken a sip. So had he drugged me for some other reason? Had he simply wanted me unconscious? What if something had happened to me in the black spaces either side of waking up? I felt dread start to pool.

  ‘Mr Raker?’

  ‘I was here the whole time,’ I told her.

  But maybe I wasn’t.

  ‘Then why didn’t you answer the door?’

  ‘I was feeling … I was …’

  I stopped. Ill. That was what Field wanted to hear. That would make her life a whole lot easier because it would help answer a whole bunch of questions. Me being sick played into the entire narrative concocted by Erik McMillan and the woman.

  ‘You were ill?’ she pressed.

  ‘No,’ I replied, too quickly, and wondered whether my denial might actually have made things worse. Just as rapidly, I added, ‘Just a little bit of a cold. I’ve managed to shake it off fairly quickly.’

  ‘Right.’

  I could tell she didn’t believe me, so I shifted things on: ‘What is it you wanted? You said you had something I needed to hear?’

  She didn’t respond and, from the front of the house, I heard a car pulling up. I went through to the kitchen. The Volvo had barely stopped before Field was getting out of the passenger side, followed by Kent on the driver’s side. Out of one of the back doors came a third person: a guy in his late thirties, smart in a tie and jacket. He was carrying a black bag.

  ‘So you’re home now?’ Field asked.

  It was too late to deny it.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good,’ she said, and a second later our eyes met through the kitchen window as she ended the call and started to make her way towards the house. Behind her, Kent was shrugging on a grey raincoat.

  Between them was the man in the tie and jacket.

  The closer he got, the more I could see of him, and what he had wrapped around his neck and shoulders: a stethoscope.

  After last night, I was starting to worry that everything was in my head.

  Now I was about to find out for sure.

  36

  ‘How often do you get headaches, David?’

  The doctor had introduced himself as Gregory Carson. He was good-looking, square-jawed and lightly tanned, with dark brown eyes I could see myself in. When he leaned in, I could smell deodorant on him, a faint scent like pine, and as I did, I pictured the deodorant I’d found in the bathroom that belonged to the woman, and the fact that it was no longer there; the fact that all evidence of her was missing.

  Removed, when I was unconscious.

  Or never there in the first place.

  ‘Once in a while?’ he said. ‘Once a month? Every day?’

  He had a southern Irish accent, which reminded me of Kennedy. As I thought of him, I thought of my parents’ old cottage in which he was staying. For the first time in a long while I actually wanted to go there, to be next to the sea, to seek solace in the silence and isolation of the house. I wanted to be anywhere but here.

  ‘David?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘But you get headaches regularly?’

  ‘At times of stress, I suppose.’

  ‘Are you stressed now?’

  He’d already shone a penlight into my eyes, but now he did it again. When he was done, I blinked and looked over to where Field and Kent were standing on the other side of the room, just blobs of yellow light for a second.

  ‘Well, I’ve got two police officers in my home,’ I replied, ‘and a woman pretending to be my dead wife – so, yes, it’s fair to say that I’m not feeling at my most relaxed at the moment.’

  Carson just nodded.

  ‘Have you suffered any more blackouts?’

  Yes. And this one lasted nearly thirty-five hours.

  ‘David?’ Carson prompted.

  ‘No,’ I lied.

  ‘No more blackouts?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘I think I’d remember.’

  He began fishing around in his bag for a blood p
ressure kit. There was silence in the room as he attached it to my arm, and when I looked at Field, she simply looked back, a hint of pity in her eyes. Kent had his head down and was busy typing on his mobile.

  ‘Have you ever suffered memory loss?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Ever been diagnosed with depression?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Post-traumatic stress?’

  ‘Three years ago, a doctor said I might be suffering from mild PTSD. I didn’t agree with him.’

  He checked the blood pressure gauge and then began removing the strap from my arm again. As he did, he took a fractional glance towards Field and Kent and I could see the remains of something in his expression.

  The first tremor of panic hit me.

  Does he know I’m lying about the blackout?

  ‘We’ve spoken to Dr McMillan,’ Field said.

  It was the first time she’d talked since entering the house.

  I turned to her. ‘What?’

  ‘We spoke to Dr McMillan on the phone yesterday morning. He said you went to see him on Friday evening at St Augustine’s.’ She let me digest that, and then continued: ‘He said you blacked out, and then – when you woke up – you were extremely confused. He said he tried to help you, tried to pay for a taxi –’

  ‘McMillan’s a liar.’

  ‘Are you saying you didn’t black out?’

  ‘He drugged me.’

  Kent finally looked up from his phone, a half-smile tracing the edge of his lips, as if he thought I might be joking. By contrast, Field was absolutely still: no reaction.

  ‘He drugged you?’ Kent smirked.

  ‘He put something in my coffee.’

  ‘So you did black out?’ Field asked.

  I looked at her. ‘Yes.’

  ‘Which means you lied to us just now.’

  ‘I lied, because I knew I’d get this exact reaction.’

  ‘And what reaction’s that?’

  ‘Don’t play me. You know exactly what I’m talking about. Anything I say gets treated with immediate suspicion. Anything McMillan says – or this woman – is taken as cast-iron fact.’

  ‘That’s not true.’