(1998) Denial (38 page)

‘Yes, look, I’m sorry to bounce in on you.’

‘I’m Caroline Nelson,’ she said, frostily, ‘duty coordinator. I have actually listened to your show.’

He couldn’t tell from her expression whether she liked it or not. But it was a good sign at least that she knew who he was. He smiled. ‘They’re always chucking the ratings figures at me. Nice to know that at least one of the listeners is genuine!’

‘I’m afraid I’m not a regular listener,’ she cautioned. ‘Just occasional.’ She glanced down at his shoes, then peered more closely at his face. ‘Are you all right? Have you had an accident?’

‘I’m fine. You’ll have to forgive my appearance, I’ve been looking for someone – and I fell into a ditch.’ He could see from her expression that the explanation had not gone down well, and he made a bid to retrieve the situation. ‘Look, I’m sure you are inundated with people, but I’m not a crank. Someone I know has gone missing and I don’t seem to be able to get the police to take this seriously. I’m going on air in three hours time and I could maybe say something useful if I was given guidance – and perhaps say something about your Helpline. I’m sure you need all the publicity you can get.’

‘Can I offer you some tea? Coffee? Squash?’

‘Tea, thank you.’

Caroline Nelson led him through into a small staff rest room, brought him tea in a plastic beaker, and sat down. She remained cold and wary. ‘We get two hundred and fifty thousand people reported missing each year, Dr Tennent. If we let people come and make reports in person we’d have a queue to the end of the high street and back ten times.’

‘I understand.’

‘I’m making an exception for you. Just promise me you won’t put out our address on the radio, only the phone number.’

Michael smiled. ‘I promise.’

‘Good.’ She thawed a fraction. ‘Now, tell me what on earth has happened to you.’

Michael told her the full story. When he had finished, instead of looking at him with sympathy, she looked at him testily. ‘You didn’t have a fight with her, Dr Tennent?’

‘No! Absolutely not.’

‘You’re sure about that?’

‘Of course. We – we had –’

‘You didn’t threaten her?’

‘Not in any way. We were having a warm, loving time.’

‘With no disrespect, that’s something a lot of men say.’

‘I’m not a wife beater. I don’t have a dark side.’

‘Even though you’ve come in here looking as though you’ve been in a pub brawl?’

She was starting to irritate him, and he had to make an
effort to remain cool. ‘I told you, I was retracing Amanda’s steps and fell into a ditch.’

She watched his face and said nothing.

Uncomfortable under her scrutiny, he stared out of the window. Two starlings sat on a television aerial. Amanda was somewhere out there, beyond that window. Where?
Oh, my darling, where are you?

‘You have to appreciate that we get men contacting us all the time, telling us their girlfriends or wives have gone missing, and the reason usually turns out that they had a fight and the woman ran off, terrified, either to a hotel or to a safe-house with friends.’

‘It was nothing like that. Absolutely nothing like that. We had a perfect, beautiful day, we were walking arm in arm. She went off to her niece’s birthday party and we were going to talk later. It was magical. We were two people in love. And it’s not just me she’s vanished from – she hasn’t turned up at work, she’s missed important business meetings. This is absolutely not like her. Her staff are extremely worried.’

‘You were in love. You are assuming she was.’

‘If she was faking it, she was a great actress.’

She drank some tea. ‘You barely know her. It’s quite possible she has a secret life that she’s keeping from you.’

Michael put down his cup and stood up, clenching his fists in anger and frustration. ‘Jesus!’ He looked at her. ‘What’s with this screwed-up world? I’ve told you, I’ve been through it all. Even if she does have a secret life that she’s keeping from me, she wouldn’t have kept it from her assistant. Lulu was her confidante. Amanda’s in trouble, she’s in really terrible trouble – God forbid, she may even be dead. Am I the only person in the whole sodding country who cares about her, and who’s trying to help her?’

Caroline Nelson raised her hands. ‘OK, please calm down! We’ll help.’

Michael turned away and watched the starlings again. ‘Thank you.’

‘Do you have a photograph of her?’

‘Several.’

‘We’ll make up a poster and circulate it, see if we can get some television stations to put out an announcement. All right?’

‘Anything,’ he said. ‘
Anything
. Thank you.’

‘If it’s any encouragement to you,’ she said, ‘the majority of missing persons turn up within thirty-two days.’

‘I can’t wait thirty-two days. I’ll be in a white tunic in my own clinic.’

She smiled, fleetingly, then looked serious once more. ‘I’m sure she’ll turn up. Over seventy-five per cent turn up within the first thirty-two days.’

‘And the other twenty-five per cent? What happens about them?’

She stared him back in the eye and said nothing.

Outside in the sun, Lara’s husband, Oliver, in a Homer Simpson apron, was prodding sausages on the barbecue. The rest of them were sitting at the wooden table in the shade of the giant willow; Alice aged two, Leonora, four, and Jake, almost six were all laughing at a joke. Lara was laughing too.

Happy. Cloudless sky, total stillness. Beyond the hedge an oceanic field of ripening wheat swayed away into the distance. Alice was still chortling after the others had stopped.

‘I’m in love,’ Amanda announced.

They all turned towards her, smiling warmly, urging her to go on, to tell them more.

‘I’m incredibly in love. I’ve never felt this way before, ever, I’ve found a man who –’

Her voice sounded strangely disembodied, as if she were eavesdropping on herself. Then, like a sharp focus pull, something changed. The sunlight was fading away, blotted up by the darkness.

Amanda became aware of the hard, lumpy mattress beneath her, and with it the fear returned as she opened her eyes into the horizonless darkness that was now her world.

She lay still, wondering what the time was. Was it night? Day? Morning? Afternoon? There must be a way to calculate the time, she thought, but how?

She badly needed to urinate.

Last time she had woken, she had aligned the mattress in the direction of her latrine bucket, and, stiff from lying
down, she crawled forward slowly, then halted as she heard a faint scratching sound.

Jesus. A rat?

Something touched her face, a mosquito or a midge, some insect, she slapped it hard, savagely, heard the slap echo around the chamber.

She reached the bucket, which stank of earlier urine. After relieving herself, she sponged her face and arms from the wash bucket. As she dried herself, standing up to stretch her legs, she felt a little more clear-headed.

And now she could feel, acutely, the silent presence of the two corpses in the next-door chamber. One was a woman; she hadn’t had the courage to check the other. A woman editor had gone missing a few weeks back; she’d been in the papers, on television, a pleasant-looking woman, with short brown hair, of about thirty. Was it her?

Had they all been kidnapped by some monster like Fred West or the man who skinned people in
Silence of the Lambs?

Then she stiffened as she thought she heard the scuff of a foot.

Her brain raced with a plan that had been forming earlier, that she would stand by the door next time he came in, and slip out in the darkness behind him.

Another option was to hit him when he came in, but what with? There was nothing here. A mattress, plastic buckets, paper plates, paper tray, plastic jug. Nothing heavy enough to bring a man down, not even a full plastic bucket would guarantee that.

Then, suddenly out of the darkness, came Michael’s voice. ‘Hallo, Amanda. How are you?’

She spun round in deep shock. ‘Michael?’

Silence.

‘Michael?’ she said again, afraid she had imagined it.

‘Hallo, Amanda, how are you?’

It was Michael. A cold, detached Michael; it was his voice, but it was as if some other personality was speaking it.

The room stank of urine. Messy thing, rolling around in its
own filth. This was disgraceful; it needed to be punished for the state of this room.

Thomas, brandishing a cattle prod, watched her through his goggles. Such clear green vision! He could see every reflex. She was standing with her back to the wall, staring in the wrong direction, staring at where he had been just a moment ago.

‘Take your clothes off, Amanda,’ he said, still mimicking Dr Michael Tennent’s voice.

‘Keep away from me.’

‘Would you like my choo-choo inside you?’

Even more nervous now. ‘Keep away from me.’ She raised her voice. ‘Michael, keep away!’

Silently, he took a step towards her, then another. ‘Where would you like me to begin hurting you, Amanda?’

‘I thought you loved me, Michael,’ she said, in a choking voice, and took a step forward from the wall, thinking she was moving away from him. But silently, on his trainer shoes, he stepped sideways until he was in front of her once more. And she did not realise it but she was looking right into his eyes.

With immense satisfaction he jabbed the cattle prod as hard as he dared into her stomach and fired the electrical charge.

The sudden, ferocious stabbing, winding pain, followed by a juddering that ripped through her body, sent her tumbling backwards against the wall with a gasp of shock and agony.

There was another fierce pain, this time in her chest. Her whole insides were pinched tight then sprang free, then pinched tight again, then sprang free again, as if she were plugged into an electrical socket that was being switched on and off. The pain moved to her thigh, then to her face, each time the agonising constriction, then release. Screaming again, arms protectively over her head, she rolled across the floor, trying to escape, crashed into a wall, barrelled through the buckets, begging him to stop. ‘Please!
Pleeeeaaaasssseeeee. I’ll do anything. Tell me what you want. Ooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwww.’

Then silence.

An eternity of silence. She lay still, waiting for the next pain. But it did not come.

A floodtide of nausea burst through her. She vomited.

Marj was on the line. She phoned in every week, without fail, hoping to get through to Michael, with yet another nugget she’d hauled out of the collective works of Jung or Freud to test out on him.

The small studio felt more cramped than ever tonight. He couldn’t get far enough away from the microphone, the damned foam bulb was in his face, angled aggressively towards him like some bird of prey that was about to peck out his eyes.

Chris Beamish, the producer, sat in the control room on the other side of the wide rectangle of soundproofed glass, watching him.
Why?
He never normally watched him, just screened the callers and left him to get on with it.

And behind Beamish, the studio technician, also bearded, was farting around with some Dexion shelving, which Michael was finding irritatingly distracting. The previous occupant of this studio had stuck about a dozen yellow Post-it notes to the console top and these were disturbing him too. He tried to avoid them but his eyes kept being drawn down to them to escape Beamish’s stare. ‘Virtual Reality?’ one said. ‘Artificial Life? If it looks like a duck, walks like a duck and swims like a duck, then it probably is a duck.’

Michael pressed the microphone switch and, trying not to sound too weary, said, ‘Good evening, Marj from Essex!’

‘Good evening, Dr Tennent. I wonder if you could enlighten me on Jung’s acausal connecting principle?’

‘Certainly, Marj, what’s bothering you about it?’ he said, a trifle facetiously, but this was lost on her.

‘Well, I’m not sure I understand it,’ she said, in her
deadpan voice. ‘I’m worried that events may be happening in my life for reasons I don’t understand.’

Michael looked at the clock on the wall: seven ten. Eighteen minutes before the commercial break. Time for Marj and one more caller. He would make his own announcement after that. This was a big subject Marj had bounced on him, and he was trying to think of a succinct sound-bite to cut through it. ‘Do you ever have coincidences, Marj?’

‘All the time.’

‘Jung believed in
meaningful coincidence
. I seem to remember he once said that coincidences were God’s calling cards.’

‘I like that!’ she said.

‘You’re aware of Jung’s
collective unconscious
theory, Marj?’

‘I won’t say I understand it but, yes, I am aware of it.’

‘Jung had several personal paranormal experiences, Marj. These confronted him with events that seemed inexplicable in terms of normal physical or psychological causes. Therefore he felt that normal causality was insufficient to explain these events and he began to term them
acausal
. Is that clear?’

‘Ermmm, no, not really. Didn’t he fall out with Freud over the nature of coincidence?’

Michael tried to bring the focus back to Marj’s own personal problems, but she held him pinned to the attitudes of Freud and Jung for the remainder of the session.

‘Hope that’s clarified it for you Marj,’ he said finally, killing her call with relief, glad to have muddled through that one, although from his producer’s bemused expression, he knew he hadn’t done brilliantly.

On the small computer screen to the side of his console he could see there were six callers waiting. They were listed by their first name and the area where they lived. If they had called previously, ‘Reg’ appeared in brackets beside their name, so Michael could welcome them back.

Top of the list now was a peculiar name. Nadama from
North London. Next, below her was Raj from Ealing. Then Ingrid from Notting Hill Gate, and Gareth from Ickenham.

He pressed the switch and said cheerily, ‘Hallo, Nadama from North London!’

Through his headphones, in a quavering, terrified voice, he heard Amanda. She said, ‘Michael?’