Dust and Desire (21 page)

‘Unlucky year,’ he admitted. ‘I wasn’t aware.’

‘Did you know Gemma? Or was she before your time, too?’

His eyes widened. ‘
You
knew Gemma?’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We were an item for a while.’

‘I’m sorry,’ he said, and the hairs at the back of my neck started to prickle.

I said, ‘It wasn’t that bad a relationship.’

He half-laughed again, as before, searching my face as if for permission to do so. He started shaking his head slightly, like a foreigner who isn’t quite following the thread of a conversation. He cleared his throat and stared at his empty teacup. ‘Tell me you know.’

‘Know what?’ I said.

‘Shit,’ he said, and carried on talking, but I didn’t listen for a while because I was still shocked at hearing a headmaster come out with a word like that. I finally zoned back to hear: ‘… why she committed suicide. She had a baby to support. Oh, God, it wasn’t…’

‘No,’ I said. ‘It wasn’t mine.’

The baby was partly the reason I’d called it a day on our relationship. I was too immature to take on a woman and her child. I thought that leaving her would make it easier in the long run. It was certainly easier for me. There was no way I could possibly have known that she’d crack, as she hadn’t come across as one of life’s capitulators. Turned out that she killed herself, a couple of years later.

I felt exhausted all of a sudden, fed up with the musty old documents and depressed about my pending drive back to Liverpool. I wanted to be in London, teasing the cat and sitting with Melanie on her big sofa, stroking her ankles. But then part of me railed against that, throwing up images of Gemma, impossible images of her dangling from a flex in a cold room while her kid cried over a congealed plate of food in front of a TV that wasn’t working. Nobody had told me about her death – but then nobody knew me. We’d had what, six months together? Hardly enough for someone to feel combined with another, but obviously enough for her. I remember her pleading with me to think about it, to change my mind, but all I could think of was the terror of responsibility.

‘I’ve seen enough, I think.’

Banbury stood up and walked to the door. ‘I hope you found what you needed.’

‘More than enough,’ I said, and looked away. ‘Sorry for coming on like an arsehole, earlier,’ I added. ‘I’m desperate to get hold of this bastard.’

‘Yes, well…’ Banbury said.

‘The photograph,’ I said. ‘Can I have it?’

Jeremy was now trying to pick a hole in the grouting between the wall tiles. Banbury growled at him to get into his office. As he did so, Jeremy turned to me and mimed a wank. Outside, the bell had gone for the afternoon’s classes to begin, so the playground was empty. I walked through the swirling crisp packets, the bubblegum and the spittle to the main gates. Someone had written the words
Your a fuccking bellend
on the car windscreen, in indelible pen. I didn’t disagree.

13

I
sat in the visitors’ car park at Summerhead Hospital, listening to the tick of the Merc’s cooling engine, and studying that photograph for maybe ten minutes while everything outside its white border shrank away, turned dim, diminished. Including myself.

I stared so intently at her face that I thought I may have somehow affected the pearl surface of the paper, bruised it, worn it away slightly. Aside from the occasional memory – the bubble unlocking itself from the muddy depths of my mind and rising, unbidden, to the surface – I had not seen that face for almost twenty years. But, as the real world impinged again in the nearby sound of tyres on gravel, I saw that the photograph was still fine but for a few creases and a minute tear in one corner. It was me who was damaged. I had aged a little more, while she remained young and beautiful, and always would.

I put the photograph in the glove compartment and opened the car door. The vehicle that had just pulled up was a handsome, olive-coloured Stag. A middle-aged guy with silver power streaks in his hair got out, with a tan that made George Hamilton IV look peaky. His trophy wife followed him, quite a bit younger. Maybe she wasn’t his trophy wife, perhaps she was his trophy bit-on-the-side instead. Maybe they were going to visit his trophy wife in hospital. She was holding flowers and a smartly-wrapped box that might have contained chocolates. We all nodded at each other with flatline mouths, the kind of greeting that only ever happens in hospital car parks. I watched them leave the gravel and follow a white flagstone path up to the entrance to the psychiatric wing. Behind me, a great swathe of green stretched out to the edge of a small wood. A cricket pitch had been marked out on the grass, its wicket protected by lengths of carpet and a rope marching around its perimeter. The pavilion on the far side was boarded up for the winter: it looked pale and listless, as if it was made from the same stuff as the sky. To my left, the land fell gently away to a level, grassy area dotted with weeping willows. To the right of that, and behind the main hospital building, a steep hill carried a road up towards a lodge house and the hospital’s catering facilities: you could smell bleach and cabbage water drifting down. To my right, the road that I had followed through the hospital grounds ambled away through pleasant overhanging trees and squares of light green, that looked like the dry tablets in a box of watercolour paints. Birds tossed chirrups to each other through the soft Cheshire air. A fresh wind rustled the few leaves that were left on the trees, then rolled across the meadows beyond the hospital grounds, creating hypnotic currents through the tall grass.

All in all, a splendid place to be if you were seriously fucked in the head.

I followed the same path the trophy couple had taken, and pushed through a couple of heavy glass-and-brass doors into a faux-marble interior that was dark and cold and smelled antiseptic. That description went for the receptionist too: a starchy hen in a tweed suit and one of those white blowsy blouses with about an acre of soft collar that looks like a meringue gone wrong.

I slipped on a pair of reading glasses that cost a couple of quid from Boots, and went over to her, mussing up my hair and trying to look agitated. The receptionist was signing some stubby book of chits for a guy in royal-blue overalls, who was chewing gum and absently rolling the end of a pencil in his earhole. He was telling her about his day at the races, and she was either ignoring him with the effortless panache of the professionally aloof or she was stone deaf.

‘…came in at 10-1, can you believe that? I put a tenner on it, just to show off to her really, like you do, but I didn’t in a million years think it would romp home like that. I only picked it because its name was like hers, only a bit different:
Tarte aux Pommes
. Her name’s Pam, you see?’

I waited impatiently for him to shut up and for her to finish signing the receipts. I rubbed my hair some more, and shuffled my feet and whispered to myself:
Shit, shit, oh, bother and blast.

Eventually she deigned to look up and ask me how she could help. I was knocked off balance slightly, because now I could see that she was really rather young, and not unattractive. I instantly ceased with the scatty-old-gent disguise and leaned against the counter.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m in a bit of a pickle.’

‘I’m sorry to hear it. What can I do?’

Christ, she was what? Twenty-two, twenty-three, going on fifty.
What’s with the tweed?
I wanted to scream at her, but maybe such an ascetic get-up had been forced upon her by her superiors. Maybe, back home, she showered off this dour exterior, poured herself into skin-tight leather and burned bras all night.

‘I had a friend here. He… left, unexpectedly, shall we say?’ I raised my eyebrows and looked around me, leaned in a little closer. I was pleased to see her mirroring my actions. A fragrance came off her, something sultry, almost feral. She was no member of the knitting circle, this one. She didn’t even know how to eat a Victoria sponge, let alone make one. I felt I should wink at her, just to let her know that I knew. ‘Name of Cullen. Gary Cullen.’

‘Ah,’ she said, and sat back in her chair. ‘We’ve been told not to talk about Mr Cullen until a full investigation has taken place.’

‘Yes, but I’ve driven all the way up here from London. He had a mistress and, well, she’s pregnant and only a few weeks away from giving birth. She’s not well.’ I was thinking wildly now, trying to come up with something that would get her to lean forward and create that little pocket of intimacy again. But I was losing her: the tweed was creeping across that gap that contained her heart. She actually fastened one of the buttons. ‘I just need to know if he had any visitors before he took off?’

‘I’m sorry, sir, but we’ve been given express orders not to talk to anyone about this.’

‘Not even a chap like me who would like to whisk you off for dinner later…’ I smiled, lifted the glasses, had a long look at the name tag pinned to her left breast, ‘…Sonya?’

I might as well have shown her a dead rat in a shoebox. I thought,
How come Mickey Rourke managed to land none of this crap in
Angel Heart
?

The shutters went down in her eyes. I was dismissed.

A couple of overweight security bods in matching black serge stepped out from behind an arch that would have led me deeper into the hospital. I pretended not to notice them, nodded my thanks to the receptionist and went back to the car park. I waited for the guards in their itchy suits to step outside, and then I ostentatiously revved the engine and steered the car on to the road that led to the exit. In the rear-view mirror, I saw one of them speaking into a walkie-talkie. By the time I got down to the exit, three more puddings in half-mast trousers were waiting for me. One stood in the road, preventing my progress; another one approached me revolving his finger. The other stood there with nothing to do, fighting the urge, no doubt, to rescue the yards of serge that his arse was slowly eating.

I did as No. 2 was requesting, and wound down the window. He sank his head into view. He was wearing the kind of buzzcut and clipped moustache that you find on hard bastards in edge-of-town pubs. I bet he wore Fred Perry shirts and owned a Staffordshire bull terrier. I bet his best mates were only ever referred to in abbreviated form. I bet he saw them only on Friday nights, because Saturday nights was quality time with his girlfriend.

‘Afternoon,’ I said. ‘Problem?’

He wouldn’t fix his eyes on mine, which I didn’t like one bit. In my experience, that’s shorthand for
I’m going to hurt you very badly
. He was polite, too, which only tweaked my watch-it monitor up an extra few notches. I kept my foot hovering over the accelerator, and left the handbrake off.

‘Could be,’ he said. ‘Would you mind switching the engine off, sir?’

He invested the word
sir
with the tenderness with which Harvey Keitel says
cunt
.

‘I’d rather not.’

He was nodding, as if to say to himself,
We’ve got a clever swine here
. ‘I hear you’ve been making enquiries about Gary Cullen,’ he said. ‘Could I ask why?’

‘You certainly could,’ I said.

Time passed. His astringent aftershave muscled its way through the off-side window and stuck its thumbs in my eyes. His mates were strolling after him, looking this way and that, affecting nonchalance while their knuckles turned white.

No. 2 stepped back slightly and played charades some more:
Get out of the car.

I smiled at him, quizzically.

‘Could you get out of the car?’ No please, no sir. Three bags full of edge and irritation. He was eager for violence now. He was bouncing lightly on the balls of his feet. I’ve seen that before, too. Right before the blood starts flying.

‘I could, yes.’

Instead, I floored it and traversed the fifty metres or so to the exit with No. 3 gurning against my windscreen. He slid off as I turned the Merc on to the main road, but his greasy expression of astonishment remained until I parked up in a lay-by, half a mile further along the road, and wiped it off with my handkerchief. I changed out of my Merrells into a pair of waterproof Caterpillar boots that I keep in the back of the car, and slid down the embankment to a barbed-wire fence. Once I’d picked my way gingerly through that, I found myself in a field populated by a piebald horse watching me in the good-natured way that horses do. I took my bearings and angled through the field. Ten minutes later I saw another fence, this one wooden, painted white. Beyond that I saw the tip of the pavilion. By the time I’d climbed over the fence, I could see the edge of the main hospital building.

I reached the rear of the pavilion and checked my watch. Night was due to start its shift here in a couple of hours. Till then I had the crude graffiti scrawled on the back of the pavilion to keep me company. That, the cold, and the grumble of hunger in my belly.

* * *

Becs came to me, during those cold two hours, after I had given up trying to break into the pavilion to see if there were any barrels of biscuits from the previous summer’s afternoon teas. She sat with me while I huddled against the back wall, under the red words SHAZ SUX COX, looking out over the field I had trudged across as it turned dusty, its white fence growing ghostly in the gloaming. I didn’t turn to look at her, in case that meant she would go away. I stared straight ahead and we talked in low voices, about Sarah, mostly, but also about Melanie. When it was time to get up and turn my thoughts to other things, I could remember nothing of our chat apart from the way she had said it would be all right, really, if I wanted to be with someone else:
Being with someone else doesn’t mean that you’re not with me as well.

The cricket pitch had meanwhile become a black hole separating me from the hospital. Lights now punched through the blocks of brown stone. I saw silhouettes in the windows, figures looking out at the screaming miles of darkness and seeing nothing but a mirror for their own minds. I wiped away my tears and began to walk the boundary that would take me along a line of tall, slender cypress trees, keeping me hidden until I reached the forecourt. As I got nearer, I checked for possible ways in to the building. The visitors’ car park was still being used, which was a relief: it would mean I probably wouldn’t be stopped if I was spotted wandering the wards. To bolster my chances, I snatched up a handful of irises from a flower bed at the edge of the car park, and returned to focusing my scrutiny on the doors. My best choice, I decided, was not one of the orthodox entrances that might be manned by security muppets looking out for me to return. Instead, my attention was drawn to the fire doors, and one in particular, since it seemed to provide unofficial access for admin slaves who needed to pop outside for a cigarette break. To facilitate ease of passage, a brick had been placed against the door to prevent it locking and thus stranding poor, freezing nicotine addicts on the wrong side of it. I watched while a group of three women shivered there and turned the air blue, then hurried back inside. As soon as they were gone, I rushed out of the shadows, across the road, and in through the same door. Wisps of smoke hung around the chilly interior, along with the dulling echoes of heels on stone steps, the chatter and laughter of colleagues well known to each other.