Dust and Desire (35 page)

By a coincidence that I wasn’t too happy about, the exhibition was in a place called the Spitz Gallery, on Commercial Road, part of Spitalfields Market. It seemed a completely different place to the one I had left just over a week before, although I noticed the police cordon around the Elegant House was still in effect.

Neville greeted me warmly – there were only a handful of other guests so far – and we talked. The tabloids loved the story of my escapades and had come back for seconds and thirds. The hospital had needed to put security on my ward to prevent hacks trying to take pictures of me and offering me huge sums of money for my side of the events. The money would have been good, but I’d have rather chewed my own face off than pocket a penny of it. I just wanted to forget. I wanted anything and everything associated with the last few weeks scoured from my head, like a stain scrubbed from a sink. In time, I thought it might happen, but on every occasion I imagined this, Gemma Blythe’s impaled head would swim out of my thoughts and give me a smile with its greasy, cherry-coloured, corrugated mouth.

‘What’s going on here, then?’ I asked Neville. ‘You gone all Tate Gallery on me?’

‘Remember that night,’ he said, ‘when I found you licking the pavement in Archway? After I packed you off to hospital, I went back to the squat just in time for the mother and father of all barnies to kick off. There were crusties chucking stones at the police, and the police piling in with horses and shields and batons. Pure theatre, it was. I must have shot fifteen rolls. Anyway, a couple of galleries saw my pictures in the papers and one thing led to another, and here you go.’ He was smiling like the Joker with wind. ‘I’m up for an award next week. For photo-journalism. News Picture of the Year. Editor of the
Independent
asked me to go to Syria.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I said fuck off. I said “
You
go to Syria”.’

I had a couple of glasses of wine and felt myself slowly relaxing. It had felt for a while as though I might never know what relaxation felt like again. It seemed the past fortnight had seen me only in different postures of stress and pain. More guests arrived. A couple of them looked at me as if I was someone who shouldn’t really be there, but nobody said anything. I wouldn’t say anything to a man who had a foot-long scar on his face, either.

I decided to have a look at the pictures and get home to bed before a real crowd formed. I didn’t want to risk being jostled. Enough people had arrived and were milling in what was quite a small space to have me sweating up already. I decided I would get out of the city as soon as I had mended sufficiently. I needed some time off, time to mend properly, and try to deal with the upset of losing Melanie. A quiet coastline and a rented caravan. Me and Mengele and a bottle of vodka. A bit of fishing. A lot of sleep.

All of the photographs were in matt black and white. Some of them had been manipulated in the darkroom to give the sky a more forbidding look. The physicality spilling out of the images was impressive, and the inherent threat of violence oppressive. The heat and the smoke and the noise of the throng around me was already getting to be too much. I thrashed about, trying to see Neville in order to say goodbye, but he was lost among such numbers.

I shambled through the crowd on my crutches, towards the exit, and found myself having to take a detour past another wall decked with pictures. I said no as politely as I could to a woman with a wine bottle, and twisted violently aside when it looked as though she was determined to freshen my glass anyway.

That put me just an inch away from the photograph. In the foreground, a lone police helmet. In front of him, a dozen baying protestors in grungy clothing, all dreadlocks, beards and piercings. A girl was standing off to the side of the main pack, flipping the finger at the police. She wore a cropped top bearing the number 69. A bolt of silver gleamed in her navel. She wore torn hipsters and trainers. The noise and heat were suddenly sucked away down a long corridor that I doubted I’d be able to find my way out of for a long time.

‘Sarah,’ I said, as she disintegrated before my eyes. ‘Sarah, I found you.’

DO NOT RESUSCITATE

T
here’s a monster in St Josephine’s hospital, Paddington, by all accounts. I haven’t been back there since Sarah’s birth, but I know Jen, one of the midwives. Her ex, Graham, and I sometimes took in a football match at Craven Cottage back when Fulham were flailing around the third division and the crowd could be counted in the tens. But what can you do? It’s a mate. It’s football. After a fashion. You go to be nice, to fit in. You go because to not go leads you back to a corner of a room where things that ought to remain still continue to flex and twitch like a spider sensing dinner. So we’d watch Fulham get tonked by Torquay or Mansfield or Northampton or whatever small fish was finning around the depths of the English football league back then, and at full time we’d have a pint or two at the Golden Lion on the Fulham High Street before heading back to their pad in Barnes for a proper homemade curry that Jen and my wife – my girlfriend at the time – Rebecca, would have been crafting all afternoon while they drank cava and listened to 80s music. I quite miss that. The curry, I mean. Not the football.

After Jen and Graham split up – this would have been back in the early Noughties (he wanted children, she didn’t) – she fell into the rabbit hole of work and didn’t resurface for what felt like years. Friends took her out for drinks and dinner, but she found it difficult to make connections that had come so easily previously. She felt like a potential source of disappointment to everyone she met. Nobody matched up to Graham, with whom she’d felt a special, rare compatibility shattered only because of their differing bloodline desires. Our friendship kind of petered out after that, partly because they were in Barnes – diametrically opposite to our first London flat in Wood Green – but more importantly because Becks and I were on the cusp of committing to each other, an acknowledgment that this was really it and we didn’t want to feel jinxed in any way.

I met Jen on a cold February afternoon. Wind was thrusting up Praed Street like a fist, making all bow before it. I was sitting in a coffee shop watching these comma men and women and wondering how many of them were monsters, or had been monstrous. Or were capable of monstrosity. The things we’d do if we could get away with it. What divides us? What prevents those who merely entertain the dark thoughts from those who make them concrete? Are we any less monstrous for having those thoughts in the first place? I touched the scar on my cheek, only just healing properly two months on, and tried to not think about the monster who had delivered it. I really needed a break from the monsters.

* * *

Jen came in like a piece of that wind torn off at the edge, her hand fretting at her hair though it was so short it remained unspoilt by the weather. She was wearing long brown suede boots over faded jeans, a white blouse and a short tan leather jacket. I kissed her cheek and squeezed her shoulder. She looked nice. The short hair and the high cheekbones were as I remembered. She seemed hunted, though that might just have been the gale, or my imagination. Everyone I meet doing this job seems to wear a version of that look. The lost, the desperate, the last-gaspers. I’m sure I wear it myself half the time. I thought to myself,
she’s in her early forties now.
The clock was ticking and she didn’t even hear it. She had put it under the pillow. She had turned it to face the wall.

‘Sounds like a police matter,’ I managed to say, through my tightening throat, over my squirming guts, once she’d given me the gist of it. ‘I can give you the number of a pukka guy at New Scotland Yard. Name of Ian Mawker. I say “pukka”, but he has all the charm of an undescended testicle. He’s tenacious though, and he’ll look into it.’

‘I’m asking
you
, Joel,’ she said, and I heard the fracture in her voice. It was the sound of someone who has been tightrope-walking over an abyss for too long. ‘It’s just a suspicion of mine and I haven’t mentioned it to anybody at work yet. I can’t go to the police.’

‘Why not?’

‘Because–’ She checked in her bag for something that was not there. She closed her eyes and worms of moisture glistened at the join. Agony trembled just beneath the skin. ‘Because I’m involved with the guy I think is doing this.’

Doing this.
You really don’t want to know. Suffice to say there every department of a hospital that poses the risk of death: A&E, for example. Oncology. Neonatal. In a way that, say, ophthalmology doesn’t. These substations are where the bodies – or the parts of bodies – end up prior to their delivery to the morgue, or the incinerator. Jen was involved with a guy called Renfrew who was a hospital porter. Part of his job description involved the transferral of dead matter – bodies, limbs, stillbirths, what-have-you – from ward to morgue or incinerator depending on the what and the why. Only, this matter was not arriving, or not all of it was. He was saving titbits and taking them home with him, or so Jen believed.

‘You see him do this?’ I asked.

‘No,’ she said. ‘But in the delivery rooms things were going missing. Placentae. Blood bags. A child, almost, once.’

‘A child?’

‘Yes. You might have read about it in the news. Gael Miller. The security doors failed. Power loss. Nobody knows how or why, but while the power was out – there wasn’t that big a panic in the delivery rooms because it wasn’t hugely busy and we had back up – someone took a baby. But whoever did it must have been disturbed, because Gael was found an hour later in the rubbish bin of the gents toilets.’

‘It wasn’t just an opportunist thing? A freak off the street?’

‘No. I mean yes, it was opportunist. But it wasn’t an outsider. How much of a coincidence would it be for a chancer to be lurking around the doors at the exact time the power knocked off?’

‘It could have been set up. Someone could have seen to it that the power was cut.’

‘No. There was no sabotage involved. It was a genuine failure. But someone took advantage of it. Someone waiting for the chance.’

‘Your man.’

‘I think so.’

‘So the police must have been involved there.’

‘Yes, but they didn’t make any arrests. Like you, they reckoned it was an opportunist and made most of their enquiries outside of the hospital.’

‘What about the other departments? Paediatrics? A&E? Gynaecology? Anything going on there?’

‘Stuff is vanishing all over the place.’

‘Stuff. What kind of stuff, exactly?’

She sighed, closed her eyes, steepled her fingers and rested her forehead against them. ‘Little pieces of children,’ she said. I stared at her. My coffee had gone cold. Hers too. I wanted something much stronger. I thought about what I was going to ask her for quite a while, weighing up the tact of it, wondering if it was too upsetting. And then I went ahead and asked her anyway.

‘This guy. This Renfrew. You’re still seeing him?’

She went grey, as if my asking her had somehow solidified the horror of it in her mind. She nodded quickly, eyes closed, lips clamped. ‘I don’t want to lose my job. I don’t want to go to prison because of him. They’ll think I’m complicit, won’t they?’

‘Tell me about him.’

* * *

Carl Renfrew. Born without his left arm. Somehow he’d gone on to become a black belt in taekwondo. I was mulling over that so much that I almost missed out on the rest of it.

She’d fallen for him after she heard he’d rescued a kitten from the canal and shaken the water from its lungs, massaged it back to life. Though she worked in midwifery, there was, she said, little to no tenderness in her workmates. That might well be a failing in her, she admitted, a lack of empathy or a tendency to be overcritical. But she felt what she felt. The kitten episode turned her head. She found that Carl could gee her up if she’d had a bad day. He could draw a smile from her when she was broadsided by tragedy, a death in the delivery room. He was simple – in the best sense of the word – uncluttered, undemanding, and unexpected. This last she’d thought was an advantage, at first. She liked being surprised by him. He might reel off a line from an obscure Nicaraguan poet he liked, or take her to the zoo one day to see the peccary he had adopted, or make her a beautiful bouillabaisse from scratch, delighting her with his one-handed knife skills. If he could chop an onion like that, with just five fingers, imagine…

But then the simple things about him grew to be less endearing, more unsettling. He would switch off in the middle of a meal and she would have to endure silence for ten minutes or more until he suddenly snapped back, sometimes finishing off the sentence at the exact spot he’d drifted away from earlier. She would catch him endlessly sharpening a cook’s knife on a whetstone with a faraway look in his eyes, and at such times she would fear for his safety, and her own. When he kissed her, sometimes, she said she felt as though he was tasting her.

She told him she needed some time to herself, that she didn’t feel ready to commit to a long-term relationship; her work involved hard, long hours and she couldn’t reciprocate the effort he was devoting. She had been scared beyond all reason when she told him this – it hit her like a lorry – and she knew in the asking for it that she didn’t want a little time to think, she meant to drive a stake into the heart of whatever it was they had.