Mischief (30 page)

Robbie and I sleep in the marital bedroom I once shared with Ted. Robbie moved in with me when we married. We did try to sell the house, though no buyers turned up, there being a current threat of compulsory purchase in this neck of North London. We didn’t try very hard, I must admit. It was a large, convenient, suburban home and had many happy memories for me, and Robbie said Ted would be rather pleased that I had someone to look after me. I’d accepted that it must be difficult for the twins, in their late adolescence, to have a stepfather sleeping in the bedroom where so recently I’d lain with their father – and only now did it occur to me that Ted might find it difficult too. Perhaps that was why he had spoken to me so harshly in the night? We’d had the room redecorated, bought a new king-size double bed and had the original forest green carpet replaced by pale. The twins had even admired the new décor.

Maude....  A new fresh start, Mum. Can’t be bad.

Martha....  Out with the old, in with the new!

Maude and Martha are identical, blonde and beautiful, and thank God now away at college. They were here at home for the Christmas holidays when Ted so suddenly died, when the clot crept up like a thief in the night to steal away his life – at least I think that’s what happened. The death certificate had certainly said so. Cynara hinted otherwise at lunch today, but then she was out to upset me, and succeeded. I shouldn’t have had lunch with her, but I’d had a sudden fit of paranoia which I thought Cynara might be in a position to relieve. The ‘leave me alone’ dream must have really disturbed me.

I replayed this morning’s scene in my mind. We’d had vigorous sex earlier. The dream had woken me. After a time I’d gone back to sleep, conscious of Robbie’s steady breathing beside me, his reassuring warmth, my own body – if not my mind – well satiated and duly grateful. Robbie stirred, woke, swung his legs over the side of the bed to get up. And then he stopped. There was a lump of wet mud – about the size of the heel of a man’s shoe – on our pale green bedroom carpet.

‘What’s this?’ Robbie asked. He bent down and sniffed at the mud which seemed unnecessary, but then he is a scientist, the kind of man to whom detail and order is important, a left-brainer, rational and dutiful. (I’m a right-brainer, a fuzzy thinker, muddled but creative.) I’d have just chucked it out and thought no more about it, but anything out of place or unusual and Robbie was on to it like a terrier.

‘Ted must have brought it in with him last night,’ I said, without thinking. ‘It was raining in the dark wood.’

‘Ted is dead,’ Robbie said flatly, not in any spirit of protest, or reproach, but with what seemed a kind of quiet satisfaction. On the few occasions Robbie neglects me and I sleep longer and undisturbed I have fewer nightmares. Well, nothing is for nothing. Bad dreams, good sex, one or the other. I know which I choose.

‘I know that,’ I said. ‘I’m being silly. But Ted was so real in last night’s dream it gets hard to remember.’

‘Did he say anything?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘He never does.’ I don’t know why I lied. Except – loyalty to my one-time husband and our life together still lingering, I didn’t want Robbie to see Ted in bad light.

‘Would you say the dreams are getting stronger?’ he’d asked.

‘I don’t know about strong,’ I said, ‘but they used to be quite nice. Now they’re not.’ And it was true. In the days of my celibacy, before I hooked up with Robbie I’d rather liked the dreams. I would go to sleep hoping to catch a glimpse of Ted battling with thickets and thorns in the dark wood, struggling towards the light, knowing that one day he’d finally be through to the other side and would turn and smile at me. Waking, I’d feel comforted and reassured. Make of that what you will. But now the Ted dreams came thick and fast and registered more as nightmare. Ted seemed annoyed by my presence, prowling round a clearing like a trapped animal rather than journeying on. ‘
Leave me alone!
’ – the only words he’d said to me since he died. Well I wasn’t going to tell Robbie that, was I?

Then Robbie did something that startled me. He took his Samsung Singularity S20 – ever the brightest, best and newest, as provided by Portal Inc – from the bedside table and snapped away at the small slab of mud on the carpet. He had the phone in 3D mode.

Then he ran downstairs, still naked, his half-erect penis waving ahead like a flag, came back with a freezer bag from the kitchen drawer, got my tweezers from the bathroom, and used them to place the slab of mud inside the bag, which he then put into his laptop case. It occurred to me he was treating the mud as he would some valuable piece of evidence from, say, a murder scene.

I don’t know why this so disturbed me but it did. I continued pulling on my leggings as if his behaviour was nothing untoward, but my flesh and my mind had gone oddly and suddenly cold and cautious. Perhaps Robbie was a little mad? I knew so little about him. My body not my brain was doing the warning. My conscious mind could do little else these days but shrug and accept and feel good. Yet my body was telling me something somewhere was terribly, terribly wrong. Well, first rule when danger’s detected: keep calm, act normal, carry on as usual. Second rule: give yourself time to think. Third rule: escape while the going’s good. So that’s what I did.

‘Tell you what, Philly,’ he said to me when he came back into the bedroom. ‘These dreams of yours are beginning to be a real problem. Don’t you think you should see someone?’

‘Like who?’ I asked. I am not a talking cure kind of person, which he should surely know by now. The grief therapist was an aberration. There is no such thing as ‘closure’.

‘Like whom,’ he corrected. As I said, he is a left-brainer. ‘Like my psychologist colleague Dr Ben Marcus. I suggest you drop by Portal Inc and see him one day soon. I do a lot of work with him. His speciality is the connection between post-traumatic stress syndrome and the dreaming self.’

‘Oh I see,’ I said. ‘The trauma being your predecessor Ted’s death.’

‘Exactly,’ he said. ‘Ben’s brilliant, out of this world. A sixer. Known him since Harvard.’

A sixer; in Robbie’s terminology someone with an IQ of between 140 and 145. His being 141. (I, untested, had to make do with an estimated 134, but Robbie said that was pretty high for a woman.) You have to be really very clever to get into the Harvard neurology programme. Robbie’s current area of research is into intellectual impairment in women affected by PMDD – pre-menstrual dysphoric disorder; in other words, me. Mind you, I never thought my fits of sulks and bad temper suggested mental impairment, on the contrary, just rather more mental acuteness than was comfortable. The real me might very well be the disagreeable, argumentative, one-week-a-lunar-month me, not the nice three-weeks-a-lunar month version. On the other hand, I could see the first version of me was quite difficult to live with, so I’d asked Robbie if he could think of anything I could take to even out the mood swings, and Robbie had obliged with a medication from his lab which so far has seemed to work. One little pink pill night and morning, and I now felt generally benign and tranquil. I saw no need at all to ‘see someone’.

I said as much, rather snappily and Robbie looked at me oddly and said ‘Did you forget to take last night’s pill?’ and I lied and said no.

But it had occurred to me only the previous evening that the change of feeling tone in the Ted dreams might be something to do with Robbie’s two-a-day tablets. As the conscious distress calmed, so the unconscious was playing up. There’d be no harm in halving the dose and seeing what happened. I’d dropped the tablet down the loo and forgotten about it. And what had happened? I’d had the best sex ever, the worst dream ever, had a fit of paranoiac shivers over Robbie’s reaction to slab of mud. How did one start to sort these things out? That was how my day started and I hadn’t even got to lunch with Cynara, Robbie’s one-time squeeze. No wonder I was exhausted.

I’d done my best to keep things normal as I made coffee as usual, while Robbie prepared his oatmeal and grated apple as usual. He kissed me goodbye as usual and I waved to him from the door. But as I watched him leave the house I was uneasy. He seemed more like a stranger than a husband, this gangly, attractive, bespectacled, Armani-suited, highly-sexed American who now occupied my bed and leapt from it each morning to go to his job at Portal Inc. What did I really know about him – what he thought, what he felt, what was the wellspring of his being? It was as though I’d acquired a kind of male manikin to take Ted’s place in my bed, bathroom and kitchen. I knew the manikin’s sexual habits and had grown very fond of them. Robbie was great deal less – how shall I put it? – languid than Ted had ever been.

I knew how Robbie brushed his teeth, but I didn’t know the state of every individual tooth as I had with Ted. I knew Robbie was as happy with frozen food as with fresh; Ted would be appalled at the thought of a frozen lasagne. I was suddenly not sure I even liked Robbie, let alone loved him.

But what was the matter with me? There was so much to love and like. Robbie declared love and longing frequently, listening to my boring dreams and even taking notes, watching what I ate and drank, concerned about my health and welfare. But perhaps he was pretending? I should feel grateful, and suddenly I wasn’t one bit. Yet the doubt and suspicion in itself was familiar – a return to the monthly fits of paranoiac ill temper that had that so blighted my life with Ted and the twins. Were Robbie’s little pink pills really so fast acting and so powerful?

I’ve always had vivid dreams. When I was small, about six or seven, a lady in a white dress would come and sit on my bed while I went to sleep. She had strange blonde hair which kept fading into nothingness and that Cheshire cat smile left behind when she faded away, but I didn’t mind her sitting there, pulsing in and out of existence, any more than at first I’d minded seeing Ted wandering about in the dark wood. It was only later others told me the blonde lady ‘must have been a ghost’. But children do see things that aren’t really there: the young brain has a whole set of new experiences to make sense of and sometimes gets them wrong.

I was an adopted child, and I knew the reason for the adoption. When I was four my father shot and killed my mother then turned the gun on me, but fortunately changed his mind and shot himself instead. Childhood amnesia only partially sets in at that age, and I remember the broad strokes of this traumatic event, if not the detail. I daresay such a trauma rivals waking up and finding your husband dead in bed beside you, but not by all that much. The ghost at the foot of my bed was in all probability my mother, but my adoptive parents – who were kindness itself, but not very bright – did what they could to steer me away from what they called ‘spookiness’. Odd, considering my adoptive mother made quite a name for herself as a fortune-teller in the village fête world. To me, believing you can foretell the future using cards and tea leaves is weirder than anything. But I tried to oblige my new Mum and Dad, who were very good to me, and I got into the habit of keeping silence about any weird spookiness of my own.

Then when I was about ten, playing on the foot of the war memorial in the grounds of our local church, I saw a young soldier wearing puttees sitting on the steps and someone old said, ‘Oh, that’ll be poor Joe Morland. He died in 1915. He was only twenty-two.’ I reckoned it was a kind of time slip: I was seeing Joe Morland at twenty-two as he was then, not him now coming back from the dead or anything like that. Such time slips continued to happen from time to time but if I saw people who didn’t look as if they were quite there, or were dressed in odd clothes, I learned to shut up about it.

As I grew older I’d do rather less of this ‘seeing people’. I once watched someone’s cat die in the road after being run over, and the difference between the living animal and the dead was so great it certainly gave me the feeling that the spirit left the body and went somewhere else. But one sees what one expects to see (ask any conjurer), and events in the real world can be even more disturbing than any number of visions, dreams and phantasms.

I looked in the trash can as soon as Robbie had left for work to make sure he hadn’t dumped the plastic bag before he left, but he hadn’t. He’d taken the mud to work for some kind of forensic report. But was I being paranoid in assuming so, or was Robbie being that in doing so? It was perfectly possible that I’d brought the lump of mud into the house on my trainers before I’d gone to bed, that I’d noticed it subconsciously and done nothing about it which was why the mud had featured in my dream. I might well be turning into a really feckless housewife. Nothing to do with Ted stepping over into our reality: how could he? True, the natural laws of the nano-world differ from ours in ways we do not understand, though thanks to the Hadron Collider and such, no doubt we soon will. But even acknowledging the reality of alternative universes, and living in the quantum-conscious age we do, no-one is yet suggesting material objects can pass from one dimension to another. Robbie has
Scientific American
and
Nature
delivered every week, and I find them as fascinating as in the Ted days I had found
Vogue
and
Elle
.

My uneasiness got worse not better, and by mid-morning I found myself punching in Cynara’s number. I hadn’t spoken to her for months: she was the last person I wanted to talk to – the weeks after Ted had died were still too painful for too much remembering. But Cynara had been Robbie’s lover before he so suddenly deserted her and married me, and she would surely have something to say about what actually went on at Portal Inc’s developmental facility, and I thought I deserved to know.

I shared a domestic life with Robbie – I shared an intensive and concentrated exchange of bodily fluids night after night, but I knew surprisingly little about his work. Cynara might be prepared, if only out of spite, to tell me something I didn’t know. Robbie was an American, not an Englishman, and people from outside one’s own culture are often hard to read – but maybe he was just too good to be true?

And then I put down the phone. This was madness. I had so many reasons to be grateful to poor Robbie. Had he not come to my rescue when I was floundering about as a widow, wooed me, entranced me with his lovemaking, told me he adored me, married me, restarted the engine of my life so that after a few chokes and groans it ran smoothly? Hadn’t he paid off my mortgage, got the roof mended, settled the twins’ college fees? I was ungrateful, unreasonable, suspicious, hormonally disturbed and dysfunctional. Had I not lived with Robbie in peace, harmony and order for many months? He did not deserve this sudden distrust on my part. All he had done was pick up a piece of wet mud in tweezers and take it off to a lab to be examined. Surely he had his own reasons, which could be perfectly well explained if only I were in the mood for explanations. Again I picked up the phone, and then again put it down.