Out of Mind (11 page)

“You misunderstand,” he said softly, turning back toward me. “You simply won’t make the program. I’m speaking on behalf of
Melanie Jacobs. Regard it as an instruction from beyond—”

He broke off and for the first time in the conversation looked genuinely shaken.

“Beyond what?”

“From Melanie, that’s all I meant.”

I returned to the office feeling physically sick. I didn’t want to hurt Melanie. But I thought it was also entirely possible
that Collins had his own agenda. Without more information, I found it impossible to know what to do.

Sal wasn’t in the office. The darkness of the afternoon had worked its way inside the room. I turned on the light and went
over to gaze out the window. The Corporation offices look out over the shops and restaurants of London’s West End. It was
pouring with midsummer rain again, but the streets were busy, and there weren’t many umbrellas in evidence. It had been such
a wet summer that people seemed to have gotten used to it. They hardly even ran for cover anymore. It was as though the entire
population had turned into mermaids and mermen, swimming through the streets as naturally as they walked. There were a couple
of girls on the corner eating out of fast-food wrappers in the rain, apparently perfectly happy to eat chips that were slopping
around in half a gallon of water. I felt as though I were looking through the glass of a goldfish bowl. I turned away. One
surefire way to tell you’d gotten too mashed up in Corporation politics was when the outside world began to look like an alien
universe.

I sat at my desk and checked through my e-mail. Guiltily, I opened some of my dozens of missing persons e-mails. There was
one from a woman whose husband left for work one morning and hadn’t been seen since. She and her sons were still reeling.
There was a second e-mail from the police in Salford. Another of my missing people had been found dead, and his family wanted
to withdraw from the documentary. I had already done several interviews with them, and I hoped they would change their minds,
but I would understand if they did not.

I would be kidding myself if I thought anyone had agreed to take part in the making of this series if it was not in the hopes
that they would be reunited. There’s a whole world of television that specializes in fairy-tale endings, even if they have
to pay the fairies. So it’s hard to explain to people that I can’t change anything. There are people who simply don’t want
to be found, and there are people who walk away from everything for good reason. It’s not my job to decide who deserves to
be reunited and who does not.

I checked the Web site that was set up by Melanie’s mother. There was a photograph of Melanie, a full description and the
details of when she had gone missing and from where. Nothing new.

My mobile rang. It was Q, short for Quentin, the Corporation’s political editor and my friend Jane’s husband-to-be (Jane had
resisted marriage until Quentin could prove that he was willing and able to father a child for her).

“We’ve got a little girl,” he said breathlessly. “ She’s perfect. Six pounds, brown eyes, bald as a golf ball. Jane says you’re
to come and see her now.”

At St. Thomas, I found Jane and Quentin, both exhausted, and a little scrap of a girl wrapped in soft cotton and placed in
a crib at the end of the bed.

“She’s gorgeous,” I exclaimed. “So tiny.”

“We’re calling her Rosemary. It’s just such a pretty name we couldn’t resist.”

I had never heard Q talk like this. I handed Jane the package I’d stopped off to buy on the way.

“She’s such a wee thing.” Jane was fretting. “I should have eaten more carbohydrates.”

“She’s going to be fine,” Q comforted her. He was waving a champagne bottle at me and a paper cup. “It was an easy birth;
it might have been harder if she was bigger.”

“Q,” Jane said sharply, jabbing my gift in his direction, “doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and missed every prenatal
class he signed up for, and should shut up if he knows what’s good for him.”

It was a pleasure to see two professional giants shrunk to human size by one baby. Jane is the editor of
Controversies,
a late night news analysis program that she has managed to turn into an institution—no easy matter in an era of rolling twenty-four-hour
news and insta-analysis on the Web. The program could have been named for her. She was born with the urge to stir, and she’s
still doing it nearly forty years later, only now she’s getting paid for it. She looked pale against the pillows. Her dramatic
black hair, which is usually sculpted and pinned, had fanned out around her head. Her lips were almost white and her Chinese
skin opalescent. Jane grew up in Perthshire and has the accent to match, but her parents fled North China to escape Mao.

She opened the gift wrapping, and soon little pink and lilac suits lay scattered around her on the white sheets.

“They’re gorgeous, but will she really need so many?” she asked faintly, then added uncertainly, “They’re very pink. I’m not
sure I want a pink sort of a girl.”

“You’ve called her Rosemary, what do you expect? Anyway, little girls are all pink, it’s just the way they are,” I told her.
“You just have to go with the flow. Can I hold her?”

I lifted Rosemary in my arms. She was light as a feather compared with Hannah and William. Her eyes were tight shut, but her
little face was in constant motion, as though delightful memories of the womb were alternating with shocked realization that
things could now get only worse.

“They didn’t bathe her,” Jane was saying behind me. “I hope that’s the right thing . . . all very Chinese, my mother would
be pleased.”

Jane fussed a little more, and then she drifted off to sleep. I had no desire to return to the office. The hospital room was
cozy, little Rosemary was snuggled against my tummy, and Q kept replenishing my paper cup with champagne. Q is as much of
a political animal as the men and women he covers. He has an ear to every Corporation keyhole, a finger in every Corporation
pie. There is nothing he loves more than intrigue.

It wasn’t long before we’d run out of baby talk and I found myself somewhat boozily relating to him my pursuit of Melanie
and describing that morning’s conversation with Ivor Collins.

I told Q how the conversation with Collins had ended.

“He was going to say ‘beyond the grave.’”

“You think Collins knows Melanie’s dead? You’re not lining him up as a murderer?” He smiled with the slightly supercilious
expression that sometimes rubs me the wrong way. “I’ve never found him that sinister. Surely we all assume that she’s dead.
I know I do.”

I pulled a face, unwilling to agree, and changed tack.

“Maybe he’s right, maybe I’m just blithely marching into something I know nothing about,” I said. “It’s the same with all
these people who’ve disappeared. Once you begin to dig a little under the surface, nothing’s as simple as it looks.”

“Collins’ concerns about Melanie aren’t of the same nature, are they? He’s not worried about skeletons in the closet?”

“Wouldn’t fear of exposure make her want to disappear?”

Q pulled a face. “Exposure of what?”

“Well, exactly, it’s all smoke and mirrors. Maybe Collins just has a guilty conscience, so he’s trying to frighten me off.”

“A guilty conscience? Collins? I don’t think so.”

We both fell silent. Q reached for the bottle again, and all I could hear was the dribble of champagne into his cup and a
newborn baby crying in the next room.

“I’ll keep my ear to the ground,” he said.

I
read
Goodnight Moon
to the children determinedly through a chorus of giggles and shrieks. The house in
Goodnight Moon
with its high ceilings and its fireplace and its rich paintwork, warm carpet, and striped heavy drapes, is not unlike our
flat. The rooms are cavernous, and I sometimes look up from the book and half expect to see a little old lady sitting in a
rocking chair by the fireplace and whispering, “Hush.” I close the book, switch on a tape of nursery songs, lean over to kiss
twin foreheads, spend a few moments begging them to be quiet, then make my way to the kitchen, holding my breath in case one
of them hears my footsteps and calls out to me. I can still hear flurries of laughter, and Hannah shouting out, “Good night,
toilet!” to a squeal of delight from William, and there is even the thump of a foot on the floor, but I ignore it.

I toast a piece of bread and grill a tomato on top with garlic, chopped basil, and butter, which is all the cooking I have
energy for. Then I collapse on the sofa and put in a videotape, turning the volume down low so that the sound of gunfire doesn’t
disturb the children. After a few minutes I put my supper aside, unable to carry on eating.

These are images of hell on earth, a pendulum of violence that Melanie clings to as it swings from continent to continent.
In Gaza she runs with the camera filming through a cloud of tear gas. I can hear it catching in her throat, hear those who
are running alongside her crying out, see them falling to the floor, clutching at their eyes.

In Kosovo she tours sites of mass graves on open green hills. She is handed a white paper suit to cover her clothes in order
to enter a bullet-riddled house, the site of a massacre, that is full of rotting bodies. She is handed a mask, because inside
investigators are piecing bodies together like jigsaws. She stops filming to put on the protective gear. She and her fellow
journalists process in, walk from room to room, pausing here and there, as if they were looking to purchase real estate. In
the village, a group of women wail for a son whose body is exhumed from a mass grave and transferred, in a sheet, to a coffin.

In Fallujah she films body parts in the streets, patrolling troops, burned flesh. She is there when a roadside bomb goes off,
and four soldiers are felled in an instant, quivering on the ground, waiting for help, blood spilling from them. It is the
sound that makes my flesh ice over, the high-pitched cries of pain. They are grown men, but their screams sound like a newborn
demanding help to stay alive.

In several of the film clips, especially in Rwanda and in Iraq, there are images that would never have made it onto television
even in the middle of the night when no one is watching. Images so evil that they would leave a bloody stain on the television
screen. Men and women and children turned into gaping wounds, fly-crawling orifices, brains liquefied, entrails raw, flesh
pierced and punctured, eyes open with the spirit fled. She must have known these images would never be shown, so I wonder
why she films them. Is it because she wants to campaign, back in headquarters, for a more bloody telling of the story? There
are journalists who believe that to report war in the way it arrives, sanitized, on the evening news, is essentially to misrepresent
the truth. Is it because she feels these things must be documented, whether or not they are ever shown? Or could it be a morbid
fascination born of being too long around the dead?

Suddenly it seems ridiculous to me to suspect Mike Darling of anything when all at once the accepted version of Melanie’s
disappearance seems to make perfect sense. Which horror of all these was the worst? What one thing makes a person break who
has already seen so very much? Because it seems to me, as the images flicker across the scene, that to break is inevitable.

When the telephone rings, I am relieved of the obligation to watch, and I find myself filling my lungs with air as though
I have been drowning. It is Q, Rosemary crying in the background.

“Are you free at one for lunch tomorrow?” the new father asks. “I may have something for you.”

The day Lieutenant Sean Howie died in Kabul three years ago, his parents were not there. Nor were the superior officers who
would later try to determine how exactly he had died. At least the commanding officers had access to evidence, to witness
reports, to forensic clues. His parents, however, had only the little that they could glean from talking to their son’s friends,
and they had little enough to say. Some could not bring themselves to talk about Sean’s death, and others were intimidated
by the cloak of secrecy the Ministry of Defense had thrown over the events of that night. The little information his parents
had they transcribed, and that meager record of their son’s last minutes they sent to Ivor Collins and to the army, because
they blamed both Melanie and the army for his death.

I don’t know how Q got hold of the dossier, but he passed it to me over a hurried lunch the next day.

“It’s a photocopy,” he said in a low voice, “but I’m assuming it’s the information that matters. As you can see, the Corporation
received it a year ago, months after the boy died.”

I thanked him. “Though I’m not sure how far I can go with this,” I said. “Can I ask how you got hold of this?”

“I have a friend in personnel,” he said, and winked.

Back at home in the evening, I thumbed through the pages of printout. The complaints against the army were fairly well documented.
Sean Howie’s parents had a letter from their son complaining about the communications equipment his unit had been issued with.
It had a tendency to go off frequency, as indeed it had done on the night he died.

This claim was backed up by photocopies of other soldiers’ letters home, letters that had been passed on by friends. One soldier
sent a wish list of equipment to his mother, including walkie-talkies, and asked her to buy it on the Internet and get it
sent to him, but Lieutenant Sean Howie asked for nothing. He just joked about his vulnerability.

“I suppose it gives the enemy a fighting chance,” he wrote once, “which otherwise they wouldn’t have, given as how they’re
not what you’d call crack troops. I never thought I’d be fighting a war without good coms. What next? Hey, lads, you’re way
too good to fight people this badly trained, so we’re going to take away your body armour. Maybe we should pretend to be crap
so they don’t take away our guns.”