The Treatment (41 page)

“Hey—ssh, come on, calm down, what have you been lying about?”

“You'll hate me—”

“What have you been lying about?”

“About Malcolm.”

“What about him?”

She took a deep breath and squeezed her eyes closed, speaking into the air as if reciting a hard-remembered poem. “I don't remember what happened, Jack. The last thing I remember is getting on my bike to go to Mal-colm's—and that's all until you were going to Paul's funeral.” Silence. She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Jack—I know I've fucked up—I just thought—oh, I don't know—I thought there was something wrong with me if I didn't remember—or—or—”

He dropped his hand from around her shoulder and sat for a long time in silence. So this was what it had all been about. He thought about the statement in the hospital, he thought about the inquest, about her dead flatmate's body lying in the hallway, about Rebecca, hanging in the kitchen. And then he realized that what she had just done was to take a step toward him.

“Is that what it's all been about? The sex?”

“I got scared. I must've thought I might suddenly remember while we were—oh fuck.” She jammed knuckles into her eyes. “I know it's stupid.…”

“Because I've been trying to make you think about it?”

She nodded, her bottom lip twisted under her teeth. All her eye makeup was down on her face, the eyelashes quite soft and naked.

“You didn't report it, did you?”

“Of course not—you didn't really think …?”

“Oh, Jesus, Becky, Rebecca.” He pulled her closer, pressing his face into her lopped-off hair. “Oh, Jesus.”

Y
ES, HELLO?” A WOMAN'S VOICE
on the answerphone in the hallway, the sound echoing through the house. Upstairs, stretched out on the floor next to the radiator, Benedicte jerked awake, pawing blindly toward the sound.

“Hello, this is a message for Mr. and Mrs. Church. I hope I've got the right number. My name is Lea and I'm calling from the Helston cottage agency, and, um, we were expecting you at Lupin Cottage in Constantine and I've just been told the cottage is still empty, so I'm calling because we haven't heard from you and we're just checking that everything's OK. And, um, what it is, Mr. Church, what it is, is because we haven't had a, you know, an official cancellation, we're going to have to, I'm sorry to say, we might have to charge you for Lupin Cottage if we don't hear from you and you might lose your deposit—so, well, maybe you've been delayed, but do give me a call and let me know. Right.” She paused for a moment. “Right. That's all. So good-bye now.”

“
No
.”

“Oh, and it's about nine A
.
M
.
on Wednesday. I might try to give you another call at the weekend just to make sure everything's OK. Thank you.”

The receiver clunked down, the tape whirred, a series of clicks, and the aging answerphone rewound the tape.

“Fuck you, fuck you, fuck
you
.” Benedicte sprang forward, roaring at the door. “
I'll kill you.
” She hammered on the floor with her broken-up hands. “You fucking bitch! You and your fucking deposit, you shitty bitch.
Hal! Josh! Can you hear me? Can you hear me? I love you so much, I love you so much.…
”

Tracey Lamb's mood was good.
Cooking
, she told herself,
you're cooking now
. She put her hair in rollers, big pink rollers that glistened like sponge cake. When it was set she didn't brush it out. She sprayed a little mist in it, pulled on Wellington boots and, carrying a cup of tea, a bucketful of bits and pieces, keys, and with her sputum cup in the pocket of her cardigan, she left the house by the back door, thinking about sangría and cheap, strong cigarettes. She was singing to herself.

She took the Datsun up to the quarry and parked it facing into the trees. An anorectic brindled dog was sitting in the undergrowth staring up at the trailer.

“Go on!” She kicked at the dog and it slipped back into the hedgerow, its legs so bent that its stomach almost dragged the ground. “That's it, go on. Git.” She put the mug of tea on the bonnet of a rusting old Ford Sierra and fished in her pockets for the keys. Carl had always told her to lie about what she was keeping in the trailer, but Carl was dead now and she no longer had a reason to obey him.

Caffery and Rebecca slept together in an exhausted knot on his bed, her face resting on his hand so that he could feel it twitch and move as she dreamed. She had kept on her underwear and T-shirt, and although he had his arm around her he tried to keep it unsexual, tried to keep a segment of air between their bodies. In the morning he pulled out his arm carefully and got up without waking her. He showered, shaved carefully, dressed in a well-cut Italian suit, the legacy of an ex-girlfriend, put on a gray Versace tie and began to move his mood round to bargaining with the bank manager.

When he went downstairs Rebecca had woken and was
walking around the kitchen in jeans, making coffee, diminutive as a young boy with her new haircut. When she saw him in the suit she whistled. “My God, you're so gorgeous.”

He smiled.

“Where are you going?”

“Just the office.” He straightened the tie and poured some coffee. She looked rested. In fact, considering last night, she looked incredibly well. For a moment he felt hopeful for them, as he sat at the table with his coffee and watched her moving around, opening the fridge; for a moment he thought it could all be easy, but then he thought,
Maybe it's just the heroin—don't they say that about heroin? At first it makes you look just great
… and then he thought about where he was going today and how by rights he should cancel it, how by rights he should make an effort in return for what she'd done, and the whole thing made his mood crash so quickly that he got an instant headache. He downed his coffee, stood and kissed her quickly on the forehead. “I'm just going to the office.”

When he'd gone Rebecca went into the garden and lay on her back in the grass. It was a perfect day—so blue, just a few clouds running Grand Nationals across the sky. She lay in silence, waiting to find out how she felt about it all. She'd done it. She'd taken steps, big, big steps. She'd stuck her finger up at one of London's biggest art critics and now she supposed she should start unpicking it, wondering about making amends. But she couldn't convince herself she'd done the wrong thing: every time she tried to be strict with herself and give it serious consideration, her thoughts floated away, like a bubble from one of those silly children's games. Maybe it was the heroin—
maybe that's why the junkies put up with puking for the first few rounds just to get this numbness for a while.
Shouldn't it have worn off by now? She had the sense that something very important had happened, that she'd been spun round to face in the right direction, and that she should be feeling very scared and very exhilarated. But then she thought about Jack, nuzzling a kiss in her new-cut hair—
Jack, you
didn't get angry, you didn't tell me to leave
—and she knew that it was OK and that, after all, she could be quite calm. When she dropped her hands over her face she found, oddly, that she was smiling.

The brain is something like a blancmange on a stem, floating perilously around in the skull in a protective whey. Its tissue cannot be compressed without damage, nor can it survive even short periods without oxygen. Thus there are many ways to damage this sensitive, unfathomable organ: it can be pushed against the skull by a leak of blood or a tumor; it can be starved of blood by trauma or stroke; it can be twisted and whipped around inside the skull so quickly that its connective tissues are sheared; it can be forced downward through swelling and bleeding until it is almost pressed out through the hole at the base of the skull; or it can be shaken up like a plastic snowstorm and hurled against the skull. If a young child were to be thrown backward onto a concrete floor, for example, there is a chance that his brain, responding to suction forces and the laws of acceleration and deceleration, would be thrown backward and then
forward
from the impact site, where it would be grazed and ripped on the jagged interior of the skull diametrically opposite. This peculiar phenomenon is a “contrecoup” injury, and it is exactly the injury that Ivan Penderecki inflicted on the small boy he had imprisoned in a chilly Nissen hut on the Romney marshes.

Carl Lamb, by a peculiar quirk of fate, saw the whole thing. It was a cold October night in the 1970s and he was standing at the window of the hut, smoking a cigarette, waiting for the big Polish man to finish with the child so that he could have his turn. A struggle started, and when the child fell Lamb knew immediately that something was wrong—there was no blood, but there was something sinister about the way the boy's eyes dilated, the way he became suddenly limp.

“Oh, fuck,” he said, chucking the cigarette out the window and starting to panic. “Fuck—what're we going to do?”

But in Penderecki's eyes it wasn't what
they
were going to do, it was what
Carl
was going to do.
He
was going to be the one to deal with it. Carl was young, still in his early twenties, and still a little in awe of Ivan Penderecki, who in those days was the mogul of the ring. So he obeyed without argument, gathering up the broken, still pulsing thing from the floor, expecting that within minutes he'd be holding a dead body. A body he'd have to find a hole for. On the long drive home, with the child on the backseat twitching under a blanket, he passed reservoirs and lakes and even drove under the big river Thames, which snaked under the moonlight out to the estuary. He should have stopped and launched him there and then, but somehow he didn't have the juice for it. He'd done a lot in his short life—but he'd never got rid of a body before. Something, maybe cowardice, maybe an overpowering sense of the significance of what had happened, made him keep driving.

Back in Norfolk he put the boy on the sofa, got a beer, put some music on and sat down in the armchair, wondering how he was going to dispose of him when he died, wondering if he could cut up a body without puking. Minutes turned to hours, the boy's face swelled monstrously, hours turned to days and he breathed on, a glittering string of saliva connecting him to the pillow. His right arm and leg drew up on themselves like bird's claws, but by the third day, when Carl put a hand on his shoulder and shook him, he sat bolt upright and vomited down his mustardyellow T-shirt.

“Fucking animal.” Tracey Lamb, still a teenager in those days, was furious with this intrusion. She stomped out of the house and went to stand next to the hangar, lighting a Marlboro and turning her back angrily on the house. Carl ignored her. He paced the room looking at the boy, wondering if he could kill him here and now. He should just drive him out to the motorway, he decided, and dump him on the hard shoulder—but he didn't know how much he remembered of the night in the Nissen hut, who he could finger. Maybe he should just drive him down to London and dump him on Penderecki, but Penderecki was
still an intimidating prospect. So he was stuck. He examined the child, trying to decide if he would be worth something to someone. The right side of his face was ruined, swollen and drawn downward as if melted. He dribbled constantly. Basically he was useless. Over the next few days Carl made up his mind countless times that he was going to do it—he was going to kill him. But countless times he found he didn't have the courage. And then, suddenly, something put an end to all his indecision. Suddenly Carl noticed that the boy was changing.

It was a slow process, but gradually, miraculously, the paralysis in his face began to correct itself and the dribbling stopped. He still grimaced and jerked, his head zagging back and forward like a baby trying to get out of a high chair, and when, a month or so later, he got up and tried to walk, his right foot pointed down like a horse hoof, but somehow Carl found all that easy to overlook. New possibilities were opening up to him.

The change in Carl's attitude didn't escape Tracey's attention. She was glad. He had stopped being surly and losing his temper every five minutes. One night she heard noises coming from the bathroom, noises that echoed around the dark house, animal screams and the thudding of a body being battered against the cast-iron bathtub. When she tiptoed upstairs she met Carl coming out of the bathroom, a grim look on his face. He was sweating, he didn't meet her eye, and she knew, without knowing how, that from now on the boy was going to be Carl's special friend.