Land of the Living Read online

  "I'm not sure I've given them much to go on."

  "Your job is to get better."

  I sat back in my chair. I looked up at the floors of the hospital surrounding us. One floor up a small boy with a high forehead and a solemn face was looking down at us. I could hear the hum of traffic outside, the sound of horns.

  "You know one of my nightmares?" I said.

  "What?"

  "I've got lots of them, actually. Like being back in that room again. And I hate being in this limbo, I feel trapped. But sometimes I fear that I'm going to leave hospital, go back to my life and it'll just go back to normal and the man will never be found and the only trace there'll be will be the bits of memory of him like a worm crawling around in my head eating me up."

  Irene Beddoes looked at me; her eyes were keen. "Didn't you like your life?" she said. "Don't you like the idea of getting it back?"

  "That's not what I mean," I said. "I mean that I can't bear the idea of nothing coming of all this. And I'll never be able to get rid of the idea as long as I live. You know the people who get that sort of deafness, except it's not deafness. It's not silence. It's a noise in their ears and it never goes away and it drives people mad until sometimes they kill themselves just to shut it up."

  "Could you tell me about yourself, Abbie? Before all of this."

  I took a sip of my coffee. From being too hot, it was now too cold. "Where do I start? I'm twenty-five. Um .. ." I stopped, at a loss.

  "Where do you work?"

  "For the last couple of years I've been working like a lunatic for a company that furnishes offices."

  "What do you mean?"

  "If some company is setting up a new office, we can do as little or as much as people want. Sometimes it's just designing the wallpaper, sometimes it's everything from the pens to the computer system."

  "Do you enjoy it?"

  "Kind of. I can't believe I'll still be doing it in ten years' time or even in one year's time, when I come to think of it. I just kind of wandered into it and discovered I was quite good at it. Sometimes we're sitting around, but when the pressure's on we work all night. That's what people pay us for."

  "And you have a boyfriend?"

  "Yes. I met Terry through work. That's the way most people meet, isn't it? I don't know where else I'd meet anyone. He works with company computer systems and I moved in with him about a year ago."

  She just sat and waited for me to say more, so of course I did, because I've always talked too much, especially when there's a silence and because I wanted to talk, I suppose, about things I'd never put into words before. So now I took the plunge in a gabble.

  "Actually, the last few months haven't been exactly brilliant. Well, they've been awful in many ways. I was working too hard and he was working too hard and when he works hard, he drinks hard. I don't think he's an alcoholic or anything, he just drinks when he wants to unwind. But the trouble is, he doesn't unwind, or not for long. He gets weepy or he gets angry."

  "Angry about what?"

  "I don't know, really. Everything. Life. Me. He gets angry with me, because I'm there, I think. And he, well, he-' I stopped abruptly. This was very hard to say.

  "Is he violent?" Irene Beddoes asked.

  I felt I was slipping down a slope towards things I had never properly told anyone.

  "Sometimes," I muttered.

  "Does he hit you?"

  "He's lashed out a couple of times. Yes. I always thought I was the kind of woman who would never let myself be hit more than once. If you'd asked me a few months ago, I'd have said that I would just walk if a man hit me. But I didn't. I don't know why. He was always so very sorry, and I guess I felt sorry for him. Does that sound stupid? I felt he was doing something that hurt him much more than it hurt me. When I talk about it well, I've never really talked about it before now, actually, but now, I feel that this isn't me I'm describing. I'm not like the woman who stays with a man who treats her badly. I'm more well, more the kind of woman who escaped from a cellar and now just wants to get on with life."

  "And you did terrifically," she said warmly.

  "I don't think of it like that. Really. I just did the best I could."

  "By the sound of it that was very good indeed. I've made something of a study of these sort of psychopaths .. ."

  "You didn't tell me that," I said. "You said you were a psychiatrist and that you weren't interested in all that side of it."

  "The way you handled yourself was first amazingly resilient, just to survive at all. Then there was your remarkable escape. That is almost unprecedented."

  "You've only heard my version. Maybe I exaggerated it to make myself seem more heroic'

  "I don't see how that's possible," she said. "After all, you're here. You're alive."

  "That's true," I said. "Anyway, now you know all about me."

  "I wouldn't say that. Maybe over the next day or two we can meet again."

  "I'd like that," I said.

  "I'm going to get us lunch in a minute. You must be starving. First I'd like to ask a favour."

  "What?"

  She didn't answer. Instead she started rummaging in her shoulder-bag. While she did this I thought about her. I had to make an effort to prevent myself feeling that she was the sort of mother I would have invented for myself: warm where my mother was detached, assured where my mother was nervous, intelligent where my mother was, well, not exactly Einstein, and just sort of deep and complicated and interesting.

  She pulled a file out of the bag. She put it on the table and removed a piece of paper, a printed form, which she put in front of me.

  "What's this?" I asked. "Are you trying to sell me insurance?"

  She didn't smile. "I want to help you," she said, 'and I want to make a proper assessment and in order to do that I want to build up as complete a picture as I possibly can. I'd like to have access to your medical records, and for that I need your permission. I need you to sign this."

  "Are you serious?" I said. "It's just bundles of stuff about injections for going on holiday and antibiotics when I had a chest infection."

  "It would be useful," she said, offering a pen.

  I shrugged and signed. "I don't envy you," I said. "So, what do we do now?"

  "I'd like to talk," she said. "Or, rather, I'd like you to talk. Just talk and see where it takes you."

  And I did. I gave myself up to it. Irene Beddoes went into the building and returned with sandwiches and salad and fizzy water and tea and biscuits, and the sun moved across the sky and I talked, and sometimes, as I thought of the sheer tiredness that my life had been over the last year, I cried, but mainly I talked and talked and talked until I was exhausted and the courtyard had become dark and cold and she led me through echoey corridors back to my room.

  There was a large bunch of daffodils on my bed, and a note scribbled across the back of a used envelope. "Sorry you weren't here. I waited as long as I could. I'll come back as soon as I can. Loads of love and I'm thinking of you, Sadie."

  I sat on the bed, weak with disappointment.

  "How's the investigation going?"

  "We're short of anything to investigate."

  "There's the women."

  "There's five female names."

  "Six. Including me."

  "If you .. ." Cross paused and looked awkward.

  "If I remember anything," I said, 'you'll be the first to know."

  "This is your brain."

  "My brain." I looked at the scan spread out on the light board in front of us and then touched my temples. "How odd to look at your own brain. Well, is it all right?"

  Charlie Mulligan smiled at me. "It seems pretty good to me."

  "It's a bit shadowy."

  "It's the way it's meant to look."

  "But I still can't remember. There's a hole in my life."

  "Maybe there always will be."

  "A disaster-shaped hole."

  "Or perhaps memory will gradually return and fill it in."

&nb
sp; "Can I do anything about it?"

  "Don't fret away at it. Relax."

  "You don't know who you're talking to."

  "There are worse things than forgetting," he said mildly. "Anyway, I ought to be getting on."

  "Back to your mice."

  He held out his hand and I grasped it. It was warm and firm. "Back to my mice. Get in touch if you need anything."

  If I need something you can do anything about, I thought. But I just nodded and tried to smile.

  "I read somewhere that you only really fall in love twice, maybe three times, in your life."

  "Do you think that's true?"

  "I don't know. Maybe. But, then, I've either fallen in love lots of times, or hardly ever. There's the bit where you can't sleep and you can't eat and you feel sick and breathless, and you don't know if you're very happy or completely wretched. You just want to be with him and the rest of the world can go hang."

  "Yes."

  "I've had that feeling quite a lot of times. But it doesn't last long. Sometimes just a few days; sometimes until the moment after you've had sex. It settles down and then you have to see what you're left with. And usually it's not much. Like ashes after the fire's gone out. You think: God, what was that all about? And sometimes you still care, feel affection, desire. But is that love? The time I was most intensely in love was when I was at university. God, I adored him. But it didn't last."

  "Did he leave you?"

  "Yes. I cried for weeks. I thought I'd never get over it."

  "What about Terry? Has the relationship with him been stronger than other ones?"

  "Longer, at least, which must count for something, some kind of commitment. Or endurance." I gave a laugh that didn't sound quite like my normal laugh. "I mean, I feel I know him really well, now. I know him in a way that I hardly know anyone. All the intimate little things, all the things he hides from other people .. . And the more I know him the more reason there is to leave him, but the harder it gets to do it. If that makes sense?"

  "You make it sound as if you're trapped."

  "Lots of people feel trapped in their relationships at times, don't they?"

  "So you feel trapped at work and trapped at home?"

  "That's a bit dramatic. I've just let things get into a rut."

  "Which you've wanted to escape from?"

  "You get into things gradually, and you don't realize quite where you are until it's a crisis and you suddenly see."

  "So you're saying .. . ?"

  "This is my crisis."

  The next day when Irene came to my room .. . My room. I would catch myself saying that. As if it was where I was going to spend the rest of my life. As if I wouldn't be able to cope with a world outside where I would have to buy things for myself, make decisions.

  She was as composed as always. She smiled and asked me how I'd slept. In the real world, people might sometimes ask you how you were, but they didn't really want to know. You were just meant to answer, "Fine." They didn't ask you how you'd slept, how you were eating, how you were feeling, and really want to know the answer. Irene Beddoes wanted to know. She would look at me with her intelligent eyes and wait for me to speak. So I said I'd slept fine, but it wasn't true. That was yet another thing about hospital. I had my own private room, of course, but unless your room was on an island in the middle of the Pacific you were always going to be woken at about two thirty in the morning by some woman screaming. Someone would come and deal with her but I'd be left staring at the dark, thinking about dying and being dead and about that cellar and the voice in my ear.

  "Yes, fine," I said.

  "Your file arrived," she said.

  "What file?"

  "From your GP. Your basic NHS file."

  "Oh, God," I said. "I'd forgotten about that. I suppose it's full of stuff that's going to be taken down and used in evidence against me."

  "Why do you say that?"

  "It was just a joke. Now you're going to say that there's no such thing as "just a joke"."

  "You didn't tell me you'd been treated for depression."

  "Have I?"

  She glanced down at her notebook. "You were prescribed an SSRI in November 1995."

  "What's that?"

  "An antidepressant."

  "I don't remember that."

  "Try."

  I thought for a moment. 1995. University. Wreckage.

  "That must have been when I split up with Jules. I told you about that yesterday. I got into a terrible state; I thought my heart was broken. Well, I suppose it was. I wasn't getting out of bed in the morning. I was crying all the time. I couldn't seem to stop. Strange how much water there is inside you. So a friend of mine made me go to the college doctor. He prescribed some pills, but I can't even remember taking them." I caught myself and laughed. "When I say I can't remember, I don't mean more amnesia. It just never seemed important."

  "Why didn't you mention it to me before?"

  "When I was about eight I was given a penknife for my birthday. Unbelievable, but true. About eight minutes later I was trying to carve a bit of wood in the garden and the knife went into my finger." I held up my left hand. "Look, there's still quite a nice scar. It bled like anything. I may be imagining it, but when I look at the scar I can feel what it was like when the knife slipped and went in. I didn't mention that either."

  "Abbie, we've been talking about your mood. We've been talking about how you react to stress. But you didn't mention it."

  "Are you saying that I forgot it, the way I can't remember being grabbed by this man? But I did mention it. I told you about it when we talked yesterday."

  "Yes, but you didn't mention that you received medical treatment."

  "Only because I didn't think of it as relevant. I had an affair with someone at university then got depressed when it went wrong. Oh, OK, maybe it's relevant. Everything's relevant, I suppose. Maybe I didn't mention it because it was so sad and I felt so abandoned."

  "Abandoned?"

  "Yes. Well, of course. I was in love and he wasn't."

  "I was interested, looking through your files, in how you had reacted to other episodes of stress in your life."

  "If you want to compare me being held prisoner by someone who wanted to kill me with bits of my life where I broke up with a boyfriend or where I had some kind of eczema that took about two years to go away have you reached that bit of the file? well, then, all I can say is that there is no comparison."

  "There is one thing they all have in common, which is that they happen to you. And I look for patterns. This has become an event in your life. Like everything that happens in your life it will change you in some way. I hope I can help you to make sure it doesn't affect you in a bad way."

  "But there are things that happen in life that are just bad and that is one of them. It's always going to be bad. I can't turn it to good. The only thing I can think of that's really important is for this incredibly dangerous man to be found and locked away where he can never do this again to anyone else." I looked out of the window. Over the buildings I could see a clear blue sky. I couldn't feel the cold outside but somehow I could see it. Even looking at it made this hateful room unbearably stuffy. "There's another thing."

  "What?" said Irene.

  "I need to leave here. I really do, or I'll never be able to. I need to be in ordinary life again. I suppose I can't just get up and put on these borrowed clothes though, come to think of it, I don't know why not but I'm going to track down Dr. Burns, or leave a message with his secretary, and tell him that I'm leaving tomorrow. I'll leave a forwarding address with Jack Cross. And if you still feel that it's worth talking to me, then I can come and meet you at any place you suggest. But I can't stay here any longer."

  Irene Beddoes always reacted as if it was always just what she had been expecting me to say, and that she quite understood.

  "That may be right," she said. "Could you do us one favour? As we've talked about before, you're being seen by all sorts of different people and depa
rtments. I'm sorry about all the delays but as you can imagine it's a logistical nightmare getting everybody together at the same time to agree on a decision. I've just heard that there's going to be a meeting tomorrow morning with absolutely everybody. We're going to talk about where we go from here. One of the obvious issues is about you leaving."

  "Can I come?"

  "What?"

  "Can I come to the meeting?"

  For the first time ever Irene looked at a loss. "I'm sorry, that's not possible."

  "You mean there are things I might not want to hear?"

  She smiled her reassuring smile. "Not at all. Patients don't attend case conferences. It's just one of those things."

  "It's just that I think of it more as an investigation in which I'm involved."

  "There's nothing cloak-and-dagger about it. I'll come and see you straight away."

  I wasn't looking at her. My gaze was drawn to the window once more. "I'll have my bag packed," I said.

  I didn't get Jack Cross that afternoon. He was too busy. I got a less important detective called Detective Constable Lavis. He was one of those men who was so tall that he was constantly ducking as if he was about to bump his head, even if he was in a room like mine that was about nine feet tall. He looked very much a stand-in, but he was friendly too, as if it was me and him against everybody else. He sat down on the chair next to my bed, which looked ridiculously small under him.

  "I tried to contact Cross," I said.

  "He's out of the office," Lavis said.

  That's what they told me," I said. "I hoped he'd give me a call."

  "He's a bit busy," Lavis said. "He sent me."

  "I was going to tell him that I'm leaving the hospital."

  "Right," said Lavis, as if he had hardly heard what I'd said. "I'll pass that on. I've just been sent along to talk about a couple of things."

  "Like what?"

  "Good news," he said cheerfully. "Your boyfriend. Terry Wilmott. We were getting a bit worried about him, but he's turned up."

  "Was he working or was he on a binge?"