‘Positive. But you can have it verified.’
His look is withering: clearly that process is already underway. ‘Did she ever mention friends or relatives in Scotland?’
‘Bethany isn’t a friends-and-relatives kind of girl. Scotland never cropped up.’
‘Do you sense there might be some kind of message encoded in this?’
I tell him that ‘yours electrically’ is a humorous reference to her ECT, and Wheels is her typically tasteless nickname for me, and Child B speaks for itself. Apart from that, no. But tell me. How can I help?
He sighs. ‘I suggest that you just go home, and wait. If there’s any other contact from her, ring this number.’
He hands me a card. ‘If you leave Hadport for any reason, call me first, and let me know where you’ll be. If she turns up, we may need you again at short notice.’
Back home, the phone is ringing. I reach it too late to answer, but I can see there have been ten missed calls, all from the same number. Clearly, some hard-core psychopathology is at work. But whose? Seconds later, it rings again. It’s Joy. She is frantic. She has heard the news about Bethany’s abduction. But the word she uses is escape.
‘If you helped her get out, you don’t know what you’ve done. I warned you.’
‘I didn’t help her.’
‘Don’t you see, the whole world’s in danger now? Don’t you get it?’ Her agitation is palpable. ‘I was like you once. I didn’t believe people could be evil. But I do now. She’d destroy the whole planet if she could.’ Joy’s need to cling to a notion that eliminates the random stirs a weary pity in me. But I can do nothing to help her. ‘If you know where she is ’
I interrupt her and snap, ‘I wish I did. But the fact is, I don’t. Then a man’s voice — sharp — can be heard in the background, appealing to her. A second later Joy yells, ‘Get off me!’ There’s a clatter in my ear, as though the phone has been dropped to the floor. I can still hear her raging. ‘Hello?’ says the man. Her poor husband. ‘Who is this I’m speaking to?’
‘Gabrielle Fox. We met at the restaurant.’
‘Oh God. I must apologise for Joy. The drugs she’s on—’
I tell him there’s no need to explain. Or apologise. That I completely understand. That Joy is blessed to have him. And that I wish him luck.
He will be needing enormous quantities of it.
After the car smash upended my life, I made the assumption that my thoughts would forever revolve around the aftermath and constraints of my injury, that no outside factor would diminish my enforced solipsism, and that this exhausting preoccupation with myself would carry on, like the low-level hum of tinnitus, ad nauseam, until the day I died. That I would continue to wake every morning to the reality of a life chopped down. But now — It seems I am living in times so charged with grotesque momentum, that there are whole minutes in which I forget the mess that I am — and when I remember, can forgive it. When a text message signals itself on my mobile as I prepare for bed, I know that I have been waiting for it. It’s from an unknown caller.
THORNHILL STATION CAR PARK
TEN AM TOMORROW. NOTHING TO POLICE. WG.
Who is WG? Wary, stirred, and paradoxically elated, I swiftly pack a large suitcase: clothes, make-up, toothbrush, medical and wheelchair accessories, painkillers, shampoo. What am I doing?
But I don’t stop myself.
When the blood is in charge, logic doesn’t get a word in. But hope does. And it’s the fiercest imperative I have felt in a long time.
When I finally fall asleep I dream of whirling black birds.
Chapter Ten
There are many things I would like to believe in, because they would accord life coherence. One of them is God. Another is the notion that on the brink of death, one’s life dances before one’s eyes in kaleidoscopic fragments: dramas, traumas, transcendent highs, troughs of gloom, or the crystallised moments that encapsulate a certain mood on a certain day, like — for me — the smell of forsythia blossom at nursery school, or a turn of phrase — ‘
A line now so far behind me that my old life feels surreal.
It’s October but so sunny and warm it could still be summer. The popcorn smell of discount bio-fuel floats on a breeze that sets curled dried leaves rustling across the streets. Out on the horizon the blades of the wind turbines rotate under a blue sky jazzed with threads of cloud. I drive through a Hadport busy with morning ritual: people flocking to work or school, exercising dogs, opening up offices and shops, buying takeaway croissants and lattes, queuing for trams, heading for early-morning AA meetings or DIY hypermarkets or lovers’ arms. Fear and anticipation make for a motivating cocktail, the result being that I am in Thornhill by nine. I park at the station and, with an hour to kill, I head for the town’s famous medieval church, negotiating my way through a graveyard freakishly landscaped by subsidence, and shored up by crude cement bulwarks. Grit and builders’ sand collect in the shallow treads of my tyres as I skirt the leaning yews.
Even with the door opened wide, the sepulchre is dark, its chill that of a meat-freezer. Above the pulpit, the stained-glass windows hum with complex ecclesiastical matrices of colour divided and subdivided by black lead. On one wall, there’s a mural depicting Christ pinioned to the cross, head to one side, ribs jutting, speared wound gushing blood, crowds surging around. Shivering, I rummage in my purse and drop some coins into the collection box, inhaling the wax-and-saltpetre mustiness that pervades all houses of God measuring more than a thousand square metres. They’re raising money for drought-struck Africa because fresh water has been lost from a third of the Earth’s surface. Can this be true? Lost since when? If I were a believer I would pray and hunt for a votary candle. Instead, I scrutinise the stained glass in an attempt to decipher a coherent theme linking the panels, then at a quarter to ten, I spin back out into sunshine so fierce the colours are bleached clean away, leaving only glitter-edged shapes. Back at the car, I’m dumping my folded wheelchair on the passenger seat when the black bird-dream from last night drifts into my head, perhaps summoned by the lead interstices of the church’s stained glass. Ravens? Crows?
I feel a sudden, unexpected grin split my face. Praise be to the subconscious.
I switch on the car radio, wondering if there might be more news about Bethany. Instead I get a phone-in about pensions, a subject the nation’s over-fifties are increasingly obsessed with. It’s one of those programmes where people ‘from all walks of life’ but all, coincidentally, middle class, recount their fiscal woes in a polite but subtly aggressive whine. Just as a financial expert is launching into an analysis of buy-back mortgages, the door of the newsagent’s opposite opens to disgorge a man in baggy jeans and a red-and-black T-shirt splatted with a cartoon tarantula, carrying a bumper pack of Haribos. He crosses the road, scans the car park and then heads for where I’m parked, his free hand raised in the casual greeting of an old mate. He’s mid-thirties, with a tumble of
