against the studded steel. His body was crooked, bent to blend with the metalwork, and Dryden wondered if Shaw’s team had spotted him at all. No balaclava, just a black woollen hat pulled down low and something rubbed into his skin so that it was dark and blotched.
‘We didn’t think you’d come – alone.’ Dryden didn’t speak, and in the silence heard the knocking of a light boat against the bridge support below.
‘Got a tongue?’ He thought he recognized the voice from the phone but couldn’t be certain.
‘Sure. What d’you want me to say?’
Dryden leant against the steelwork looking upstream where, across the moonlit water, he could see one of the pleasure boats edging out, letting the current take it downriver.
He was down quickly, and Dryden didn’t have the nerve to back off as he came forward and grabbed him by the shirt front. Up close he could see the eyes now, and where they caught the moonlight Dryden could see how scared he was. He stuffed a piece of paper into one of Dryden’s pockets. ‘That’s a statement. We want that in the story too – along with something from Peyton saying he’s packing the business up. We’ll watch developments and keep the dogs, just for insurance. When Sealodes closes down he gets ’em back.’
Up close Dryden could actually smell the fear, laced with nicotine. He was just a few feet away now and Dryden tried to memorize the face: an oversized jaw, and small, flattened nose which looked broken.
‘Let’s go,’ a second voice, this time from below, where an outboard motor suddenly burst into life. ‘There’s a boat coming.’
The grip tightened at Dryden’s neck and the face came closer. ‘I hope that’s nothing we should be worried about, Dryden. Betrayal is a very ugly word – disfiguring.’
The engine below screamed and at the same moment a searchlight thudded into life from the deck of the pleasure boat upstream, blinding Dryden, so that he didn’t see the punch coming, the knuckles cracking against the orbital bone above his eye. He went down on the tarmac, his cheekbone hitting the ground with a thud which made him lose consciousness. But as he drifted into an internal silence he heard a loud hailer, although the words made no sense, each unrelated, evading meaning.
When he came to he didn’t know how long he’d been down, but the side of his skull was numb and pitted with grit. In the distance he could see headlights approaching along the drove, a blue flashing light above. Overhead the thwup-thwup of helicopter blades was close enough to move the night air, while a spotlight burned down, illuminating the bridge around him. In the silvery light he saw a rat panic, zigzagging over the tarmac.
They’d left the holdall, just a few feet away. So he crept towards it, the pain in his head oddly distant. He was kneeling when he got the zip down and the helicopter was making a second run, the blazing halogen-white light suddenly electrifying the scene like a flashbulb. Inside there was some heavy mater ial, like rotted carpet, which he prised apart to reveal bones and a skull. He took the head out and held it level with his own, and looking into that lifeless face he could see the glitter of a single metal filling, so that he knew one thing only as he heard footsteps running towards him – that these were not old bones.
So now I know. I have a life, complete of itself. A name, a wife, a gift – apparently – to write. She came with the policeman this morning while I worked in the gym. Elizabeth. I call her Liz, that’s what she told me. I always have. She’s beautiful, and I can see why I might have loved her. But she’s a stranger to me now, and I wonder if I’ll ever remember what it was we had together.
Because I don’t have to remember. That’s how it works. The doctors have set the same prognosis, that the past will return but from the earliest memories first, rolling forward to the present. Flashes out of sync perhaps, no more. But there are no guarantees the process will ever be complete. It’s started already, my childhood unfurling. But it might just stop: stop short – so that I’ll never know about Kathryn, and I’ll never know why I was on that bridge. And who did I meet? And will they come for me again?
I know more about you, Laura, than I know about my wife. At least you and I have a past, however brief it’s been.
Liz told me what my life was like. I think she knew I couldn’t remember, and she wants me to remember, so that we can have something to share. But it’s like sharing ashes, and there’s not even a memory of the fire.
And then there’s what I do remember, the past revealing itself. It’s an odd feeling, not so much remembering as uncovering. I don’t recall the past with any sense of triumph or discovery, it just appears, fully made, already stale somehow, tarnished by a thousand other rememberings I’ve forgotten.
The present is the only reality in which I feel alive.
My life so far then, in a few paragraphs, as I’ve actually remembered it. Yes, I was born in Jude’s Ferry. In Orchard House, where the garden ran down to the river. I only have the one memory before we started moving – hiding amongst the box hedges and watching a car crackle past on the gravel drive. Why that memory? I doubt I’ll ever know. My father, a diplomat, took us away. The house, mothballed, we said was home. And we did come back for the summers, and a single Christmas.
But my life was somewhere else. To Singapore – where the wonderful gardens ran down to the harbour – to Belize, to Washington. A life oddly untroubled by all that movement. English schools in exotic climates, and the poor glimpsed through the windows of the polished cars that always whisked us from the airport. And then mother died – while I was at Coniston. I was ten and a boarder and father was in Saudi Arabia where we couldn’t go. I can remember being told. I was out on the rugby pitches, the snow on the hills. I was called to a cold room, lined with books, and there was a slab of sunshine on the floor which edged away from me as the headmaster talked. University. English at Oxford. Keble, the rain running down those depressing red bricks.
Summers at Jude’s Ferry. Always an outsider however hard I tried. Dad didn’t tell me he’d sold up to the MoD. I found a letter, about the rent. He said it was a nest egg for me, but he’d sold the only home we’d ever had. And then a heart attack at Sunningdale lecturing to a room full of bored civil servants on a pale afternoon. I scattered his ashes on the beach at Holkham, trying to recall even then what he looked like.
I was alone, so I came back for that last summer to Orchard House. There was nothing else, just a bank account, blinking black on the screen. I was owed it – a year of my own, at home, at last, even if the family had gone.
And I felt a sense of liberation too. So I thought I’d teach. Whittlesea. A new scheme, for graduates, learning on the job. A windswept comprehensive built of concrete and glass with a playground like a supermarket car park. But I loved it; so different from my life until then, chaotic, raw, on the edge. And that’s where I met her, Laura. Something’s stopping me crossing that line, to what happened next, because there’s something there I don’t want to remember. But I know the emotions that match the missing pictures: passion first, then guilt. And then anger at last. I’m clinging to these because all I feel today is fear. Which is why it’s so important that I
