head.
I did no more work that afternoon. I just walked into the wind and rain until I saw by my watch that I had to run to be home to meet Elsie. I was out of breath when I ran along the drive, a sour pain in my chest, and I saw the car was already back. I ran inside and picked up my little bundle and held her close against me, burying my face in her hair. She pushed herself back and reached for some incomprehensible picture she had drawn at school. We got out the paints and covered the kitchen table with newspaper and did more pictures. We did three puzzles. We played charades and hide-and-seek all over the house. Elsie had her bath and we read two whole books. Occasionally I would stop and point to a short word – ‘cow’, ‘ball’, ‘sun’ – and ask Elsie what it was, and she would look at the picture above the text for clues. If it was totally obvious – ‘The cow jumped over the… What comes next, Elsie?’ – she would make an elaborate pretence of spelling out the word – ‘Mer… oo… oo… moon!’ – that in its elaborate mendacity impressed me more than if she had simply been able to read.
After her bath I held her plump, strong, naked body and rubbed my face in her sweet-smelling hair (‘Are you looking for nits?’ she asked) and I suddenly realized two things. I had spent almost three hours without brooding on horror and deceit and humiliation. And Elsie wasn’t asking after Finn or even Danny. In my darker moments I sometimes felt as if there were slime on the walls left by the people who had been inside them, but Elsie had moved on. I held her close and felt that she at least was unpolluted by the evil. I croaked a couple of songs to her and left her.
Though it was barely after eight o’clock, I made myself a mug of some instant coffee or other that was nominally reserved for Linda’s use, topped it up with lots of milk and went up to bed. Elsie had survived this horror the way it seems that children are designed to do and I had a sudden impulse to take her away from all of this, go somewhere safe, away from fear and danger. I had never escaped. As a teenager I had kept my head down and worked and worked. I had worked even harder as a medical student and then harder still once I had qualified. There had never been a light at the end of the tunnel. Just the next examination or prize or scholarship or job that nobody thought I could get. Food and fun and sex and the other things that life is meant to consist of had been something to grab bite-sized pieces of along the way.
A thought occurred to me and I gave a bitter smirk. I’d forgotten. Finn had got away from it all, backpacked her way around South America, or whatever the hell it was she’d done. She’d even polluted the idea of safety and purity. I remembered the one item of Finn’s that I had held back. I sprinted across the chilly room, grabbed the chunky paperback and sprinted back to bed, pulling the covers over me. I looked at the book properly for the first time.
Peru, everybody said that was beautiful. I flicked through the book until I came to a paragraph in the Peruvian section headed ‘Problems’:
I grunted once more. Elsie and I could handle that. Where was it that Finn had gone? Mitch something. I looked in the index. Machu Picchu. That was it. I turned to the entry: ‘The most famous and sublime archaeological site in South America.’ I could take a year’s sabbatical and we could travel round and Elsie would have the advantage of being fluent in Spanish. My eye drifted down the page until it was stopped by some familiar words:
There it was, Finn’s great transcendent experience, pinched from a crappy little travel guide. I remembered Finn’s shining eyes, the tremble in her voice as she had described it to me. It felt like my final failure. There had been a little vain bit of me still left in a corner of my psyche which hoped that I had got somewhere with Finn. Despite the wickedness and the deception, she had liked me a bit, just as she had won Elsie’s love. Now I knew that even there, where it wouldn’t have mattered, she hadn’t taken the trouble to toss me something real. It was all fake, all of it.
Thirty-One
‘Have you thought of seeing someone about what’s happened? I mean, you know…’
Sarah was sitting at my kitchen table, making sandwiches. She’d brought cream cheese, ham, tomatoes, avocados – real food – and was now layering them between thick slices of white bread. She was one of the few people I could stand to have around me. She was straightforward and talked about emotions objectively, as if she were a mathematician puzzling over a problem. Now the sun was streaming in through the windows, and we had the afternoon to ourselves before Elsie came home from school and Sarah returned to London.
‘You mean,’ I took a swig of beer, ‘go and see a trauma counsellor?’
‘I mean,’ Sarah said calmly, ‘that it must be hard to get over what’s happened.’
I stared at the crooked metal eye of the beer can.
‘The trouble is,’ I said at last, ‘there are so many bits to it. Anger. Guilt. Bafflement. Grief.’
‘Mmm, of course. Do you miss him a lot?’
I often dreamed about Danny. Usually, the dreams were happy ones, not of losing him, but of finding him again. In one, I was standing by a bus stop and I saw him walking towards me; he held out his arms and I slid into their empty circle like coming home. It was so physical – his heartbeat against mine, the warm hollow of his neck – that when I woke I turned in the huge bed to hold him. In another I was talking to someone who didn’t know about his death, and crying, and suddenly the stranger’s face became Danny’s and he smiled at me. I woke and tears were streaming down my face.
Every morning, I lost him all over again. My flesh ached for him, not so much with desire as with loneliness. My homesick body recalled him: the way he would cup the back of my head with a hand, the rasp of his roughened fingers on my nipples, his body folded against my folds in bed. Sometimes I would pick Elsie up and hug her until she cried out and struggled to get away. My love for her felt, suddenly, too big and too needy.
Too often I would take out the letter he had written to his sister. I wouldn’t read it but would stare at the bold black script and let phrases come into focus. I only had a few photographs of him; he’d always been the one behind the camera, the way most men are. There was one of both of us in shorts and T-shirts; I was looking at the camera and he was looking at me. I couldn’t remember who’d taken the picture. There was another of him lying on his back and holding Elsie up on his lifted legs. His face was out of focus in the sunlight, a bleached-out blur where his eyes should be, but Elsie’s mouth was agape in panicky delight. Mostly, he was turned away from the camera lens, hidden. I wanted a photo of him that would stare directly at me, like a film star’s glossy publicity, for I was terribly scared of forgetting what he looked like. Only in my dreams did I see his face properly.
‘Yes’, I answered Sarah, picking up a sandwich that disgorged tomato as I lifted it to my mouth, ‘yes, I miss him.’ I chewed a bit, then added, ‘I don’t know how to restore him to his proper size in my memory. If you see what I mean.’
‘What about her?’
‘Finn, you mean? God, that’s complicated. First of all I almost got to love her; she was part of the family, you see. Then, I hated her; I felt almost sick with hatred and humiliation. And then she died and it’s as if that’s stopped all my emotions in their tracks. I don’t know what I feel about her. At sea.’ I shivered at the figure of speech, remembering again the dark waters. I saw Michael Daley standing on the breaking boat and, in slow motion, I saw again the metal pole hitting him, the boom striking him, his long body buckling.
