Fragile Cord (18 page)

Coupland knew better than to think
that. He’d had a number of conversations with the dead himself,
over the years.

Joe never got over the death of
his wife and daughter. They’d been his anchor in a country that
largely only gave a damn about its servicemen when there was a war.
During peacetime, the armed forces were an extravagance to be pared
down, kept out of view like a battered wife. Joe’s decline had been
swift, terrifying. There’d been no military support for his ailing
mental health; instead he’d had to wait his turn beside the
binge-drinkers and drug addicts, waiting in line to get his
referral for psychiatric help. It would be many years before his
post-traumatic stress was treated seriously.

Driving
through the streets in search of Joe now, Coupland knew enough
about his friend’s routine to know he wouldn’t be far away, that if
he hadn’t been able to bed down in a city centre hostel he may have
spent the night under the railway arches at Chapel Street, a couple
of hundred yards further along. A couple of the arches were boarded
up, had been converted into workshops and a garage. The remaining
arches were open. They provided shelter from the rain but not the
biting wind, and so they were used mainly during the summer months,
as a protection from frequent showers.
You
get used to the discomfort
, Joe had told
him once,
but you never get used to the
dishonesty
.
You
have to sleep with your boots on, Kevin, if you want to see them
again next morning.
He’d come across
dozens of ex-servicemen over the years, men paid to serve their
country who’d suffered a sense of loss the day they handed in their
ID card. Institutionalised, the only people they’d ever known were
other servicemen. It was a sad fact that for many, being sectioned
was the best thing to happen to them since being discharged. Out of
the thousands who went to the Falklands to fight, more had
committed suicide since coming home, than actually died out
there.

Did joining up
make you weak-willed
; Joe had asked
Coupland once,
because everything was done
for you?

Coupland hadn’t known what to
say to that.

He’d read somewhere that three
months of homelessness took three years to get out of the system.
He thought of Joe and did the maths, wondered if there was any hope
for his friend. After scanning the pavements for several minutes
for signs of Joe he came into view, his proud frame heading into
Salford from the direction of Chapel Street’s railway arches, his
cardboard box port-a-bed folded neatly under one arm. Joe always
looked ahead when he walked, never glanced around or stopped to
study his surroundings: workers beginning their early shift, cars
speeding towards Manchester’s city centre. Moving forward with a
purpose. His direction never wavered, yet in a sense all he ever
did was look back. It wasn’t just his memories that were frozen in
time; in a way Joe himself was trapped, unable to slough off his
military identity and feel at ease in civilian skin.

Recognising Coupland’s car Joe
raised his hand in salute, a smile breaking out across his face at
the prospect of a full stomach.

Half an hour later they were
sat at their usual table in the café, Joe listening without
interrupting as Coupland told him about Tracey Kavanagh. Not one
for passing judgement, he studied Coupland’s face as he talked him
through the case and understood far more by the set of his friend’s
jaw and the downturn in his voice than any of the words he was
using.

‘And you say there was no prior
warning?’ he asked when Coupland had finished.

The detective shook his
head.

‘By all accounts, no. The usual
medical and social reports have been carried out, pretty
unremarkable so far.’

They attracted little attention
these days. Over the past year Joe had swallowed his pride and
accepted Coupland’s hardly worn clothes and shoes, and depending on
whether he’d been lucky enough to get a night in the shelter and a
shower, the stale smell of unwashed sweat was kept to a minimum –
though it always helped of course, if you sat downwind of him.
Occasionally Coupland had tried to do more, to fix him up with
work, to find him somewhere to stay but each time he was met with
polite refusal.

Don’t you see
it’s my penance, Kevin,
Joe had explained
once,
for not doing anything to save the
men that perished on my ship? For not being around to protect my
Marie and Sophie?

He’d dismissed the detective’s
logical reasoning, that he’d been suffering from shock during the
aircraft attack, that he’d not been in a fit state to help anyone.
And again, when he’d been committed to hospital following his
breakdown, the events that led to the hit and run had been beyond
his control.

Doesn’t make
it any easier to bear though, eh?
He’d
said simply.

Coupland had merely shaken his
head. He knew how slowly time passed for the grieving.

‘You know, I’m
not convinced…’ Joe began evenly, once their breakfast plates had
been cleared away and he’d wrapped up the left-over toast in his
paper serviette for later, sliding it into the pocket of his hand
me down jacket. Even on summer days he wore it, wouldn’t take it
off his back.
True meaning of the capsule
wardrobe,
he’d said with a laugh, and
Coupland knew in that moment that Joe would never return to
a
normal
life,
that he was intent on serving his penance.

‘…Just how reliable is the
information you have regarding this woman’s state of mind?’

‘Well, like I said,’ Coupland
replied, ‘the reports we’ve had back don’t flag up any areas for
concern.’

‘Maybe not,’ Joe countered,
‘but I’m telling you, the clues will be there…..This young mother
was deeply troubled by something she felt she needed to protect her
son from. Something big enough to justify her actions – to herself
anyway. Something she felt unable to share with anyone else.’

He paused, his eyes shutting
down as though he was looking inside himself for the answer.

‘Do you think she was mad?’
Coupland asked.

Joe rolled his eyes towards the
ceiling, shaking his head. ‘How the hell would I know?’ he
reasoned, ‘I’m a walking talking Looney Toon, but I recognise the
actions of a desperate person, someone afraid to unburden their
fears in case they are judged. It’s a typically British trait,
stiff upper lip and all that……Realising you suffer from a mental
illness is terrifying.’ He said purposefully.

‘It’s not just a condition, it’s a
definition. It becomes who you are, or at least who the outside
world thinks you are. From then on in, every action or reaction you
have is put down to your illness and there is nothing you can do
about it.’

He paused; spread his calloused hands
flat on the surface of the table. There was dirt under his
fingernails and they were broken. Tell-tale nicotine stains on the
index finger of his right hand. On his left hand, scratched and
battered out of shape, a wedding ring.

‘I tried so
hard to stay well for my Marie. She was struggling to cope with the
little one
and
me. I’m sure there were days when she thought her life would
have been easier if I hadn’t been discharged, or better still, if
I’d been killed on that ship. The burden of caring for me was
tearing her part.’

He paused, ‘The nightmares I
had about the ship being hit and the burning bodies didn’t stop.’
He looked across the table at Coupland.

‘The
nightmares have
never
stopped, Kevin, I just learned to stop talking about
them…’

‘Didn’t medication help?’

‘I don’t want a life of
numbness!’ Joe spat. ‘I want to grasp life by the thorns until my
hands bleed – isn’t that what I deserve?’

He looked down at his wedding
ring, traced the edges of it with the index finger on his right
hand. His voice shook when he spoke next:

‘It’s a
fragile cord that binds us to sanity, Kevin, and wouldn’t we do
everything in our power to cling onto
that
?’

Coupland said nothing. It was
as though the life-force that had propelled him to the café that
morning had finally deserted him. His shoulders looked a good
couple of inches lower than when he’d first sat down.

Joe leaned back on his plastic
chair, studying Coupland as though he were an exhibit in a zoo.
‘What’s wrong?’ He asked quietly.

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’ve been on edge since we
got here, like the past twenty minutes have been a warm up to
something else, something bigger. I thought maybe you were building
yourself up to it. Are Complaints on your back again?’

‘No.’

‘Then what? You’ve listened to
me drone on enough about my problems in the past, if there’s
something bothering you,’ Joe opened his arms expansively, ‘I’ve
got all day.’

‘Lynn’s got cancer.’

Even as he
said the words aloud he didn’t quite believe them. His mouth filled
with bile and his eyes felt as though a thousand needles were
pressing into them. He swallowed the sour tasting liquid, blinking
his eyes several times in succession. ‘And all the time I was
worried that she was upset with me over something
I’d
done.’ He slammed
his fist down hard on the table, his action barely drawing a glance
from the guy behind the counter.

‘I was too far up my own
backside to realise something serious was troubling her. I took her
moodiness to be her way of punishing me. I never gave a moment’s
thought that she might be ill.’

When he’d
drawn level with her the evening before at the hospital’s main
entrance, she’d introduced him to a consultant whose name for the
life of him he still couldn’t remember, all he could think of
was
bastard.
She
was leaving him for a colleague and for some reason that was beyond
him she thought it was helpful he meet the man who would replace
him in their bed. Strangely, Dr Bastard didn’t look very smug at
bagging himself a stunner. In fact, he looked pained, as though
he’d rather be anywhere but here with his new girlfriend and her
fat ex-husband. They’d both looked at him then, as though he’d
spoken aloud.

‘Kevin?’ Lynn
whispered. She had that look in her eye when she wanted him to do
something he was dead set against.
‘Nick
has just asked if he can have a word, his consulting room is on the
ground floor, just past the lifts.’

Good for him.

‘It’s more private there.’ Dr
Bastard added.

They turned in unison as though
they’d been practising and walked back into the hospital leaving
Coupland with little option but to follow. He remembered he’d left
the car in a disabled parking spot and the wardens round here were
like Nazis. He shrugged.

Bring it on.

The corridor was longer than Lynn had
implied. Coupland found himself taking a left past the café and WH
Smith then a right along a row of closed doors before slowing in a
department signposted Oncology. Dr Bastard removed a bunch of keys
from his pocket and unlocked his office, ushering Coupland and Lynn
in ahead of him before asking them to take a seat on the two chairs
in front of his desk. Funny how Lynn chose to sit beside Coupland
rather than stand beside her new fella, Coupland observed, old
habits die hard he supposed. The consultant took his seat and began
talking once more, only Coupland found himself having to
concentrate really hard to keep up.

‘I’ve known Lynn for a number of years,
worked with her back in the early days before we both moved into
our specialisms….’ So what? Was he trying to justify their
attraction for one another, rationalise it as something inevitable
between good friends. Coupland glanced at Lynn suspiciously; she
dropped her gaze but leaned toward him to take hold of his hand. He
knew at that moment that something was badly wrong, he just didn’t
know what. He felt like he wanted to empty his bowels. Now it was
Lynn’s turn to speak:

‘I wanted to be sure before I
said anything, wanted to be done with the tests so I could tell you
facts not suspicions.’ Christ, you could tell she was a copper’s
wife. ‘But even then I couldn’t bring myself to do it. You’d think
being in the trade I’d know how to handle breaking bad news but
that just isn’t true. For two nights on the run I’ve sat at my
mum’s with a bottle of wine but by the time I got home I took one
look at you and couldn’t bring myself to say the words.’

‘What words?’ Coupland asked
slowly, already fearing the worst.

‘Lynn has Breast Cancer.’ Dr
Bastard said as gently as he could, followed by a barrage of facts
about survival rates and treatments but all Coupland could hear was
the sentence no one had spoken out loud yet.

Lynn was going to die.

When Coupland looked up Joe was
standing beside him, his hand gripping his shoulder as though they
were on the edge of a cliff and Joe was trying to prevent him from
jumping.

‘I’m so sorry.’ Joe said
softly.

Coupland’s throat was sore, as
though he’d swallowed a bag of razor blades. He merely nodded,
pushing himself to his feet so that the two men were standing eye
to eye. ‘How the hell will I cope without her?’

‘She’s not gone yet.’ Joe said
sharply, ‘You need to be strong. For Lynn, for Amy, but most
importantly for yourself.’

‘What if I can’t cope?’

‘You won’t have a choice.’ Joe
said simply.