Fragile Cord (23 page)

Amnesia was
overrated. Angus came to this conclusion after a shrink his parents
had organised came to see him at home and attempted to explain why
he could no longer remember anything relating to the discovery of
Tracey and Kyle’s bodies. When the first officer on the scene had
sat with him, scribbling notes into a pad, he’d been able to answer
general questions:
How long had he and
Tracey been married? What age was Kyle?
But he’d been unable to recall the name of the client he’d
been to see, or even the purpose of his appointment.

All he could
remember was that he’d gone to a business meeting which hadn’t
lasted long…..and suddenly his life went into freefall, splitting
into two distinct parts, his life
before,
and his mere existence
afterwards. The events that followed once he’d let himself into his
home were a blur. All he’d been able to tell the policeman was that
they’d been happy, over and over, until he stopped asking questions
and put his notepad back in his breast pocket.

It was
perfectly normal, according to the psychiatrist, for the mind to
protect itself from re-living something that was distressing,
something that could otherwise tear you apart. The doctor had made
it sound like a good thing, as though he was lucky that the scene
he’d stumbled upon had vanished from his mind. But he was wrong,
because Angus had been left with all of the pain, all of the
emptiness, but none of the comprehension. None of the memory, just
an unfathomable loss. Part of him was missing, he just couldn’t
piece together
why.

This shouldn’t be happening, he
kept saying to anyone who’d listen.

But it already had.

Nothing was straightforward
when it came to the skewed landscape of depression. It was two in
the morning when Coupland took an apologetic call from a male nurse
on duty in Hope Hospital’s Casualty Department. He’d barked his
name and rank into the bedside phone automatically, throwing the
nurse off track.

‘Sorry to disturb you Sergeant,
but we’ve been given your details as next of kin…’

Coupland’s blood ran cold.
Lynn, had something happened to her? A feeling of panic washed over
him. Why had she insisted on working as normal when their lives
were now anything but? He held his breath as he waited for the
nurse to continue.

‘We have a….’ there was a pause
while the caller cleared his throat, tried to put his words in
order. ‘We have a homeless gentleman here….’ Coupland’s first
thought was one of relief, that Lynn was OK – at least for now. But
then it occurred to him that that meant Joe was with them, and he
sat bolt upright, swung his legs over the edge of his bed as
readied himself to spring into action.

‘What is it?’ he demanded, his
mind running into overdrive.

‘Severe trauma to his face and
neck, sir, I’m afraid…..he’s in surgery now.’

Bastards, Coupland thought.
Someone had had a pop at him, overpowered him in a doorway.
Probably one of the local wasters who saw picking on the vulnerable
as a leisure activity. Up there with dog fighting and beating up
the missus.

‘I’m on my way,’ he said,
imagining Joe’s quiet dignity in the face of mindless violence. He
sneered at the term, for what other kind of violence was there? His
blood pumped faster through his veins as rage gripped him.

‘How the hell did it
happen?’

The nurse cleared his throat
again, and Coupland was just about to shout for Christ’s sake get
on with it when the man replied hesitantly, as though, because he
was the messenger, he feared he’d somehow get the blame.

‘He put his head through a shop
window.’

‘Bollocks.’

‘There are witnesses. According
to the police who brought him in, he’d been seen staggering along
the Arndale Centre in the city centre, drunk as a lord, swearing.
Then he just seemed to….snap.’

One of the
more intriguing aspects of being on medication
Joe had once observed,
was the way
that it whittled away life’s rough edges, all potential sharp
emotional corners, left you feeling placid about the shit life
threw at you.

‘
I don’t want a life of
numbness
,’ he’d insisted when Coupland
broached the subject of taking something for his depression.
‘
I want to grasp life by the thorns until
my fingers bleed – isn’t that what I deserve?
’

Thirty minutes later and
Coupland found himself back in the emergency department of
Salford’s Hope Hospital, barking Joe’s name to the same pissed off
looking receptionist who’d been on duty the night Wilson had been
admitted. She pointed half-heartedly to the triage area, to a
middle-aged man with shaved hair and a tired smile. The male nurse
recognised Coupland’s name from his warrant card, held out his
hand.

‘He’s still in theatre I’m
afraid. Made a right mess of his face. One ear was hanging on by a
thread.’

Coupland clenched his jaw. He
felt as though he’d been struck dumb, couldn’t think of a single
sensible question to ask. ‘Will he be alright?’ was about as much
as he could muster.

‘Well, put it this way,’ the
nurse continued, ‘he won’t be needing a mask come Halloween.’ At
that moment Coupland’s own face resembled a mask, a mask of anger
that silenced the other man’s attempt at further humour.

‘Look,’ the nurse said, keeping
his bald head low as though ashamed at his tactless remark, ‘I’ll
take you through to the ward; you can wait for him there. Poor old
bugger.’

‘Old?’
Coupland repeated, ‘Old?’ He was still pissed off with the nurse’s
attitude, wanted to put the little upstart in his place. He looked
at the nurse’s paunch beneath his tunic, the balding scalp
disguised by the barber’s razor. ‘He’s younger than
you
.’

That seemed to shut him up. The
nurse led the rest of the way in silence, walking briskly so that
there was no possibility of a further conversation between them. He
pointed to a room with a television and uncomfortable looking
chairs, told Coupland to wait there, the ward sister would come for
him soon. He then walked over to the nurses’ station, shared a joke
with a weary looking woman at the desk before looking back and
pointing Coupland out to her. He raised a hand and waved before
disappearing through a set of double doors. Coupland ignored
him.

He rubbed his eyes and looked
around the drab room that cried out for a lick of paint and the
flick of a cloth. He wondered what had happened to the men and
women who used to push floor polishers up and down the corridors
all day and night. Hospital floors never seemed to shine any more.
Another cost-cutting exercise by the men in suits, he wondered.

A cheap Formica table displayed
out of date grubby magazines with curled up edges. The television
was mounted so high on the wall that only the top five per cent of
the population had a say in the programmes that were aired. There
was no remote control. A woman with large breasts gyrated on screen
in front of a gleaming American car. A group of black men in
bandanas postured for the camera and sang, white teeth and gold
chains gleaming in the Los Angeles sun. The sound was turned down.
Coupland thanked God for small mercies.

He folded then unfolded his
arms. Wished he’d brought a paper, a coffee, anything to relieve
the monotony of just sitting there. He’d radioed the station on his
way over to the hospital, left a message for the uniforms who’d
brought Joe in to have a report on his desk first thing. Somewhere
right now some copper was cursing him, unable to clock off until
he’d finished his paperwork, probably wishing he’d left the
pissed-up wino well alone, waited for someone else to call it in.
Coupland shrugged, didn’t give a toss where he stood in the
division’s popularity stakes. His head was in turmoil. Given his
state of mind and his hatred of hospitals he wasn’t even sure what
use he’d be, but being useful was way down on his priorities right
now.

Right now, all he was bothered about was
staying awake, keeping alert long enough to see his friend wheeled
safely onto the ward.

Alex couldn’t sleep. She’d been
distracted all evening and even Carl’d had the sense to keep out of
her way, taking himself off to the spare room to work on his
computer once Ben had gone to bed. She tip-toed downstairs to the
kitchen so as not to disturb them, poured herself a glass of milk
before perching on a stool at the breakfast bar.

She’d expected her visit to Professor
Ansell to allay her fears, to reassure her that only a certain type
of person acted the way Tracey had. Instead she’d come away with
the worrying knowledge that everyone had a tipping point, and when
that point of no return was crossed, anything was possible. The
lesson she’d learnt was that there were no lessons; the relentless
point of trying to understand Tracey’s actions was futile.

Any action could be rationalised.

She wondered if she and Carl should
count their blessings, quit while they were ahead. They had a
family and it worked. Why tempt fate?

Tracey Kavanagh’s Filofax lay open
before her on the kitchen counter. Alex had called a couple of the
contacts in the address book after she’d read Ben his bedtime
story, most of them distant acquaintances from Tracey’s ante-natal
group who’d read about the tragedy in the evening news but hadn’t
really kept in touch with the young mother and her son. They asked
Alex to pass on their condolences to Angus. There were only a
couple more pages to go, and she flicked through them idly wishing
it were morning so she could complete her calls and hand it back.
Carrying the address book around had become an unwelcome reminder
of the investigation and she chastised herself for bringing it into
her home. No wonder she had trouble sleeping.

Outside the kitchen window the sky was
at its darkest giving the illusion that black card had been placed
against every pane of glass, obscuring any decent view. Alex stared
into the gloom and sighed. What kind of a life had she chosen for
herself? It was the middle of the night and her husband and son
were sleeping soundly upstairs while she read through the address
book of a dead woman.

She flicked through the remaining
pages, comforting herself that at least there weren’t many names
left for her to call: there were no entries on the Z page, a
solitary Young, George, on the page before, and only three listed
under W. She dragged her finger down the list of names: Watts,
Paul; White, Sandy…..but it was the final entry that caught her
off-guard, making her sit up and try to second guess its
significance.

Coupland stayed on the ward long enough
to see a sheepish Joe come round from the anaesthetic. He’d only
had time to utter a relieved ‘We’ll talk later…’when the ward
sister ushered him out. He put up no resistance, following the exit
signs as though searching for the Holy Grail. Rather than return to
the car park, he headed towards the Maternity wing, to the smaller
entrance at the side of the building that lead directly to the
Neo-natal Unit, its entry system the most secure in the hospital.
He pressed the buzzer, glaring at the CCTV camera while staff went
in search of his wife. After a couple of minutes Lynn let herself
out of the building, giving him a look that told him she thought
he’d lost the plot. He probably had. Bathed in light from the
illuminated sign behind him he resembled an avenging urban
angel.

‘What are you doing here, Silly?’ she
chastised him, ‘I’m going to have to take this as my break now, you
realise that don’t you? Got to practice what I preach.’ She was
smiling as she said it, so no real harm done.

‘Come here,’ Coupland
pleaded, folding her into an embrace, nuzzling the top of her head
with his lips.
His eyes were shiny, his
mind alert, processing thoughts that for the moment were better
left unsaid.
‘You know that I love you,
right?’ he whispered into her hair, ‘And that everything else is
just bollocks….’ Lynn nodded into his chest, her hands moving
greedily over his shoulders. After all these years he was still
like a caged animal, one liable to turn wild at the slightest
threat.

‘I feel so fucking helpless,’ he
confessed, ‘it doesn’t seem right that there’s scum out there-’

‘-Shhh….you can’t talk like that.’ Lynn
chastised him, ‘No one deserves cancer.’

Coupland wasn’t so sure.

They stood like that for several
minutes, holding onto one another, each afraid to let the other out
of their sight for very different reasons.

Coupland had been back on the road five
minutes when his radio crackled to life. A disturbance had been
reported at an address on the west side of town; close enough to
where he was now for him to respond. He recognised the address
immediately as Angus Kavanagh’s place. He’d radioed back that he’d
take the call, that he was nearest to the location and that he knew
the family.

Correction he knew the
sole-survivor.

As he pulled into the cul-de-sac his
eardrums were assaulted by the boom of a stereo on full blast,
blaring from the windows of Angus’s home. Every window was open for
maximum effect. Angus’s neighbours, Diane and Harry White, were
standing on the shared expanse of lawn between both their homes,
looking up at the master bedroom window, towelling dressing gowns
wrapped tightly around them. They ran towards Coupland as he
climbed out of his car.

‘It’s not that we wanted to complain,
did we Harry?’ Diane informed him, looking to her husband for
corroboration, ‘you know, about the noise?’ She pointed to Angus
who was precariously leaning out of the open upstairs window, ‘We
were worried about what he might do…’