Out of Mind (7 page)

“Is there anything he won’t be able to do?” I asked, embracing Dr. Lam’s principle of learning the worst.

“Did you have plans to play football for England, Justin?” he asked.

Justin was by this point incapable of speech, incapable of even shaking his head, but Dr. Lam assumed a negative.

“That’s okay, then, you will have a normal life.” And on this airy assurance, Dr. Lam took his leave.

I sat there for a while after he had gone. I couldn’t think of anything to say, comforting or otherwise. And Justin was similarly
silent. After a while, I heard him clear his throat. Then he said, “When’s my dad going to get here?”

I got up and went over to the bed. His face looked waxen, his blond hair a sickly yellow against the stark white of the pillowcase,
his pale gray eyes silver with pain.

“Did they tell you he’s coming?” I asked.

“No. I just thought—”

“I don’t know,” I said quickly. “I thought he was waiting for you to come back home, but maybe I’m wrong. I can check. It’s
just a few days.”

Justin closed his eyes, and later I left, hoping that he would sleep.

That night I called home. My mother was worried and tearful. Dave had already told her what had happened, but I had to go
through everything again, and only when she knew every detail did she seem to feel better. I spoke to the children, who had
no idea anything was wrong, and I spoke to Carol, who lives with us and looks after the children while I work. I cried a little
when I hung up, but that hurt, so I had to stop.

Then I called Finney, who had heard the basics from my mother. He sounded exasperated.

“What on earth is going on?” he demanded.

“I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

“What were you doing in a minefield?”

“I wasn’t in a minefield. I was at the edge of it. These things spit out shrapnel.”

There was silence from his end.

“Does it hurt?”

“Well”—I tried to jolly him along—“I’m not going to have a face lift if this is how it feels.”

That night, the telephone beside my bed rang. It was Maeve, spluttering more with frustration than condolence. Why couldn’t
she reach me on my mobile? Was I in pain? When would I be back? Would I need time off work? But once I’d reassured her that
I was not at death’s door, the cloak of concern was rapidly shed.

“Robin,” she said, her voice tense, “it occurs to me that I can’t quite remember what you’re up to out there. I’m sure you’ve
run it past me, but could you just remind me?”

I took a deep breath. The time for keeping Maeve out of the loop was past.

“I’m putting Melanie Jacobs into my series on missing people,” I told her, “and I discovered that the last man to speak to
her had met her before, which the police weren’t aware of. He left England after Melanie disappeared and came to Cambodia.”

There was a terribly long silence as my words bounced off some distant satellite and found their way to Maeve and she absorbed
them and exploded back into the stratosphere.

“But you can’t. You simply can’t do something like that without informing me!”

“Why not?”

“You know as well as I do,” Maeve retorted, “that Melanie Jacobs is not just anybody. She’s a Corporation employee, and as
such there are procedures that must be respected.”

“Okay, I respect the procedures.”

“You do?”

“I’m informing you, aren’t I?”

“Robin, I know that you have never, ever, respected any procedure in your life. At times I have even admired that lack of
respect. But in this case it’s not that simple.”

“Why not?”

There was a knock on my door, and a nurse peered into the room, looking concerned at my raised voice. From the other end of
the line, there came a sigh of exasperation.

“Do nothing,” she told me, “speak to no one, arrange no further interviews, don’t even think about Melanie Jacobs until you
have talked to me. Do you understand?”

I told her that I understood, but of course I didn’t. I had expected a slapped wrist, not a gag order.

When Dave came to visit, he brought my laptop. I rigged up a connection through the hospital telephone and found an e-mail
from Finney.

Saw Veronica Mann at a meeting today. Haven’t seen her in ages now she’s transferred. She sends her best wishes. She said
I probably hadn’t been properly sympathetic. Sorry about that. She also said I should try and make you laugh. I said I’d feel
more like telling jokes if you could find a way to steer clear of major head injury in the near future.

I read through the e-mail a few times, hoping to find a smidgeon of comfort somewhere, but if it was there, I couldn’t see
it. He hadn’t even put my name at the beginning of the e-mail or signed off at the end. I wasn’t expecting a row of hugs and
kisses, but a simple “Love from” wouldn’t have gone amiss. A message from my mother, however, disclosed the newsworthy fact
that Finney had dropped by at my house while she was there. This was the first known instance of Finney seeking out my family
when I was absent. He had even been persuaded by Carol to read a bedtime story to Hannah and William, which he had done, my
mother wrote, “in the same Tone of Voice he’d use if he was giving Evidence in court.”

When I went to visit Justin the next day, I found him seated out of bed and more animated than he had been. He was, however,
extremely upset. Once he started talking, he couldn’t stop. It was as though all the pent-up emotion of the past days, and
perhaps even of the past few weeks, was pouring out of him.

It was the thought of going home that sparked the outburst.

“Who’s going to look after me? Dad’s not a nursemaid.”

“You’ll look after yourself,” I kept telling him. But it seemed as if Justin felt he had no choice but to be dependent from
now on. He could not see things getting better. In his mind’s eye, he would be lying flat on his back or sitting in a chair
for years to come.

He talked and talked about the time he had spent with Mike, seeming to blame him for the catastrophe that had ripped his leg
off. Justin, it emerged, felt that Mike had bullied him mercilessly. When I asked him for specifics, the bullying he described
was not so much cruel as insensitive, as much about Justin’s own sense of inadequacy as about Mike’s urge to rub his nose
in it. He talked about Mike’s friendship with his father, Kes, a friendship that to Justin embodied an overwhelming weight
of machismo.

“I can’t compete,” he told me. “Even my dad’s name, his real name’s Kevin, but everyone calls him Kes, it’s short for kestrel.
Dad says it’s because he’s done more parachute jumps into enemy territory than anyone ever. There were always four of them.
You’ve met Mike and Alan, and then there’s my dad, and Ray Jackson. When Ray died, that was when they all decided to get out
of the army. They’re like blood brothers. I haven’t been to war, and I don’t want to go. Dad was like . . . born to go to
war. That’s the way his brain works. Mike is straight down the line, black and white, friend or foe, everything has a right
way and a wrong way. But Dad’s like, forget the rules, let’s play it by ear. They always joke that Mike’s the one that wrote
the book and Dad’s the one that tore it up. But they’ll both think I’m an idiot. And I’ll be living with both of them like
the resident bloody cripple.”

I stopped him and got him to back up and explain what he was talking about. Once he started to pour it all out, he couldn’t
stop. He hated his stepmother, Sheryl, who had married his father only a year after his mother died of leukemia. Now that
his dad had left the army and gone into the private security sector, there was serious cash coming in for the first time.
He’d been earning 250 pounds a week with the SAS, but he could quadruple that doing contract security work in Saudi and make
thousands as a bodyguard in Afghanistan or Iraq. When Sheryl was left a part share in a decrepit house near Sydenham Hill
Wood, she had insisted that Justin’s father move out of their modest Norwood flat and had persuaded Mike’s wife, Anita, that
they should go into partnership. Anita and Mike would buy the other share of the house, and they would renovate it, turning
the ground floor into a gallery for Anita’s paintings. The second floor would be an apartment for Kes and Sheryl and the third
floor an apartment for Mike and Anita.

I caught myself looking somewhat dispassionately at Justin. Of course I was sympathetic, but I have to say that what interested
me more than Justin’s misery was the fact that he was going to share a house with the family of Mike Darling, the last man
known to have seen Melanie before her disappearance.

“Dad’s there about one month in three, and Mike just upped and left four months ago.”

“So I heard,” I said. “Why did he do that?”

Justin shrugged. “He just flipped. Around the time that woman disappeared. He was questioned by the police, because he’d been
having a drink with her before she vanished, and he was so pissed off, he completely lost it. Not with the police, but at
home he was yelling and screaming—they had no right to interrogate him, he was being treated like a criminal. Then he said
he needed to get away. That’s what Jacqui says, anyway. Jacqui’s mum, Anita, she’d just had a new baby, so she didn’t want
Mike to go, she was begging and pleading and crying, saying Mike had promised he wouldn’t go away again, but he went anyway.
So Jacqui’s gone to live with her mum to look after the baby because she can’t cope. She’s got some kind of postnatal thing.”

“Postnatal depression?”

“Yeah. That’s it.”

“What about you and Jacqui, then?” I asked unthinkingly. Every time he mentioned the name of Mike’s daughter, his voice took
on a worshipful tone. And the two of them had clearly kept in touch somehow while Justin was in Cambodia. It sounded to me
as though when Justin had left Britain, their childhood friendship had been hovering on the brink of an entirely new and hormonally
driven relationship. If Justin had gone to Cambodia to prove himself a man to Jacqui, however, things had not gone as he would
have hoped.

“What about it?” His voice had become flat again. “She’s a dancer. She’s not going to be interested in a one-legged freak.”

“You’ll have to ask her about that,” I said.

Justin sank into a sulky silence, and I kicked myself. It wasn’t exactly a sympathetic response. But what else was I supposed
to say? I can’t even guarantee myself love. I can’t go around guaranteeing it for other people.

London

I
returned home to my haunted house. The wailing and the bumps in the night have nothing to do with anything supernatural.
Hannah and William do the wailing and the bumping. It’s Adam, who willed us his flat and who is therefore both ghost and patron
of our home. We saw next to nothing of Adam when he was alive. He’s there now, though. Not in chilly blasts, thank God, or
I’d have moved out long ago and left him to haunt himself. He’s a rather warmer presence than that. Sometimes I find myself
talking to him—I get on better with him now he’s dead. But usually I can’t even hear myself think, let alone listen out for
ghostly voices.

When I arrived from the airport, I let myself in through the basement door. The house is large and semidetached, and once
upon a time a medium-grand family would have occupied the whole thing. Nowadays, unless you’re a millionaire, you get a bit
of a house, not the whole place. This one had been split, and Adam had bought the basement—which gave us the garden—and the
first floor. This meant that from the street we either had to go down steps to the basement door, which was ours alone, or
we could take the steps up to the red-painted door that was originally the main door to the house and which we shared with
the flats above. The basement resonated only to the breathing of sleeping children. Their bedroom and mine were both downstairs,
along with a big kitchen and dining room, which had been knocked into one. Carol had retired to her room upstairs. During
my working day, Carol looks after Hannah and William in our flat, along with one other child, a three-year-old boy whose single
mother is my neighbor and works as a legal assistant in the city. The arrangement works for all of us. My neighbor gets a
child minder next door. She can drop off and pick up in an instant. The kids have a playmate. And because my neighbor pays
a portion of Carol’s salary, the financial pressure on me is relieved slightly. Once in a while, the system breaks down and
we all get ratty, but for the most part it works.

I could hear Carol’s television whispering and the occasional burst of studio laughter. She always retreats to her room when
the children go to bed, and she hates to be disturbed unless she’s baby-sitting and a child wakes up. Usually she’s out on
a Friday night, but my traveling had put a stop to that this week. I would have to make it up to her. Carol had become so
indispensable that even the slightest chance that she might go was enough to make me quiver with anxiety.

I think I would know if she was unhappy, because she’s not the type to fake it. I know that we have diametrically opposed
views on a vast range of issues. But the only reason I know that is because she likes nothing better than to get a good political
argument going. At least I know that she appreciates me as a sparring partner. But I have to live with the knowledge that
if she finds someone she disagrees with more, she may end up leaving me for that person. Of course I don’t pay her a fortune,
either, although it feels as though I do.

I went straight to the twins’ room and kissed them on their smooth foreheads, pale in the sliver of light from the hallway.
I gazed down at them. I was tempted to wake them to say hello, but it wouldn’t have been wise. In less than two weeks they
seemed to have grown, their plump little legs reaching farther in their beds, arms longer. They share a room because we need
a room for Carol, but I wish I could separate them because bedtime every night is a riot. At three years old they are like
puppies, their bodies like bundles of industrial springs. The commandments of later childhood—thou shalt not launch thyself
headfirst off the bed, thou shalt not beat thy twin to a pulp, thou shalt not lob food at thy mother—are still just the stuff
of nightmare, a glimpse into a bleak future.