Whatever You Love (10 page)

‘Can’t you two find a time when you can talk together, at all, just the two of you, you know, share what’s going on? I’m asking for his sake as much as yours.’

I scoff out loud as we step inside. Through the kitchen, Rees comes towards us head down, torpedo-like. ‘I doubt Chloe would allow that.’ Rees charges into me and clutches at my legs, begins to howl.

Toni gives me her characteristic grimace. ‘I’ll get back to you on that.’

*

David Bradley is one of those men who could play himself in a television drama. On casual acquaintance, he seems two- dimensional; a quiet, clever stalwart, a vertebrae in the backbone of the NHS – thinning hair, small, hunched shoulders. I used to wonder about people like him, both men and women. My professional life was built around them, those restrained souls who seem to have wiped the slate of their personality clean in order to be good at what they do. Do they seethe, beneath, I used to think? Are they full of things? What are their secret lives? No one would ever have accused me of being secretive, before. Chatty when I was in a good mood, obviously glum when I was not. If people asked me how I was, I told them. Sometimes, they got whole stories. But Bradley, and people like him: the secret ones, the tidy men and women – I used to wonder.

Bradley deals with death as he would any other professional colleague. When he is asked a question, he gives an answer and he never patronises the grief-stricken. One of my patients was a woman who suffered nerve damage in one leg after an epidural that went wrong during the birth of her second child. Two years later, her husband committed suicide by closing the garage door and leaving the engine running in their Volvo estate. The pathologist was Bradley. I took the woman to see him. She couldn’t believe that her husband would be so selfish as to kill himself, leaving her a disabled widow with two small children. They didn’t have any money worries – with my help, she had got a good settlement out of our local NHS Trust. It became clear to me as we spoke with Bradley that she was hoping her husband’s death was accidental, that he might have forgotten to turn the engine off. (Before stuffing his coat beneath the garage door, reclining the driver’s seat and lying down…?) He hadn’t left a note. It was clearly an impulse suicide.

I think a lesser man than Bradley might have told the widow what she wanted to hear. He might have made himself feel better by offering her ambiguities designed to let her invent her own story. Bradley did nothing of the sort. He took her through the report line by line and gave her the cold facts, as they had been discovered, entirely free of interpretation. Later, an open verdict would be recorded at the inquest, but not once did Bradley say anything that the widow could interpret as permission to delude herself. He paid her that compliment. He left the rest of her life in her own hands. In his position, I am not sure I could have been that strong, that principled – I have always wanted to be liked too much. David Bradley is my man; he will tell me what I need to know.

*

I drive down the esplanade; it is a harsh, grey day. Few people are out and the shops are doing poor trade. Suddenly, a plastic bag swoops down from the high periphery of my vision and lands on my car windscreen with a slap and flutter. Startled, I flip on the windscreen wipers, which whisk the bag to and fro before throwing it back up into the air. I slow right down to catch my breath and see as I glance to my left that Mr Yeung the chippy has boarded up his window and hung a ‘closed’ sign on his door. Odd, I think, how one shop closing can make a whole row of retail outlets look derelict. It seems so quiet downtown. A lone dog lopes across the road in front of me, the last animal alive in a post-apocalyptic landscape. I shake my head. This trip is taking all my nerve. I cannot allow myself to be unsettled by a plastic bag.

Bradley’s office is at the far end of Southside Road, almost out of town, in a cluster of municipal buildings of the sort that members of the public don’t usually need to visit. The buildings themselves are ugly brick cubes huddled close together just off the main road, exposed to the wind that whips smartly down from the rise. A sea view – that rectangle so greatly beloved of all those who don’t live near the sea, who don’t have to look out of their windows and see the endless crash of it, day after day – such a view is Bradley’s. He is expecting me. As I sit down, we exchange the briefest of preliminary remarks. Glancing at his desk, I see that his report lies on it, ready for me. He pushes it towards me. ‘Take a look,’ he says, ‘then ask me anything you want to know.’

It is in a pale green plastic folder. Betty’s full name and date of birth are written in a neat, sloping hand on a sticker in the top right-hand corner. I reach for it and pull it on to my lap, opening the cover quickly. I can’t allow myself to hesitate; it’s all here, the bleeding, the lung and chest trauma – cause of death was multiple internal injuries. It is easier to read than I had expected. The terminology renders me professional. I scan it once, then read it slowly and properly from the top. While I do, Bradley waits, half turned away from me in his revolving chair, attendant but detached.

‘Why was this break so bad?’ I ask. ‘The left femur.’ I still have my head down, reading. Betty’s left leg was broken in two places. It is not the kind of thing I was planning on asking him about. The break to the femur did not kill Betty, after all. It was the internal bleeding that did that.

Bradley pauses. This is uncharacteristic of him and makes me look up. His face is still expressionless. ‘The vehicle had bull bars.’

We stare at each other and all at once I understand his pause. He has stepped outside the remit of our discussion and is giving me a detail that I do not need to know. The car had bull bars. That means it was a four-wheel drive. I shouldn’t be surprised, but I am. I realise that, until now, I have had no physical image of the vehicle that killed my daughter. Had I been asked to conjure one, I would have thought of something old, second-hand, driven by a youth or a man in his twenties, perhaps – someone a little careless but still within the speed limit. How fast he was driving is now in doubt. What he will be charged with is also, now, in doubt.

I am realising something. It is coming over me in a wave, like one of those dramatic climaxes in a disaster movie when the scene goes into slow motion so you can observe the expression on the actor’s face as he or she leaps from the path of danger; a rush of water, a wall of flame, a falling building. Up until now, the fact of Betty’s death has obscured the manner of it.

The driver of the car that killed my daughter was not some callow youth in a beaten-up, second-hand rust bucket. The driver was a man who could spend tens of thousands of pounds on a gleaming four-by-four with bull bars. This driver, this faceless, mythical creature whom I have refused to admit into my thinking is no longer some shadowy thing, a grey ghost who came and took my Betty. He is taking shape, acquiring substance with each new detail that I learn about him.

I don’t know whether Bradley can guess at what is forming in my head but he adds, ‘It is unproven that he was driving at excessive speed, Laura.’

‘I know,’ I say shortly. All at once, I am suspicious. ‘Why do you say that?’

Bradley sighs.

‘He had convictions, didn’t he? He had previous.’ I am fishing.

Bradley removes his glasses and looks at them as if they don’t belong to him. He glances to one side, out of his window, puts his glasses back on and looks back at me. ‘Laura,’ he says, ‘I’m sorry but I’m speaking to you in an official capacity.’ He intends this as obfuscation rather than confirmation but I know it to be both.

*

I drive back along the esplanade. I would like to park and go for a walk on the beach but Julie will be bringing Rees home soon. I have to get back. As I drive slowly, glancing from time to time at the choppy grey water, I fail to notice that the lights at the pedestrian crossing are flashing. A group of teenage lads, the sort that hang out at the chip shop, are already striding across the road. I brake suddenly. The car slides forward to a halt, then stalls. All at once, they are surrounding the car, two of them gesturing and shouting obscenities, the others looking on with sullen, dead expressions on their faces. One of the two who is shouting, the tallest of all of them, leans across and bangs his fist down hard on the bonnet of my car. His face looms and leers through the windscreen, a long white face beneath a brown cap, acne scattered in an arc across his cheek, eyes blaring. He calls me a stupid cunt. I’m inclined to agree. He takes a long time to move away from my window and by the time he does, I am breathing so hard that it is a moment or two before I am able to restart the car. I drive home slowly, my heart thumping in my chest.

Once I am inside my own door, the adrenalin from the incident drains away and my legs shake. I wish I had one of Toni’s cigarettes. I know that after the expense of energy this morning, a darkness will descend upon me this afternoon as sure as night following day. It was like this after my trip to the playground, and Willow’s wake. Anything other than being at home on my own costs me so much, depletes me, leaves me entirely in the grip of what I have been gripped by ever since my daughter was killed. Was killed. Was killed by somebody. Didn’t just die. Didn’t dissolve into thin air in a puff of smoke. She was a whole human being, a life, my life, and somebody came along in a car and killed her.

Then I see it, on the mat, a small white envelope. I pick it up, recognising the type and shape of it, the fact that my name is not written anywhere. I open the blank envelope and unfold the sheet of A4 paper. Typed on it, in the usual typeface, is one sentence – like the last one, just one sentence, again – she is quite succinct these days.

I hear you’ve gone quite mad.

*

That night, I wake after an hour or two of sleep, the way I do most nights. I lie on my back on Betty’s bed for a long while, then turn on her bedside light, a rotating starfish, and pick up my watch from her bedside table. It is 2.34.

The rotating starfish throws orange triangles around the room. They wheel slowly, passing over the opposite wall, across the ceiling, down the other wall. The hypnotic effect is deliberate – we’ve had that light since Betty was a baby. Baby Betty would lie in her cot and kick herself to sleep while the orange triangles whirled around her. We used to watch her from the doorway sometimes, peering round, spying on her. Kick kick kick, her little legs would go. Kick kick kick. Then, all at once, she would go still, as if someone had flicked the off switch, a still form in the gloom beneath a slowly turning myriad of orange.

After another long while, I push back the duvet and go to the bathroom. I lift my nightie and pee in the dark. I don’t wash my hands. I pad down the stairs, my arms wrapped around myself against the chill of an unheated house. When I reach the bottom of the stairs, I go to the coat rack and lift down my coat, my heavy woollen one, old but comforting. On the same peg is Betty’s woollen scarf, her mermaid scarf. I wrap it round my neck. I look about for shoes.

Outside, the air is crisp, cool as water, clear and soft. Night air, I think, better than coffee or any other stimulant. I feel more awake than I have done for weeks as I walk briskly down the street, my arms still folded across my chest, my nightie dangling beneath my coat. I don’t have any socks on and my walking boots – the first pair of footwear that came to hand – rub briskly on my feet, which has the same effect as the bracing air: it makes me feel euphoric.

The streetlights on our road are sparse and dim. They give off a soft, white glow, so soft that they hardly seem to be on and I wonder if there is some vast switch somewhere in the Town Hall that dims all the lights at this hour. Every house is dark. I think how interesting it is to be able to see the lining of people’s curtains in a way you can’t usually when the houses are lit from the inside. As I turn the corner on to the main road, I see a single window alight, a small square one at the top of the detached house on the corner. Someone is up and using the bathroom – I don’t know the occupants of that house but feel briefly affronted that I don’t have the night to myself.

The main road is deserted. It takes me ten minutes to walk its length and in that time only one car passes, at speed, someone hurrying to be home. I cross the road just before the roundabout and marvel at how easy it is. I am used to negotiating my right to be in a road, whether I am on foot or driving a car, used to feeling that my occupation of any given space must be carefully managed and only then with the permission of others. It is exciting to feel I own this night, emboldening. Why haven’t I done this more often?

It used to take us twenty minutes to walk to Betty’s school – longer if Rees insisted on getting out of his pushchair, as he often did. It was always a relief to reach Fulton Avenue, the penultimate road.
Nearly there. We’ll make it just before the bell.
If we were on the left-hand side – the side opposite Ranmali’s shop – then I would sometimes bid Betty goodbye and let her run on alone from there.

I am on the left-hand side now. I am standing on the pavement. I have my back to Ranmali’s shop and am facing the playing fields, the gates of which are padlocked with a heavy chain. Tied along the railings are bunches of rotting flowers, heads shrivelled until they are unidentifiable, hanging at diagonals. Some are wrapped in cellophane and these have degraded more quickly than the others, brown slime inside. Some of them have notes attached. I step towards them and try to read one but rain has washed away the writing which is no more than a few slanting, pale-blue lines. At the bottom of the railings are more flowers, also rotting, including a couple of more recent ones where the blooms are still identifiable: there is one with pink chrysanthemums. Next to it is a row of three cuddly toys, two teddy bears and one soft duck. The duck has been splashed by mud from passing cars and lies on its side, fur matted. One of the teddies is blue. It is wearing a yellow T-shirt and a yellow hat.