Perhaps he did expect me. I chose the day carefully, after all – the anniversary of Mum’s death. After a lifetime thinking about her, about what she did to herself, I am now, second by second, growing older than her. I have survived her. Every moment now is a bonus. I am going to enjoy myself.
The smell of damp wrestles with the smell of stale cigarettes for domination of the air. Ben has compensated for his circumstances by filling the flat with other, better worlds. There are books everywhere. Travel magazines and Sunday supplements teeter in piles against the walls. There isn’t anywhere to sit down beyond a hollow-bottomed leather couch under the lounge window, and Ben paddles his way towards that ahead of me, desperate as a drowning seaman striking out for the lifeboat.
I stay standing.
Ben blinks up at me. ‘Well.’
The radio is on. The voice is one I recognise.
‘How are you?’
I don’t answer. I am listening to the programme. It is. It is Mandy. She’s on a review show, discussing some exhibition I’m never going to see. She likes it. She’s employing words like ‘revenant’ and ‘spiky’. It’s nice to hear her being so positive about something.
‘Conrad?’
‘Do you mind if we have the radio off?’
One thing about Mandy – she has staying power. Last year you couldn’t turn your computer on without there being some banner trailer for her memoir creeping down the side of your screen on creepy, eight-fingered hands. She mentioned me, but glancingly – a minor lover of her early life, before the accident sewed her into her current, compelling form.
Ben snaps the radio off. He sits down. He swallows. He is very thin, strung out on whatever medicines are crowding the table by his side. ‘How are you?’
I won’t say anything to that. What would be the point? His eyes rove over me, a father’s instinct kicking in. Bit by bit, you can see it register with him – my cheap clothing, my cap, my worn boots. The size of me.
Some bit of forgotten etiquette heaves into view behind his eyes. ‘Do you want something to drink?’
‘It’s all right, Ben.’
He looks relieved. I wonder if there’s anything at all in his kitchen. I’m tempted to ask him to show me around. ‘This is the living room. This is the master bedroom.’ I can see well enough how he lives – enough to know that I will never be able to add measurably to his burdens. It is hard for me, and not at all reassuring, to discover that life has exacted its own revenge upon him. I thought that was going to be my job. Now I’m here, there doesn’t seem much point.
I tell him what I know. How I tried to contact him, in the weeks after Mandy’s accident, but that he had never returned my calls. Even after all this work I cannot pinpoint exactly where his trail of phone numbers and forwarding addresses slid off into fiction.
Ben shakes his head, whether in denial, or because he can’t himself remember, hardly matters now. The clinic he worked at, abandoning me to Poppy’s care towards the end of my time at school – that was real enough. Even the job checked out. And the one after that. And the one after that.
By then, though, Dad had been reduced to some sort of high-grade janitor. After that his work record melted away into casual three-month contracts at this clinic, that care-home, each one further away than the last – he had moved across the public health network like a nomadic fisherman, following the seasons from pond to pond. Even his applications for criminal record checks (spotless, always) petered out in the end. The last six years are completely unaccounted for.
Will I look like this, when I am his age? So small, and, well, pointed? Like some small forest mammal, poking its snout up above the leaves. His presence is disturbing. It is so much less powerful than his absence has been.
I am strong now. Michel has toughened me. I could break him across my knee like a twig. I tell him, ‘I hired a professional,’ and I want to enjoy the way his face quivers, but to be honest all I can feel is a faint and guilty disgust.
I’ve been paying Cobb for a private investigation. He seemed to me a reasonable man. Vaux, with all the resources at his disposal, had employed him – this was as good as a recommendation.
Cobb, when he wasn’t putting the virtual frighteners on me, turned out to be a pleasant, heavy-drinking ex-submariner on his second career and his third divorce. It took him no time at all to track Ben down. He found him managing a state-funded care home, a former B&B on the coast east of here. When Cobb phoned to tell me, he boasted that he hadn’t even had to leave his desk. The work had proved so easy for him, he offered me a discount.
By the time I got up the guts to follow Cobb’s lead, however, Dad had lost the job, the care home was closed down, and its elderly clientele were dispersed and absorbed. Dad’s easy enough to find now that he’s drawing his minuscule state pension.
‘You know what day it is. Don’t you?’ I could be harder with him if I wasn’t having to stand over him. Looming like this, everything that comes out of my mouth, however innocuous, acquires the power of a threat. I sit on one arm of the sofa, and he shifts backwards against the other arm, edging away from me. I want to shed my puffer jacket but these kinds of places can’t afford heat, and our breaths are coming out in clouds.
Dad seems to have acquired some of the district’s hardiness, making do in a red lumberjack shirt, the collar turned up to hide the wattle of his neck. He offers me a cigarette. Nothing dates him more than this – the genteel suicide aid of a vanishing generation. ‘I know what day it is.’ He takes a lighter from the table. A medicine canister topples onto its side. He ignores it and inhales, dragging the flame into his cigarette.
‘You knew I found her. In the boot of the car. You knew I saw her there.’
Ben closes his eyes. Is this suffering, or is he reliving a painful moment of the past? It could be he’s just savouring his cigarette. With a face like his, it’s impossible to tell. Its mask of habitual suffering hides any ephemeral emotion.
‘I can tell you about it if you want.’
The story comes out of him easily, without any kind of struggle. I don’t know whether to believe it or not. There are details which ring with such a nice irony, I wonder whether life can really have thrown them up. The bag, he says, was hers. The plastic bag, wrapped round her head with packing tape. It’s how he found her – after racing to her aid, frantically trying to make sense of her confused directions. (‘I’m in a phonebox.’)
How Sara’s bipolar trajectory had kiltered so far off its usual orbit, driving her to try suicide even before she made it to the camp, Ben can only speculate. ‘I got her to take her pills,’ he says. ‘Before she went to the camp. It was a deal we had.’ Blaming iatrogenic medicine again. Presumably this is a trick he learned off her.
He found her in a motel room, the evening after she left. He knocked on the door and the door was already open. Perhaps she wanted to be found and rescued. Perhaps this was her cry for help.
The bed was a pool of vomit, with here and there frothy little islands of half-dissolved aspirin. Sara had passed out. The bag crackled as it rose and fell against her face. It was torn.
How long he sat there beside her, he cannot now remember. Eventually, borne down by the weight of things, he reached for a pillow and pressed it over her face until she stopped moving.
He picked her up in his arms and carried her down the corridor to the lobby. It was empty. He laid her down on the sofa by the door and went to the desk and rang the bell.
No-one came.
He waited. He doesn’t know how long. In the end he picked her up again and carried her out to the car. He laid her on the back seat and looked up the location of the nearest hospital on his phone. He drove there and sat in the hospital car park all night. An edge of blue touched the horizon, and he remembered me. He pulled Sara off the back seat and laid her in the boot of the car. He drove home. He came home in time to see me safely to school.