Up on Cannon Point, the culverins - six Elizabethan siege guns pointing out to sea - gleamed under a sky of dirty milk. Birds' nests in nude trees were shadows in a lung X-ray. I heard the distant breath of engines, a long exhalation, but did not look up.
I got back to the shop - no boxes waiting for me - locked the door and stumbled through the narrow hall of books to my room. It felt like a black corridor narrowing around me. I felt water on the back of my hand as I lifted it to jerk open the door, and I frowned at the ceiling, but then I remembered it had not rained for days. It was sweat drizzling off my forehead. That sound, like an old boiler overworking, was my breath. Everything at the base of my back felt loose and disordered, like the bottom of a canvas bag of individual iron tools.
I made it to the bed and kind of collapsed against it; I resembled some old punter at a bar who's had far too much to drink but is trying to maintain some semblance of sobriety. I said 'Thank You' to Tamara as she handed over the plastic wallet in which I kept all my drugs and then swore at her because she hadn't unzipped it for me. I took some pills, dry-swallowing them because I couldn't turn the tap, and then tried to find a position that was bearable while I waited for the bastard things to take hold.
'Where are you?' I asked her, but she wasn't falling for that one. I looked up to the spot where she had been standing and tried to make her re-materialise there, but she was just memory dust clogging up my mind. I couldn't picture her without that lovely, cheeky half-smile. She seemed so close sometimes that I could smell her.
I must have fallen asleep, although it seemed only seconds later that I opened my eyes to find the light gone and the sounds of female footsteps scratching and clacking on the road outside the window. I very carefully got myself upright, pausing every now and then for the lances and jags and bolts, but they never came. The worst ache was in my chest; I must have pulled a muscle breathing so harshly. I checked my watch. Early evening. I'd been asleep for four hours.
I shuffled through to the bathroom and now I had no trouble getting the taps on. Steam leapt up. The mirror fogged instantly. I cracked open the window and started the long, arduous chore that was undressing. I pushed my focus back, purposefully blurred my eyes and thought of something else - Tamara, of course - to prevent myself from sucking up the detail of all these bruises and bumps and snakes of scar tissue. I turned off the taps and silence came rushing back. I could still hear footsteps, but they were far away, maybe not even those made by the same person. Unreliable echoes. Just the muffled, tricksy sounds of night time, now.
I got in the bath. Closed my eyes. Too hot in here. I could feel my heartbeat assaulting my insides. The surface tension, if I checked, would be shivering, as if something unspeakably large were closing in. Heat. I thought of what Amy had told me. I tried to put myself in her position. An impossible position. I tried to imagine what was worse, smothering and burning, or falling from a great height. Both were horribly violent deaths, and the irony was not lost on me that I had spend fifteen years poking a stick into the eye of both possibilities. It was amazing now to think that I had never given a moment's thought to an aeroplane disintegrating at 30,000 feet, or an engine catching fire, or the inferno following a crash. But then I supposed if we all succumbed to fear of occupational hazards, little would get done every day.
I soaked a flannel and draped it over my face. It moulded quickly to my features and the air I sucked in was hot and tasted faintly of soap. A brief dance of cold air came through the gap in the window. I felt drowsy with the temperature and the morphine in my bloodstream. At such moments I felt as near as I was likely to being comfortable. I could consider Tamara, and her actions, with a detachment that simply was not there during the hourly struggle to cope with this new body and the itinerary of pains, fresh and old, that it brought with it.
I put myself behind her eyes. I imagined her getting the phone call and imagining her putting down her book, or her cup of tea, and calling a taxi (she didn't drive) to take her to the hospital. She was gregarious, but I imagined she'd repel any chatty overtures from the cab driver. Rain on the windows, maybe. She rubbed her hands together when she was anxious.
Were you anxious? Did you come to the hospital? Or did you decide to start packing straight away?
I stayed with the loyal Tamara. I saw her hurrying through the rain to the A&E entrance.
Pol
, she'd say.
Where's Pol?
The confusion. Ukrainian words slipping through. The receptionist stoically asking her to calm down. Gradually making herself understood. Close to tears. Hysteria.
Will he... is he all right? Can I see him?
The long wait sitting in a plastic moulded chair in a room where everyone wants to be a million miles away. Blistering coffee that tastes nothing like coffee, but nobody cares. A TV on with the sound turned down and everyone watching and nobody seeing. The edges of the waiting room blacking out and everyone falling into the gap without a sound. I couldn't hold up the foundations of a reconstruction of something that had not happened. Loyal Tamara? No such character was listed in the credits. The whole scenario turned to ash.
The bath had cooled slightly. I reached out and wrenched the tap, hurting my finger on the handle. I swore. It felt good. I swore some more. Heat surged through the water. If it hadn't happened like that, then what? The phone call.
We're sorry to inform you... he's in the operating theatre now... he's critical...
Putting the receiver down. Calling the taxi.
Where did you go?
I opened my eyes and turned off the tap. What I thought was the trickle of water was more echoes from the road outside; a very young child's laughter. Late, wasn't it, for babies? But what did I know? It didn't matter.
I'd been fretting so much over the why of Tamara's actions that I'd neglected the where. And both avenues of thought had offered me an in: taxis. How else would she leave the village, especially if she had a few cases with her?
Quarter of an hour later I was on the phone, a list of the taxi firms - three of them - in the immediate vicinity. I knew it might be a long shot that any of them would still have a log of the actual phone call Tamara would have made, but there was a chance the drivers themselves would remember picking her up, especially if she was distraught. A handsome woman going to pieces. People remembered that.
The first number produced a dead tone. Maybe they'd gone out of business. The second firm I called, contrary to my suspicion, had a log that went back as long as a year; neither Tamara's mobile number, nor the B&B's, were on their records. I considered the possibility that she had called from somewhere else, a restaurant for example, but she only ever went out to restaurants with me, and anyway, it would have been difficult for the hospital to contact her beyond the numbers that existed on my person at the time of the accident. Despite my fears that she had abandoned me straight away, logically it didn't wash. She would have come to see me, if only to gauge how destroyed I was before bailing out. I stuck with the date of the hit-and-run.
The third taxi firm had no records at all. 'I'm just a one-man outfit,' he said. 'One man, one car, one phone.'
I tried to describe Tamara to him but it was piss in the wind.
'Look, mate,' he said. 'I'm busy. They say we're coming out of recession, but it feels to me like I'm still up to my neck in it. So if you don't mind, I've got to clear the line for all those punters who aren't about to call.'
I was about to put the phone down but had a thought. 'Okay, I'll book a taxi,' I said. 'Now, if you would. Take me to the A&E in Ipswich.'
He was a hefty guy in his mid-forties. I knew he was hefty before I even saw him, because he sounded his horn three times from the cab before coming to the door and giving it a weighty knock. He was back in his driver's seat by the time I'd hobbled to the door and he wouldn't look me in the eye then. Guilt at rushing an invalid along. Guilt at not being there to help him into his seat. He wore a glossy moustache and a side-parting. Little white pinch marks on the bridge of his nose showed me he'd just taken his glasses off. You become a regular Sherlock Holmes when you've little else left in life beyond observation.
'Please,' I said, as he threw the gearstick into first. 'Hang on a sec.'
'You do want to go to the A&E, don't you?'
'Yes, but it's no rush. I'm not having an emergency.'
'You look as if you have, and not that long ago.'
Another Sherlock Holmes. We could have opened a practice. 'Never mind about that,' I said, and I took out my wallet. Already his expression was of mild regret at accepting this job.
'This is the woman I was telling you about on the phone,' I said. 'I really need to find her. It would help me enormously, more than you can imagine, if you could tell me if you picked her up.'
He sighed and held his hand out for the picture. I felt a momentary pang when I handed it over, as if in doing so I was somehow casting Tamara away. I fidgeted nervously, wanting the photograph back all the while he was wiping the grease off his mitts all over her.
'This is like in the movies, isn't it?' he said. His piggy eyes sucked her in. Tamara had been wearing a tight white T-shirt on a cold day when I took the picture. I swallowed it down and waited.
'You know, it's difficult. I pick up attractive girls like this all the time. Friday, Saturday nights, you know?'
Yeah
, I thought.
Yeah, right. Here we go.
'But this one, this one I'm not sure about. I can't quite remember...' He was rubbing his chin now. I saw black hoops of sweat in the hollow beneath his bingo wings.
'This
is
just like the films, isn't it?' I said.
He thinned his lips into a sheepish
what can you do?
kind of smile. I took out my wallet and withdrew ten pounds.
'She's ten pounds important to you, is she?'
I took out a twenty as well. He pocketed the notes and went back to the photograph, frowning, rubbing his chin.
'For fuck's sake,' I said.
'There's no need for that.' He presented the photograph back to me, flicked out between two fingers. 'Yes, I remember her. Of course I remember her. She was in tears.'
My tongue thickened; my throat narrowed. I wanted to pull him near to me, see if I could smell her perfume on him. She had sat in this car. Tamara might have been sitting where I sat now. I pressed my hand against the upholstery.
'Where did you take her?' I managed.
'The hospital. Same one you're going to now. I take it she was coming to see you? This was months ago.'
'Over six months,' I said. I placed the photograph back in my wallet and tucked it safely away from him. He kept his eyes on my pocket, as if he could still see the outline of her through my jeans. I knew how he felt; she was like that. She left an impression. 'And then what?'
'And then what, exactly? I don't know. I went off and had a pie, read the papers, took a guy to the airport. You know. Same old, same old.'
'I mean, you didn't wait for her? You didn't take her back?'
'Didn't take her back, no. But then, by the looks of you, it wasn't likely to be a quick visit. No grapes and chocs for you, I'd imagine.'
'You didn't take her back at all? Later? I mean, hours later? Days?'
'Nope.'
'I don't have any more money, other than enough to pay for this trip. We could stop at the bank...'
He held up his hand, nervous now. Perhaps he realised that what he'd done was less than chivalrous. 'It's all right. I don't want any money...'
Any more, you mean.
'... I didn't take her back, no. Not that day, not ever. I haven't seen her since. There are other cab firms, you know. I'd remember having her in the car. She's a handsome woman, that one. A special catch. You lucky swine.'
I could have punched him, but I would have set my rehabilitation back weeks. Instead, I pulled on the door lever.
'Hey, what about my fare?'
I unfolded myself, gritting teeth, clenching fists. 'Like you said,' I grunted. 'There are other cab firms.'
He stepped on the gas and gave me the Vs as he tore away. Any satisfaction I had in wasting his time was short-lived: I was wasting my time too.
I waited another twenty minutes for a different taxi firm to send a driver round. I showed him the photograph too, before we set off, but drew a blank. No bribe needed this time. We travelled the 35 miles or so to Ipswich in silence. I was glad he preferred quiet, although I could have done without the smell of stale cigarette smoke. At the A&E entrance he wished me well and I grabbed hold of that, guarded it hard and fast against the suspicion that this was already a wild goose chase and that Tamara had simply called a different cab firm, or thumbed a ride, or simply vanished into thin air like the vapour from an open bottle of the perfume she liked to wear.
Inside the hospital, I was rapidly shunted from the counter when it was clear that there was nothing freshly wrong with me -
Can't you see there are sick people waiting to be treated?
- and told to talk to someone at the main reception. Once I was there, a security guard with thighs for arms and industrial chimney stacks for legs peered down at me from the shadow beneath his security guard's visor as I tried to make myself understood to the receptionist.