Remnants of that good feeling had stuck around. I wouldn't be able to be as pro-active as I had planned, but I could still plan and budget and co-ordinate. Get busy and keep busy. Keep my mind off things by focusing on others. If I could prove to myself, through this project, that I had some use, that I wasn't a vegetable likely to languish in a wheelchair for the rest of my life, Tamara might come back.
Five rooms on the ground floor. Dining room. Lounge. Private lounge. Kitchen. Office. The office was a small room, half a room, really, with a space for a desk and a chair and a safe and little else; my torch cast weak, fragmenting light against the walls. Bare bright patches showed where pictures had once hung. The only other thing in the room was a lever-arch file filled with plastic wallets containing invoices with faint, illegible type on them.
I poked my head into each room, trying to suck in some of the positive ambience I'd felt the previous summer. Now, in the dark and the cold, the work that was needed seemed insurmountable. The kitchen units needed replacing; God knew how long the old ones had been in place. Some of the doors were hanging off the carcases. The linoleum was peeling away from the floor. Every wall needed a fresh lick of pain. The toilet needed replacing; the old one was a gutter of stains and cracks. The cost of refurbishment kept kerchinging in my mind. I had a good amount of money saved up, and an inheritance to draw upon, but it was still going to be a steep outlay.
I eased up the stairs, hoping there might be a bed and a mattress so I could lie down. It didn't matter how dirty the damned thing would be; I needed to work away a few hours and although I'd slept in the car - and Christ, more than enough over the past six months - I still felt tired. The doctors had urged me to rest. The body repaired itself best when I was unconscious.
I decided to move on past the first floor to the top of the house and start there. Two double bedrooms. One single bedroom. And then the largest bedroom, a private section with its own sizeable bathroom and shower. It boasted the best views too. The previous owners had clearly decided that their own happiness was more important than the premium price they could have demanded for such decadence. There was a bed frame in here but nothing to rest upon. There was a very cheap-looking wardrobe in one of the other rooms too, that looked as if it was still standing, albeit in a vaguely upright position, by dint of wishful thinking. No other furniture. Another shower room that needed totally replacing. I descended to the first floor thinking that the best way to clean the whole place out would be to torch it, but the thought of flames made me feel sick, and I knew that there'd be something else waiting for me in the morning when I got back, no matter the ugly weather. Skeletons came out to dance rain or shine.
First floor. Four double bedrooms, two en suite. One single bedroom. Wallpaper touching its toes. One shower room. A mirror with a crack in it. A toothbrush lying on the floor, bristles thick with mould. A copy of
Mojo
magazine partially obscured by dust. A dead beetle.
A noise from upstairs.
I've just been up there, I sighed to myself, trying to rationalise it, trying to keep my heart calm. Maybe it was just my physical presence, after months of absence, or empty space, causing a greater-than-normal level of subsidence. Some animal trapped in the attic, making a final bid for freedom.
I came out on to the landing and stared up into a blackness that my feeble torch could not pierce. Darkness made an oblique across the staircase like the diagonal of a guillotine blade.
There it was again. It was a kind of slumping noise, as if a heavy person was trying to get comfortable on a bed never known for it. I stood on the landing and felt my heart fraying, bit by bruised, gnarly bit. I didn't know what to do. I had seen nobody up there, but I hadn't exactly stuck my face to the floor to check under that old bed or pulled open the wardrobe door to see if my own private Narnia waited inside for me. I hadn't taken a peek through the loft hatch. I hadn't checked to see what state the fire escape was in, or the flat lower-level roof.
'Hello?' I called up the stairs, but I couldn't generate much volume. My mouth felt drum dry. The door to the master bedroom creaked. Weird acoustics: I could hear the weather all over the house - especially at the landing window behind my back - but it was shut off from that particular corner as that door closed. And it wasn't a draught closing it. There was a pause, and then it was pressed into the doorway. I heard the click of the latch bolt snap home. I heard a ferocious cry. I had no idea what it was; undercover of the storm it sounded like metal tearing, cats copulating, the lusty railings of a distressed baby.
Ten minutes later I was in the alleyway outside the house, staring up at the windows and not knowing what it was I was expecting to see. I had gone up to the top floor somehow, found the steel from somewhere. Call it pilot's nerve - maybe that kind of thing does not leave you, really - but I got up there and placed my hand against the door as if I might feel something, some hideous vibration through the flesh to confirm what my ears thought they'd heard. I couldn't bring myself to turn the door handle. The prospect of seeing the room as I had initially left it was far worse, somehow, than any yawning terror my imagination could throw at me.
Outside, in the rain, I thought I saw the lazy shift of low-spectrum colour from one side of the pane to the other. But my eyes weren't what they were. Nothing was as it was.
I guessed it to be another three hours till sun-up. The rain was showing no signs of dropping off. It looped and swirled like sheer silver dresses on a washing line. The cold was affecting my movement. It had sunk so deep into my legs that they were shivering even when firmly planted on the ground.
I was fiddling with my phone, trying to stab some sense out of it in order to find a taxi number, when I saw Amy's number. I checked the time. It was four in the morning. Christ. I couldn't. I couldn't.
I did.
She answered on the first ring. She didn't sound tired at all. 'Airman,' she said.
'You remembered.'
'I kind of knew you'd call. I just didn't think it would be in the middle of the night.'
'You weren't sleeping?'
'I cat nap. During the day, mostly. I prefer not to sleep at night. Psychological. And anyway, I do my best work round about now.'
'Could I come to you? I'm locked out. Nowhere to go. And I'm freezing my nuts off.'
'Only if you'll agree to help me,' she said. But she didn't wait for me to agree. She gave me her address; she was renting a flat above a sweet shop in the centre of the village, opposite the main hotel. I shuffled and snuffled for another fifteen minutes and thought, maybe, that the sky was just showing the first dirty green-grey streaks of dawn by the time I reached the triangular lay-out of shops.
A figure was standing in the narrow ginnel between the sweet shop and the post office. It had to be her, although I was made uneasy by how still she was, like a dressmaker's dummy in a window. That's what damage did for you, I thought. The rest of a life marked out in yards achieved, rather than miles. The moment when life changed for us involved lots of movement, critical movement: my monumental collision with a car; the flail of limbs as she fell seventy feet. More animation than we would ever know again.
'Inside,' she said. 'I have a hot shower. Something hot to drink.' She flapped a silver cape from out of a bag. It looked like something NASA might use to panel its lunar landers. 'It's for hypothermia,' she said. 'Runners use them all the time. You see them flapping around at the end of marathons. Like a super-hero convention.'
I'd been out in the cold for two hours, more or less. Being inside the B&B didn't really count; it had been colder in there than on the beach.
She held my hand as we ascended the stairs. At the top, she got my shoes off and handed me a mug of steaming soup. She watched me spoon it down. It was bad stuff, rehydrated packet 'broth', but the heat of it and the sugars in it instantly perked me up.
'Better?' she asked.
I nodded, handing the mug back. The shakes in my hand were lessening.
'Shower next,' she said. 'Take as long as you want.'
I made sure the water temperature was tepid to begin with; I didn't want to scald my new flesh. But after I'd grown accustomed to it, and the greyness in my toes and fingers had turned to pink, I whacked the heat up until there were billows of steam obscuring the rest of the bathroom. I stood under the jet, letting the water pound the back of my head, and wondered what help it was that Amy had been referring to. I'd not taken much notice of her flat before shutting myself up in the bathroom, but a single pool of light above a desk had shown me that her life was one disorganised mess of papers.
She'd left a large, ratty-looking but clean towelling bathrobe for me to wear and I gratefully wrapped myself in it. As soon as it was on, I felt my eyelids droop. Warmth was pressing in from all sides. Like the winter wind, it was almost an assault, but this was one I could live with.
She was sitting at her desk when I came out, on one of those ergonomic chairs without a back to force your posture erect. A glass of whisky sat by her arm. She flapped her hand at the coffee table behind her without looking around. Another glass for me.
'Some more cockle-warming material,' she said. 'I won't be a minute.'
I sat down on the sofa. There were papers not just on her desk but in every available space. On the floor under the windowsill was a rank of grey box-files. Most of the fresher spine labels listed road names - A3, A49, M56 - but there were place names too, punched out on faded and cracked Dymo red tape: Dunblane, Warrington, Morecambe, Hungerford. Other, less recognisable names not readily associated with tragedy. A new file, marked Southwick, lay next to the whisky. My hand brushed against it as I picked up the glass.
'I've got the accident and disaster and tragedy sites of the last hundred years documented in these folders,' she said. 'Photos of motorway pile-ups. Zeebrugge. Paddington. The rescue operations. Other stuff. The Chinese cocklers. The sky looks fantastic in the background. Air crashes. Manchester. Lockerbie. Kegworth...'
'But why are you here?'
'I'm a ghoul. I'm here for the death.'
'What death?'
You've got death crawling all over you.
I took a stiff pull on the whisky to calm my nerves. Being around this woman set my teeth on edge. She was like tin foil on a filling.
'That's something I'd like your help with,' she said.
I wasn't ready to hear it. I asked her if this business of disasters, of geomancy, was how she made her living.
'Kind of,' she said, 'but it's not, like, officially my real job. My real job involves designing websites for small businesses who've realised the hard way that nobody wants flashy, flash-based pages any more. Just simple stuff. Simple stuff rules. I do it all on my MacBook. It pays for the petrol for my Mini and it means I can be mobile. All I need, wherever I land, is a socket to recharge my gadgets. But I make most of my money sending photographs of disasters - the wreckage, bodies if possible, the aftermath, cleaning up, that kind of thing - to a handful of clients over in the States.'
'Sounds dodgy,' I said. 'Sounds like you're whoring yourself out to questionable people with unappetising appetites.'
'It's not like that,' she said. 'These people are researchers.'
'How long have you been doing it?'
'Since my accident,' she said.
'Are the two linked?'
'I expect so. It's hard to say, because I couldn't be sure if I was able to do what I do before I jumped out of that hotel room.'
I finished the whisky and put down the glass. 'I'm sorry, you lost me there. Do? Do what? Take photographs of death locations?'
'No,' she said. 'Remember what I told you about echoes?'
I did, but I thought I must have dreamed it. 'You hear echoes?'
'Kind of. Kind of feel them too. Tremors.'
'Through time.'
'Through time.'
'Ever since your accident?'
'Yep. Maybe, I don't know... maybe a switch was thrown in me because I was so very close to death. Maybe I have an affinity for it, without really knowing what it is. Maybe some deep, unmineable part of me does know, but I won't ever be conscious of it. Not till the moment I check out, I suppose.'
She was looking at me in a strange way, and this time it wasn't that ferocious cast of her eyebrows, her dark grey eyes, or the scar carving through her forehead.
'Not me,' I said, twigging. 'I'm sorry, but I don't think so.'
'Maybe not,' she said. 'Maybe you need to open yourself to it.'
'To death? I was about as open to it as it's possible to be without actually being dead. I didn't like that place. I don't want to wallow in it, thanks.'
Books on photography were stacked by her bed: Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Eugène Atget. A wide-angle and a telephoto lens sat on a table next to a scuffed Nikon DSLR and an iBook plastered with
Finding Nemo
stickers. I thought of what might be on the memory card inside the camera and wished I had another drink.
She reached out a hand and placed it on my own. Her fingers traced the route of the scar tissue. 'The scars are the worst part, for me,' she said. 'I don't mean in any pathetic oh-I've-lost-my-beauty shit. But they bother me more than anything else. More than memories of the fall itself, and trying to make the decision that went before it.'