I felt a stab of panic, out there, standing impotently in the quickening rain, miles away from where I might be of use. I was more concerned than I probably ought to have been about the flood of colour on the flower heads of the weeds thriving in that cut where the accident took place. I wondered how much of my blood I had lost lying in the grass, how much had drained into the soil to feed the seeds and the weeds. It was small comfort to think that I'd provided nourishment for something while lying in my coma.
I set off across country. Staggering through fields helped mask my limp. For a while I felt almost normal. Once through a bank of silver birch, the edge of the village of Breydon made itself known to me, via a series of old metal fences failing to do what they had been intended for. I could edge myself through one of the gaps in the fences, the spars rusted back to the thickness of feathers; it flaked away in little brown avalanches whenever I knocked against them.
I emerged in a concretised parking space, forgotten by cars if not security guards; warning signs that patrols with dogs were frequently made were attached with nylon ties to rusting coils of poorly positioned razor wire. Weeds foamed from the cracks and buckles in the concrete and for a moment I had a sense of how the world would go, once we human beings were all ushered off it.
My panic over Tamara was now so persistent, so keen, that it was like tinnitus: I was aware of it all the time, but it had become a part of me. I was slowly coming to terms with it. Which didn't mean that I wasn't propelled by it, that it didn't fuel me any more, but I was learning to deal with such a heightened state; I doubted I would survive if I didn't. She certainly wouldn't. I felt that conviction deep inside me; it was the constant ache in my bones.
My breath was coming in a series of squeaks and grunts. The pain was so great it had no focus or location, and felt only as if my back meat had been parted to the chine by some diabolical butcher. I'd have no chance of getting away if I was accosted by the security patrols, but the place seemed deserted; worse, forsaken. There were a few sorry buildings that did not seem important enough to deserve the amount of parking space, never mind the protective fencing. All of the windows were boarded up, so I couldn't get any idea as to the purpose of the offices. Part of me stalled then, thinking that Tamara might be inside, but why here and why not any of these houses radiating out from a point fifty feet away from me? She was everywhere and nowhere, and if I searched this place and did not find her that was more time for her to fall into and become lost for ever. Still, it was gut-wrenching to leave the buildings behind me; to walk past a great articulated lorry with the cabin obscured by closed curtains; to avert my gaze from a man in a vest standing in his bedroom window, what looked like a rubber cosh dangling limply from his fist. She was somewhere, so why not? And why not? Why not?
Charlie lived in a house set back from the main road that ran through the village. It was a strange little house, almost something of an afterthought. Perhaps it had been a lodge, or gatehouse for some other, grander abode that had been removed from the landscape in the past. My boots crunched in the trail of sand and aggregate leading up the track to the door. A cement mixer with a crust of dried product ringing its mouth gaped at me as I rang the doorbell. Charlie's van was nowhere to be seen. Light glanced off the windows, making it difficult to look inside the house. I tried the doorbell again, waited, and went down the side of the house to the garage. I cupped my hands against the window and peered inside. There was a vehicle covered in tarpaulin; quite obviously, from the size and shape, different to Charlie's van. A few old tins of Duckhams motor oil and a rotten canvas bag revealing a broken sea fishing rod. Packets of seed mouldering on the windowsill. I tried the door but it was locked. I stared at the tarpaulin. That shape. That size. I stared for so long that I began to imagine blood blooming through the material, on that blunt edge, for example, where the radiator grille must be. I raised my head and listened hard for a moment. Then I put my elbow through the garage window.
It put me in mind, instantly, of the hit-and-run, and I actually turned away, thinking I must be sick, but the sensation passed and I was able to deal with the edges of glass remaining in the frame without any further wobbles. I hauled myself through the gap, feeling every grind and squeal of my bones as they complained against each other, and stood gasping and sweating on dark, oil-stained cobbles. I fingered the knots keeping the tarpaulin in place. A Siberian hitch? A truckie's knot? It was easy to disentangle. I got my fingers under a corner of tarp and dragged it up. Deep red. Not blood. Paint. A vintage Wrangler Jeep. Charlie's little project. I checked the radiator grille. Old, but undamaged. No bits of me hanging off it. No impact scars. I struggled to reknot the ropes until I realised it didn't really matter; there was no point in trying to dust over my tracks when there was broken glass all over the place. Which meant that it made it easier for me to break his kitchen window too, although this time I did it with one of the rusting oil cans. Guilt was riding me hard by now. I'd expected to find a black 4x4 under that tarp. I'm not sure why. I was desperate. I was spinning out of control. I needed to pin something on somebody, and it was suiting me to do it to someone I knew.
I had never been to Charlie's house before. He had never invited me. But I'd sometimes see him pottering around his garden when I was being ferried around by Ruth, shortly after returning from hospital. He hardly spent any time here, though. Much of his waking life, from very early in the morning - before 5am, until midnight, maybe later - were spent either on the waves or in his fishing hut or at the markets. He used his house as a service station, little more. And that was reflected in the austere appearance. In the kitchen was a kettle; a pan and a plate and a fork were dried on a dish rack. The fridge had nothing in it. The freezer was full of fish bones, most probably intended for Ruth's stock pots. Cupboards broadly bare. One chair drawn up to a small table. A newspaper. A battery-operated radio. No pictures. There was a door that presumably led to a cellar, but it was sealed shut with old paint; I tried the handle but there was no give whatsoever. No keyhole, no cracks to peer through. Perhaps there had been a serious problem with damp - this region was prone to flooding - and the cellar had simply been filled in. But still, despite its plain accessibility, it was frustrating not to use the door for what it had been intended.
Every room was similar. It was like a house that had been gutted by people ready to move out. Only a few bits and pieces remained, as though awaiting the removal men. Upstairs there were two bedrooms, but only one contained a bed, which was more a thin mattress on a foldaway base. A cheap-looking plastic digital alarm clock stood on the floor next to the bed. I checked its settings: Charlie was wakened at 4am. I imagined him in the cold room, his breath solidifying around him, as he dressed in his thermals and his gansey and his blue overalls beneath the unshaded 60-watt bulb, the silence of the world piled against the house like an assault.
I didn't know what I was expecting to find. The bathroom contained a toothbrush, a razor, a bar of soap with a cloying aroma that seemed to seep through the house, a plastic cup with a faded design, a grey flannel hanging desultorily over a dripping tap. Anything that looked as if it might possess something to give me a direction - such as the chest of drawers or the wardrobe - proved to be so bare as to beg the question why bother owning it in the first place? In the four drawers I found only some woollen socks and a chart of seas I didn't know that contained alien sounding names: Charlie-Gibbs fracture zone, the Immarssuak seachannel, Great Meteor Tablemount. I felt the shock of the world I thought I knew going away from me. I had to clench my hands tight and, for a second, grope for my name. I'm Paul Roan. I am Paul Roan. No matter what. Despite and because. Et cetera and et al.
In the wardrobe there were a few dark, heavy coats, nothing in the pockets. An unopened bottle of whisky at the foot. But here was a box I almost missed because it was so dark, almost the same colour as the wardrobe wood. This was where Charlie kept his broken hearts and his forget-me-nots. Here, too, his many incarnations. Clipped photo-booth pictures of him going back in time. You could make a flicker book of him and see the colour of his hair undergo a rare alchemic change: silver to coal black. The shirt collars widened. The flesh on his face lost its sags and padding and became leaner, more elastic, wolfish. Handwritten letters from the 1950s, from him to his mother. From his mother to him, a pet name I didn't know about:
My Darling Fingal...
Later, letters to a woman called Sarah. I flashed through them, expecting a hand on my shoulder at any moment. Sweat from my forehead dripped on to a page, blurring ink that had been painstakingly shaped there half a lifetime ago. I blotted it dry with my sleeve and flicked deeper into the beautifully preserved deck: each envelope had been razored open; every page retained its original crispness.
The early letters were long and rambling; the later ones were shorter. All of them contained tender language, outpourings of love and devotion. After a date in the 1960s they dried up. Sarah became his wife, I guessed: you didn't need to write any more.
Other letters. In the 1970s he began to receive postcards from Gordon, written in ineligible handwriting. Reports home from the tent in the garden. Big expedition. Pleas for milk and jam sandwiches. That is, I thought they were from Gordon. But they were from Ruth.
Thanks, Dad. I love you, Dad. All my love, Ruthie. xxx
So Ruth was Charlie's daughter.
Okay. Okay.
I searched but could find no letters from Gordon. Surely his son would have written some too, especially if he was playing with his sister. And even if I'd got the dates wrong and Gordon had died before Ruth was on the scene, where were his pictures, his silly notes to Dad?
Here was a tin containing Charlie's birth certificate, and those of Sarah and Ruth (Sarah's death certificate was in here too, along with their marriage licence). There was nothing of Gordon's. I thought of how Charlie had related the story of Gordon's death, and of how there had been deep love in the telling. And I wondered whether that emotion might have been planted there. Gordon, I thought. I thought, Charlie.
Why would he lie about something like that?
The letters stopped after a while and I couldn't fathom why. Perhaps Charlie had started using email, but he didn't seem the type. And then I thought I might have been burning things for him. Or if he had been burning them himself. Stuff that was best not preserved. The people of this village seemed to be bent on doing things differently. I'd never really dwelled for too long on the reasons behind behaviour that had seemed quirky and detached, but now appeared more sinister the more I thought about it. I'd fallen in with the disposal idea readily, because - most of the time - it took my mind off the awful Technicolour frames of memory that showed me being sliced up by the car. I had a task that seemed to be important but, when you boiled it all down, it was just plain weird.
Downstairs was a living room that seemed an insult to the name. Precious little of anything went on in here, it seemed, let alone living. It was one of those rooms that feel colder than the rest of the house, possibly because they lack any human habitation. There was a bat-winged chair and a table. A fireplace filled with ash that might have been a thousand years old. No books. No television.
I decided to leave. I felt guilty about stoving in Charlie's window, and about harbouring bad feelings towards him. He was an easy target; my only target. I was desperate, lashing out, that was all.
I got back on the road and trudged towards Southwick. Almost immediately I saw Jake on his bicycle, powering his legs on the pedals against the wind. The remains of his lunch crackled and crunched in the plastic bag swinging from his wrist. I stepped back out of sight and watched him swing his bike into a driveway. He got off and unlocked the front door. He took his bike inside and closed the door. I waited and watched. An opaque window upstairs filled with orange light. I saw him move within it: dark hair, dark beard, dark jumper. Steam shifted against the glass. He was having a shower, or a bath.
I licked my lips and looked up and down the street. I hurried to his drive and slipped down the side of the house. No garage here. An untended garden with knee-high grass. A rusted lawnmower seized up and forgotten in the middle of its task, taken over by the lawn. There was a small shiplap toolshed painted black, with a sign on the padlocked door:
Gone Fishing.
Nets that needed mending, old lobster pots, a rusting grapple anchor and about twenty feet of corroded chain, a buckled water heater, orange Spongex floats, boss snaps and skiff releases. A plastic shovel and a scaling hammer. It really was a mess. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't break into Jake's house while he was in the bathroom. It was a dare too far.
Go home, you fool,
I thought.
Forget it.
I was halfway down the drive when I thought about that padlock. I went back and tested it. It was a fairly new padlock. There were no windows. I put my face to the thin crack between the door's edge and the frame. A smell of soil and engine oil and freshly sawn wood. The clean, cool metallic tang of well-kept stainless steel implements. I couldn't see anything in the darkness.
I whispered: 'Tamara?'
Thunder rackled across the sky. A sudden scattering of rain against glass, like stones thrown at the window of someone whose attention you are trying to grab.
Stop dallying. I snatched up the shovel and wedged it into the gap and tried to force it open. Nothing doing. My back was the more likely to cave in.