I closed the folder and frantically searched for anything else that might contain references to Tamara. My eyes were jagging all over the screen. Slow down. Relax. My host was still being grilled by the woman with the clipboard. Now she was peeling off sheets and handing them over. I saw the nurse glance my way, but she either couldn't see where I was positioned or hadn't really registered anything; she was looking for an escape route. I took a deep breath, squeezed my eyes shut for a moment, then reassessed the desktop and waited for her to come to me.
There. Another folder. APPOINTMENTS. It had been partially hidden under the ADMISSIONS folder. I dragged it clear then double-clicked on its icon. Another list of names. I stared at Tamara's for a long time, thinking, no, it must be somebody else, despite the chances of another Dziuba living within a thousand miles of this village being virtually nil.
I clicked on her name and a dialogue box opened. It showed me that Tamara had visited the hospital on half a dozen occasions before I had suffered my accident. One of the appointments had a little paper clip icon appended to it. I clicked on that. Another dialogue box. This one said: 12-week scan: 17/6/10. There was a host of jargon, stuff I couldn't for the life of me decipher, other than one word that I homed in on:
Healthy
.
Tamara Dziuba had been here for a scan on the seventeenth of May last year. The maternity unit. And someone - not just her - was found to be healthy.
It took a while to put the pieces together in my head. And then the nurse was back with my tea and she saw me staring at the screen and she swore and put the mug down and tea sloshed over the side on to my knee. I didn't even feel it.
'She's pregnant,' I said.
I didn't get to drink my tea. I was asked to leave. It didn't get any nastier than that, presumably because the nurse who had taken pity on me didn't want to lose her job.
I meandered through the corridors, not knowing where I was going, just content to keep moving. The chemical tang of the wards and the brisk shushing of starchy uniforms, the sunken bodies pushed around on trolleys, the sense of purpose everywhere, was reassuring.
But I couldn't stay for ever. I was no longer a patient here, and my purpose was beyond these walls. And I realised my progress through the hospital was anything but meandering when I found myself outside the tiny shared office that Ruth used. There was nobody inside. The door was unlocked.
All of the computers in this room were off, but a residual heat, and the smell of used toner from the printer, suggested that they'd been used recently. Three office chairs were in varying stages of decomposition, fabric worn or bare; stuffing poked through like frozen smoke. The tables were a mass of files and folders and cold, stained coffee cups. A shredder was packed to the lid with tapeworms of text.
I'd spent a couple of weeks in an office like this, during a summer job before going to university. A friend of the family who worked at University College London's haematology department. They were clearing out their archives, readying them for a digital makeover. They needed someone to go in and dig out years' worth of folders from dozens of filing cabinets and sort them into piles. I did all that and then watched a couple of doctors come in to trash about three-quarters of them, each folder flying towards an incineration pile along with a weary, barely varying phrase that seemed to go on for hours: 'He's dead, he's dying, she's dead, she's as good as dead...'
I'd left that office a couple of hundred pounds better off but appalled by the disaffected way of those people charged with saving life, and convinced that I was riddled with cancer. I felt for a long time less like a person with dreams and feelings and fears and more a sack of meat and offal that was staving off time somehow before it dirtied up a gurney for a few hours while someone sawed it open to see why it had stopped working. And then, of course, I started my pilot training and I was no more attached to the objects I forced through the air than the people who had worked for years studying blood and its deformities and diseases. The doctors and nurses couldn't afford to become attached; they'd never get through a single working day. They were untouched, but they were trying to save lives, and sometimes, in the face of seemingly insurmountable odds, they managed it.
Now time had slowed down for me, I could see all of this. Previously I hadn't noticed, or hadn't thought a great deal about it. I had an opinion, that was it, like a footprint trapped in cement. But I was prepared to be a bit more fluid about people these days. The only thing was, you saw every colour in the spectrum. Every portrait had its light tones but also its sombre shades, its cross-hatchings, its black.
Me, Amy, Charlie, Jake. DI Keble. There was darkness there, there was plenty of rust undermining the shiny, polished surfaces. I thought of Ruth straddling me in that dark room, the sweat wicking off her on to my torso, the tight swelling of her abdomen, like an angry, hot infection, drumming against my skin. She'd exorcised the violence of that rape by channelling it into me. I could still feel her in the tender ache at the tops of my thighs, and feel the ghost of those ropes at my wrist.
I thought of Tamara growing heavy with the baby and felt another stab of panic. Maybe she hadn't talked to me about it because it wasn't mine. Did you think about that, First Officer Roan? Did you consider the possibility? In her loneliness, she'd turned to someone else, or perhaps the rapist - that random Dad - had unwittingly forced another bastard upon the world.
The panic lessened as I began stroking the edges of paper folders, looking for ways in: names, references I might recognise, something to undo this tricky stopper knot: the monkey's fist that was tied tightly and prettily around the hard secret at its centre. It
must
be mine. She was devoted to me. We spent so much time together, especially after I walked away from flying, and there was no time to make new friendships, let alone intimate ones with other men. All of our thought had gone into the new venture. We'd spent hours, well into the night, talking and making notes and writing up a business plan, poring over maps of the British coastline, working out where would be the perfect spot to reinvent ourselves.
I felt a sting at not being with her to watch her change. It hit me how rare it was to see a woman come to terms, grow into, her pregnancy. There was Ruth, but I could think of nobody else. She was always moving, always sighing and wincing and shifting around, like a feverish cat trying to find a comfortable position. She didn't seem happy in this skin of hers. I got the impression she wanted the baby out as soon as possible. I imagined Tamara growing into the role, like an actor born to a particular part. I imagined her sexy with that bump, carrying it athletically, as if she were meant for nothing else. In the airline industry, the female flight attendants I saw on the jets either didn't get pregnant or, if they did, then that was it. You didn't come huffing into work with a burgeoning lump. You didn't fly if you were pregnant; the attendant health problems were unknown, but the kind of stresses the body felt in a pressurised cabin could not be good if experienced on a regular basis. And anyway, the aisles were too narrow.
Tamara's belly distending. My hand on the stretched, hot skin, feeling a hand or a foot press against mine through mere centimetres of flesh. Listening hard for a tiny, rapid heartbeat, hidden beneath its louder, stronger, slower counterpart;
(that shiver of something almost remembered again... that tip-of-the-tongue moment)
the tender jealousy that a baby would be a part of her and not a part of you.
The desk was locked. I jemmied it open with a paper knife and a screwdriver from a pen pot. I didn't care any more. Catch me, fine me, throw me in jail. I was making things happen, at least.
Ruth's work diary was in there, her name on a label stuck to the top right-hand corner. I went through it. Nothing beyond references to meetings, courses to attend, occasional after-work committee business. I didn't know if I should be concerned about that or relieved. I didn't know what I was expecting to find.
I checked the drawer beneath and found two more diaries, for the preceding years. I leafed through 2010, my fingers pausing on the page where my life had been suspended. There was an asterisk on the corresponding date. A telephone rang in the distance. I heard a voice call out for someone called Martin, telling him that he'd have to move his car or risk someone emptying the wet waste-bins all over it. Someone walked past the door, her perfume strong enough to make its way through the jamb and scour my nostrils.
Prior to the date of my accident, I spotted handwritten marks at weekly intervals. A single letter: 'T', and a time, and a place, away from here. The names of pubs. If that was Tamara, then she was talking to Ruth about the baby outside of her professional capacity. I thought: is that good? I thought: was she asking Ruth's advice on an abortion? Then why have a 12-week scan? I pictured her confused and frustrated, not knowing what to do. Is that why she went AWOL? I found myself grasping for that, because it would mean she wouldn't be raped and dead and cooling in some waterlogged marsh.
I closed the drawer and staggered out of the room. I wondered if Ruth was all right. I tried calling her from the hospital but nobody was answering. The world had disappeared when I reached the exit.
My back was grinding and flaring like something in a forge. Perhaps the weather had something to do with it. There was nothing but sky: the whole world was being smothered by a great dark grey blanket. Rain was its stitching, coming loose all over. Here and there were bodkins of lightning. The fabric tore in thunderous rents.
I got outside and the wind ripped at my clothes. The smell of the sea was thick around me. There were no taxis, no buses, no cars. I saw one other person bent against the storm, fighting his way into it. My foot charged against the kerb and I yelled out against the pain that tore through my spine, but I couldn't hear myself in the midst of all this howling. Slates fled a roof as easily as autumn leaves. The wind shaped the rain like ropes being weaved in a fishing yard. I was instantly drenched. I was close to screaming, feeling the untapped fury that had layered up inside me begin to crack and warp. There was plenty more beneath that. Rage and panic and fear and frustration.
And then I saw a flash of lightning and I was suddenly back at the harbour in Southwick, standing in the cold. Staring out to the mill with its denuded sails, its collapsed roof. The line of sheds along the harbour path, squalid and black. The tired decorations, the fishing nets and buoys, the oxidised anchors, the chalked signs. Colchester oysters. Brancaster mussels. Crab claws.
'
You work here?' I asked.
He nodded. 'Work here. And harbour. Sell fish. Got hut.'
I knew where I would find her.
69
I heard something break. I think it was this morning. Early. There was sound of glass breaking. And then someone walking around. Someone soft and going in circles at first, as if they were pottery (is that the right word?), as I used to in kitchens of people I meet for first time. I like to peek in the cupboards and check the spice racks while they are busy pouring drinks or putting on CD. The footsteps went away and I didn't hear them again for long time, but then they came back. These were different, though. They were footsteps with something on their mind. It was different person; it must have been. I thought maybe the first set of footsteps were Paul's. I was sure of it. He was like that, soft and pottery sometimes, especially in mornings at breakfast, and when he came back from long-haul. Like he was getting rid of locked energy from himself as he potter from bread bin to fridge to stove to table. But how would I know, now, for sure? He was so small and thin in his hospital bed, so weak and battered. How could his feet make any kind of weight or noise again? He must be in wheelchair. He might be dead. He might still be lying in bed, becoming like sculpture, like fossil, like foetus.
She's diminished, despite the good food and the regular supplies of drinking water, the portable heater and the Mozart. Gnawing dread will do that to a person, no matter how well cared for they are physically. The not knowing will cause the disintegration to begin, like an old rope with a poorly whipped end, unreaving, losing its shape, its purpose. Her earlier belief that The Man wore a mask because he wanted to protect his identity from her, thus negating the fear of murder, no longer rang true. She feared she might die here, whether purposefully, at his hand, or otherwise. She could begin to understand how people simply gave up. No matter how much the body clung on to life, the instinct that raged in us like fire, the intellect could overthrow it. If there were enough black marks in the AGAINST column, it was possible to find that internal switch and throw it. The lifelong sweethearts separated by death: how often did the partner follow soon after? Tamara had remembered reading about a serial rapist and murderer from her own country - the Wolf, did they call him? - a man who had terrorised Odessa during the 1980s and whose final victim, a seventeen-year-old student, was found a week after the killer was captured. She had been kept prisoner in a drain on the grounds of a disused factory by the railway in Malynivs'kyi. Her hands were tied behind her back. In this drain, which was filled with water almost to the grille, there was a ledge that she had been perched upon. If she remained on tiptoe, her face was just above the surface. If she lowered her heels, her nose and mouth were submerged. If she were to move forward she would drop off the ledge and sink. When she was found, dead, the Wolf finally deigning to give the police her whereabouts, it was broadly believed that drowning was the cause of death. But a post-mortem found no water in her lungs. There was no obvious answer to the question of what had killed her. It was thought that her body had simply given up; the severity of her depression had caused her to shut down. At the time Tamara had been shocked by the reports, had simply not believed them, thinking that youth was its own fuel, that its spirit was indomitable. The thought of death, to a teenager, was as far away as the faintest star in the night sky. It had been her first inkling of mortality. She never considered that her own body might come so close to following a similar path.