There was a fraction of her, the most infinitesimal part (awful, unforgivable, disgusting), that found a shred of relief in what had happened to her. It meant she was spared having to watch her boyfriend (and God, wasn't that the weakest way to describe him... no, he was her man, her love,
the
love) curl up like a piece of paper introduced to flame. And if he was in hell, then she was with him now.
She'd read somewhere once, about a mathematician, about how he would find himself some space and time to think, a window of fifteen minutes. The most he could devote to a problem was two or three minutes before his mind wandered. But this was exceptional, apparently. Most people spent less than that. Maybe only a minute or so, before something else impinged. It might feel as though you were dedicated to a task, but only generally. The ordinary mind couldn't cope with that kind of focus.
She tried staying with Paul, but other things snapped their fingers, waved their hands in her face.
That curtain, for example.
It was a shower curtain. Like a shower curtain. White. Or it had been, once. Now it was grey, stained, mottled at its lower edges with mould. It was opaque, but not to the extent that you could not discern that something lay behind it. It was suspended by rusting rings from a rail attached to this low ceiling. So low that the bottom of the curtain was pleated up against the floor. It's bottom hem was filthy, dark with water sucked up by capillary action. It was the only other thing in the room, beyond that pitted lightbulb, to look at. It was so still that she sometimes formed the illusion that it was shivering, pulsing infinitesimally, as if it were touching something that bore a heartbeat and was waiting for her to sleep, or die, so that it could have its way with her.
Not once, in all the days I've been here, has The Man pulled that curtain back. I don't know what's behind it. A bath? But he's only ever washed me with a cloth and a bucket of warm water. If it's a toilet, then why won't he let me sit on it, instead of putting me in those nasty incontinence pants morning and night? What would you need to conceal in a shitty little room like this? It makes me want to scream. I feel this panic build up behind my lips and sometimes its too great for whatever it is to escape. I cry or make this weird sort of sobbing, strangled voice in my throat. What is that? Frustration? Fear? Panic? All of it, and more, probably. I've never made a noise like it before in my life. I'm finding out about myself in here. I'm coming to know me a little better. And I'm not sure I like who I am.
She tried screaming, once. Early. Maybe as early as the first day, although her head was pounding with the dregs of whatever it was he'd bested her with. Chloroform? She remembered the hand and the handkerchief whipping around her face, and then a dream of monkeys linking arms, dancing around a campfire, and she was dancing too. And then waking up with her hands tenderly manacled, and the great, punishing dark, so black she was sure for a while that she was dead. She called out but nobody answered, nobody came. She screamed for help and her voice fell against the walls as if it were constructed from cotton wool.
He came to her later, The Man, and switched on the light and she averted her gaze from the cold, orange plastic of his face, and read the note he pushed in front of her eyes.
Scream all you want. Soundproof. Nobody will hear you.
Why doesn't he speak to me?
Chapter Five
CVR
On the beach. Nacre sky. Endless stones damp and bright from the retreating surf. I empty the plain polythene bag of its contents and start building the pyre. Milk teeth in an envelope. A mass of clipped hair tied together with rubber bands. A photograph of a man sitting in front of a Mediterranean meal, his eyes scorched out of the paper. I finish him off. First match. The teeth don't burn. I toe them into the stones, hoping that the child that gave them up made a few quid from the tooth fairy. Hoping they fell out naturally. A sweetish smell rises from the burning hair, and it goes with a lilac flame. I see faces in the smoke. Half-recognised. Strangers.
I never wanted children. Or rather, I thought I didn't. I believed I had no time for that, and when my career was over, or at a stage where I had more time, I would be too old to become a father. I thought, post-40, it was a bad idea to procreate. You'd be too tired to play with your offspring when they needed it. You'd be nothing but a mildly interesting fossil to your grandchildren.
I never discussed children with Tamara. She never brought it up so I didn't feel the need. We used contraception when we first started seeing each other and this carried on out of habit. Tamara was very easy around children, and I could see her mothering instinct was coming to the fore. When I left my profession I thought it might be time to discuss family. But then the accident happened. Maybe she left me because she wanted to be a mother and believed that I wasn't interested. Maybe she thought I would be no use now as a father. What good is a dad who can't play football with his son, or swing his daughter around in the park?
I trudged to the bookshop. Ruth was at work, but she'd agreed to let me play shopkeeper. She told me she'd buy me a present if I made more than five pounds in one day. I wasn't seeing her around as much as I hoped. I wanted to talk to her about the boat trip, and I was worried that she was spending too much time doing her job. I suspected it was a way of screening her thoughts from the baby because when her mind turned to the pregnancy she also dwelled upon the events that resulted in it.
Vulcan trotted in after a few minutes and took up his position on the cushion in the window. He paused to look at me while he washed one of his paws, as if he couldn't quite believe someone else was being his underling today. I put out some food and water for him and then I tried to find the booklet about Winter Bay that I had seen the previous day, but I couldn't remember where I had positioned it. I checked my room, in case I had accidentally taken it back with me, but it wasn't there either. Someone must have bought it.
I sat at the desk for an hour, trying to read, but my pain would not allow me to focus. No position was comfortable. Just trying to keep my balance on the rolling ship had caused me agony in muscles that my wasted legs had not used for months. The motion of the sea had stayed inside me, as if it had stolen aboard and was influencing the tides of my blood.
I closed my eyes and thought of one of my first times flying a commercial passenger jet. I had the controls of a 737 and we were flying through heavy cloud, climbing out of Prague. The sun was shining through them, giving everything an otherworldly brightness. It was like flying through glass. We banked left, a steep one, and a couple of minutes after levelling off I suddenly felt certain that the jet was going into a subtle roll. The horizontal situation indicator was dead level though. I closed my eyes and yes, there it was, that feeling of tilt. I compensated with the steering column and the indicators showed we were tilting to the right.
'I think we have an instrument malfunction,' I told the captain. He took over the controls - correcting my manouevre - and checked the display.
'Not that I can see.'
We talked about it and he told me it was spatial disorientation, a fairly common phenomenon that most pilots experienced, even seasoned ones. I'd been made aware of this during my training as a pilot, but until then I'd never experienced it. It was believed to be the cause of an Air India 747 crash in the 1970s.
Now I felt like this all the time. Listing, spinning, a sense of always being about to fall over despite being on an even keel. Nevertheless, thinking back to my days as a pilot had a calming effect. Gone, or at least reduced, was the edge that seemed to harry me all the time. The coldness of or in my bones lessened, and I didn't feel quite so ill-fitted in my skin. It was as if the memory of altitude had nourished me in some way, reminded me of who I was, essentially, rather than what I had become superficially. The breaks and bruises would take time to heal and the scars would be ever-present, but I was coming back. It might take years, but I was still Paul Roan. I still had a part to play in things.
Bolstered by this, and the realisation that I might well make a full recovery given time, I felt the urge once again to connect with Tamara. I was convinced that she would change her mind if she could only see how well I was progressing. And any improvement would surely be accelerated were she to return to me. I couldn't see how she might refuse, despite Ruth's insistence that she would eventually have moved back to her comfortable, certain life even if the accident had been averted.
I dug out the numbers I'd dialled and tried them again. No answer. I tried them again, dialling carefully with the stiff pegs of my fingers, but there was no joy. I felt cheated. My mood upswing had been checked too easily.
I thought of Tamara maybe sitting in a room, dressed for lunch with her old flame, but poring over photographs of me. She'd be chewing her lips as she often did when she was worried or unsure.
I should call him. I should see how he is. How could I just walk out on him like that? At the very least he deserves an explanation, an apology.
Yes. That's right. Call me.
I closed my eyes and willed it.
Footsteps outside the door.
I opened my eyes, fully expecting to see Tamara's hand reaching out, but it was a bald, heavily-bearded man in a pale grey jumper, bottle-green corduroy trousers and Wellingtons armoured with mud. He was old. He was carrying a box and peering through the glass as if unsure that the shop was open. He seemed uncertain, worried even. I noticed that I'd failed to switch the sign around to read OPEN. I went over and let him in. His expression didn't change.
'Books?' I asked, cocking my head at the box. 'Ruth's not around at the moment, but you can leave them with me if you like.'
'Not books,' he said. And then I saw that his expression was less to do with whether the shop was open and more to do with me. He was assessing me.
'This is... well, let's just say it's a box of things I don't need any more and leave it at that.'
I nodded. I was a little taken aback. Usually I was left items by anonymous donors. This was the first time I'd seen in person someone who wanted to be rid of something. I didn't want to touch the box, so I asked him to leave it outside. He did so, wiping his hands on the back of his trousers. He seemed about to leave when he turned back. Suddenly he was close to tears.
'You're filth,' he said, and it seemed he was having trouble keeping the emotion from his voice. His eyes shone. 'You disgust me. I wish you'd died on that road. Nothing you can do. Nothing we can do. Nothing we've
done
. None of it is any good. Nothing will work.'
I didn't know how to respond. I felt as if he'd kicked me in the guts, despite my feeling the same way sometimes, about my unconventional role within the community. Was this how people saw me? Even as they were leaving me their little piles of guilt to dispose of? I stroked Vulcan's fur and thought about how I had come about this unwanted position. I felt upset: there was a spike in my throat I couldn't swallow around. Sin-eater. Trouble-shooter. Janitor. Eliminator.
I didn't recall seeing the old man around the village before, but then I didn't pay much attention to other people. Maybe he was an out-of-towner come in especially to give the village pariah a box of grief.
I went outside and picked up his offering. It was heavy, and something was seeping through the cardboard, darkening it. There was a faint smell rising from beneath the oily tea-towel that served as a lid, a smell I recognised so well yet could not identify.
I carried the box away from the village, as if it were a bomb that needed to be disposed of in a safe environment. It was heavy. At the pier I hobbled down the concrete steps to the sand and shuffled into the shadows where the ghosts of previous fires waited bitterly for me. The wind hissed around the promontory; slow footsteps moved across the wooden slats of the pier above my head. In the summer this place was thronged with visiting families. Queues in the café for fish and chips snaked out of the door. Out of season I was sometimes the only person in that café for hours.
Blistered, salt-burned supportive columns. An empty beer bottle. The sand gradually losing its toffee colour to the pounds of carbon dust I was adding to the beach. I thought I saw the broken gull being rocked on the curdling tide but it could have been anything. I stared at the box. I knew what was inside. I couldn't understand how he had happened upon it, or why he thought I would be able to destroy it with fire.
I peeled away the tea-towel and gazed at the 'black box' nestled within. Much of it was dented and scratched, the lettering stencilled upon it - FLIGHT RECORDER DO NOT OPEN - partially obliterated by scorch marks. Fire had already tried to have its way with this thing.
'But there was no crash,' I said. 'There was no fire.'
I felt something cold sweep through my bowels, as if I'd suddenly been immersed in the North Sea. I wanted to hurl this thing away. I couldn't understand why the guy had dumped this on me: no beach fire was going to penetrate an exterior capable of withstanding temperatures upwards of 1,000 degrees Celsius. Of course the box was nothing to do with Flight 029, but inexplicably, I knew that if the tape housed inside the thing were retrieved and played, my voice would be on it, monotoning the same mistake that I had made on that night over Madrid.