Remember Me This Way (31 page)

She nodded and clasped her hands together. ‘OK,’ she said. ‘Well, it’s not the end of the world. People often change their minds. It’s usually reversible. Send him in and we’ll get going on that.’

Nothing she said made sense. ‘What’s reversible?’ I said.

‘His vasectomy. It says here—’ she swivelled back to the screen ‘—he was seen by us on the second of September 2010 and referred to the Lister, a private hospital. The operation took place seven days later on the ninth of September. Fast turnaround, but . . .’ she smiled ‘. . . we often find that once men have decided to have the procedure, they’re keen to get it over with.’

‘A vasectomy?’ I laughed. ‘You must be looking at the wrong notes. Zach Hopkins.’

She glanced at me and then away again. ‘Um,’ she said. ‘You should probably send him in. Make another appointment, a double one, and we’ll all talk about it together.’

I don’t know how I got out of the surgery. I felt as if I’d been hit in the stomach. She hadn’t made a mistake. I remembered September – how he went off sex for a week. He had walked with a slight limp. He said he’d twisted his groin getting off his bike. He didn’t want a baby. He wouldn’t have been able to share me. He was jealous of my
dog
. He wanted me all to himself. He’d been toying with me, playing along to get his own way.

I didn’t go back to school. I rang the office and said I was sick. I spent the afternoon walking the streets, trying to work out what to do. If I moved with him to Cornwall, he would crush me. I sat in a café and wrote him a letter. It was poised and distant. It said none of the things I felt.

That night, I cooked supper from a recipe Jane had given me. I was distracted, added mushrooms to the sauce. He refused to touch it. I tried to eat normally. Every scrape of my own knife and fork jarred. I chewed as quietly as I could. He watched every mouthful, winced with every swallow. We didn’t speak until all evidence of the meal – my insurrection – had been removed. I still might have confronted him, given him the opportunity to explain. But he made some dismissive comment, his lip curled.

You run from a big wave or you dive into it. I decided to run.

He was in the bathroom, washing his hands, when I posted the letter. It wasn’t a big thing, slipping the envelope into the mouth of the box at the end of the road. It wasn’t monumental. Nothing crashed and burned. Not then.

Zach

January 2012

She’s mine now. I can feel it. It’s not so much an illness, as a stupor. She is intoxicated by love. I’m happy. Each day is a gift, one we share. It’s calm in the house, and still. No one comes near. (Apart from Jane, whom I sent packing.) I keep her mobile phone about my person. No lover has tried to get in touch – unless he’s being careful. I ran her a bath earlier and checked under the pillow but no second phone. I think she’s telling the truth. After her bath, I wrapped her in towels and dried her and took her back to bed. She lay there, weak and grateful, as I stroked her hair, her face. I tucked her in tight, and tentatively laid out my plan – cutting all ties, moving to Cornwall, starting again.

‘OK, my love,’ she said drowsily. ‘If it will make you happy. Yes.’

YES.

Shame about Onnie. I’ve cut the connection. She was getting on my nerves. If I’m honest, I didn’t even like her, let alone desire her. I broke it off by phone. Her parents have found out about the Esher no-shows. They’ve banished her to Cornwall to do retakes in some shitty sixth-form college under the auspices of some crap au pair – away from all distractions. (Not sure that suits me. I’ll have to think my way out of that.) She sobbed down the line. Was it something that she’d done? Was she too fat?

‘Of course you’re not too fat.’

‘What is it then?’

‘It’s nothing.’

‘Is it
your wife
?’ she said, disbelieving.

‘Yes,’ I said. I couldn’t stop myself. ‘Yes, it is.’

My wife. My Lizzie.

Chapter Twenty

Lizzie

Thursday is one of those days that doesn’t get light. The sky is low, as if stage curtains have been strung across it. I snap at the year elevens for mucking about on the computer. I evict two of the year twelves for chewing gum. Every time the library door opens, I jump.

You can torture yourself with ‘ifs’. I shouldn’t have written that stupid fake letter. I should have confronted Zach. That would have been the grown-up thing to do. It would have meant a terrible scene. He might have denied it, or twisted it against me, but we might have got beyond it. And perhaps there were excuses I might have understood, to do with Charlotte? Had she been carrying his baby? Was the tragedy of her accident behind his decision? Or did his affair with Onnie have something to do with it? Or Xenia? Or was it simply the overbearing influence of his upbringing – his fear of what families do to each other? I don’t know because I didn’t ask. I hid. I behaved like the old Lizzie who, for an easy life, let people get away with murder.

When I see her standing outside the house, I stop in my tracks. I almost turn and go back the way I came.

She has seen me, though. She is holding flowers, a frail bunch of blue anemones – one colour.

‘Please, please, please,’ she says, thrusting them at me. ‘I’m so sorry. I know it was wrong. Let me explain. Please.’

I walk past her, without saying anything, and put the key in the door. ‘I don’t need flowers,’ I say. ‘I’d just like the laptop.’

‘Yes. I’m sorry. I know.’ The rucksack is hanging on her shoulder and she pulls it off and puts it down on the ground. She starts rummaging through. Items of clothing – a scarf, a black vest top – fall on to the path.

The laptop is finally extracted and, still crouching, she holds it up to me.

‘Thank you.’ I take it and am poised to close the door on her. It would be easier if she stood up. Psychologically, I don’t want to leave her prone at my feet.

She looks up at me. Her eyes wide, rimmed with black eyeliner, she looks like a strange woodland creature. ‘Please,’ she says again. She is stuffing her possessions back into her bag. The anemones are on the ground. ‘I know more than you think. I can be helpful. We should do this together.’

‘Do what?’

She stands up. ‘Find Zach, of course.’

Ten minutes later Onnie is sitting again on my sofa in the front room. She has cried a little bit – snotty tears that seem genuine – and told me how sorry she is. It was a spur of the moment decision. She just saw it, sitting there on the desk, and she thought if she just had a bit of time, she might be able to crack his password. She hadn’t, and now she knows I haven’t either, we should do it together. ‘Two brains are better than one,’ she says. ‘We’re not enemies. We should be friends, do it together. Between us we must be able to work out what he would choose, what was important to him.’

I haven’t said much. I am standing against the fireplace, holding the laptop to my chest.

‘I heard you,’ she says, ‘when you left Sand Martin that time you came to lunch.’

‘I didn’t come to lunch.’

‘OK, that time you didn’t come to lunch. I’d left them all in the drawing room and I was on the stairs. I heard you muttering as you ran out of the house. I couldn’t make much sense of it – something about having to find Zach. But now I know. All those things you said the other day, the way you talk about him.’

‘What?’

‘He’s still alive, isn’t he?’

I don’t answer straight away.

‘How could that be possible?’ I say eventually.

‘I’ve been thinking about it. All day yesterday, I just tried to work it out. He must have faked the accident.’

‘It’s very unlikely,’ I say carefully, in a slow, schoolteacherish voice. ‘Lots of people were involved in his crash. The farmer who called the fire brigade. The driver of the Asda delivery lorry who stood in the road to stop the traffic. The tow truck – three people involved with the removal of the wreckage. Witnesses, coroners, two different police forces. It was a big deal, Onnie.’

‘Have you heard of Jolyon Harrison? Do you know who he is?’

‘The name’s familiar.’

‘He disappeared. He went missing from Cornwall. The same week of Zach’s accident. Don’t you think that’s weird?’

I feel a racing, a tightening in my chest. ‘It’s a coincidence.’

‘The last sighting of him was in Bude. Kulon said he’d been in the bar before Zach came in.’

‘Zach was in the bar that night?’

‘Yes. It’s where I found him.’

I look past her out of the window. The new pane of glass has a different glint. Less dimpled. Flatter. I thought he had been in Exeter that night. What does it mean if he was already in Cornwall? I study the glass, try to keep calm.

‘Zach would be clever enough to have worked it out. He and Jolyon could have been in the car together. Zach got out in time – threw open the car door, rolled into the ditch and when the car went up in flames, he decided just to walk away. Or he was never in the car. Jolyon was driving. Jolyon died. Zach has kept under the radar ever since. He’s waiting until it’s safe and then he’s coming back.’

I say, testing her, ‘You can’t pretend to die and then carry on as normal. You need documents, a driving licence, a passport and National Insurance number. Ordinary things, like renting somewhere to live or getting a job – none of it’s possible without a legal identity. All those loopholes to do with babies who died the year you were born, applying for their birth certificates and pretending you’re them – it doesn’t work like that any more . . . It’s impossible to just start a new life.’

I notice that I have raised my voice.

Onnie stands up and takes a step towards me. Her eyes are glittering. ‘What if you don’t want a new life?’ she says. ‘What if you just want to mess with the old one?’

Zach

February 2012

She’s better. The fever broke. She says she’s given in her notice, but I don’t believe her. She’s lying, as she always does. It’s changed again. I can tell. I can feel the slippage, sand slinking under my feet like a tide on the turn. I don’t know what she does there, all day, up in that school. She’s like a fish. I can’t hold her. I have to press so hard to keep her in one place. It was the flu that made her love me, I realise now, not her heart.

When she’s late, I lose it. Shouldn’t. Can’t help myself. I start drinking too early, pacing the rooms, fiddling with plugs. Checking and double-checking. My hands are sore from washing. It all goes wrong. The pills, I think. She watches me. I feel judged. I love her so much I can feel emotion rise until I want to spit in her face.

I’ve invented a gallery in Exeter. The dealer is mad for me, I told her. Nothing like that waste of space in Bristol. This bloke’s serious. There’s a meeting in the diary. It’s the abstract landscapes he likes – he wants more. We’ll have to move down to Cornwall sooner. She thought I wouldn’t see the horror that came into her eyes, but I did.

Howard, old chap: I’m afraid your time has come. I have finessed my slow poison campaign. I bought some marrowbone in Pets at Home, which I hacked into slivers, inserting a pill into each section. I’ve hidden them in a bin bag hung from a discreet nail under an unravelled tarpaulin in the garden shed. She never looks in there.

Chapter Twenty-one

Lizzie

On Friday, Jane appears in the doorway just before the final bell. She plans to pop down to St George’s and wonders if I want to come too. I stare at her. I’m so tired, my mind so fractured, I don’t know what she’s talking about. ‘See how he’s doing,’ she says. ‘Show him a friendly face.’

‘Who?’ I say.

‘Sam! Who else?’

I have left Onnie at home trying to crack Zach’s password. I have reluctantly accepted her help. We are dubious accomplices. It seems bizarre – his wife and his schoolgirl mistress joining forces to work him out. We spent the evening brainstorming possible combinations. I would have given up. ‘It could be anything,’ I said. ‘A random assortment of letters.’ But Onnie is tenacious. She’s convinced Zach would have been as careful with this as he was with everything he did. ‘It will be something that is meaningful to him.’

She told me not to worry about Xenia. She is still trying to get in touch with her.

I think she is stalling but I don’t know what else to say.

I wonder whether it would amuse Zach or annoy him, our complicity, or whether it has been his plan all along. I feel uneasy about it and slightly sick, but at the same time defiant. What is the worst he can do now? Kill me? Kill us both?

Onnie has promised to keep an eye on the dog, to ring me if he seems any worse.

‘OK,’ I tell Jane. ‘Life goes on.’

She drives us there in her beaten-up estate. The back seat is laden high with boxing gloves and fold-up chairs, props for
Bugsy Malone
. I can’t see out the back to see if we’re being followed.

‘You’re quiet,’ she says. ‘Feeling a bit . . . ?’

‘I’m fine.’

I text Onnie to tell her I’ll be home a little late and then switch off my phone.

We find Sam in one of the men’s surgical wards. He is lying, dressed but without shoes, on a bed at the far end. His head, bandaged, is propped on several pillows and he is reading a book entitled
Evil Genes
. He doesn’t see us approach and I think two things as we walk towards him. The first is how nice it is to see him, how uncomplicated he is. And the second is how odd it is to see a colleague horizontal. And without footwear.

‘Ah,’ he says, putting his book down and smiling. ‘A delegation from work.’

Jane says: ‘Is that any way to greet your fellow workers, the providers of buns?’ She kisses his brow, just below the rim of the bandage. It’s tinged with greyish yellow, Magic Mustard, the iodine ointment they used to put on our scrapes at school. I had imagined a bump. I hadn’t envisaged a cut. I don’t kiss him, but it’s not because of that.

He is looking at me as if he knows I’m embarrassed. ‘Carter,’ he says. ‘Nice of you to drop by.’