The Ties That Bind (40 page)

The walk to the lift was difficult. He leaned on Charlene, astonished by her strength. He supposed that was what a year of picking up and rolling over a heavy patient did to you.

‘He’s not looking great,’ she said, pressing the button for ‘up’. ‘He’s a lot sicker than anyone realised. Idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. IPF for short. Ever heard of it?’

Luke shook his head. ‘Is it terminal?

‘His doctor reckons he could go another few years but I’m not so sure. He’s . . . the spirit’s gone out of him. You’ll see what I mean.’

‘How come you’re having cosy chats with the doctor all of a sudden?’

She gave him a sharp look.

‘All those staff and all those people on the charities, and no one gave enough of a shit to come and visit him in hospital. I was coming in to see you every day anyway. I couldn’t ignore him.’

‘Are you still on compassionate leave?’

‘Kind of. He’s given me a new job.’ She doffed an imaginary cap. ‘Meet the new company driver.’

‘
You’ve
got Vaughan’s old job?’

This was too weird.

‘Why not?’ She looked offended. ‘Better than spending all day talking about rents and deposits. And I can’t wait to drive the Bentley. I’m already making calls to get it reconfigured to accommodate a wheelchair. It’s going to be a while before he walks again. Although it’ll be a shame to rip out those beautiful seats.’

‘What’s the female for chauffeur? Chauffeuse?’

‘Watch it.’

The lift doors closed on them.

‘Have you got a booster seat so you can see over the steering wheel?’

She rapped her knuckles on the top of his head. ‘Fuck off, baldy.’

This floor looked identical to the one Luke had just left.

‘Hang on, though,’ said Luke, as they inched their way along the corridor. ‘I thought you were looking after your dad?’

Diffidence pulled Charlene’s gaze towards the floor. ‘Here’s the thing. I told Mr Grand, just while we were chatting, what had happened with Dad’s benefits and stuff, and he’s paying for a private nurse so that I can keep working.’

Well, Luke thought, I suppose he’s got a bit more money coming in now that he doesn’t have to pay Vaughan any more. And he always liked his little worthy causes. So Charlene was the latest – the last? – of the people that Grand had arbitrarily judged and found deserving. The first time he had died, when he had abandoned one life for another, he had signed away most of his empire. He was doing the same now.

‘I know, I know,’ said Charlene. ‘I feel like I’m taking advantage of an old man. But it’s my
dad
. I can’t say no, can I?’

‘Char,’ said Luke. ‘No one would expect you to. He can afford it. He
likes
giving things away, you know that as well as anyone.’

‘She pumped sanitising gel from a wall dispenser, smeared half onto Luke’s hands and rubbed the remainder between her own palms.

‘He wants to give one of the nurses a flat. He’ll have signed over half of Black Rock Heights by the time he gets out if nobody stops him. And you know what?
I’m
not going to stop him. If anyone deserves a free flat it’s these nurses. Here he is,’ she said, pushing on the door. ‘All right, sir? Luke’s here to see you. I’ll leave you two to it.’

Grand’s room was exactly like Luke’s except that the black and white photographs on the wall were of Barcelonan rather than Parisian architecture, winding Gaudi staircases that resembled portals into the next world. Grand too was monochrome, reclining in grey and white pyjamas, his complexion the colour of old newsprint. For the first time since Luke had seen him, he hadn’t shaved and his beard was surprisingly dark, patched with white only on the chin. Luke wondered what further ravages it disguised.

He sat in the bedside chair.

‘So,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the room. It was very generous of you.’

‘You can have Kathleen’s house,’ said Grand tonelessly. ‘Lawyers are coming in tomorrow. I’ll get it signed over to you.’

‘I
couldn’t
,’ said Luke, and meant it. He was tired of feeling like a prostitute. Joss Grand had not yet finished the long slow process of buying back his soul, and Luke wasn’t sure if he wanted to exchange a part of his own for the old man’s benefit.

‘Suit yourself,’ said Grand. ‘I can’t take it with me when I go, though.’

‘Don’t talk like that,’ Luke replied with a sudden flare of anger. ‘I was with you in that cellar. I saw . . . I’ve never seen fighting spirit
like
it. You didn’t go through all that just to give up now. You’re just snapped in two, that’s all.’

‘Bones don’t mend at my age, and neither does the other stuff.’ He gave his own chest a weak punch and Luke did not think he was referring to his lungs.

‘I know you’ve been disappointed,’ he said. ‘By Vaughan, by me, by everyone except Kathleen. But please don’t think that everyone’s out for what they can get from you. Charlene’s the real thing. She’s a good person. She won’t be a replacement for Kathleen, but she’ll be there for you . . .’

Grand shook his head. ‘Make you right. But it won’t be the same. It takes years to build up proper friendship and trust. It takes a
lifetime
.’ To Luke’s horror, the old man’s lower lip wobbled like a child’s. ‘Do me a favour, boy, take me for a walk, will you? If we go up to the top floor we can see a bit of sky.’

At the press of a bedside button, a male nurse came to help Grand into a dressing gown the same colour as his camel overcoat and transfer him from bed to wheelchair. Luke saw the skinny frame under the pyjamas. He was half the size he had seemed when wearing his uniform of shirt, waistcoat, jacket and coat. Had that starving child’s body been beneath all along? It was impossible that Grand would live to see the completion of the book, let alone its publication. No wonder he had spoken so freely.

He directed Luke along a polished corridor and towards the lift. Walking was easy using the wheelchair as support. On the top storey was a short, dead-end corridor policed by a quietly buzzing vending machine stacked with crisps and chocolate. Along the corridor’s inner wall, floor-to-ceiling windows gave onto a diamond-shaped roof whose only features were a dry riser inlet and a dead seagull. The sky Grand had longed to see was an inch of grey ribbon above a building opposite. Luke tried and failed to orient himself in relation to the sea. There was a bench facing the window, apparently all the better to enjoy the view. He parked the wheelchair next to it and took a seat himself. A grey splash of bird shit landed on the window in front of them, making Luke jump back. The mess began its slow slide down the pane.

Grand looked around as if to see if anyone was watching them. ‘Want to see something?’ he said, fumbling in his dressing gown pocket. A shiny patterned scarf was pulled from the pocket with a magician’s wave. The ruffled silk opened like a rose to reveal at its heart a small dull pebble of glass, its cracks threaded with dried-out DNA.

‘How did you get this?’ he said.

Grand’s brief smile was a sliver of sunshine in the crack between two clouds. ‘Still got it, eh?’ He waggled his fingers. ‘Seventy years and never been caught. Sleight of hand and distraction, works every time. I got it out of Sandy’s pocket when everyone was watching your mate shout his mouth off. The idiot filth didn’t think to check my coat. Here, have it, it’s yours.’

It was in Luke’s palm before he could question or protest. He couldn’t have felt more nervous if he was holding a lump of plutonium.

‘You know this could put you in prison.’ It wasn’t intended as a threat, more an expression of astonishment that he hadn’t jettisoned it.

‘It could put you away, too,’ said Grand, acknowledging the bind Luke was in over the book. ‘Tell you what, why don’t you hold onto it for a little while later.’ This was the nearest he would get to giving the posthumous publication his blessing.

‘OK,’ said Luke. ‘OK, I will.’ He folded the lens back into the scarf and put it in his own pocket. It was surprisingly light, for something that carried so much weight.

‘Your mates are nice,’ Grand said after a while. ‘Looking out for you. That one with the grey hair, is he your . . . ?’ Of all the expressions Luke had ever expected to see cross Joss Grand’s face, this coyness was not one of them.

‘Ex-boyfriend,’ said Luke, to put him out of his evident misery. Grand nodded as though a great mystery had been solved.

‘I
thought
you was a poofter when I first saw you, then I thought you was too scruffy. No offence.’

‘None taken,’ said Luke. ‘Actually, I thought
you
might be, at one point.’

‘
What?
’ Grand’s voice reverberated along the empty corridor.

‘You and Jacky. I thought you might have been a couple. I thought that might’ve been why you killed him. Because he was going to end it, or because you wanted to keep it quiet or something.’

Grand broke into a strange snorting laugh that used up oxygen he couldn’t afford.

‘What’s funny?’ said Luke, watching the needle on the dial leap about.

‘I’m just picturing Jacky’s face if he heard that. He’d have knocked your block off. Gawd, whatever gave you that idea?’

‘Something you said about what marriage entailed being impossible for you and Kathleen. I thought you were talking about sex.’

The laughter was blown away on the same swift breeze that had carried it in. ‘No, no.’ Grand shook his head. ‘Granted, I wanted her, I was mad about her . . . but that was the point about Kathleen. If we’d been man and wife we would’ve got close, wouldn’t we? It would have come out, somehow, what I done. You can’t live with someone and lie to them every day, not if you love them. And I would have lost her for sure then. Better to have a little bit of her for ever than all of her for a little while and then lose her.’

Outside, a plastic Tesco bag blew across the flat roof and got tangled around a drainpipe. Grand tutted.

‘Will you look at that? That’s no sight for people on the mend. You could make a nice little courtyard out there. I’m going to make a donation, have them plant it up with some rose bushes and them little trees you get in pots. The Kathleen Duffy Memorial Garden. Violets in the summer. She’d have liked that.’

Chapter 59

Jem was due to arrive late on Saturday morning. Luke had not been able to eat breakfast knowing that he was on his way. He was no longer afraid of Jem but frightened
for
him, worried about how he could possibly break the news about the falsified email. He could not have felt more guilty if he had written it himself and meant every word. When it came to their relationship, he needed to be tying up loose ends, not levering open Pandora’s boxes left, right and centre. Jem was about to find out that the man whose life he had just saved on the strength of a love letter did not, after all, want to be with him.

Every time Luke convinced himself that the only fair way was to come out with it straight away, he saw the chair in the corner and pictured Jem asleep there, book on his lap, twitching awake at the slightest irregularity of the monitor’s beep. When Jem arrived, he immediately lost his nerve. Jem’s cheeks glowed from his walk from the station and he wore an olive-coloured cashmere coat with an upturned collar that did a lot for him. Where Luke had expected to read hope in his eyes he saw an apprehension that corresponded with his own.

For the first few minutes they had nothing to say to each other. Their last few meetings and conversations had been
in extremis
. It was as though they knew how to love each other, and they knew how to fight each other, but civil, neutral, they were virtual strangers.

The doctors had said they could go out, and the hospital receptionist – who in this place seemed to double as a kind of concierge – called a taxi to take them down to the pier.

It was Luke’s favourite kind of weather, cold and crisply sunny. The sea was a million shattered mirrors. The lights inside the amusement arcade were wasted on the handful of punters and the depressing pub had not yet opened. The pirate ship ride, whose queues had snaked halfway down the pier when he had arrived in Brighton at the end of the summer, now carried a crew of three, their thin screams lost on the breeze.

Luke’s ears and neck were freezing. It had taken a near-death experience to appreciate the vital role his thatch had played in keeping his head, his whole body warm.

‘I need a hat,’ he said, but the only ones for sale on the pier were huge padded top hats appliquéd with Guinness logos and shamrocks, left over from the last St Patrick’s Day and waiting for the next. The idea of Luke wearing novelty headgear for the serious conversation they had to have coaxed nervous laughter from both of them. Ice broken, Jem took off his scarf and Luke wound it round his head like Lawrence of Arabia. He caught sight of himself in the arcade window, decided that it was better to be cold than undignified, and took it off.

‘While you were asleep,’ Jem began, ‘I had this fantasy that you’d wake up and I’d apologise for the way I treated you and you’d thank me for saving your life and we’d fall into each other’s arms and it would all be . . . healed.’ Oh hell, thought Luke, here we go. ‘But it’s not, is it? It doesn’t change the way I treated you. It doesn’t change how it ended between us. Oh, shit, I don’t know how to say this. I spoke to my therapist yesterday for a long time, a very long time, and I thought about it all the way down, and I . . .’ his voice cracked. ‘I’m just going to come right out and say it. I
can’t
, Luke. I can’t get back together with you.’ Luke was shocked into silence at this unexpected reprieve, and hoped the soaring elation within him wasn’t showing on his face. ‘It’s just . . . I’ve got to work on my relationship with myself before I can even think about sharing my life. And after everything we’ve been through together, well, there’s too much water under the bridge, I’m too far along my journey to start retracing my steps.’ He angled his face towards Luke and caught his breath. ‘And now I’m kicking you while you’re down. Oh, darling, please don’t cry.’