Tideline (27 page)

‘So you found it near Sonia’s?’

‘Sonia?’

‘She’s my friend. The one Jez was going to borrow music from. Her house is that way, but this side of the power station. He might have been on his way to hers when he dropped
it.’

‘What should we do?’

‘Well let’s walk back that way now and you can show me exactly where you found it.’

They stood up and hurried along the river path away from the light. Helen shivered at the sound of the water as it sucked and slurped at the wall. Dark shadows cast by the bars of the iron
railings, and their own misshapen forms, loomed in front of them, grew, then vanished each time they passed through the glow of the lamps. They went by the pub, then along the alley. Sonia’s
house was in darkness and the light outside wasn’t working. The path was all in shadow and eerily quiet and remote-seeming, in contrast to the floodlit O2 over on the bend of the river, and
the white lights of Canary Wharf on the other side. They continued along the footpath to the power station, enormous and lowering above them. Underneath the coaling pier, Alicia stopped.

‘Here,’ she said, pointing at the ground by the wall. ‘This is where I found it.’

The wind lifted something large in the black structure above them that clanked and banged and Helen felt a strange uneasiness sweep through her.

‘Let’s go,’ she said, and not wanting to alarm Alicia she added, ‘at least we know he got this far. As soon as we’ve found somewhere warm to sit, we’ll
discuss what we’re going to do.’

Sonia

It’s almost dark when I get back from my mother’s. Lights blink on along the river.

I unload the wheelchair and push it to the garage, unlock the inner doors, shove the chair in. Jez is lying on his back still, his arms tied above his head. He is sweaty and pale.

‘Jez, we’re going back to the music room where I can look after you properly,’ I tell him. He gazes at me. There is no reaction. His face is gaunt and his lips look drained and
blue. He mutters something incoherent, then closes his eyes.

‘You’re unwell,’ I say. ‘We need to get you somewhere comfortable. Just slip into the wheelchair so I can push you home.’

I slice the bonds at his arms and legs with the kitchen scissors I’ve brought in my pocket, and swing his legs off the bed so he’s forced into a sitting position. I support his back
from behind. Somehow between us we manage to get him into the chair. I put Greg’s anorak back over him, making sure the hood covers his head, then wrap him in blankets. As a precaution
against him making a run for it, even though I’m almost certain he’s too weak, I strap his hands and feet together again with the tape. I want to gag him, just in case someone stops and
tries to talk to him, but I’m afraid that if I muffle his mouth he won’t be able to breathe at all. Already he is coughing and wheezing. Instead, I cover his face, pulling the hood down
low and wrapping the scarf loosely over his nose. Only his eyes are visible once I’ve finished. I’m desperate to get him home. To nurse him back to health.

I squat by the garage doors, push them open them a crack to see out, and survey the part of the alley that’s within my view.

A gaggle of drinkers comes past, fooling about, pushing one another and laughing loudly. I watch as the girls teeter about on heels and lurch into the boys who sing and jeer and stagger from one
side to another. They disappear up the street, their voices gradually fading away. More footsteps, the soft voices of two women talking. I squint through the crack in the door and gasp. One of the
women looks like Helen. Is Helen. What’s she doing down here? She’s with someone slim whose face I can’t discern as she’s on Helen’s other side. I pull the door
closed, and squat behind it, trying to control my breathing. After several minutes, I open the door a crack again.

The alley’s in darkness now, only slices of it lit up by the street lamps. There are more footsteps coming from the direction of the pub. Two police officers, striding along, their
fluorescent jackets glowing bright yellow in the dark, chatting together as they go. I withdraw into the garage.

I pull the inner door shut, lock it, lean against it, my heart going so fast I’m afraid it’ll burst. I look at Jez. His head is nodding against his chest, he’s half asleep. I
feel his forehead under the hood. Yes, he still has a temperature. His breath is laboured, wheezy. He needs an inhaler. I have to get him to the warmth and comfort of the River House. I can’t
leave it much longer.

At last the alley quietens down. There’s just the usual clank of the sheet of metal up on the coaling station and the smack of waves against the wall, some delayed wake from a passing boat
has set them rolling across the river. I push open the doors, wheel Jez into the alley and back towards the door in the wall.

I spend the whole night in a chair, beside Jez, holding his hand in the music room. He struggles for breath. Some of his coughing fits seem so gruelling it’s as if he
doesn’t have the strength to push the air out of his lungs. Several times I’m afraid I will have to phone an ambulance. His breath is empty, it feels as if it is neither entering not
leaving his lungs as it should. I rummage through the pockets in his leather jacket and the hoodie he wore when he arrived and find an inhaler in one of his pockets. I hold it to his mouth and pump
it. This eases things a little but he remains virtually unconscious.

At around four o’clock, when he still shows no signs of improvement, I realize I have to formulate a plan if I am to keep Jez safe. In this case, now, safe equals alive. I think it through
step by step, trying not to let my feelings of loss or regret take hold. Jez must live.

What I’ll do is take him to a hospital before first light. I can get him to my car in my mother’s wheelchair and I’ll drive to St Thomas’, or even as far as Hampstead and
the Royal Free. I cannot take him to the local hospital, it will be too risky. I might be recognized and stopped. And I need time to get away before the family turn up. I’ll sedate him before
we go, no longer a problem now I have Greg’s prescription. And I’ll wrap him up warm. I’ll leave him in the hospital foyer with a note asking that they look after him, and with
contact details for Helen.

Then I must disappear out of his life. Not only his life. I shall have to take myself away from Kit too, so that she will not have to endure the indignity of her mother’s crime. For I know
this is how what I’ve done will be interpreted. And I must take myself away from Greg, who will want to know why and how, and to harangue and blame me for not going to the doctor about my
‘depression’. I will have to take myself away then from the River House.

My eyes fill with tears as I think of how I must let everything go. Kit, and the River House, and Jez at his most exquisite. I squeeze his hand and let my tears fall onto his upturned wrist.

Later, I will realize that fatigue made me see things in a distorted light. That the idea of taking Jez to hospital was neither necessary nor rational. But now, as the high windows begin to
lighten almost imperceptibly in the dawn, I am convinced this is the end.

Sonia

When I wake up later that morning, having fallen asleep at last in the chair, the sun fills the music room with a honeyed light. I can hear Jez’s breath flowing more
freely. He is still in a deep sleep, but there is a little more colour in his cheeks. For the moment anyway he seems stable. I go downstairs.

At ten o’clock Simon arrives for his voice-coaching session. He takes my hand in his and presses a small cling film-wrapped shape into my palm.

‘Your mother’s dope, darling. Medicinal marijuana, just as you ordered.’

I kiss the air next to his cheek. ‘My dear, middle-aged drug dealer.’

‘No problem, Sons. You can knock the price off my bill.’

It’s Monday. I’ve had to reinstate my voice-training sessions. I cannot remain out of circulation for too long or people will want to know why.

‘We’re going to conduct the session downstairs today,’ I tell him, ‘in the kitchen.’

‘I thought you preferred having me in the music room.’

‘We’re having some work done up there. The floorboards are up and it isn’t safe.’ It was having the builders on Saturday, putting up the window bars that gave me this
idea.

‘If you need the loo, use the one down here. I’ll make you some coffee. Sit down.’

‘Are you completely better now, sweetie? We were all afraid you’d got swine flu! You look a little tired I must say. But you’re more glorious than ever. You’ve lost
weight!’

‘A little, maybe.’

‘Not that you needed to, of course. But flu can streamline our jawlines which is never a bad thing in midlife’.

‘Simon!’

‘At my age you have to work at your looks. You can no longer take them for granted.’ Simon objects to time passing as if it were a personal affront. ‘I’m fifty-five,
Sonia! It’s a travesty! How can I, Simon Swavesy, be fifty-five? Do I look it? Is it written all over my face?’

‘You look no different to the last time I saw you.’

‘But my jowls! And I’m sure I’m developing a double chin.’

‘Well, our voice exercises will help with all that,’ I say, pouring his coffee. ‘We must get to work.’

The sun comes in through the kitchen window lighting the ledge inside, lending the kitchen a radiance it rarely displays. Little areas are thrown into relief, the mugs hanging
along the shelf of the dresser, the oranges in the fruit bowl. I look at the row of marmalade jars glowing amber in the sunlight. I feel slightly removed from everything, perhaps due to having been
awake most of the night.

‘How’s business then?’ Simon asks. ‘Not too effected by the economic crisis? One good thing, people always need escapism. Oh, I meant to ask, were you well enough to see
Tosca
?’

‘I was – just. And I loved it. You were amazing, Simon, as always.’

There’s something exquisite about the precariousness of my secret, this double life. I never foresaw that this might be a consequence of Jez’s being here. Each time I get away with
something I feel myself rise upwards on a high that is incomparable with anything I’ve experienced since childhood.

There’s a new smell in the breeze blowing in from the river. A freshness after the lowering, cloud-trapped chemical smell of winter.

‘What a sublime day!’ Simon says, leaning on the windowsill and gazing out over the water. The surface looks almost solid in this light, like satin or polished metal. ‘Do you
think spring’s arrived at last?’

The day does indeed feel sublime. There’s a kind of lifting in my heart as if it were a baby spider in its silken parachute sailing up into the spring sky over the river.

I have Jez. He is recovering, thanks to me. I feel like I did as a child on the first day of the summer holidays when I awoke and knew the horrors of school lay so far away I did not have to
think about them. That the days within sight were long and free.

When Kit was a child of perhaps six or seven, she said she heard a bat squeal. We told her she was mistaken, that the human ear cannot detect such a sound. Now I’m discovering levels of
feeling which were too extreme to be accessible to me before. Peaks of emotion that, like a bat’s cry, I had not thought a human was capable of detecting.

After Simon leaves at eleven o’clock I go up to see Jez.

‘Where am I?’

‘You’re OK, Jez. You’re back in the music room.’

Even he must feel this lifting, this lightening of the atmosphere, the way the sun’s rays come through his high windows warming the covers on his bed.

‘What day is it? What time?’

‘It’s Monday. Late morning. Do you want some coffee?”

He’s still unwell, not feeling like drinking coffee, he says.

‘You know there’s fresh soap and clean towels in the shower room if you want them, don’t you? There’s all the music equipment. Books, the radio. And you’ve got me,
right here, to wait on you hand and foot. I’m happy to do that for you, Jez, you know that.’

‘Mmm.’ He’s still poorly, but his breathing is better. He’s barely able to open his eyes and he’s shivering again.

‘There’s a pain, in my back,’ he says. ‘Between my shoulder blades.’

‘Yes, well you must rest. And you need a wash and to clean your teeth.’

I bring him a flannel and a toothbrush and clean him up as best I can. He’s so weak I allow him to get up and go to the bathroom to relieve himself and then he stumbles back to bed and
lies down with a sigh.

‘I’ll bring you a hot-water bottle.’

‘Yes, yes please. It’s so cold. The ice has frozen my fingers. Look! My fingers have gone thin!’

I tuck the bottle under the sheets and wonder as I do so whether, since he is clearly delirious, I might lean across and kiss him without startling him. But his lips look dry after his illness,
and he gives off an acrid scent. This worries me, he may lapse again.

Downstairs I go to Greg’s computer in the hallway that blocks the front door onto the street. The door we never use. I feed Jez’s symptoms into Google. The most likely diagnosis is
pneumonia. It means he will be ill for quite a while, his strength diminished. It explains his cough and the pain in his shoulder blades. However, although it sounds serious, it seems that if I
take special care of him, as I of course intend to do, there should be no need for medical intervention.

Having made my diagnosis, I spend a little longer on Google, searching various sites, losing myself. I browse Nadia’s sculptures, and follow the link to the site where she got the Modroc
for the pregnant torsos Helen told me about. On impulse I order some for myself. Then I find the Facebook page Mick and Maria have set up for Jez. His face, plumper, shinier, smiles out at me, with
friends, with adults I’ve never seen, with a guitar and with a bunch of girls. I can’t bear to see these images of Jez with other people, in another life, and I click off quickly.

When I next go up to see him, Jez is in a peaceful sleep, lying on his side. The roll of duct tape lies on the landing so I fetch it, rip off a length, and stretch it round and
round his wrists until they are held securely together behind his back. I go downstairs and double-check the locks, the bars on the windows. I make sure the front door is bolted. The door on the
river side is also Chubblocked and bolted. I’ve taken the extra precaution of closing the curtains, something I rarely bother with since we only look out onto the path and the river, and
drawing down the blinds in the kitchen. From the outside, the house must look closed up, as if we’ve gone away. I stash the Rohypnol Greg prescribed for me in the kitchen drawer, handy for
dropping into Jez’s glass if the need arises.