Tideline (28 page)

Jez is awake when I return to him. He complains that he still aches all over.

‘What’s happened to my hands?’ he asks, a look of alarm on his wan face. I wonder whether the illness along with the cocktail of drugs I’ve had to feed him have played
havoc with his memory. Perhaps he doesn’t recall anything about being strapped up in the garage. If that’s the case it’s a good thing. Neither of us wants to remember that.

I sit down on the bed and look at him with all the compassion I feel in my heart.

‘Jez, I think I trust you. But this first time you come downstairs, I’m taking a small extra precaution. When you’ve shown me you aren’t going to try anything foolish,
you can come down, hands free. I promise.’

‘I’m coming down? Where to?’

I smile. ‘To the kitchen. Please don’t look so frightened. We’re going to spend the afternoon together. I’ll cook and you can talk to me.’

‘I’m still here?’

‘In the River House, yes. You’re still here. It’s alright.’

‘But I’m going home, aren’t I? You’re going to let me go. You said so.’

I stroke the hair off his forehead.

‘Of course you’re going home,’ I say. ‘Soon now, I think. Very soon.’

Sonia

The afternoon is near perfect. Jez sits at the table, his hands behind the kitchen chair, while I cook. I put the green and white blanket around him to keep him warm. Refill
his hot-water bottle, which I rest on his lap under the blanket. I put Jeff Buckley on the CD player and we listen to ‘Hallelujah’.

I make him a hot toddy: whisky with lemon, honey and hot water. I take the precaution of giving him a plastic tumbler instead of a glass, even though he can’t hold it and has to take sips
as I put it to his lips. I don’t think he’ll do anything impulsive now. Something’s changed between us. He understands that I am nursing him back to health. That I really do not
want any harm to befall him.

I turn pieces of chicken over in flour for a casserole we’ll share if he has an appetite later. I slice shallots, fry them in olive oil, add bacon. I glance over at him while I cook. I
suppose I was expecting to see him as he was that first day, relaxed, his feet lolling against the table leg as he drank his wine. So it’s a shock to see the tears rolling silently down his
face and plopping into the plastic beaker. His nose is running too, long glistening threads dripping off his upper lip, and, when he sees me looking at him, his chest starts to heave.

‘Oh Jez,’ I say, and I move towards him.

I wipe his nose and bathe his face with a clean flannel and give him water to drink.

‘Jez, look, you’ve been very unwell. But you’re getting better now. Please don’t cry. I’m here to look after you. To make everything right.’

Eventually his sobs subside, he takes a huge breath and gives me a weak, sheepish smile.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘It’s just, I feel so ill.’

It’s getting warm in the kitchen. Now he starts to writhe about a bit, saying he feels hot. He shakes off the rug I’ve put round him then asks me to take off his hoodie. This
isn’t easy with his hands tied up as they are. I tell him I’ll roll up his sleeves instead. I’m aware of everything about him as I turn back the cuffs. His broad wrists with the
prominent wrist bones. A spearhead of light along the valley between the radius and the ulna. There’s a veil of sweat on his forehead. Beads of perspiration in the crease of his elbows.

‘You can’t just take it off? I’m really hot. Burning.’

I’d love to undo his wrists, lift his hoodie off his head. But even though he’s so weak and compliant, I daren’t risk it.

When I’ve rolled up his sleeves I continue to stir sauce, grind pepper.

‘Are you OK now, Jez?’

‘Yes, that’s better.’

After a long while he asks, ‘What’s in all those jars?’

I follow his gaze. ‘Marmalade,’ I tell him.

‘That’s what you were making the day I came here.’

‘Yes. I make it every February, as my mother did. It’s traditional. The smell . . . it’s a smell I love, though it makes me feel sad too.’

‘Some of my memories feel sad sometimes. Not because they were sad, but because the time’s gone. It’s not being able to go back.’

I turn and look at him. At last he’s talking more like he did that first day. We’re getting somewhere again.

‘What is your earliest memory?’

He thinks for a while. I examine his face as he does so. It’s thinner, no doubt about it. But there’s something else, something wary in his expression that was never there before.
His eyes dart about. It’s as if he daren’t miss a thing, as if he has to stay alert every second. I don’t like it. I want him to relax.

‘Swans on the river. My dad used to bring me in a pushchair, I guess. We used to throw bread to the swans. He told me they belong to the Queen. Do they?’

‘Only unmarked mute swans. And only those who live here on the Thames. Or on its tributaries.’

‘And the smell of Marmite on the breeze. When I smell Marmite even now, it reminds me of here. The river. Before everything changed.’

‘It’s not really Marmite. It’s yeast from the brewery. But that smell is one of my earliest memories too. Some people object to it. I like it. And the swans are still here of
course. They disappear sometimes. But they always come back.’

‘Yes. But it’s not how it was then. Mum and Dad will never be together again. I’ll never be that little kid again. Some things are gone for ever.’ Tears well up in his
eyes once more.

‘That’s not true, Jez.’ I put down my knife, and lean on the table, looking into his eyes. ‘I used to think that, but I don’t any more. Things don’t go, the
past isn’t gone, time is not linear as we imagine it to be. It loops and spirals and plays amazing tricks on us. It’s something I’ve come to know recently. I wish I’d always
understood.’

I move around the table to his side. I lean over him and I look right into his lovely, pale face, into the eyes that have sunken during his illness but that are beginning to brighten again now,
and I whisper, putting all the passion I feel into my words.

‘You came to me. You came just when I needed to know that the past was not gone. You showed me that I had a second chance and that I need never go through that kind of loss
again.’

He doesn’t reply, just stares back at me, and for a while he seems to look deep into my soul. We are as one.

There’s a peaceful calm, as the light fades outside and I return to my cooking. Jez and I are quiet in each other’s company. We do not need to talk.

Later, I’m not sure how much later, because time has started to play tricks again and the day to have slipped away in seconds, Jez says, ‘I feel shit again. I need to lie
down.’

‘Let’s go through there. I’ll light the fire and you can lie on the sofa.’

I roll down the sleeves of his hoodie. Wrap the rug round him and lead him to the living room. He lies on the sofa and I begin to build a fire in the grate, with none of the sense of forboding
this room usually evokes. As if, now Jez is with me, I believe that all those aspects of the past that haunted me, however indefinable, have been erased. But something, perhaps his feet lolling on
the sofa, the awareness I have of his body supine and inert, ignites it all. Not just the feeling, but every little detail, the picture in the corner of my eye that usually slides aside each time I
try to focus on it.

It is illuminated as I put a match to the kindling in the grate, and it brightens as the flames take hold.

An early spring day, the light failing outside. I pushed open the door. There was some kind of table in the centre of the room. Candles throwing enormous shadows up against the
walls. Grown-ups in black, their heads bent. I knew what was on the table, they did not need to move apart. I could see between them the shiny wooden box with its polished brass handles. But I
could not go closer. And no one asked me to. No one spoke to me. I stood alone in the doorway waiting for something, a movement, a word. The heads stayed turned away from me. The smell was enough.
They had not lit the fire. The room was colder than the river itself.

The phone starts to ring. It’s on the table next to the sofa where Jez lies half asleep. Or at least I thought he was half asleep. He sits up so abruptly at the sound, I
wonder now whether he was only pretending. I’m on the other side of the room. It takes a couple of seconds to come out of my reverie, to register that he is using his chin to knock the
handset off its cradle, that he’s speaking into the mouthpiece, ‘It’s me, Jez!’ he shouts.

I’m across the room, my finger ramming down the mute button before he’s completed the three little words that could take him away from me for ever.

‘How could you?’

‘What?’

He cowers back away from me on the sofa.

‘Jez! I brought you downstairs. Now you do this to me.’

‘I don’t understand. What did I do?’

‘You were going to try and leave me.’

‘No! I picked up the phone without thinking.’

I take a long, deep inhalation, walk once around the room, my hand running through my hair. This must not turn nasty. I sigh. Sit down next to him on the sofa. Put my hand gently on his knee.
‘OK. I’ll overlook it this once. Let’s forget it for now. But it’s time for you to go back to the music room. You can’t stay down here any longer. Come on.
Up.’

I’m trembling as he goes ahead of me out of the room. Shocked that he continues to fear me. But whether it’s because he is still feeble, or because he is sorry for upsetting me, he
goes forlornly, his hands taped securely behind his back, his head bowed and does not confront me as we climb the stairs.

Once he’s locked in again I hurry straight to the answer machine to listen to the message. I need to see if there’s any indication that they’ve detected Jez’s voice.

It’s Helen.

‘Sonia, you won’t believe this . . .’

I pick up the phone and dial Helen’s number. She answers immediately.

‘Can I come over?’ she asks.

For a few seconds I can’t speak. Did she hear Jez’s voice? Is this a trick?

‘Sonia? Are you there? Can you hear me?’

‘Yes, sorry. Hi.’

‘I need to talk to you. Could I come to yours?’

‘No.’ It’s too abrupt. I try again more softly. ‘No. Sorry, Helen, not a good moment.’

‘Please, Sonia. I’m so alone in this . . .’

Her voice sounds sincere. Recognizing a false note is something I’ve learnt in my line of work and I’m pretty sure there isn’t one. Of course she
could
come over. I could tell
her the same as I told Simon, that the music-room staircase has to be cordoned off while the floorboards are up. But Helen would never leave. It’s different with Simon and my other clients.
They pay for their time. Helen could talk for hours. She has no deadline to meet. And the blanket’s still in the kitchen. The plastic cup in which I gave him his hot toddy. The casserole I
made for us, uneaten in the oven.

‘What? Have you got clients, Sonia? When can I see you? I do need to talk.’

‘I’m sorry Helen, I . . .’

Then she says something that makes me change my mind.

‘Alicia wants to meet you too. Jez’s girlfriend. She’s got information about Jez. I think she’s on the brink of discovering what’s happened to him.’

‘What’s it got to do with me? Why does she want to meet me?’

‘I’m sorry if this is a nuisance for you. But we both think you can help. Please don’t get angry.’

‘I’m not angry, Helen. I just asked, why me? What’s it got to do with me?

‘You are, you’re irritable. I’m sorry. I know it’s a nuisance to you, this business, but she found something of Jez’s near your house, and she’s sure you
might have seen him without realizing it, the day he went missing. She really needs to talk to you, Sonia. And so do I.’

I take a deep breath. Did I sound angry? I am usually so careful to control my voice.

‘Where would you like to meet?’ I say. ‘I could give you an hour. But you can’t come here. I’ve people coming.’

‘The Anchor? It’s not far for you so it won’t cut into your evening too much. I could be there in ten minutes. How about you?’

‘OK. I suppose sooner is better than later for me,’ I say. ‘See you there.’

Sonia

The Anchor, that would once have been stuffy with smoke and cramped with men in grey suits bumping into each others’ beer bellies at this time, early on a Monday evening,
is instead bare and chilly and smells strongly of antibacterial cleaning fluids. The men, though their faces look roughly the same as they always have, seem to have flatter stomachs. I miss the
smoke. The illicit atmosphere it lent to after-work pubs. The fog. The sense that even the most jaded of us could walk out of our responsible jobs into the promise of a freer world. Why the smoking
ban? Look where it’s left pubs. Scrubbed. Sanitized.

I can’t see Helen in the bar and wonder whether she’s gone through to the dining area that overlooks the river. What she told me about Alicia has made me feel unreal, out of my body.
But sometimes this heightened state induces clarity of thought. I’ll use what they say to make practical decisions about whether, when, and how to release Jez.

Helen’s not in the dining area either and I begin to feel impatient. I wonder why she isn’t at work today. I go back to the bar and order a double whisky. I never normally drink
spirits but I feel I’m going to need it.

‘You’re drinking!’

I turn. ‘Helen!’

‘This is Alicia.’

Next to Helen is a skinny, dark-haired, nose-ringed girl, with a gap between her front teeth. Although she’s young there’s a world-weary look about her. She wears, in spite of the
weather, a T-shirt with the image from Tim Buckley’s album ‘Works in Progress’ on the front. I recognize it instantly because it’s the same as the image on the badge Jez
wears on his hoodie. The image on the album he’d come over to borrow from Greg.

‘My right-hand girl and source of emotional comfort. Even though she’s been going through hell herself, as you can imagine. What a stalwart she has proven to be. While you’re
at the bar, get me a large Sauvignon, will you darling. I’ll buy the next round. What’ll you have, Alicia?’