“You’re scaring me, Joe.”
“What happened to them?”
“One of them died last Easter of a drug overdose.”
I am ahead of her now, reading a list of names: Justice McBride, Melinda Cossima, Rupert Erskine, Lucas Dutton, Alison Gorski— all were involved in the same child protection case. Erskine is dead. The others have all lost someone close to them. What has this got to do with me? I only interviewed Bobby the once. Surely that isn’t enough to explain the windmills, the Spanish lessons, the Tigers and Lions… Why did he spend months living in Wales, landscaping my parent’s garden and fixing the old stables?
Mel is threatening to hang up on me, but I can’t let her go. “Who put together the legal submission for the care order?”
“I did, of course.”
“You said Erskine was on holiday. Who signed off on the psych report?”
She hesitates. Her breathing changes. She is about to lie.
“I don’t remember?”
More insistent this time. “Who signed the psych report?”
She speaks straight through me, directly into the past.
“You did.”
“How? When?”
“I put the form in front of you and you signed. You thought it was a foster-parent authorization. It was your last day in Liverpool. We were having farewell drinks at the Windy House.”
I moan inwardly, the phone still to my ear.
“My name was in Bobby’s files?”
“Yes.”
“You took it out of the folders before you showed them to me?”
“It was a long time ago. I thought it didn’t matter.”
I can’t answer her. I let the phone fall from my hand. The young mother is clutching her baby tightly in her arms, jiggling him up and down to calm his cries. As I retreat down the steps, I hear her calling her older son inside. Nobody wants to be near me. I am like an infectious disease. An epidemic.
5
George Woodcock called the ticking of the clock a mechanical tyranny that turned us into servants of a machine that we created. We are held in fear of our own monster— just like Baron von Frankenstein.
I once had a patient, a widower living alone, who became convinced that the ticking of a clock above his kitchen table sounded like human words. The clock would give him short commands. “Go to bed!” “Wash the dishes!” “Turn off the lights!” At first he ignored the sound, but the clock repeated the instructions over and over, always using the same words. Eventually, he began to follow the orders and the clock took over his life. It told him what to have for dinner and what to watch on TV, when to do the laundry, which phone calls to return…
When he first sat in my consulting room, I asked him whether he wanted a tea or a coffee. He didn’t reply at first. He nonchalantly wandered over to the wall clock and after a moment he turned and said that a glass of water would be fine.
Strangely, he didn’t want to be cured. He could have removed all clocks from his house or gone digital, but there was something about the voices that he found reassuring and even comforting. His wife, by all accounts, had been a fusspot and a well-organized soul, who hurried him along, writing him lists, choosing his clothes and generally making decisions for him.
Instead of wanting me to stop the voices he needed to be able to carry them with him. The house already had a clock in every room, but what happened when he went outside?
I suggested a wristwatch, but for some reason these didn’t speak loudly enough or they babbled incoherently. After much thought, we went shopping at Gray’s Antique Market and he spent more than an hour listening to old-fashioned pocket watches, until he found one that quite literally spoke to him.
The clock I hear ticking could be the knocking of the Land Rover’s engine. Or it could be the doomsday clock— seven minutes to midnight. My perfect past is fading into history and I can’t stop the clock.
Two police cars pass me on the road out of Hatchmere, heading in the opposite direction. Mel must have finally given them Erskine’s address. They can’t know about the Land Rover— not yet, at least. The little old lady with the photographic memory will tell them. With any luck she’ll recount her life story first, giving me time to get away.
I keep glancing in the rearview mirror, half expecting to see flashing blue lights. This will be the opposite of a high-speed police chase. They could overtake me on bicycles unless I can find fourth gear. Maybe we’ll have one of those O. J. Simpson moments, a slow-motion motorcade, filmed from the news helicopters.
I remember the final scene of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, when Redford and Newman keep wisecracking as they go out to face the Mexican army. Personally I’m not quite as fearless about dying. And I can’t see anything glorious about a hail of bullets and a closed coffin.
Lucas Dutton lives in a redbrick house in a suburban street, where the corner shops have disappeared and been replaced by drug dealers and brothels. Every blank wall is covered in spray paint. Even the folk art and Protestant murals have been spoiled. There is no sense of color or creativity. It is mindless, malicious vandalism.
Lucas is perched on a ladder in the driveway, unbolting a basketball hoop from the wall. His hair is even darker, but he’s thickened around the waist and his forehead is etched with frown lines that disappear into bushy eyebrows.
“Do you need a hand?”
He looks down and takes a moment to put a name to my face.
“These things are rusted on,” he says, tapping the bolts. Descending the ladder he wipes his hands on his shirtfront and shakes my hand. At the same time he glances at the front door, betraying his nerves. His wife must be inside. They will have seen the news reports or heard the radio.
I can hear music coming from an upstairs window: something with lots of thumping bass and shuffling turntables. Lucas follows my eyes.
“I tell her to turn it down, but she says that it has to be loud. Sign of age, I guess.”
I remember the twins. Sonia was a good swimmer— in the pool, in the sea, she had a beautiful stroke. I was invited to a barbecue one weekend when she must have been about nine. She announced that she was going to swim the Channel one day.
“It’ll be much quicker when they build the tunnel,” I’d told her.
Everyone had laughed. Sonia had rolled her eyes. She didn’t like me after that.
Her twin sister, Claire, was the bookish one, with steel-framed glasses and a lazy eye. She spent most of the barbecue in her room, complaining that she couldn’t hear the TV because everyone outside was “gibbering like monkeys.”
Lucas is folding up the ladder and explaining that “the girls” don’t use the hoop anymore.
“I was sorry to hear about Sonia,” I say.
He acts as though he doesn’t hear me. Tools are packed away in a toolbox. I’m about to ask him what happened, when he starts telling me that Sonia had just won two titles at the national swimming championships and had broken a distance record.
I let him talk because I sense he’s making a point. The story unfolds. Sonia Dutton, not quite twenty-three, dressed up for a rock concert. She went with Claire and a group of friends from university. Someone gave her a white pill imprinted with a shell logo. She danced all night until her heartbeat grew rapid and her blood pressure soared. She felt faint and anxious. She collapsed in a toilet cubicle.
Lucas is still crouched over the toolbox as though he’s lost something. His shoulders are shaking. In a rasping voice, he describes how Sonia spent three weeks in a coma, never regaining consciousness. Lucas and his wife argued over whether to turn off her life support. He was the pragmatist. He wanted to remember her gliding through the water, with her smooth stroke. His wife accused him of giving up hope, of thinking only of himself, of not praying hard enough for a miracle.