Читать книгу The Blame Game - C.J. Cooke - Страница 18

I’m woken by a man and woman removing my drip. Both are in plain clothes, the man dressed so casually that I jump when I see him standing so close. Jeans and a colourful Hawaiian shirt with a rosary around his neck. He speaks to me in Kriol.

‘I’m sorry, I don’t understand,’ I tell him. He starts to gesture with his hand but I don’t understand it. After a few minutes of confusion the nurse says ‘X-ray’ and I realise they want to take me for one.

‘Yes. Yes, X-ray,’ I say, nodding. They bring in a wheelchair, tell me to take off my clothes to be gowned. I’m so hot and filmed in blood and dirt that I virtually have to peel them off, which takes a while. Every movement makes me yelp in pain. When Reuben starts to follow after the wheelchair they shake their head and I try to explain that he has to come with me, but they won’t hear of it. I look around desperately for Vanessa.

‘My son … my son’s autistic,’ I say, stumbling over my words. ‘He has to come with me because I’m afraid someone will hurt him. Please …’ The nurse rubs my arm and tries to tell me it’s OK, he is safe here in a hospital, and then they ignore me completely and wheel me down the corridor while Reuben stands in the ward, dumbfounded.

I’m crying and shaking all over when they wheel me into the X-ray room, weakened by fear and shock. The radiographer – a woman about my age, slim, concerned – speaks good English and asks me what’s wrong.

‘We were in a car accident,’ I say, and I’m trembling so badly I can hardly get the words out. ‘I’m afraid someone is going to come into the hospital and hurt us.’

She bends down in front of me and listens.

‘Who do you think will hurt you?’

‘A man,’ I say, gulping back air as though I’m drowning. ‘He was wearing black boots. He crashed into us on purpose … he’s going to come here, I know it!’

She takes my hand and I manage to take a breath. ‘Is there security at the hospital?’

She frowns. ‘Not really. But the police should help. If you had a car accident they will want to find who did this.’

This is comforting enough to help me stop shaking. ‘The police,’ I say. ‘The woman from the British High Commission said they would want a statement but they’ve not come to see me yet.’

She smiles reassuringly.

‘They will be here very soon. It is not a big police force so they may be busy. But they will help. If someone is trying to hurt you, the police will protect you.’

I lie on a cold metal table as she pulls the machine over my collarbone, then my legs and arms.

In my mind’s eye I see myself standing in our ground floor flat in Sheffield. Reuben is in his high-chair in the room behind me shouting and throwing beans across the room. The postman pushes a pile of letters through the letter box and Reuben screams at the sound.

Most of the letters are bills, but there’s a padded envelope sent on by our landlady, Lleucu, from our loft flat in Cardiff. Amongst the letters is a cream-coloured bonded envelope with ‘Haden, Morris & Laurence’ emblazoned in navy lettering across the back. It looks important, so I open it first.

K. Haden

Haden, Morris & Laurence Law Practice

4 Martin Place

London, EN9 1AS

25th June 2004

Michael King

101 Oxford Lane

Cardiff

CF10 1FY

Sir,

We request your correspondence in receipt of this letter to the address above.

Our clients desire a meeting with you regarding the death of Luke Aucoin.

The time to meet about this tragedy is long overdue. Please do not delay in writing to us at the above address to arrange a meeting.

Sincerely,

K. Haden

The letter drifts from my hand to the ground. Reuben continues to shout in the background. I feel like someone’s run through me with a sword. Slowly I sink to the ground and pick the letter up again. Five words scream off the page.

The death of Luke Aucoin.

Those words chill me to the bone, turn my guts to mush. At one point I believed Luke was the love of my life. And yet I caused his death.

I turn and look at Reuben. My first thought is: they’ll take him from me. I will lose him if I face this.

So, I hid the letter. And I persuaded Michael that it was time to move again.

I thought it would all go away.

The voices in my head remind me that there have been dozens of occasions in the past where something has gone wrong and I’ve connected it to these letters. When we lived in Belfast our cat Phoebe died. The vet said it was poison. I worked myself into a complete state, certain it was deliberate, payback for Luke, until a neighbour approached us and apologetically explained that he’d left out rat poison in the back garden and had spotted Phoebe near the tray on the day that she died. And the miscarriage I had a few years before Saskia came along … for about year afterwards I was trapped in the silent torture of being convinced that Luke’s family had done it. I even had the scenario in my head. We were living in London at the time and I took the tube to and from work every day. I was seventeen weeks’ pregnant. The first cramps started about ten minutes after I got off the tube. It would be easy to inject me with something that would start early labour. A light prick that I’d probably never notice.

It’s difficult to explain paranoia. Saying something like that aloud – though I never did, not to anyone – makes it sound ridiculous. But the suspicion was like a monolith in my head, impossible to budge. We buried our little girl in the hospital graveyard, named her Hester. And when the voices of suspicion finally died down, a new one set in: Hester’s loss was karma for Luke.

Other mishaps were similarly difficult to assign to chance: a slashed car tyre, the night I was followed home in Kent, a few week of silent phone calls at three in the morning, two bouts of severe food poisoning. On hindsight it’s unlikely any of these were related to what happened to Luke, but at the time I was sure they were, and I carried that knowledge like a knife lodged in my chest. I could tell no one, not even Michael. My hair would fall out in handfuls and the smallest thing felt physically impossible. Cooking a meal, meeting up with friends … I felt incapacitated, barely able to look after myself, never mind my children. Life stalled and sputtered, but somehow hobbled on.

There is a point when fear is no longer a protective instinct, and it becomes sabotage.

No, I tell myself resolutely through tears. The crash has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with what happened to Luke.

I’m trying hard to convince myself, to drown out the other voices. But they’re too loud for me to silence. They shout in my head like a Greek chorus.

But what if it is? You’re alone in the hospital, completely vulnerable. If they want to come and finish you off they only have to walk through the doors.

When I return to the ward – with the news that my wrist is broken – I breathe a sigh of relief that Reuben is there, hugging a flat rectangular object with a blue rubber casing to his chest. His iPad. The glass is cracked in one corner but otherwise it seems OK. I ask him if he’s OK, and he nods, but then tells me that a man came up to him and asked him where I was.

‘Who was it?’ I say. ‘Was he a doctor? A nurse?’

He shrugs and moves his eyes around the room. He seems agitated, but of course he has every reason to be and I can’t read him.

‘Did the man say why he wanted me?’

‘My headphones are gone,’ he says.

‘How did you get the iPad?’

‘A nurse,’ he says, but doesn’t explain further.

I nod and study his face for clues. This is probably as much information as I’m going to get from him about the man who came. I look around the ward – it’s unusually quiet, all the visitors gone and the patients asleep. Just the sound of the traffic outside and the ceiling fan.

‘Let’s go check on Saskia,’ I say, and he wheels me quickly down the hall to her room. When I see her there in the bed it’s a bizarre mixture of relief and renewed grief that hits me hard.

I take her little hand in mine, staggered by the confirmation by each of my senses that this is happening. Crescent moons of blood and dirt under her nails. Her closed eyes and the frightening chasm between each bleep of her pulse.

Night falls and every time I hear footsteps coming up the hallway I seize up with blunt, raw fear. The ward I’m in is right at the far end of the wing and there is no exit without going up the hallway, so if anyone came to get Reuben and me, we have nowhere to run. The hospital is like something straight out of a zombie movie – there is one bathroom that I’ve spotted and it was crawling with insects, no loo paper, and brown water pouring from the taps. No catering, very little drinking water. Both Reuben and I are weak from hunger. I’ve asked to be moved but the nurses either don’t understand me or feign ignorance. Vanessa hasn’t appeared and I’m worried that she won’t return. She said a neurosurgeon was coming to see Saskia – why isn’t he here?

There is no phone I can use and I don’t have my mobile. Worst of all, they won’t let me sleep in Saskia’s room. Reuben and I take up too much space and the nurses need to be able to access her – it took half an hour of interpretive gestures for me to work out that this was the reason – but it’s utter rubbish, because we only get seen once a day. I’m trying to be brave for Reuben’s sake. He keeps saying, ‘What’s wrong, Mum? What’s wrong?’ and I have to tell him I’m fine, that everything is fine.

But it’s a lie.