Читать книгу Down to Earth - Melanie Rose - Страница 19

A black car drew up at the kerb next to the bus stop and I glanced over to see Matt sitting in the driver’s seat. He rolled the window down and grinned at me.

‘Need a lift?’

I found myself smiling back. ‘You’re still speaking to me then?’

‘Why wouldn’t I be?’

I edged over to the car and saw Kevin watching me from the back seat. ‘A small matter of being incarcerated in a police interview room for most of the day, perhaps,’ I suggested.

‘Just like old times,’ he said flippantly. ‘It took me back six years. Only the interview rooms have been repainted and the coffee is better.’

‘I’m really sorry.’

I was sorry and yet I wasn’t. The relief I felt at Matt’s appearance was palpable. The feelings of being so completely alone and at odds with the rest of the planet had melted away as soon as I’d seen him. I’d felt the same when he’d come for me in the pub, I realised. He was the only one with the possible exception of Kevin, who wasn’t treating me with hostility and suspicion. And just like the previous night when I’d insisted on sharing his bed, I felt an overwhelming desire to connect physically with him, as though he might be able to anchor me securely to the world.

Kevin ran his window down and stuck his head out. ‘Are you getting in, or what?’

I realised they had been waiting for me. Kevin had apparently even left the front seat vacant, so I scurried round to the passenger side and slid onto the cream, leather upholstery.

‘Where to, Milady?’

‘I was going to find my mother. She’s in a nursing home – but you knew that didn’t you?’

Matt nodded. ‘I thought you had enough to cope with this morning, without us telling you about your parents.’

I read out the address of the nursing home and swivelled to look at his profile as we headed back towards Leatherhead. ‘How come you know so much about me and my family? I understand that you were sucked into the aftermath of what happened to me all those years ago, but my father died a whole two years later and my mother went into a home some time after that. After the police released you, why didn’t you simply put it all behind you?’

‘I told you. I felt responsible for you. What happened to you seemed like my fault. I convinced you to jump, I asked you to put your trust in me and promised you’d be OK. When you vanished I felt like I’d failed you. Kevin and I have considered every possible scenario for your disappearance, including keeping watch on what was happening to the people in your life.’

It made sense to me. But DI Smith’s voice echoed in my head. ‘An unhealthy interest, an obsessive amount of documentation …’

‘I still don’t understand why.’

Matt sighed. ‘It isn’t every day something inexplicable happens. Maybe I just needed an explanation as to where and why you vanished, to make my own life worth living. It seemed a scandal that you had your whole life ahead of you and the police gave up with the investigation.’

‘The trouble with the police,’ Kevin put in from behind me, ‘is that they have no imagination. They deal in the here and now and what’s right in front of them. Lateral thinking is beyond them.’

I watched the imposing rise of Box Hill looming against the darkening skyline on our right, and settled more comfortably in my seat. The two of them sounded completely nuts, yet however crazy it was, I felt increasingly relaxed in their company. On the pretext of watching the shadowy scenery, I studied Matt’s profile and resisted the urge to reach out and brush my fingers along his jaw. Glancing in the mirror I realised that while I’d been watching Matt, Kevin had been watching me. What was it with these two, I asked myself?

The nursing home was in a big old house on the corner of a large plot behind a church. Matt drew the car into the kerb and turned off the engine. ‘We’ll wait right here for you.’

I paused as I climbed out of the car, trying to keep the doubt out of my voice, ‘I’m not keeping you from work or anything, am I?’

Matt shrugged. ‘I don’t have a flight for a few days and Kevin’s between trouble-shooting jobs.’

Hesitating with one foot on the kerb and the other in the car, I stared at him in surprise, ‘Flight? Trouble-shooting? What do you do?’

‘Kevin’s a freelance IT expert and I’m a pilot.’

I felt my eyes open wider. ‘A pilot?’

He grinned at me. ‘I fly cargo planes for a living, and I can tell you that flying the things definitely beats coaxing terrified people to jump out of them.’

Half of me wanted to get back into the car and hear about how Matt had become a pilot, but it had been a long and traumatic day – and it was now nearly twenty four hours since I had landed in the airfield and found that my world had fallen apart. I shook my head, there was so much I wanted to find out. But first, I had to see my mother.

The nursing home was in semi darkness as I stood on the wide-stone step and rang on the bell. A few minutes passed before I heard soft footsteps and the front door creak open, revealing a girl of about my own age dressed in a nurse’s uniform, black Afro hair swept up in a tight knot.

She looked me up and down. ‘Can I help you?’

‘I’m Michaela Anderson. I’ve come to see my mother, Susan Anderson.’

She glanced at her watch. ‘It’s rather late. We’ve started getting the patients ready for bed. Can you come back tomorrow?’

‘I really need to see her now.’

She pursed her lips but stood back to let me pass. ‘I’ll have to talk to her first. A lot of our residents get upset when their routine is disturbed.’

I stepped into a wide hallway, lit softly by a yellow light, with a wide central staircase sweeping upwards. It would have looked like any other large house, except for the sterile looking office which opened off to one side and the faint smell of stale urine and antiseptic in the air.

‘You’ll need to sign the visitor’s book.’ She led me into the office and turned a hefty tome towards me so I could add my name to the list of daily visitors. She eyed me apprais-ingly. ‘I haven’t been here long myself, but I don’t remember having seen you before.’

‘I’ve been away,’ I said vaguely, following her round the corner where she paused at a lift door. ‘She won’t be expecting me.’

We stepped into the lift and waited in silence while it took us to the second floor.

‘Wait here, while I go and talk to her.’ The nurse turned to walk down a carpeted corridor, but I caught her arm.

The nurse stared at me and I read the name on her badge in the dull light. ‘Please, Zenelle. It would mean a lot to me to be able to tell her I’m here myself, in person.’

The nurse looked doubtful.

‘How is she?’ I asked. ‘Is she very down?’

‘She has good days and bad days. Today she has been quite calm. It would be a shame to get her over-excited so close to bedtime.’ Zenelle looked into my pleading eyes and seemed to relent. ‘Very well, you can come with me while I talk to her, but if she doesn’t want to see you, you will have to come back tomorrow when we have more staff on duty.’

I nodded and followed her as she went to a door which surprisingly was standing ajar. I found I was inexplicably nervous of seeing my mum in these unfamiliar surroundings. I don’t know what I expected – locked rooms with bolted doors or something. Calum had said my mother was in a secure nursing home after all. I peered inside to see a slender woman with short, cropped brown hair sitting slumped on the edge of a single bed staring into space. She seemed listless and tired, her shoulders hunched miserably forwards as if even sitting up straight was too much of a bother. Zenelle walked over and spoke softly to her and the woman looked up.

I felt the tightening in my stomach which had become all too common in the last twenty four hours. The woman looked like a stranger and yet was heart-rendingly familiar. My mother had been all elegant curves, while this woman was painfully thin. The mother I had seen the week before had only been in her late forties, whereas this person must be in her mid-fifties.

Willing my legs to move, I inched towards her, noticing the agitated look on her face as she stared at me in disbelief. This was a pale imitation of the woman I had gone to with my problems, the chair-person of the Woman’s Institute, charming hostess to my father’s colleagues and the woman behind the powerful, dynamic man my father had been.

‘Mum?’

‘It’s not you,’ she said, her voice coming out in a thin wail of distress. ‘It can’t be. They say my daughter is dead.’

She began to rock to and fro on the bed, her eyes darting about the room as if looking for a means of escape from something she didn’t understand. ‘You’re not real. They tell me you’re never real – just an illusion I’ve conjured up.’

I went to her and rested my hand on her shoulder but she shrugged me off. ‘Mum, it is me. It’s Michaela.’ I tried to take her hand but she wrapped both arms protectively round her body, her hands wedged firmly under her armpits as she continued to rock, her red-rimmed eyes avoiding my face.

‘I hurt,’ she whimpered. ‘I ache all over and you’re making it worse. Go away and leave me alone … I know you’re not really here.’