Kitabı oku: «The Blame Game», sayfa 4

7
Michael
31st August 2017

I can hear someone screaming. No, not screaming. A mechanical whine, a machine somewhere that whirs.

I open my eyes and immediately bright light squared off by a window blinds me. My eyes adjust and I see I’m in a room with a small rectangular window to my right. Plaster is peeling off the wall beneath the windowsill. I can hear shouting down the hall. All a bit Mad Max in here. A white sheet is drawn across my legs. My T-shirt and jeans are covered in dirt and blood stains. There’s dried blood all over my arms. I feel like someone’s beaten me with a metal bar.

My mind flicks through reasons that I might be in hospital like a slot machine spinning its three wheels printed with cherries and bells. Three sevens line up, and I remember.

The crash.

It comes to me in vivid, broken flashes. The sound of the car whipping round. I was sure I’d died. I was sure we’d all died. Did we hit a tree? I remember the car coming to rest virtually upside down. Helen was shaking like she was having a fit, her teeth chattering. I told her it was OK, that everything was OK. Her breathing slowed. After a few moments I managed to make out something she said.

He just came out of nowhere.

A tear slid down her cheek.

Who? I said. Who came out of nowhere?

The van. He just slammed into us.

I told her I loved her.

I love you too. I’m so scared, Michael.

I thought those were the last words I’d ever hear.

I think back to last night, when I chased after the guy who’d been trespassing outside our beach hut. I didn’t want to make much of it to Helen but when I got to the top of the bank I saw someone running towards a white van that was parked about a hundred yards away from the hut. I shouted, ‘hey!’, and this guy turns and looks at me, holding his hands at either side of his shoulders as if to say ‘what?’

I stopped dead in my tracks and gave a gasp. He looked exactly like Luke. Same sandy-blonde hair, same build, same face. I felt all the blood drain from my face.

‘Luke?’ I called out. ‘What are you doing here? Luke?’

He took a few steps towards the van, then jumped in and took off, the tyres kicking up white stones. I was so stunned at the sight of him that I didn’t react, at first. Then I started to run after him, thinking that if I could get the registration plate I could report him. He sped off down the path and took a right. There was no way I was going to catch up with him so I cut through the trees. Daft, on hindsight, but I was in a daze. Luke is dead. It could have been Theo. But why here? And why now?

I’m lucky to have made it out. The rainforest is fifty miles thick. One wrong turn and I’d have been in deep kimchi.

The bleep of the heart monitor tugs me back into the present.

I sit up and try to speak but my mouth feels full of cotton wool. I think back to the fire at the bookshop. The bookshop wasn’t just my pride and joy. It was an offering, an act of supplication to Luke. And they burned it down.

We’re not safe here. They won’t stop until we’re all dead.

8
Helen
31st August 2017

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.

9
Michael
31st August 2017

My head hurts like a meteor has landed on it. Someone’s knocking against the windowpane, a thunk thunk that seems to fall into rhythm with the banging in my head. I get up to see who’s knocking and find it’s an insect of some sort, the size of a small bird, trying to get outside. With a gasp of pain I yank the tube out of my arm and struggle forward to let the bugger out. He has a stinger about three inches long but he’s more scared of me than I am of him.

I sit on the side of the bed and discover I’m wearing a snot-green hospital gown, tied at the waist and neck like a weird apron. Nothing underneath. Who undressed me? I’m in what seems to be a hospital, albeit a pretty nasty one. It looks like a building site. Smells like one, too. My back aches like I’ve fallen off a mountain. I’m covered in cuts and bruises. My first thought is that I’m here because of the fire, and my mind spins back to being trapped inside the shop, black smoke swirling. The sensation of my lungs being crushed.

And then the sight of Luke at the beach hut. His hands out at either side in a half-shrug, as if to say, what did you expect? With a shiver I wonder if I saw a ghost. A more rational explanation is that I was half-asleep, or that the trespasser bore an uncanny resemblance to Luke. But it could have been Theo.

There’s a black rucksack on the floor next to the bed. I pull it towards me and begin hunting through it. Not much in here. Someone’s already been through it. Of course they have. I know I put Helen’s passport in here, the kids’. All three are gone.

I remember putting my passport in the secret pocket at the back. It’s still there, along with my wallet, a notepad, pen, and my mobile phone. The battery’s dead. Damn it.

My checked shirt is rolled up in there, too. I pull off my bloodied T-shirt and use it to wipe my armpits and neck, throw on the clean checked shirt. I see my shoes on the floor by the door.

I see a nurse walking down the corridor and my impulse is to call out to her, tell her to contact our next of kin and tell them what’s happened. But neither Helen nor I have parents, or any close relatives.

I sit back against the cold bars of the bed, weighed down by the knowledge that we have no one to call for help.

This is my family. I have to do it. There is no one else.

10
Helen
1st September 2017

I fight sleep for as long as I can, listening out for sounds of movement in the hallway. I have the distinct feeling of being watched. Not just a feeling – a gut-wrenching certainty. All the hairs on my body stand on end despite the crushing heat, my senses on high alert and my heart fluttering in my chest. I’m in excruciating pain and physically helpless against whoever is in the shadows, watching us. None of the nurses on the ward tonight understand me and no one helps. We are completely alone.

The white van coming towards us is a vivid, garish splinter in my mind, and my foot jerks, puppet-like, at an imaginary brake pedal every time I think of it. Over and over, this circular reaction, my body reacting to a memory that’s stuck in the pipework of my mind.

When my body finally caves in to exhaustion I dive deep into dreams and surface again with a gasp into that same terrible realisation of where I am, and why.

I dream of the fire at the bookstore, black clouds of smoke billowing out of the windows of the shop, ferociously hot. Michael and I at the end of the street helplessly watching on as fire fighters roll out long hoses and blast the flames with jets of water. In the dream, though, it is the beach hut that’s ablaze, not the shop. A figure running away from the scene, up the bank into darkness. I try to get Michael’s attention.

Look! Do you think he was the one who caused the fire?

Michael’s comment floats to the surface of my dreams.

Kids didn’t start the fire, Helen.

There is a tone in his voice that I can’t work out. When I wake, it continues to echo in my ears, making the slow transition from dream to memory.

A little after eight in the morning I hear voices down the hall: an ambulance is here to take Saskia to the hospital in Belize City. To my relief, they say that both Reuben and I can go, though for one terrifying moment I feel I’m abandoning Michael. He would want me to go.

But right as the nurses are helping me into the ambulance, Vanessa pulls up alongside us in her car. ‘The police have requested that you go to the station right now to make a statement about the collision,’ she says emphatically.

I tell her that Saskia is going for surgery right at this moment but she holds up her hands.

‘It’s not my call,’ she says. ‘The police have the last say. And they require you to go to them right away.’

It’s a heart-breaking decision to have to make, but Vanessa insists I have no choice. She says I have a legal obligation to give information on the crash and that it has to happen right away.

‘I’m very sorry,’ she says. ‘But this is out of my hands.’

I watch on, tears rolling down my face, as the ambulance pulls away with my daughter inside. It feels like someone is pulling off one of my limbs and dragging it down the street, out of sight. My instincts divide me, one shouting that at least Saskia will be safe in Belize City and the other shouting, Are you nuts? You’ve just let them take her away! You have no idea that they’re even real doctors!

At least the police will protect us. I’ll tell them about the trespasser, about the van driver who got out after the crash and looked over us without helping.

And perhaps they’ll assign Saskia a police escort to ensure she’s safe.

The police station is about half a mile outside the town of San Alvaro, which appears to be no more than a row of wooden shacks selling fruit, vegetables, and handmade rugs and clothing at the side of a dirt road. Children running naked in the streets. Stray dogs everywhere, their ribs protruding like comb teeth through patchy fur.

Inside the station, we are summoned to a small room at the end of the corridor. Vanessa pushes me in the wheelchair and a couple of police officers stop chatting at the front desk when they see us. Vanessa addresses them cheerfully in Kriol, but they don’t respond, their eyes fixed on me and Reuben, who is clicking his fingers and being extremely brave in this hostile and foreign place.

‘So, tell me what happened,’ Superintendent Caliz says once Vanessa, Reuben and I are sitting down by his desk in the small room. His eyes are hidden behind darkened lenses, the corners of his mouth turned down in a deep frown. A pot belly stretching out his beige uniform, badges on the breast pocket. Photographs behind his desk show him being decorated for service in the police over many decades. He flicks his eyes across Reuben who has his attention fully on the row of glass bottles by the window, filtering sunlight across the floor in a kaleidoscope of colours.

I notice that Superintendent Caliz has no pen in hand to transcribe the interview, no tape recorder. I glance at Vanessa and tell him everything that I can recall: the trip to Mexico, our fortnight at the beach hut, the trespasser running up the bank. Then, my heart in my mouth, I tell him about the crash, recounting it with tears streaming down my face. I have to tell him this so he understands why the van driver standing at the scene of the crash, watching us, was so cruel. Recounting this feels like I’m right back on the ground again beside Saskia, praying for our lives.

‘I feel afraid,’ I say, trying to be as clear as possible in my use of language so he doesn’t miss a thing. ‘I feel worried that this man is going to come back and hurt us again.’

Superintendent Caliz purses his lips, nods. ‘You were all wearing seatbelts?’ he says.

‘Yes,’ I say, confused.

‘Why your little girl go out the window?’ He makes a motion with his hand. It takes a second for me to realise he’s demonstrating Saskia being catapulted out of the windscreen of the car.

‘We were wearing seatbelts,’ I say, but my mind turns to the last time we pulled over to let Saskia go to the loo. Did I clip her seatbelt in? She was capable of doing it herself and I usually left her to it, but the rental car was old, a 1999 hatchback with tight, irritating seatbelts that she complained about. Guilt rivets me as I think that I didn’t check it. If I had, she might not be in coma.

‘You were driving, yes?’ he says.

I nod. ‘Yes.’

‘Why your husband not drive?’

‘The other vehicle drove straight into us,’ I say in a brittle voice. ‘It wouldn’t have mattered who was driving. He swerved into our lane, right at the last minute …’

He leans forward across the desk, his hands clasped, and gives me a murky look. ‘You buy drugs here in Belize?’

‘Drugs?’

Superintendent Caliz addresses Vanessa in Kriol. She falters, confused.

‘We were told that someone has been arrested,’ Vanessa interrupts, addressing him. I can’t believe what I’m hearing. I had thought the police of all people would want to help, that the Superintendent would see the situation for what it is and offer to protect us. Michael lies unconscious in the hospital. Saskia is seventy miles away, in a hospital surrounded by strangers. Reuben and I are completely alone.

‘What’s he saying?’ I ask, and she hesitates before answering me.

‘They’ve arrested the driver of the van that crashed into your car,’ she says slowly.

I take a deep breath. ‘Good.’

But she shakes her head, as though I’ve misunderstood. ‘He is saying the crash was deliberate. The driver says he was paid to do this.’

A noise escapes my mouth. Every suspicion I’ve had has been correct, all my instincts ringing true. Someone was watching us. Someone wants us dead.

‘So, you’re completely sure,’ Vanessa asks me again. ‘No drugs purchased in Mexico. No reason for anyone to try and harm your family.’

‘This has nothing to do with drugs!’ I shout, the strength of my anger surprising everyone in the room, including me. ‘I told you! Someone was watching us at the beach hut and the next day a man crashed into our car. You say you’ve arrested him. Who paid him to crash into our car?’

Superintendent Caliz leans back in his chair, laces his fingers together and barks something in Kriol.

Vanessa processes whatever information he has shared before tilting her head to mine, her brow folded in confusion.

‘What is your husband’s name?’ she asks.

‘Michael,’ I say, confused. ‘Why?’

‘Michael Pengilly?’

‘Yes, Michael. Why? What has that got to do with the man who crashed into us?’

My voice rises again in desperation. She repeats this to Superintendent Caliz, then listens intently as he replies in Kriol. The air is suddenly loud with suspicion and menace. I had expected to feel safe here but instead I feel in even more danger than I did at the hospital.

Vanessa fixes me with a dark stare. She chooses her words carefully. ‘The van driver claims your husband paid him to crash into your car to kill you all and make it look like an accident.’

Her words are like a black hole, sucking me into it cell by cell, until all that’s left of me is a scream.