Now – 23rd March
Everything is falling apart.
Derek knocked on my door in the early hours this morning, white-faced in his PJs, and told me he thought his Jenny was dead. I followed him to their flat, numb from lack of sleep and the last of the bourbon I finished in a cup of hot milk. When I got to Jenny I was shaking, unable to face another crisis, and not happening to someone as good as her.
But she was breathing still and I found the pulse that Derek had been too panicked to feel, beating weakly in her frail wrist. I told him to call an ambulance and we waited together for it to come, both watching her, as if the intensity of our vigil would be enough to keep her going until help arrived.
Now, I’m at her bedside again. In the acute ward at Charing Cross.
Derek isn’t in much better health than she is and I sent him home for a rest, told him to bring some clean clothes for her and the pictures of her boys. He didn’t want to leave her but she’s going to need him to be strong and at his age one long night on a hard chair, in a draughty waiting area, can soon turn to pneumonia.
Jenny is sleeping; she looks peaceful, oblivious to the hustle and noise in the surrounding bays. Every hour a nurse comes and checks her pulse and temperature, pricks her finger to test the levels of her blood, speaking in a bright voice, heavily accented. Jenny barely stirs. I don’t think she realises I’m here.
The nurse asks if I’d like a cup of tea.
She looks at me with the same level of compassion as she lays on Jenny and I tell her I’m fine, thanks. The next time she comes around I ask where she’s from and we talk for a few minutes about Athens, where her husband and children still live, in a house they share with his parents and sister and her two daughters, and how she hopes things will get better there one day.
In the other beds are women working through their own problems, the surprised ones in hospital gowns, the regulars in their own nightdresses. Jenny, despite her stroke last year and whatever happened last night, looks healthier than all of them.
The visitors come and go and I try to block out their talk. When a pair of brothers begin fighting across their mother’s bed I take myself outside for a smoke, check my phone, find no messages from Carol, who is still waiting for Quinn’s friends to get back to her.
After three days we both know it won’t happen. She’s beginning to talk about hopping a cheap flight down there herself, as if her radical radar will magically guide her to the paranoid anarchist group he was supposed to be squatting with.
Ella hasn’t called me either. I don’t want to talk to her but I don’t want this silence to continue.
First thing this morning I went to Kennington station to try and find out why they were still holding Callum, what he was being charged with. When I arrived, the desk sergeant refused to speak to me because I wasn’t a relation. I asked to see Wazir or Gull and neither could be reached. Finally, I realised Callum might not even be at that station and when I checked, the woman confirmed that he had been but he was released days ago.
Which means something has stopped him coming home.
‘You got a light?’
A young man, tan and rounded with dark shadows like bruises under his eyes, holds up his Superking at me. I cup my hand around the lighter flame and he nods his thanks before walking off.
Where else could Callum possibly have gone?
Knowing he was in police custody was bad enough. At least he was safe there. Now he could be anywhere, sleeping rough or squatting. For all I know this has tipped him over the edge and he’s killed himself.
I take a breath, pull back from the idea.
He has no reason to do that, does he?
Does he?
What the hell do I know about him to make such an assumption?
Still, something has changed while the police had him, and all I can think is that he’s been given information that has turned him against me and that’s why he hasn’t come home. It would have to be serious, though, and if it was serious then I wouldn’t be standing out here smoking, I’d be arrested already.
Nothing makes sense any more.
There’s a cafe in the reception area and I buy a flat white and a small packet of biscuits, take them back with me along the warren of pastel corridors to the acute ward. Twice I get lost and have to retrace my steps, past doors protected by keypads and wards in mothballs because of staff shortages.
When I reach the right bay I find Jenny’s bed empty.
‘She’s just gone for a scan, love,’ the woman across the aisle tells me.
‘Thanks.’
I sit down with my back to her, not wanting to get dragged into a conversation about her ailments. I’ve already heard it all, told to the nurse and the junior doctor who did his rounds an hour ago.
Joylessly, I eat the biscuits, trying to remember if Callum ever mentioned other family in the city. Or anywhere, for that matter. Our relationship has not been a talkative one, I now realise. We’d drink together and sleep together, watch a film or whatever was on TV, and sometimes we’d talk about that, but otherwise it was always the evictions and the fight to stay.
We don’t really know each other.
His parents came down to London from Inverness, that much I remember. But it was after he left home and signed up for the army. When he mentioned it, in a dark and drunken mood, I decided not to press him on the details, sensing they wouldn’t be good.
Somehow I doubt he’s gone back up there, anyway. He never talked about the place, didn’t seem to miss it. I’m sure he’s still in London.
When I get back to the flat I’ll start calling the homeless shelters where I know people, ask them to keep an eye out for him. Maybe I should be calling the hospitals too, in case he’s had an accident, but in my gut I know it’s not that which is keeping him away.
It’s me.
There are things I’ve done that would make him hate me. He knows more about my past than I know about his, but not everything. There are things the police might have thrown out to make him turn on me. Activities a soldier wouldn’t approve of.
What would he make of my police file? Not just the convictions but the suspicions too. That’s how they’d damn me.
I rub the scar on the inside of my left ring finger, remembering the sting as the cut fence tore it open, the split second of numbness before the blood welled and the night air chilled the wound. Callum could have been on the other side of that fence. Politically he is. That’s why we never talk about the news. I only mentioned being at Greenham Common once and saw the expression on his face, the disapproval and the way his jaw hardened as he resolved not to say whatever he was thinking. Do soldiers ever stop believing what they’ve had drummed into them?
How ironic would it be if I overlooked his history only for him to judge mine?
A cheery porter wheels Jenny back on to the ward and brings her over to the bed. She’s listless and slumped in the chair and he has to lift her out of it, careful as he lowers her on to the mattress. Discreetly he arranges her right arm and leg, which have been immobile since her stroke last year, and pulls the blue waffle cover over them. She looks woozily at him, doesn’t notice me, and as soon as her head is on the pillow she closes her eyes.
‘It’s best she sleeps now,’ he tells me. ‘MRIs always take it out of you.’
I smile and nod. ‘I’ll just wait until her husband comes back.’
He wheels the chair over to another bed and helps the woman there into it, laughing when she makes a flirty comment.
For a while I manage to tune the ward noise out. I drink my coffee, but the caffeine isn’t strong enough to overcome the bone-deep tiredness I’ve been dogged by since this started. My limbs are heavy, my spine hollow-feeling. I’m numb. All of me. Just existing from moment to moment; walk here, lift this, say that. Say the wrong thing, mostly, because I’m not thinking straight.
I feel like I haven’t made a single correct decision since that night when I stood at the window with Ella and the dead man behind me, and convinced myself that the only way out was to hide his body.
How do criminals live with this?
How come I can’t? It isn’t like this is the first illegal thing I’ve done in my life. It might not even be the worst, depending on your moral framework.
I suppose the difference is, I could justify those acts as part of the greater good and so I barely paused to consider what would happen to the other people involved, or to me if I was caught.
When the food comes around the smell of it makes my stomach flip and I go outside for another cigarette. There’s a police car parked in the unloading zone; nobody in it, but the driver’s-side rear window is smeared with blood, a distinct handprint on the white paintwork around it.
A female officer comes out with a cloth and wipes the blood off the car, shaking her head as she does it and muttering under her breath. For a brief moment I imagine going and telling her what I’ve done, giving her Ella’s name and address and letting this whole problem be handled by somebody else. But I’m too scared. I’ve been in prison before and never want to go back. Especially not now I’m older and more vulnerable.
And Ella would cope even worse than me. She thinks she’s slumming in that thousand-pound-per-month flat in Camden that her daddy’s paying for.
If it’s Quinn she killed, will I tell the police? If it’s out-and-out murder she dragged me into?
I watch the policewoman drop the bloodied cloth into a bin and pause to study her hands to check for traces left on her skin. She looks up sharply, straight at me, and I look away, feeling like she’s read the guilt on me and the fleeting urge to confess.
When I finally lift my gaze from the toes of my biker boots the policewoman is gone and Derek is walking towards me, stooped inside his bright-orange anorak, the hood up against the cold, carrying a floral overnight bag with Jenny’s things in.
‘How is she?’ he asks.
‘Sleeping. She’s just been down for an MRI.’
‘You heading back now?’
‘I’ll come over in the morning,’ I say. ‘If they don’t release her this evening.’
‘They won’t.’ He shifts the bag from one hand to the other, winces; his arthritis must be playing up. ‘Thanks for sitting with her. She’ll have appreciated that.’
I give his arm a quick squeeze before he walks away and go to find a taxi. It’s a luxury, I shouldn’t be squandering money, but I’m too tired to wait for a bus.
The driver refuses to pull on to the site when we arrive at Castle Rise, stopping at the mouth of the gateway instead and sourly regarding the sprawling development, before leaning across the wheel to look up at the sparkling monolith of Rise 1.
‘Wouldn’t live up there if you paid me,’ he says. ‘Mate of mine’s a builder, reckons they’ll be crumbling inside of ten years. Right waste of money.’
‘I don’t live up there,’ I tell him, as I pass a twenty through the slot. ‘I’m in the block they’re pulling down.’
‘Oh, right. Sorry.’ He takes the note and hands back my change, doesn’t ask if I need a receipt because why would I, somebody living in a condemned building, need that? He says, ‘You going to get back to your door alright, love?’
‘I’ll be fine, thanks.’
‘It’s not very well lit. You sure you’ll be alright?’
‘There’s plenty of security about,’ I tell him and wish him a good night and step out on to the pavement, wondering how he sees the place, whether it really looks so dangerous that he isn’t entirely happy to let a stranger head into it alone.
I walk up the centre of the road, boots scuffing in spilt sand and dust from the demolition, which somehow remains weeks after the debris itself was cleared away. An entire block of flats, sixty homes, all of those lives, reduced to tiny specks that stubbornly cling to the dimpled tarmac. Breezeblocks and plasterboard and wallpaper and doorframes where children’s heights were once marked, climbing year on year, all of it indistinguishable now, so insubstantial it barely crunches under my feet.