East of Innocence (24 page)

‘You tell Mr Halliday,’ I begin. I pause.

‘Yes?’ says Eddie.

‘You tell Halliday that if he threatens me one more time I’ll…’ But as I say the words I realise how childish this all is, how Halliday is reducing me to the language of the playground. If you do X, I’ll do Y, the most primitive of equations. ‘Tell Mr Halliday I’ll see him when I get back. We’ll sort it out then.’ I do hang up now, with some relief. I am in Halliday’s bad books, I know; but at least I have not threatened him with violence. There may still be a way out, which there would not have been had I said anything rash.

I hear somebody clear their throat and look up and see the receptionist at the hospital’s front desk regarding me with disapproval. She points to a sign that shows a picture of a mobile phone within a red circle, a diagonal red line across it. I put my phone away and walk up to her. She is young and quite pretty with strawberry-blonde ringleted hair and freckles, but she has the distracted, frustrated air of somebody who knows that everybody she deals with will come away dissatisfied in some way.

‘Help you?’ she asks.

‘Yeah. I’m looking for my mother.’

*

Conneely’s wife had told me that she knew where my mother had gone. At the side of that two-lane Moroccan road, I had struggled to hear what she was telling me as a bus blew past, pulling a cloud of dust in its wake.

‘I don’t know where she is now, you understand me? I cannot tell you that.’

‘Yes,’ I said, pressing the phone so tightly against my ear that my wrist ached.

‘But I can tell you this. She was working as a cleaner at the hospital there.’

‘The hospital?’

‘Saint Mary’s. She had a job there, I know that much.’

‘When was this?’

‘Oh, Mr Connell, this was years ago. Twenty-five years ago it must have been.’

‘Right,’ I said and I could not help the disappointment sounding in my voice. ‘Thank you.’

‘You said anything, if I know anything,’ she said defensively. ‘You asked.’

‘Tell me,’ I said to her. ‘When your husband was forcing women to have sex with men they didn’t know and then taking their money, when he was buying confused and scared young girls from criminals. While all that was going on, Mrs Conneely, what were you doing?’ I waited for her reply but there was none, and some seconds later I heard a click as she hung up. I had not heard from her since.

The hospital receptionist turns to her keyboard. ‘What ward is your mother in?’

‘No, she… She isn’t a patient,’ I say. ‘She used to work here.’

She stops, looks back at me. ‘Used to?’

‘A long time ago. I’m trying to find her.’

‘How long ago?’

‘Twenty-five years.’

She frowns, confused. ‘You haven’t seen her since?’

‘I’ve never seen her.’

She tilts her head, ringlets cascading gently, and something softens in her look. I’m willing to bet that she is a sucker for those magazines full of true stories of hope and tragedy, of children lost and mothers found. Now it is happening to her, for real. I could have walked in holding my own severed arm and she would not be more concerned, more willing to help. She folds her arms and leans towards me.

‘Were you adopted?’

‘Not exactly,’ I say. ‘She was taken away.’

Her eyes, which are a startling blue, widen. ‘By her family?’

‘Criminals,’ I say, loading the word with as much significance as I can. ‘Criminals took her.’

She mouths a silent ‘Wow’ with her lips. Now that I have her undivided attention I can see that she really is pretty. She shakes her head slowly. ‘That’s terrible?’

I do not know why she posed that as a question, but I nod anyway. ‘I know.’

She sits back up, back to business. ‘Twenty-five years is a long time,’ she says. ‘You’ll need to talk to Personnel.’

‘Where will I find them?’

She pulls over a plan of the hospital and shows me where Personnel is housed, in a separate building on the other side of the complex. I thank her and head away, and she calls after me. I turn around.

‘If you find her,’ she says, ‘tell me, yeah?’

I arrived back in Manchester last night and went back to the hotel I had originally stayed in, where they recognised me and gave me the same room I had left only a few days ago. I had not driven back to Tangier, instead headed for Casablanca where I had taken a flight home, which stopped at Barcelona on the way. I had left the Panda in the airport’s parking; I felt a slight pang of guilt for the one-eyed man who had rented it out to me in Tangier but figured that, even in Morocco, a car in that state couldn’t be worth much more than I had paid to hire it.

The weather in Manchester has now changed, sunshine swapped for a persistent drizzle under grey skies. It is no longer hot and the people no longer radiant; it is as if I have returned to a moribund city that has, since I left, experienced a collective minor tragedy. I have to walk for five minutes before I find the building that houses Personnel, a grey, tired prefab that looks as if it was put up temporarily, yet thirty years later nobody has found the money to replace. Here, too, there is a reception desk but behind it is an older woman wearing glasses on a chain and with the flat eyes of somebody who long ago lost the habit of empathy. She looks me up and down, nostrils flaring as if she has smelled a turd.

‘Help you?’

‘I hope so. I’m trying to trace my mother, who used to work here.’

‘She’s missing?’

‘Kind of,’ I say. ‘I don’t know where she is.’

‘I see,’ the woman says, but she doesn’t; nor does she want to. Already she has me marked down as a nuisance. ‘Why do you think we can help?’

‘You might not be able to. Only, all I know about her is that she used to work here.’

‘Recently?’

‘I don’t know. She was certainly here twenty-five years ago.’

The woman exhales through her nose with annoyance. ‘Twenty-five years?’

‘Could have been more recently.’

‘We’re a hospital,’ the woman says. ‘Not a missing persons’ bureau.’

‘But maybe somebody would remember her,’ I say. ‘Even know her. I would like to find her.’

‘Have you asked the police?’

‘Why?’ I say. ‘What would they do?’

‘So instead you come here,’ she sighs. ‘What did she do here? At least tell me that. Was she on the staff?’

‘She was a cleaner,’ I say.

The woman cocks her head in surprise. ‘A cleaner? Twenty-five years ago?’ She shakes her head and removes her glasses, lets them hang over her grey cardigan. ‘We wouldn’t have any record of that. Not now. And anyway, most of our cleaners come through an agency.’ She leans closer. ‘Most of them are foreigners. Somalis, Poles, God
knows where they come from. But they don’t use their real names, they don’t pay taxes. I don’t get involved.’

‘You’re telling me that my mother is not worth finding?’

The woman does not like my tone. ‘I am telling you that there is nothing I can do.’ She laughs unkindly. ‘Twenty-five years ago.’ Like I’ve asked her to perform alchemy.

‘You won’t look? Check? I have her name.’

‘It won’t do any good. Our records won’t go back that far. Everything was computerised.’

‘I have a photo. If I could show people…’

‘Mr…’

‘Connell.’

‘Mr Connell, I am sorry but we are talking about ancient history. This is a hospital, not a museum. If you have lost your mother, then I am of course very sorry and wish you all the best. But there are proper channels and you cannot just appear at my desk and snap your fingers.’

I look at the woman’s hand and notice that she is not wearing a wedding ring and wonder whether she has been unloved for so long that her capacity for emotional engagement has atrophied, withered like an unused arm. I know that she will not help me, know that there is no better nature to appeal to. In any case, she is probably right; to find a casual worker from a quarter of a century ago is an impossible task. I nod and walk away but as I go she says, with a sharpness which I believe entirely unwarranted, ‘And I would thank you for not wasting the time of the hospital staff with your enquiries.’ She will be reflecting indignantly on my intrusion for hours, stewing until her microwave pings to announce dinner for one. I am tempted
to wrench the door of the prefab off its hinges but instead I let it swing closed. Some people are lost causes.

I walk the corridors of the hospital and pass several cleaners polishing the linoleum with big machines like benign lawnmowers or towing trolleys loaded with sprays and cloths, but none of them is old enough to have been working twenty-five years ago; looking at them, the futility of my search hits me. I am chasing a ghost, somebody who may well have cleaned the corridors I am now walking but who did it a lifetime ago. I see a sign directing me to the exit and decide that there is nothing that I can do, that I might as well give up. As I pass through reception, the pretty girl from behind the desk sees me and calls out.

‘Did you find her?’

I shake my head and keep walking but she runs out from behind the desk and catches me up, ringlets bouncing.

‘You didn’t find her?’

‘No.’

‘You went to Personnel?’

‘The woman there wasn’t much help.’

‘She’s a bitch.’

I smile. ‘That’s the word I was looking for.’

‘What did she do here, your mum?’

‘She was a cleaner.’

The receptionist is quiet for a time. ‘It’s such a long time ago,’ she says.

‘I know.’

‘Thing is with this place, cleaners are here, like, for a month? Nobody remembers them.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Even other people, doctors, twenty-five years… Did you talk to Nurse Abbotts?’

‘Who?’

‘She’s been here for ever. Nobody knows how long, it’s like a joke. Only she’s nice, yeah, she’s lovely.’

‘You think she’s worth talking to?’

‘You’re not just going to give up?’

‘I don’t know.’

She looks at me in amazement. ‘When you’re this close?’

‘This close? I’m looking for a cleaner who probably worked here for a week, before you were born.’

She flaps a hand. ‘Someone’ll remember her. You just need to keep trying.’

‘You think?’

‘You’ll find her,’ she says. She puts a fist to her heart. ‘I just know it.’

I am not a superstitious man and of course I did not take the receptionist’s words seriously; yet on another level, her enthusiasm for my lost cause gave me at least the strength of purpose to find this Nurse Abbotts and ask if she knew anything. The receptionist, who told me that her name was Maggie, showed me where I could find Nurse Abbotts: on the delivery ward which she ruled, and had ruled, for as long as anybody could remember. Maggie even put a call through to the ward for me, telling whoever was there that I was on my way and could they help. When I get there, I explain to the nurse guarding the door of the ward against desperate fathers unwilling to wait for visiting hours why
I am here. She tells me to hold on, she’ll go and find Nurse Abbotts for me.

I expect a bosomy woman with pinned-back hair and a severe expression, a
Carry On
harridan with all the humanity of a stone. But instead Nurse Abbotts is a small, slender black lady with short hair and gentle eyes and an air of calm efficiency. She holds her hand out and I shake it; it is small but her grip is strong and she gives my hand two brisk pulls.

‘What is your name?’ she asks. She has a slight accent but I cannot place it, though I think it is from the Caribbean somewhere.

‘Daniel. Daniel Connell.’

‘Well, Mr Connell, come with me.’ I follow her down a main corridor, her quick steps making me feel as if I am lumbering behind her. On either side of the corridor are four-bed wards with women sitting up, many holding babies to their chests. She opens the door to a small room with a coffee machine and a sink and a table, around which are four plastic chairs. She sits down at one, invites me to take another. She puts both elbows on the table, hands clasped as if praying.

‘Now, the nurse tells me that you have lost your mother.’

I nod. ‘She was a cleaner here, a long time ago.’

‘Child,’ Nurse Abbotts says, ‘cleaners come and go. One week they’re here, the next they’re gone. You know that, don’t you?’ She looks at me and I can see a kind concern in her eyes; she has no more expectation of success than I do. I suspect that she is practised in delivering bad news to people in this room.

‘I understand. But this is all I know about her.’

‘How long ago we talking about?’

‘Twenty-five years ago.’

‘Goodness me,’ she says. ‘Goodness. Did she have a name, this mother of yours?’

‘Marcela,’ I say. ‘Marcela Cosma.’

‘Not much call for second names, not round here,’ she says. ‘Marcela. You have a picture of Marcela?’

I take out the shot of my mother holding her sunhat to her head, in the yellow mini dress. Nurse Abbotts takes it almost reverentially, for which I like her enormously. She looks at it for some time, then back at me.

‘I believe I remember a Marcela,’ she says. ‘But she didn’t look like this lady, no-uh. Nothing at all like this beautiful woman here.’ She passes the photograph back to me. ‘But I believe it is the same person.’

‘You do?’

‘A sad lady, this Marcela. She told me she had once had a child herself. The look in her eyes as she saw all these mothers, with children themselves…’ Instinctively, Nurse Abbotts reaches across the table and puts her small hand over mine. ‘I did so feel pity for her.’

Something in the way she says this makes me think that she is speaking of my mother in the past tense; Nurse Abbotts must notice the alarm in my eyes because she squeezes my hand and hurries to go on. ‘Oh, child, no, the last time I saw your mother she was well. As well as I ever saw her.’

Nurse Abbotts asks me if I would like a coffee; I say no, but she tells me that she would, that she has battled with
caffeine for over thirty years and that she is ashamed to confess that caffeine has always been the victor. She tells me that she will not drink the coffee from the machine in the nurses’ station, that there is a Starbucks not five minutes away. I have to walk fast to keep up with her as she strides briskly down corridors, greeting people along the way, down a flight of steps and we are outside, and then out of the hospital grounds completely. She does not talk and I do not ask her any questions; I believe that she has something to tell me but wants to do it in the right environment.