In a Good Light (43 page)

I gazed at the babies' little froggy legs and puny, inadequate necks and the diamond-shaped patch of unjoined skull pulsing on the scalp, and wondered how it was any of us survived the perilous journey to adulthood intact.

Strangest and most marvellous of all was the gift that arrived with so little fanfare in the morning post, in a pile of bills and fliers. A cheque for £200,000 – a fantastic, mythical amount of money back then – was accompanied by the briefest letter from a solicitor, whose name itself was straight from a fairytale.

Dear Mr Fairchild

My client, who wishes to remain anonymous, has heard of your plight, and would like you to accept the enclosed. There are no conditions attached to its use.

Yours sincerely

A. Weazlewort

There had, of course, been other, smaller donations before, from local businessmen and church groups, and generous individuals who'd read about Christian's predicament in the local paper. There had been editorial outrage that the ambiguous circumstances of his injury made him ineligible for a payout from the Criminal Injuries Compensation Board, and the resulting whip-round had paid for the conversion of the downstairs cloakroom into a bathroom, and a hoist for getting him in and out of bed.

But this was something different. Anyone who says money can't buy happiness has obviously never felt the transforming touch of sudden wealth. It wasn't love or faith or counselling or pills that raised Christian from the trough of depression into which he'd sunk: it was money. And the fact that it came unasked for and unearned was a double blessing. It was as if all the pennies and pounds that Mum had scraped together and sent off to the Less Fortunate over the years had now come back to us a hundredfold.

Mum and Dad had been quietly formulating a plan to sell the Old Schoolhouse to the developer who had turned over Mrs Tapley's place and buy back one of the converted apartments. With the released capital they intended to buy or build a place where Christian could live with as much independence as possible. Unfortunately this scheme depended on the death of Grandpa Percy, or his removal
to a nursing home, whichever came sooner, and therefore serious discussion of it had to be indefinitely postponed on humanitarian grounds. The dreamlike arrival of the windfall removed all the obstacles from the planning of Christian's ideal home. It started life as a sketch on the back of my O level history file, and grew, over three years, into the house we live in today.

Christian was involved in every aspect of its design, and became so absorbed in the minutiae of architectural drawings and building regulations that I began to wonder how he would ever fill the void once the job was done. He made regular visits to the site – a half-acre plot inside the M25 at Caterham that met all his criteria: secluded but not isolated; close enough to Mum and Dad to allow support rather than indiscriminate dropping-in; somewhere new, but not alien – and watched the creeping progress with a fanatical eye. The team of builders, once they'd met Christian and knew his story, seemed to view the project as something of a crusade themselves, and were painstaking in their pursuit of perfection.

‘Oh, that'll do,' Christian would say, as they agonised over some infinitesimal flaw, and the site manager would fix him with a stern gaze and reply, ‘“That'll do”
won't
do!'

Having begun to entertain the possibility of selling the Old Schoolhouse, Mum and Dad couldn't quite let it drop, and when Grandpa Percy finally died much later – I was twenty-one and doing my Master's degree at the time – they revived the idea. It was in clearing out his room for the move that they discovered, behind a plug of loose plaster in the wall, the missing £400 from the jar on the kitchen dresser.

WHAT FOLLOWS IS
Christian's account of the night he broke his back, written up from notes he dictated to me in hospital, and part of which formed the basis of his statement to the police.

When I arrived at Martina's at about ten past eight she had already taken the overdose. (I only slept with her once, by the way, and regretted it immediately: it was the worst thing I could have done.) Her aunt opened the door to me. I thought maybe she was a doctor and she thought I was the ambulanceman, and it took us a moment or two to clear up the misunderstanding. She'd come home to find an incoherent message from Martina on her answerphone, and had driven over straight away to find Martina drowsy but still conscious enough to tell her what she'd taken. The aunt had dialled 999 and then made Martina drink salt water till she was sick. She said she didn't know if this was
the right thing to do. I said I thought it probably was as long as she hadn't drunk bleach or anything.

All this information was delivered as we ran upstairs to the sitting room, where Martina was curled up in an armchair, shivering. She had threads of watery vomit from her chin to her T-shirt, and her face was slack and putty-coloured, but she was lucid enough to force the corners of her mouth into a smile for my benefit, and say ‘sorry'. The blanket she'd been wrapped in had slipped to the floor and she hadn't bothered or been able to retrieve it. I tucked the blanket round her again and held her hand, and tried to think of comforting things to say – you know how crap I am at that – to keep her awake and alert while her aunt went out to move her car so there'd be a space for the ambulance. It was one of those roads of redbrick, Victorian terraces, completely parked up both sides. By the time she'd driven round the corner and found a spot someone was already indicating to pull in. I was torn between going down there to explain, and staying with Martina, who in any case had hold of my hand so tightly I couldn't have got away if I'd wanted to.

Through the window I saw the aunt sprinting along the road, waving at the driver, who had now reversed into the space and was opening the door. Just a few polite words of explanation would have done the trick, but the aunt was obviously fired up for a confrontation, because she started shouting and gesticulating, completely ruining any chance that the other woman would go quietly. Now she was getting out of the car I could see she was one of those hatchet-faced upper-class types who don't take orders from anybody, but I felt reassured that she wasn't likely to throw a punch. I didn't have a clue how
I'd break up a scrap between two women. It was a double relief when the whoop of the siren heralded the approach of the ambulance, and hatchet-face yielded to a higher authority and drove off.

I was so grateful when the two paramedics came clumping up the stairs and took over. They were calm, businesslike blokes, completely impervious to the chaos of female emotions around them. Martina and the aunt deferred to them immediately. I couldn't help thanking God I wasn't a woman, pitched from crisis to crisis by feelings.

Martina went off in the ambulance and the aunt said she'd follow in her car. She asked me if I wanted to come too. I had a horrible feeling she thought I was Martina's boyfriend, and I was quite keen to clear up any confusion on that score, but I couldn't get the conversation round to it. We went along to the hospital and I sat in Casualty for an hour or so, listening to the sighs of the waiting wounded, while the aunt filled in forms at the desk, and Martina was taken off somewhere. Once the experts were in control and Martina was part of some vast system, which would process her without any help from me, I was able to relax a little. I wanted to phone Penny, but the aunt had borrowed all my loose change to ring round trying to find Martina's mum. Once she'd got hold of her she calmed down. Like me, she didn't want the responsibility.

It was about half ten before they'd finished with Martina and shifted her onto a ward. While I was saying goodbye her mum arrived in a great fluster, and sort of fell on Marty, weeping. I thought, yeah, well done, that's just what she needs.

I said cheerio to the aunt, and turned down her offer of a lift. She shook my hand and said thank you, and because it was my last chance, I blurted out: ‘I'm not Martina's boyfriend, by the way.' She looked at me as much to say, ‘What's your point?' and I felt such a prick I couldn't get away fast enough. When I got out on the street I realised I was actually quite dizzy with hunger and the stress of it all, so I went into a pub and had a Guinness and some peanuts. I tried Penny's number again from a call box but there was no one in.

I fell asleep on the night bus and overshot the stop, but it wasn't raining so I decided to walk home. I was the only passenger left on board, and I wasn't aware of being followed. I'd forgotten about the precautions we were supposed to take when coming back after dark: I hadn't ever taken it very seriously and, besides, I was preoccupied with the events of the evening: I still had Martina's dried vomit on my T-shirt. I didn't pay much attention to the car parked and unlit in Knots Lane, but as I drew level I did notice that there was someone sitting very low down in the driver's seat, which struck me as odd, because the lane doesn't lead anywhere except the church, and eventually the turning to the Old Schoolhouse. When I'd gone past I heard the door click, very softly, and that was when I first thought I might be in trouble. I didn't look round, or start running, I just kept walking at the same pace, but tense and super-alert to any sound. As soon as I heard the scuff of shoes I was off at a sprint. If I'd just kept going I could probably have outrun him and reached home safely – I had a head start after all – but I stupidly ran into the churchyard. I thought I could lose him, or cut straight through and up over the wall. Anyway, I didn't
know if he had a gun or what. I knew it was me he was after though, because I could hear running feet behind me.

As soon as I was in the churchyard I knew I was cornered. There was no gate in the far wall, which was too high and sheer for me to climb in a hurry, and it wasn't easy to stray off the path without tripping over protruding gravestones in the dark. The clouds were blowing so fast across the sky that the moon was coming and going like a strobe. I ran round the far side of the church, locked at that time of night because of vandals, and did the only thing I could think of – something I'd always done as a child when I wanted to get away from someone – I climbed a tree. Just inside the flint wall was an old chestnut tree. I took a flying leap and swung myself up onto the lowest branch and then it was easy. I kept on scrambling up until I saw the beam of his torch come swinging around the side of the church, combing the gravestones to find me. I didn't get a good look at him – the angle of the beam meant he was never lit up, but I could see what he was carrying. A cricket bat. It was the one detail that kept coming back to me. If I hadn't been at such an extremity of fear, cowering in a tree, I'd have found it funny: death stalking me with a cricket bat.

I don't know how long I stayed in the tree – time probably gets distorted by terror, and it was no longer than minutes – but I could see the cone of torchlight still moving methodically below, searching. I had frozen in an awkward position with my neck cricked, and the muscles were burning with pain: I knew it would only require a fractional adjustment to bring me relief, but as I moved my head the brim of the Raskolnikov hat snagged on a
twig and peeled back off my head. I knew that if it hit the ground the noise would give me away, but of course there was no time to formulate this or any other coherent thought – I acted entirely on instinct and lunged to catch it.

I didn't feel the impact as I landed, but I did hear it, as a loud crump, like a nearby explosion, and I seemed to see myself, as if from above, lying half across the tomb of Walter James Traill, only son of Cuthbert Traill and Caroline Traill, died 4 August 1917, aged 26. Then I drifted down and rejoined my body, which was something separate, without sensation. I knew I had broken my back because when the torchlight shone in my face and his black shape stood over me I tried to roll into a ball, but nothing happened. One arm was trapped underneath me. I covered my eyes with the other because I didn't want to watch myself being killed. It was very peaceful waiting for Death. Once it was certain there was no fear at all, just a sliding surrender.

But he didn't kill me: he snapped off the torch and took off at a run as if
I
was after
him.
The terror came crowding back then, because now I still had my life I had something to lose. And with fear came pain from that trapped arm. I tried to call for help, but the fall had knocked all the voice out of me. I heard the car start up in the lane and the whirr of the engine growing fainter until it was swallowed up by the wind shaking the leaves. I must have gone into a kind of faint to protect me from the sparking pain in my arm and shoulder, because I wasn't aware of anything more until I was roused by the church clock striking one, and the beautiful, raucous sound of an ambulance, racing to my salvation.

‘
SO CHRISTIAN WANTS
to marry this girl,' said Dad, as we stopped to tread water in the deep end of the Holiday Inn pool. We meet there every Tuesday morning for thirty lengths and a chat during the Evergreen session for the over-sixties. They let me in because I'm accompanying Dad. At least I hope that's the reasoning.

‘Hardly a girl,' I replied. ‘She's forty-seven.'

‘As old as that? I didn't realise. Has she been married before?'

I nodded. ‘She separated from her husband when they were in their twenties, but they never formally divorced. Then when he got ill last year she went back and nursed him till he died. So I suppose she's widowed, technically.'

‘Any children?'

‘No. They'd fallen out before they ever got round to it.' I'd had all this from Elaine herself, but in greater detail. Since her status as Christian's girlfriend was now official,
she'd taken every opportunity to collar me for what she no doubt regarded as bonding sessions, in the face of which I remained resolutely non-stick.