Natural Flights of the Human Mind (21 page)

‘You’ve got paint on your beard.’ Although he hasn’t. She just wants to irritate him.

She throws him a rag and he wipes the beard, but can’t find any paint. He looks puzzled, standing back from the window and touching his beard nervously with his fingertips. He’s wearing a white shirt and grey trousers, old and threadbare, but immaculately ironed. His forehead creases into a frown as he gives his beard one last examination; then he picks up his paintbrush again.

‘Maybe at the last moment someone else took over the controls, or there was some kind of mechanical failure. Or it was just bad luck, the wrong place at the wrong time.’

‘No. I caused the crash. It was my responsibility.’

‘But you can’t remember. That’s what you said. Were there any witnesses?’

‘Yes, but nobody could work out exactly what happened. Lots of different stories, no evidence.’

They say nothing for a while and continue to paint. It’s becoming clear that although the little panels in the window
look picturesque, they’re a lot of trouble. It might be worth changing them when they do the windows at the front. Never mind period detail. She wants to be able to see through them, let in lots of light. That’s all that matters.

‘I can’t see how you can really know.’

‘The voices in my dreams. They’re there all the time, telling me.’

‘About these voices. Are they supposed to be ghosts?’

He thinks for a bit. ‘No. I don’t believe in ghosts.’

‘Neither do I.’ So there’s one good thing. ‘But they have conversations with you?’

‘Yes.’

He probably doesn’t want to pursue this, but Doody thinks they should. ‘Are they real voices? That you can hear? Like mine now?’

‘It’s only in my dreams,’ he says. ‘Not during the day.’

‘Not schizophrenic, then?’

‘No. Just nightmares.’

‘But you believe them?’

‘They’re very persuasive.’

‘Like Maggie? She’s like a real person to you?’

He hesitates. ‘Maggie won’t let me forget. She makes me face up to it.’

‘But she’s dead.’

‘Yes.’

They go on painting. Doody tries to make sense of it, but can’t. ‘Why do you write to all their relatives, keep files? What’s it for?’

‘I have to keep them alive. I can’t let them disappear or be forgotten. It’s important that I see them all as if they’re still here, that there’s someone to hold on to them in case everyone else walks on past.’ His voice is low but urgent, rushing through the information compulsively. ‘People do that—after five years, ten years, they move on. They might marry someone else, have another child, grow old without
them, so I want to hold all those people in my head to stop that happening.’

He’s taking on too much. ‘You can’t do it,’ she says. ‘You can’t carry seventy-eight people round with you. It’ll make you mad.’

‘Perhaps I am mad,’ he says.

It’s a distinct possibility. ‘It doesn’t make them alive again, though, does it?’

‘No.’

‘But it’s not as if you meant to kill them all.’

‘No.’

‘Well, there you are. It wasn’t premeditated murder.’

‘It might have been.’

‘More like carelessness, I’d have thought. There’s a world of difference between Hitler, who meant to kill all those Jews, and…’ She tries to think of another accident, but can’t. Aberfan,
Titanic, Herald of Free Enterprise
…They seem a little extreme, since hundreds of people died, and they’ve become historical landmarks.

‘How come so many died?’ she says instead. ‘It’s not usually that many in a train crash.’

‘Fire,’ he says harshly. ‘It engulfed two carriages of the train. They couldn’t identify some of the bodies because they were so badly burned.’

Doody tries not to see the blackened, wrecked train and the unrecognisable victims. They paint in silence for a long time and the tension of the conversation begins to dissipate. There’s a faint rustle in the lilac tree, a car passing in the distance, voices of children calling to each other in a faraway garden. Doody likes this awareness of things going on, the feeling of someone beside her working. She can hear the swish of his paintbrush, the slurp as he puts more paint on it, the creak of his knees as he bends to do the lower level. She can hear him breathing, moving to one side, the ease of his presence. She remembers the first day when he invaded her garden, the
sharing of silence with someone else. It’s the same again, but more comfortable. The rhythm of sounds around them, the soothing nature of being together without speaking.

On the first day when Harry didn’t come home, Imogen wasn’t worried. Sometimes he would turn up and she’d forget he was coming. She’d be cleaning, wiping all the skirting-boards, which didn’t need doing, and he’d be standing there, watching her, when she turned round, scaring her to death. Then they would hug, and she would take his coat off, get him to sit down while she made him a cup of coffee. She’d go into the kitchen and worry about what to cook for him, bring down all the recipe books, check what tins she had and what was in the fridge. By the time she’d worked it all out, and produced the coffee, he would be sprawled out on the sofa, his mouth open, snoring away.

That was all he ever did in the end. Sleep.

Sometimes she stood over his inert body and allowed herself to be angry. She’d waited all that time for him to come home. What had happened to their life together? The conversations, the fun? It wasn’t all her fault, surely?

At first, she thought she’d made a mistake. On the second day, she started to worry, and went through his papers to see if he had a timetable, a list of days on and off. He’d never shown her anything written down. He used to just tell her, ‘Back on Thursday late’ ‘I’ve got three days at home’ ‘Don’t bother with dinner. I have to leave by five o’clock.’

After three days, Imogen summoned the courage to phone the hospital and spoke to a receptionist. ‘You want Dr Doody?’

‘Yes, Harry Doody.’

‘Hold the line.’

She waited until she was cut off.

After two hours, she tried again, her hands shaking so badly
that she had to keep redialling. ‘Please, I need to speak to Dr Harry Doody.’

‘Hold the line.’

‘Please can you be quick? I got cut off last time.’

‘I’ll do my best.’ She could hear the receptionist’s irritation.

‘Hello?’ A man this time. ‘To whom am I speaking?’

‘It’s Imogen Doody. Harry’s wife.’

‘Well, Mrs Doody, you can tell Harry that if he wants to keep his job, he’d better get right back here.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘He let us down in a crisis. You don’t do that in medicine.’ Imogen could hear his annoyance pulsating through the phone line. ‘He has a duty of care. Tell him that.’ And he put the phone down.

She didn’t know what to do. She still thought Harry would just walk through the door. Every time the post was delivered, she was there, expecting him to come racing through. ‘Imogen!’ he would call, in the urgent way she liked. ‘I’m home.’

She would find herself holding her breath, listening, thinking perhaps she’d missed the sound of his key in the door. She lay awake all night, imagining she could feel the weight of him sliding into bed beside her, careful not to let him know that she was awake, so that he would drop straight into his exhausted, desperate sleep without knowing that she wanted to talk to him.

For another day, she forgot to eat, wash, or go outside. She went to bed, got up, waited, listened, and he didn’t come back. She didn’t know how to think about it. All she could do was wait.

Then the phone rang. At last. He was letting her know that there had been a delay. He didn’t want her to worry.

She ran to pick it up. ‘Harry!’

But the voice wasn’t Harry’s. ‘No, Imogen, it’s Stella.’ Harry’s mother. He was with her. He’d asked her to phone and say that he’d left her. Imogen didn’t want to talk to her
and have it confirmed. It was better not knowing, thinking that she’d made a mistake and that he’d be arriving any minute now.

‘Can I speak to Harry?’ Imogen said.

‘But I was going to ask you that.’

‘Oh.’ Imogen had to pause and think. ‘He’s not here.’

‘When do you expect him back?’

She didn’t know what to say.

‘Imogen, are you there?’

‘Yes.’

‘When will I be able to catch him? I need to check arrangements for our wedding anniversary.’

‘Sorry?’

‘He has told you, hasn’t he? November the second. It’s our twenty-fifth.’

‘Oh, yes.’ Imogen didn’t know anything about it.

There was a pause. ‘Imogen, could you just tell me when I can speak to him? I haven’t got all day.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘What do you mean, you don’t know?’

‘I don’t know where he is.’

And that was it. That was when Imogen realised he wasn’t coming back. His mother phoned all the hospitals in the area in case he’d had an accident. She phoned the police. The police came to talk to Imogen, and it was Celia all over again.

Nobody had any idea where he was. The last person to speak to him had been Hassan, who was his best friend, they told Imogen. Harry had never even mentioned Hassan. They’d got married suddenly, out of the blue, in a few hours without telling anyone, so there had been no wedding reception, no best man, no speeches in the marquee in the garden. Just her and Harry with two strangers they’d picked off the streets to be witnesses.

Stella was distraught, furious with her. ‘Why didn’t you call
me? He might have had an accident, be lying somewhere injured. We could have saved him. Now it might be too late.’

She couldn’t accept that Harry would go away willingly without telling her. But Imogen knew that he’d just walked off one early morning and kept on walking because he couldn’t cope with it all. The job, the travelling, the lack of sleep, Imogen. She’d known, right from the beginning, that he wasn’t coming back, which was why she hadn’t rung the police or anyone else.

After the police had been through the house, Imogen searched again, looking for clues, examining his clothes, his pockets, his books, his drawers. She piled everything in the centre of the living room, a great pile of non-existent Harry, the man who had ceased to be. She became increasingly frantic, tearing the clothes with her hands, throwing them on to the pile, screaming at them if they wouldn’t come apart.

She tore up his papers, his lecture notes, screwing them into tight balls and hurling them on to the pile. She ripped pages out of his books, pulled the tapes out of his cassettes, long shining ribbons of his favourite music, tangled and twisted.

When she couldn’t find anything else that belonged to him, she started to kick it all viciously.

‘Traitor!’ she yelled. ‘It’s no use having good manners, or a posh voice, or a private school if you can’t look after your wife! Call yourself a doctor? What about kindness, compassion? What about me?’

Overwhelmed by the desire to destroy everything connected with him, she picked up a box of matches. They wouldn’t light—they must have been damp. Then one stayed alight. She held it over a sheaf of papers, her hand trembling.

She started to cry. Tears poured down her cheeks, dripping on to the match, just before the flame reached her fingers.

She cried and cried and cried.

Then, the next day, she did the same thing as Harry. She left the flat and everything in it, and walked away. She took a
small suitcase with essential clothes, and, as an afterthought, one of Harry’s textbooks. To prove to herself that he had really existed.
Advanced Studies in Neurology
.

She caught a train and went to Bristol where she had never been before and knew no one. She walked into a labour exchange and saw a job for a school caretaker. She went to the interview, said she was a widow, ready to start immediately, and they gave her the job. She gave them two references: an old friend of her father, who was a lawyer and would sound convincing, and her former headmistress, who could at least back up Imogen’s claim to exist. While she waited two weeks for the house to be vacated, Imogen slept in shop doorways, under bridges, walked everywhere, looked at everything, and decided that she didn’t mind living as long as she didn’t have to be close to anyone.

She liked the idea of being someone new. Starting again, being a different person. Strong, hard, in control. Nobody messes with Doody.

She kept her new-found knowledge of anger. She carried it around with her, nursing it, polishing it, holding it ready. And every now and again, she opened the lid and let it out. It had an amazing effect. People backed away from her and apologised. Children cowered and confessed. Men put their hands into the air and surrendered. No one came near the space she manufactured around herself. For the first time in years, she felt safe.

Once she’d moved in she rang home. Jonathan answered the phone.

‘Hello, it’s Imogen.’

He sounded surprised. ‘Imogen? Where are you?’

‘Bristol.’

‘Why?’

‘I fancied a change.’

He was having difficulty thinking of something to say. ‘Shall I fetch Mummy?’

‘No, I’ll give you my phone number.’

‘OK. Have you got a flat?’

‘No, a house.’

‘Oh, good.’

‘’Bye, then.’

‘Imogen—what happens if Harry comes back? How will he find you?’

‘He won’t come back.’ She put the phone down. What did they care? They’d only met Harry a couple of times anyway. She was right. On the rare occasions Imogen rang her, her mother never once mentioned Harry, or his disappearance. She had always thought he was too good for Imogen.

‘Why in the world did he marry you?’ she’d said, after Imogen first brought him home as her husband, and her surprise was so genuine that Imogen had had to leave the room in frustration.

Jonathan started to phone instead, and he’s always been the one to contact her ever since. He must have had some feeling that they should pretend to be a family, since they were the only ones left.

Imogen never spoke to Stella again.

Doody and Straker are working on the garden when she decides to tell him about Harry, without knowing how she arrives at this decision. He’s digging and she’s working behind him, picking out the weeds with a trowel. They should be inside the cottage, making it warm and habitable before the winter, but the weather is fine, and it’s pleasant out here, smelling of freshly turned soil, as they pile up weeds and fallen leaves.