The Blasphemer: A Novel (16 page)

‘Painkillers not working?’

‘No, the painkillers are working. It’s the sedatives that aren’t working.’ One-handed, she twisted the top off a plastic bottle of mouthwash, took a swig, sluiced and spat. ‘I’m going back to the doctor’s today to see if I can get something stronger.’

‘That wise?’

Still facing the mirror, Nancy spoke to her reflection: ‘I haven’t had a proper night’s sleep for three weeks. When I do manage to sleep I have nightmares. When I’m awake I have panic attacks. Yes, it’s wise.’

They both turned as Martha’s voice carried from her bedroom: ‘Daniel, come quick! You’re on the telly.’

‘Call me Daddy,’ Daniel said as he arrived in the bedroom with Nancy. A map of the Galápagos Islands was being shown on the breakfast news. A dotted line indicated the flight path of their plane. A reporter was mid-sentence: ‘… Islands, birthplace of Darwinism, of the theory that only the fittest survive. It was here that …’

‘Turn it up,’ Nancy said. ‘What’s he saying?’

‘… has revealedd that the mayday transmissions from the seaplane were never received, and a combination of factors meant its disappearance went unreported. According to the inquiry, the pilots had anticipated a further delay, having already been forced to wait twenty-four hours for bad weather, and so had left the details of their flight plan open, reclassifying themselves as “unscheduled”. And because the seaplane came down close to the Galápagos Islands, air traffic controllers tracking its progress on a radar in Ecuador assumed it had arrived at its destination and landed safely on water. The four surviving passengers owe their lives to the bravery of one man.’ A photograph of Daniel in his academic gown came up on the screen.

‘It’s you, Daniel!’ Martha said.

The reporter continued: ‘Daniel Kennedy, a thirty-eight-year-old scientist, swam fourteen miles in twenty-one hours. He was not available for comment but one of the other survivors had this to say …’ A tall African-American man appeared on the screen. He was grinning. ‘Don’t know how he done it. Seems no one in Ecuador knew the plane had gone down. I’d have died out there if he hadn’t come back for us. Man, I was gettin’ very cold. I saw one old guy get eaten by sharks right in front of us. He’d fallen off the floats. One minute he was there, the next the water was red with blood. I’m telling ya, it was horrible.’

‘Another of the survivors spoke to us from Boston this morning.’ Susie came on the screen, her face marbled with pink lines where her scabs had recently been. ‘I owe my life to Professor Kennedy,’ she said, not looking directly at the camera. ‘My husband Greg was one of the ones who didn’t make it. He’s with the Lord now. It was the cold that … that … We’d only been married for …’ A sob interrupted her words.

The reporter came back on the screen. ‘That was the moving testimony from—’

Daniel had pointed a remote control at the television and switched it off.

‘Hey,’ Martha said. ‘I wanted to see the end of that.’

Nancy turned to Daniel. ‘Did you know they had finished the inquiry?’

Daniel raised the slice of toast but instead of taking another bite he stared thoughtfully at where it had sweated on to the plate. ‘Someone from breakfast television rang yesterday for a comment about it,’ he said. ‘I couldn’t think of anything to say.’

‘Were you going to tell me?’

‘I was … I, of course, but …’ Daniel stroked Martha’s hair. ‘You have enough to think about.’

‘Poor Susie.’

‘Poor Greg. He asked me to tell his parents that he was at peace. I’d forgotten about that. You weren’t given any numbers for the other survivors, were you?’

‘You could ring the people at the airline. They should have them.’ She turned to Martha. ‘You should be getting your uniform on. We’re going to be late. Do you want peanut butter or Marmite sandwiches for lunch?’

It had been Daniel’s decision to buy a bigger house than was needed, or than could be afforded on his salary alone should Nancy choose to give up work after having another baby. He had assumed that they would. A boy preferably. Instead, over the years, the couple had colonized a spare room each as a study. Even Martha had her own study, which doubled as a playroom. Each year the couple spent money on a house project: a roof terrace; a loft conversion; the solar panels. The most recent building project had been the most ambitious. They had extended into their side-return next to the kitchen and knocked through the wall separating it from their dining room. This had left them with a single open-plan room where the family spent most of their time together. One wall was windows and exposed brickwork, the other was hung with three large frames containing original film posters for
Jules et Jim
,
Le Notti di Cabiria
and
La Notte
. Despite its size and its chrome and glass minimalism, it was cosy, thanks in part to concealed spotlighting and the small, potted bay trees decorated with fairy lights which stood in each corner of the room.

Ten minutes after his mention on television, Daniel came downstairs and found Nancy wearing a rope-knitted jersey and appliquÉd jeans. She was sitting on a high stool pinching the bridge of her nose. He studied her from the doorway. She looked older, he thought. The crash had aged her. She was reduced, as if limp and boneless. Her eyes were swollen and red from crying and he could see odd strands of grey hair. Had she had them before? When did she stop dyeing them? Her hair was greasy and unwashed. There were nail scores on her neck where she had been scratching. The varnish on her toenails was chipped. She was confused and forgetful. The doctor had said it would take time.

When the toaster launched two slices of golden bread with a loud clunk, Nancy looked up, saw Daniel and looked down again.

He walked past her and shook some Nurofen from a pot.

‘Headache no better?’ Nancy said, spreading peanut butter and jam on two slices of bread.

‘The same.’ Daniel washed the pills down with a pint of water, refilled his glass from a water filter on the table and drank that as well. Since the crash he had had an unquenchable thirst. ‘You seeing that counsellor again today?’ he said, draining the glass and refilling it.

‘Tom.’

‘First names is it?’

The coffee maker gave a raspy gurgle.

‘You should come with me.’

‘Sit around holding hands and singing kumbaya? No thanks.’ Nancy cut the crusts off the bread and placed the sandwiches in Martha’s
Finding Nemo
lunch box. ‘It’s not like that.’

‘I could sign up for the crying workshop. Maybe bring Dad along.’

‘He’s a professional therapist.’

‘He’s a charlatan.’ Daniel picked up a corner of a child’s painting and pushed it across to Nancy. ‘Seen what the baby has drawn?’

Nancy turned the painting right way round and held it at arm’s length. Coloured crayon marks showed an island with palm trees and a plane crashing towards the sea. Black smoke trailed behind the plane and flames leaped from its wings. Matchstick passengers with arms raised were hanging out of the windows. Some were falling out of the sky into a blue sea dotted with black shark fins. Nancy stared at it for a moment and blinked. A tear beaded her cheek.

‘Sorry, darling, I didn’t mean to …’ Daniel gently extracted the painting from her hand and laid it on the kitchen counter top. ‘Martha was trying to …’

Nancy waved the thought away and swallowed. ‘You haven’t met him.’

‘Haven’t met who?’

‘Tom. How can you say he’s a charlatan?’

‘All counsellors are charlatans.’

Martha walked in and asked: ‘What’s a charlatan?’

‘Someone who preys on the vulnerable and panders to the egotism of the unhappy.’

‘For God’s sake, Daniel. She’s nine.’

‘Martha knows what egotism means, don’t you, darling?’

The child took hold of her father’s hand. Reached for her mother’s. ‘I know what unhappy means,’ she said.

If Tom Cochrane was a charlatan he was a sympathetic one: a Scotsman with kind eyes, handsome, angular features and a mouth that turned up at the corners, even in repose. When Nancy went to see him later that morning, he was wearing a linen jacket over a pale blue shirt, but no tie. Professional, yet casual.

‘My husband thinks you’re a charlatan,’ she said as she lowered herself on to his sofa and, as though for protection, held a cushion over her lap. ‘Are you?’

‘Your husband?’ Tom said in his soft, Morningside accent. He had the counsellor’s habit of answering questions with questions.

‘I thought of him as my husband.’

‘Thought?’

‘Think.’

‘I read about him at the time of the crash. There was a lot in the papers about him.’

‘My mother saved some cuttings. Haven’t read them yet.’

‘You must feel proud.’

Nancy shrugged and began twisting her hair. The fluorescent light above her was humming gently.

‘I think I saw something about him on BBC online today.’ Tom swivelled in his chair so that he was facing a PC covered in yellow Post-it notes. He double-clicked his mouse with a slender finger, paused and clicked again. ‘No, I can’t find it. There was something, though.’

‘You haven’t answered my question,’ Nancy said. ‘Is there any point to these sessions?’

‘Do
you
feel there’s a point?’

‘Daniel says talking constantly about traumatic incidents only makes them worse.’

‘He might be right,’ Tom said.

‘He also said that veterans of the First World War didn’t need counsellors. They coped by repressing their memories.’

‘It doesn’t work for everyone. How have you been feeling?’

Nancy stared at a polystyrene coffee cup on the pine table in front of her. ‘Daniel insists I take my own mug to Starbucks. To save the planet.’

There was a silence that Tom did not attempt to fill.

‘Tearful,’ Nancy continued. ‘I’ve been feeling tearful and … I don’t know … claustrophobic.’

‘That’s normal. The fight or flight mechanism floods the body with adrenalin, heightening the senses. So when you were trapped on the plane it would have been like having one foot on the accelerator and the other on the brake.’

‘Will it go away?’

‘The claustrophobia? It takes several weeks for adrenalin levels to return to normal.’

Another silence.

‘I feel angry all the time,’ Nancy said.

‘That’s normal, too. Angry with yourself?’

‘A bit. I felt angry as the plane was going down. I kept thinking, why me? I also felt angry with those passengers who were screaming, because they were disturbing my last moments. Afterwards, when some of them were killed, I felt guilty about having felt angry with them.’ She picked an elastic band up off the floor and began stretching it. ‘I think I felt angry with God. I prayed to him, you know, on the plane.’

‘Thought you were an agnostic.’

‘A Catholic agnostic.’

‘Ah.’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Just means ah.’

‘Anyway, there was no one there. I had no sense of Him. I cried out for help and God was silent, just as he was silent when the
Zyklon B was being tipped into the gas chambers, and silent as the babies were having their heads bashed against the trees in Cambodia, and silent when the Tutsis were being hacked to death by the Hutus.’

‘Have you talked about this with Daniel?’

‘He’s the one I feel angry with the most, though that anger is more like a background whisper. Everything he does annoys me at the moment.’ With her teeth, she worried the fatness of her lower lip, biting on one corner. ‘He keeps smiling all the time. Since the crash. Makes me want to punch him.’

‘Trauma affects people in different ways. If Daniel has been feeling positive it might be survivor’s syndrome … It makes some people feel invincible and godlike. Have you talked about it with him? The crash?’

Nancy shook her head and began breathing more quickly. She could feel loose contours of anger inside her narrowing to a peak. In her hand she repeatedly stretched and released the rubber band, gripping it as tightly as her anger gripped her. ‘After the crash I kept repeating in my head, “Why hast thou forsaken me? Why hast thou forsaken me?”You know, from the Bible.’

‘You felt God had forsaken you?’

‘Daniel.’

‘Daniel felt God had—’

‘No. No … It doesn’t matter.’

‘How has Daniel been feeling?’

‘He gets headaches.’

‘Is he sleeping?’

‘Dunno. I’ve been sleeping in the spare room.’ She held up her slinged arm by way of explanation. ‘Trying to sleep. When I do manage to fall asleep I wake up feeling anxious. Wide awake, with blood pumping in my ears. Can’t sleep beyond four am.’ She looked around the room. There was a sterility to it which the few books, the DAB radio and the hatstand with the mac hanging from it did nothing to dispel. On a wall opposite the window was a framed medical certificate. ‘You’re a doctor?’

‘Not as such,’ Tom said with a shake of his head. ‘I don’t do this
full time. It’s voluntary work. The local authority pay my expenses and provide me with this office. I’m a surveyor in my day job.’

Nancy inspected Tom’s bookcase. There were biographies of Freud and Jung and textbooks on cognitive therapy and behavioural psychology but also, on a lower shelf, some titles that would make Daniel hyperventilate:
Alternative Medicine – the Truth
;
Psychic Energy, Crystal Healing and the Power of Chant
;
Inner Expansion – Guardian Angels and How to Contact Them
. ‘What kind of a therapist are you exactly?’ she asked.

‘The psycho kind.’

The joke reassured her. She smiled.

‘I am a qualified trauma counsellor,’ Tom added. ‘That is my certificate.’ He pointed to the frame on the wall. ‘Those books you were looking at were given to me by patients. A lot of people find that New Age stuff useful, even if it is a placebo.’

Nancy knew that Daniel would argue that ‘New Age stuff ‘ relied on gullibility and superstition, but he didn’t understand why an increasing number of people were turning to it. He didn’t understand that they were unhappy, that they wanted answers, that they wanted placebos – that she, Nancy, the woman he had lived under the same roof with for ten years, wanted a placebo.