The Invisible Ones (25 page)

“Ray? Mr. Lovell? I’m sorry to ring you at home, but since it’s the weekend . . . I wanted to tell you that . . . Sorry, it’s Rob here. Rob Anderson from Alder View. I think you should come up here again. All the work’s been stopped. They’ve found something on the site. They’ve found human remains.”

32.

St. Luke’s Hospital

For some reason, my right hand stays numb and inert even after the rest of me comes back to life. Naturally, I’m right-handed. I can pick up the right hand with the left, squeeze it, bend the fingers, pinch the skin, but I feel nothing. It’s like handling a glove full of sand.

One of the nurses comes daily and pricks me with a needle. It fascinates me to watch her pushing the metal tip under my skin, while the expected pain doesn’t materialize.

“What if it stays like this? Can’t you do something?”

The nurse is young and cheerful. She has rosy cheeks that she ineffectually tries to tone down with greenish powder, and a small gold cross around her neck that swings out of her cleavage and dangles over my bed like a benediction. Even without the cross, you can tell that she’s swaddled in the love of Jesus.

“We’ll organize some physiotherapy for you. But there’s no physical damage, so the nerves should recover on their own. You’ve got every hope.”

She smiles at me. She’s so young—about twenty-four—so confident, sweet, and pleasant. I bet she wanted to be a nurse from the age of five.

I have every hope. That sounds so nice. I wish it were true.

I am getting better; I can tell. Over the past few days—I don’t know how many it is—I have been recovering speech and movement. But I still can’t remember how I came to be here. And I can’t atone for the mistakes I have made. Being a victim doesn’t exonerate you. After the Georgia debacle, people said to me it wasn’t my fault; I couldn’t have foreseen what would happen. But they were wrong. I had met her killer. I looked into her killer’s eyes. I should have known.

Sometime later—I must have finally dozed. I open my eyes to see someone sitting beside my bed on one of the leakproof plastic chairs. (They don’t even trust visitors to be continent.) At first, it’s only because the broken sunlight coming through the cherry tree makes a different pattern. A pattern splashed with red. Lulu Janko. With her red shoes and red lipstick, her red, bitten nails. And, today, a thin crimson scarf wound around her neck like a slash of blood. It takes me a second to remember why I should be surprised that she’s here; my sluggish brain, fogged by the sedatives they give to help me sleep, creaks into action, and I am duly ashamed. But she is here. I’m not sure whether to be happy about this or worried. I think that, on the whole, I am happy.

“Are you awake? Ray? Hello, Ray.”

She looks a little irritated.

“Hello.”

My voice comes out reasonably clearly.

“You look much better today.”

“You came before?”

I try to think back—I can’t picture her in the hospital room at all. “Yes. You weren’t awake, though. Not very . . . with it. I didn’t stay long.”

God. What sort of state was I in? But she has come—twice! Take that, wheelchair man.

“That must have been a pretty sight.”

“Yeah.”

She smiles.

“What brings you here?”

The smile goes. I didn’t mean to sound aggressive.

“Would you rather I went?”

“No. I didn’t mean that. I’m really glad you came. I know the last time we met . . . Well, I’m sorry—about it all. Wouldn’t be surprised if you never wanted to set eyes on me again.”

Shouldn’t have said “really glad.” Just glad. Or touched. Or . . . indifferent: something less than the truth.

“Doesn’t matter. So you’re feeling better?”

“Much better.”

“That’s a relief.”

“So are you on your way somewhere?”

She shakes her head.

“I just wanted to see how you were.”

“Oh.”

I can’t think of anything to say. I am full of questions, just not appropriate ones.

“Erm . . . How is Christo?”

There’s something nagging away at the edge of my conscious mind. Something to do with her.

“He’s doing well. He’s still in hospital, but . . . they’re really looking after him.”

The more I think of it, the more I don’t understand why she’s here, why she’s being nice to me at all.

As though she’s reading my mind, she says, “I phoned your office. I spoke to your boss. He told me you were in hospital and . . . so here I am.”

“My boss? I don’t have a boss.”

“Oh . . . well, the man there. He sounded . . .”

“Posh voice?”

Caught out, she actually blushes. She isn’t the first person to assume Hen is the boss.

“Did he tell you what happened?”

“He said that you’d been taken ill and crashed your car. And that you were in quite a bad way.”

She shifts in her chair.

“Yeah. I was poisoned.”

Her eyes widen.

“Poisoned? What do you mean? Food poisoning?”

“I went to see Tene and Ivo. I think they gave me something to eat. And . . . here I am.”

“Oh, God.”

She leans forward, her forehead creasing. She looks horrified.

“What did you eat? Was it shellfish?”

“I don’t know. I don’t remember. But I wondered if . . . they were okay. They might have got ill, too.”

“Oh . . . God, I don’t know.”

She takes a deep breath and lets it out in a short, sharp sigh.

“I’m so sorry, Ray, that’s awful.”

She called me Ray. She can’t be too angry with me.

“According to them here, it was plants.”

“Plants?”

“Yeah. Poisonous plants. I think . . . henbane was one . . . and ergot.”

She doesn’t look at me anymore. The crease in her forehead deepens. Finally, she says, “Do you . . . have any idea how it could have happened?”

“Well . . . I suppose it must have got into the food, somehow.”

I am speaking to the top of her head. For the first time, I notice a little stripe of gray at the roots of her parting. She must have been too distracted to see to it. Distracted . . . by what? For some reason, this fact squeezes my heart with an almost physical pain.

“You should check on them. It wouldn’t do to be ill like this and not be in hospital. Especially Tene.”

She nods, fiddles with the handbag on her lap, although “handbag” is a misnomer. You could get a cocker spaniel in there.

She looks at me, finally. I’m not sure, but there could be tears in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry about this, Ray. I . . . They do collect stuff to eat
sometimes, like mushrooms, berries, and things, you know—I suppose it’s easy to make a mistake . . .”

“Yeah.”

I shut my eyes for a minute. After the harsh sunlight, searing patterns scribble themselves on the insides of my eyelids—they resemble monsters with long teeth, and filthy claws.

Lulu seems uncomfortable, uncertain. A couple times she almost stammered. It strikes me that this is the first time she doesn’t have a default position that puts me automatically in the wrong: defiance, suspicion, outrage.

“I’m really sorry about all this. My family drive me mad, but they aren’t bad people. They wouldn’t hurt you deliberately. Ivo . . . I know he doesn’t always seem very . . . polite, you know, but he loves that boy with all his heart. He’s really grateful for all you’ve done for him, with the specialist and so on.”

I don’t know what to say. I don’t think I accused him to her face.

Then I think, if she hasn’t seen them, how does she know he’s grateful?

She jerks her head toward the door of my room.

“They say you’re going to be fine. I hope you get better very soon.”

“Thanks. You should tell Ivo, though . . . in case he doesn’t know. It’s dangerous.”

“Yeah, yeah. I will.”

I am still bothered by the feeling that there’s something important I need to remember. Something involving her.

I just can’t for the life of me think what it is.

Lulu avoids my eyes and stares into the middle distance, chewing at her lipsticked mouth, wearing off the harshness of the red, leaving it blurred and sore-looking. A strand of dark hair has slipped out of her barrette and falls in a long wave down the side of her face—it forms a reverse curve: the elongated
S
, the most beautiful of lines, according to Chinese aesthetes: the line of a woman’s hip and waist when she’s lying on her side . . .

Oh, my girl, you don’t know. You don’t know what you do to me.

“You know, I found something,” I say, recklessly, because now I’m afraid she’s about to go; I can feel her attention slipping off elsewhere, tugging at the leash. I want it back. “I was about to tell Tene, but I didn’t get a chance . . .”

I try to move my right hand but can’t. Still dead meat.

“About Rose . . . About . . .”

A look of anxiety comes over her face, and she leans in to me. And suddenly, with a jolt like a thousand electric shocks, I’m aware of her hand on mine. My numb right hand, lying on the cover with its plastic bracelet like a dead snared rabbit. With as much feeling. She’s holding my hand. Well, not holding but definitely touching—I can just see it out of the corner of my eye. Typical. She touches me when I’m paralyzed—or, perhaps, because. And I think: of course, that’s the way she likes them. I can’t feel a thing. Not a thing. Although I imagine that I can.

I imagine everything.

“What is it?”

I realize I can’t remember if I told her before. Or was there something else?

“You told me about the . . . bones they found. Is that it?”

I open my mouth to speak. The human remains . . . Yes. And there was something else, I’m sure, but the thought is breaking up even as it forms in my head. Maybe if I whisper, she’ll lean down toward me, her ear an inch from my lips. Maybe I will catch a whiff of her cigarettes-and-perfume smell.

At the same time she seems to become aware of my eyes on our hands, and though I try not to react, she moves her hand away, and it dives into her vast handbag and starts to scrabble in the murky depths. For what? The answer? It comes out again, empty.

“You look tired. I shouldn’t keep you any longer.” (No! No! You should!) “I have to go, anyway. Got to be at work soon.”

It’s like a slap in the face. Go. Work. Him.

The illusion of intimacy evaporates like scent.

“Work. Of course.”

She gets up, glances at me suspiciously, although I didn’t say it in any way at all. But then she stands by the bed for a long moment, about to speak.

“Ray . . . uh, I hope you feel better soon. I’ll see you. Okay?”

She walks out, her shoes busily ticking off the seconds down the lino-leum corridor. I listen to the sound fade, and time returns to its normal hospital crawl.

In the slow hours that follow her visit, I have the time to think about things. Like, what was she going to say at the end, before she changed her mind? Like, why did she come and see me, twice? To check that I wasn’t dying, so she can report to the family that they don’t need to skip the country?

To assuage her own guilt?

And what on earth does she keep in that vast sack of hers that she needs to drag around with her all day? Her purse, her cigarettes, a selection of red lipsticks . . . a year’s supply of hostility . . . an economy pack of disapproval . . .

The secret, inexplicable blueprint of all my desire and delight?

How did it end up there?

33.

JJ

The pain wakes me. I come to, having no idea where I am. I’m curled up, surrounded by something prickly. A strange smell. Something hard juts into my hip. My right fist is throbbing, and, when I try, I don’t seem to be able to straighten my fingers.

I shift, and there’s a rustling all around me. It’s very quiet. Then, from somewhere nearish but outside, I hear a car engine—a smooth, expensive car engine—start up and drive off, and I remember where I am. A soft thudding comes from much nearer, which means the horse is walking around in his stall. An explosion of air from horse nostrils. It’s a good sound. I was right to come here, I think. It’s going to be all right.

I had to break in to the stable last night: the door was locked, which surprised me—it hadn’t occurred to me that people would lock a horse in for the night, but luckily one window was open, so I slithered through, scraping a load of skin off my hip bones on the windowsill in the process. The horse was moving around but didn’t seem alarmed at my appearance. He didn’t start making a lot of noise, anyway. I spoke to him in a low voice, reminding him who I was. I could just see the gleam of his eyes in the dark. He seemed mildly curious, that’s all.

I didn’t want to put the light on in case someone saw it, but I
remembered that the stable was divided into three loose boxes and a small extra bit at the end for tack. There are wooden walls in between that don’t go all the way up to the ceiling. The end box is where Subadar lives; the middle one is empty, apart from a couple bales of hay and odds and ends, and the one at the other end is where they keep the straw for his bed, and tools, and his food and stuff. There’s a big stack of straw bales—I remembered that you couldn’t see the top when I was here before, but that was a couple weeks ago, and there is less now. Still, I climbed up and made a sort of hollow where I couldn’t be seen from the door, and fluffed lots of straw around myself, so I’d be pretty hard to spot even if you were standing right next to me. The only bad moment was when I slid down to fetch one of Subadar’s stripy horse blankets. I reckoned he wouldn’t mind. I managed to knock over a metal bucket in the dark, and it made a horrendously loud clanking and ringing noise as it rolled around on the brick floor. I froze, sweat springing in my armpits, waiting for lights to come on everywhere and police sirens to start, but nothing happened. I suppose Subadar kicks buckets quite often. I climbed up onto my straw platform and lay down, pulling the blanket over my head, trying not to giggle with nervous horror because I had kicked the bucket.