The Road Between Us (10 page)

Sometimes when he has night terrors she will come through to his room and cool his brow with a compress, a damp flannel chilled in the fridge. Because he seems afraid of the silence, too, she will sometimes lie down on the floor beside him and whisper. She knows that what she says matters less than that he hears a human voice. Sometimes she even sings him lullabies. It calms him.

On certain occasions he will still think, in his confusion, that she is Frejya. When this happens he will not look anxious, for a change, but instead relieved. To play along with his delusion seems the
kindest thing for her to do. There is no need to correct him. Not yet. She stirs the pot faster as she thinks about this.

Part of his disconnection from the world seems to arise from an inability to express himself. He hardly ever speaks; just gives tense half-smiles, and even these seem more like a remembered reflex than a genuine expression of happiness. It is as if someone has told him that when you want to be polite, you smile, so he smiles. But his smiles cannot disguise his indifference to her.

If only he would let her help him. But she has come to suspect that she is part of the problem. Because of her constant presence, and her resemblance to her mother, he is retreating into himself, becoming more silent and withdrawn.

She contemplates the usual difficult evening ahead and finds herself longing for some of her old life back. She misses her friends, or rather she misses being able to meet them in the pub at short notice, without first having to arrange for Niall to come and ‘father-sit’. And though none of the other band members have said anything to her face, she can tell they are growing tired of her skipping practice sessions. Even when her old housemates, Aisha and Kate, come to visit, the atmosphere feels strained. They sit upstairs in her bedroom, skinning up and listening to music. When they talk it is in hushed voices.

As she thinks about them now, Hannah wonders whether it might help to lighten her father’s mood if she were to smoke a spliff with him. Might it help them bond? Perhaps she should roll one for him in readiness. As she opens the drawer where she keeps her Rizlas, she sees a photograph of her mother walking on Polzeath beach, back-lit, kicking up water. It has been placed in there face down. He must have done it because he can’t bear that she isn’t here, but Hannah is almost relieved. She has grown tired of being reminded of how far she falls short of her mother’s ideal.

Edward’s pace is slow as he walks down the King’s Road, his stick making clicking noises as it contacts the pavement. He realizes that there are more people around than the last time he did this. As they
nudge, and edge, and sidestep, he finds himself having to weave constantly to avoid collisions.

London seems too big, too loud, too crowded – more crowded than it used to be, and, something else that’s different, everyone seems to be talking into mobile phones as they walk. He feels lost, navigating a strange and hostile land without a map and a compass. By the time he reaches Sloane Square, he feels exhausted too. He rests on his stick and looks up. Starlings are balling and massing overhead in a white-clouded sky being wiped blue by a gathering breeze.

Where am I, he thinks? What is this place? The shops here seem impossibly bright and vivid. A blur of expensive sensation. As he is taking it all in he notices someone staring at him with cold eyes. A stranger. An old man with angular features. Only gradually does he realize it is his own reflection in a shop window. Unrecognized. Unrecognizable. As he stares back at the stranger, he becomes aware of the hidden universe of machinery beneath his skin, the scaffold of interlocking bones, fibres and muscles. This makes him feel dizzy, so he looks around for a café in which to sit down.

There are two young mothers with children in pushchairs at the next table. They are not talking to one another but texting on their phones. Seeing a queue of people, he realizes that he is supposed to get up and order from the bar. He looks at the coffee options on a board – latte, mocha, cappuccino – but cannot recall what they mean. When his turn comes, he asks for a glass of milk and looks around. Most of the customers are either talking into their mobiles or reading compact newspapers. Several are working on their laptops.

When a bearded man in a djellaba enters, his heart starts pounding and his palms begin to sweat. Thinking the man will not want to be looked at directly, for fear he will be identified, Edward averts his eyes and stares at the laptop screens around him instead.

He feels confused again. There had been email before he was kidnapped but no Twitter, no Facebook, no YouTube, and these inventions seem alien and
hostile, reminders that his home country has moved on, and left him behind.

Hannah has given him a smartphone and shown him the new applications on the computer, but he finds it hard to take in what any of them can do. Something about high-speed broadband. Leaning forward to see better, he studies a nearby screen: the home page of the BBC news website. Since he was a schoolboy he had followed British and American elections assiduously. His equivalent of soap operas. But the cast of characters on the screen are unfamiliar to him now, and his lack of political knowledge seems to emphasize his alienation. Apparently there is a black president in the White House.

Some of the other customers are staring at him now. Do they recognize him? A young man strides over and holds his phone up in both hands, at arm’s length, as if showing it to him. A woman nearby starts doing the same. When the young man looks down and touches his screen, Edward realizes that he has been filming him. The young man looks up, smiles and says: ‘Can I buy you a coffee?’

Edward shakes his head, no. He wants to say something in reply – maybe these people mean well – but without his senses working as they should, he feels incomplete, disengaged, a halfway man. He can understand what people are saying to him, yet he cannot always hear them, as if he is lip-reading.

His doctors have him on a course of serotonin and antihistamines and this has helped with his disequilibrium and mild agoraphobia. And the Prozac and Xanax he is being prescribed are supposed to subdue his emotions – leave him incapable of anger, love, anything. But for some reason the medication doesn’t seem to be working. Today he feels anxious and tired.

He stares at his hand as if unsure it is his own. In his fingertips there is still numbness, but in other ways he feels as if he is recovering his health. The colour is returning to his skin. The doctors have told him they are pleased with his weight gain: a stone a month. He has also been getting some of his muscle tone back, thanks to regular visits from a physiotherapist.

It helps that Niall has arranged to have some gym equipment installed in the garage: a treadmill and an exercise bike to go with Frejya’s cross trainer and his old dumb-bells. If he gets himself back in shape physically, it will help him regain his mental composure; that’s what the doctors say, anyway.

He trusts them, but not the therapist, who has told him that the past eleven years were effectively a living death for him and that it was no wonder that now, in this ‘afterlife’, he is confused, detached and exhausted. If he still doesn’t feel as if he has reconnected to the world, if he feels he is in limbo, then this is hardly surprising. His ordeal has taken him back to zero, the therapist said. Taken him ‘off-grid’ emotionally. He is having to learn to speak again, and walk again, have feelings again, as if he has never done any of these things before. And if he is seeing things, the therapist added, these are only the hallucinations of a mind disturbed by grief.

And all of this has confirmed for Edward that the therapist doesn’t know what he is talking about. Is he hallucinating when he looks at his daughter and sees his wife? No. He sometimes sees a double exposure, as if the outline of one face has been superimposed on the other. And the illusion of familiarity combined with strangeness is unnerving him, leaving him feeling as if he is being haunted in his own home.

The therapist had come three or four times but has now put his visits on hold. Unless Edward is prepared to co-operate, he said, there seems little point. He even had the nerve to take Hannah aside and explain to her that her father had barely spoken in their last session, and had then fallen asleep. It wasn’t quite true. He had only been pretending to be asleep.

There is nothing to say. Nothing to be done. Frejya is dead and, at least once a day, Edward catches himself wishing that he was, too.

A man parks his scooter on the pavement outside the café. A second man arrives on one. While the first talks into a mobile, the second takes out a camera with a bulky lens. The man on the phone jabs with his finger in Edward’s direction, turns to the other man and mouths the words ‘got him’. The photographer starts taking photographs through the window.

The young man who offered to buy the coffee looks concerned as Edward passes his chair on his way out. Another two photographers have arrived outside the café. As Edward heads back towards the King’s Road, a corona of electric light forms around him. The photographers walk backwards in his path, their flash units tripping rapidly.

V

HEARING HER FATHER BEFORE SHE SEES HIM, HANNAH RUSHES TO
the window and watches his approach. Being forced to sleep on a hard surface for so many years has left him with a slightly sideways gait. She can see how hard he has to concentrate just to keep his balance, even with his stick, as if walking on an uneven surface.

The front door closes. ‘I’ve got a surprise for you,’ Hannah says, holding out her hand. When he takes it, she leads him into the kitchen. ‘I’ve cooked reindeer stew.’ She gestures at the flickering candles on the table she has set for two. ‘Guess whose recipe?’

Edward drops her hand and says: ‘Excuse me a moment.’ He seems agitated as he heads upstairs.

A minute later, Hannah steps out into the hall and listens to the thumping noises that come from one of the bedrooms. It sounds like boxes being dragged. She runs up the stairs and stands in the doorway to the master bedroom. Her father has pulled out a couple of suitcases and is packing clothes into them on the bed. ‘What are you doing?’ she asks.

He looks up with dry eyes. Out of breath. One of Frejya’s dresses is in his hand. ‘I think we need to get rid of these,’ he says. ‘Give them to a charity shop.’

Hannah ruts her brow. ‘Right now? Why can’t they stay in here?’

‘It’s not healthy. I don’t think it’s doing either of us any favours. We need to clear her desk out, too. Put all that stuff in storage.’

When Hannah places a hand on his shoulder, he recoils.

‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘I just think it will help. And we need to take her message off the answering machine.’

‘Yes, I’ve been meaning to do that. Do you want to do it now?’

She follows him downstairs. When she presses play on the machine, an electronic voice says: ‘Your outgoing message is …’ then Frejya’s voice is heard, that hint of a Scandinavian glottal stop. ‘If you’d like to leave a message for either Frejya or Hannah, please do so after the tone.’ Hannah presses it again and the message is repeated. ‘Are you sure you want to delete it, Dad?’

Edward is calmer now. ‘Let’s take the tape out and put it with her things.’

‘Sure. You know we have her speaking on some videos, don’t you? Do you want to watch them?’

‘Later maybe.’

They return to the kitchen and eat without speaking, forced to listen to the cruel scrape of cutlery. He leaves his plate mostly untouched. When she has finished, she picks up her guitar. ‘Do you want to hear this song I’ve learned? See if you recognize it.’ She strums the guitar and sings ‘So Long, Frank Lloyd Wright’. Halfway through she trails off, as if interrupted by a broken A string.

‘It’s Simon and Garfunkel,’ she says.

‘Yes.’

‘I love that line about how architects may come and go and never change your point of view. That has to be the most improbable line in …’ She looks down. ‘You haven’t heard a word I’ve been saying, have you?’

‘Sorry. I’m …’

‘Don’t push me away, Dad. Tell me what happened.’

‘Not now.’

‘How was my stew?’

‘OK.’

‘OK?’

‘Yes. Fine.’

‘That’s it? That’s all you’re going to say? OK this? Fine that?’ This
is better, she thinks; her frustration is pushing her into anger. She feels strengthened by it. ‘Why are you being like this?’

‘Like what?’

‘Is it me? Do you hate me?’

‘No, of course not … I’m sorry.’

‘And stop apologizing all the time …’ She strums the guitar, a single chord that lingers. ‘We had a funeral for you, you know. There was a coffin. We filled it with things of yours. Clothes, CDs, books … You did die in that cave, didn’t you? In a way?’

Edward raises and drops his shoulders.

‘It’s quite a procedure, you know, declaring someone dead. There are all sorts of, like, legal implications. People can turn up again many years after being presumed dead. They might have been in a coma, or they might have faked their own death as an insurance scam.’ Feeling she has gone too far she puts her arm around him.

He dips his shoulders away from her.

‘Do you ever cry about Mummy?’ It is the first time she has used the word in front of him. He stares at her mouth. He does this, she has noticed, as if unable to hear her unless he is looking at her, and he always seems to want to avoid looking at her.

‘Look at me,’ she says.

He looks. Afghanistan is still scratched on the backs of his eyes.

‘I think I should move out,’ he says. ‘I’ll move into the Travellers Club.’

‘Why?’

‘You need to get on with your life.’

Hannah folds her arms. ‘I should be the one moving out then. This is your house. There’s a girlfriend I can stay with.’

Edward scrapes back his chair and takes a step towards the door. ‘No, this house is yours now. You can have it. I don’t want it any more.’

‘This isn’t just about you, you know,’ Hannah says, bringing her voice down by three notes. ‘When I was nine I was told that my father had disappeared and might be dead. The father I loved and played with and had always assumed would be there in my life for
ever. Throughout my teens I had to live with a mother who dedicated her every waking moment to campaigning for her missing husband.’ An intake of breath. ‘And when I was nineteen I had to watch as they buried you in an empty box, and a few days later I opened the door to a policeman and a policewoman who had come to tell me my mother had died. A nineteen-year-old orphan.’ The edge of a laugh. ‘Poor Orphan Hannie. Then you come back and now I have decided that I’m never going to let you out of my sight again. Never going to leave your side.’ She is breathing quickly; her mounting indignation is making her words come in a steady, unstoppable stream. An unfamiliar hardness enters her eyes as she puts one hand on her hip and, with her other hand, holds the corner of the table, as if preparing for an impact. ‘I never left your side in the hospital, you know. For the first three weeks you didn’t even know who I was. And now, now when I’ve got you home, it’s like …’