Ventriloquists (22 page)

Confessions and Accusations

1.

‘Roger? Do you think we need to talk about this?’ Phyllie asked.

Bluffing more than somewhat, her husband replied: ‘About what?’

‘Is it because I’m getting fatter?’

‘No.’ Thereby acknowledging that there was indeed a problem worth discussing.

‘…Then what is it?’

‘Something bugging me,’ Roger answered curtly.

‘Yes I know that much, Rog. My question is what. You’ve hardly so much as touched me for three nights. And I’m starting to think you’re not ill, which was what I thought at first.’

‘No, I’m not ill.’

‘Then
what?
What have I done?’

Roger turned on the bedside lamp, rolled onto his side, and took Phyllie’s hand. Over the following few minutes he confessed his suspicions (‘crazy feels’ he called them) about Don the Birdkeeper. His concluding summation was tense.

‘We missed something,’ he said. And then he made a long confession. And then he waited for Phyllie’s disgusted response, which did not arrive.

‘To phone Vig.’ Naked, she exited the room, her legs unsteady in that familiar way that Roger loved (she was always unsteady on her pins after she’d been lying down for a while).

‘It’s two in the morning!’

‘He’ll be awake.’

Roger followed her out onto the landing. ‘What makes you say that?’

‘He can’t sleep in that big house. He told me.’ Phyllie lit the landing and descended the first of the stairs.

‘He told you when?’

‘On the phone. You know we talk. I’ll call him while you get some clothes on.’

Roger remained on the landing. ‘Now? You wanna go there
now?
’

From the hallway Phyllie called: ‘If it stops you being a monk. No time like the present.’

2.

Roger’s confession went like this.

Emotionally bruised by the weird altercation with Don Bridges, he had entered Homebase a few minutes after it opened on Saturday morning. In his left hand, the grease from the bacon butty that he’d bought from the van in the car park seeped slimily through the shopping list he carried. (Roger was a great one for lists. He believed in lists.) The shop was empty: just the way he liked it, and he allowed himself time to linger. A keen aisle assistant, spiffed and polished in the black-orange uniform, asked Roger if he needed a hand. Though the phraseology used amused Roger, he didn’t smile; he just said no thank you to the boy and dropped a coil of washing-line into his basket. By the time he had reached the checkout, the basket contained two drums of fence paint, the washing-line, and a packet of ten sheets of rough grade sanding paper. The paint was for a long-overdue job on the back garden shed and fences (a chore for tomorrow morning, weather permitting); the line and the sandpaper were intended for tonight’s bedroom shenanigans. He’d got the idea off a Latvian bondage website to which he expensively subscribed.

The problem was, he remained troubled by the visit that he and Dorota had paid on Don Bridges. Despite his wife’s questions on the subject, he hadn’t revealed the reasons for his unease; in truth, he didn’t know the reasons himself. But there was something: it was something he’d seen in Don’s cabin; something that hadn’t quite rung true. And the knowledge that it had been there – just beyond his mind’s reach – had been putting him off his game. His erection was less sure of itself; he had trouble concentrating in the bedroom.

He pocketed the till receipt and offered his thanks for the Saturday girl. Parenthetically considering what her teeth braces would feel like on his scrotum (would he know they were there?), Roger placed his purchases in the boot of his car. His memory had snagged on a case over which he had presided, three or four years earlier. In a gathering drizzle he stood stock still to the rear of his car, squeezing his keyring. When a hopeful fellow motorist pulled close, eager for a space so near to the store, Roger was conscious enough of his surroundings to wave him on with a regretful shake of the head (he wasn’t leaving just yet); but other than this action, Roger was back there, climbing stairs in his present memory that had felt much harder to climb in reality. Oh, he had seemed to climb stairwells
for ever!
What a tough old day that had been, that case…

The sales assistant’s braces were what had brought the memory clambering back: the girl in the Bedford tenement – Louisa – had worn braces as well. And he’d ascended to her flat in a thickening drizzle: maybe the weather was partly responsible for the recollection too… Roger continued to squeeze his keyring, in much the same way as he had on the morning that he’d walked up through the drizzle, expecting to find Louisa and her daughter dead.

It would have been impossible to work in psychiatric crisis assessment for as long as Roger Billie had without having encountered death, or at least an awareness of the same. An awareness of death – of what human beings might conceive to do to and with their own bodies – was nothing more than the air that Roger breathed, professionally speaking. In fact, for some years now he had been preparing a paper that (in his imagination) he would deliver at some hypothetical healthcare conference at the end of the universe: a paper that would triangulate the subjects of psychiatry’s expectations of high-risk suicide; the erotic and spiteful transference process by which the high-risk patient loves and hates her care-provider; and the erotic countertransference inherent in the discovery of the patient’s dead body. The paper that would get him struck off the medical register; possibly prosecuted. At the very least
investigated.
And then – Good Lord! – what would the authorities find out about him!

The truth was, nothing much that would
definitely
incriminate him. Or rather, nothing much recently. Go far back enough and you’ll locate a ball of yarn that began its journey as one of a different colour; and Roger’s past was not unstained. In his salad days in particular, he had made no bones about accepting the occasional sexual favour that was more or less (he quickly learned) little more than a perk of his job. And while he had never failed – not once – to make a patient aware that he had noticed the scratches on her arms, or the faint whiff of brandy on his breath at ten in the morning – or the soapy pupils and goaty sweat of a patient’s mental indigestion that the patient himself could not pronounce; the freshly shy character of a six year-old girl who would not go to school on the days she had Gym – Roger had been guilty in the past of using these observations as
tools
, as helpful leverage – rather than as punishment for the patients that he feared would clam up from him from that point onwards. He had told the patient that there was no need – no
absolute
need – for him to record what he’d noticed in the casebook… provided he heard a solemn pledge that he would not notice it on his next visit. And although, as a tactic, it was limited (it rarely acted as a cessation of the self-hostilities), it had at least served to get patients on Roger’s side.

It had been working with Louisa for four months. Tough love, if you wanted to call it that. Roger had made it clear that he knew of Louisa’s fondness for inflicting cigarette burns on the skinny belly that she imagined was too fat, but that if she ever performed something similar on her baby’s flesh –
ever –
she would be receiving a visit from employees with greater authority than that wielded by the social services. She’d be going to prison; she would lose her daughter. Did she understand?

I’ve done it, Roger,
she had told him on the phone that morning.
I’ve really done it this time
. And she had started crying.

Standing in the rain by his car, Roger could bring back that phone call with a clarity that chilled his scalp. He was certain that he’d never forget it, and good luck with trying to do so.

Done what, Louisa?
he had asked her in the office he had shared at the time, before his promotion.
What have you done?

But she wouldn’t stop crying at the other end of the line. Neither in his private life nor in his professional had Roger ever been good with tears (apart from his own, which he enjoyed shedding). Louisa’s lament had only made him cross; his reserves of empathy had been low that day.

What have you done, Louisa?
he’d demanded.

I’ve hurt her
, she had answered in a gluey voice that had sounded neither drunk or normal. Pilled-up, possibly.
And I’ve emptied the medicine cabinet. How long will it take?
She had seemed genuinely curious.

For what? For death to arrive? For the ambulances to get there?

I’m on my way, Louisa,
Roger had told her.
Don’t lie down.

I’m already lying down.

Then get up. Call an ambulance. Keep moving and talking to Billie. Do you understand me?

Yes.

I’m angry, Louisa.

I know you are. I knew you would be. I couldn’t take it anymore. I wish I were sorry. I wish I could
feel
something.

One law of the universe that Roger had observed was that traffic worsens in direct correlation to one’s anxiety. The journey had taken twenty minutes (it was ten on a good day) and he had expected to find two bodies when he kicked down the door. All the same, as he’d marched along the fifth landing walkway, a weird sense of calmness had enwrapped him. They’d be dead – he was sure of it – but his anger had evaporated; he’d felt ready.

What he
hadn’t
been ready for was Louisa opening the front door for him when he arrived. But she did. And what was worse was the smile on her face: the smile that said
Gotcha!
The smile that showed her braces, and the braces that caught the light.

I just wanted to see you again, Roger,
she’d said.
I’ve bought new bed linen – just for you.

And he’d slapped those braces hard. He’d knocked her over.

Roger stared into the cave of that much-regretted morning, seeing it as clearly, as colourfully, as he saw Homebase through the shiver of rain: one reality as the palimpsest of the other, but which was which? Dodging idling cars sharking for a free space, Roger walked over to the supermarket, intending to browse in the baby aisle, as he often did. But not to buy for their germinating first; nor even to perve over the pregnant women buying things for their own. No: Roger wanted to check what colour boxes Pampers nappies were sold in.

In his mind it had all come together. Remembering Louisa, as he’d pushed her backwards into her kitchen; as he’d slammed her door shut; as he’d moved towards her, down the narrow hallway… On her small kitchen surface, next to the toaster, had stood a large box of Pampers. Roger remembered it clearly, this box. Even when Louisa had sunk to her knees in front of him, he had not wished to look down into her crybaby eyes; he had kept his gaze on the Pampers. He had focussed on that box while he lowered his fly, and while she did what they both knew she must.

Pampers nappies.

Funny the things you remember, Roger thought, knowing that he had seen a box of an identical colour in Don’s front room.

Why would an old man be buying nappies?

3.

Phyllie was sceptical.

‘That’s it? A box of
nappies?
’

‘In the lounge of a man who takes care of birds for a living. Who has no children and especially no grandchildren…’ Roger argued (silently congratulating himself on his bowdlerised version of the confession: it had ended with the slap to Louisa’s face and then a talking-to in the young mother’s kitchen. There were some things that even Phyllie might not forgive).

‘But how do you
know
he’s got no children, Rog?’

‘Dorota said.’

‘And how would
she
know? She only met him ten minutes ago! She’s not exactly his
biographer.
Maybe he’s met someone! And she’s married or something, and she brings her child – or why not
their
child? – to the gingerbread hut in the woods. And while the baby’s sleeping, Don treats his new flame to a hunka hunka birdkeeper love…’ Phyllie laughed.

Roger didn’t. ‘You get a feeling,’ he tried to explain.

‘Oh I know all about your
feelings,
Rog…’

‘I’m serious.’ His frown and the muscle-knotted nub of flesh at the crown of his nose confirmed this. ‘I mean, how many homes have I entered in the line of business over the years?’

‘You tell me.’

‘Hundreds! That’s how many. And you look for clues, Phyllie: it’s not a million miles away from being a private detective.’ Roger waited to be contradicted; failing a contradiction, a furtherance of the interrogation would suffice. But nothing came. ‘The man’s hiding
something
,’ was all he could think of to add.

They had finished a snack of cheese and crackers during the conversation and were sitting at the kitchen table, their elbows to either side of their completed plates. Now taking her husband’s hand, Phyllie said, ‘So what are you proposing, Rog?’ Her voice was soft and understanding. ‘You already went there and found nothing. And he did well to keep his temper, by the way. But he’s not likely to be so sympathetic a second time.’ She waited; she squeezed his fingers. ‘Is he now?’

‘No.’

‘So what? Sneak in when he’s not there? It’s not impossible, Roger, but ask yourself why you’d be doing it. It’s not against the law to own a box of nappies, even if he
doesn’t
take care of a baby. It’s not as if he’s done anything wrong, and if you remember, the reason we suspected something in the first place – it had nothing to do with a
baby
. It was a missing schoolgirl.’