In A Dark, Dark Wood Part 20

'I want to remember.' My teeth are gritted. 'M-more than you can believe.'

'I believe you,' Lamarr says. There is something sad in her voice. I feel her hand on my shoulder, and then there's a bang at the door and the nurse comes in, pushing a trolley.

'What's going on here?' She looks from me to Lamarr, taking in my tear-stained face and unconcealed distress, and her pleasant round face puckers in disapproval. 'You, Missie, I'll not have you upsetting my patients like this!' She stabs a finger at Lamarr. 'She's not twenty-four hours after nearly killing herself in a car crash. Out!'

'She didn't-' I try. 'It wasn't ...'

But it's only partly true. Lamarr has upset me, and in spite of my protest I'm glad to see her go, glad to curl on my side under the sheets as the nurse dishes up cottage pie and limp green beans, muttering under her breath about the high-handedness of the police, and who do they think they are, barging in here without so much as a by-your-leave, upsetting her patients, setting them back days if not weeks ... A school-dinner smell fills the room as she plops and ladles and sets the tray down beside me.

'Eat up now, pet,' she says, with something close to tenderness. 'You're just skin and bone. Rice Crispies are all very well but they're no food to get well on. You need meat and veg for that.'

I'm not hungry, but I nod.

When she's gone though, I don't eat. I just lie on my side, holding my aching ribs, and try to make sense of it.

I should have asked how Clare was, where she was.

And Nina, where is Nina? Is she OK? Why hasn't she come and seen me? I should have asked all this, but I missed my chance.

I lie, staring at the side of the locker, and I think about James and about all we meant to each other, and everything I've done and lost. Because what I realised, as I held his hand and he bled all over the floor, was that my anger, which I had thought was black and insuperable and would never fade, was already going, bleeding out over the floor along with James's life.

It has defined me for so long, my bitterness about what happened. And now it's gone the bitterness is gone, but so is James, the only other person who knew.

There is a lightness about that knowledge, but also a terrible weight.

I lie there, and think back to the first time not the first time I met him, for that must have been when we were twelve or thirteen, younger perhaps. But the first time that I noticed him. It was summer term in Year 10, and James was playing Bugsy Malone in the school play. Clare was of course Blousie Brown. It was a toss-up between that and Tallulah but Blousie gets her man at the end and Clare never did like playing the loser.

I'd seen James before, in lessons, horsing about, flicking paper planes and drawing on his arm. But on stage ... on stage he somehow lit the room. I had just turned fifteen, James was a few months off sixteen one of the oldest in our year and that year he had shaved a savage undercut into his hair, and twisted the remaining black curls on top into a little knot at the back of his skull. It looked punky and rebellious, but for Bugsy he had smoothed it down with hair oil and somehow, even at rehearsals in his school uniform, that simple thing made him look completely and utterly like a 1930s gangster. He walked like one. He stood like one, an invisible cigar clenched in the corner of his mouth so convincingly that I could smell the smoke though there was nothing there. He spoke with a laconic tw.a.n.g. I wanted to f.u.c.k him and I knew that every other girl in the room, and some of the boys, felt the same way.

I knew what Clare thought, for she'd told me, hanging over the row of chairs behind me, whispering into my ear, her pink Blousie lipstick tickling my hair.

'I'm going to have James Cooper,' she told me. 'I've made up my mind.'

I said nothing. Clare usually got what she wanted.

Nothing happened over the summer holidays, and I began to wonder if Clare had forgotten her promise. But then we went back to school, and I realised, from a thousand tiny things the way she flicked her hair, the number of b.u.t.tons undone on her school shirt that Clare had forgotten nothing. She was just biding her time.

The autumn term play was Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and, when James got cast as Brick, Clare got the part of Maggie. She gloated to me about the extra rehearsal time it would necessitate, alone in the drama studio after hours, but not even Clare could charm her way out of glandular fever. She was signed off for the rest of the term, and her part was given to the understudy. Me.

And so, instead of Clare, I played Maggie, hot, sultry Maggie. I kissed James every night for a week, fought with him, draped myself across him with a sensuality I didn't know I even possessed until he called it out of me. I didn't stammer. I wasn't even Lee any more. I've never acted like that, before or since. But James was Brick, drunken, angry, confused Brick, and so I became Maggie.

We had a cast party on the last night, c.o.ke and sandwiches in what we called the green room, but was in fact an empty cla.s.sroom up the corridor from the hall. And then, later, c.o.ke and Jack Daniel's in the car park, and in the kitchen of Lois Finch's house.

And James took my hand, and together we climbed the stairs to Lois' brother's bedroom and we lay on Toby Finch's creaking single bed and did things that still make me shiver when I think about them, even here, in the hospital room, ten years on.

That was when James Cooper lost his virginity. Sixteen years old, on a winter's night, on a Spiderman duvet cover, with model aeroplanes turning and wheeling over our heads as we kissed and bit and gasped.

And then we were together that was simply how it was, with no more discussion than that.

My G.o.d, I loved him.

And now he is gone. It seems impossible.

I think of Lamarr's soft, plum-coloured voice saying, And James how did you know him?

What should I have said, if I were telling the truth?

I knew him so that if I touched his face in the dark, I would know it was him.

I knew him so that I could tell you every scar and mark on his body, the appendix slit to the right of his belly, the st.i.tches from where he fell off his bike, the way his hair parted in three separate crowns, each swirling into the other.

I knew him by heart.

And he is gone.

I have not spoken to him for ten years, but I thought of him every single day.

He is gone and, just when I need it most, so is the rage I have nursed all this time, even while I told myself I no longer cared, that it was a part of my past shut away and gone and done.

He is gone.

Perhaps if I say it often enough, I will start to believe it.

22.

I SLEEP THE sleep of the dead that night, in spite of the noise and the beep of machines down the corridor and the intrusive lights. The nurses have stopped coming in to check on me every two hours, and I sleep ... and sleep ... and sleep.

When I wake it's with a sense of disorientation where am I? What day is it? I look for my phone automatically.

It's not there. There's a plastic water jug instead.

And then the weight of the present comes crashing down on the back of my skull.

It is Monday.

I am in a hospital.

James is dead.

'Wakey wakey,' says a new nurse, coming briskly in and running a professional eye over my charts. 'Breakfast will be coming round in a few minutes.'

I'm still in the hospital gown, and as she goes to leave, I find myself calling out, 'Wait!'

She turns, one eyebrow raised, plainly mid-round and in no mood to stop.

'I'm s-sorry,' I stammer, 'I was just wondering, c-could I, can I get any clothes? I'd like my own clothes. And my phone, if possible.'

'We ask relatives to bring them in,' she says briskly. 'We're not a courier service.' And then she's gone, the door flapping shut behind her.

She doesn't know, then. About me. About what has happened. And it occurs to me, the house is probably a crime scene. There's no way Nina and Clare and everyone can still be there, tiptoeing around James's congealing blood. They must have gone home or been shipped off to a B&B. I'll have to ask Lamarr when she comes in. If she comes in.

For the first time I realise how very dependent on the police I am. They are my only line to the outside world.

It's around 11 a.m. when there is a knock on the door. I am lying on my side listening to Radio 4. It's the Woman's Hour drama, and if I shut my eyes hard enough, and press my headphones to my ears, I can almost imagine myself back home, a cup of coffee proper coffee at my side, the traffic roaring softly outside my window.

When the knock comes it takes me a minute to adjust to Lamarr's face in the wire-hatched pane. I pull off the headphones and struggle up against the pillows.

'Come in.'

She holds up a paper cup as she enters. 'Coffee?'

'Oh, thank you.' I try not to sound desperate, try not to s.n.a.t.c.h the cup from her hands, but it's amazing how much these small things mean in the goldfish-bowl world of the hospital. I can tell by the feel of the cup that it's too hot to drink and I nurse it while I think how to phrase what I want to say, and while Lamarr chats about the unseasonably beautiful winter weather, and how the roads are clearing up from the weekend's snow. At last she grinds to a pause and I take my chance.

'Sergeant-'

'Constable.'

'I'm sorry.' I'm annoyed with myself for the mistake and try not to get fl.u.s.tered. 'Listen, I was wondering, how is Clare?'

'Clare?' She leans forward. 'Have you remembered something?'

'What?'

'Have you started to remember what happened after you left the house?'

'What?'

We stare at each other for a moment and then she shakes her head, ruefully.

'I'm sorry. I thought from what you said ...'

'What do you mean? Has something happened to Clare?'

'Tell me what you remember,' she says, but for a minute I say nothing, trying to read her beautiful, closed face. Her eyes meet mine, but I can't tell anything. There is something she's not telling me.

'I remember ...' I speak slowly. 'I remember running through the woods ... and I remember car headlights and gla.s.s ... and then after the accident, I remember stumbling along, I'd lost a shoe, and there were chunks of gla.s.s on the road.' It's coming back to me as I speak, the lowering tunnel of bare branches, pale in the headlights, and my limping run as I tried to flag down someone anyone to help. There was a van swinging along the road, headlights raking the dark. I stood, waving frantically, the tears streaming down my face, and I thought he wouldn't stop, I thought for a moment he'd run me down. But he didn't he skidded to a halt, his face pale as he wound down the window. What the f.u.c.k? he said, and then, Have you been ...? The rest of the sentence hovered unspoken.

'But that's it. Between that, it's so jumbled ... it's like the images get more and more shaken up and then there's just a blank spot. Listen, has something happened to Clare? She's not ...'

Oh my G.o.d.

Oh my G.o.d. It cannot be.

I feel my fingers close on the bedsheet, my bitten nails digging in so hard that my fingers hurt.

Is she dead?

'She's OK,' Lamarr says slowly, carefully. 'But she was in the accident, the same accident as you.'

'Is she all right? Can I see her?'

'No, I'm sorry. We've not been able to interview her yet. We need to get her version before ...'

She trails off. I know what she is saying. She wants my truth, and Clare's truth separate, so they can compare our stories.

Yet again I have that cold, writhing feeling in the pit of my stomach. Am I a suspect? How can I find out without looking like one?

'She's still not really up to being interviewed,' Lamarr says at last.

'Does she know about James?'

'I don't believe so, no.' There is compa.s.sion in Lamarr's face. 'She's not been well enough to be told yet.'

I don't know why, but it is this that rattles me more than anything else she has said so far today. I can't bear the idea that Clare is lying somewhere in this very hospital and doesn't know that James is gone.

Is she wondering why he hasn't come? Or is she too ill even for that?

'Is she going to be OK?' My voice cracks and breaks on the last word, and I take a long, aching gulp of coffee to try to hide my distress.

'The doctors say yes, but we're waiting for her family to come, and then they'll take a view about whether she's stable enough to be told. I'm sorry I wish I could tell you more, but it's not really my place to be discussing her medical details.'

'Yeah, I know,' I say dully. There are tears trapped at the back of my throat, making my head ache and my eyes swim as I blink angrily, trying to clear them. 'What about Nina?' I manage at last. 'Can I see her?'

'We're still taking statements from everyone else at the house. But as soon as that's concluded, I imagine she'll be allowed to visit.'

'Today?'

'Hopefully today, yes. But it would be very, very helpful if you could remember what happened after you left the house. We want to get your version, not anyone else's, and we're worried that speaking to other people might ... confuse things.'

I cannot tell what she means by this. Is she worried that I am waiting, pretending memory loss so I can get my story straight with someone else's? Or is it simply that she's concerned that in the vacuum of my own memories, I might implant someone else's account unconsciously?

I know how easy that is to do for years I 'remembered' a childhood holiday where I rode on a donkey. There was a photo of me doing it on the mantelpiece, I was about three or four, and I was silhouetted against the setting sun, just a dark blur with a halo of sun-lit hair. But I could remember the salt wind in my face, and the glint of the sun off the waves, and the feel of the scratchy blanket between my thighs. It was only when I was fifteen that my mum mentioned that it wasn't me at all, but my cousin Rachel. I was never even there.

So what are they saying? Cough up the memories and we'll let you speak to your friend?

'I'm trying to remember,' I say bitterly. 'Believe me, I want to remember what happened even more than you want me to. You don't have to hold Nina out like a carrot.'

'That's not it,' Lamarr says. 'We just want to get your account I promise this isn't some kind of penalty.'

'If I can't see Nina, can I at least get some of my own clothes? And my phone?' I must be getting better if I have started to worry about my phone. The thought of all those emails and messages building up, and no way of answering them. It's Monday now, a working day. My editor will have been in touch about the new draft. And my mum has she been trying to call? 'I really need my phone,' I say. 'I could promise not to contact anyone from the house if you're worried about that.'

'Ah,' she says, and there is something in her face, a kind of reserve. 'Well, actually that's one of the things we'd like to ask you. We'd like to take a look at your phone, if you don't mind.'