I HAD BATHED AND SHAVED AND THERE WAS STILL NO SOUND from our bedroom, so, with reluctance, I put on the clothes I had been wearing the day before and made myself a second pot of coffee, relieved that any confrontation with Olivia could be postponed.
From the noise outside, the traffic was only just starting up and since there was no need for me to get off to work for nearly an hour, I took another look at the tale I’d been reading.
They must have known, really, the two companions, that this stranger was the lost friend they believed dead—though they didn’t know they knew—because when they got to the inn, at Emmaus, they persuaded him to come in and eat with them. And when, over supper, he broke bread and revealed himself, and then vanished again as suddenly as he had appeared, they said to each other, by way of confirming his identity, ‘Did not our heart burn within us, while he talked with us by the way?’
One heart; two people. Standing in the kitchen, looking out at a green and incandescent orange sky, in which a frail crescent moon was lingering still, my own heart burned, thinking of my brother’s bright incipience given for my pitifully uninspiring life.
‘Davey?’
My first thought was that it must be Bar. Then I recognised with alarm the voice of Cath Maguire. The use of my first name betokened something serious.
‘Cath?’
‘St Stephen’s have been ringing.’
‘Tell me.’
‘It’s your wolf man. I’m sorry.’
‘What?’ Maguire was no panicker.
‘He’s tried to kill a nurse. I’m sorry.’
When I got to the hospital, Maguire was at reception, waiting for me, her comely face twisted in an anxious knot. ‘I’m sorry, Dr McBride, I know you’re fond of him, poor soul.’ She’d recovered her formality but I was as touched as I was troubled by the concern which had led her to discard it.
‘What happened? Is she all right?’ My poor wolf man, I doubt you meant anyone harm!
‘They’ll fill you in better than me but from what I’ve gathered this new nurse was afraid of him. You know how fear breeds fear?’
I did. Fear was fingering me there and then. It was I who had ordered that the wolf man’s security restrictions be lifted.
‘And do we know how he did this thing?’
‘I gather he tried to strangle her, with a telephone cord.’
‘Jesus! How the bloody hell did he get his hands on a telephone cord, for Christ’s sake?’ At least they couldn’t lay that oversight at my door.
‘God knows, Doctor, I didn’t ask.’
I drove to Haywards Heath, swearing at other drivers for my own errors of judgement, and as I walked into the hospital reception—smelling, as it always did, of disinfectant—my heart was racketing wildly between my mouth and my shoes. Although my most pressing impulse was to ask to see my patient, I was aware it was important that we deal first with the injured nurse. I recognised, too, that, unfairly, I wanted to blame her for this catastrophe.
The nurse had been taken off to the local medical hospital and I was relieved to hear that, physically, the worst we had to address was some bad bruising to her neck. Her mental state, I was given to understand, was altogether a graver matter. The nurses’ union was already involved, as the senior registrar informed me, a low-sized man with a serious case of dandruff, judiciously professional in his speech, but, I sensed, under a veneer of sympathy, thanking his lucky stars that he was not in my place and secretly relishing the fact. People do so enjoy another’s crisis.
The wolf man was under lock and key and drugged up to the skin. But his anguished gaze locked fast on to mine as I entered the security cell where he was detained.
‘Peter?’ I said, and it’s a curious fact but, perhaps because to me he had always been ‘the wolf man’ and I had seldom used his given name, only then did I connect him with ‘Peter and the Wolf’. It crossed my mind that perhaps it was Peter rather than the wolf man who had committed this atrocity.
‘Doctor, will they hang me?’
‘No, Peter. They won’t hang you. Peter, why did you do it? Can you say?’
‘I said I weren’t safe. I said so. They can’t hold that against me, can they?’
‘I don’t know, Peter. I don’t know what happened. Could you tell me? Did she scare you?’
‘Please ask them, Doctor. Ask them, will they hang me?’
‘Peter, did you do this thing because that is what you wanted, to be hanged?’
But however much I questioned him further he spoke no more words to me, either then or later, but merely looked at me, beseechingly, with his trapped-wolf’s eyes.
I did what needed to be done, approved the extra security provision and attempted to begin to establish how he had contrived to get hold of a phone. It seemed likely he had secured this during his move down a floor. One of the nursing offices had had a spare, perhaps left out on an unattended desk, and our guess was that the wolf man had lifted it quietly and later removed the cord. I was surprised he had it in him to be so forward-planning—but I should have remembered that what people have in them is often a surprise.
Driving back towards Brighton, the traffic had increased with the onset of the day and after a couple of near scrapes with other cars, and with anger mounting inside me, I pulled over to the Dew Drop Inn, which infelicitous pun I’d marked on my journey down.
The Dew Drop’s clientele was for the most part lorry drivers, exchanging comradely badinage, or reading the Sun over a quiet smoke and enjoying the sight of pairs of substantial breasts over plates of, equally substantial, breakfasts and mugs of orange tea. I longed to be one of their number, freed from responsibility for the crazed actions of others and to be looking, peacefully unmolested, at pictures of pretty naked girls.
I ordered the ‘Full English’ and two rounds of the thick white toast which, well buttered, is more consoling than tranquillisers. And a pot of tea, because although the waitress swore blind it wasn’t I guessed that the coffee was instant.
‘You all right, dear?’
The tea had arrived in advance of the breakfast and I nodded thanks to the middle-aged woman whose pleasantly ordinary face was signalling a nosy concern. She left the table and the briefly checked tears returned. I put my hands over my face and relinquished control.
Of course my poor wolf man wanted to be out of it. I must have known this. How could I not since it was my own position exactly? It was why I so often drove with my seat belt unfastened, even as I did so, coolly and clinically noting the danger I was inviting; it was why I was always secretly longing to contract some fatal illness, so I could retire from life’s gruelling demands with guiltless dignity; it was why I worked too hard, and long, over other people’s affairs, because it lent to existence a point and purpose. It was also why, though I had never formulated the thought, I had acceded to Olivia’s request that we never have children, for I knew that children are hostages to fortune and that a part of me would resent the claim on my affection, a ballast to ground me when I preferred not to be grounded, so that I could the more easily slip away.
And in my desire to offer up my will-to-live to other lives, I had robbed the wolf man of his escape. He would never now be free of some overruling constraint, which would shackle him for the rest of his days to a life he would rather be rid of, enough to contemplate taking another’s life. And that life too would now for ever be tainted by an increment of fear.
Beware, beware of those who care! I, who cared so little for myself, had by way of compensation cared too much for others and they were the losers thereby. As I’d flicked my ignorant way through the school Bible that morning, which now seemed another world away, I had paused over Cain’s resounding cry at the first recorded murder: ‘Am I my brother’s keeper?’ The ancient question was a rhetorical one, a piece of brilliant dramatic irony, for far from being his ‘keeper’ Cain was his brother’s killer. And hadn’t I always believed I had been Jonny’s keeper? It seemed that in this case also a keeper was a killer in disguise.
It was in Jonny’s stronger reality, which had never left me, and of which I had become the living custodian, that I had found the model to hold out my hand to others more obviously wanting than myself, to protect them, as, fatally, he had protected me. The recognition made me literally shake now as the tears ran down unrestrained.
The breakfast arrived and I dabbed at my face with the thin paper napkin, because in my hurry that morning I had forgotten my usual handkerchief, and ate the eggs, bacon, sausages, tomatoes and mushrooms, my white toast, buttered thick and anointed with sweet bland marmalade, as if it was I who was to be hanged and this was my last requested meal. And then, because physically to move seemed more than I could manage, and to delay my departure further, I ordered another mug of orange tea from the nosy waitress and sat longer than I could calculate in a more dead than alive trance.
When I summoned the strength to get myself up from the table to settle the bill, I went and sat in the car, by the parked lorries, and, still unready to face any further incompetence in my driving, leaned my arms on the steering wheel and laid my face on my arms and wept uninhibitedly like a child.
After a while, I stopped crying and drove my car, pretty much without conscious navigation, till I found a way up to the South Downs. I stopped the car in a lay-by and walked up a rutted track, turning up my collar against the driving cold. I’d had no opportunity to replace the lost scarf.
I walked on upwards and when I’d gained height, enough that I could no longer see the road, I stopped and turned my face to the icy wind blowing in from the sea. It had brought in its skirts a collection of gulls, white birds in a cruel white sky, harbingers of more ill weather to come. I stood under the chilly sky and the wheeling birds, with winter-bleached grass beneath my rapidly freezing feet, and howled like a wolf into the countering wind.
I howled for my wolf man, for Bar, for Olivia, for Dan, for Elizabeth Cruikshank, and for her Thomas, who suddenly, absurdly—for in life we were perfect strangers—I missed almost as sorely as I missed my lost brother.
But I also howled for myself, because for the first time even the unreality of Jonny was not there for me, no one and nothing was there, and I couldn’t for the life of me see how I was going to manage alone.