Ten empty Newkie Brown bottles hanging on the wall…
There were ten empty Newkie Brown bottles lined up on the bog seat. Ten. I lay in the bath staring blankly at them, trying to work out how long it had taken to drink them. I couldn’t talk myself into getting out of the bath and all the way over to the toilet, but I needed a piss – had needed one for the last twenty minutes, so I could have been here for, what? An hour? Two?
It was four months since Lexie died (‘Sepsis,’ the consultant had said. ‘She would have been vulnerable to sepsis from the moment she was admitted and I find it difficult to believe you weren’t warned of the possibility’) and I suppose it’d be fair to say I’d let myself go. I didn’t know if I was more depressed that she was dead than I was depressed Dove had won, after everything. Every time someone found a corpse in Scotland, bones mashed into the side of a rock or something bloated bobbing like a dirty tarpaulin in the sea, they thought it was Dove’s body. But it wasn’t. I’d thought he was going to be easy to find. So I’d been wrong about that too. Some days I thought I knew the answers, others I knew I didn’t.
On the floor my mobile rang. I dropped my hand over the side of the bath and grabbed my jeans, shaking them until the phone fell out of the pocket.
‘Are you supposed to use mobiles in the bath?’ I asked the phone, staring at it. The display said: Finn. Answer? ‘I don’t know. I mean, will it kill me if I do?’ I opened the phone. ‘I’m in the bath,’ I said. ‘This could kill me.’
‘Fucking great,’ he said. ‘It’s two in the afternoon, you’re in the bath and I’m sitting staring at an empty in-box. Was expecting fifteen thousand words and a synopsis by nine this a.m. At the latest. Instead I’ve got six slush-pile manuscripts and a Ghanaian asking me to ship money into his bank account.’
I didn’t answer. I’d been dragging my feet, waiting for Dove’s body to pop up before I committed to a book deal. But I knew I was losing it: a lot of what had happened out on Cuagach had already been released – the public knew about the pig corpses, the gargoyles, what life in the Psychogenic Healing Ministries was like. Two ex-members had already signed publishing deals for their stories. The story, the whole purpose behind the last six months, was slipping through my fingers.
‘He’s dead, Oakes. Dead. Can you hear me?’
I lifted my foot out of the water and studied it. It was pink and wrinkled into magnified folds, like the skin on a baby rat. I tried to turn the hot tap on with my toe, but it wouldn’t budge.
‘Oakes,’ Finn snapped. ‘Can you hear me?’
I pushed the tap harder. When that didn’t work I changed my strategy and stuck my toe up it instead. I looked at it for a moment or two, then laughed. I was thinking about an old film where a plumber comes into the bathroom and finds some blonde or other with her toe stuck in a tap. I laughed again, liking the way my voice echoed off the walls.
‘Oakes, you are weirding me out here. You’re laughing. Can you hear yourself? Laughing.’
‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘I know. I’ve got my toe in the tap. It’s funny.’
There was a long, cold silence. ‘Joe, you can sit there laughing because you’ve got your toe in the fucking tap, but out here in the real world there are articles every day about what happened on Cuagach – something only this morning about his Mexican wife, Asunción. She died on the mainland two years ago, did you know that?’
‘Yes. I knew.’
There was a moment’s silence. I stared at my toe. Even more like a rat now. A rat with its nose up a tap.
‘Oakes, you’re hurting for money, am I right?’
I pulled my toe out, letting my foot splash into the water. ‘Yeah,’ I said dully. ‘You’re right.’ I’d gone a long time without a paycheck. My syndication-agency accounts stood at zero. Worse, when I got back to London I’d discovered the hole Lexie had got herself into without telling me. She’d run up an overdraft of over three K on our joint account, paying her therapist seventy quid a pop. There was a P45 in the mail, too, from the clinic. Another part of her life she’d forgotten to mention.
‘And then,’ said Finn, ‘yesterday I hear how some hack from Glasgow is auctioning his story. Reckons he’s interviewed some of the major players in the police and the clean-up crew out on the island. Says they let him inside the temporary mortuary and what he’s saying is there’re photos.’
‘I’ve got pictures from the mortuary,’ I said coldly. ‘I told you already—’
‘I know, but that was more than four months ago.’
‘Yes. And in those four months I lost my wife.’
Finn sighed. ‘I’m sorry, I really am. But you’re acting like you’re on some fucking candyfloss cloud floating across the sky. Now, listen. I’m going to tell you what to do.’ I could hear him switch off his computer and swivel round in his chair. ‘First, get me those words. Don’t worry about Dove, just do it. Then I want you to talk to that kid.’
‘Kid?’
‘The one who pulled the video hoax. The one arsing around with the devil suit. He’s important to the story. Did you speak to him yet?’
I hesitated. I looked at the winter sunlight making stars of the condensation on the window. Angeline was out there in the garden. She’d come down to London with me, waiting until they found Malachi’s body and the probate began. I knew it was a mistake. I’d given her the front room with the fold-out guest futon, the one printed with the bright orange flowers that Lexie had been nuts about, and she stayed in there day after day, the door closed tight, coming out only to cook or to go into the garden. She spent hours outside, digging and planting vegetables, sometimes even in the dark. But most of all she spent time watching me. She would sit at the kitchen table, her chin in her hands, and stare at me, like she was expecting me to say something. It’d got so I didn’t look at her. I knew if I did I’d have to go into a part of my head I didn’t want to open.
‘Well?’ Finn said. ‘Have you got an interview with the kid? Without an interview it comes across like you’ve taken your eye off the ball. It comes across sloppy.’
‘Then you know what?’
‘What?’
‘That’s probably because I am sloppy. In fact, you know what? I’m so sloppy that right now I’m pissing in my bath-water. It’s gone cold, so I’m pissing in it while I’m talking to you.’
There was a pause. Then he said, ‘No, you’re not. Don’t talk sick.’
‘I am.’ I closed my eyes, relaxed my muscles and the urine leaked out of me across my thighs. ‘Told you.’
‘Jesus, Oakes. What’s happening to you? What’s happening? You’ve got to pull yourself together…’
I dropped the phone on the floor and lay back in the bath. The condensation hung like teardrops from the ceiling – the whole bathroom was soaked with steam. No wonder it’s cold: the bathroom is stealing my heat, I thought, and suddenly I was crying. I was trembling and crying and holding my hands up to my face, shaking my head and crying like a baby. I got up, sobbing angrily. You just pissed yourself, for fuck’s sake. Where’s this going to end? I unplugged the bath, turned on the shower and stood under it, exhausted, self-pitying sobs jerking out of me while the cold water rained down on me and the pissy water disappeared down the plug-hole between my toes.