Twenty

Late that same afternoon, Mark Werth sat with Lin while she slept.

When she finally woke, it was almost dark.

‘Hello,’ Lin murmured. Her hand was lying on the outside of the sheet, and she made a slight waving motion with her fingers.

‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.

She smiled. ‘You must get fed up of asking that question,’ she said quietly. ‘Don’t you ever want to tell people how you’re feeling?’

‘All the time.’

‘I’ve got a headache,’ she said.

‘That’s really not surprising. I’ll get you some medication.’

‘Not yet,’ she said. She glanced towards the window.

He watched her. She seemed calm.

‘Are they real,’ she asked, ‘the things I see?’

‘Tell me what they are.’ He leaned forward, crossing both arms in front of him, resting them on the bed.

She frowned, her gaze trailing about the room. ‘I see people,’ she said, looking very slowly about her, just as one would look at a crowd gathering. Her eyes wandered from head height to the floor, and back again. As she spoke—and it was such a sane and reasonable voice—he felt a prickle of unease at the back of his neck.

‘What made you ask if I were dead?’ he asked.

She smiled slowly. ‘Because this is not like life.’

‘In what way?’

‘Sounds. The things I see. It’s almost like dreaming. Or death, perhaps. I feel very strange—as if I’d stepped out of the world.’ She gazed at him with an almost blank stare. ‘I want to come back,’ she said quietly.

‘Do you feel very depressed, Lin?’

‘No, doctor,’ she sighed. ‘I do not feel very depressed. I do not feel at all depressed. Confused, yes … frightened, frustrated.’

‘But you feel very tired.’

‘Tired is … not the word for it.’

‘Exhausted.’

‘You know those old-fashioned wringers, that they used for squeezing water out of washing?’

‘Yes.’

‘Right through one of those—flat as a pancake.’

‘Tell me about these people you see,’ he said.

‘They are different … all kinds,’ she said slowly. ‘The lady in pink, she isn’t here now, but she’s been here last night, this morning. And there’s a little boy of about six or eight. He’s very lost. He cries. And there are two men, boys, I suppose, of about seventeen or eighteen. They’re waiting. They ask the nurses questions, and no one answers them. We’re in this waiting room, this room, an anteroom. We wait …’ She sighed, twin lines of concentration marked on her forehead. ‘Who are they all?’ she murmured. ‘If I knew them … but I don’t know them.’

‘Perhaps they’re people you’ve seen on television.’

She stared at him.

‘Think of your memories like holograms,’ he said. ‘The brain records your memories in infinite detail …’

‘That’s not it,’ she said.

‘Hold on, let me explain,’ he told her. ‘What, to the eye, is the difference between a manufactured image and an actual image?’

‘OK. But you can’t see them.’

He glanced behind—to where she had nodded her head. ‘No, Lin,’ he said, ‘I can’t see anyone.’

She closed her eyes. ‘Oh God,’ she said softly.

‘Lin,’ he said. ‘Are you able to concentrate on what I’m saying?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

‘It’s possible you have some kind of brain disorder. It may be having neurological effects,’ he told her. ‘With epilepsy—for instance a kind called temporal-lobe epilepsy—patients can report strange effects. They might hear or see something they had forgotten long ago—anything at all, like a railway station, a taste of their mother’s cooking, a smell from their childhood home, even an emotion. Lots of people think they see God, for instance. They have a sense of knowing the universe and all its secrets. Or they might feel very afraid, or have sexual feelings, or be angry.’

She had opened her eyes, and was staring at him.

‘And they might attribute the effects they sense to some very odd causes. They might feel that the sunlight—or the darkness, or one particular sound—makes odd repercussions, odd connections, in their head. And sometimes it does. The brain is a complicated network; it has functions we don’t grasp. In the hypothalamus, for example …’

‘This is a side effect?’ she asked. ‘Like an itch under the plaster of a broken arm?’

‘Yes, you could say that. That would be a fairly good analogy.’

‘These people … they are itches to scratch?’

‘Maybe, yes.’

‘But they talk,’ she objected.

‘That is possible.’

‘They say things I don’t know about—I’ve never heard about. Things I don’t understand at all.’

‘It will be something you have indeed heard and stored away,’ he replied equably. ‘There’s no need for us to understand the things we memorize. And we memorize all the time unconsciously: everything we see and do and feel.’ He smiled at her kindly, taking his time, speaking slowly, waiting to see that she had understood him. ‘The brain is a limitless hard disc constantly processing,’ he went on, ‘and when we injure the brain, or it’s subjected to illness—and perhaps you’ve had a viral inflammation that has suddenly aggravated this, like a particularly high temperature in a computer, threatening to burn out or short-circuit, subjecting those billion cells to unbearably high pressure—’

‘Mr Werth,’ she interrupted, ‘they are real.’

‘They will seem extraordinarily real, yes.’

‘No. Not seem.’ She put her hand to her head, tracing a line across her forehead. ‘I’ll tell you what’s the strangest thing of all about it,’ she said, looking at him without turning her head. ‘Want to know?’

‘Of course.’

‘I was never convinced before that I was really alive.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Like ordinary people. I always felt alone.’

He frowned a little. ‘You’ll have to elaborate for me,’ he said.

She hesitated for a moment. ‘I’ve always been the odd one out,’ she said softly. ‘At home: the youngest, a girl, the clever one …’ She made a little self-conscious face. ‘Or so they always said. Also I looked like no one else in my family, and I had a head full of odd thoughts …’

‘Odd in what way?’

Again she waved her hand briefly. ‘Oh, nothing too extreme, but I felt …’ She tried to find the right words. ‘I felt different to everyone around me.’

‘Did you see and hear anything unusual then?’

‘No,’ she replied firmly. ‘I’m just saying that I’ve always felt out on a limb, different, alone.’

‘Well, we are alone,’ he told her. ‘At the most important times of our life we are alone.’

‘But I felt that all the time. I felt that I wasn’t connected to the world,’ she murmured. ‘I wanted to be physically bigger. I never knew how to make small talk. I just could never understand …’

‘That isn’t uncommon. The psychiatrists even have a word for it.’

‘Oh, I know that,’ she said.

‘Well, then?’

She gazed at him for a long time. ‘Maybe you’re a memory hologram, too.’

‘I can assure you’—he pinched his arm—‘I’m really here.’

She lifted her head. ‘Like the man in the boat.’

His smile faded and he sat back, crossing his arms over his chest. He realized that her gaze had settled on a point behind him, somewhere a little below the ceiling. She was suddenly transfixed.

‘Don’t you know anyone who died of drowning?’ she asked in a low-key, lilting tone. ‘He had a small sailboat, and he died quite close to land.’

Werth said nothing.

‘It infuriated him, you know,’ she said, ‘to be that close—he could see the harbour, he could see the headland, and—damn, that wave. Just like that. So very quick. Damn … that wave.’ Her voice was tender and low. ‘Just went away so quickly. He saw you and your mother loading the car, putting in that green slick-covered coat, the basket, his boots …’ She gave a great, laboured sigh. ‘Oh well,’ she said. ‘That’s the way it goes. My little boat with the blue paint. One damn wave. Oh boy … oh boy.’

She managed, very slowly, to sit up. She rubbed her hands over her face. ‘What time is it?’ she asked.

Werth looked at his watch. It took him some moments to register the time, and tell her. ‘It’s … almost six.’

‘There’s a kind of fog,’ she murmured.

He leaned forward and looked intently in her face. ‘Lin, do you remember what you’ve just said to me?’ he asked.

She seemed to be half asleep. ‘Sorry?’

‘Do you remember what you just said to me?’

‘The boat,’ she murmured.

He stood back, utterly perplexed. As he did so, she seemed to rouse a little. ‘They won’t go away, once they’ve come,’ she said. ‘That’s what’s driving me mad. They just won’t go.’ She turned her head, to look at the trees beyond the window. ‘Where did I remember the boat from?’

Werth shook his head.

She looked around at her locker. ‘I’m thirsty,’ she said.

He poured her a drink of water.

‘I have to drink a glass an hour,’ she said. ‘I wish there was gin in it. Can’t you please get me some nice Gordon’s?’

He smiled, and watched her empty the glass. He put it back on the locker for her. She slumped back on the pillow.

He walked over and looked out of the window at the last fading light.

‘Can you tell me what the man in the boat looks like?’ he asked.

‘About sixty-five … white-haired. Burly, not tall, muscular.’

Werth turned and looked at her, arms again crossed. ‘Do you always see such detail?’

‘Yes.’

‘So you’re seeing a lot of pictures: moving images of people?’

‘Yes.’

‘And they speak to you? They move in relation to you—you see them in specific places, moving through doors, along floors, and so on?’

‘Some of them do. Others just come. They materialize—and they vanish.’

‘You see concrete images and blurred images?’

‘Yes.’

‘And tell me again. Sounds?’

‘Yes. Voices.’

‘Speaking like … like this man?’

‘Yes.’

‘All the time?’

‘Not all the time.’

‘How often? Every hour? Every few hours?’

‘Oh no. Sometimes I see nothing unusual for a few minutes.’

‘So you are seeing these strange images every few minutes?’

She closed her eyes, frowned, and lifted her hand very slowly to her throat, as if speaking was an increasing effort. ‘There are crowds and crowds of people,’ she said, ‘and those I can’t see, I can hear—outside.’

‘And all this has only happened since you were admitted to the hospital?’

‘Yes.’ She seemed to be getting very tired. He thought she might have drifted into sleep, so long was the next pause. As he stepped towards the bed, she rolled onto her side and clamped one hand to the side of her head.

‘Lin,’ Werth said, ‘what do you see now?’

She did not reply, so he lifted her wrist, felt the pulse racing.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘All right, all right.’

She opened her eyes. He felt a curious friction under his fingers.

‘He says,’ Lin told him, ‘to call you Tunny.’

Slowly, Werth put her hand back down to the bed. Equally methodically, he lifted the sheet over it and smoothed it down.

‘Am I still scratching an itch?’ she asked.

He said nothing.

‘Damage beyond the primary visual cortex,’ she murmured.

Just for a moment, he swayed a little backwards. ‘What?’

She narrowed her eyes as she looked at him. ‘It just came into my head. You thought it just now, as you were touching me.’

He made no comment at all. Instead, he stepped away and leaned against the window, watching her silently. There was a very long pause.

‘I was in hospital last year,’ she said at last. ‘Not like this one. It was a psychiatric ward. My husband said that I needed help.’

‘And did you?’ Werth asked.

She laughed quietly. ‘Oh, yes.’

‘Why was that?’

‘Because I tried to kill him.’

In the silence, they both could hear the visitor’s bell sounding along the corridor. Werth pulled up the chair and sat down again next to the bed.

‘He’s quite a famous man,’ Lin continued. ‘He writes books. Perhaps you’ve heard of him.’

‘Yes, I know. Kieran Gallagher: Christ’s Wife.’

‘That was published two years ago. He wrote Forbidden Fruit this year.’

‘I saw Christ’s Wife on television. Your husband presented it.’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That was my idea.’

‘And the house thing.’

‘I was hired as his assistant, to type out his manuscript. He was writing history books for schools then.’ She rested her head on the pillow, and looked at the ceiling. ‘When you saw him lecture, he was creative and clever; everyone wanted to listen to him. But when he put pen to paper, he dried out. So, for that manuscript—it was Hannibal—I rewrote some of the chapters in the style that I had heard him speak. All the black jokes, the comparisons with modern leaders.’

‘Those are considered his trademarks.’

‘Yes, the politics.’

‘You wrote his books? And the TV adaptations?’

‘No … no. I just rewrote, edited. But I write the scripts for the …’ She smiled at him. ‘The house thing.’

‘You’re a busy woman. And when you met him, you were a student yourself?’

‘I was, but I gave it up after I had known him for eighteen months.’

‘Why was that?’

‘I became pregnant.’

‘He was already married?’

‘Yes. He was married to Ruth Carmichael.’

‘I see …’ Werth stared at her, almost hearing the pieces clicking into place, rather ominously, in his own mind. ‘And last year? What happened last year?’

She paused as if trying to marshal her thoughts. ‘I went a little crazy. He had always told me that I was mad.’

‘Why?’

She shrugged. ‘Have you ever been married?’

‘Yes. Some time ago now.’

‘He wanted me to be more like Ruth—that’s the bottom line.’

‘In what way?’

She sighed. ‘Ruth is very calm and ordered. She’s very single-minded, dedicated. I’m not. I get bored, antsy. I don’t plan. I have all these ideas: a head full of ideas rocketing around. Or I get preoccupied with doing something with Theo, perhaps … I’m difficult to live with.’

‘Does your husband say that?’

‘Oh, yes. He feels I ought to calm down.’

‘And the ideas that rocket around?’

She lifted her hand from under the sheet and placed it softly on his. ‘I’m not a manic depressive, if that’s what you think. They don’t rocket round that much.’ For the first time, he heard her laugh, and was surprised and pleased at the genuine warmth in it.

She smiled. ‘Am I an interesting case, Mr Werth?’ she asked almost plaintively.

He smiled at her in the encroaching darkness. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You are indeed a most fascinating case.’

It was past ten when Mark Werth finally got home that night.

As soon as he got in, he rang Directory Enquiries to find Ruth’s number.

She sounded tired.

‘I’m sorry to disturb you,’ he said, ‘but I wanted to ask something about Lin Gallagher.’

‘All right.’ Ruth gave a very long sigh.

‘Has she ever been to Ireland?’

There was a pause. ‘Ireland? No, I don’t think so … oh, yes, of course. She went with Kieran to promote his book last year.’

‘What part did she visit?’

‘I can’t remember. Is it important?’

‘Did they go to Galway at all?’

‘I really can’t say. Why?’

Werth paused, drumming his fingers on the table at his side.

‘Nothing. It’s a long shot—a very long shot. I’m sorry to have bothered you.’

‘It’s no bother.’

They spoke briefly about Lin herself—no more than pleasantries. Ruth Carmichael sounded too weary to be very interested.

He put down the phone and walked several times around his living room, picking up items and putting them down again absentmindedly. Eventually he went upstairs, showered, and got into bed.

Where he lay awake for over an hour.

Mark Werth’s grandfather, who had always insisted on calling him Tunny, had drowned off Galway’s Abbeyhead peninsula in a little sailing boat four years ago. It had a peeling blue-paint hull—and it had been sunk in seconds by a single wave.