A Trick of the Mind (6 page)

‘Please be OK. Let me not have caused you any serious harm,’ I whispered. ‘If it was me. Please though, please let it not have been me, let me get away from here. Back to my
new life.’

He was on a bed under the window.

Beyond, the trees were tipped with green, just coming into leaf. The sky was blue, it was a beautiful day. I could see my car, the culprit, down below. I wanted to be in it, to get away as fast
as I could.

I looked back at Patrick. There was a drip set up. His legs were hidden under the tent of hospital sheeting.

I shut my eyes, then opened them. Forced myself to look at his face.

I was shocked. Patrick McIntyre was about my age. Late twenties, I guessed. What had I imagined? In spite of the nurse’s assumption I was his girlfriend, I had been thinking of perhaps a
teenager, a youth, someone a bit wayward. Not a fully grown man. Short dark hair protruded from the dressing on his head. A bronzed face, and his forearms, that were folded across his chest, strong
and golden and smooth with that ridge of muscle; the thought came to me unbidden that this was a man who should never have ended up like this.
What a waste,
was the thought that slid in. I
forced it out again. It would be a waste, of course, whoever it was. But somehow, seeing all this health and vitality cut down like this seemed unfair, unbelievable. I thought of Guy, out there on
the beach with my friends. Of my brother Ben, with his glossy golden girlfriend. Bright successful good-looking types.

Patrick looked like one of them.

‘He might be able to hear, it’s worth talking to him. He’ll be pleased to know you’re here. And it’ll help bring him round.’

I glanced up at the nurse, checking to see if he was testing me out. I could be anyone, couldn’t I? I wanted to ask again, is he going to be ok? But the words stuck in my throat. My hands
felt light, as if they didn’t belong to me.

‘Got anything with you that might jog his memory when he comes round? Photos. Anything like that?’

Why? Why would he need his memory jogging?

‘Just in case there’s a little bit of amnesia,’ the nurse went on. ‘He had a blow to the head, the way he landed. Though it’ll be impossible to know until
he’s fully conscious. He’s still under the anaesthetic. But familiarity as soon as possible is always helpful.’

I forced myself to behave as I imagined his girlfriend might in this situation. Efficient. Sensible.

‘I’ve got my phone.’

What was I doing, playing along like this? I rummaged through my bag, my hands were slippery, sweaty with nerves. I pulled things out – trying to control my movements as I did so. My
diary, an appointment card for a haircut, my purse, dumping them on the bedside table until I found my phone that had slipped to the bottom.

I clicked it on. Smiled up at the nurse.

He wasn’t even looking. He was studying a chart at the end of Patrick’s bed, filling it in. After a while he left, closing the door gently behind him.

There was not much in the room apart from the beeping monitor and the drip. A trolley, out of reach of the bed, with a plastic jug of water on it. A couple of laminated signs
Blu-tacked to the walls advertising patient liaison services. No flowers, no cards. It was probably too soon. Or maybe this man was far from home, and family and friends.

I ran my eye up and down Patrick’s body.

‘Please don’t die,’ I whispered. ‘Please don’t let me have killed you.’

His chest rose and fell, his breath just audible, his closed lids a delicate pale lilac.

I wondered what colour his eyes might be when they were open. Brown, I guessed, dark, intriguing brown.

His full lips were pale and dry. On his chin a neatly clipped, black beard. This part of him, at least, had been spared, I thought. His face was intact.

I tried to visualise the moment of impact on my car. I recalled the journey for the millionth time. The light fading behind me, darkness up in front. My music up loud and Pepper distracting me
for a second – or was it longer?

A shock ran down my body into my legs. The jolt was quite hard. The car had wobbled, swerved, I’d righted it and driven on, fighting my need to check.

I
could
have hit Patrick as I looked at Pepper, caught him, if, say, he’d stepped out from the verge, perhaps waving me down, perhaps hitching a lift. I remembered the jogger
then, how I’d barely seen him until I’d almost passed. It was completely possible I had seen no one on the road, because I was looking down when it happened, and hadn’t heard the
full impact because Beyoncé had been singing about not wanting to play the broken-hearted girl.

I visualised it all as I stood there beside him, the impact as he stepped out, losing his foothold, knowing he could do nothing to help himself as he ricocheted into the air, the flipping over,
the legs buckling, the head-first crunch onto the tarmac.

I stood up. I needed to get out. I couldn’t stay here, knowing something no one else in the world knew. Or I could tell someone. Who? I could tell the tall nurse with his skinny legs. What
would he care?

I could go to the police.

Then other thoughts tumbled in. My friends, all waiting for me to return and entertain them for the weekend. The show this evening at which I was to raise money for Mind. There were important
buyers coming.

And anyway it was insane, wasn’t it?

There had been nothing but part of a tree on the road, and the bird. That was what had caused the blood on the bonnet.

I stared at his well-toned body. He was well groomed; neatly clipped sideburns, as well as the beard, and, I noted, über-clean nails. He had tanned skin with a sheen of health on it.

His lips turned up a little at the corners as if he was dreaming of things that amused him.

Would he still have that look when he came round and found he’d been knocked over by a stranger?

I looked about the room.

I mustn’t be long. Anyone might turn up at any time, ask what the hell I was doing here, a stranger at his bedside. But maybe if I found out who he was, where he was going last night, I
would perhaps be able to fit things together, prove it wasn’t me.

There wasn’t much here. A locker. I opened it. A wallet, packed with credit cards.

An iPhone. I flicked it on. He didn’t have a pass code, the icons came straight up on the screen. There was his Facebook, impossible to resist a quick peek. I clicked on it.

This must be him, squinting into the sun. He was in a suit, his arm round a woman. She was Asian-looking, Chinese, Korean maybe.

He was grinning, creases radiating from the corners of his eyes.

The woman was smiling adoringly up at him. I examined her. Slim, beautiful, in flimsy black evening clothes and high heels. Behind them, just visible, was a line of deep blue sea.

His ‘Friends’ list was there, his life in mates in front of my eyes.

I scrolled down the list. There were a few men standing beside yachts, several were in wetsuits. A couple of tanned, smiling women.

I had to leave. I put the phone away. I’d take a quick look in his locker then go.

An expensive-looking watch.

A receipt in his wallet printed out from the internet, a flight booking receipt. He’d flown back from Corfu in March.

I closed the wallet.

‘I’m sorry,’ I said, taking up his hand, feeling its weight, the black hairs that curled over his knuckles, a chunky ring, not on his wedding finger. The nurse had told me to
speak to him, but what to say?

‘Please, whatever you do, don’t die,’ I said. ‘It was an accident. I was on my way to Southwold. To my aunt’s house. You might know it, the blue clapboard house on
the beach. If you don’t die you could come one day. When you’re better. You and your girlfriend. Do please get better.’ A last plea, it came out with a sob.

‘I want you to know I never meant to hit you.’

The door opened and I swung round.

A nurse. Small, neat, Filipino.

I steeled myself, opened my mouth to say I was leaving, but she smiled as she checked Patrick’s monitors and made notes on his charts and ticked things off.

‘It was bad luck,’ she said, pulling his sheets straight. Picking up his file from the end of his bed. ‘He’s handsome. But silly boy. Lucky his injuries aren’t
worse.’

‘Is he . . . is he going to recover?’

‘We hope,’ she said. Then she winked. ‘Don’t you worry. You must tell him no more walking in the dark. Impossible for drivers to see you on those dark country
roads.’

‘Do they know what happened?’ I asked, my voice weak, tremulous.

I should have gone, but I liked this nurse, there was something comforting about her small neat briskness. She would never get into the kind of mess I’d got into. I imagined her home, a
minimalist retreat, with tiny cups and a china teapot of green tea. Clothes hanging on a rack of uniform hangers, ironed, no clutter. I imagined her children, I had children like this in my class.
Pretty, clever children – children who played violin and got top marks in maths and were fluent in both their mother tongue and English and often other languages too, who wrote beautifully
and were sweet with it. It was a stereotype I was creating, I knew, but for now it soothed me.

‘Who found him? Who reported it?’

‘Another driver phoned the ambulance. The police are still making enquiries. They have two suspects.’

She paused. Looked straight at me.

‘You must be verr-ry worried. You his girlfriend?’

I nodded, stupefied.

‘He often get in fights?’

I shrugged. ‘Not usually, no.’

‘Not what police think. It was hit-and-run, you know? The car hit and drove on. Shameful! They think it was after a fight. He had alcohol in his system. Witnesses saw him in pub earlier.
They think the driver went after him deliberately. But you’re not to worry. Police will sort it all out, they will come back to talk to him when he comes round. They will be in
touch.’

I stared at her, my tongue sticking to the roof of my mouth, wanting to ask more.

But she nodded and went out as briskly as she’d come in.

So. There had been a feud, in a pub. Someone had deliberately gone after Patrick, in a drunken rage! It had nothing to do with me.

It was still awful to imagine this poor man being mown down by some drunken louts, but it meant I could disentangle myself.

The sun came in, and the room was warm; it was quiet apart from the beeps from the monitors. I wanted to run after the nurse and hug her, thank her for reassuring me. My fear seemed to
evaporate. All my limbs went floppy, relaxed, as the crazy thoughts that had been taunting me loosened their hold.

I didn’t need to go to the police, there was no need to confess to anything.

The man in the bed was OK anyway, he wasn’t going to die. I would walk out, put this whole crazy incident behind me. No one need know that for twelve hours I’d been obsessed with the
insane idea that I might have killed someone.

But I had to leave. Before someone turned up. Accused me. A stranger by the bedside.

Probably almost as much a crime in itself as a hit-and-run.

‘I’ve got to go,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll make sure you’re OK. I’ll check the local news. I’m so glad you’re not going to die. It’s all
going to be alright.’

I picked up my bag.

I turned round at the door to have one last look at him. My heart jumped a beat.

His eyes were open.

I blinked. Took a step away. But no, it must have been a trick of the light, for they were as they had been when I’d come in, his eyelids shut, smooth, the black eyelashes curling gently
against his cheek.

I turned my back on him and pushed open the doors.

‘Hey,’ came a voice from behind me. ‘Let me see you.’

CHAPTER SEVEN

I bolted. Down the corridor past the nurses’ station, ignoring the demands to disinfect my hands, not stopping to speak to the nurse, Tom, who was rifling through files,
and whose eyes I imagined burning into me as the door to the ward banged behind me and I leapt down the three flights of stairs.

I don’t know how I got to my car. But within minutes I was accelerating out of the hospital car park, and driving fast back out of the town. The sky was huge and yellow and relentless, I
felt raw beneath it, exposed. I wanted to get among tall buildings, among cramped streets. I wanted to be in London, people of every nationality hurrying past the windows, each in their own world,
not looking at anyone else. Where everyone was anonymous.

When the man in the bed had spoken those words to me I’d panicked, left without turning to face him. If he shouted out that he’d never seen me before, what would I do? What if he
asked the nurses who I was, what I’d been doing there? I mustn’t think any more about it.

I clutched the steering wheel, leaning forward to make sure there was no chance I might hit anything else by accident. How was I going to get through the exhibition tonight, entertaining my
friends, Louise and her boyfriend and the public? I’d have to be the sparkling hostess when I had this new knot of anxiety deep in my stomach, that I might be accused – if not of
running the man over – then of being some sort of imposter. But I had no choice. I’d been gone for over an hour. I couldn’t stay away any longer.

Southwold was busy. It was Saturday and day-trippers had driven in, their cars filling the parking spaces along the streets. Groups ambled along the pavements, stopping to look
in shop windows, to gasp at the price of property in the estate agents or to buy overpriced cheese from the delis, or designer sailing wear from the clothes chains. I parked near the church and
walked down to the promenade.

I stood leaning on the white railings. I could see my friends and Pepper down on the beach. I could see myself at six years old, sitting on one of the posts along the groyne. Picking at stones
that had got wedged into holes in the wooden pillars by the tides, in a hopeless quest to get them all out. Far away to my left, beyond the lower promenade with its pastel-coloured beach huts, was
the pier.

I looked at my friends caught eternally in the sunshine of a spring Saturday, not knowing that this moment was passing even as they threw the ball to and fro. They thought everything was
perfect. They had no idea how quickly what we cherish and look forward to can switch to something dark and frightening and out of our control. But I was their host. I was responsible for making
this weekend good for them. And the man was alive. He was unlikely to ask who I was. He’d only seen my back, so everything
was
alright.