A Trick of the Mind (8 page)

‘Yes. A hit-and-run. It was on the news.’

‘I thought it was me.’

‘What?’

‘When I heard the news, I became convinced I might have been the hit-and-runner . . . it haunted me all that night. I had to make sure it wasn’t me. I know now it
wasn’t.’

Chiara laughed.

‘You
thought
it was you?! You are bonkers, Ellie. You would have
known
if you’d run a man over – it was a man, wasn’t it? Fully grown?’

‘But I bashed into something on the road. It smashed my wing mirror, look, see?’ I gestured over to my left, where the mirror was smashed, one piece of the glass missing.

‘Oh, I see. Yeah. But still, I’ve hit a baby deer, in Scotland, much smaller than a man, and believe me you damn well know if you’ve hit something that size,’ Chiara
said, ‘the impact’s terrifying. I had whiplash after that and it was just a little thing. You’re a nutcase, that’s all there is to it. It’s just like the time you made
me go all the way back to the flat with you because you were convinced you’d left the gas on and might be poisoning poor old Frank and all the other neighbours!’

She chuckled.

I didn’t want to mention that I’d actually gone so far as checking by visiting the hospital. It would sound completely mad. Over-the-top – obsessive.

We’d turned off down the Mile End Road now and were crawling past the fried chicken shops and the Asian food stalls and the mosques. The air coming in was warm and fuggy
with smells of the city, exhaust and oil and a fainter sweeter smell of good spicy food. Police cars sped past us. The man who arranged all his fruit in plastic ice-cream tubs on the pavement,
exposing them to a constant smothering of exhaust, sat outside his shop on a fold-out chair. We passed women in wildly patterned headscarves pushing buggies, caught glimpses of men in djellabas and
leather jackets inside cafés, chatting in groups. Another world to the middle-class enclave that was Southwold.

‘Look,’ Chiara said, and I glanced at her. Her tone had changed. ‘While we’re on the subject of moving on and all that, I have to tell you . . . I’ve been putting
it off, but . . . oh dear, this is hard.’

‘Go on.’

‘Well, it’s just that Liam’s found somewhere in London Fields. It’s a flat, but there’s a garden. He’s put a deposit down.’

‘Oh.’ Was her suggestion I go back to Finn a way of softening this blow?

‘I know. I’m sorry.’

‘So, you’ll be moving out?’

‘But you’re going to be OK, Ellie. If you carry on like this you’ll be leaving your teaching job, you’ll probably move down to Southwold, won’t you? Become a
full-time artist.’

‘I don’t know about that.’ I tried to keep the panic out of my voice. I knew Chiara and Liam were looking to buy a house, it was to be expected now they were having a baby, but
I’d imagined it might take months. I’d imagined I would have moved on long before they had. The thought of being left alone in our little flat without Finn, without my best friend,
unnerved me.

‘Ellie? Things had to change some time didn’t they?’

‘Of course.’

‘And you’ll be OK. We’ll both be OK.’

‘Sure.’

‘See you at the gig later,’ Chiara called over her shoulder as I dropped her at Liam’s house in Tredegar Square, and I went on to our road, a cul-de-sac just past Stepney Green
Tube. Amazingly I found a space just next to our building.

Chiara was right. I’d be OK. I would focus on the commission for New York. I’d been so preoccupied, I was forgetting the money I’d just made at the gallery. Nearly two thousand
pounds. If I sold any more paintings I could put a deposit down and rent a nicer flat. I’d move to a quieter area, perhaps drop another day’s teaching, spend more time sending out
proposals for commissions. I’d socialise in new circles and might even meet a new man. It was what I’d wanted!

I dragged my bag from the boot, took Pepper up in one arm. We climbed the steps to the front door. I was met by the fusty smell of a building lived in by many people, and stumbled over the heaps
of junk mail no one bothered to pick up from the slimy floor. Yes, I would definitely move, once Chiara had gone. I wouldn’t be able to afford to live here alone anyway. Chiara had, as usual,
left her domestic mark on our little kitchen with its window overlooking the B&Q car park. Fresh tomatoes and lollo rosso and some interesting-looking cheese in the fridge. Oranges in a bowl.
The flat was just bearable with her homely touches, but I couldn’t imagine living here alone, or sharing it with anyone else.

This conversion didn’t work. The building had been chopped up into flats so the landlord could make maximum money out of the limited space. The circulation of air was poor, cooking smells
infiltrating the bathroom and the cut-in-half bedrooms, and the sounds from other flats came through badly engineered partition walls.

I dumped my bag on the shoddy grey carpet and went to listen to the messages on our landline answerphone. There was one from Mum asking me to let her know how the house had seemed this weekend,
whether I’d had further thoughts on selling it. Another message from the suppliers I’d contacted about some canvas and stretchers.

Then there was one that sent a chill from my toes up through my body to my head. I had to hold on to the bookshelf to steady myself.

‘Ellie? This is Patrick. The nurses said you came to visit me. They’ve told me I have amnesia and to get in touch with you as soon as possible. You’re not supposed to use
mobiles but these hospital phones are hell to use, you have to get a card and fiddle about so it’s easier for you to call me. I’m pissed off. They’re saying I’m going to
need major rehabilitation. Call me, will you? It might help, they say, if we can just talk. Here’s my number. Oh and . . . You looked so pretty when I saw you leaving.’

I slammed the phone down.

How did he get my number?

How did he know my name?

CHAPTER NINE

I stood for several minutes beside the phone in the kitchen, trying to ignore the drip from the ceiling our landlord had failed to fix. A pigeon was preening itself on the
windowsill. One of its feet was deformed, a pink stump where the claws should have been. I looked away. Played the message again.

Was this a punishment for not going back and checking whether I might have hit someone on the road? A man – a stranger – was stalking me. Stalking? The man in the bed had seemed so
strong, so wealthy, and good-looking, I couldn’t imagine he called people he didn’t know out of need. That glamorous woman on his iPhone showed he was hardly desperate. And anyway, it
was
me
who had gone to see
him.
Stalking was the wrong word. He had phoned me because he believed I was someone he knew.

I would call Chiara, confess I’d gone as far as visiting the man in hospital, that now he’d rung me thinking I was someone he knew, and we would sit in the pub and have a good laugh
about it. She would tell me to forget it.

I picked up my phone, relieved to have a signal now I was back in civilisation, and pressed Chiara’s number. It went straight to voicemail.

Flustered now, I played Patrick’s message again. His tone was relaxed, friendly. The anaesthetic – and he must only just have been coming out of it when he woke and saw me leaving
– must have confused him. That was when I remembered my diary, missing when I’d gone to get it out at the exhibition. I got my bag and put it on the kitchen table. I rummaged through.
My make-up bag was there. My purse. No diary.

I’d emptied my bag in the hospital, looking for my mobile, when the nurse had suggested showing him photos. Had I missed putting the diary back, in my anxious state?

If he rang again I would tell him that we’d never met. That it was a mistake. If he asked how my diary had got there I would say I had no idea. There were any number of explanations
– someone might have found it elsewhere and brought it in while visiting someone else. Who knows?

Everything would be cleared up and I would never see him again.

With this thought I went through to my room to unpack my bag, shaking everything out onto the bed, then pushing it into the washing machine. The clothes I wore at the hospital seemed
contaminated, I wanted the weekend washed off them.

I put on my yoga trousers and a vest top and spread a rug out on the floor. I lay down and lifted my thighs into the Bridge. Lowered myself. I moved into a Fish, arching my back, folding my legs
into a fishtail shape, lifting my shoulders from the mat and resting the tip of my head on the floor. I lay on my back and did a Happy Baby pose – holding my toes – usually guaranteed
to evoke a sense of being in the moment. I lay back, tried again to empty my mind.

The phone went almost as soon as I’d relaxed. I heard it click on in the kitchen, the recording asking the caller to leave a message.

‘Ellie! I’m a bit drugged up. You didn’t call back! I need your help to get me through this. Someone ran me over. But they can’t find who did this to me. It’s all
getting to me now. Please phone, no one else has.’

Was he crying? Was that a sob I could hear?

Should I pick up the phone? Explain? Or pretend I wasn’t here?

I could perhaps ask to speak to one of the nurses, tell them that their patient was ringing me in the mistaken belief that he knew me. I hesitated, then made for the phone, grabbing it just as
the line clicked shut. That settled it. I would leave it.

The poor man must realise, as his memory came back, that he’d never met me, that it was a mistake. The diary would be thrown away and my visit forgotten.

I sidled into our cramped bathroom, put the plug in, ran a deep, hot bath and got in. Reflections of bathwater danced on the ceiling, white on white. Police cars whooped along Mile End Road
outside. Cars, their windows down, went past, music turned up loud, the bass reverberating. The bathroom door was ajar. I hadn’t bothered to lock it since there was nobody here but me. I
thought for a second that I heard someone opening the main door into the flat. Pepper began to yap. No one but me and Chiara had a key. But Chiara was at the pub with Liam. I froze. Someone was
moving about out there. I could hear the creak of a floorboard, the sitting-room door’s squeak.

There was a smallish window in here, frosted glass, big enough if I pushed it up to crawl out of onto a garage roof. If I’d locked the bathroom door, I’d have had time. I sat up,
pushed my hands down on the edges of the bath, stood, dripping, reached for a towel.

I stopped, listened again. I’d left my yoga clothes strewn all over the sitting-room floor. Nothing could have given an intruder a better indication of my vulnerability, in the bath, on my
own.

My options: one, lean across, slam the door to buy myself time, jump out and slide the lock across. Two, confront whoever had come in. It couldn’t be Patrick from the hospital. He
couldn’t have recovered already. But his voice on the phone had unsettled me. So, option three, climb straight out of the window onto the garage roof off the road.

I stood in the water, wasting time deliberating when I should shut the door, lock it, get through the window. Then I was certain, footsteps were coming towards me across the sitting room. I was
out of the bath, grabbing a towel. I stood, the toilet brush in my hand raised, the only implement I could find with which to defend myself, a towel wrapped round me.

A shadow fell across the gap in the bathroom door.

CHAPTER TEN

‘Put the toilet brush down! I surrender.’

‘Finn!’

‘Oh my God, you thought I was an intruder?’

‘Of course I bloody well thought you were an intruder! What’re you doing walking in like this?’

I pressed the towel closer around me.

‘I came to see how it went.’

‘Christ! You could’ve given me some warning. Now if you’ll excuse me I need to put some clothes on.’

‘I’ll open a beer then.’

My eyes prickled with tears of relief, and something else. I’d gone all weak, as if someone had been holding me up, like a marionette, and had let go of the strings. My nerves were highly
sensitised, twitchy, because of the man called Patrick, those phone calls. I’d thought Finn was him! How ridiculous when Patrick was stuck over sixty miles away in hospital.

Finn and I had spent hours in the past naked together but I couldn’t let him see me like this now we weren’t together any more, so when I’d thrown on some clothes I joined him
in the sitting room where he was on the sofa, head bowed.

He looked awful close up, as if he hadn’t slept for days. But that was nothing new. Finn led the kind of life where he could forget to go to bed for weeks on end. Pepper had trotted
straight over to him and jumped up onto his lap. Finn fondled his silky ears with his finger and thumb.

‘You brought your own beer?’

He shrugged.

Finn was on a permanent tight budget – his bringing beer was uncharacteristic.

‘Finn! I’ve got wine in the fridge, you know. You needn’t have worried.’

‘I can pay my way.’

I wished what I felt for him was a wash of love. Instead what I felt was pity.

‘I’m not suggesting . . . oh, never mind. Anyway, it gave me a shock, your walking in like that. Where did you get the key?’

‘I saw Chiara in the pub. With Liam. She said she was worried about you, so I said I’d come round, and she gave me her keys.’

‘You should have knocked! It’s not on to just walk in like that.’

‘I won’t do it again.’

‘Please don’t, Finn.’

There was a silence. I’d never spoken to Finn in this bossy way before. I softened.

‘What was Chiara worried about?’

‘She just thought you might avoid joining us. So I came to find you.’

‘I was going to come,’ I said. ‘I needed to unwind first.’

He looked up at me through his floppy fringe. ‘Sorry to snap,’ I said. ‘It was kind of you to come.’

‘Not really. Selfish motives. I’ve been missing you.’

I poured myself a glass of wine.

‘But next time – I do have a doorbell.’

‘It feels unnatural to ring the bell. I’ve never had to ring your bell before!’