Dispossession (5 page)

Looking more closely, even between the metres of
sticking-plaster and cotton padding that made a patchwork man of me I could see
a diagnostic pattern to the weight and colour of the bruising, and I was monkey
enough—
monkeypuzzle man
—to work it out
slowly. Black diagonal like a heraldic bar, drawn from right shoulder to left
hip, two or three inches wide with a herring-bone texture and strikingly
distinct edges; that must be where the seat belt had caught and held me. Bless
the thing. I might apparently have been driving a fast car crazy-fast on a
dangerous road, but at least I’d retained that much sense, to wear a belt. Or
more likely it wasn’t sense at all, it was pure instinct: just something I did
every time I got into a car, and surviving even when my famous common sense
seemed to have died the death.

Blurring the centre of that strong diagonal was a massive
disc of dark, which must have been the steering column slamming into me as the
car folded up, in despite of the seat belt’s good retentive work. No air-bag,
presumably, in this MR2. Which was yet more evidence of how wrong the story
was, for all that I had to believe it; because I couldn’t believe I’d buy any
car without one, let alone a car built purely for speed.

Unless you just bought it to
impress
, a quiet, suspicious voice murmured in the back of my mind.
Like to impress a girl, maybe? Young, beautiful, and you
with some kind of seven-year itch going on?

I didn’t remember any itching, I’d thought myself settled
and content; but something had happened to deny that. So much was clear,
undeniable.

Only that it had happened to someone else, effectively. I
didn’t recognise either the actions of this supposed, this apparent Jonty Marks
or the motives that had driven him; he was as much a stranger to me as Sue was.
Myself and my wife, and I didn’t know either one of them...

Finding myself straying into abstraction again, drifting
into muddled and misty tales that I couldn’t get a finger’s good hold on, I
pulled myself sharply back to what was actual and solid and very much there,
very much attached to me in a way that these stories were not: my body, as it
lay in this bed.

The torso told the tale, seat belt and steering column
vividly marked out. For the rest of me, my arms and legs were where most of the
patching-up had been done, as I guess you’d expect from a man strapped into a
rolling car; it’s got to be flailing limbs that take most damage. I couldn’t
see the damage, for all the dressings; nothing too horrendous, though, by the
feel of things. It hurt to move them, but that was more wrenched joints than
anything else, I thought, whiplash-equivalents for elbows and knees. Lucky
again, when you thought of the fragility of bone within a failing steel cage...

Fragile bone in manky skin, and I had hot water at my side.
Reached for flannel and soap, and grunted sharply as something stabbed and
twisted in my shoulder.

Nothing
, I told myself,
it’s only muscles yanked about too hard, maybe a bit of
ripped tissue, that’s all, barely more than a stiff neck from sleeping wonky...

Maybe so, but it felt like flexible steel, it felt like a
blade buried between bruised flesh and battered bone. I’d stretched and shifted
about in bed hitherto, and thought I’d learned the extent of my discomfort; but
now I was actually trying to
do
something,
I found out just how wrong I’d been. My fingers had problems enough picking up
the flannel; getting my other arm across to handle the soap was agonising.

If I hurt this much now, I thought maybe I should be
grateful for having spent three days unconscious, having slept through what
must have been worse.

Would have been grateful to have slept through this also, to
have been cleaned up in the night. And though I didn’t, I wouldn’t ring the
bell to ask, I was nothing but grateful when Simon put his head around the door
after ten minutes or so and said, “How are you doing, then? Need any help?”

I’d have waved the white flannel at him like a flag of
surrender, only that I rather thought I’d drop it. Instead, “Bit of a problem
bending,” I muttered, gazing all the length of me at the impossibility of feet.

“Thought you might. You tell me how far you’ve got, and I’ll
do the rest.”

He washed my feet and legs for me as briskly and efficiently
as an undertaker washing a corpse, except that undertakers don’t presumably
keep up a constant stream of chatter with their clients as they lave; then he
helped me roll over and did my back, brought me a clean robe and knotted me
into it, settled me against a mound of pillows and shaved me neatly.

“Anything else now, before I bring your breakfast?”

“Yes,” I said, running a hand slowly over smoothness of skin
between scabs and thinking how much I liked being shaved, how much I hated
shaving, “are you available for hire?”

“Bar mitzvahs, weddings and funerals,” he said cheerfully.
“Bar mitzvah boys don’t shave, and you’re already married. You could hire me
for your funeral, I suppose. Money in advance.”

He waited, I suppose for a smile or a swear-word; but got
neither, because he’d caught me in the gut unintentionally, sent me plummeting
back into confusion. Married I was, I accepted that, but acceptance made none
of it any easier to handle. Married to a stranger, I was still in love with
Carol if with anyone. I hadn’t thought about it, I supposed, for years; not in
those terms. But if knowledge and understanding, comfort and affection and
concern added up to love—which I thought they did, pretty much, I felt that
would be an adult definition of the word—then yes, I was in love with Carol.

And she with me? I would have said so, by the same
definition. Three months ago—the latest I could remember—I would definitely
have said yes to that, and so I thought would she. But she hadn’t so much as
sent me flowers, and Carol sent flowers to bare acquaintances who found
themselves in hospital. Could be she didn’t know I was here, of course; but she’d
also slammed the phone down on me without saying a word, without giving me the
chance to tell her. Carol, I thought—knowing her, understanding her—was deeply,
deeply angry.

That was one of the two certainties I could find in my life
that morning, and neither one gave me much to hold on to. First, Carol was
angry with me, and no blame to her for that; and second, by whatever definition
you chose to measure it, I was certainly not in love with my wife.

Oh,
God
...

What I wanted that morning was metaphorical dressing-gown,
teddy bear and cocoa, all the comforts of childhood against an adult world. I
wanted to curl up in some fœtal space, to know that I was safe and someone else
was out there coping for me, sorting all my problems.

What I got instead was doctors and nurses, my sheets changed
and my mind only a little reassured. The amnesia should pass, they said, but I
would have to give it time. Meanwhile just rest, they said, watch telly or
listen to the radio, don’t try to read if your head’s still aching.

Then they left me alone again. And no, I didn’t watch telly
or listen to the radio, neither did I read or rest. I only lay there fretting,
wondering, too sore to move and too confused to sleep.

It was almost a relief when Sue turned up.

Almost? Nah. It was definitely, absolutely a relief. She got
me out of there, if only on a limited licence.

o0o

Breezed in, she did, just after lunch, wearing black denim
and a baseball cap, black again with a silver-blue logo,
Q’s
above the peak. She kissed me quick but
unhurried, which is a neat trick if you can do it, which she could. I guess the
quick was in case I showed signs of pulling back, the unhurried was purely for
pleasure. Then she patted my shaved cheek approvingly, picked a little at one
of my scabs and hissed apologetically when I winced, laughed when I pushed her
away; and said she had permission to take me out.

“Only for a bit, mind. And if you act weird I have to bring
you straight back again, so mind you behave yourself.”

“Where are we going?” I asked cautiously.

“Just out. Out and about.”

Out
was good, out was
great, a temporary release the closest I could hope to come today to
dressing-gown and cocoa.
Out with Sue
was
more problematic.

“Tell me,” I said.

“Trust me,” she countered instantly. “We’ll go for a drive,
here and there, and then I’ll bring you back. It won’t hurt, Jonty. Promise.”
Then she grinned, and added, “I already had to promise them, twenty miles an
hour and no sharp stops, and nothing you could bang your head on. We’re going
on a tall person’s drive.”

She said that, she said that and
Trust me
, and then she helped me dress. Clothes
she’d brought with her, nothing I’d seen before: silk shirt and soft baggy
cotton trousers, thin warm socks and moccasins. All in black, matching outfits;
and all a perfect fit, all showing signs of having been worn and washed.

Nor was that all. At her quiet insistence, by virtue of her
clever fingers, the stud and the ring went back into my ears; she fastened the
chain around my neck, and I tried not to see a symbol in that; she put the
wedding-ring onto the third finger of my left hand and said, “With this ring I
thee wed
again
, Jonathan Marks, and don’t
you forget again...”

A nurse fetched a wheelchair; Sue pushed me through the
corridors to the exit, and out to her car; and I said, “A tall person’s drive,
you told me.”

“Okay. A tall person’s drive in a small person’s car. I’ll
drive like a tall person, I promise. Well, not like you. I won’t drive like
you, you crash things.”

It was no big surprise, I guess, that Sue drove a Mini
Cooper. It suited: a short, aggressive little car, gloss black and gleaming
clean, all the windows tinted as dark as the law allowed. What was more
surprising was when she helped me up out of the wheelchair, and really was a
help to me. She was small, but she was springy; I leaned on her more than I
meant or wanted to, and she showed not a sign of buckling.

“Duck,” she said, hand firm on the back of my neck to encourage
me. “Duck and fold. Don’t you
dare
bang
your head, or I’m taking you straight back.”

I didn’t bang my head. What I did, though, I caught a
glimpse of my face reflected in that darkened glass, as I ducked and folded.

Caught a glimpse, and couldn’t believe it.

Once I was in and she’d slammed the door on me, I pulled the
sun-visor down to get at the vanity mirror, looked again; and was still staring
as she got in the driver’s side and caught me at it, and I didn’t know what the
hell to say.

Not a problem. She did. She’d probably been practising, only
waiting for the moment.

“Bad hair day, huh? Never mind, we all have ’em,” touching
the peak of her cap in a conspiratorial gesture,
me
too, why d’you think I’m wearing this?

“It’s not my hair,” I said wearily, stupidly. She knew that.
Neither one of us could see my hair.

She smiled, with I thought a little effort, and tried again.
“Is this the face that lunched on a thousand chips? I kept telling you they’re
bad for the complexion. You wouldn’t listen, and look at you now.”

“No, thanks,” I said, shoving the visor up again, hiding
from myself.

I looked monstrous. The bandage around my head I knew about
already, but I had two appalling black eyes to go with it, and all the flesh of
my face was dark and swollen and a nest of worms, thread-like scabs clinging to
mark where the windscreen glass had scarified me.

“Shaving didn’t help much, did it?” I said, actually
wondering how the hell Simon had navigated the razor around and between all
those cuts, without slicing the scabs off and setting the blood to run again.

“Vain pig. Did it hurt?”

“Everything hurts,” I said grumpily. She patted my knee and
I could have bitten her, except that my teeth also hurt. “But no, getting
shaved was okay. Simon did it.”

“Did he? That’s nice. That’s service, I guess. But don’t
worry about your face, the doctors said there’s nothing permanent. You’ll play
the violin again. On my heartstrings,” grinning at me sideways, pleased with
herself.

I was already off on another track, impatient with banter.
“Sue, who’s paying for the room I’m in? Who sent me private?”

“Vernon Deverill. Soon as he heard about the accident, he
had you transferred. I guess he’s picking up all the bills, unless you’ve got
some arrangement...?”

I shook my head slowly. “I don’t know Vernon Deverill. Not
like this.” Again I was thinking
scam
,
thinking
set-up
, thinking how easy it would
be to black a solicitor’s name with gifts when he was unconscious. And
wondering why the hell he’d want to, why pick on me?

“You’ve been pretty thick with him, the last two months,”
she said. “For a man who doesn’t know a man, I mean.”

I don’t know you either, and I
married you.
But that was evidence for the prosecution, not the defence.
I felt very ill-defended: caught in possession, with nothing to offer but
feeble denials—
not my life, not my wife
—and
even my own mind turned accusatory, no longer believing myself. This would be
the fast track to schizophrenia, I thought, if I allowed it.

“Where are we going, Sue?” Second time of asking, and I don’t
think I expected an answer this time either. Nor did I get one.

“Okay,” she said. “You don’t want to talk about Vernon
Deverill, that’s fine. I don’t like him. Where do you want to go?”

“Away from here is fine. I’m not ambitious, just curious.
You’re taking me somewhere, and I don’t like surprises.”

She snorted at that, and I was aware of the irony myself, a
moment too late. Right now, all my life was a surprise to me. It was true,
though, I wasn’t enjoying any of it.