Inch Levels (2 page)

The news travelled fast, breaking within minutes against the walls of that neat bungalow on the crest of the hill where a collection of lives already lay in shards. They had found her, in the water at Inch Levels. This family knew, already, that Christine would not be coming back: but such knowledge was neither here nor there, not when – later that day – the pitiless facts were set out.

There was an assumption made, silently, that this was one of those crimes that would never be solved. It seemed highly accomplished or at least flawlessly executed: tracks covered and dust kicked; no traces left at all. Someone might have seen a blue car – but the blue car came to nothing. He – the man, whoever he was – may have done it before, somewhere else; he may have been practiced – these were the thoughts that did the rounds. Besides, the abundance of one kind of crime in this neck of the woods meant that other crimes – normal crimes, the police said to each other, although not to the parents – tended to be overlooked. Little chance – no chance, they said privately – of an arrest.

The chatter faded fast. The colour photograph of the girl that had been circulated to the media was of good quality. Patrick remembered the photograph, remembered how Christine was smiling a beaming smile – but this in the long run made little difference. The family was articulate – but this made little difference too. The case was remembered, talked of – but there were so many others, so many other crimes, so many other examples of depraved human behaviour, of sin and of grief, that this crime became but one on a list. He remembered all this.

What else? Here, facts faded a little and suppositions took their place, though these were easy enough to imagine. Those left behind made an attempt to find their way through it. Some of them knew they could rely on each other; some of them found they could not. For some of them, love and a kind of mutuality would, they were determined, see them through, and so would a will to honour the memory of this girl, this daughter and sister – even if the newspapers had been quick to pull up sticks and move on. Yes: they would make their way through it, some of them. Christine’s family could no longer use the lane in which the schoolbag had been found: not ever again, meaning a longer drive, the long way round, into the town; this was one of the facts with which they were obliged to live. Another: the pills shoved in large quantities at various members of the family by well-meaning general practitioners; another was the insomnia. But they made their way through it, some of them. Other families had done so in the past; other families would have to do so in the future. There was nothing else to be done. So they said.

Suppositions, yes – but easily imagined.

Then, on a cold Friday afternoon in late October – the season already definitively over, the town beginning to close down for the approaching winter – Christine’s mother made her way down from the crest of the hill, into the town, over the rocks beside the pier and into the water. Nobody was there on hand to see her: nobody loitering on the pier on such an evening, with the light fading and a sharp wind blowing from the north-east and rippling the waves into chill, white crests. When she was spotted, minutes later, it was already too late: the ripping circular current that runs offshore here, that sucks water in from the open Atlantic, through the narrow mouth of Lough Foyle and out again – it caught her quickly, as she had known it would and it took her.

Still, they managed to recover her body before night quite closed in. And that at least, they said – later, at the wake, over the nips of whiskey and the cups of tea and the ham sandwiches – that was a blessing.

Probably this kind of thing was said. Patrick had been to many wakes; he knew the standard patter.

Now he lay stretched flat, in his high hospital bed, under his blue standard-issue NHS counterpane. Encyclopaedic knowledge, forensic detail. Yes: because he had made a point of gathering all the detail he could. The sun had left the room, now, and the pink screen of his eyelids was replaced by a dull yellow. Someone had flicked on the overhead light: a few moments ago, when he was lost in his reverie. And he knew who had flicked the switch.

He opened his eyes, looked along the length of his body towards the base of the bed. Not left and not right.

‘Hello, Patrick.’

There was Robert, sitting very upright in the dark hospital armchair to the right of the bed. There he was. Patrick swung his head a little to the right. There he was.

‘Hello. How are you feeling today?’

Patrick opened his eyes. He was dying, and as if this wasn’t enough, now there he was: the unwelcome visitor lounging in the high-backed standard-issue armchair by his bed.

No avoiding such visitors, of course. They were par for the course in this kind of environment, appearing at the door with dreary regularity, slung about with the inevitable grapes and chocolates. He’d said to the nurse, ‘Don’t people have any imagination?’ She smiled, smoothed the blue coverlet on the bed.

Sometimes the grapes came straight from the supermarket shelf, unwashed. He could tell.

And the visitors had not been slow in beating a path to his door. News travelled fast in a city this size, and bad news at the speed of light: and he was hardly through the door, he thought, hardly settled in his baby-blue bed before the faces began appearing, eager noses and avid eyes against the glass.

No avoiding this. And besides, the clock was counting down the days and hours and minutes remaining: people were entitled to feel that they hadn’t a moment to waste, were entitled to be on the bustle. In his brighter moments, he could make this concession.

There actually was a digital clock beside the bed, its poison-green numerals flicking the time onwards silently, relentlessly.

‘Digital! Imagine: fancy pants,’ murmured his sister, Margaret, as she settled him on that first evening. His ward was on the eighth floor, with a sweep of darkening countryside visible outside his window. A book or two, a
Guardian
and his dented old transistor radio, all set out neatly on top of the bedside locker; pungent lilies, all veins and nodding stamens, unwrapped from their clear plastic shroud and plunged into a glass vase on the windowsill.

‘Bad taste, if you ask me.’ Their mother had contributed the digital clock. Now, Margaret looked again at it, tilted her head to the right, pursed her lips, considered.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Better than one of those egg timer things, what are they called? You know, the sands of time. Imagine if they had one of those, instead, sitting on the window sill, looking at you.’ She too smoothed the bedspread. ‘You’d be entitled then, to talk about bad taste.’

Patrick closed his eyes. Well, his family had a good line in mordancy, after all. It was their natural terrain.

‘I think you can probably go now,’ he said after another few minutes. ‘I’m settled and besides, I should try and sleep. I mean, if sleep is even possible in a place like this.’

Margaret said, ‘Really?’ She looked around. She had been there all of ten minutes. Outside, gulls were wheeling and crying; they had been blown inland in the stiffening wind. A visiting family clipped and squeaked along the corridor outside. A child’s voice rose, clear and questioning, above the murmuring background noise. He watched Margaret listen, watched her shoulders stiffen and rise a little inside her sensible cardigan.

‘Really, yes.’ Now he closed his eyes. ‘I know you’d like to get up a game of Scrabble among the patients, and that’s very kind of you. But you know, this
is
a hospital; and besides, Robert’ll be expecting you.’

Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me
: well, and how many times had he proved
that
one wrong, over the last few years. He watched her flinch, as though struck, watched her retreat.

And it paid her back for the egg timer, too.

Margaret paused at the door.

‘Ma will hardly come in tonight, will she? Too late now, probably.’

‘Let’s hope it’s too late.’

As Margaret opened the door, he said, ‘Thank you for the flowers.’

She paused. ‘I should’ve snipped off the pollen heads,’ she said. ‘We don’t want them staining.’

She left, and he waited a few minutes and then pressed the bell. A nurse appeared.

‘Will you take those flowers away, please? Give them to someone else?’

‘Someone else?’ the nurse said, frowning.

‘Not fond of lilies.’ He gestured with a fingertip at the vase. ‘Please. Let someone else enjoy them.’

The nurse pursed her lips, bore away the glass vase, the lurid flowers.

That had been then. And now, a day or two or three later (for time passed strangely in this place), there was the latest unwelcome visitor. There was Robert himself, all long arms and legs in the armchair.

‘No Margaret today?’

‘Couldn’t come,’ Robert said. ‘So I said I’d pop in instead.’ He was tall, lean; his cheekbones stood out in a gaunt face.

They might have been brothers, the two of them. They might both have been sick.

Patrick looked at those cheekbones, looked at the shadows under the eyes and the skin stretched tight over his brother-in-law’s skull. Thinner than ever, now. He thought: which one of us has the cancer? If I wasn’t lying here in this bed, you’d hardly know.

‘Oh, “pop”, is it? Pop in. Good of you,’ Patrick said.

After a moment, Robert got up and went to the window, looking out at the view, the broad grounds of the place. The hospital had been built in the 1950s, a hulking block twelve storeys high on the crest of a hill: it faced into every wind that blew, and could be seen twenty miles away. To the west, the city opened up, ridge after ridge, with the Donegal hills a blue backdrop in the furthest distance. A grammar school edged the hospital grounds to the south: Patrick’s old school, where he had been a pupil and where he had for several years taught; for too many years his alma mater. This was an unfortunate juxtaposition, everyone agreed. The hospital mortuary edged into the school grounds. It was a pity to have so much death in close proximity to a mass of schoolboys, besides which, the sound of the school bell, tolling regularly, mournfully in the school’s handsome copper-topped belfry was much too funereal for some nerves to withstand. Very unfortunate; poor planning, to be sure. Nothing much to be done about it now.

Robert looked out at the view for a while and then said, ‘Nice, isn’t it?’

Patrick said nothing.

‘Very nice.’

Silence fell. At last, Patrick broke it.

‘One positive thing, you know, about my situation.’

‘What’s that?’ said Robert, still looking out at the hills, the views.

‘It concentrates the mind. You think: “well, at least I don’t have to put up with certain things any longer”. You know, tick tock, and all that.’

There was a little pause.

‘Tick tock,’ said Robert. ‘Sure.’

‘So we don’t need to go through certain pleasantries, is my point.’

‘Sure,’ Robert said again. ‘Meaning –’

‘Meaning you don’t need to come again. If I’m going to be knock knock knocking on Heaven’s door, I’d sooner be selective about who sees me off, if you get my drift.’

It seemed that Robert did. Their mutual disregard, their mutual dislike, had been absolute from the moment they met. No, since
before
they had met. And it was oddly liberating: both were aware that they could say just about anything to each other; that little was out of bounds – even now.

Still, Robert felt compelled to make some sort of gimcrack effort. ‘I’d have thought –’

‘And I’d have thought,’ Patrick interrupted, his eyes closed, ‘that you’d be content, social niceties not after all being your strong suit.’

That settled it: Robert was soon bundled into his coat.

‘I’ll tell Margaret to drop in tomorrow,’ he said.

‘Don’t.’

A pause, a turn at the door. A hesitation, Patrick saw, as though his visitor were about to say something else, something unexpected. And then a change of mind: and instead, one last parting shot. ‘What about your mother? She’ll be in soon, I’m sure.’

Patrick kept his eyes shut tightly. ‘Ma will please herself, as she always has done. Off you go now.’ He kept his eyes closed until the door had opened and then shut with its thin wheeze. Then he closed his eyes very tightly, as though in sudden pain. In the distance, the bell began to toll.

Patrick lay, stretched on the bed.

Better, always, to think of the past.

This was one lesson he had learned in this month of steadily increasing pain. Even with all its darkness, the past was better. It was over and done with. It was better than a present that was threaded with pain, with regret and guilt.

He remembered a steep, ocean-facing hillside on the northern coast of Ireland.

Long ago: twenty-five years and more ago. The colours, sights, smells, the wide landscape: all were vivid in his mind. He was clear about what he was doing: this was a time of grace, at least for him. A time when their lives were, or seemed to be, intact.

This landscape was a palette of greens, changing with height into the deeper green-brown of bracken, purple of heather, hard silver glint of scree-strewn slopes. Sheep roamed on the upper slopes; and a few tethered goats grazed the rough grass. The lower fields were terraced, some of them, moulded onto the contours of the land – and the potatoes were already up on the west-facing slopes, line after neat line: the soil was dry, crumbling, after days of sunshine and steady southerly winds. Here and there arable fields shone with the fresh, luminous green of early summer, with a dense carpet of white clover, with spangled buttercups behind hawthorn hedges that still held a remnant of pale blossom. Red cows grazed; and away down there the land fell into a glen, along the bottom of which a peat-black stream rushed towards the sea. A few yellow whin blossoms still clung to the bushes, throwing out their languorous, incongruously tropical coconut scent.