Inhuman Remains

One

What do I like most about my village?

It’s this: nobody asks any questions.

In St Martí d’Empúries they don’t want to know what brought you here, or why you choose to live here. Okay, maybe they do, but it’s not in their nature to ask. If you want to tell them, they’ll listen, but they won’t push you to it. If you have a past that you need to leave behind you, that’s where they’ll let it stay. . even if, now and then, it still shows in your eyes.

Our house is on the Catalan coast, on the north of what you might know as the Costa Brava. It overlooks the sea, with nothing obscuring the view. It’s set on the highest point in the village, alongside the church. I’ve no idea how old it is, but some of the outer walls must date back for hundreds of years, maybe even a full millennium. It wasn’t built, as such, it evolved through the centuries into its present form, with successive owners leaving their stamp upon it, until finally, it came to us. . or, rather, we came to it.

I can’t begin to tell you how beautiful this place is. You’ll have to see it for yourself. Often, when the year is starting to bloom and the weather is set fair, I leave my bedroom shutters open at night so that I’ll waken at first light. Then I go out on to the east-facing terrace and gaze at the horizon, waiting and watching as the red sun rises from the still waters of the Mediterranean.

I’ve tried to persuade Tom to share the experience, but he’s not at his best in the morning. . not that early at any rate. One day he’ll come to appreciate it.

How did we get here, Primavera and Tom Blackstone? That’s a looooong story, too looooong to get into now. . but I’ll give you the shortened version.

They thought I was dead, you know, my dad, my sister, my son (although Tom didn’t understand ‘dead’ then: I’m not sure he does even now); everybody in the whole damn world thought I was gone from it.

They even held a memorial service for me, thirty-nine years old and gone to Jesus, at my family’s parish church in Auchterarder. It was full, with people standing in the boneyard outside, the sound from within relayed through loudspeakers. The Scottish media were unanimous, for once, in their reporting of the gig next day. (I know this because I read all the coverage on-line. I wish I could have been there to hear what was said about me, in disguise, hidden somewhere at the back of the crowd, but that really would have been pushing my luck.) They found it moving in the extreme, made all the more poignant by the fact that my body had never been recovered from the swamp in New Jersey into which the aircraft had plunged.

They agreed on something else too, that my ex had given the performance of a lifetime in his eulogy. The lady who wrote the colour piece for the Courier newspaper was convinced that, at its end, he had real tears in his eyes.

He wouldn’t have fooled me, though. I’ve always known Oz Blackstone for the consummate actor that he proved himself to be, even back in the days when he was two-timing me with his supposedly ex-girlfriend.

I wish I could look back on Oz without a trace of bitterness. Maybe I will, some day, but I’m not close to it yet, even though he was the only man I ever loved.

He owed it all to me, you know, everything that he became.

I don’t say that lightly. But for me, he’d never have met Dawn, my actress sister, and Miles, her film-director husband, who in a drink-fuelled moment decided to give him the break that he seized with both hands, both feet, and that almost prehensile cock of his.

Hah! That’s something about him that I do miss: I have to admit that from the day we met he and I were, metaphorically and often literally, joined at the groin. There was always that thing between us, indestructible, even after the second time he dumped me for another woman. I had power over him, and now I’m a little ashamed to admit that I used it whenever I could, even though it got me into bad trouble and, for a while, cost me custody of Tom.

Yes, I had my own share of guilt in our relationship but, still, I can’t call it quits and look back on him with kindness. Why not? Because the bastard tried to kill me, that’s why not!

If I had fronted him up about it, I’m sure he would have denied it. Christ, he might even have made me believe in his innocence, as everyone else does, for long enough for him to make a proper job of it second time around. But I know I’m right; nothing has happened since to make me change my mind.

He never got on the damn plane, you see, the private jet he had chartered to take us from Trenton to Newark to catch a transatlantic flight. Four passengers were listed but only three got on board; Oz stayed behind, with a Chinese messenger girl who had turned up to collect a package. I didn’t hear the story he spun the pilot, but I’m damn sure she was part of it, part of the set-up.

He was standing there as we began our taxi. I looked at him through the window, and our eyes met. He had the strangest expression on his face. It puzzled me then but now I can describe it as anticipation, mixed with a little fear, and fear was something Oz didn’t show too often. I wondered about it all the way through the flight, right up to the moment when we heard the bang and Scott, the pilot, told us through the speaker system that we had a problem, and that he was going to attempt an emergency landing.

I knew then, for sure, what that look had been about. He had decided to get me out of his life for good. When he wanted to be, Oz was lethal, and like many very wealthy people, he could get things done.

The ‘emergency landing’ wasn’t: it was a crash, pure and simple. We came down hard, with a crunching, tearing bang, and that’s all I remember, until I came to among the wreckage and found that everyone else on board was dead.

How did I survive? That’s a little embarrassing, but it’s true nonetheless.

I was on the toilet, wasn’t I, perched on the tiny bog at the back end of the plane, when Scott read us all our death warrant. There was a little speaker in there too. I thought about going back to my seat, but decided that if Elvis had met his Maker with his knickers round his ankles, that was good enough for me. On the way down, I hung on tight to the hand-grips and concentrated my thoughts on Tom, banishing everything from my mind but his face, until we hit the swamp and everything went blank.

I don’t imagine I was unconscious for more than a few seconds; a minute at most. When I came to I was waist-deep in brown, smelly water and my head hurt like hell. I glanced in the cracked mirror and saw a big lump in the process of forming above my left eye, as if a baby alien was trying to chew its way out. For a moment, I had visions of the flood rising until it filled the compartment, but it seemed to have found its own level. I kicked my way out of my underwear and tried to open the door, fearful that it might have been jammed shut by the impact. I had to push hard against the water, but I made it, and stepped outside.

I saw, at once, what had saved my life. At some point during the disaster, the tiny tail section of the aircraft had been ripped off and had soft-landed in an open area, while the rest had smashed through a stand of trees. The main fuselage was yards away, still ablaze, although the swamp water was doing an effective fire-fighting job.

I thought about Oz again, and knew for sure that he had taken himself out of this. No one, not even he, was that lucky. Accident or sabotage? With him involved, the odds were way in favour of the latter. I considered my two companions on the flight, the man and the woman: both of them had been trouble in their own way, and I reckoned that Oz had simply seen them as expendable. To this day, such an idea might shock his millions of fans, but trust me, that’s how he was.

As the flames subsided, I took a look inside the main cabin; it didn’t take long to appreciate that nothing was alive in there. I was in a fair old panic, I admit. . I have never done ‘unnaturally calm’ very well. . but I was thinking clearly enough to decide that the best thing I could do was get the hell out of there. As I looked around, I saw three black objects floating on the surface, and recognised my cabin bag among them. I grabbed it; then I looked around, at my surroundings.

The area was heavily wooded; I had no idea where I was but I guessed that the plane had been heading more or less north. So I headed more or less south, trudging heavily, barefoot, through the marsh water, hoping there was nothing nastier down there than the odd tree root.

My exceptional luck held: within ten minutes I had reached a broad spine of dry land that seemed to run through the morass, and saw on that a path.

I stopped and opened my bag. The seal must have been as good as the manufacturer claimed, for the clothing inside was dry. I stripped off what I had been wearing and used my upper garments to dry myself, then put on a fresh shirt, jeans and trainers. I found a mirror, comb and usable makeup in my very soggy handbag. When I had made myself look half normal, and arranged my hair so that it covered the creature in my head, I set out to follow the path.

America never ceases to surprise me with its contrasts. Less than half an hour later, I stepped out of the wilderness, and into a quiet suburb of what I guessed was a dormitory town for the nearest city. The streets were as empty as the swamp had been, save for a few cars parked in driveways. I walked on, aimlessly, until a black and white taxi slowly turned a corner and pulled up outside a house thirty yards away. A middle-aged woman paid the driver, then climbed out. She had barely reached the stone path that led to her front door before I flagged the guy down.

‘Where to, lady?’ The cabbie looked disconcertingly like Big Pussy, the Sopranos character who went to sleep with the fishes, but I forced myself to look at him casually and reply, ‘Into town.’

‘A little more specific?’

I searched for an answer that would mask my ignorance of my surroundings, and came up with ‘Sorry, Wal-Mart.’ In the USA, those are everywhere.

That Wal-Mart turned out to be in the centre of a community that seemed to have no obvious industry; my dormitory conjecture had been correct. I paid the man. . happily, he was not gabby, and just as happily, the cash in my purse was still dry. . and looked around. Straight across the road, I saw a car lot, the New Jersey equivalent of the sort of place you might find in EastEnders. It was evening, going on for eight o’clock, but it was still open.

I checked my cash reserve. I had six hundred dollars in my purse, and ten thousand in a compartment in my case. . emergency money that I’d never thought I’d need. Around a third of that bought me an elderly but serviceable Chrysler Voyager, from a dealer who probably thought all his Christmas Days had come early. I gave my name as Mary Edison, and an address I also made up on the spot. He asked no questions. He even threw in a free map and a tank of gas.

I was fuelled by adrenaline: I found the nearest Interstate, and drove through the night without a break, apart from a couple of pit-stops, till early next morning, when I reached the city of Buffalo, and with it, the Canadian border. I ditched the car in a public car park, found the station and bought a ticket for the evening train to Toronto.

I had most of the day to wait; I bought a big floppy hat and a huge pair of sunglasses that covered most of my face, and spent it looking at the Niagara Falls, and thinking.

What was there to think about?

Are you kidding? Plenty.

First, had I done the right thing in committing what was probably a federal offence by leaving the scene of a fatal air accident? If I was certain that Oz had staged the crash, shouldn’t I have stayed right there and denounced him?

A quick glance at that morning’s Buffalo News was all it took to convince me that I’d done the right thing. As far as the media were concerned, Oz was a victim himself. Rescue teams were searching for his body as well as mine. I knew damn well that when he surfaced there would be a wave of public relief. I knew also that if he had sabotaged the plane. . and the media were already alluding to suspicious circumstances. . there was no way it would ever be traced to him. If I spoke out, I’d be a mad woman, a bitter and twisted ex-wife, with a track record of trying to harm him. Not a soul would believe me and I would still be in his sights.

No, much better to go along with playing dead for a while.

I was confident that I wouldn’t be traced to the car lot in that New Jersey town, the name of which I still don’t know, simply because nobody would be looking for me there. The riskiest part would be getting into Canada, but since the press seemed to be calling me ‘Mrs Blackstone’, and I was travelling on my Primavera Phillips passport, I reckoned I’d get through without leaving a trace.

The second big consideration was what to do next. My dad and my sister would be in agony, I knew. Was it right to allow that to continue? Much as I hated it, I told myself I had to, for a while at least, if I was to keep Oz off my trail. The word ‘stoic’ could have been coined for Dad, but Dawn was flaky. If she knew I was alive, she’d never keep it to herself. . and she, Miles and Oz were still close. Then there was Tom, but at that stage I couldn’t bring myself to think about him.

Finally, I asked myself the toughest question of all. What was I going to take from the experience?

I looked back over the time since I had met Oz, and thought of the person that I’d become, that he had helped to make me. It didn’t take me long to realise I was having trouble blaming him for trying to bump me off. In his shoes, I’d have been tempted to do the same thing. Whatever happened, as the Niagara’s white water thundered down I promised myself that I would emerge from the wreckage of my life as a better person, as the daughter David and Elanore Phillips had raised, not the woman she had been for the best part of a decade.

Crossing the border wasn’t a problem. The Canadian immigration people looked at my passport and thought, ‘Tourist,’ as they took my entry card and filed it with the rest, where no American FBI investigator was ever likely to look.

I spent the night in the smallest hotel I could find in Toronto, to lessen the chances of being spotted. Next morning I went back to Union Station and bought myself a transcontinental train ticket for Vancouver. It seemed like a good place to kick off my new life, for a couple of reasons. My time with Oz, and our divorce, had left me very well fixed financially, thank you, and most of my money was stashed there, invested through a private bank. And so were some other items, in a safe-deposit box, chief among them being my two extra passports.

In the brief period when I was married to Oz, I’d applied for a passport as his wife and had managed, by a discreet lie, to hold on to the one it was supposed to replace, the one I was still using. But I’d done more than that. I’d obtained another, as Janet More, the birth name of my predecessor, the first Mrs Osbert Blackstone. She was dead, and it was before the days of biometrics, so it was easy. Why did I do it? Because I was a devious, cunning bitch, always looking for an advantage, and thought that I might find it useful some day. That was how being with that guy made me think.

I checked into a hotel in Burrard Street, and holed up in Vancouver for a week, hanging around Granville Island and Stanley Park, breakfasting in Starbucks (I like Starbucks, okay?), dining in the Sandbar, Joe Fortes and Earl’s, and reading every newspaper I could find. When I was sure that my disappearance had lost its news value, I booked a flight to Las Vegas in Jan’s name, and rented an apartment through an Internet agency. Las Vegas, you ask? Trust me: it’s one of the best places in the world to hide. The population changes all the time as the casino hotels fill up and empty, fill up and empty, weekend in, weekend out. If you need to, you can be truly anonymous there.

And so I set up my hopefully temporary home, and began to consider how I could get back into my own life, and into Tom’s. It didn’t take long for me to realise that it wouldn’t be easy. In truth, I didn’t have a clue about how I was going to do any of it.

But as it happened, six months after my ‘death’, all the subterfuge became irrelevant. I’ll never forget how I found out.

I was having lunch in my favourite bar on the Strip; as always the place was busy, full of half-pissed rednecks having fun. Most of the television monitors were showing a country-music video, but there was one that was tuned to CNN. I happened to glance at it, just as a shot of a smiling Oz appeared. I couldn’t hear what the anchorman was saying, but from the look on his face, one thing was certain: it wasn’t a good news story. I left my chilli unfinished, went straight home, and switched on the telly.

They said, after the autopsy, that it was a ruptured aorta, a time-bomb in his heart that had been waiting to happen, the same condition that had almost killed his father a few months earlier. It had caught up with him on the set of a movie, during a stunt that he had insisted on handling himself.

At that moment, I didn’t care what it was: all I knew was that the man who had tried to kill me was dead, that my unforgettable lover, my ex-husband, was dead, that Tom’s father was dead. I cried for two days, and very little of that was out of relief.

Briefly, I thought about getting a flight home to Scotland and turning up at the funeral, which I knew would take place in Anstruther, his home town. Again, it didn’t take me long to abandon that idea; it would have caused a sensation, and been desperately cruel to Susie, Oz’s widow, and to the rest of his very nice family. Also, it might just have got me arrested if it had led to someone finding out that I’d entered the US under a fraudulently obtained passport. So instead I sat tight in Vegas until I saw coverage of the send-off on Entertainment Tonight. Next day, I called my father.

At first, he didn’t believe it was me. He thought I was a malicious caller, until I told him that his middle name was Montgomery, spelled like the soldier, not the golfer, and that he had a birthmark on his shoulder in the shape of the mouse that had scared my grandmother when she was carrying him. When he was convinced, he asked me the obvious question.

‘Because, at the time, being dead seemed like my best option,’ I told him. ‘I think that’s what was meant to happen.’

Dad’s a very clever man. He knew what I was saying to him, not least because of the timing of my call. The line was silent for a few moments, and then he said, ‘When your mother was alive, I became rather used to telling her, “Primavera knows best.” I’ve always believed it too. What are you going to do now?’

‘Come home, if I may.’

Two days later, I flew back to Vancouver as Jan More. I burned her passport, very casually, in an open fire in the Sandbar restaurant, and continued my journey as Primavera Eagle Phillips. I kept the Blackstone passport, but I didn’t want to use the name at that point. Dad met me at Glasgow Airport.

On the way back to Auchterarder, I told him the story I’ve just told you, and much more too; I told him the truth about all of my life with and around Oz. He’s a very slow driver, yet I had only just finished by the time we arrived at the great false-Gothic pile that is Semple House.

He dealt with the Dawn situation, thoughtfully and very well: instead of speaking to her, he called Miles, who was in the US at the time, and told him what had happened. Two hours later my sister phoned back; by that time she had calmed down and didn’t give me too much grief over the pain I had caused them. Miles handled the inevitable American aftermath of my reappearance; he’s a powerful guy, with political contacts, and so all I had to do was sign an affidavit, describing what had happened and saying that I had left the scene in a state of shock, a statement close enough to the truth for me to live with.

My reconciliation with Tom was down to me alone; that was less than plain sailing. The newly widowed Susie went ballistic when I called her at her home beside Loch Lomond. I wondered why her reaction was so extreme until, later, she told me that Oz had been so completely shattered by my disappearance that he had barely spoken to her for the last few months of his life. I could guess why that was, but I didn’t tell her, not then at any rate.

‘I suppose you want to see Tom,’ she said, eventually.

‘I want more than that, Susie,’ I told her, as gently as I could. ‘He’s my son.’

As I spoke, I had visions of an expensive legal battle. But Susie’s a good person, through and through, better than I’ve ever been, and she’s a mother too. ‘Come and see him,’ she replied, ‘and let’s take it from there.’

We did. A month later legal custody passed to me, with the proviso that Tom would always be able to visit his half-siblings, Janet and Jonathan. He moved into Semple House with Dad and me, while I considered where our permanent home would be.

The choice, when I made it, surprised even me.

Early in our travels together, when we had only just started on the road to badness, Oz and I, nouveaux riches, pitched up by chance in a tiny village called St Martí d’Empúries, just along from the town of L’Escala, a fishing village that’s become a family holiday resort. St Martí goes back to the Greeks and Romans, and maybe even before them. It’s like a snapshot of history, and yet it has moved easily into the twenty-first century, catering for northern European tourists in summer and for Spanish weekenders and expats in winter. We were happy there, until he left me. After that I stayed on for a bit, content on my own, until he reappeared and took me back to Scotland. Of all the places I’ve ever been, St Martí is where I’ve been most at peace with myself.

I took Tom out there for a week, in early summer, before the place got too busy; Mrs Blackstone and her son, as we will always be from now on. He wasn’t quite five then, so I had no school problems in Perthshire. We stayed in a hotel near the village; it opens on to a beach and Tom thought that it was paradise. My friends in St Martí remembered me. . they never forget a face. . and welcomed me back. After a couple of days I asked a few of them if anything was for sale. Property there is never advertised; the word is put about, that’s all. Someone told me about the house, that it might be on the market, at the right price, and I bought it, there and then.

That’s a couple of years ago now. Tom’s turned seven and he goes to the local primary school; we speak English at home, but with his pals he speaks Catalan, Castellano or both, and he’s retained the French that he picked up when he was in Monaco with Oz and Susie.

He couldn’t be happier, and neither could I. . even after all that bloody drama with Frank!