Chameleon's Shadow

Eight

DEPRIVED OF MOST of his cash by Jackson, Acland stopped at an ATM on the way to the tube station. He pulled his wallet from his back pocket and flipped it open to retrieve his Switch, but as soon as he thumbed the plastic from its slot, he noticed that Robert Willis’s business card was in the wrong place. It should have been tucked behind the American Express but now it was where the Switch had been.

He had a mental picture of Jackson going through his wallet, looking for someone to phone, and he knew she’d have found a psychiatrist irresistible. What had Willis told her? What had she told Willis? ‘Your patient’s showing psychopathic tendencies, Doctor.’ ‘Did you warn him that injuries to the head can inhibit moral sense?’ ‘Did you know he was dysfunctional when you gave him the all clear?’

Acland wondered why he’d kept Willis’s card, except that it was a link, however tenuous, with a time when he was still in the army. Perhaps, too, he had hoped to leave an upbeat message one day that everything had worked out fine, as if somewhere in his subconscious the psychiatrist’s good opinion mattered to him. Instead, Willis now knew that every gloomy prediction he’d made had come true. Acland was a loner. He was suspicious to the point of paranoia. And the recurring pains in his head were making him unstable.

Someone shifted impatiently in the rapidly building queue behind him and he went through the process of inserting the card and tapping in his PIN. He pictured Willis phoning his parents, or giving their number to Jackson, and a sweat of humiliation broke out in the small of his back. Did they know their son had run amok in a London pub? Christ!

He felt a prod in his back. ‘Are you planning on taking that money, son, or are you just gonna look at it?’

Acland drew in a breath through his nose and resisted the impulse to round on the man and punch him in the face. With a muttered apology, he tugged the wad of twenties out of the ATM’s metal grip, stuffed them into his wallet and turned away.

Another prod. ‘You’ve forgotten your card.’

It might have evolved into a rerun of the previous evening if the creaky voice hadn’t so clearly belonged to an old man. Nevertheless, Acland swung round and grabbed an arthritic finger before it could jab him again. ‘Don’t do that,’ he grated, staring into a pair of rheumy eyes.

Indignantly, the eighty-something wrestled himself free. ‘I was trying to do you a favour, mate, but go ahead . . . leave the card. Do you think I care if you’re robbed of all your savings?’

‘I don’t like people touching me.’

The pensioner wasn’t easily intimidated. ‘Then stick a sign on your back. There’s not many of us gonna realize you’re a bad-tempered bastard if we’re standing behind you. A man’s gotta see your face for that.’

Acland took up a position across the road in the shadow of a plane tree. He was prepared for a long wait – even welcomed a period of calm in the hope his anger might dissipate – but, in the event, he abandoned his stake-out after fifteen minutes. The old man had been right. His temper was evil. When the attack happened there was no sympathy in his heart, just an increase of frustrated fury. Now what? he thought in unfeeling calculation. Now what?

Back in his flat, the lower one of two in a converted Victorian terraced house, he tore up Willis’s card and, for good measure,

burned the pieces in an ashtray. He followed that by going into the pint-sized garden that came with the apartment and lighting a ceremonial bonfire of anything that connected him to the army

– commission papers, regimental documents, pay slips, medical board reports. He would have tossed his old fatigues on to the flames as well if the woman above him hadn’t shouted out of her window that what he was doing was illegal.

Taking breaths to compose himself, Acland raised his head to look at her, shielding his eye with one hand. He’d avoided her as far as possible, put off by her excessive show of friendliness on the day he took over the lease, and the way she reminded him of Jen. He could have tolerated any other tenant, but not a woman who demanded attention.

She’d arrived at his door with a bottle of wine, entered without invitation, shortened his name to Charlie and insisted that he call her by her nickname, Kitten. In short order, he learned that she was a thirty-five-year-old divorcee with two children, that her ex was a two-timing bastard, that she was lonely, that she thought Charlie’s eyepatch was ‘cute’ and that she was always up for a night out as long as somebody else paid.

After an hour of making an effort to be polite – he was about to spend six months with this woman as a neighbour – Acland’s responses became increasingly monosyllabic. There was nothing about her that attracted him. She even looked like Jen. Blonde, vacuously pretty with large mascaraed eyes, and a body like a beanpole, clad in tight jeans and a cropped top. She drank most of the bottle, but couldn’t hold the alcohol and veered between vicious remarks about her ex’s new wife and clumsy, slurred attempts to tell Charlie she found him attractive. When she asked him coyly if she was outstaying her welcome, he delivered a curt yes and her mask slipped abruptly.

Playful flirting gave way to hissing antagonism. She was only trying to be friendly. What sort of woman did he think she was? Acland listened to her without comment, wondering what she’d expected from him. Sex? Admiration? Whichever, he turned from being ‘cute’ to ‘sick’ in the time it took her to stumble to his door.

Her subsequent spite took the form of petty nuisances – intrusive noise from upstairs, litter thrown into the garden or in front of his door, watching to see when he left and when he came in. On the outside, he presented a frigid indifference; on the inside her behaviour ate away at the fragile respect he still had for her sex. The whole experience was a dangerously negative one for a man as alienated as Acland. In the end, her only achievement was to reinforce his distrust of women.

He saw a movement in the upstairs window of the next-door house and shifted his gaze from Kitten to their elderly neighbour. It was hard to tell from the man’s disapproving expression whether his grievance was with the bonfire or with Kitten’s colourful language about Acland’s criminal behaviour.

‘You’re a fucking moron!’ Kitten finished angrily. ‘I’ll call the police if you don’t put that bloody thing out now.’

Behind her, Acland caught a glimpse of a child’s anxious face. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘It’s not illegal, it’s just not encouraged in case people like you complain. The police have better things to do than explain to a screeching harridan that she’s got her facts wrong.’ He saw the child pluck at her sleeve, then jump away to avoid a vicious jab from her elbow.

‘It’s the summer, for Christ’s sake,’ she hissed. ‘Do you know what the temperature is? We’ll all go up if a spark hits the fence. Can’t you see that? Or are you blind in both fucking eyes?’

Acland looked at the fire. ‘It’s under control,’ he murmured, using his foot to nudge the remains of a cardboard folder towards the dying flames.

‘No, it’s not. My baby’s choking on the smoke. Do you want me to sue you when he gets asthma? You’re so damn selfish. Don’t they teach you about climate change in the army?’

‘There’d be no point. You don’t count pollutants when an oil well blows up, you just count the corpses. Have you ever seen a body burned to the bone while it’s still alive? The stink’s so bad you can’t go within ten yards without breathing apparatus. All you can do is watch the poor bastard die . . . and that’s not pretty.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ she said angrily. ‘I don’t want my kids having nightmares.’

‘Then don’t pretend one little fire in London does more damage than what’s going on in Iraq and Afghanistan. Every time a Tornado takes off the ozone layer takes another hit.’ He watched his army medical card melt and curl. ‘War destroys everything. Better your children understand that now. It’ll give them a chance to enjoy their lives before the world goes up in flames.’

But she wasn’t interested in philosophy. ‘Don’t you tell me how to raise my kids. At least they don’t run around the streets half-naked and shout their heads off in the middle of the fucking night. You’re a headcase. It wouldn’t surprise me if you’re the gay killer. You’re psycho enough for it.’

Acland hadn’t realized that his terrifying awakenings from nightmares were loud enough to carry to the floor above. He squinted up at her again. ‘What gay killer?’

‘Don’t pretend you don’t know.’

He eyed her for a moment, then trod out the ashes with his shoe. ‘You should see a psychiatrist,’ he said. ‘Someone ought to tell you that the reason men don’t want to have sex with you isn’t because they’re gay. It’s because you’re a complete turn-off. Your husband proved that by leaving.’

‘Bastard!’ She threw something at him – a china ornament – but it missed and fell with a thud into some weeds by the fence. ‘You don’t know anything about me.’

Acland’s fingers itched to retrieve the missile and launch it back again – there was no way he would miss – but he held himself in check. ‘I know enough not to want to know any more,’ he said with sudden resolve, heading towards his french windows. ‘I’m out of here as soon as I’ve packed my stuff.’

*

He rued his spur-of-the-moment decision as soon as he was back inside. With five months of his tenancy left he would be paying rent on an empty space until the agents could be bothered to advertise for another occupant. But there was no going back on it. The bitch upstairs would have a field day if he changed his mind.

In any case, he knew he couldn’t go on like this. Something had to change. At times the pains in his head were unbearable.

He resisted any impulse to take up Jackson’s offer of a bed. If he thought Kitten would gloat over a change of mind, he could just imagine what Jackson would say if he crawled back in under twenty-four hours with his tail between his legs. He was more inclined to listen to Robert Willis’s voice inside his head, even if burning the card had been an attempt to cut his ties with the man.

‘We can all walk out, Charles – it’s the fashionable thing to do these days – it’s asking to be let back in that takes courage.’

On another spur-of-the-moment decision, he called a cab and gave the driver the name of the road that Willis’s colleague, Susan Campbell, lived in. ‘Which number, mate?’

‘I can’t remember. Just go slowly when we get there. I’ll recognize the front door when I see it.’

‘You’re the boss.’

Twenty minutes later, and after three passes up and down the street, the cabbie drew into a parking space and turned round. His expression was wary, as if he’d begun to suspect that his passenger’s disfigured face was a reflection of something warped inside. ‘We can do this all afternoon, mate, but the meter’s ticking and I need some proof that you can pay. I reckon you’re looking for somewhere to doss . . . but that somewhere ain’t gonna be this cab.’

With a sigh, Acland took out his wallet. ‘I know which house it is. I just don’t know if I want to go in,’ he said, sorting the fare.

The driver grew more amenable at the sight of cash. ‘I feel the same every time I visit the ex’s place to take my kids out.’

Acland handed over a twenty-pound note. ‘I don’t suppose you know of a cheap hotel somewhere? I don’t care which part of London it’s in.’

‘How cheap?’

‘Thirty quid a night.’

The cabbie laughed. ‘You’ve gotta be joking. It’s the height of the tourist season. You could get lucky on a last-minute deal somewhere, but it’ll cost you an arm and a leg to drive around looking for it. If you’ve a laptop, you might find something on the internet, but I wouldn’t bet on it. London’s expensive.’

‘What about a pub?’

‘Same problem.’ The man handed over the change. ‘I’d stick it out here for a night if I were you and have a rethink in the morning. Cheers.’ He pocketed the tip Acland gave him and eyed him sympathetically. ‘Why don’t want you want to go in? What’s waiting on the other side?’

‘Questions,’ said Acland wryly, opening the door and backing out with his kitbag.

‘And you won’t have an answer for any of them, eh? Or not ones that you want to give. Mother?’

‘Close enough.’

‘That’s the difference between the sexes, mate. Blokes are happy to hold up their hands and take a caning . . . women insist on examining the bloody entrails. If you don’t believe me, talk to my ex-missus. She rips my guts out every time I see her.’ He drew away from the kerb with a hand raised in farewell.

Acland slung the kitbag over his shoulder and walked the fifty yards to Susan Campbell’s house. ‘You said come back any time,’ he reminded her when she opened the door. ‘Did you mean it?’

She looked more like a charlady than a psychiatrist. Her grey hair was piled on top of her head with large red clip and a cigarette dangled from the side of her mouth. It was a poor indication of what she was really like. Acland knew from his previous stay that the untidy, garrulous image she projected hid a genuine toughness underneath.

‘Are you safe to let in?’

‘As safe as I was before.’

‘Mm. Except you seem to make a habit of attacking people just before you come to me.’ She assessed him briefly, then pulled the door wide. ‘I’ve been talking about you on the phone.’

‘I thought you might have been.’ He followed her into the corridor. ‘News seems to travel faster round the National Health Service than it does round the army. What did the doc say?’

Susan led him past her sitting room, where a couple of paying guests were watching television, and showed him into the kitchen. She stubbed out her butt in an over-full ashtray on the table. ‘That you punched an inoffensive, overweight Muslim who’s never lifted anything heavier than a pen all his life.’

‘I damn nearly killed him.’

‘Is that why you came? Are you worried you’re going to do it again?’

‘Maybe.’

Susan pulled out a chair and pointed to it. ‘Sit down. I’ll make you a cup of tea.’ She busied herself with a kettle. ‘What other reasons brought you here?’

Acland lowered himself on to the seat. ‘I had to leave my flat and I couldn’t think of anywhere else to go. It’ll only be for one night. I’ll look for a new place tomorrow.’

‘What happened at the flat?’

‘Nothing. I just don’t like the woman upstairs.’

Susan poured boiling water on to a tea bag and poked it with a spoon. ‘Did you have a fight with her?’

‘Only a verbal one. She takes it personally if a man doesn’t want to sleep with her.’

Susan took what she could from this answer. ‘It’s difficult when people won’t take no for an answer.’

‘Right.’ He thanked her for the mug of tea she handed him, but placed it on the table as if he wasn’t interested in it. ‘What else did the doc say?’

‘That you’re dangerously underweight for your height.’

‘How would he know? I haven’t seen him for weeks.’ Acland watched her for a moment. ‘You should tell him not to believe everything Jackson told him. The woman’s the size of whale. She probably thinks everyone’s dangerously underweight compared with her.’

Susan tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and went on as if she hadn’t heard. ‘That you’re under-employed and have too much time on your hands . . . that you think too much and your thoughts are misdirected . . . that someone should give you a kick up the arse and remind you that you’re a functioning individual.’ She opened her fridge and peered at the contents. ‘I’m a bit short on food at the moment but I can rustle up a cheese sandwich. How does that sound?’

‘Bloody awful,’ he said rudely. ‘Which doc have you been talking to?’

‘Both of them.’

‘What about patient confidentiality?’

‘Quite unbreached. All three of us have treated you at one time or another.’ She took a slab of Cheddar off the shelf and retrieved some bread from an earthenware crock. ‘You can’t run without eating, Charles. It’s elementary mechanics. You’ll end up badly malnourished if you do. How much weight have you lost since you left hospital?’

‘I don’t know. There weren’t any scales in the flat.’

She took a knife from a drawer and cut into the bread. ‘Vehicles don’t function too well when their engines overheat either, so why aren’t you trying to manage your migraines instead of allowing them to control you?’

‘They don’t control me. I’ve worked out a way to live with them.’

‘So what went wrong last night?’

‘It wasn’t a migraine that caused the fight . . . it was a stupid loud-mouthed bastard poking me in the shoulder. And it’s not just Muslims either. An old white guy kept sticking his finger into me this morning when I was trying to get some money out of the bank and I damn near clocked him one as well. I don’t like people touching me.’

‘So I gathered the last time you were here.’ She smiled slightly. ‘But I didn’t ask you what made you lose your temper, Charles, I asked you what went wrong with your method of coping with pain. It’s one thing to say you live with migraine, quite another to suffer such a debilitating episode in public that a doctor has to intervene with medication.’

‘It was a one-off.7 If I’d been allowed to drink my pint in peace I’d have been OK.’

‘I doubt it. Alcohol on an empty stomach is one of the primary triggers . . . as is intense exercise without regular fluid intake . . . prolonged guilt-ridden stress . . . sleep patterns disrupted by nightmares . . . a refusal to take medication. Do you want me to go on?’

‘No.’ He watched in silence as she prepared the sandwiches for him. ‘I’ve had enough lectures to last a lifetime,’ he said with sudden irritation. ‘Everyone I meet has an opinion . . . even the cabbies.’

Susan chuckled. ‘And what were you expecting from me? A hug? You’d have turned catatonic if I’d even tried.’ She wagged a butter knife at him. ‘You knew perfectly well what you were going to get . . . you told Robert I was bossy and interfering. You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t wanted a lecture.’

Acland cracked his finger joints. ‘Go on, then,’ he said with grudging amusement. ‘I’m ready. Give me your best bollocking.’

‘Nn-nn.’ She shook her head as she pushed the plate of sandwiches towards him. ‘I’m just the middleman. You need medical attention, Charles. When you’ve eaten those, I’ll call a taxi and take you to a doctor.’

He eyed her suspiciously. ‘I’d rather stay with you.’

‘It’s a Friday night in August, Charles. All my beds are taken for the weekend.’

‘Which doctor?’

‘How many do you know in London?’