Splinter

15

Non-acceptance. Suppression. Denial.

Tottering feebly down the stairs, he wondered whether hallucinations were yet another typical concomitant of the early phase of the grieving process. Then he remembered reading an article which stated that this phase was identical, surprisingly enough, to the process of dying. For the first few weeks, a terminally ill person resembles someone recently bereaved in refusing to accept the awful truth.

Suppression. Denial. Oblivion…?

Marc clung to the banisters. Not just because he felt faint, but because he wanted to feel the cool wood beneath his fingers. It felt damp at first, damp and rather unpleasant, like the touch of something dead, but at least he was feeling something.

I’m alive. I may be losing my mind, but I’m alive.

The pain in his side was another sure sign. He’d developed a stitch after only a few steps. But it didn’t hurt half as much as the mental agony inflicted on him by Sandra’s cold, apprehensive expression.

She didn’t recognize me.

If it was her.

Still holding on to the banisters, Marc dragged himself further down the stairs. He wondered if his brain was playing tricks on him. Was he having a dream, from which he had only to wake up? If so, what did this dream signify? Why was there a different name on the door and why couldn’t he get into his own flat? Why did his damned toes still hurt where Sandra had squashed them in the door?

He paused somewhere between the second and first floors. His eye had lighted on a pair of children’s boots that looked as if they’d been left out for Santa Claus to fill. They belonged to the only person apart from the caretaker with whom he’d exchanged a few words since moving in. At weekends, whenever it wasn’t raining, Emily would set up her little flea market in the yard and sell objects that had value only in the eyes of a six-year-old girl. Although Marc never needed any of them, he had quickly become her best customer. He simply couldn’t walk past her stall without buying a marble, a Jungle Book pencil sharpener or a bunch of dried flowers. For a moment he wondered whether to ring her mother’s doorbell.

‘Sorry to trouble you. I know it sounds weird and you don’t know me, but please could you wake Emily up? I’d like her to reassure my late wife that I really do live here, so she’ll let me into my flat.’

He gave a wry laugh, realizing for the first time why so many people sit on park benches talking to themselves. Then his wristwatch buzzed another reminder to take his pills. Pills that were waiting for him in his bathroom cabinet, in a flat to which he was denied admission because the wife he’d thought dead had failed to recognize him and wouldn’t let him in.

For the moment, he decided to make for his car. Since crashing Sandra’s car he’d driven the silver Mini only once, when going to have his dressing changed. His grief that day had been so overwhelming, he had been afraid of breaking down in the Underground. After that he’d kept a spare packet of pills in the glove compartment.

‘That’s what I’ll do,’ Marc said aloud, still talking to himself. As soon as he’d cured his headache he would make a plan. Perhaps he really was in the process of losing his mind. Perhaps grief had driven him mad. But as long as he could put one foot before the other, and as long as he was capable of reflecting on the absurdity of the situation, he wouldn’t do anything rash.

His resolution was short-lived. It expired the moment he emerged from his block of flats into the rain-laden November wind and saw at a glance that his silver Mini was no longer in the parking bay. Nor were any of the other cars that were usually parked there. Flapping in the wind in their place were several rusty ‘No Parking’ signs he’d failed to notice earlier on, when talking to the nurse.

He sucked in lungfuls of cold air. It smelt of damp leaves and the rubbish regurgitated by flooded sewers. To calm his trembling fingers, he knelt beside the kerb and tied his shoelaces. At that moment a police van turned the corner and drove slowly along the cobbled street. Its uniformed occupants eyed him suspiciously as they crawled past at walking pace.

Marc rose to his feet. He wondered briefly whether to flag them down but missed his chance. The polive van was already turning the corner.

He sprinted after it to the next intersection, running faster and faster. Having made one circuit of the block, although he knew for certain he hadn’t parked his car in any of the side streets, he finally came to a breathless halt outside the entrance to the flats and looked up. On the third floor – where the room with all the boxes he still hadn’t unpacked was situated, where his pictures were stacked on the laminated floor and his empty aquarium served as a rubbish bin – a figure dodged back behind the curtain. Someone with long fair hair.

Okay, enough of this nonsense.

Marc felt in his pocket and extracted his mobile from between the application form and an empty strip of pills. He hadn’t often had to ask for help in his life, but he definitely couldn’t cope on his own, not now.

I’ll call my flat first, to see if Sandra picks up. Then Constantin. Even the police, perhaps…

‘Shit, what’s this?’ Marc was talking to himself again. He shut the mobile and reopened it. He heard the familiar beep, ran his thumb over the familiar scratch on the display and saw his screensaver, with its familiar cloudy background. But the mobile felt odd for all that.

Nothing.

Not a single entry. He couldn’t call a soul. His address book had been entirely deleted.