The Suspect

3

The Land Rover has a top speed of forty and a tendency to oversteer into the center of the road. It looks more like a museum piece than a motorcar and people honk when they pass as if I’m driving for charity. This could be the most perfect getaway vehicle ever conceived because nobody expects a wanted man to escape so slowly.

I use the back roads to reach Lancashire. A moldy road map from the glove compartment, circa 1965, keeps me on track. I pass through villages with names like Puddinglake and Woodplumpton. On the outskirts of Blackpool, at a near-deserted petrol station, I use the bathroom to clean up. I sponge the mud from my trousers and hold them under the hand dryer before changing my shirt and washing the cuts on my hands.

The Squires Gate Hospice is fixed to a rocky headland as though rusted there by the salt air. The turrets, arched windows and slate roof look Edwardian, but the outbuildings are newer and less intimidating.

Flanked by poplar trees, the driveway curves around the front of the hospital and emerges into a parking area. I follow the signs to the palliative care ward on the ocean side. The corridors are empty and the stairways almost tidy. A black nurse with a shaved head sits behind a glass partition staring at a screen. He is playing a computer game.

“You have a patient called Bridget Aherne.”

He looks down at my knees, which are no longer the same color as the rest of my trousers.

“Are you family?”

“No. I’m a psychologist. I need to speak to her about her son.”

His eyebrows arch. “Didn’t know she had a son. She doesn’t get many visitors.”

I follow his smooth, rolling walk along the corridor, where he turns beneath the staircase and takes me through double doors leading outside. A loose gravel pathway dissects the lawn where two bored-looking nurses share a sandwich on a garden seat.

We enter a single-story annex nearer to the cliffs and emerge into a long shared ward with maybe a dozen beds, half of them empty. A skinny woman with a smooth skull is propped up on pillows. She is watching two young children who are scribbling on drawing paper at the end of her bed. Elsewhere, a one-legged woman in a yellow dress sits in a wheelchair in front of a television with a crocheted blanket on her lap.

At the far end of the ward, through two doors, are the private rooms. He doesn’t bother to knock. The room is dark. At first I don’t notice anything except the machines. The monitors and dials create the illusion of medical mastery: as though everything is possible if you calibrate the machinery and press the right buttons.

A middle-aged woman, with sunken cheeks, is lying at the center of the web of tubes and leads. She has a blond wig, pendulous breasts and tar-colored lesions on her neck. A pink chemise covers her body, with a tattered red cardigan hanging over her shoulders. A bag of solution drips along tubing that snakes in and out of her body. There are black lines around her wrists and ankles— not dark enough to be tattoos and too uniform to be bruises.

“Don’t give her any cigarettes. She can’t clear her lungs. Every time she coughs it shakes the tubes loose.”

“I don’t smoke.”

“Good for you.” He takes a cigarette from behind his ear and transfers it to his mouth. “You can find your own way back.”

The curtains are drawn. Music is coming from somewhere. It takes me a while to realize there is a radio playing softly on the bedside table, next to an empty vase and a Bible.

She’s asleep. Sedated. Morphine perhaps. A tube sticks out of her nose and another comes from somewhere near her stomach. Her face is turned toward the oxygen tank.

I lean my shoulder against the wall and rest my head.

“This place gives you the creeps,” she says, without opening her eyes.

“Yes.”

I sit down on a chair so she doesn’t have to turn her head to see me. Her eyes open slowly. Her face is whiter than the walls. We stare at each other in the semidarkness.

“Have you ever been to Maui?”

“It’s in Hawaii.”

“I know where it fucking is.” She coughs and the bed rattles. “That’s where I should be now. I should be in America. I should have been born American.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Because the Yanks know how to live. Everything is bigger and better. People laugh about it. They call them arrogant and ignorant, but the Yanks are just being honest. They eat little countries like this for breakfast and shit them out before lunch.”

“Have you ever been to America?”

She changes the subject. Her eyes are puffy and dribble has leaked from the corner of her mouth.

“Are you a doctor or a priest?”

“A psychologist.”

She laughs sarcastically. “No point getting to know me. Not unless you like funerals.”

The cancer must have struck quickly. Her body hasn’t had time to waste away. She is pale, with a neat chin, graceful neck and flaring nostrils. If it weren’t for her surroundings and the harshness of her voice, she would still be an attractive woman.

“The problem with cancer is that it doesn’t feel like cancer, you know. A head cold feels like a cold. And a broken leg feels like a broken leg. But with cancer you don’t know unless you have X-rays and scans. Except for the lump, of course. Who can forget the lump? Feel it!”

“That’s OK.”

“Don’t make a fuss. You’re a big boy. Have a feel. You’re probably wondering if they’re real. Most men do.”

Her hand shoots out and closes around my wrist. Her grip is surprisingly strong. I fight the urge to pull away. She puts my hand under her chemise. My fingers fold into the softness of her breast. “Just there. Can you feel it? It used to be the size of a pea— small and round. Now it’s the size of an orange. Six months ago it spread to my bones. Now it’s in my lungs.”

My hand is still on her breast. She brushes it over the nipple, which hardens under my palm. “You can fuck me if you like.” She’s serious. “I’d like to feel something other than this… this decay.”

The look of pity on my face infuriates her. She thrusts my hand away and wraps her cardigan tightly around her chest. She won’t look at me.

“I need to ask you a few questions.”

“Forget it! I don’t need any of your buck-up-now speeches. I’m not in denial and I’ve stopped making bargains with God…”

“I’m here about Bobby.”

“What about him?”

I haven’t planned what I’m going to ask her. I’m not even sure what I’m looking for.

“When was the last time you saw him?”

“Six, maybe seven years ago. He was always in trouble. Wouldn’t listen to anyone. Not me, anyway. Give a kid the best years of your life and he’ll always be ungrateful.” Her sentences are ragged and short. “So what has he done now?”

“He’s been convicted of a serious assault. He kicked a woman unconscious.”

“A girlfriend?”

“No, a stranger.”

Her features soften. “You’ve talked to him. How is he?”

“He’s angry.”

She sighs. “I used to think they gave me the wrong baby at the hospital. It didn’t feel like mine. He looked like his father, which was a shame. I couldn’t see any of me in him, except his eyes. He had two left feet and a round loaf of a face. He could never keep anything clean. He had to put his hands into things, open them up, find out how they worked. He once ruined a perfectly good radio and leaked battery acid all over my best rug. Just like his father…”

She doesn’t finish the statement, but starts again. “I never felt what a mother is supposed to feel. I guess I’m not maternal, but that doesn’t make me cold, does it? I didn’t want to get pregnant and I didn’t want to inherit a stepson. I was only twenty-one for Christ’s sake!”

She arches a pencil-thin eyebrow. “You’re itching to get inside my head, aren’t you? Not many people are interested in what someone else is thinking or what they have to say. Sometimes people act like they’re listening, when really they’re waiting for their turn, or getting ready to jump in. What are you waiting to say, Mr. Freud?”

“I’m trying to understand.”

“Lenny was like that: Always asking questions, wanting to know where I was going and when I was coming home.” She mimics his pleading voice. “‘Who are you with, petal? Please, come home. I’ll wait up for you.’ It was so pathetic! No wonder I got to thinking is this the best I can do. I wasn’t going to lie next to his sweaty back for the rest of my life.”

“He committed suicide.”

“I didn’t think he had it in him.”

“Do you know why?”

She doesn’t seem to hear me. Instead she stares at the curtains. The window must look directly over the ocean.

“You don’t like the view?”

She shrugs. “There’s a rumor going around that they don’t bother burying us. They throw us off the cliff instead.”

“What about your husband?”

She doesn’t look at me. “He called himself an inventor. What a joke! Do you know that if he made any money— fat chance of that— he was going to give it away? ‘To enrich the world,’ he said. That’s what he was like, always rambling on about empowering the workers and the proletariat revolution, making speeches and moralizing. Communists don’t believe in heaven or hell. Where do you think he is?”

“I’m not a religious person.”

“But do you think he might have gone somewhere?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

Her armor of indifference shows a weakness. “Maybe we’re all in hell and we just don’t realize it.” She pauses and half closes her eyes. “I wanted a divorce. He said no. I told him to get himself a girlfriend. He wouldn’t let me go. People say I’m cold, but I feel more than they do. I knew how to find pleasure. I knew how to use what I was given. Does that make me a slut? Some people spend their entire lives in denial or making other people happy or collecting points they think can be redeemed in the next life. Not me.”

“You accused your husband of sexually abusing Bobby.”

She shrugs. “I just loaded the gun. I didn’t fire it. People like you did that. Doctors, social workers, schoolteachers, lawyers, do-gooders…”

“Did we get it wrong?”

“The judge didn’t think so.”

“What do you think?”

“I think that sometimes you can forget what the truth is if you hear a lie often enough.” She reaches up and pushes the buzzer above her head.

I can’t leave yet. “Why does your son hate you?”

“We all end up hating our parents.”

“You feel guilty.”

She clenches her fists and laughs hoarsely. A chrome stand holding a morphine drip swings back and forth. “I’m forty-three years old and I’m dying. I’m paying the price for anything I’ve done. Can you say the same?”

The nurse arrives looking pissed off at being summoned. One of the monitor leads has come loose. Bridget holds up her arm to have it reconnected. In the same motion she dismissively waves her hand. The conversation is over.

It has grown dark outside. I follow the path lights between the trees until I reach the car park. Taking the thermos from the bag, I swig from it greedily. The whiskey tastes fiery and warm. I want to keep drinking until I can’t feel the cold or notice my arm trembling.