Tuesday's Gone

Seven

‘You’re joking.’ Reuben sat back in his chair, looking delighted.

Frieda scowled. ‘I’m just going to spend a few minutes with her.’

‘It’s the thin end of the wedge.’

‘I don’t think so. Karlsson said he wanted me to see if I could make sense of what she was saying.’

‘You told me you were never going to get involved with police work again, under any circumstances.’

‘I know. And I’m not going to. Don’t look at me like that.’

‘Like what?’

‘As if you know me better than I know myself. It’s irritating. I hope you don’t look at your patients like that.’

‘I know you’re intrigued.’

Frieda was about to protest, but stopped herself because, of course, Reuben was right. ‘Perhaps I should just have said no,’ she said slowly. ‘I thought I was going to, and then I heard myself agreeing.’

They were sitting in Reuben’s office at the clinic, where Frieda worked part-time and on whose board she sat. The Warehouse had been Reuben’s creation and had made him famous as a therapist. Frieda still hadn’t got used to the changed appearance of his room. For years – ever since she had known him when he was her mentor and she a young student – Reuben had worked in chaos, papers strewn everywhere, piles of books collapsing around his chair, ashtrays and plant pots overflowing with half-smoked cigarettes. Now everything was in a state of determined order: there was an in-tray with a few papers in it, the books were on their shelves, there wasn’t a cigarette stub in sight. And Reuben himself had changed as well. Gone was the look of an ageing rock star. Now he was wearing a plain navy suit over a white shirt, his face was shaved, his greying hair was no longer down to his collar. He looked trim: a few months ago he had shocked everyone by joining a gym. Worse still, he went there every morning before work. Frieda had noticed that his suit trousers had to be held up with a belt. What was more, he ate green salads at lunch and carried a bottle of water around with him from which every so often he would ostentatiously drink. She couldn’t help feeling he was playing a part and that he was pleased with the impression he was creating.

‘There’s another thing,’ she said.

‘Go on.’

‘I had a strange idea – no, to call it an idea is to make it sound more definite than it actually was. A sensation, perhaps. When Carrie told me how Alan had changed, and then disappeared out of her life.’

‘And?’ Reuben spoke after a long pause.

Frieda frowned. ‘It was as though I’d walked into a shadow. You know, when you’re suddenly cold, even on a hot day. It’s probably nothing. Forget I said anything. When’s Josef back?’

Josef was their friend, a builder from Ukraine who had quite literally fallen into Frieda’s life just over a year ago when he had crashed through the ceiling into her consulting room. He had ended up living with Reuben, when Reuben was going though what he now called, rather proudly, his depressive breakdown. Josef had become the tenant who paid no rent but mended the boiler and fitted a new kitchen, made endless pots of tea and poured shots of vodka whenever there was a crisis. He had never left, until a few weeks ago, when he had returned to his homeland to see his wife and children for Christmas.

‘He’s probably snowed in. I looked up Kiev online the other day. It was about minus thirty. The real answer is: I don’t know. Maybe never.’

‘Never?’ She was surprised by the dismay she felt.

‘He said he was coming back. His things – not that he owns much – are still in his room. His van’s parked in my drive, with a flat battery so I can’t even move it to make way for my own car. A couple of young women have knocked at my door asking for him, so they must think he’s coming back. But he’s been gone for six weeks now. It’s where his family are, after all. He misses them, in his own way.’

‘I know.’

‘I thought you would have heard from him.’

‘I did get a postcard recently, but he sent it weeks ago. He hadn’t put the postcode on.’

‘What did he say?’

Frieda smiled. ‘It said, “Remember your friend Josef.”’ She stood up. ‘I should go. They’re sending a car to collect me.’

‘Be careful.’

‘She’s not dangerous. She’s just disturbed.’

‘I’m not worried about her. I’m worried about you. Beware of slippery slopes.’

‘Thin ends of wedges, slippery slopes – you’ll be warning me to look before I leap next.’

‘I’ll remind you of this conversation.’

Frieda and Karlsson walked together up the long corridor. An artist had been brought in to brighten up the forbidding stretch of windowless wall. Every so often they passed a mini-landscape in primary colours, a painting of a bridge over a blue river, or a green hill with miniature figures at its domed summit. At a picture of an oversized bird with feverishly bright feathers and a cruel turquoise eye, which Frieda thought would disturb the calmest patient, they went through double doors into another broader corridor. Although it was the middle of the day, it was eerily quiet. An orderly walked past and his shoes creaked in the silence. Trolleys and wheelchairs stood by the walls. An old woman came towards them on a Zimmer frame. She was tiny, like a weak child, and moved with infinite slowness, rocking back and forward on the rubber-tipped legs of the frame, going almost nowhere. They stood to one side and let her pass, but she didn’t look up. They could see her lips moving.

‘It’s just to the left here.’ Karlsson’s voice sounded too loud and he winced.

Pushing open the door, they entered a ward of eight beds. The windows looked out on to a patch of garden, which was in need of tending. The damp uncut grass and the weeds in the borders gave the place an abandoned air. Several of the patients in the ward seemed to be asleep, just motionless blanketed humps in their beds, but one was sitting in her chair and crying steadily in a high pitch, rubbing her small dry hands together. She looked young and would have been pretty but for the burn marks all over her face. Another, with a homely grey bun and wearing a Victorian nightdress buttoned up to her neat chin, was doing a jigsaw puzzle. She looked up and smiled at them coyly. There was a smell of fish and urine in the air. The nurse at the desk recognized Karlsson and gave him a nod.

‘How is she today?’ he asked.

‘She’s on her new drug regime and she had a quieter night. But she wants her things back. She keeps looking for them.’

The striped curtain had been drawn around Michelle Doyce’s bed. Karlsson drew it back slightly and gestured for Frieda to step inside. Michelle was sitting up in her bed, very straight. She was wearing a beige hospital gown, and her hair was brushed and tied into two pigtails, like a schoolgirl. Frieda, looking at her, thought that her face was strangely indeterminate, as if it lacked a clear outline: she was like a watercolour of diluted layers – her skin was pink but had a faint tinge of yellow; her hair was neither grey nor brown; her eyes had a curious opacity; even her gestures were vague, like those of a blind woman who feared she might knock against something.

‘Hello, Michelle. My name’s Frieda Klein. Is it all right if I sit here?’ She gestured to the metal-framed chair by the side of the bed.

‘That’s for my friend.’ Her voice was soft and hoarse, as though it had gone rusty through lack of use.

‘That’s all right, then. I can stand.’

‘The bed is empty.’

‘Can I sit on it? I don’t want to crowd you.’

‘Am I in bed?’

‘Yes, you’re in bed. You’re in hospital.’

‘Yes,’ said Michelle. ‘I can’t get home.’

‘Where is your home, Michelle?’

‘Never.’

‘You don’t have a home?’

‘I try to make it nice. All my things. Then maybe he won’t go away again. He’ll stay.’

Frieda remembered what Karlsson had told her about Michelle’s compulsive collecting – her bottles and nail clippings, all neatly ordered. Perhaps she had been trying to make the drab room in a run-down house in Deptford into a home, filling it with the only possessions she could lay her hands on – all the detritus of other people’s lives. Maybe she had been trying to fill the emptiness of her days with the comfort of things.

‘Who is it that you want to stay?’ she asked.

Michelle looked at Frieda blindly, then abruptly lay down flat in the bed.

‘Sit beside me,’ she said. Her eyes stared up at the ceiling, where strip lights flickered.

Frieda sat. ‘Do you remember why you’re here, Michelle, what happened?’

‘I’m going to the sea.’

‘She keeps going on about the sea, and the river,’ said Karlsson.

Frieda looked round at him. ‘Don’t talk about Michelle as if she isn’t here,’ she said. ‘Sorry, Michelle, you were saying about the sea.’

The woman who was wailing in the ward gave a sudden shriek, and then another.

‘Lonely, lonely, lonely,’ said Michelle. ‘Not for them, though.’

‘For who?’

‘They come to be near again. Like he did. Admirable.’ The unexpected syllables came out of her mouth like stones. She looked surprised. ‘That isn’t the right word. Not a patch on it.’

‘The man who was on your sofa …’

‘Did you meet him?’

‘How did you know him?’

She looked puzzled. ‘Drakes on the river,’ she said, in her rusty voice. ‘He never left me. Not like the others.’

She held out her roughened hand; Frieda hesitated, then took it. Outside the curtains, a nurse was talking in a brisk voice to the weeping woman.

‘Never left,’ repeated Michelle.

‘Did he have a name?’

Michelle stared at her, then down at their two clasped hands, Frieda’s clean and smooth, the hands of a professional woman, Michelle’s calloused and scarred, with broken nails.

‘Did you notice his hands?’ Frieda asked, following Michelle’s gaze.

‘I kissed it where it hurt.’

‘His finger?’

‘I said, “There there, there there.”’

‘Did he talk to you?’

‘I gave him tea. I welcomed him. I said to him, “My home is your home,” and then I asked him not to go away, I said “please” at the start of the sentence and at the end as well. Everyone leaves because they’re not really here. That’s the secret no one else understands. The world goes on and on with nothing to get in its way, just the empty world and then the empty sea. You can feel the wind that comes all the way from the beginning, and then there’s the moon looking at you and it takes a hundred hundred years to see. You want a final resting place. Like him.’

‘You mean like the man on your sofa?’

‘He just needs feeding up. I can do that.’

‘Was there an accident?’

‘I cleared that away. I told him it didn’t matter at all and he mustn’t be embarrassed. It happens to the best of us. I like to help people and give them things so they might want to stay. Wash their clothes and comb their hair. Sharing is caring. A problem halved. I could even give him some of my things, if he wanted to stay.’

‘Did something happen when he was with you, Michelle?’

‘He rested and I tended him.’

‘His neck was hurt.’

‘Poor love. He was so uncomfortable until I cleaned him up and made him better.’

‘Where did you meet him?’

‘Well, now. Dreaming all the while and then catching fish and then, of course, it was the one who never came home alive.’

‘This is getting us nowhere,’ Karlsson said, from the end of the bed.

‘Michelle.’ Frieda’s voice was quiet. ‘I know that the world is a scary and a lonely place. But you can speak to me. Sometimes talking makes things a little bit better.’

‘Words,’ said Michelle.

‘Yes. Words.’

‘Sticks and stones. I pick them up.’ Michelle stroked the back of Frieda’s hand. ‘You’ve got a nice face and so I’m going to tell you. His name was Ducks. His name was My Dear. You see?’

‘Thank you.’ Frieda waited a few seconds, then stood up and tried to pull away her hand. ‘I must go now.’

‘Will you come again?’

‘I don’t think that’s a good idea,’ said Karlsson.

‘Yes,’ said Frieda.