Page 78 of The Man Who Didn't Call
Chapter Forty-Two
Several hours later I’m free.
I walk through an evening softened by misting rain, humming some tune or other. Mostly, I’m on footpaths, but from time to time I take a lane. Damp earth, damp tarmac, damp leaves. Damp Eddie. From time to time droplets fall from the edge of my hood.
I kick a stone along in front of me and think about the session with Mum today. Based on Derek’s recent reports, Arun wants to tweak her medication, which I think is a good idea. It hadn’t escaped my notice that she was sliding into paranoia – at first I’d thought it was perhaps just a temporary reaction to my absence, but Derek said he’d noticed warning signs before I’d gone away.
I learned many years ago that miracles don’t happen, so I’m not expecting a monumental change, but with a bit of luck Arun’s new cocktail will arrest a downward spiral and avert a crisis, and that’s more than good enough for me. No matter how fantastic her mental health team are, how brilliant the research, how efficacious the treatments, they can’t transplant Mum’s brain.
The best thing was that she came away from the meeting in relatively good spirits: so good, in fact, that I persuaded her to go for tea and cake in Cheltenham. She had a largeslice of flapjack and only suspected one man of plotting to murder her. She even managed to laugh at herself.
When I dropped her off so I could get back to the workshop, she told me I was the best and handsomest man on earth and that she was more proud of me than she could ever say.
So that was nice.
Later, Derek called me. ‘How are you doing?’ he asked.
I told him: ‘Fine.’
‘Sure?’
He said that I had looked exhausted. ‘Remember, I’m always here if you’re struggling, Eddie.’
Half an hour later I reach Bisley and the heavens open. ‘Pleasant,’ I remark to a crow on a post. It flies off, presumably to somewhere nicer, and I feel a touch of envy. Mum might be heading out of danger, for now, but nothing about my life has changed. I’m not free, and I can’t have Sarah. And nothing Derek can do for me – no strings he can pull within the mental health services – can change that.
‘Right, Ed,’ says Alan, a few minutes later. He offers me the most severe expression he has, which is not at all severe. ‘I’m afraid this isn’t good enough.’ Alan is one of the gentlest, warmest people I’ve ever met. Tonight he smells of strawberries and sourness, and his jumper is covered in pink stains. Lily had a tantrum involving strawberry yoghurt when he told her he couldn’t read her bedtime story.
I grin at him, although I can’t remember a time I felt less jolly. ‘I know. Just give me another week or two to get over the business with . . .’
I can’t say her name.
‘. . . with . . . the lady . . . and then I’ll be on it.’
Thelady?
Alan is kind enough not to laugh.
I’ve been summoned to the pub to discuss my fortieth birthday, which is less than four weeks away. So far, I’ve organized nothing and Alan says he’s ‘concerned’.I think I should check up on you, he messaged yesterday.Get some plans brewing & make sure you’re not growing a beard.
He’s chosen the Bear in Bisley for the intervention. It’s a lovely old pub, and it reminds us both of the glory days of our youth, but it’s convenient for neither of us. We’ll have to share an expensive taxi later, and Alan’ll have to somehow pick up his car tomorrow. But he’s moving to the village soon, and wants to check out the beer situation, and I was very happy to walk here after a day of hospitals and kitchen building.
Hannah Harrington lives only a few doors from here. I bumped into her in Stroud a couple of years back, in the health food shop of all places. I was buying something not particularly healthy, like banana chips, but she was carrying armfuls of oat bran and all sorts of other things that have become curiously indispensable to middle-class people. It was perhaps the fourth or fifth time I’d seen her since Alex died, and – as ever – I was struck by the remarkable similarities between twelve-year-old Hannah and grown-up Hannah.
I wondered how much my sister would have changed, if she’d lived.
Hannah had told me that she and her husband had had an offer accepted on a house in Bisley. We’d discussed house prices and builders, and then gone our separate ways. I wish she’d told me that Sarah had moved to America. I wish she’d said, ‘Hey, remember my evil big sister? She buggered off abroad, years ago, so you and Carole need never worry about bumping into her again!’
Alan puts a pint in front of me and sits down.
‘Thinking about the lady?’ he asks.
‘Yes. Stop me.’
He karate-chops my forearm and says, ‘Stop it, Ed. Right now.’
Then he looks at me, and I see in his eyes the ghoulish fascination of the long-term married. ‘What were you thinking? Was anyone naked?’
I smile. ‘No.’
