Conrad & Eleanor (9 page)

She is dragged from her memories by Paul, who claims he also could not sleep, and says they must call the police today.

‘I'll tell them,' he says. ‘You don't need to do anything.'

‘They'll want to come round and question us all.'

‘So?'

‘They'll go through his things – his computer.'

‘Of course. That's how they'll try and trace him.'

‘Paul, I just don't think it's necessary yet.'

‘I'm phoning them now, Mum, right now.' He heads for the kitchen.

El has realised she has not scoured Con's computer as thoroughly as she meant to. What if they take it today? She dresses quickly and goes to Con's study. She'll have to call in sick, there's no way she can do the departmental meeting and the lecture. She'll try to go in later and finish the grant application.

Turning on the computer and sitting at his desk, she feels sick with dread. The dread of finding something out, something secret, shameful, something he has chosen to keep hidden from her. The grey box on the desk in front of her is basically an extension of his brain; flicking through its files and folders, its Work, Home, Contacts, is fully as invasive as prying into his mind. She imagines a surgeon peering into an opened skull, delicately probing the dense grey tissue, pressing apart the folds in the living cortex with his blunt pink fingers.

As the computer slowly churns to life and opens its programs, she steels herself. Bad as his disappearance is, to find out the truth of it will be worse. Because then she will have to know. People talk about closure, thinks El. The first time she saw it in the press, she thought it typically American. Part of a culture that talks too much, faking understanding with the glib vocabulary of therapy. In so far as she understands closure, she surely doesn't want it. How can the end of this story be good? As long as it is unknown there is a chance it might be OK. There is a tiny space for hope. With closure, there will be none.

Scanning his emails is not as big a job as she imagined. His desktop is only a year old, and the email traffic is tiny in comparison to hers. His emails are mainly junk and intermittent exchanges with colleagues about research papers. The Deleted box is empty, but to judge from the spam in his Inbox, that is because he has never deleted anything, rather than because he is a scrupulous PC housekeeper. There are storage folders labelled HOUSE, ADMIN and MAD. She clicks on MAD. There are seven emails, the first dated four months ago.
Don't worry, I haven't forgotten you, wanker
. The subject line is empty and there's no signature. The sender's address is [email protected]

The second says,
Oh Conrad I have something very special up my sleeve for you.

The next,
Why so quiet? Squeal piggy squeal.
You will.

Next:
You looked cute on that hotel bed. Shall I send the photo to your wife? Pity about my bra n panties on the bed.

El pauses, the words dancing before her eyes. OK, she knew. It had to be a woman. But what kind of woman is this? A blackmailer? The following one, sent in December, reads,
What punishment is good enough for what you've done? I should rip
your
heart out.

He must have dumped her. What else could it mean? Next:
Long distance torture is easy, eh. What the eye doesn't see.
You will see, shitface, trust me.

Only one left, dated two weeks ago.
See you soon, sweetie.

El's heart is pounding. She clicks wildly, looking for replies in the SENT folder. There are none. There is not a single email addressed to [email protected] She checks the MAD folder again – none of them shows a replied symbol. She becomes aware of a hubbub in the hall. Cara's taxi has arrived. Swiftly she closes the folders and runs out to say goodbye. Should she say anything? No, not yet. Not till she knows more. But this woman – why has he kept these emails? As evidence? In case she really harms him? Has he left them here for El to find?

Cara's face is white.

‘Did you have breakfast?'

‘No time, Mum.'

‘For God's sake. Have some at the airport. Here – and for the taxi.' El thrusts £60 into Cara's hand. ‘Ring me when you get to your hotel. Promise.'

‘Yes, Mum.' They hug and Cara is gone. Paul – police-­botherer Paul – is mysteriously quiet. Unless he has gone to work. El heads back to Con's office.

I should rip
your
heart out.
Meaning he had ripped out hers? And that last message – a reconciliation? An agreed meeting? Or is the ‘sweetie' a threat? El stares at the emails, opening them one after another, and eventually printing each one off. If she gives these to the police, won't the police be able to trace an email address? If anyone has harmed Con it must be her, Mad. But what if he has changed his mind and run away with her? What if he has chosen to be with her? But how could he be with someone so abusive and hateful? A blackmailer, a woman who makes threats?

El is going round in circles. There is something missing here, there is something that doesn't make sense. She will email the woman herself, she thinks. When she has a clear enough head to work out what to say.

She glances at her watch. There's still time to get to the meeting, and she might as well go. As she's putting on her coat she calls Paul's name and he appears at the top of the stairs.

‘How did you get on with the police?' she asks.

‘Someone will call me back.'

‘Is that it?'

‘Yeah.'

‘OK. Are you here all day?'

‘Yeah.'

‘I've got to go to work. Ring me if —' She hesitates.

‘Yeah yeah. Bye.'

C
onrad is sitting
on the floor under the window. There is a revolving light outside. The orange glow flashes across the room from left to right, chased by darkness. It must be an ambulance or a police car. But there's no siren. Breakdown truck? Roadworks? It doesn't really matter. But he can't close the curtains because of the suffocating dark, and if he leaves them open the room is filled with this measured flashing. You can count to ten between each turn. On the bed it was going over him. Under the window he is sheltered.

It's 2.30. A long time till daylight. Reaching forward he pulls the pillow and duvet from the bed and curls around it, foetal under the window. He can't remember when he last slept. He tries to imagine the children. But all he can see is Cara, crying; it's an image from a dream, he was willing El to pick her up because he couldn't reach but El raised her eyebrows as if he was stupid. He sits upright again.

The people next door have stopped. That was the other thing that drove him from the bed. The increasingly frenzied knocking of the other bed against the wall; then he thought he heard a woman crying. Maybe it was pleasure; what does he know? Just get through the night. It will feel better after dawn. A primitive understanding.

The lights in the monkey house go out at 8pm. It's pitch dark in there, apart from the red safety light above the emergency exit. He used to think it must be a relief to the monkeys, when the switch is flicked. In the dark, no humans come to stick ­needles in you, or carry you away to the knife; no one rams a tube down your throat and force-feeds you drugs; no one peers at you critically through the mesh, weighing up your chances. You are at peace in the dark with your dreams and warm sleep and the fug of other monkey snores all around. But now he thinks of their terror. The recently operated upon, alone in the dark with their pain, fighting waves of nausea. Unable to see either friend or foe, smothered by blackness. And the healthy, on borrowed time, knowing their turn will come; in the dark there's no possibility of the slenderest imagining of escape. At least in daylight the mesh is visible, the lock is visible, the door is visible. At least a way out
exists
; at least on the clothes of rapidly passing humans, there is the scent of outside, the reassurance that another world still exists. In the dark there is only absence.

He considers himself as the subject of an experiment. Watches himself with a note-taking eye.
Subject not sleeping. Huddled by wall. Rejecting food. Irregular bowel movements.
He is here in this box. Surrounded by the noisy lives of strangers. What has he ever done to deserve more? He is alive. That's what he has got. His life, in this box. His fifty-year-old life.

In fact he is hungry. That's a thought. He's hungry and what can he do about that? He struggles to his feet and the revolving light catches him, flooding his retinas and blinding him so that he has to put his hands to the window ledge and rest there a moment, waiting for the dark to re-form. You can't get food at 3am. You have to sleep. You can only get food in the morning. He wraps the duvet round himself and curls up on the floor again. In the morning he must find something to eat. He tries to remember what he last ate. Before this night – before this night – he was walking. There was a train. Yes, a train. The train was stuffy; as it warmed up, the compartment he was in began to stink of orange peel. But he was afraid to go to another compartment, because she might be waiting for him. He hunted for the peel in the luggage rack and in the armrest ashtrays, but it was nowhere to be found.

He sees himself in the kitchen at home. Trying to decide whether to peel one potato or two. Reaching into the cupboard for a plate, a cup. Checking the time although no one will come in, only El, late, after he's gone to bed. Pulling down the blind in order not to see his lone reflection at table, sitting in his same old place as if the ghosts of the children occupy the others. He puts the radio on but it is too brash, and music is too loud at any volume. Music shouldn't be used to fill silence. It should be listened to or not played at all. All he is doing is waiting. Anything else would be false: outings, music, TV, social arrangements. Waiting for the next step to become clear.

In routine, he has discovered, you can have less and less. You need hardly ever touch the sides. You can stay in the empty centre. Drive to work at 8; read the lab reports and mail; adjust drug regimes, whip through research reports, analyse statistics, check some results. Attend a departmental meeting, drive home. Heat something from the freezer. Sit in the empty kitchen letting the evening pass. Sometimes one of them would ring. Or there'd be an email among the junk. Sometimes El would be at home, uneasy and cheery in his presence, hastily trying to cook or make conversation, offering him wine. He was relieved when she went into her study after dinner, to do a couple more hours' work. It was astonishing how little one could do and still get by. Time never stood still, there was no need to invent ways to pass it, it simply passed itself.

His mind turns to Cara. He had to go to Leeds to fetch her back. She had been ringing and crying for three weeks but when he knocked on the door of her room in the hall of residence, he wasn't prepared for how she would look. Deathly pale, her hair lank and unwashed, her eyes brimming with tears. He hated the boy, the stupid callous thoughtless boy, the boy who wasn't worth her grief. He saw that whatever reasoning or persuasion he had imagined offering to her would not be relevant. She was packed and ready; they carried her things in silence to the car.

She cried all the way home, weakly, inconsolably, while he made ineffectual attempts at comforting her, and noticed the stick-thinness of her fingers, hands and arms, and blamed himself and El for not realising sooner. But she was rescued, he reassures himself, swimming up from his doze. He did rescue her. He stayed off work, he made her soups and snacks and treats, he took her out for walks and swims as if she were a little girl again. And palely, sadly, brokenly she obeyed, ate and took exercise, listened and nodded to the mantras he offered: it's all right, there's no pressure, you don't have to go back.

He and Eleanor argued. ‘You make her worse, you're pandering to her, encouraging her to wallow —'

‘El, can you not see the girl is ill? She's on the verge of breakdown, she's lost over a stone —'

‘She's got to learn to cope with life. What on earth has happened that's so traumatic? Her boyfriend's dumped her, OK, it happens every day to thousands of people. They don't all fall apart at the seams.'

‘You really don't see, do you —'

‘I see she's getting behind with her essays. How much harder is it going to be to go back if she has a mountain of catching up to do?'

‘She doesn't want to go back.'

‘She's already got enough of a chip on her shoulder about Paul and Megan's A levels. What good will it do her self-­confidence to know she couldn't hack university?'

Was El right? Was it right that he looked after Cara and honoured her distress, or should he have packed her off back to Leeds the following weekend? In that she has never returned to university, perhaps so. Con sees there was no right answer. All the questions have been trick questions, and here he has been, all his life, earnestly trying his best while something somewhere snorts with laughter at his attempts – at his naive and credulous life.

Dawn comes slowly, grudgingly. When he hauls himself up to the window there is thick white mist outside, cloud, there's no sky to be seen. There's nothing in the street, the flashing light has gone. In the half-light Con finds his shoes and puts them on. Cautiously opens the door. No one there; no one on the stairs; no one on the desk. He unlocks the heavy front door and slips out, pulling it to behind him. The air is thick and icy cold, like stepping into a freezer. When it hits his lungs he coughs, tugging the lapels of his coat together, turning up the collar. The pavement is dark grey and wet, coils of white mist linger in the street. There's a noise approaching; materialising as a street-sweeping van, its rotating brushes scouring the gutter, its driver's glazed eyes sliding as impersonally over Con as if he were a bin of grit.

Something to eat. He turns right then left, and there is a bright glass front of a café. Its golden window is filled with heaps of croissants and cakes; the aroma of fresh coffee zips across the cold street. People stand at the bar in their coats or sit on high stools along the walls, sipping coffee, absorbed in papers, an extraordinary vision of ordinariness. Con gets a latte and two croissants, finds a vacant stool, joins the ranks of the saved. The regular hiss of the espresso machine rhythmically drowns out the barman's banter; Con is inside a warm sweet engine. When he has finished he orders the same again, relaxing into the slow contentment of being fuelled. There's a long heavy mirror above the ledge where his coffee rests; the bevelled edges remind him of one they had at home, the first mirror they ever owned. El bought it in a junk shop. It stood in their bedroom and its edges caught the morning sun and scattered flakes of brilliant light across the walls and ceiling. He remembers how it used to fascinate Paul when he was toddling – he would reach up to try to grasp the specks of light from the wall. There was no other furniture in that bedroom, only the bed. At night, in the soft glow of the bedside lamp, the mirror reflected their pale bodies intricately and intimately combined.

Staring into the glass Con registers a young couple come in, with a baby. The infant is wrapped in a pouch strapped to the boy's chest. As the girl orders their drinks, the boy smiles and nods at the child, who gazes up at him adoringly. Turning from the bar with a coffee in each hand, the girl leans in and blows a breath of air at the baby. She and the boy laugh.

They had a pouch like that for Paul. Faded blue corduroy, slightly padded, it came up to support his head at the back. They used it when he was very young. In the days of innocence.

Con remembers the feel of the warm weight of the child pressed against his chest. The secure binding of the corduroy straps around his back and over his shoulders. He remembers walking down the street like that, holding hands with El.

‘My turn to carry him for nine months now.'

‘OK. Just as long as I don't have to carry him again for the nine months after that!'

‘I'm serious about looking after him as much as you.'

‘Con, it's understood.'

He found her lightness slightly irritating. ‘You say it as if it's not even worth discussing, but no couple I know have ever done this.'

‘But we agreed from the start! Things have changed – loads of fathers will be looking after their kids from now on.'

‘When I took him to baby clinic on Friday I was in a waiting room full of women.'

‘You don't need me to praise you for this. You and I are equal; we both
know
what it means.'

‘I just want recognition. My father never changed a nappy. Never got up in the night. We're reinventing the roles —'

‘OK! I recognise it. Our Experiment; the new model family.'

‘Thank you. That's all I wanted. What
he'll
do, of course,' stroking Paul's fluffy head, ‘is reject us for a pair of crazed ideologues and find a wife he can treat like a slave.'

Together, they laughed.

But the experiment was serious stuff. Since no one but El could feed Paul, Con did all the rest once he was home from work: bathing, nappy changing, long walks round and round the sitting room at night, gently rubbing the fretful baby's back and waiting for him to burp and settle. Con remembers it as a time of generosity between himself and El; she gave him the baby, in return he gave her time for her work. While she was on maternity leave they passed the child back and forth between them with the elegance of an old-fashioned dance; he remembers leaning in to lift Paul from her arms as she sat in the pool of light cast by the old anglepoise, watching her stretch and smile at him as she buttoned her shirt, watching her reach for her books on the table and pull them into her lap where the suckling child had just lain. He remembers the warm boy against his chest, his wife's glossy head studiously bent in the lamplight.

Once she stopped breastfeeding and returned to work, he was able to take on more. El was finishing her house job at Oldham Royal, and her specialism was Obs and Gynae. Steptoe and Edwards were making history with their attempts at IVF, and like many others at the hospital, she was caught up in the drama of it. It was inevitable that she should end up working in the same field. It was Con who took Paul to Kelly the childminder in the morning, he who was regularly able to leave work earlier than El and pick him up in the afternoon. They made it equal between them then, that was why it was good. The only grounds for bitterness must be that it ended. They were agreed on the great benefits of breast over formula, and from the start, after feeding Paul, El always expressed milk and froze it. So when she returned to work there was a good supply stashed away for bottle-feeding. Though her own milk dwindled once she was on the wards again, she could still manage to feed him herself morning and night; bottle-fed by Con and the childminder with the frozen supplies, he didn't need to go onto formula for a whole extra month. Utterly endearing, to Con, this typical El efficiency applied to her own milk production: cow, farmer and dairy rolled into one. She was decisive about all sorts of practical aspects of their life: they must always use disposable nappies, because of the savings in time and energy; it was more cost-effective to employ a cleaner than for her or Con to do it; cooking stews and soups at the weekend and freezing portions was the most convenient way for them to eat. They argued briefly about clothes, he remembers.

‘Con, it's idiotic to dress a growing child in new clothes. The charity shops are full of really good stuff —'