Gulnaz
The girl is ushered into the outer lobby and the door slammed behind them. A little of the emotional turmoil that had impelled Daniel to run is shed at the doorstep, and for a moment he can be still. A second later, he pushes on through to his flat and steers the girl inside.
She peels off her wet coat and hands it to him. He spreads it out over the hall radiator, wedging the collar behind to hold it in place, throws off his own coat, and then leads her through to the kitchen.
Given the sight before them, his guest might be forgiven for thinking there had indeed been a burglary. However, to Daniel it’s immediately clear that no-one has trashed the place; no-one has rifled his things. No-one but himself, at least. The Christmas festivities have simply licensed a greater degree of slobbery than usual. Christmases can be a tough time for anyone living alone. A time to be with family and friends. For those who have neither, such sentiments aren’t easy to swallow. Daniel’s stand has been to down everything else with it. Breakfasts, lunches, those numerous toasts to self-pity, they all lie strewn around the flat marking the spot where each has been curtly dispatched. If in some backwater of his mind he does cringe a little as they plough through the mess then his conscious attention is wholly directed at the kitchen table and the half empty bottle of scotch upon it. Before he can begin to think about anything he has to kill the image of that face.
“Here,” he grunts, removing the cork and sliding a tumbler towards her. “Merry Christmas.”
“Thanks, but I think I’d prefer the coffee you offered me.”
“Have this first. It’ll make things easier. I’m going to need your help here.”
It’s then that Daniel wonders whether he resents her having followed him home like this; whether he would have preferred the isolation, some space to get to grips with what had happened back at the cemetery. A night alone might have given him a chance to reshape events such that, by morning, the unconscious man would have become a total stranger once more: a simple case of mistaken identity resulting from all the excitement. The photo – that was harder, but perhaps one Daniel himself had accidentally dropped there, from the pocket of a pair of trousers he’d not worn in a while, which the guy had picked up out of curiosity or obsessive tidiness. Alex was dead, and he could have damn well stayed that way.
But something tells him this girl is going to take them along very different pathways; the very fact that she had pursued him, all the way down Cooper’s Hill, over the zebra crossing and down the side road into Sedgefield Court, quizzing him all the while about his brother. Though Daniel had determined not to look back or let her get too close, he’d also stopped short of shooing her away. Those insistent demands for answers had propelled him forward with a nervous energy, powering through each leg, along the arms and up the neck to drive his hands and face. His voice cut across hers with unfinished outbursts. He just… He couldn’t… How was he…? By the time they reached his flat, she’d put out fifty questions and he’d answered none.
No, if Daniel had really wanted to be on his own he wouldn’t have caught himself slowing down and waiting while she hesitated at the crossing, never mind pausing at his front door to ask her in. Yes, it was Christmas evening and they were two people alone, yes they’d just shared an emotional encounter, but if he’d really felt compelled he could have just shut that door in her face. When he suggested they both needed coffee it wasn’t the euphemism normally trotted out to his latest conquest, he actually meant coffee. Coffee and companionship.
The girl gives in, but the whisky has barely wetted the glass before her hand goes out. Daniel mutters something, pours himself enough for them both and lets the drink hover at his lips for some seconds. Its impact is not at all what he’d been bargaining on; far from dispelling the image, the earthy aroma only draws him closer to the craggy face on the ground that had so caricatured his own.
“Say if you want me to go. If I’m intruding,” she says through his silence.
Something stirs beneath the skin; a force from within the face that is not of its own making, pushing upwards to raise one eyelid. From the hollow blackness beneath, an earthworm, like a beckoning finger, wriggles into the light. It hauls itself over the rim of the eye socket and slithers out across the temple. In its wake, seething rivers of woodlice prise apart the jaw and spew from the partially open mouth down both cheeks, over the chin, onto the neck. A battle charge, a mass exodus… The whisky burns the back of Daniel’s throat.
“Um, can I call you George?” she says, unexpectedly.
He coughs, and the horror-flick images dissolve. Over by the fridge now, he flips the kettle switch and dredges up two mugs from the sink.
“I saw the name on the doorbell,” she explains. A dirty saucer on the drainer catches Daniel’s elbow and Frisbees over the edge. It turns and shrinks like a stone thrown from a cliff top, the moment of impact held, when for an instant it seems to come to rest before exploding across the floor. The sound stops him dead. The girl hurriedly makes a move to gather up the pieces.
“It’s Daniel. George is my surname. Daniel – not Dan or Danny.”
“Oh, right. I’ll remember that.” Her laugh is a little tense as she places the three pieces of saucer into the pedal bin. “I didn’t tell you mine, did I?”
Still transfixed by the point of impact, he’s no longer gazing down from the roll-top drainer, but from a fringe of grass overhanging a cliff edge. The soup-splashed Formica doors beneath have become a precipice of bird-splattered rock, the grey vinyl flooring a deathbed of lethal rocks. A salt breeze pushes aside the stale kitchen air and at once Daniel can taste the sea.
“It’s a bit of a challenge, my name. You might have to work on it. Gulnaz. Try it.”
The perspective shifts, and she’s standing now on the coast path behind him. At first he can say nothing. Only his lips move, speech lost to the shriek of seabirds. Then at length the name slips out through clenched teeth. Gull noise.
She giggles. “Ha-ha, I like that, but it’s nearer goal than gull. Emphasise the second syllable: Gul-naaaz, with a long A.” It’s all a ruse perhaps to lighten the atmosphere and get him talking. Maybe it’s working, or maybe it’s the scotch. Either way, he’s back from the cliffs and into his flat. He repeats the name until the shape is right. Encouraged, she pitches in with another question about his brother.
“Would it help if you told me about how he died?”
The kettle begins to rumble on its base, clicks and settles again. Daniel reaches for the Kenco and spins the lid. At the sixth spoonful of coffee, three in each mug, he drops the teaspoon into the jar and gazes absently through the window.
“I don’t remember much about it. I was nine.”
“But you’ve been told what happened?”
Hot water fizzes over the granules. He seizes upon the nicotine blast.
“Kind of. He drowned.”
Now he sniffs the milk and slops it in, shovels in a generous quantity of sugar and stirs.
“I think my mother knew. But it upset her too much to talk about it.”
Daniel knows he’s on autopilot, the lines pre-programmed. And in the normal run of things this would be his story told as far as brothers go. The subject sometimes came up when friends or colleagues asked about his past, or when a latest girlfriend felt she should properly ‘get to know him’. But he’d never quite brought himself to answer the question ‘Any brothers or sisters?’ with a straight ‘No’. He and Alex may have been parted for nearly a quarter of a century, but the bond they’d forged in the womb still held on by a thread; he just couldn’t bring himself to deny his brother’s existence. Instead, he’d mastered a patter that stuck pretty much to the truth while carefully avoiding a can of worms. Brother drowns when he’s a child, doesn’t remember much about it; his mum may know more but has never wanted to discuss it. Family history over, demons neatly conquered… now who’s for a drink?
But the normal run of things did not include him having identified the same long-dead
twin brother only minutes before. Nor did it include having someone like Gulnaz as a witness. He has a feeling that his tactic for putting paid to prying questions isn’t going to wash with her. There’s a tenacity there that he ought to be quashing, but instead is rashly indulging. And the realisation troubles him. A complete stranger, a nurse, of all things, and yet here she is, sat at his breakfast table, eager-eyed, full of nervous energy and driven by some imperative he can’t begin to fathom.
Back at the table now, Daniel takes the stool beside her, placing the mugs down between them. Somehow he’s managed to give her the one with the awful stain inside, the one with the cracked rim – and the dirty joke on the side.
“Try to think what your mother told you,” Gulnaz suggests. She sips her coffee and lays her other hand on his arm. “Like, do you know the date he died?”
The hand is quick to retreat from Daniel’s rifle-shot laugh.
“Ha! Easy. Christmas Day, 1982. Twenty-four years to the day. His anniversary. It’s the only reason I went there today.”
He clears his throat to mask the crack in his voice that has shot through the word ‘anniversary’. It confirms this to be everything he’d feared. This woman is breaking through. Like the dirty coffee mug – place a crack like that under stress and it’s going to spread. And he fears it has finally arrived; that moment when he comes to pieces, when his life falls apart and he can no longer pull the bits back together. Or maybe it’s nothing but a dry throat. He’s just so, so fucking tired. His head throbs. More than anything, it’s the numbness he needs now, that oblivion upon which he can always depend. Without a second thought, he tops up his coffee with a generous slug of scotch and knocks back half the mug.
“So,” Gulnaz says in a near whisper. “The grave you visit, it’s your brother’s.”
At first the words trigger no response. There’s no upward inflection in her voice to suggest a question or prompt an answer.
“Then it’s easy to see why you made a mistake. When you saw that man you were wrapped up in thinking about your poor brother. In the heat of the moment you saw in his face what was really just in your mind.”
The caffeine and alcohol are just kicking in when the image formed by her first remark congeals through a fog. A sight so long denied him, a little stone in a quiet corner of the churchyard bearing the words ‘Alex George, Aged 9’.
“Christ, no. That wasn’t Alex’s grave, it’s my mother’s. Alex hasn’t got a grave. They never found his body.”
Never a body, only a glove – wasn’t it? His glove and his coat. Up on the cliff walk. Or maybe that wasn’t right. Didn’t they fish them out of the water? How the hell is he supposed to know? He was just a kid. They’d always made a point of hiding the facts from him. If he could only recall something more, but to hell with it, over the years he’s tried so many times. Just that one scene, and he’s not even sure it’s connected: the two of them there on the cliff top and the black and white hull of a rowing boat down on the shore.
But yes, the boat was white with a black boot line. The first time he’s recalled it that clearly. Maybe it’s why that memory so often connected with the magic set; the one with the white-tipped wand and the black top hat. Then always from there back to his mother’s face. Invariably that face. And it’s the face that brings him round to the photograph at the graveyard.
“No. No way.” The girl is beginning to irk him now. It had nothing to do with being ‘wrapped up in remembering his brother’. It had everything to do with that emaciated tramp having a photo of him in his hand. As he pushes himself off the stool the table begins to sway. He concentrates on the doorway to the hall and weaves a slight S shape to retrieve his coat from the floor. Dropping it onto the kitchen table, he searches each pocket, feeling for the wrinkled paper. The picture was of his mother: small, frail, seated in the middle, Alex to her right with his head cocked in a gummy grin, and his father, standing proudly to her left, a little behind, smart in his uniform. It wasn’t a good shot, poorly focused and off the vertical. No, not in his coat. In his trousers, then. One hand steadies him as the other gropes each pocket until the hands are forced to swap. He’s on his back pocket now and becoming desperate. Damn it. Damn it! No sign of the bloody thing. In his shock beneath the street lamp he must have dropped it. Or it had fallen out in the rush to get home. He so needs this evidence to prove – to himself as much as to her – that he isn’t going crazy. Once again he picks through coat and trouser pockets, this time turning out the lining just to be sure. He’s left standing ridiculous, like a boy during a chewing gum confiscation at school. But still no photograph.
Then he must describe it in detail to her and search out the copy that’s somewhere in his flat. Gulnaz is reassuringly struck by what he tells her. It pleases him when she swears beneath her breath, retracts her earlier theory and waits obediently while he disappears into the next room. There’s only one place he could possibly have seen the album: in one of the boxes of his mother’s things at the back of his wardrobe.
He kicks through the floor of scattered clothes and yanks at the door. It squeals and judders on its sliders. After pushing aside the hangers of shirts and trousers he kneels down and touches the three boxes. None of them is labelled, the contents have not been categorised; they were all packed in haste when his mother’s house sale suddenly went through. The best of her belongings went to charity shops, second-hand markets and pawnbrokers. Much of what remained was only fit for burning or dumping; the rest he’d bundled into these boxes. When he moved into the flat he’d stuck them in the wardrobe as a temporary measure, and as so often happens with temporary measures, it became their permanent home.
He lifts out the first box, staggered to think that a decade has passed since its lid was sealed; eight years since he’d even touched the damned thing. The brittle Sellotape breaks without a fight. As he lifts the flaps, something grabs him by the throat and throws back his head. He simply hadn’t been prepared for the smell. If anything turns back the clock it’s smell. Smell carries the mind to another place, another time. Musty, stale, but with it a femininity – a perfume, a wisp of her soul escaping captivity. Having to confront the contents of these boxes is about the last thing on earth he needs right now. But he has to have that photograph.
At the top of the pile he finds a stack of paperbacks, beneath these, a pair of embroidered lampshades, and lastly a chequered vinyl tablecloth. No joy there. In the second box there’s a sewing kit, more books, her favourite handbag and…
Daniel winces. Cards. Stacks of them. God, why had he kept these? All those sanctimonious verses; ‘…In your moment of sorrow’, the knowing fiction of ‘Get well soon’, the downright lie of ‘Thinking of you’. It’s too much, this ferreting through a dead woman’s chattels. He’ll need another drink before attacking the last of the boxes. The vodka bottle is still by the bed, courtesy of Christmas Eve. No need of a glass.
With more abandon now, the final box is dragged out onto the carpet and ripped open. Again the smell has him gagging, but this time he does not hesitate. He knows at once he’s about to find the album. This box is familiar – one he must have had reason to open a year or so ago. He remembers seeing the half-used writing pad, the pack of envelopes (hadn’t he even taken a few and used them himself?) and the bright red address book. There’s her fountain pen, now clogged with dried ink, a blotting pad, a half empty bottle of Quink. Lying beneath, and just visible through the scattered papers, is the unmistakable brown leather of a photo album. He can breathe again.
There’s no need to empty the box completely. The other items fall back inside as the album comes up in his hands; a couple of envelopes he has to brush away with his palm. As he shuffles towards an empty area of carpet on which to lay the book, a wad of loose prints slips out from between the leaves. Fewer than half of the pictures have been properly secured beneath cellophane. The rest have spent all these years awaiting their turn.
He’d forgotten all of this. Quite when it was
he’s unsure, but perhaps four years, even five, after Alex’s death, his mother had launched into the project of bringing all their photos together in one album. Holidays, weddings, Christmases, birthdays, friends, family – she’d even sent him to Boots to have their slides made into prints. She must have stuck with it for, what, nearly a month? By then she’d come out of the worst of her depression (or the pills had duped everyone into believing so) and so-called expert opinion had it that a project like this might be cathartic. Night after night she would sit in bed with the album opened in front of her, fountain pen and ink on the bedside table with her water and pills, and the photos on the blankets in three piles: the sorted, the partly-sorted and the yet-to-be-sorted. Sometimes she could be so quiet that Daniel feared her having dropped off; visions of ink spilled over sheets, her bedclothes up in flames. But no, there she was as before, reading glasses perched on the end of her thin nose, cigarette to her lips, scrutinising a shot and either indexing it there and then or making notes on the back to help pin it down later. Daniel had begun to notice the change in her. It didn’t curb the heavy smoking, but she was drinking less, sleeping more easily, eating a little and even very occasionally smiling. Only much later did he understand the truth – that the journey back into the most painful recesses of her mind was driving her towards another breakdown. He can’t remember in detail, but there was that awful night…
“Everything alright in there?”
The sound of a woman’s voice quite freaks him out. For a moment, it’s his mother’s voice he’s hearing. He’d forgotten all about Gulnaz. He swigs the vodka and calls back to say the album is found and that he won’t be long. In an attempt to force his mind back onto the job he closes the book and reopens it at the beginning.
“Why don’t you bring the whole album through? It might help you remember.”
Even the first couple of pages reveal what an understatement that is. To start with, nothing but fifties and sixties snaps of his parents as children, his uncle and grandparents, but even these are already putting him in mind of home, the pride of place they had taken on sideboards and shelves. And over the page he finds his parents’ wedding photo. He remembers it hanging framed on a wall in the lounge. He turns another page. Newborn babies. The caption, in his mum’s wild, spidery hand, reads, ‘Alex and Daniel – August 1973 – Derriford’. The twins’ very own point of arrival, captured on celluloid. As he lingers over the next few pages, all devoted to Alex’s tragically short life, Daniel can’t help wondering what became of that vital coexistence they so briefly shared – why only random relics of it remain in memory. And gradually, as the turning pages narrate the story of their years in far away Devon, he comes to a chilling realisation. Those recurring memories of his infancy, the garden, the beach, the cliffs, they’re all caught here on camera. His recollections may never have been of the events themselves, but only of these photographs, shots he’d have known as a teenager and would have seen again when he last had cause to open the box. God, had his childhood been so screwed up, the loss of his brother so devastating, that nothing had survived that was genuinely his own? It means he could be anyone. No-one. Just a blank page clutching on to other people’s camera clicks, his past given meaning only by someone else’s scribbled captions.
He’s gazing now at a picture of his mother holding Alex by the hand. The two sets of dead eyes stare up from the album both to taunt and to haunt. In the photo beside it, his father and uncle are grinning beneath their berets before a waiting bus. His father stands tall, erect, to attention, suitcases lined up at his heels like obedient dogs. ‘Richard and Martin – March?/April? 1982 – Thurlestone’, says the caption. That fateful year. Daniel’s eyes freeze over the shot and the image begins to swim. With a nervous hand he slowly lifts the page, convinced that the picture he seeks is waiting overleaf.
But the remaining page is blank. As is the next, and every page thereafter. And suddenly Daniel understands. The final goodbye to her husband and brother was the last piece of the jigsaw his mother had been able to put in place before herself disintegrating into a thousand pieces. Frantically he gathers up the remaining prints and flicks through them. But the crucial photo isn’t there. So that’s it. He’s remembered it all wrong. It wasn’t in this album that he’d seen it. Gulnaz will think him a liar. Or a fool. Perhaps he’s both. With rising despair, he throws the album back into the box, lobbing the loose prints on top like leaves onto a bonfire. He forces down the lid and slides the box back into the wardrobe, then begins reclosing the others and stacking them up. At the last box he spots some envelopes that must have fallen in when he was lifting out the album. And with them, a stray print. Lying upside down, it might easily have been missed among the sympathy cards but for the distinctive blue writing on the corner: ‘Richard, Alex and Rose – April 1982 – Devonport.’
And there is his picture, exactly as he’d recalled it, a shot identical to that held in the clutches of the unconscious man. It hadn’t been in the album that Daniel had seen this photo before, but simply lying loose in the box with his mother’s envelopes and writing things. Now Gulnaz will have to believe.
He hears, drifting in from the kitchen, a kind of gentle percussion that nobody has struck up in weeks. Gulnaz stands with her head turned from him as he reaches the doorway. She has the sleeves of her sweater pushed up so that they mimic its roll-neck, one bare arm elbow-deep in dishwater, the other methodically stacking the drainer. When she becomes aware of him she turns from the sink and smiles.
“Just thought I’d make myself useful.”
She registers his look.
“I hope you don’t mind.”
“Please just leave that. I want you to look at this.”
A winning ace could barely strike a table with a more triumphant snap. Wiped of her smile, Gulnaz quickly rinses her hands, dries them on her jumper and hurries over. For a while she studies the picture, turns it over and holds it up to the light. Daniel watches her, baffled. It’s the very image that he’d described, surely that much was obvious.
“Well? You see?”
She can see, of course. But the authenticity of the picture is not her concern. “I’m not doubting you,” she assures him. “It’s just that there has to be some other explanation.”
“Yeah? Like what?”
“Well, not just coincidence, clearly.” She picks up the picture again. “Maybe your mum had a copy and gave it to a friend. The man at the cemetery was… the friend’s son?”
“Oh, come on. So why track down Mum’s grave after all this time? And you’re forgetting, that guy was my double.”
“But was he, really?”
Daniel’s look is answer enough.
“Okay, then he’s a distant cousin or something.”
A war of attrition is slowly developing. A bizarre parlour game.
“Nope. No other immediate family. My mother’s brother never married. My father’s brother did marry, but they never had any children. In our generation there was only ever me and Alex.”
Gulnaz gives in, only to advance on a new front.
“So, if they never found your brother’s body then why declare him dead? I mean, if no-one actually knows what happened. Say he didn’t die, then maybe that man tonight really was your brother. Daniel, I do think the album would help us.”
He so doesn’t need this: this stubborn stranger in his flat, these obsessions in his head, this cocktail of spirits in his blood. For a moment every muscle is unable to move. Anything but those boxes again. Gulnaz gives him a sympathetic look and checks her watch.
“I think you need food. You’ve put nothing down your throat but strong drink since we arrived. It’s already half-six. I’ve not eaten anything since lunch either. With your permission…?”
She opens the fridge door and squats down. “What do you have in here?” She talks as if addressing the fridge, but even the sorry answer from within fails to discourage her. “Okay, how about you bring the photo album and something to wri
te with, and I’ll fix us a snack with this lot.”
Neither the fridge nor Daniel has the will to argue further. Daniel climbs off his stool in weary surrender. Until now it has only made him angry – the irreconcilable certainties of the man in the graveyard being his brother and of his brother being dead. It’s the anger of a child who feels the world isn’t playing fair. But, short of Alex having risen from the dead, one of those certainties clearly had to be wrong. If it weren’t for Gulnaz, the unconscious man’s identity would have been the only contender. When the last two and a half decades of your life have been shaped by one central tragedy, a tragedy so terrible that it has destroyed everything you hold dear, and a tragedy accepted as fact by family, neighbours, the media, even the authorities, then it’s not a tragedy to be questioned lightly. Yet Gulnaz is asking exactly that: what if Alex hadn’t actually died?
If Alex hadn’t actually died then the implications were beyond imagining.
As she clears the table and lays a spread of turkey roll, ham, sliced bread, pickles and tomatoes, Daniel returns reluctantly to his room and pulls out the boxes once more. The course of their long evening together is now set; perched side by side at the kitchen table, picking at their food and poring over each image in turn, Daniel declaring every few minutes that none of this can possibly be happening, that there is no way he can get his head around the thought that Alex might still be alive. Anything of any relevance is jotted down, until the account they’ve been seeking is finally mapped out across four pages of notes.
Christmas Day, 1982. Their mother is taking the two boys on an afternoon walk along the coastal path near their home. Definitely not before lunch, as she would have been too busy preparing food. Alex has raced ahead, spurred on by the sight of a boat down in the water – nothing in the album supports this, but it’s the recurring scene that with each telling grows more vivid – and Daniel has chased after, equally excited, but also anxious for Alex’s safety. With much of the rock face at Thurlestone falling vertically to the sea, some stretches of the shore can only be seen from the very edge of the path. But the grassy cliff tops overhang the sheer drop. Several photographs taken from the beach show these lethal cliffs in the background. By the time their mother has caught up, Alex is nowhere to be found. Daniel sees her crouch down, lean forward over the precipice and retrieve a single glove from the crumbling rocks; a little detective work here, drawing together two distinct mental images. The local coastguard is scrambled, a thorough search made of the waters, but nothing is found of him but his coat. As the minutes become hours, all hopes of finding his brother alive begin to fade, and by nightfall the search is suspended. Though it resumes at first light, nobody really believes there is still a chance, and before the week is out Alex has been formally declared dead – presumed killed on the rocks and carried away by the tidal currents (buried at sea was all his mother would ever say).
No photographs offer testimony to this moment or beyond, but Daniel does remember a little of the aftermath; the reporter who came round, Alex’s face in the paper, the headmaster’s speech at assembly, the awful teasing and exclusion that followed. Somehow they had come through those dreadful, dark months, Daniel managing to bury all but the most fleeting memories. But here are those disparate fragments once again, freshly raked over, edited together now for the first time into a narrative. Incredibly freeing, in one sense. And to have done all this before a witness. But the lifting of one great weight only serves to burden him with another.
“Then where the hell has Alex been all this time? And why didn’t he let us know he was alive?”
She won’t get it, of course. Gulnaz can’t possibly imagine the misery it had put them through, all those years with nothing but a letter declaring, ‘Missing, presumed dead’; no death certificate, no body over which to grieve, never quite accepting, never quite losing hope.
She shrugs. “Maybe he’s only just found you. Maybe he’s been away, out of touch.”
Out of touch, she says. He’s been that, alright. “It just doesn’t make sense, him being at the cemetery like that. And this photo.” Daniel rounds on her. “So, come on, you’re the nurse. What exactly was wrong with him? Why was he unconscious? Had someone attacked him? Or maybe he’d just fainted at the sight of mum’s grave – waking him up to the fact that he’d left it a bit bloody late to come breezing home.”
If Gulnaz feels she is being tested then she chooses to let it go. “I was just wondering the same,” she says. “The scratch on his head seemed fairly minor, but I think he’d also received a blow to the face, perhaps enough to knock him out. But it could have been something else altogether: a heart attack. Or a stroke.” For a moment she seems lost in the backwaters of her training, then suddenly she faces him.
“I’m sorry, Daniel. This must all be so hard for you.” Again she touches his arm, less tenaciously this time, more the action of a child drawn by a ‘Do Not Touch’ sign. “I hope you’re okay with all this.”
Daniel says nothing but shifts his arm. He fears she’s reaching a diagnosis that he won’t want to hear. But it turns out her thinking has moved on.
“Is it possible perhaps, when he disappeared, that Alex didn’t fall here –” she covers the awkwardness of their broken touch by turning the pages back to the views of the beach and circling the stretch of sheer cliff with a finger, “ – but here?”
The finger picks out the edge of one shot where an extrusion of harder rock winds its way steeply though not vertically from the coast path down into the water. To Daniel’s mind her question is irrelevant, the exact location a petty detail in relation to everything else.
“This boat you mentioned,” she persists. “Say he wasn’t just trying to get a closer look, but was actually trying to reach it. Surely he wouldn’t have tried climbing down a sheer drop; he’d have chosen somewhere easier. So, if he slipped and fell on those rocks he might not have been killed, only knocked about. People who’ve had a blow to the head can lose their memories, sometimes for years. They wake up one morning with their wife at their side and suddenly remember that they’re not called John, that they’re already married and have a bereaved family hundreds of miles away.”
Enough is enough.
“I’ve already told you. They scoured every inch of the beach for days. You think they wouldn’t have found some concussed nine-year-old wandering about?”
“Could someone else have found him first, taken him in?”
“For God’s sake, it was in all the papers. And on TV. They’d have known immediately who he was.”
He’s begun to find the whole thing quite ridiculous. Gulnaz falls silent. Then she looks at him.
“I’m only trying to help, you know. Could he have run away?”
He groans. She’s so off beam. Alex, run away! Strong, athletic, popular, apple-of-his-father’s-eye Alex? The fuck he would. But Gulnaz isn’t waiting for his answer.
“No, I suppose they’d still have found him soon enough. As you say, a nine-year-old isn’t going to get far.”
There is no point in this. Daniel wants it to stop. So far she’s come up with nothing to challenge the official line. More worryingly, he’s already imagined another possibility, something so dreadful that it must stay unsaid at all costs. His fear now is that she might voice it. The bleak look he throws her is by way of a warning. Gulnaz reaches carefully for her glass of water; Daniel reciprocates with the last of the Stellas. But he knows she is about to embrace the darkness.
She whispers, “I think maybe he was abducted.”
A pressure valve fails suddenly in Daniel’s head.
“Don’t say that! Don’t you ever fucking say that!”
Outwardly, the torrent is stemmed right there, but inside the anger surges over the floodgates unchecked. How fucking dare she. She’s known him barely ten minutes, bullies her way into his home, starts organising his life and then has the gall to come out with something like that. Alex, his own flesh and blood, kidnapped and, and, what, abused?
Raped? Held captive for over two decades? She’s sick! He’s not having that. Any of it. Twenty-four years he’s lived under the shadow of his brother’s death. Twenty-four years that made his school days a living, fucking hell, hijacked his education, slowly killed his mother and is all but killing him. And, what, so it had all been for nothing? So they were all wrong. All of them, the papers, the TV, everyone. Alex had simply met up with some paedophile who’d been grooming him for sex all this time. Maybe they’d had a lover’s tiff, maybe the pervert had died of AIDS, whatever, so Alex decides he might as well just come strolling back home to be with Mummy and twin brother.
“I’m sorry Daniel, I’m sorry!” Her lower lip is quivering as she stands to get her coat. “I’m not helping here. And it’s late.”
“No, wait.” He’s taken aback at the level of upset in her face.
For the first time Daniel puts his hand on her arm. He pulls it gently towards the table to sit her back down, then sticks out his elbows and sinks into his hands.
“I’m sorry. Look, you are helping. Really. It’s just all been too much. Can we… Can we just let the subject drop for a while?”
And so an uneasy quiet falls over the room. Somewhere along the way a line had been drawn that Gulnaz had unwittingly crossed. And in many ways so had he. Whatever need she had to stay and help him through this, it didn’t extend to being directly insulted. There seems to be nothing more to say. He chews, she does not. Then conversation tentatively resumes, an unspoken pact between them to fill in with talk of ordinary things. He senses how carefully she puts her questions – about his work, his flat, his friends – and when she’s sure these are not overstepping the mark she ventures a little about herself, describing how she works as an agency nurse. It could mean a week in A&E covering for holidays or sick-leave, a few days seconded to a GP’s surgery or, as currently, longer stretches helping out in a care home. And it’s after this that she becomes a little bolder and tells him how she’d gone to the churchyard straight from work and had seen him standing on the path, hugging himself to ward off the cold. He learns that she’d passed by, wished him a merry Christmas so tentatively that he’d failed to notice and had then heard his shouts, watched him hurry into the shadows and drag something through the undergrowth. Of course she’d then seen the figure on the ground behind him.
They talk together for the best part of three hours.
When she discovers it is after midnight and says she has to get home Daniel goes into something of a panic. Not because he’s been expecting her to stay, but because a whole lot of things have now settled in his mind that still need expressing.
“I’m going to go in tomorrow and see him,” he stammers, as she moves to collect her coat for a second time.
“That’s good, Daniel. You should go.” Her approval sounds more dutiful than heartfelt.
“Okay, look,” he sighs, “I think you might have been right. About, you know, the abduction thing – and maybe the amnesia. I mean, why else wouldn’t he have made contact? But…” He so hates being in someone else’s pocket. “…But, you’ll come with me, won’t you? I mean you know about hospitals and all that. They might not let me see him otherwise.”
She considers for a moment. He has the awful feeling she’s about to say no. He couldn’t bear that, the thought of going there alone. But then she nods and says, “Ring them first. Explain who you are and that you think you might be family. No doubt they’ll be anxious to know the man’s identity, if he hasn’t already been discharged.”
There remains that awful distance in her eyes.
“If in the morning you still want me there, then call me and I’ll come with you. I’ll wait in till ten. But I would need a lift.”
Without waiting for his response, she scribbles down her number and heads for the hall. He suddenly needs to hug her, or something. His emotions are all in a spin. Say something, Daniel, a voice urges him. Say something.
“Have you got far to go?”
“My bike’s padlocked to the railings outside the church. I’ll be okay.”
“I can walk with you.”
“Really, I’m fine. You should go to bed.”
He’s losing her. But only for tonight. Tomorrow is arranged.
“Gullnazz…”
The makings of a smile touch the corners of her mouth.
“…Er, you know. Thanks for helping out. For the food, and that.”
He’s not good at this. It doesn’t come over casually enough. He begins to busy himself collecting the plates. Then he sees her mug.
“Oh, shit. You never drank your coffee. Look, sorry about that. I never meant you to have the cracked one with that filthy joke on it. You must think I’m a bit of a prat.”
She stops at the door and walks slowly back towards him, takes his hand and gives him a peck on the cheek.
“The mug was fine. And I don’t think you’re a prat. It’s just that I don’t take sugar in coffee.”