A Room Full of Bones (24 page)

Suddenly they are flooded with light. The security light has come on and the monster has resolved itself into a young man wearing a wet suit and carrying a surfboard on his shoulders.

‘Hallo,’ he says. ‘I hope I didn’t startle you. I’m Cameron. Sammy and Ed’s son.’

Sammy and Ed? Who the hell are they? Then Ruth remembers. The weekenders. Her other next-door neighbours. And this massive creature must be the little boy she remembers trekking over the marshes with his inflatable boat. Well, he obviously still likes the sea.

‘Just come down for a couple of days surfing with some pals,’ he says. ‘Hope we won’t disturb you.’

He has a very posh accent, far posher than his parents, but he seems friendly enough. Who on earth would go surfing in November? A public schoolboy called Cameron, that’s who.

‘No problem,’ she says. ‘Make as much noise as you like. You won’t disturb me.’

‘Dada,’ says Kate.

Inside, she makes Kate some supper (though she isn’t very hungry after the roast potatoes) and gives her a bath. Sitting in her cot, fluffy-haired, clutching her bottle, Kate looks angelic, the sort of baby who is going to sleep for eight hours without a murmur. What will Kate think if Max starts visiting regularly? She seems to like him but will she resent him taking up Ruth’s time? What if Max and Ruth break up and Kate misses him terribly? What if Claudia savages Flint or vice versa? Stop it, she tells herself. The relationship hasn’t started yet and you’re
worrying about it ending. From next door she can hear the soothing thump of rock music.

Maybe it’s
Guns ‘n’ Roses
or Ruth’s minor key version of
Wheels on the Bus
but Kate is soon fast asleep. Ruth tiptoes out of the room. Six o’clock, just time to catch the end of
Time Team
. Maybe she can have a glass of wine too. She realises that she is smiling.

The phone rings. Ruth answers, still smiling.

‘Ruth. It’s Judy. It’s about the boss. About Nelson.’

She isn’t sure when she stopped smiling. She just knows she isn’t smiling now.

‘What about him?’

‘He’s ill. In hospital. It looks pretty serious. I thought you’d want to know.’

Why, Ruth wonders. Why did Judy think she’d want to know? As far as Judy knows, Ruth and Nelson are just acquaintances, professional colleagues who’ve worked together on a couple of cases. Why this urgent phone call on a Sunday night? But, of course, she does want to know.

‘What’s wrong with him?’ Her voice comes out in a whisper.

‘No one really knows. Cloughie’s just spoken to Michelle. They think it could be a virus, one of those that’s resistant to antibiotics.’

‘Is he—’ Ruth stops, afraid to go on. Judy’s voice is kind, professionally concerned.

‘He’s in a coma but his internal organs seem to be shutting down. It doesn’t look good. Michelle and the girls are with him.’

Michelle and the girls. From a long way off, Ruth hears her voice saying, ‘Thanks for telling me Judy. I’ve got to go now. Bye.’

Ruth puts the phone down and realises that she is shaking. In all her worst fears, in all her most fevered ‘what ifs’, she has never imagined this. She had thought that Michelle and Nelson might move away, even that Nelson might be killed in the line of duty, never that he would succumb to something as prosaic as a virus. It’s like Hercules dying of a common cold. It just can’t happen. She sits down, stands up again, switches on the TV, switches it off again. What can she do? She can’t exactly ring Michelle or turn up at the hospital. She tries to remember the last thing that she said to Nelson. It was at the museum, wasn’t it? Nelson had just been winding up their interview when Danforth Smith had barged in. ‘We’ve finished, haven’t we?’ she’d said to Nelson. And he’d answered, ‘Yes. We’ve finished.’ So is that it? Finished. Over. Can there really be a world without Nelson? She thinks of her daughter sleeping upstairs. Now Kate may never have a chance to get to know her father. Ruth realises that she is crying.

The phone rings and she snatches it up. She steels herself to hear Judy saying, compassionately, ‘It’s over, he’s gone’ or any of the hundreds of platitudinous things people say to avoid telling you that someone is dead. But it’s Shona. Ruth feels quite weak with relief.

‘Hi Ruth! What are you doing?’

‘Nothing much. Watching TV.’ Not for anything in the world is she going to tell Shona about Nelson.

‘Cool. Can I come over? Phil’s got the flu and he’s being such a man about it. I’m so bored. I haven’t been out of the house all day. It’s hell being pregnant.’

But to Ruth now it seems like heaven. When she’d been pregnant, Nelson had been alive and well and Kate had been safe, safe inside Ruth.

‘I’m sorry,’ she hears herself saying, ‘but I’ve got a lot of work to do.’

‘OK. Not to worry.’ Shona sounds disappointed, then her voice picks up again. ‘Did you go to that Aborigine conference? Phil was invited but he thought it would be too weird.’

‘It was weird. Weird but interesting.’

‘Are you sure you’re not free for a quick chat?’

‘Sorry Shona, I’d love to see you but I’ve got a ton of essays to mark.’

‘All right then. See you soon.’

‘Bye. Hope Phil feels better.’

Outside, the wind continues to blow. The front door rattles and she hears her dustbin falling over. She remembers the time when she was lost on the Saltmarsh and Nelson came to save her. He had found his way along the hidden paths, the secret crossing places, and he had come to rescue her. She remembers the time when he had thrown himself into a freezing river for her sake. She’d taken him for granted, Nelson and his lunatic bravery. What would it be like not to have that presence in her life, that massive, exasperating presence? Although she has only known Nelson for a few years, she just can’t imagine it.

The knock on the door freezes her with terror. She thinks of other unexpected summonses: Erik, Cathbad, David, even Nelson himself, that dreadful night when they found Scarlet’s body. Who is it this time? The reaper whose name is death? The nameless creature from
The Monkey’s Paw
? Maybe it’s Cameron, come to invite her for a spliff and a talk about the meaning of life.

She opens the door.

It’s Michelle.

‘Can I come in?’ says Michelle.

She looks terrible – unmade-up, hair lank, clothes crumpled – but she is also, mysteriously, more beautiful than ever. Ruth thinks that she looks other-worldly, a creature of the night, an ageless picture of feminine grief.

‘Of course.’ Ruth stands back.

‘Have you heard?’ asks Michelle. ‘About Harry?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth.

Michelle comes in and sits on the sofa. Flint appears from nowhere and tries to sit on her lap. Ruth shoos him away.

‘Can I get you some tea or coffee?’ Ruth is aware of how ridiculous she sounds, but Michelle must have come straight from the hospital. Maybe she hasn’t eaten all day.

‘No thank you,’ says Michelle. She looks down at her hands, long elegant fingers with a huge diamond on the wedding finger. How had the young PC Nelson ever afforded a ring like that?

Ruth sits opposite, waiting. There’s nothing else she can do.

‘Harry’s in a coma,’ says Michelle at last. ‘Did you hear that?’

‘Yes,’ says Ruth. ‘Judy rang me.’

‘Judy? Oh, the policewoman. What else did she say?’

‘Just that Nelson … Harry … was very ill and no one knew what it was.’

‘Yes. They think it might be a virus but they’re not sure. He’s not responding to anything at the moment. It’s terrible, they’re nursing him in masks because they don’t know if it’s contagious or not.’ She stops and takes a deep breath. ‘He doesn’t recognise anyone, not me or the girls. It’s as if we can’t get through to him.’

‘I’m sorry,’ says Ruth, inadequately.

Michelle looks at her. Ruth thinks it might be the first time that they have been alone together. She is struck again both by the classical purity of Michelle’s face and by the expression in her eyes. Something about Michelle’s expression makes Ruth feel very scared indeed.

‘Do you know why I’ve come?’ asks Michelle.

Ruth shakes her head.

‘I want you to go to him.’

‘What?’

Michelle looks at Ruth and her eyes are huge, wet with tears.

‘I want you to go to see Harry,’ she says. ‘He misses you.’

Ruth’s voice sounds as if it’s coming from a long way away. ‘He doesn’t,’ she says.

Once again Michelle looks at her with that awful shining simplicity, ‘Oh, he’s not in love with you, I know
that. But he does care about you. He hates not being able to see you. He’s … he’s used to me. I thought … if he saw you …’

Ruth’s eyes also fill with tears but she says nothing.

‘I thought, if he could just see you, hear your voice …’

Ruth looks at Michelle, who is watching her with those big, strangely innocent, eyes. At this moment she really feels that she loves Michelle, loves her more than she ever loved Nelson. But it doesn’t change her answer.

‘I can’t. I’m sorry.’

‘Why not?’

‘I’m afraid. Nelson’s ill, no one knows what it is. I’m afraid of carrying the infection back to Kate.’

Michelle stands up. She is taller than Ruth but now she seems ten foot high, a vision of implacable justice.

‘I was wrong about you, Ruth. I thought you loved him.’

Ruth says nothing.

‘All the things I’ve thought about you, I never thought that you didn’t love him. It’s funny, it didn’t make me hate you. It made me think that we had something in common. I love him. I love him more than anything.’

That summer, the long cold summer when Nelson finally chose Michelle over her, had been one of the hardest times of Ruth’s life. She was on her own, everyone seemed to be on holiday: Shona and Phil in Tuscany, the Nelsons (she’d heard) in Florida, Cathbad in a monastery on Iona. Ruth had resisted an invitation from her parents to join them at a Christian camp on the Isle of Wight. She had spent her time going for long walks with Kate in her
buggy, down the shingle paths of the Saltmarsh, along the seafront at Cromer, through the streets of King’s Lynn. She would have lost weight if she hadn’t spent the evenings eating chocolate biscuits.

But through the grey lonely days and endless nights, Ruth was stalked by fear. She let herself be consumed by this fear, surrender to it, almost seemed to revel in it, spending hours searching the internet, seeking out information that could feed the fear. And the fear was illness, specifically Kate becoming ill. In the early part of the summer, the news had been full of the swine flu scare. Ruth, feverishly searching websites at night, kept coming upon stories of healthy babies, happily playing one minute, critically ill in hospital the next. Some of the babies died. Ruth, slightly unhinged by solitude, did not take in the fact that the children who had died usually had some existing medical condition. All she knew was that Kate might be taken away from her. She felt Kate’s forehead constantly, invested in a thermometer that went in the ear and used it so often that Kate developed an ear infection and howled all night. Ruth, pacing the floors with her sick child, felt herself to be literally on the edge. She wasn’t sure that she could cope any more. She thought about walking into the sea with Kate in her arms, surrendering to Erik’s relentless tide. She would have prayed if she’d known how.

But things got better. Friends returned from holiday, swine flu disappeared from the news, Ruth let whole days go by without taking Kate’s temperature. Term started and she was able to immerse herself in work. A beautiful
autumn succeeded the dreary summer. But when she had heard Judy’s words, ‘They think it could be a virus, one of those that’s resistant to antibiotics,’ it had all come flooding back. Nelson is dying of a mystery virus and now Michelle wants her to expose Kate to this danger. If it was only her own safety, Ruth thinks that she would sacrifice it willingly for Nelson. After all, he has risked his life to save her. But she has Kate to think about and she is all Kate has.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says again.

Michelle sweeps to the door. ‘Goodbye Ruth. I hope you won’t feel too guilty.’

A forlorn hope. As the sound of Michelle’s car disappears into the night, Ruth wonders if it is actually possible to die of guilt.

Ruth is relieved when morning comes. She doesn’t think that she slept for more than a few minutes all night. But those few minutes were enough for terrible dreams: Nelson drowning, his hand stretched out to her, Erik’s voice calling from the sea, Cathbad turning into a snake, hissing ‘sleep little three eyes,’ and Kate, always Kate: Kate burning with fever, Kate lying dead in her cot, Kate lost in the dark, searching for her. When Kate’s imperious crying wakes her at six, Ruth is only too glad to get up. She showers with Kate in her arms and goes downstairs to get on with the day. She is so tired that her feet seem to be stuck to the floor and every step feels like uprooting them. Coffee briefly gives her enough energy to collect her rucksack and Kate’s nappy bag and get them both in the car, but by the time she reaches Sandra’s, great waves of weariness are breaking over her.

‘You don’t look too good,’ says Sandra. ‘Got the flu?’

The flu. People like Sandra make illness sound so normal, an irritation, something to be coped with and got over. But to Ruth, the slightest sniffle from Kate is
the sound of impending death. Why does she feel like this? Is it because of her parents who, after they found God, also lost all faith in contemporary medicine? ‘God will provide,’ became their mantra. Ruth blames her parents bitterly for not having her vaccinated against measles, resulting in a nightmare few weeks at university. Her parents’ imaginations also became markedly more apocalyptic, their conversation littered with references to death, judgement, heaven and hell. The devil became a regular correspondent. Is this why Ruth sometimes feels that some terrible catastrophe is just around the corner, or is this just normal paranoia?

More coffee gets her through her first lecture and tutorial, but by lunchtime she is flagging. She breaks her own rule and keeps her phone on when she’s with her students. Every second she expects to hear Judy’s voice, ‘I’m sorry …’ Or perhaps she won’t ring at all. Perhaps she’ll just send a text message.
N dead
. Maybe no one will bother to tell her and Ruth will have to struggle through this day and the next not knowing whether Nelson is alive or dead. She buys a sandwich from the canteen but can’t be bothered to eat it. She sits at her desk staring at her poster of Harrison Ford, the archaeologist’s pin up. She feels as if she’s in an Indiana Jones movie, running desperately through traps and obstacles, each one more cunning and improbable than the last. Should she go to see Nelson? On one level, her fear is completely irrational. Kate could easily catch a virus at Sandra’s, or at the doctor’s, or at one of the soft play areas that Ruth resorts to on rainy Saturdays.
But that is different from Ruth herself passing on the infection, giving her child up to the danger, like Abraham taking Isaac to be sacrificed. Oh, bugger her parents and their Bible stories. She puts her head down on the desk.