White Light (9 page)

CHAPTER EIGHT

Wednesday, 8 April 2015. 22:04

There were no Dr Who time tunnels, or glimpses into the fabric of the universe, I just found myself lying on the damp flagstones four minutes earlier. I gasped at the pain of my battered ribs and my splitting head, and when I could think straight my first thought was to fumble the battery out of its connection; my second to get away as fast as possible – whoever that maniac was he was probably on his way here already and I
really
didn’t want to meet him again.

I grabbed the bag and rolled up onto my knees. A wall of pain crashed over me and I bit my lip to stop myself screaming out. As soon as it had passed, I dragged myself onto my feet and staggered down the lane. I had never really imagined what real pain felt like, now every step sent jolts of agony up and down my spine, stabbing into my kidneys, crushing through my skull. Aside from the darkness I could hardly see through a film of blood dripping into my eyes, and even blinking it away just revealed a more profound blurring that took away the edges of my vision. An ancient tree loomed into sight out of the gloom and I shied away from it, almost giving at the knees.

My breath burned in my chest, and when I could think at all I wondered whether Sarah had felt like this while they had tried to cut her out of the wreckage of her car.

At last I recognised the gleaming windows of the pub and in a few steps I was under its overhanging story and tottering into the road. A blinding light dazzled me completely and I stood there stupidly, thinking that the unbibium must have reconnected and I was going to be taken back to the start of this pain, then a enormous screaming noise filled my ears until I thought my head would split right in two.

‘What are you doing?!’ A taxi driver leaned out of the window of his cab, having slammed on the brakes and skidded to a halt in the middle of the road an inch in front of me. Then, seeing my bloody condition, he opened the door and came towards me.  I sank to my knees, and slowly began to sag sideways.  ‘Are you alright, mate?’

Twenty minutes later my rescuer, Mohammed, helped me out of his cab at the Accident and Emergency department of the John Radcliffe Hospital.  Depositing me gently onto a blue plastic chair in reception he reported my arrival to the lady in the perspex booth, and then came and squatted down next to me.

‘She says they’ll come and see you as a priority,’ he smiled and patted me on the arm. ‘Got to go back to work now, so take care.’

‘Thanks,’ I managed to mumble through swollen lips. We shook hands, and he wished me luck. I thought I would need it.

The nurses took me into a curtained cubicle and pressed and prodded my battered body with medical ruthlessness. I was dimly aware of the arrival of a succession of increasingly senior doctors, who dispatched me on my trolley to x-ray, to a CT scan of my head, to ultrasound scans of my kidneys. Aside from the physical agonies, I was tormented to be separated from the bag, and my eyes swivelled back to find it as soon each time I was wheeled back to my cubicle.

Eventually, a tired-looking consultant looked at my notes and informed me that I had a cracked rib, two broken fingers and needed a ridiculously large number of stitches. Miraculously, my brain and internal organs had escaped the damage that had been aimed at them.

‘What happened?’ she asked, not really interested.  ‘Your friend said he just found you in the street.’

‘Mugging,’ I said, thickly. Nurses had finally given me some pain-relief and I was floating on a warm cloud of not-caring. Despite myself, my eyes slid automatically to the bag, sitting innocently on a nearby chair.

‘Get anything valuable?’ asked the doctor, following my gaze.

‘No,’ I replied, thinking of the unbibium. ‘Lucky me.’

With a shrug, the doctor intoned that she would send a nurse to patch me up and advised me to go straight home to bed. I said I would, not meaning it, and she nodded, not believing me. Just another night in A&E.

I laid back, feeling I was hovering a few inches above the trolley surface, and let my thoughts float away. During the past few hours I had come to realise who had beaten me to a pulp this evening. A series of terrifying freeze frames had spooled slowly through my brain as I’d gazed blearily at hospital ceilings, and eventually I’d recognised the shoes that had stamped down on my hand, back, kidneys and all the rest of it. I’d seen those polished shoes a hundred times, on the feet of Richard Holland. It made sense really, yesterday I had told Maggie that I knew he’d killed his daughter. At the moment I was too spaced out on the painkillers to really care how close to death I had actually come, but I felt my brain tuck this nugget of knowledge away ready for the morning.

My next thought was that I had proved that I could travel in time with only the scratches on me that my dear father-in-law had provided. Sadly, I turning the clock back hadn't left all those injuries behind – I seemed to have re-appeared four minutes earlier in exactly the same state that I'd left, but at least there were no apparent effects of radiation, no misaligned cells, no two hearts, or at least, none that the wonders of the NHS could discover.  Another thought for tomorrow.

Finally, some harassed but kindly nurses swept in and stitched and stitched until my skin felt stretched beyond endurance. Another nurse wrapped my broken fingers together in a painful but efficient splint. They dabbed my face and head with wet cotton wool to get some of the blood off, and wound a tight white bandage around my midriff to strap my cracked rib.

‘You need to take it easy,’ said one of them, smiling.  I smiled painfully back but made no promises.

A grey dawn was breaking over Oxford as I tottered out of A&E, clutching my bag and a packet of codeine tablets. I stopped and looked at the view from Headington Hill, the University buildings just visible in the shadowy valley. The air was wonderfully cool after the over-heated Emergency Department, and I felt my head start to clear for the first time in many hours. The pieces of knowledge that had come to me during the night, and set aside for just this moment, stood up and came forward to be noticed. I noticed them, and I knew what I had to do.

Surprisingly, my little cheapo phone had survived the evening's entertainment and I dug it out of my pocket and phoned Dave. It was early, but I knew he'd already be at the lab.

‘Christ, Adam!’ he answered. ‘Where are you? I've just seen your car!'

'I'm at the JR,' I said, 'can you pick me up?'

Thursday, 9 April 2015. 07:04

Twenty minutes later I was sitting amongst the fast food wrappers in my friend's battered Nissan. Dave was driving with one eye on me.

'God Almighty! You look like shit!’

‘Cheers,’ I said, dryly, ‘actually I feel marvellous.’  He frowned and took in the stitches, splint and general gore, but decided not to say anything else until we had left the ring road and were heading towards home.

‘So what’s happening, Adam?’ he asked. ‘You’ve been locking yourself away in your lab for the past couple of weeks, and now your car is trashed and you turn up looking like you’ve been in a train wreck.’

I sighed, feeling achingly tired now the hospital painkillers had begun to wear off. ‘I’m onto something really big, Dave, I mean really big.’  He opened his mouth but I went on, having spent the time waiting for him to pick me up rehearsing what version of the truth I was going to tell him. ‘And I’m not going to tell you about it.  Not yet, anyway.’  Time for a Nobel Prize later, I thought wryly.  ‘Some people are trying to stop me researching this, and they’ve been busy sending me a message – hence the car, the bruises etc.’  Dave twisted his face and looked like he didn’t believe me, and who blamed him?  ‘Anyway, thanks for this. You’re a mate.’

‘Hmm,’ agreed Dave, pulling into my drive. By the time the car stopped we’d both noticed the front door had been kicked off its hinges. I realised that someone – guess who? – had been here before us and trashed Sarah and my home with joyous violence. We crunched into the hall on a sea of broken furnishings, smashed mirrors and the like, and just stared at the destruction in silent horror.

‘Fucking hell,’ breathed Dave.  ‘Shall I call the police?’

I shrugged.  ‘Why bother, I know who did this.  Don't worry about it.'

My laconic friend swung round and to my surprise grabbed me by the shirt front, causing a fire of agony to flash through my damaged ribs. 'Don't worry about it!' he yelled, 'are you crazy?' He dropped my shirt and stepped away, fumbling a fag out of his pocket and lighting it. 'Jesus God Almighty, Adam, what is up with you?'

I was gasping and holding my side when a hideous thought ripped through me. 'Fuck! Where's the cat?'

Dave straightened up in alarm and we both starting calling for Fergus. I could just imagine what Richard would have done –

'Adam?' a familiar voice quavered in through the open front door, and we stepped outside and towards the sound. 'Adam, is that you?'

It was Max, and as I craned painfully up to look over the hedge I saw with a wash of relief that he was holding Fergus in his arms.

'Good God! What has happened?' His mouth sagged in horror as he caught sight of my bruised and patched face.

'It's ok, Max, I was just in a bit of an accident, at work.' He had gone a worrying grey colour and I hoped the shock wouldn't be too much. 'But it looks worse than it is.'

'Yeah, stupid sod was borrowing my bike and fell off!' Dave had come up beside me and was smiling at my elderly neighbour with a rueful what-is-he-like expression. Max visibly relaxed.

'Oh, I see. Well, tricky things, bicycles.'

'Especially if you're a twat,' said Dave, cutting his eyes to me with a meaningful glare.

'Anyway,' I ignored him, 'thanks for looking after Fergus.'

The elderly man smiled and cuddled the cat happily. 'That's no problem, he came zooming in through the cat flap last night and didn't want to go out again. I think something must have scared him.'

Dave and I didn't look at each other.

'Probably a fox,' I said, 'I think there's been one prowling about. Listen, I've got to go away for a couple of weeks, could you look after him for me?'

Max's face brightened. 'Ah, delighted, delighted. He always gets on so well with Nelson, don't you?' Fergus closed his eyes and purred as he was rubbed under the chin. Fickle bastard.

'Here's my phone number, in case you need anything,' said Dave, handing over an empty ciggie packet that he'd quickly scribbled on. Max took it with a little micro-expression of distaste, and I felt suddenly very fond of the pair of them. Here they were, helping me out, even though Max was ninety and Dave thought I was being a complete arse.

'Thanks, guys,' I said, 'see you, Max.'

'Rightho, take care,' he called, turning away to walk slowly back across his garden. Dave and I moved back towards his car.

'Do you want to come and stay with me whilst this is sorted?' he asked. I thought about it for a second: I could so easily go back to Dave's flat, doss on his sofa, eating take-away and playing video games. I could just let everything fade away, let it be somebody else's problem. My body burned with tiredness, my head ached, I wanted to lie down and sleep for about three weeks.

And then I thought about those polished shoes kicking me with such practiced malice, and about how many times those shiny, expensive, establishment brogues must have carried my father-in-law up the front path of the house in Headington, daughters in tow, handing them over to disgusting sick bastards like himself...

'Thanks, mate,' I meant it, 'but I'm good. I know I'm being weird but please try not to worry.'

He gave me a long look and then shrugged. ‘I’ll get someone to come and board up the broken windows,’ he added. I suddenly thought of something.

'Listen, if anyone wants to know where I am, no matter who they are, even if it's my in-laws,' his intelligent eyes met mine and I sensed the question he wasn't asking, 'could you tell them that I've said I'm going to visit my Uncle in Redruth?'

For a second I thought he was going to ask me whether I
was
going to visit my Uncle in Redruth, but Dave wasn't a top-flight physics post doc for nothing and he just nodded. I reached over and shook his hand. He sighed, then folded himself back into his tiny car and drove away.

It was still early, and the sky was clearing into a beautiful blue, chased here and there with cartoon-like white fluffy clouds. The air was fantastically sharp and pure, and as the sound of Dave's engine faded away all I could hear were the birds singing. The nightmare that had been last night seemed impossible, it just didn't compute with all this normal – was this what every day had been like for Sarah? Every nice thing, every ordinary event, underscored by the jarring dissonance of her other experiences like silent screaming?

I shook myself. Tiredness, physical pain and hospital drugs were making me slow and I needed to get moving. I didn't think Richard would dare return to the scene of the crime during daylight but I shouldn't take any chances. I turned and pushed open the fractured front door and went back inside what had used to be my home. It didn't feel like home anymore. Upstairs the vandalism had reached a crescendo, with paper ripped off the walls and bedding torn right across. The wardrobes in the main bedroom had been toppled, in frustration I supposed – all Sarah’s belongings had already been removed.  How lovely of her father to seek them out, I thought, feeling sick to my stomach.

Fortunately the bathroom had only attracted a normal amount of smashing, and was still serviceable. I had a lot to do, but decided to invest some time in getting myself together, so slowly peeled off my filthy clothes and clambered painfully into the shower, gingerly washing blood off my body and watching it coil darkly down the plughole. With some difficulty I unwound the bandage from my torso, and flung it onto the floor. Then I washed my hair, slowly, as lifting my arms up was agony, rinsing out the dried blood and the grit from the pavement. My scalp and its stitches burned horribly and after a few minutes I decided that whatever state I was now in was going to have to be good enough.

Wincing, I stepped out of the shower, located a partially-ripped towel and gently dried myself off. I picked my way into the spare room, which seemed to have missed Richard’s destructive whirlwind, and pulled on a clean shirt and some black combats, and shoved my feet into a spare pair of trainers, then I limped back into the main bedroom, raking through the mess until I found an old black bum bag that Sarah had once bought to go jogging in. I remembered teasing her about it and felt a flash of guilt which I had to push out of my mind. Downstairs, I carefully decanted the 122 and its make-shift apparatus from the birthday bag into the bum bag and cinched it painfully around my waist, opening it to check inside that everything was still connected. I put my wallet, phone and keys into my pocket, and on an after-thought added the iPod. Automatically I looked round the room to see what else I needed, and then realised I was being stupid: I didn't need to take anything with me.

I headed down the hall at a fast hobble. After a moment's thought I decided to go round the side of the house to my workshop where I wouldn't be overlooked. As I got closer I noticed that the gravel had been shifted as if the doors had recently been pushed open, and I tottered forward as quickly as I could to see if Richard had been in there too. I dragged open the old wooden door and hastily looked around... things seemed a bit out of place but nothing was missing or smashed. He must have decided not to bother in the end, or perhaps he'd simply been too knackered to break anything after energetically destroying most of my house – either way, it felt good to be in one space Sarah's father hadn't metaphorically pissed all over.

Then, to the infinite relief of my hind brain and its constant siren of
run! run!
I took a deep breath, mentally revised my calculations for the hundredth time, and then reached into the bag to twist the control dial to the right number. For a second I stood and listened to the whine of the building charge and then everything around me vanished in a flash of brilliant white.