The Long Forgotten Page 7

  ‘If it crashed that close to the coast of Great Britain, then why didn’t we know about it?’ Dash manoeuvres her microphone into position, but before she can speak, Cole leans forward into his.

  ‘The sea is big. A plane is small.’

  ‘Isn’t that a little flippant, Professor Cole?’ the journalist asks. He is a large man with unhealthy-looking skin, collar clinging to the sheen of sweat on his neck. ‘Isn’t this the question the loved ones of those who went missing on the flight will want answered?’ There is a dull murmur of agreement from the journalist’s peers, or rather, Cole thinks, the sound of their column inches being filled, and it is this, the tawdry state of most modern reporting, that draws his indignation. This man isn’t interested in bringing to a close the grief of those who lost loved ones on The Long Forgotten. He’s interested in perpetuating it to sell newspapers.

  ‘It’s a fact,’ Cole says, ‘and to think anything different is to completely misunderstand our insignificance in the face of nature. We’re a speck of dust. And you, sir, are a speck of dust on the speck of dust.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  Cole fixes the man with a grimace. All the joy of his unlikely reprieve when the whale saved his life has vanished for the time being, and won’t return until he sees his wife again.

  Dash scrapes her hair back behind her ears and starts speaking into her microphone too eagerly, creating a screeching feedback loop she has to shout over. ‘What Professor Cole means is, aeronautical tracking equipment has advanced at a fantastic pace since the loss of flight PS570. These days we can track flights on our mobile phones. But back then, as you’ll know, things were very different, and until we ascertain exactly what went wrong on the aircraft, we’d simply be speculating. As Professor Cole was trying to say, we’re not in the business of speculation. It’ll be at least a few days before we get any more information from the flight recorder.’

  Cole slides backwards in his chair and closes his eyes. Homemade Key lime pie. Damn, if he can’t just taste it.

  SEVEN

  Dove sits in bed waiting for the last vestiges of his headache to fade. Keen to distract himself from the disconcerting memory of Hens Berg on the clifftop – the anger and betrayal Peter felt in his bones still resonating in Dove’s – he checks Facebook. That’s when he sees a photograph of Lara Caine and remembers an anger of his own.

  The images have appeared on her page overnight, which has piped them directly into Dove’s timeline, despite him making every effort to block them, so he couldn’t be reminded of the relationship he’d destroyed ten whole years before, when he was kicked out of university. Whenever he saw her picture, whenever he read her name, that awful excerpt of history swirled in his stomach – a sneak attack on his senses in the form of a photograph. Lara Caine standing outside her brand-new apartment. On her thumb, thrust out at her side as though she’d hitch-hiked to get there, were hooked the keys to her new home.

  Dove immediately recognized the building. One of the newly built blocks beside the canal before the water disappears into the tunnel that shepherds it in darkness from Islington to Camden. Expensive small flats like this were popping up all over London, capitalizing on a hunger to live in the expanding centre of the city by flushing out the old and the poor. No thought for the past, no thought for the future, these were ugly monuments to the now.

  The photograph of Lara with her new keys was not the only one that appeared that morning. There were twenty-seven more. A virtual tour of a life. Inside, the rooms were small, with walls painted white. The floors were faux wooden, the worktops grey marble, lights hidden in a false ceiling, and the living space open-plan. Chrome taps bent to resemble swan’s necks. She’d had a house-warming party at which a neighbour who knocked to complain about the noise was persuaded to stay for a drink. Dove now knew this just as he knew which gym she attended, where she was buying her wedding dress, even what she ate for brunch at weekends. All of these things, events, people, places: someone else’s memories, suddenly, wrongfully his.

  This is why he’s walking to work along the canal again, where riverboats part the algae like curtains drawn to mark a death, and then standing outside Lara’s apartment block. Because this is what Peter Manyweathers would do. Dove knows it from the memories. He’d move forward. He’d carve his own path of happiness into the future, just as he’d begun to hunt the flowers in the love letter. He wouldn’t sit and wait for life to happen to him. If Dove could just make amends with Lara, then he could do the same.

  He looks up at the building with its almost sheer glass facade, where once stood a pub servicing the men who built the waterways, and he imagines the view from the windows at the top. Until recently it would have afforded Lara a near-full panorama of south-east London, but the opposite bank had been developed in tandem, and so now, if she looked out to watch evening drape its tired body across the city, she’d be met by a row of tiny but expensive, identically furnished apartments – her own life mirrored back at her.

  For a second he thinks he might ring the buzzer with her name beside it. Her voice will crackle through the intercom and this will be it, his chance to finally apologize for that night, years ago, when, consumed by an anger he couldn’t control or even source, he was carried out of the student union bar by two campus security guards while she watched, the disdain on her face almost scything him in two. But then something about the proximity – it is still early, and in real terms she is only metres away from him, in bed with her fiancé no doubt – snaps his senses back into focus. She’s better off without him in her life, a life he wishes for the mercy of knowing nothing about. Dove wonders if she’s as happy as her online presence suggests. Whether it’s possible to tell any more. Or, as is more likely, whether there are two versions of her, two versions of everyone.

  Dove has always felt there are two versions of himself, and this had been precisely what interested Lara most about him in the first place. The discrepancy between the life an abandoned child lives, and the life it would otherwise have lived. His twin fates. After a while, at university, she’d been preoccupied by the idea of Dove as a foundling, and he’d grown to trust her so implicitly that he told her everything she wanted to know, things he’d not talked to anyone about, before or since.

  He moves away from the door of her building as another resident exits, knowing with some sadness they’ll never be as close as they were back then. He leaves, continues on down the canal, lungs filled with the phosphorous scent of algae. In some sense, he’ll always be outside the door now. And that’s OK with him. But still he remembers with fondness those days where he talked and she listened, and he’d told her exactly where he was when he first felt different to Len and Maud.

  They were sitting in the garden. Dove was eight years old, watching Maud drag a trembling razor blade down the crest of Len’s throat. The sound of it scraping on his stubble and the whisper of insects. She washed the blade in a red plastic bowl.

  ‘I have another question,’ Dove said, and Len and Maud both smiled. He’d been chatting incessantly for close to an hour, and so far they’d struggled to adequately explain how rainbows were formed, why penguins huddled together for warmth, and why he should always go to bed at 7.30 without them having to ask twice. But this next question was different. He could see it on their faces, how Maud let her hair fall across her eyes.

  ‘Why did you keep me?’

  ‘Why you?’ Len asked, sparing his wife. Dove nodded. ‘You weren’t number eighty-three. Oh no. You were much, much more than that.’

  ‘What was I?’

  ‘You were our son. We fell in love with you, and that was how our bread was buttered.’

  Dove just said it, or rather, it tumbled out, what had been stuffed down inside him for as long as he could remember.

  ‘I’m not like you, am I?’ In one sense or another he’d always known. He didn’t have their ruddy skin, nor Len’s big feet, nor Maud’s coiled hair and hooked nose. He had brown eyes, tanned skin,
dark hair and a button nose. They always seemed so peaceful to him, which made the tempest of his feelings all the more inexplicable.

  ‘Not like us how?’ Maud asked, pouring dirty water into a flower bed.

  ‘We’re not the same.’

  ‘Of course we’re the same. We’re all human, aren’t we? Doesn’t matter what you look like.’ She ran her fingers through his hair and he felt the stiffness that lingered in her knuckles.

  ‘I don’t mean that.’

  ‘You mean because we’re not your parents?’ Len rose from his deckchair, holding his hip like he might flip a gun from its holster. ‘No, we’re not the parents you were born to. But we’re family. Family is what we are.’

  The dog forced itself through the flap in the back door, waddled onto the lawn and turned a circle before collapsing on its stomach. Its health had been waning lately. Twice Dove caught it cowering behind the shed, and from what little he understood of overheard conversations between Maud and Len, a recent visit to the vet’s had resulted in discouraging news. But he was fond of the musty cigar smell of its damp fur after a swim in the ponds. Of the way it nuzzled the soft flesh behind his knee when he climbed out of the bath, licked the suds crawling down his legs.

  ‘What’s wrong with Doggle?’

  ‘He’s just old, that’s all,’ Maud said, as her and Len’s breathing reached slow synchronicity, both lost in the same thought, if only for a fraction of a second. ‘He’s just old.’

  ‘Will he die?’ Dove asked, voice faltering. Len pressed his thumb against the nape of Dove’s neck, drawing perfect circles both conciliatory and ineffectual.

  ‘We all get old,’ he said.

  As suddenly as a dry match sparks aflame, Dove felt a great surge of anger shoot up from his stomach, through his neck to fill his head. He exploded from his seat and ran as fast as he could to the bathroom, the only door in the house he could lock, his instinct when he felt this way to be cocooned, imprisoned, so that whatever it was trying to escape him could go no further than this. He took the showerhead and smashed it hard against the tiles. He only stopped when the tears on his cheeks cooled.

  Maud was outside the bathroom door when he opened it. She held him against her chest the same way she always did, rising, falling, rising, enough that afterwards, when he was calm again, there was a phantom motion to everything, and the universe was a boat adrift in a sea that knew nothing of the tempers in its past.

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, ‘it’s OK.’ She smoothed his hair, and eventually he fell asleep knowing they too would leave him, one day.

  That’s what he told Lara. He didn’t know then that one day she’d see his rage for herself.

  Early evenings are always relatively quiet in the Pit. People are arriving home from work. They’re making spaghetti bolognese, watching soap operas, sitting on the sofa; activities that don’t tend to require the attendance of an ambulance. While in the real world outside, those more dangerous pursuits that do – drinking, fighting, falling, the three often connected – have only just begun. Dove considers a society working towards a future where there are no emergencies because nobody actually does anything. He’ll be out of a job, but he doesn’t care. All he cares about now is Peter Manyweathers, and what happened to him next. It’s been on his mind all day, how Peter knew his and Hens Berg’s destinies were somehow bound from the moment they met. Dove can feel it. He can feel how Peter feared and yet wanted this closeness, a link with another. Peter Manyweathers’ life feels so much more seductive and romantic than Dove’s own that he is beginning to lose himself in it completely, longing for the next memory, the next instalment of Peter’s story to make itself known, because every time it does, his own world becomes that much more colourful and complete.

  ‘Dove?’ Cliff is standing behind him, hopping from one foot to the other like a horse in a dressage competition. ‘Is now a good time for a chat?’

  ‘With me?’ Dove asks, suddenly wishing for a call. An emergency tracheotomy, anything.

  ‘Yes, with you.’

  Dove follows him across the floor and into his office, where Cliff draws the crooked plastic blinds on the internal window, then leans against the slats, smearing them open again.

  ‘How are the headaches?’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘Maybe you should see a doctor?’

  ‘Really, I’m fine.’

  Cliff straightens, uncomfortable enough with the conversation that he rubs his hands across his scalp.

  ‘Do you know what I want to speak to you about?’ Dove knows. But a part of him wants to make Cliff say it.

  ‘I’ve no idea.’

  ‘I hate to do this. I consider you a friend, you know that. But I’m your supervisor, so I must. A complaint has been made about your behaviour.’

  ‘A complaint?’ Dove lowers himself into a seat as indifferently as he can, instantly undermined by the squeaking of its wheels.

  ‘Come on, Dove, let’s not make this any more awkward than it already is. Tania says you lost your temper with her in the middle of the office.’ Dove can see a small group of colleagues have positioned themselves by the vending machine for a better view through the gap in the blinds.

  ‘I didn’t lose my temper.’

  ‘I saw you with my own eyes.’ Cliff stares up at the ceiling, as though he can project there things he’s seen before, play them back and use them as evidence. ‘You raised your voice.’

  ‘Hardly.’

  ‘You held her arm.’

  Dove pinches the bridge of his nose hard enough two tiny pressure bruises appear and remain for the rest of the day. What would Peter do?

  ‘I’ll apologize,’ he says. ‘If you need me to apologize then I’ll do it.’

  ‘Good,’ Cliff says, a smile on his face far smugger than he could ever mean it to appear. ‘I appreciate it. Thank you.’

  ‘Any time.’

  ‘I hope next time we sit down and talk it’s over a beer, huh?’

  ‘Right,’ Dove nods.

  ‘And maybe you could be on time tomorrow? There are only so many blind eyes I can turn.’

  When Dove exits the office his colleagues scatter in a hundred different directions, ants beneath an upturned rock.

  Road traffic accidents are difficult to deal with at the best of times. It’s often too noisy to get a clear grasp on what the caller is saying. Usually they’ve witnessed something that has left them in a state of shock, making it hard to extract the key details needed to dispatch the correct response. Where. What. When. Sometimes there are multiple callers, each offering different perspectives on the nature of the incident. And this one is no different. But as the woman on the other end describes the way a white van shunted the rear of a blue Toyota at the junction of Holloway Road and Seven Sisters Road – three casualties, walking wounded, an ambulance is on its way – he can concentrate on only one thing. Jed’s voice, four desks away, increasing in volume as he tries to get Tania’s attention.

  ‘Flowers?’ he asks.

  When his ambulance has arrived, Dove patches himself into Jed’s line using the access code he’s watched Cliff use a hundred times. The voice of the woman Jed is talking to is fragile, unsure. She is on the verge of hanging up, Dove can tell.

  ‘I know I shouldn’t be calling this number again, and I don’t want to waste your time,’ she says, ‘but I think he might be in real pain. It’s so difficult to tell with Zachariah.’

  ‘Zachariah?’

  ‘That’s his name. Zachariah Temple. He’s holding his head, really holding it. You have to understand, he doesn’t move much, let alone speak. He’s only really here in body, not mind, if you know what I mean. But he’s looking at the flowers in the yard and holding his head and I don’t know who else to call.’

  ‘What’s the address?’ Dove’s voice in Jed’s headset makes him almost topple off his chair, exactly as he might in a cartoon, his arms flailing until he can finally reassert his balance.

  ‘Dove?’ Jed
says. ‘What are you doing?’ But Dove repeats himself to the woman on the phone as though Jed was never there.

  ‘The address?’

  ‘What’s going on?’ the woman says, confused by the introduction of a second voice.

  ‘Exactly,’ Jed says, standing now, waving until he gets Cliff’s attention. He hits mute. ‘What the fuck do you think you’re doing?’

  ‘Your address? For the ambulance?’

  ‘Blackatree Crescent Nursing Home,’ she says. ‘Zachariah doesn’t have friends or family we can call. No wife. No kids we know of. No brothers or sisters.’

  And the pain in Dove’s head is growing, stronger this time, a fist of stone bunched in his skull, pushing his brain down into his neck. He remembers Peter’s sister, Susan.

  Cliff’s voice comes from behind him.

  ‘Dove, what the hell is going on here? Are you patched into Jed’s call?’

  Dove remembers. He remembers how Peter thought of Susan as he lay helpless, bloody, dying. How Peter wondered if it was Susan who’d sent the angel to save him.

  ‘Dove! Are you OK?’

  And the woman, still on the line.

  ‘The flowers. It’s Zachariah. He’s doing it again. He’s looking at the flowers.’

  ‘Who’s Zachariah Temple?’ Dove asks.

  He remembers Susan. He remembers the angel and the sheep-eating plant.

  EIGHT

  Peter met Susan in the diner on 10th Street, a gleefully shabby joint, halfway between two of the city’s more notable churches, St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery and Grace Church on the corner of Broadway. Both tussled for the title of Peter’s favourite building in Manhattan, depending on his mood on any given day. The former struck him most on solemn mornings, when waking alone imbued the day ahead with a certain hopelessness, which he could usually shake with a brisk walk by noon. Perhaps it was the famous tomb, the solitude it brutally evoked. Come lunchtime, he was generally happier, and the awe-inspiring spire of the latter lifted him, as if it had risen proudly from his chest.