The Tell-Tale Heart Read online

  But I needn’t have bothered. Helen went to the doctor after that, got herself antidepressants. Returned, if not to the woman I’d married, into a good impression of her. She asked quiet, reasonable questions about the progress of Lucy’s pregnancy. She found out details of the hospital and sent a card when Ben was born. She refrained from asking if I visited and, as he grew older, when Lucy pestered me to ask if we could have Ben occasionally for the weekend, Helen always said yes, and put clean sheets with bunny rabbits on the camp bed in Alice’s room.

  Is it possible, like stepping into a freezer, to really face this deathly-cold blast? I carried on, seeing Lucy sometimes, and continuing to lie about it. I’m not proud of this. I’m thinking about it, is all. This is what I did. Lied to Helen, had phone conversations at work, slipped over to Lucy’s flat in the afternoons, the excitement of that . . . Lied to Lucy too, carried on lying, until I moved on. Until Lucy grew tired of me and I found a replacement.

  What did that feel like, to be a girl like Helen, unguarded, straightforward, who had allowed me to unpeel her like a mollusc from its shell, only to find that the exposure was devastating? That entrusting yourself entirely to someone can make you want to die? Helen, does it mean anything at all that I’m thinking these thoughts? That I’m able to remember and construct things differently? That for the first time I glimpsed it there from your point of view? Does it mean it’s all over for me, for the old me?

  In the morning Helen dresses quickly. She thanks me for a nice evening. She puts on no make-up and her face in that yellow kitchen light is all of her fifty years, with a dark crease under one eye that was never there before, her auburn hair now gathered up with clips, a dusting of grey at the parting. She kisses me on the cheek and I get a whiff of myself, I smell my own particular scent on her. I apologise. She says, ‘Nothing to be sorry for, Patrick.’

  We see when I open the door that it has snowed overnight, a thick white, like a coating of cake icing. The roads look bad. We note that no gritter has been out to make things better, or safer. ‘It looks treacherous out there,’ Helen says. She gets an ice-scraper from the boot of her car and I – still in pyjama bottoms and bare feet – go to fill a water jug to help clear the windscreen of ice. As I’m handing this to her in the doorway Helen says, suddenly: ‘You do seem – different, somehow.’

  ‘Performance not up to scratch?’

  She smiles and bats my arm.

  ‘Not that. I don’t mean that. Something else. I don’t know. You always kept a bit of yourself back.’

  ‘And now?’

  But she’s unwilling to say more. We’re interrupted then by a noise inside the flat. Ben rousing himself from his pupae on the sofa to call out ‘See you Helen!’ He falls instantly back to sleep.

  The car windscreen cleared, there’s no further excuse for delay. Helen and I say goodbye with a brief hug. Only after the door has softly closed do I want to call after her. I’m remembering her favourite insult for me and I want to say: Maybe I do now. Honestly, Helen. I do know I’m born.

  I find myself glad I’m not on my own and wishing Ben would wake up. I make coffee, switching on the noisy bean grinder without closing the kitchen door, whistling. Eventually I call out chirpily, ‘How will you get back, Ben, do you need a lift to the station?’ No reply.

  I place the coffee mug next to his sleeping bag on the floor by the sofa, gently shaking his body inside the purple nylon, feeling his bony shoulders at the top of it and hearing his rattling, adenoidal breathing. He doesn’t wake. I stare at him for a moment, trying to see what Helen meant, a genetic connection to me – but he just looks like any young man. Very young. He smells slightly smoky and unwashed. His brown hair doesn’t seem at all familiar, doesn’t look like family, I find myself thinking. Though perhaps it is the same colour mine was before I went grey, I can’t now remember.

  The coffee turns cold: mud-coloured. I gather up Christmas crackers from the carpet and abandoned paper hats, a tiny pair of silver scissors, a folded joke.

  Ben wakes long after lunch. I’d been scrolling down Cambridge University PGCE courses, looking up retraining as a teacher. Popular among bankers apparently, searching for something more worthwhile. I glance up from my BlackBerry and Ben nods a greeting.

  ‘Can I stay here?’ he says in his unassertive voice. ‘I don’t want to go home.’

  ‘Huh?’

  He leans over, sips at the cold coffee, then sits up with the sleeping bag at his waist. He coughs, and I can see every rib defined in his hairless white chest. His phone slips out from under him and crashes to the floor; I see that he sleeps with it under his pillow, and leaves it on, too, the light must have been beeping at him all night long like a heart monitor.

  ‘How long for?’ I say, cautiously. I hardly know you, is what I’m thinking, but what I say is: ‘This is just temporary. Hospital property. Now I’m better I’ve got to find somewhere myself, actually . . . start my life up again.’

  ‘Can I find somewhere with you?’ His voice is so quiet I have to get up and stand over him to hear it.

  ‘Ben, I don’t know . . .’

  ‘Can’t I live with you for a while? Please.’

  And what the hell, I think. Everything else in my life is different, why not this?

  ‘Yeah, OK,’ I say. Ben smiles, and his pupils darken. He picks up his phone, which as usual is kicking off at him, buzzing and flashing and practically leaping from his hand.

  A month later and I finally get my trip to Littleport. I’m driving along achingly empty Fen roads. The day is white, foggy still, frosted. Paused, somehow. Taking the turning from the A10 after Ely onto a wide road with a bank of iced white at one side, the river behind it, pylons that seem about to topple, and a long low electric wire on the other. I wind the window down; I can hear the electricity twanging in the empty landscape. The fog means there’s nothing. The yellow eyes of other cars. Driving into clouds.

  ‘What do you want to go to this next-life place for, anyway?’ Ben asked. He’s been staying with me since Christmas. The boy has nothing much to do, as far as I can see; no reason to go home, no friends, or interests. He is wedded to his phone; takes it in the bathrooom with him, never lets it out of his sight.

  I’m expected to move out of here at the end of January and he says he’s here to take care of me. I’ve been working on my Custer book and organising to rent a two-bedroomed flat in Cambridge. The city, of course, not the countryside. It might be nice to be close to Alice and . . . well, there seems to be no reason for Ben to be anywhere, in particular, since he seems to be – wilfully apathetic and incapable of making plans. He’s practically a mute. I find myself wondering if Lucy ever had him tested for . . . I don’t know what, deafness, or autism or something? We’ve been playing cards, drinking beer, playing Call of Duty together on his PlayStation. (Playing with my son: better late than never.) But today he’s lying in bed and I slip out unnoticed, Ruth Beamish’s letter in my pocket.

  Well, I see what Maureen means: the landscape is bleak all right. Bare. It’s hardly the Yorkshire Dales or the Lake District: no beautiful hills and dips, no sudden astonishing vistas of glorious colour. Utilitarian. Unlovely. Swept flatness, bent-over trees, the boringness of long straight roads. The middle of nowhere. But then again, there’s something refreshing, calming about the emptiness: minimalist. Especially today. So white; fresh. A blank screen. No one knows I’m here.

  I Googled it again, Littleport, after Maureen let slip about the funeral. There’s a church – St George’s. Perhaps that’s where the funeral was held. I park next to the Co-Op on the main street for a look around. I feel self-conscious; this is hardly the place where a visitor would be inconspicuous. Especially a visitor with a newish BMW. I wouldn’t be surprised if a ball of tumbleweed rolled down the high street. There’s a bridal shop; a For Sale sign creaking back and forth. I hug my jacket close to my face, reassured by the scratching of the zip at my chin.

  The church is in the centre of the vi
llage. St George’s Parish Church: Thieves Beware. It’s locked. There’s a CCTV camera, a notice about the Christmas services; it’s all closed up and sealed. ‘It was here that the rioters were read the Riot Act by the Reverend Vachell whose vicarage was ransacked by the rioters although the church was left untouched.’

  A quick walk across the stiffened white grass. I find the headstone immediately, brush the frost from it: ‘Here lye interred in one grave The Bodies of William Beamiss, George Crow, John Dennis, Isaac Harley, Thomas South . . .’

  Beamiss. That must be him. Drew Beamish’s forefather.

  ‘. . . executed at Ely on the 28th Day of June 1816, having been convicted at the Special Assizes holden there, of divers Robberies during the Riots at Ely and Littleport.’

  Next to this there’s a small green with a row of chestnuts. A high street with a library (closed for lunch), a bookies, a tattoo shop. A garage – Gulf – that looks abandoned but advertises on a chalkboard coach trips for pensioners to Hunstanton. I look for a café but aside from Rumbles Chip Shop, which looks more like a takeaway, I can’t find one. The only person I could ask seems deaf: an old woman bent nearly double, wearing a grey hoodie, trundling a shopping trolley, ignoring my feeble ‘Excuse me, my dear.’ She pushes the trolley down a side alley towards the Ex-Servicemen’s Club. The pedestrian crossing beeps long after she’s crossed the road and yet the van driver still waits, frozen, hypnotised by his windscreen wipers.

  Across from the church there’s a piece of public art, a metal motorbike. A silver Harley-Davidson larger than life, on a metal plinth with the inscripton: Littleport Harley Society 2003. William S. Harley of Littleport co-founded the Harley-Davidson Motor Company . . .

  I find a café eventually, the white-bread-bacon-sandwiches sort, and drink a weak cappuccino in the warm fug, before heading back to the car. Move along now; nothing to see here: for some reason this phrase rattles through my head. As if there’s been a disaster of sorts, an accident. There was, I suppose. A motorbike accident. But that was nearly three months ago, and all that remains of it is not here, not to be seen or found in Littleport, but is literally – as Alice would say – deep inside me.

  You’re made of somebody else’s dead parts, so what are you then?

  Black Drove. I’ll just take a quick look, and then it’s fine, I’m done, I’ll take myself home. Twelve Mile Bank is scarcely more than an unfinished track chasing the river; it looks as if someone laid out a grey ribbon atop a field and forgot about it. This is what they mean then by a drove, a sort of bank, higher than the road, blocking all sight of the water. There must be a river there, because two cormorants hunch on the telegraph wire, beaks trained on the water.

  The fog here is deeper, massing in front of me. The grasses, the twigs, the telegraph wires: everything crusted with white. When the little row of council bungalows appear it surprises me: I’d thought this place was empty. I check the address on the letter in my pocket. Yes, this is it. I switch the engine off. Somehow, I’ve no desire to put my jacket back on; to get out of the car.

  The bungalows are curious: each the same, dinky, and somehow with no context: it’s as if they were just plonked down on this flat landscape with nothing behind or in front of them. The fog only adds to this feeling. Jubilee Close. So a street constructed in the seventies. In front of the row is a children’s playpark, again with the sense of Toy Town, of being recently placed there. A solitary blue elephant, wet, unappealing; an inert merry-go-round. Beyond that, in the mist I make out a spindly fringe of trees in the field – the fen – and all of them leaning, like a row of old men pulled by some invisible string. The open fen behind it looks vulnerable.

  And then I see it. One of the trees has flowers tied to it, drooping in cellophane. At the base is a toy of some kind, perhaps a teddy bear. I don’t want to get close enough to see what kind: Winnie the Pooh, Paddington, whatever. I don’t need to read the inscription to know. This must be the place. I step out of the car and wrap my arms around myself to warm up. Enough.

  This next-life place. Ben’s phrase; horribly apt. I’ve seen it now, the spot.

  A huge bird is flying there, over the blank landscape. A soft, ghostly bird, the golden colour of a baked loaf, with wings so long they could be ears, the body of a fat bumble-bee. Its flight is swooping, low: it’s hunting. I watch it for a while, knowing that soon it will come and sweep right past me, wings making only the softest of silent beats. There’s no avoiding the hunt in the eyes, that heart-shaped face. I know it is the barn owl from my dream.

  On the horizon is a windmill. Or rather – must be a wind-pump, a redundant one. The heart as a pump. The historian in me is suddenly certain that people could understand the heart as a pump only once theories of circulating blood became known, but, more importantly, once the pump had been invented, once it had become a familar mechanical object to them. Once they saw it for themselves. Before that, the heart must have been understood differently, using other available metaphors.

  Seeing the squat black shape against that white landscape, the empty page, I’m thinking: the Fens. Not so bleak as I thought at first but more stripped, exposed. The ditches and droves are the arteries, the marshy lands the muscle. The aorta? The River Ouse. Yes, all right, I can see: they might be lovely in their way. A strange idea to think of the land being underwater at one time, and then suddenly revealed: the underbelly. What Lies Beneath – (what is that from? Some movie that Alice loves). And all this fog and cloud and wispiness. Something unreal about it. Insubstantial, dreamy. Like those thoughts that float up from somewhere you know must exist but can’t be trusted; that can’t always be seen, but then suddenly here they are, in all their glaring plainness. Things dredged up. Endless possibilities.

  I make my way back to the car. Only when I’m driving away do I remember: ‘endless possibilities’, that corny phrase from the sample letter that Maureen showed me.

  That night I dream of the barn owl again. One minute I’m the bird, the next I’m a vole, being chased. Then I’m a heart, but a heart with legs: a shrew. My tiny shrew-form runs this way and that, then in a panic skitters over the bank and dives down into the river, disappearing with a red splash.

  The dinner with Maureen takes a while to set up. She says at first that she regretted saying yes, that she wonders if that was unprofessional. She explains that there’s something slightly problematic about it for her, so we decide to wait for a little while, until her role in working with me is officially over. We decide after some discussion that it would be nicer to go out rather than for her to come to me. I’m moving into the new apartment near Cambridge station with Ben and it’s all at sixes and sevens; I haven’t even got chairs yet. (It’s just dinner, for God’s sake, not a marriage proposal, I find myself wanting to say, but I can tell that, for Maureen, these things are taken rather seriously.)

  Maybe it’s this awareness of the significance that she attributes to it, but I’m uncharacteristically nervous about something so unimportant, something that doesn’t matter at all. I shave more carefully than usual. I actually find myself thinking of her, of Maureen of the tufty hair and dancer’s slender body, and picturing her, while I’m showering. Daisy, whom I haven’t thought of in months, slides into view. (Always one woman blends with another; hard to keep them separate.) I lose track of the argument in the Today programme; some vicar outside the Occupy camp at St Paul’s. Talk of the riots last summer. The huge discrepancy between rich and poor. Blah blah. The one per cent they keep going on about. Who are they? I can’t remember which minister they’re even interviewing.

  ‘Are you religious, Maureen? Do you mind me asking, but I have wondered. Is it why you do this job, this ministering to the . . . sick or the – spiritually impoverished, is that how you think of me?’

  ‘No, I wouldn’t say I’m religious.’

  Now, that’s unexpected. We’re at a restaurant in Ely, near the river. It seems there aren’t too many choices and Maureen is worried that, being a Londone
r, I’ll find it all a bit, ‘you know. Small fry.’

  ‘I’m actually not a Londoner,’ I tell her, dipping bread in olive oil. ‘I’m from the North-East. I know you’d never tell by the accent. My mother used to have an accent, a Geordie one, I mean. Dad didn’t. School soon knocks that out of you.’

  ‘Does it? My kids seem to be going the opposite way. Cassie, in particular, drives me mad. It’s all “sick” and “minging”. She says sick means nice or something. I’m so confused.’

  We talk then of the idea of me becoming a teacher. At a local school round here, not a posh one, as she admits she imagined when I spoke of it. Like the kind of school I went to. No, a state school. More than that, I’m quite interested in disenchanted children. The ones who have got a bit . . . overlooked. Maybe I’m barmy to be considering it? Of course Maureen thinks it’s a marvellous idea.

  ‘They’re crying out for male teachers in secondary schools. More role models for boys. Give something back,’ she beams.

  ‘Well, I wouldn’t go that far. It’s actually more selfish than that – it’s about the challenge. I think many kids, maybe boys in particular, are turned off by education. And when I was a lad – well, learning. After my mother died. I have been thinking that in some ways, though it didn’t seem like it at the time, I was particularly lucky. My father was very busy and for me, doing well in school, succeeding, reading, I found it very—’

  ‘Comforting,’ she says, nodding. Finishing my sentences already. And comforting was not the word I was looking for.

  Maureen takes a sip of her fizzy water. ‘You were just eleven, you said? That’s sad. Awful. The worst age.’

  ‘Is there a best age? For one’s mother to die?’

  ‘Well, oh—’