Case Histories - Страница 27

"Grandchildren?" Marlee asked.

"No," Theo said. Jennifer and her husband, Alan – New York, Jewish, avuncular, heart surgeon – had decided not to have children and it had seemed to Theo to be indelicate to ask why. Jennifer had a career, of course. She was an orthopedic consultant, and they had a good life, a nice house in the suburbs, a place on Lake Ontario, a "cottage" as the Torontonians quaintly called their huge lakeshore houses. Theo had gone to stay one summer. The house was surrounded on three sides by trees and at night it was the quietest, darkest place he had ever been, the only illumination coming from the fireflies that danced outside his bedroom window all night long. It was a great place. They had a canoe that they took out on the lake, there were hiking trails through the ancient woods, they had a barbecue every day on their lakeside terrace – it would have been a paradise for kids. Of course, you never missed what you never had. And once you'd had it you missed it all the time. Perhaps Jennifer was being sensible. If she didn't have a child she couldn't lose it.

"Are you sad?"

"No. Yes. A little, sometimes." (A lot, all the time.)

"Have another sweet."

"Thanks."

After ten years Theo had suddenly become impatient. Ten years of garnering evidence, of doggedly accumulating every last scrap of anything, and now he wanted to know. Jackson had removed all his client files, loading up the backseat and the boot of his car with box after box of other people's life histories – their divorces, their house purchases, their last wills and testaments. Had Jackson dis-cerned something yet from all this information, like a soothsayer, like those clairvoyants they brought in, that Theo himself had brought in. Even the police had brought a clairvoyant in, but they hadn't briefed him properly and he had thought they were looking for a body when, of course, they already had one. The clairvoyant said the girl's body was "in a garden, within walking distance of a river," which pretty much narrowed it down to half of Cambridge, if anyone was going to go and look for her, which they weren't. How many girls were out there, unturned by the plow, unseen by the passerby? If only you could lock girls away, in towers, in dungeons, in convents, in their bedrooms, anywhere that would keep them safe.

There was a girl he passed all the time. Sometimes she was on Regent Street, she was often on Sydney Street, and he'd seen her at the Grafton Centre, sitting on an old sheet, a blanket around her shoulders. A "beggar girl." It was like something from history, from the eighteenth century. This morning she was on St. Andrews Street and Theo gave her five pounds, which was all the change he had on him.

The girl looked ill but the dog with her always looked well cared for, a nice glossy black lurcher, still young. The beggar girl had custard-yellow hair, cut raggedly short, and no one ever seemed to give her money, perhaps because she never asked for it, never made eye contact or said something cheery to make people feel good about themselves, good about her being a beggar. Or perhaps because she looked as if she might spend it all on drugs. Theo thought she would probably buy dog food before drugs.

Theo always gave her money but he felt there must be something better he could do – buy her a good meal, find her a room, ask her name, anything, before she slipped through the cracks, but he always felt too shy, too worried that any interest might be misconstrued, that she would turn on him and snarl, "Fuck off, Granddad, you old pervert."

"Does your father know you're here?" Deborah Arnold asked Marlee.

"Mum left him a message on his mobile."

"Well, I have to go out," Deborah said. "I have to catch the post" – this last remark addressed to Theo, who wondered what he was supposed to do about it. "Can you keep an eye on her?" Deborah said, nodding in the direction of Marlee, and Theo wanted to say, "But I'm an almost complete stranger. How do you know I'm not going to do something dreadful to her?" Misinterpreting his hesitation, Deborah said, "It's just for fifteen minutes, or until his nibs comes back." Marlee clambered on his knee and put her arms around his neck, and said, "Please, please, nice man, say yes," and Theo thought, Dear God, hadn't anyone told her to be cautious around strangers? Just because he looked like Father Christmas didn't make him benign, although he was, of course. But Deborah Arnold was out the door and down the stairs before Theo could protest.

"My daddy'll be back soon," Marlee reassured him. "My daddy." The very words brought a lump to his throat. Laura's second-favorite film, after Dirty Dancing, was The Railway Children, and he'd bought a copy on video a couple years before she died. They had watched it together several times and they both always cried at the end when the train stops and the steam and smoke slowly clear around the figure of Bobbie's father and Jenny Agutter (who always reminded him a little of Laura) cries out, "Daddy, my daddy," and it was odd because it was such a happy moment for Bobbie and yet it always seemed unbearably sad. Of course, he'd never watched the film since Laura's death. It would kill him to watch it. Theo never doubted for a moment that when he died he would be reunited with Laura, and, in his mind, it was just like The Railway Children - he would walk out of a fog and Laura would be there and she would say, "Daddy, my daddy." It wasn't that Theo believed in religion, or a God, or an afterlife. He just knew it was impossible to feel this much love and for it to end.

Marlee was bored. She had finished the sweets and they had played a game of tic-tac-toe – which she was already familiar with – and hangman, which she wasn't, so Theo taught her, but now she was getting whiny with hunger. From the first-floor window of Jackson 's office they had a tantalizing view of a sandwich shop. "I'm starving," she declared melodramatically, doubling up to demonstrate her hunger pains.

Perhaps Deborah Arnold wasn't coming back. Perhaps Jackson wasn't coming back, perhaps he never got the message about his daughter. Perhaps he had reacted badly to a dental anesthetic, perhaps he had died under the anesthetic, or been run over on the way back from the dentist.

Theo supposed he could leave Marlee alone while he slipped across the street to buy them both something to eat. It would take, at the most, what – ten minutes? What harm could happen to her in ten minutes? It was an absurd question to ask himself because Theo knew exactly what could happen in ten minutes – a plane could explode over a town or fly into a building, a train could derail, a maniac in a yellow golfing sweater could run into an office, wielding a knife. Leaving her in an office – what was he thinking! Offices ranked higher than planes, mountains, or schools on Theo's list of dangerous places.

"Come on then," he said to her. "We'll pop across the road and bring a sandwich back."

"What if Daddy comes and can't find us?" Theo felt touched by the "us." "Well, we'll put a notice on the door," he said.

"Back in ten minutes," Marlee said. "That's what Daddy puts."

course it wasn't as simple as that. It was three o'clock in the afternoon and the sandwich shop was about to close and had hardly any sandwiches left and the ones on offer – egg mayonnaise or roast beef and horseradish – prompted Marlee to act out a vivid pantomime of vomiting. As they came out of the sandwich shop she slipped one small, dry hand into his and he gave it a reassuring squeeze. She got suddenly excited when she spotted a burger bar across the street and almost dragged Theo into it. The letters "CJD" came into his mind but he tried to suppress them and anyway she wanted something called a "chickinlickin burger," which Theo hoped had chicken in it rather than mad cow, but then what part of the chicken and how old? And what had the chicken in turn been fed on? Mad cow probably.

He bought her a chickinlickin burger ("with fries," she begged) and a Coke. For fast food it seemed very slow and Theo wondered if anyone monitored the service in these places. Most of the people working here seemed to be children – Australian children at that.

They had been gone a lot longer than ten minutes. If Jackson was back he would be sending out search parties by now. As if the very thought of his name conjured him up, Jackson suddenly appeared out of a crowd of jostling foreign students. He looked slightly wild and grabbed hold of Marlee's arm so that she squealed in protest, "Daddy, mind my Coke."

"Where've you been?" Jackson shouted at her. He glared at Theo. What a cheek, when all Theo was doing was looking after the girl, which was more than her parents were doing.

"I'm babysitting," Theo said to Jackson, "not cradle snatching."

"Right," Jackson said, "Of course, I'm sorry, I was worried."

"Theo's looking after me," Marlee said, taking a huge bite out of her burger, "and he bought me fries. I like him."

When Theo returned along St. Andrews Street the girl with the custard-yellow hair was no longer there and he worried that she might never be there again. Because that was how it happened: one moment you were there, laughing, talking, breathing, and the next you were gone. Forever. And there wasn't even a shape left in the world where you'd been, neither the trace of a smile nor the whisper of a word. Just nothing.

Chapter 11. Jackson

Your soft palate looks very inflamed," Sharon murmured. "Does it hurt?"

"Nugh, nurnh."

"I suspect you're blowing out an abscess, Jackson."

Officially she was "Miss S. Anderson, BDS, LDS," and he'd never been invited to call her by her Christian name, although she was free enough with his own first name. Doctors, bank managers, complete strangers, all used first names now. It was one of Binky Rain's bugbears. "And I said to the man in the bank ["men in the benk"] – a cashier- 'Excuse me, young man, but I don't recall us having been introduced. As far as you're concerned, my name is Mrs. Rain, and I don't give a damn what yours is.'" Binky Rain made "cashier" sound like something you wouldn't want to pick up on the sole of your shoe.