Case Histories - Страница 6

The driver was standing next to his engine, looking baffled, and Theo asked him if he was "okay," and he said, by way of answer, "I saw just the one and I thought, Well, I probably don't need to brake for that, and then" – he made a dramatic gesture with his arms as if trying to reenact a flock of disintegrating sheep – "and then the world went white."

Theo was so taken by this image that it occupied his mind for the rest of the journey, which recommenced once they had transferred to another train. He imagined describing the scene to Laura, imagined her reaction – horrified and yet darkly amused. When he finally got off the train he took a cab halfway but then got out and walked. It would make him even later but Laura would be pleased.

Theo rested for a minute on the pavement before tackling the steep stairs up to the first-floor office of Holroyd, Wyre, and Stan-ton. The GP was right, Laura was right, he had to lose some weight.

The front door was propped open with a cast-iron doorstop. Every time Theo entered the building he admired this door to the office, it was painted a glossy dark green, and the handsome brass furniture – letter box, keyhole, lion-headed door knocker – were the original fittings. The brass plaque on the door, polished every morning by the office cleaner, announced, HOLROYD, WYRE, AND STANTON-SOLICITORS AND ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW. Theo took a deep breath and set off up the stairs.

The inner door that led into the reception area was also – unusually – open, and as soon as Theo walked in it was obvious that something was terribly wrong. Jean Stanton's secretary was cowering on the floor, a trail of vomit on her clothes. The receptionist, Moira, was on the phone, dictating the address of the firm with a kind of hysterical patience. She had blood in her hair and on her face and Theo thought she was injured but 'when he went toward her to help her she waved him away with her hand and he thought she was dismissing him until he realized she was trying to send him in the direction of the boardroom.

Afterward, again and again, Theo pieced together the events that preceded this moment.

Laura had just finished photocopying a land registry form when a man came into reception, a man so nondescript that afterward not one single person in Holroyd, Wyre, and Stanton could give a half-decent description of his features, and the only thing they could remember about him was that he was wearing a yellow golfing sweater.

The man seemed confused and disoriented, and when Moira, the receptionist, said, "Can I help you, sir?" he said, "Mr. Wyre, where is he?" in a high, strained voice, and Moira, alarmed by the man's manner, said, "I'm afraid he's late back from court, do you have an appointment? Can I help with anything?" but the man took off down the corridor, running in an odd way, like a child, and charged into the boardroom where the partners were having a lunchtime meeting, although not Theo, who was still on his way back from the station (although he had forgotten about the meeting).

Laura had been sent out earlier to buy sandwiches for the meeting – prawn cocktail, cheese and coleslaw, roast beef, tuna and sweet corn, and a chicken and salad (no mayonnaise) for her father because he really needed to think more about his weight and she had thought affectionately what a dope he was because he'd forgotten his meeting when he'd suggested lunch to her this morning. The sandwiches and coffee and notebooks were all laid out on the mahogany boardroom table (oval to match the shape of the room) but no one had sat down at the table yet. David Holroyd was standing in front of the fireplace, telling one of the junior partners about the "bloody fantastic" holiday he'd just returned from, when the stranger rushed into the room and from somewhere, probably from beneath the yellow golfing sweater he was wearing, but no one was sure, pulled out a bowie knife and sliced through the dark worsted of David Holroyd's Austin Reed suit, the white poplin of his Charles Tyrwhitt shirt, the tropical tan on the skin of his left arm, and, finally, the artery in the arm. And Laura, who liked apricot yogurt and drank tea but not coffee and who had size six feet and who loved horses, who preferred plain chocolate to milk chocolate and had spent five years learning classical guitar but never played anymore and who was still sad that their pet dog, Poppy, had been run over the previous summer, Laura, who was Theo's child and his best friend, dropped the land registry form and ran into the boardroom after the man – perhaps because she had a Red Cross certificate or because she had taken a self-defense course at sixth-form college, or perhaps it was from simple curiosity or instinct, it was impossible to know what she was thinking as she ran into the boardroom where the man, this complete stranger, had spun on the balls of his feet with the agility and grace of a dancer, his hand still moving in the same arc that had cut through David Holroyd's arm and which now scythed through Laura's neck, carving through her carotid artery, sending a great plume of her precious, beautiful blood across the room.

In a dream, in slow underwater motion, Theo moved down the corridor and into the boardroom. He noticed coffee cups and sandwiches on the mahogany table and realized he had forgotten about the meeting. There was blood spattered across the cream walls and David Holroyd was slumped like a bloody sack near the marble fireplace, while nearer to the door, his own child lay on the floor, frothy blood bubbling gently from the gash in her throat. Theo was aware of someone sobbing uncontrollably, and someone else saying, "Why doesn't the ambulance get here?"

Theo dropped to his knees next to Laura. Cheryl, his secretary, was kneeling over her, incongruous in skirt and bra. She had removed her blouse and had tried to staunch the blood from Laura's wound. She was still holding the blouse, now a wet bloody rag, and her bare skin was slick with blood. It had run in rivulets down her cleavage – the word "bloodbath" came into Theo's mind. There was blood everywhere. Theo was kneeling in a pool of it, the carpet was soggy with it. Laura's blood. Which was his blood also. Her white blouse was now dyed crimson. He could smell the blood – copper and salt and the rankness of a butcher's shop. Theo wondered if there was a way of slitting open his own veins and arteries and siphoning off his blood and giving it to his daughter. And all the time Theo was praying, "Please, God, let her be alright," like a terrible unstoppable mantra and he felt that if he could keep on saying those words he could prevent this thing from happening.

Laura's eyes were half open and Theo wasn't sure whether she was dead or not. He remembered last year, comforting Poppy at the side of the road after she'd been knocked down by a car outside the house. The dog was small, a terrier, and he had held it in his arms while it died and had seen the same dull look in its eyes as it moved into an unreachable, inescapable place. He pressed his hand against Laura's wound but there wasn't really any blood to stem anymore so now instead he held her hand, a hand that was soft and warm, and he bent close to her face and murmured in her ear, "Everything's all right, Laura," and then he cradled her head in his lap and stroked her blood-matted hair, and his secretary, Cheryl, wept and said, "God loves you, Laura."

At the moment he stopped praying, at the moment he knew she was dead, Theo understood it would never cease to happen. Every moment Laura would be standing by the photocopier, negotiating the complexities of the land registry form, wondering when her father would be back or whether she could take a lunch break because she was starving. Maybe regretting taking this job because it was actually quite boring but she'd done it to please her father, because she liked to make him happy, because she loved him. Laura, who slept curled up in a ball, who liked hot buttered toast and all the Indiana Jones movies but not Star Wars, whose first word was "dog," who liked the rain but not the wind, who planned to have three children, Laura, who would be forever standing by the photocopier in the office in Parkside waiting for the stranger and his knife, waiting for the world to go white.

Chapter 3. CASE HISTORY NO. 3 1979

Everything from Duty, Nothing from Love

Michelle had been setting her alarm five minutes earlier every day. This morning it had gone off at twenty past five. Tomorrow it would be quarter past. She could see that she would have to call a halt eventually or she would be getting up before she went to bed. But not yet. She was only one step ahead of the baby, who woke up with the birds and the dawn, and the birds and the dawn were coming earlier every day at this time of year.

She needed more time, there simply wasn't enough of it. This was the only way she could think of making it. Not making it exactly, if you could make it from scratch – brand-new time – that would be fantastic. Michelle tried to think of ways you might manufacture something so abstract, but all she could think of were examples from her own small-scale domestic economy – knitting and sewing and baking. Imagine if you could knit time. Christ, her needles would be clacking day and night. And what an advantage she would have over her friends, none of whom knew how to knit (or bake or sew), but then none of them had saddled themselves at the age of eighteen with a husband and a baby and a bloody cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by nothing but horizon, so that it felt as if the sky were a huge stone that was pressing you into the ground. No, not saddled. She loved them. She really did.

And anyway, where would she ever find the time to make time? There was no time. That was the whole point. What if she stopped going to bed altogether? She could shut herself away like someone in a fairy tale, in a room at the top of a tower and spin time like gold. She could stay awake until there was so much time, lying in golden hanks at her feet, that it would last her the rest of her life and she would never run out again. The idea of living in a tower, cut off from everyone and everything, sounded like heaven to Michelle.