Quintin Jardine - For The Death Of Me

Behind the closed and guarded door, Ellie curled up in an armchair and took refuge in sleep. She’s always been able to do that in a crisis. When our mother was in her last illness, I’d often go into her room at the hospice and find her awake and reading, or listening to music through her headphones, with Ellen counting Zs in a chair by her bedside. Indeed, when I broke my arm as a kid, and they put me under to set it, the first sight I remember as I came to was the top of my sister’s head slumped forward on her chest, and the first thing I heard was gentle snoring.

Mary and I aren’t blessed in that way. We sat side by side on a small sofa in the glow of the only table-lamp we had left on, staring out of the window towards the city, watching it as it settled down for the night. We sat in silence, and yet both of us knew that there was something occupying the space between us.

I tried to doze off, but there was no hope of that. Instead I tried to occupy myself by thinking of the day that had ended; it had begun as just another summer sunrise, but it had ended with my life changed, profoundly. Mike Dylan’s return from his secret exile might have been seen as a shock, but no more than that. I had certainly tried to play it that way, but I couldn’t kid myself.

Susie and I had got together in the aftermath of his supposed death; she’d been the emotional equivalent of a sack full of psychotic monkeys, consumed by a cocktail of bereavement, loneliness and betrayal. Me, I’d been easy pickings; in truth, I’d always fancied her and, to be honest, Jan’s death had fucked my head up far, far more than I’ve ever admitted, even to you. Susie might have made the first move, but I made the second, no question about that.

All that apart, though, our relationship, the burgeoning thing we discovered to be love, and finally our marriage had been founded on the premise, in Susie’s mind at least, that Dylan was a goner, and that he had indeed died in that shooting in Amsterdam. Now she knew different; she knew what I had known since just after Janet’s birth, the truth I had kept from her. We still had to deal with that aspect of it between the two of us: she’d made nothing of it earlier, but I knew it would fester.

Beyond that?

You know me, and you know that if there is one thing the man Oz doesn’t suffer from, it’s a lack of self-belief. And yet when I thought of the way things had been with Susie and Dylan, how strong and vibrant their relationship had seemed, I found myself worrying about how she’d react to his return, in the longer term, whether she’d look at me differently, whether what she felt would change. There, in the dark, Alanis Morrisette’s blistering line came into my head: ‘Are you thinking of me when you fuck her?’ It stayed there for a while, too, because it touched a nerve and made me face up to another inner truth: after all the years that had gone, sometimes, when I’m with Susie, I think of Jan.

And then there was Primavera. If you really turned up the voltage I’d have to admit that sometimes I think of her too. What she and I had wasn’t love, not in the conventional sense: it was pure animal attraction, backed up by two minds that were very far from the norm, and by two generously proportioned egos. When you add mutual self-indulgence to that list, you’ve got the whole picture of the two of us together. Dylan once said to me that he really belonged with Prim and Susie with me, because they were basically bent, in the non-sexual sense of the word, and we were basically straight. He was right about Susie, but. .

Now Primavera was back, rehabilitated, evidently remorseful for what she had tried to do to me the previous year, and with a legitimate excuse to claim a permanent role in my life. I wasn’t in any doubt that I’d be able to keep her at arm’s length, yet she could still throw my switches. It might have seemed weird to you when I told you about the three of us, my wife, my ex-wife and me in the swimming-pool, all of us almost naked, but that didn’t do anything to me, especially with the kids around. Yet when I’d seen her earlier, in the Columbus, changed from the more formal dress into her casuals, almost exactly the way she was dressed the first time we ever met, I will admit now that it gave me an instant boner. . and she had known it.

My dad would live. The longer we sat there the more confident of that I became, the more my faith in Mac Blackstone’s immortality restored itself. I had a feeling that I might need him too, most of all for the moral kick up the arse which only he can give me.

I smiled at the thought, and at all the day’s drama and ironies. I smiled too because what should have been righteous anger at Dylan’s deception and return had been muted by the fact that I actually liked the guy; I’d missed him too.

There were all those things going through my head, but there was something else, something much bigger, something that had been with me for a year. Part of me wanted to let it lie dormant, to push it out of my mind and get on with my life. The trouble was that, however hard I pushed, it wouldn’t go away. Maybe I wouldn’t have confronted it, but that wasn’t my decision alone.

After a while, quite a long while, I glanced at my watch. Being rich, I have a few, but my favourite is a titanium Breitling Aerospace, very light and with a black face and hands and numbers so luminous that they can glow even in daylight. It showed ten past three.

Ellie was still snoozing, slightly audibly, in her chair. I glanced at Mary, just at the moment she turned to look at me. Our eyes met. ‘It’s taking a long time,’ she whispered.

‘It’s bound to,’ I told her. ‘They explained all that. This sort of surgery is usually planned, but Dad’s in a critical condition. If it takes all night and all day, so be it, as long as it’s effective.’

‘I suppose so. It’s hard, though, the waiting.’

‘Tom Petty,’ I murmured.

‘What?’

‘ “The Waiting Is The Hardest Part.” It’s a song by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers; great band, great lyric.’

‘You can be flippant about everything, can’t you?’

There was an edge to her voice. Neither of us had ever admitted it, but there had always been a certain tension between Mary and me. It went all the way back to my childhood, when Jan and I were kids together, or, more specifically, to our teenage years. It wasn’t that I felt she disliked me, but there was something in the way she looked at me, a wariness that I didn’t understand then, and that hurt me a little. It wasn’t mutual, that’s for sure. For my part, I liked Mary. That frisson had carried on into adulthood; then it altered a bit. After Alex More, Mary’s husband, left her, and after my mother died, when she and my father grew close, I suppose there was a little private resentment on my part. Yet it didn’t overlap the other thing; that was still there, until Prim appeared on the scene.

Mary was pleased. My self-esteem didn’t let me deal with it at the time, but she was pleased that somebody had come between me and Jan.

Her pleasure was short-lived, though, for what was between the two of us was too strong; in fact, it was stronger than either of us understood. In the end we simply accepted it and gave in happily to the inevitable. If Mary had been as happy, it would have made my day, but she wasn’t. It only showed itself to me, though. As far as I knew, Jan never had a clue.

‘A joke? Where’s the joke? I don’t understand that.’

‘You’ve always been flip, Oz. Your first reaction has always been a throwaway line, a pitch for a quick laugh.’

I felt my eyes narrow. ‘Mary, if you think I find anything laughable about my dad lying on that operating slab, you don’t know me in the slightest. But you’ve never really known me, have you?’