Sophie Hannah: Hurting Distance

Naomi frowned. ‘I’ll tell you when it’s over,’ she said. ‘It’s not over yet.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Olivia. Charlie wished her sister would keep quiet, or, ideally, go back into the house. Where hopefully she might remember that she was an arts journalist and not a police officer.

‘There’s a date line on the sundial,’ said Naomi, pointing.

Charlie looked again at the rectangular slab propped against her wall.

‘On the ninth of August, Robert’s birthday, the shadow of the nodus will follow that line exactly, follow the curve all the way along. This is the nodus, here.’ Naomi rubbed the small metal sphere with her thumb.

Suspicion flared inside Charlie. ‘Why would you want to mark Robert’s birthday on a sundial and ask me to give it to my inspector?’

‘Because that’s when it began,’ said Naomi. ‘On the day Robert was born. The ninth of August,’ she repeated the date. ‘Remember to look, if it’s a sunny day.’

She turned to leave with a small wave. Charlie and Olivia watched as she got into her car and drove away.

33

Thursday, May 4

IT WILL GET better. I will get better. One day I will stand here and be able to breathe easily. One day I will feel brave enough to come here without Yvon. I will say the words ‘room eleven’ in another context—perhaps about another hotel, a luxurious one on a beautiful island—and not think of this square room with its scratched double-glazed windows and chipped skirting boards. Or the pushed-together twin beds with their horrible orange gym-mat mattresses, or this building that looks like a shabby university hall of residence or a cheap conference centre.

Yvon sits on the sofa, picking at the small bobbles on the cushions, while I stare out at the car park the Traveltel shares with Rawndesley East Services.

‘Don’t be cross with me,’ I say.

‘I’m not.’

‘I know you think it’s bad for me, being here, but you’re wrong. I need this place to lose its significance. If I never came again, it’d always haunt me.’

‘The haunting would fade over time,’ Yvon obligingly contributes her lines to this by-now-familiar argument. ‘This Thursday-night pilgrimage of ours is keeping your memories alive.’

‘I have to do it, Yvon. Until I get bored, until coming here’s a chore. It’s like what people say about falling off a horse and being scared: you have to get straight back on.’

She puts her head in her hands. ‘It’s so un like that, I don’t know where to begin trying to explain it to you.’

‘Shall we have a cup of tea?’ I pick up the kettle with the peeling label and take it into the bathroom to fill it with water. At a safe distance from Yvon, I say, ‘Maybe I’ll stay here tonight. You don’t have to.’

‘No way.’ She appears in the doorway. ‘I’m not letting you do that. And I don’t believe this is what you say it is.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You know what Robert is, what he did, but you’re still pining for him, aren’t you? That’s why you want to be here. Where were you this afternoon? When I rang? You were out and you didn’t answer your mobile.’

I look away, out of the window. There is a blue lorry pulling into the car park, black letters painted on its side. ‘I told you: I was sawing in my workshop. I didn’t hear my phone.’

‘I don’t believe you. I think you were in the hospital, sitting by Robert’s bedside. And it’s not the first time. There’ve been other times I’ve not been able to get hold of you recently . . .’

‘Intensive care’s a locked unit,’ I tell her. ‘You can’t just walk in. Yvon, I hate Robert. I hate him in the way you can only hate someone if you once loved them.’

‘I hated Ben that way once, and now look at us,’ she says, her voice full of scorn for us both.

‘It was your choice to give him another chance.’

‘And it’ll be yours to stay with Robert, if and when he wakes up. Despite everything. You’ll forgive him, the two of you’ll get married, you’ll go and visit him every week in prison . . .’

‘Yvon, I can’t believe you’re saying this.’

‘Don’t do it, Naomi.’

A ringing sound comes from my jacket, which I slung down on the bed when Yvon and I first arrived. I pull my phone out of the pocket, thinking about love, about hurting distance. Thanks to my conversation with your brother in Charlie Zailer’s kitchen, I understand you better than I did before. I worked out for myself that you wanted to hurt women, and that you needed them to worship you first in order to magnify the hurt so that it was unbearable, but it wasn’t only about that, was it? Your psychosis is like a—what are those things called? That’s right: a palindrome. It works in reverse as well. Love and pain are inextricably linked in your mind—Graham made me see that. You believed that only if you injured and abused women would they ever truly love you. Dear Mama’s legacy, Graham said. However much you might have loved your mother before she turned on you, you loved her more afterwards, didn’t you? When your father left and she made you suffer, it was your anguish that forced you to acknowledge the strength of that love.

‘Naomi?’

For a moment I mistake this man’s voice for yours. Only because of where I am.

‘It’s Simon Waterhouse. I thought you’d want to know. Robert Haworth died this afternoon.’

‘Good,’ I say, without hesitation, and not only for Yvon’s benefit. I mean it. ‘What happened?’

‘Nobody’s sure yet. There’ll be a post-mortem, but . . . well, to put it simply, it looks like he just stopped breathing. It sometimes happens, after bad brain bleeds. The swollen brain can’t send messages to the respiratory system in the way that it needs to. I’m sorry.’

‘I’m not,’ I tell him. ‘I’m only sorry that the hospital staff think he died a natural, peaceful death. He didn’t deserve that.’ It would be easy to tell myself you were a damaged person, sick, as much a victim as your victims. I refuse to do that. Instead, I will think of you as evil. I have to draw a line, Robert.

You are dead. I’m talking—directing my thoughts—to nobody. Your memories and justifications, they’re all gone. I don’t feel elated. It’s more the sensation of crossing something off a list and feeling lighter. Now there’s only one more thing to cross off, and when that’s done, this will be over. Maybe then I’ll be able to stop coming here. Maybe room eleven has become the headquarters of my operation, until close of business.

That’s assuming Charlie Zailer cares enough about closing our business to start thinking about that sundial I gave her.

As if he is reading my mind, Simon Waterhouse asks, ‘Have you—I’m sorry to ask you this, but have you spoken to Sergeant Zailer recently? There’s no reason why you should have, it’s just . . .’ His voice tails off.

I am tempted to ask him if he’s seen the sundial. Perhaps Charlie’s sister took it in and gave it to the inspector who wanted it. I would like, one day, to walk past Spilling Police Station and see it there, on the wall. I wonder if I should mention anything about the dial to Simon Waterhouse. I decide not to. ‘I’ve tried,’ I tell him, ‘but I don’t think Charlie wants to speak to anyone at the moment. Apart from Olivia.’

‘It’s okay,’ he says. His descending voice tells me very clearly that it isn’t.

34

5/19/06

CHARLIE SAT AT a window table in Mario’s—a small, loud, Italian café in Spilling’s market square—so that she could watch the street. She’d see Proust before he came in, which would give her time to arrange her features. Into what? She didn’t really know.