Pulse(15)

As was I.

I spent the rest of the day in bed. Not that I was able to sleep.

I should have been tired. I had dozed a little during the night and for the last half-hour on the drive home but it had been thirty hours since I’d got up on Sunday morning. Somehow, it seemed longer.

The twins came home on the school bus at four-thirty and both of them came up to tell me about their day. They thought nothing of the fact that their mother was in bed in the middle of the afternoon. They were well used to me working shifts, leaving, returning and sleeping at odd times. Needless to say, I didn’t enlighten them that I hadn’t been at the hospital the previous night.

‘So what did you learn at school today?’ I asked them.

‘Nothing,’ Oliver said. It was his usual reply to my common question.

‘I did,’ Toby chipped in. ‘I learned that Mr Harris can tell us apart.’

‘How do you know?’ I asked.

‘Well,’ he said rather sheepishly, ‘me and Olly sometimes swap, like.’

‘Olly and I,’ I corrected.

‘Yeah, right.’ He made a silly face. ‘So me and Olly always swap PE and art on Mondays. I hate art and he can’t stand PE, like, so we just swap. No one notices.’

‘Except Mr Harris?’ I said.

‘Yeah. He grabbed me today in PE and said that he knew that I was Toby when I should have been Olly. Of course, I told him he was wrong, like, but he put his finger up against his nose and winked at me.’

‘He must have been guessing,’ Oliver said. ‘I assume you had my kit on.’

‘Yeah, of course.’ Their school PE kit had to have large nametapes sewn on the outside to prevent ‘borrowing’. ‘But he kept calling me Toby and told me not to do it again next week.’

‘Do you swap a lot?’ I asked.

‘All the time,’ Oliver said with a huge grin. ‘It’s fun.’

Physically, the twins were almost truly identical. Even I had difficulty telling them apart unless they were both together in front of me. Toby’s left ear stuck out very slightly more from his head than Oliver’s, due, I’d been told, to the position he had been lying in my womb when his ear had developed. Other than that I reckoned they were indistinguishable.

Mr Harris must know something I didn’t.

The boys went off, supposedly to do their homework but I knew that they would be playing computer games online first. Only when it was time for bed would they moan that they still had their work to do.

I smiled.

I had been just the same when I was their age, although I’d have been lucky to be allowed to play Pong on an Atari games console plugged into the back of the family television rather than on the ultra-HD virtual-world headsets with interactive surround sound that they had now.

I rolled over in the bed and thought about the boys some more.

They had turned fourteen in September, an age at which, I was reliably informed, they would instantly transform from the sweet and adorable children I knew and loved into the spotty, rude and opinionated monsters that all modern teenagers are.

‘Good luck,’ a friend had said to me last year. ‘I’ve only got one boy and he’s a nightmare. You’re in for twice as much. It’s the surly behaviour and answering back that I can’t stand. It always ends in rows and name-calling. And he’s now got piercings in his lips and even a dragon tattoo on his arm.’

She had shuddered in disgust.

So far, clearly, Grant and I had been lucky. Or maybe our intentional plan of letting the boys have increasingly greater freedom was working. One of my therapists told me that most teenagers want to sack their parents from the job they have done in the past, only to rehire them a few years later, but as consultants not managers – all the while maintaining their current account at the family bank.

But whatever our plan, I suppose we had been fortunate that our boys hadn’t fallen in with a bad crowd where drugs were prevalent.

Drugs.

Cocaine.

The unnamed man.

Anywhere I might try to turn my thoughts, they always twisted back like a magnet in a solenoid. I was becoming almost obsessive about it.

Who was he? And why did he die?





6


At Grant’s insistence, I remained in bed for most of Tuesday. I think he believed it was the right thing for me but it just gave my mind the time and space to worry about every conceivable minor family problem, as well as some of the world’s major ones.

I was actually better when I was doing something.

Grant had taken a second day off work even though I’d told him it was unnecessary.

‘I need to look after you,’ he said.

Keep an eye on me more like, I thought, in case I decided to disappear off to Bristol once more. But the aching desire to harm myself had subsided during that long night at the bridge, at least for the time being, so I didn’t put up a fight. I simply stayed in bed as he requested.

However, on Wednesday morning, with some trepidation, Grant went back to work.

‘You stay here all day,’ he instructed before he left. ‘I’m taking your car keys with me.’

‘But I need the car. I have an appointment with Stephen Butler.’

Stephen Butler was my psychiatrist and Grant had given an assurance to the Bristol doctors that he would get me to see him as soon as possible.