We Own the Sky(82)
“Have you been sick?”
“What?” I look down at my jacket, and there are little flecks of what looks like vomit. I try to think back and realize I can’t remember leaving Parliament Hill, or even how I got to Paddington.
Lola smiles at me, as if I am a rescue puppy she is rejecting. “Anna said you were struggling a little with the...”
She doesn’t finish her sentence, but she doesn’t have to. I know Anna will have told her everything, given her side: how I kidnapped Jack, put him at risk.
How I’m a drunk. I’m sure she hasn’t told Lola about what happened in Prague, how she refused to allow our son the treatment that could have saved his life.
How instead of giving him a chance, she did word searches and read crime novels.
I am just about to say something, to tell her to go and fuck herself, when I drop my wallet and loose change spills on to the ground. I bend down to try to pick it up, but I stumble and my knees buckle and then I am lying on my back, looking up at the station roof.
I can feel Lola next to me, her arms around my shoulders, trying to help me stand up, but I can’t see straight, can’t seem to coordinate my arms and legs. So I stop and sit for a while, my head bowed, until finally I manage to stagger up and weave my way across the platform to the train.
*
My jacket is wet, I think from where I have tried to clean off the vomit in the bathroom, and I am carrying a bottle of wine and a grocery bag full of beers. I find a seat and sit back and stretch out my legs, watching the blurry skyline rush by.
I have Googled Anna from time to time, but there has never been any
indication that she has remarried. She had taken up marathon running. I couldn’t believe it at first. After our aborted game of squash, it was a standing joke between us that Anna had no interest in sports. But when I clicked on the link, it was Anna, all right. Anna in a running singlet pictured in a local Buckinghamshire newspaper, getting third place in a charity fun-run. I remember the headline: ‘Brave Mum Runs for Her Son.’”
Once, when I was drunk, I unsuccessfully tried to hack into her email and Facebook accounts, using every password combination I could imagine. I should have known better. Anna was always so careful about such things.
I wake. We are now a few miles past Exeter, following the path of the estuary, and I have spilled wine on the table and a couple near me have moved seats, glaring, tut-tutting as they go. The train emerges from a tunnel, and suddenly we lose sight of land and we are thrown out to sea, the train traveling so close to the shore it feels like we are tilting, then falling, into a giant pool of sea and sky.
I take out Jack’s camera from my bag and look through his photos. The brilliant white lighthouse on the walk to Durdle Door; a blurry shot of his favorite robin; his makeshift panorama from the terrace in Greece. Anna might have cleared out his room, taken his things to the dump, but she wasn’t having the camera. I made sure of that. I snuck it away from his bedside the day that he died, and I have never let it out of my sight.
I pass out, I think, with Jack’s camera in my hand. When I wake, I see that I have missed my station and there is a damp stain spreading across my crotch.
The alcohol is making me horny, and I think about getting out at the next station and trying to get to Tintagel to find the girl from the pub, but it is too late now, so I search on Facebook for Lola, squinting so I can see straight, and I find a picture of her wearing a wrap on a beach, coral in her hair. I try to click through her photos, hoping to find a shot of her in a bikini or a slinky cocktail dress, something I will dwell on when I get home, but all her privacy settings are closed.
When I get back home, after a taxi ride from Penzance, I collapse on the sofa with a vodka and switch on the news. The Russians are still bombing in Syria, and there has been an earthquake in Pakistan. Then, something about tax credits, and I start to drift off.
I don’t know if it is hearing his name or seeing his face that wakes me. But I suddenly jump forward in my seat, and I can feel my heart beating out of my chest, as if I have woken startled from a nightmare.
Dr. Sladkovsky, his face more jowly than I remember, is being led out of a villa into a haze of flashbulbs.
It takes me a while because I am so drunk, but I finally manage to rewind the report back to the beginning, unsure what I have just seen.
“The allegations are shocking,” the reporter says. “Investigators have accused Dr. Sladkovsky of injecting his patients with a substance that contained human plasma.”
*
The next morning, I reach for the bottle of vodka by my bed. Human plasma.
Did I dream it? A warped fantasy from my booze-addled brain. I grab my laptop from the bedside table and see it is one of the top items on the BBC.
PRAGUE—A controversial cancer doctor has been arrested on charges of medical malpractice in the Czech Republic.
Zdenek Sladkovsky, whose clinic based in Prague attracts thousands of patients each year, was arrested on May 12 by Czech police.
Prosecutors allege that Sladkovsky was using human plasma in his controversial immuno-engineering treatments and giving patients unlicensed drugs without their knowledge. They also allege that Sladkovsky was fraudulently advertising cancer products, a violation of the European Drugs Code.