The Sin Eater(32)

‘You’ll think of something,’ said Nell, when Michael reported this. ‘You always do. Or Wilberforce will provide copy. Did I tell you I’m meeting Nina Doyle after Christmas? She thought I might like to meet Benedict – I mean properly meet him. Which I would, of course.’

‘How is he?’ Michael’s mind switched from Wilberforce to the chess set.

‘Bored with being kept in hospital, according to Nina. They haven’t found what’s wrong yet; they just keep doing dozens of tests. I hope he doesn’t have to stay in hospital over Christmas. It won’t be very festive for him.’

‘It won’t be very festive for us if I don’t manage to bash out three thousand words on that pestilential Wilberforce.’





TEN


Benedict’s Christmas was very far from festive. He had been allowed out of hospital, but he must not, said the doctors firmly, be on his own, until they had got to the root of this. Was there someone he could stay with?

‘He can stay with me,’ said Nina, sweeping aside Benedict’s suggestion that he could go back to the house in Reading where at least two of his fellow students would probably be around. ‘No, don’t argue, Benedict, there’s a spare bedroom in my flat, and I can keep an eye on you.’


Benedict did not want an eye keeping on him, at least not by Nina who would read up on all the things that might be wrong with him, and offer a new diagnosis every day. He wanted to get back to a semblance of normality, to join in any Christmas parties that might be going, and to get back to his work. He particularly wanted to make a start on his criminology essay and the hunt for interesting Victorian criminals to use as its base. The thought flickered that he had found a very interesting Victorian criminal in his own family, but he pushed this away.

But he was allowed home on Christmas Eve only on the strict understanding that he would be staying in his cousin’s spare room. Four students sharing a ramshackle house near Reading University did not, it appeared, constitute the kind of aftercare the infirmary was prepared to countenance.

Before leaving, there was a discussion with the consultant neurologist who had been overseeing his case, which Nina insisted on attending. Benedict, fuzzy from the drugs they were giving him and feeling as if he was not quite connecting with the rest of the world, had not had the energy to ban her from the consulting room.

‘We still need to do more rounds of tests and will monitor you for a few weeks, but as you know we’ve been able to rule out anything actually physiological,’ said the neurologist.

‘Yes.’ Benedict had been massively grateful to the doctor who had told him this two days earlier.

‘At the moment we’re tentatively ascribing your condition to a form of dissociative personality disorder.’

At first the words danced crazily and meaninglessly in Benedict’s brain, but then they arranged themselves in a more comprehensible pattern. This means Declan isn’t real, he thought, a huge relief unfolding inside him. He’s something I’ve conjured up because I’ve got this thing, this illness. He had not heard of dissociative personality disorder and it sounded alarming, but it was nowhere near as alarming as believing his great-grandfather’s spirit had haunted him since he was eight years old.

Nina said, rather sharply, ‘D’you mean schizophrenia? Split personality?

‘Schizophrenia and split personality are somewhat different,’ said the consultant. ‘Perhaps a more easily understood term in this case is multiple personality.’ He glanced at Benedict and said, ‘It sounds terrifying, doesn’t it?’

‘It does, a bit.’ Not as terrifying as ghosts though, thought Benedict. He said aloud, ‘The word “multiple” is worrying.’

‘It doesn’t need to be.’ The neurologist, who had a slightly creased face that looked as if he had stolen it from somebody much older, said, ‘We’re still filling in details, but I’m fairly sure DPD will be the eventual diagnosis.’ He glanced down at his folder of notes. ‘How much do you remember of that day you came in here?’

‘Hardly anything. It’s mostly a blur.’ It was as well Benedict was not wired up to any of the terrifying machines they had been using to identify his illness, because this was a whopping lie. He clearly remembered being in Holly Lodge that day and feeling his dead great-grandfather – or what he thought was his great-grandfather – pull him down into that long-ago Ireland. But none of it was real, he thought. Not Declan or Colm, or that Irish village or Nicholas Sheehan.

Nicholas Sheehan. There was the chess set, he thought, in sudden panic. And I found the black king at Holly Lodge. But there would be an explanation for that, as well – perhaps he had seen the chess set that day of his parents’ funeral, and woven the memory into the fantasies.

Even so, he did not want to tell anyone the extraordinary depth of those encounters, so he said firmly, ‘I don’t remember any of it. And you’ve kept me tanked up on sedatives and tranquillizers and God knows what since I got here, so I haven’t really been able to think about anything very much.’

The doctor made a gesture as if to say this was to be expected. ‘It’s sometimes useful to trace what we call the alter ego – the second self – to its source,’ he said. ‘To find out where it’s come from or what sparked it into life. You talked quite a lot about Ireland that first day. You weren’t entirely conscious, but you were quite lucid. You believed you were actually there – the west coast, I should think it was. And you talked about meeting a priest who died in a fire.’