(1998) Denial

  ‘Yes.’ The old man nodded. ‘You know, it’s a long time I have this secret – since I am small boy, since maybe I was seven, eight years old.’ He got up from the sofa, tottered across the room and stopped beneath the porthole window. Morning sunlight illuminated him like a relic in a display case. ‘I know things that are going to happen, Dr Tennent. I see things, sometimes. Always bad things.’

  Michael watched him, waiting to see if he was going to continue, then said, in a neutral voice, ‘You are psychic? Is that what you are saying? Is that your secret?’

  Dortmund walked towards him, stopped, placed his bony fingers on the polished mahogany handle of his walking stick, and stared at him with rheumy eyes.

  ‘I do not have very much in my life to be proud of,’ he said. ‘And I’m not proud of this.’

  ‘Tell me what kind of things you see.’

  ‘I know when a tragedy is to happen to someone. I made the decision to undergo analysis because I wanted to find redemption before I die. I am not finding that, not yet, but I am seeing something, and perhaps this is why I am here with you. Perhaps destiny sent me, to try to warn you.’

  ‘To warn me of what?’

  ‘That you are going to lose a woman whom you love.’

  Michael was tempted to say, You are three years too late, but he didn’t. The man’s stare was making him uncomfortable. He glanced away. When he looked back Dortmund was still gazing at him, with a strange desperation. Michael did not want this. He did not want to legitimise the man’s fantasies by asking him for details. He needed time to think about it, to come back with a measured reply. Anyhow, what other woman did he love? Only his mother, and she was seventy-nine and in rude health. If he was about to lose her, he did not want to know – and not from this man.

  Michael looked at his watch and, to his relief, the fifty minutes were up. ‘I think we’d better stop there for today,’ he said.

  After Dortmund had departed, Michael added to the man’s notes, ‘Suicide risk’.

  His next patient was late, and he had a gap of a few minutes. Despite himself, he used it to phone his mother. She sounded fine; his father was down at Lymington harbour, pottering around with his boat. She was going with a friend to see a local flower show.

  He felt cheered by her voice. Unlike his patients, and himself, his parents at least had found contentment and peace in their life.

  Chapter Eight

  Sodden with perspiration, trapped on a hard metal surface, her arms, midriff, legs and ankles bound tightly, her head crushed in a vice, Tina Mackay could move her eyes but nothing else. She was dimly aware that she had a catheter in her urethra. She had no idea of the time, nor of where she was.

  ‘You want to know something?’

  She stared at the man, fearfully, trying to keep thinking straight despite the agony in her mouth.

  Thomas Lamark, holding bloodstained tooth forceps in his rubber-gloved hand, stood over her, looking down with gentle grey eyes. ‘Relax, Tina, not all knowledge is painful. This could be useful knowledge for you. My mother has always taught me the value of good manners, OK? Life is a learning curve. You learn things, you become a better person. Don’t you want to be a better person, Tina?’ His voice was deep and absurdly genial.

  She said nothing. She had come to realise some hours back, that down here in this place, with its bare concrete walls, sound was not going to get out. Screaming had ceased to be an option.

  Somehow she had to try to reason with the man, and she sensed that somewhere inside him was a humanity she could reach if she could establish a rapport with him.

  ‘Good manners means apologising when you are in the wrong. It takes a big person to apologise – are you big enough, Tina? I mean to really apologise for turning down my book?’

  It was hard for her to speak now, but she tried once more, to plead with him through her broken mouth, her voice a ragged, bloodied mumble. ‘Yssshhh. Can you ftchh yrrr brrrook. Trrrgettterh. Shweee can wrrkkkk on it trrgtrrrher.’

  He shook his head. ‘Tina, I’m sorry, you saw with your own eyes what happened when I tossed the coin. I have to do what the coin tells me. You have to make rules in life and stick by them. Both our lives are out of control, right?’

  She acknowledged this with her eyes.

  ‘But you could have done something to prevent this, Tina. I couldn’t, and that’s the difference between us. I was born the way I am. I never asked to be this way. All my life people have told me I’m not right in the head. I have to accept that. I really hate being this way, but I can’t fight it. I have to accept that I do things differently.’

  He took a couple of steps back, smiled, removed his surgical scrubs, and raised his massive hands expansively. ‘Do you like what I’m wearing?’

  She looked as if she had not understood the question, so he repeated it. ‘My clothes? Do you like my clothes?’

  She stared through a mist of tears at his face. At his frame. He was exceptionally tall, at least six foot six. Oh, God, who the hell was this madman? He was good-looking – and there was something wrong about this – he was almost impossibly good looking, with black swept-back hair, and wearing an open-necked white shirt, navy slacks, black suede loafers. Elegant, but dated, he resembled some louche character in a Noël Coward play.

  ‘Nicesshh,’ she mumbled, approvingly. ‘Shhlelegant.’

  ‘You’re not just saying that, are you, Tina?’

  ‘Nrrrrrrrrr.’

  He smiled such a warm smile that just then she believed everything was going to be all right. ‘The shirt is from Sulka,’ he said. ‘They make a beautiful lawn cotton, it’s really comfortable. My mother always chooses my clothes. This is the way she likes me to look. Do you like my shoes?’

  She grunted assent.

  ‘Gucci. They’re hard to get – this style’s been really popular. If you want some, you’ll have to order them now, otherwise when the next shipment comes in, they’ll all be gone.’

  He turned and walked out of sight. ‘OK, now let’s have some music. All set?’

  The room erupted with a Gregorian chant that seemed to Tina to explode upwards through the floor, down from the ceiling, and out from all four walls. Thomas Lamark came back, wearing his blue surgical scrubs once more. He smiled and his eyes rolled dreamily. He was away, lifted high up by the stark chords, the falsetto voices, the pitch, wailing then falling.

  He danced, to his own private rhythm, sweeping the forceps through the air with his gloved hand, like a conductor with his baton. Then he leaned over the terror-stricken publisher, seized one of her front teeth with the forceps, gripped it hard and levered the handle sharply upwards. There was a sharp snap as the tooth came away with part of the root.

  The music absorbed her scream, like a swab.

  Chapter Nine

  thursday, 10 july 1997

  There’s this thing about friends that has always bothered me. People have friends, it’s a normal thing to have friends.

  Everything I watch on television, movies, comedies, dramas, all the people have friends they can phone, chat to, visit.

  How do you get friends?

  Seems to me from my experience that if you surf the Net for friends, all you get is people wanting to sell you sex. I go into a pub and start talking and people think I’m trying to pick them up.

  I’m aware there’s something inside me that makes me different from everyone else. I’m not sure what it is, a lack of patience, perhaps, or I’m badly adjusted in some other way.

  My mother always told me she was the only friend I needed. I never really believed that, but now she’s gone, even after just forty-eight hours, I’m beginning to realise she was right.

  I see the world my way, my mother’s way. She said that the world is forever out to screw you. You have to hit back in any way you can.

  Otherwise the world has won.

  When in doubt, toss the coin. The coin is guided by a Higher Authority. When in doubt, He will make that decision for y
ou.

  There’s only so much responsibility that any human being can bear.

  Chapter Ten

  Gloria Lamark had been attracted to 47 Holland Park Villas by its grandeur and its theatrical atmosphere. Square, detached and classically proportioned, it was large enough to have been the manor house of a rural community, although here in Holland Park, in London, it was just one of a row of similar-sized houses, some with Georgian or Regency façades, others, like number 47, with a Victorian Gothic frontage, crenellated parapet, high, narrow windows and arched lintels that gave it a secretive and even faintly surreal air.

  In a quiet avenue only a short distance from the hurly-burly of Kensington High Street, set back from the road behind a circular gravel driveway, the house was concealed from prying eyes by a high wall, electric wrought-iron gates, and a riot of foliage from trees, mature shrubs and the heavy cladding of ivy on the walls.

  In 1955, with visions of becoming a society hostess as her acting career rose to meteoric heights, Gloria Lamark had moved here.

  The interior of the house had the feel of a stage set, with a flagstone floor in the huge hall, wide corridors and staircases, and décor that was entirely black, grey and white. Almost every inch of wall space was hung with framed photographs, again mostly black and white, of the actress.

  Gloria Lamark had wanted to be the only colour in the house, and was insistent that nothing should compete with her. She had never once, in forty-two years, permitted any other than white flowers in the house or the garden, which was planted almost entirely with evergreens. Koi carp were allowed in the pond, which had been designed with classical columns and arches like a miniature Italian lagoon, but only because, being underwater, they would not overshadow her with their colouring. Visitors who outshone her were never invited back.

  In the beginning there had been a few lavish parties, but within a decade, along with her circle of friends, they had petered out. Subsequently there had been a trickle of dinner parties, absurdly formal and stultifyingly dull for all present, except Thomas. He loved watching his mother at the head of the table, dressed in her finery, listening to her holding court with stories he had heard a thousand times before and of which he never tired.

  He was thinking about one of those dinner parties now as he sat in front of his computer in his den on the first floor, directly below his mother’s bedroom where he would ordinarily have heard her if she had called out to him. The heavy charcoal drapes – blackout curtains from the Second World War – kept out all but a few slivers of light from the morning sun. He had drawn the curtains throughout the house.

  At this moment he wished he could gouge the sun out of the sky and blind the world. Light was for the living, darkness for the dead. This was now the house of the dead.

  It was ten thirty-five on Thursday morning and he had been up, as usual, all night. Although it wasn’t quite as usual because his mother was no longer here, and therefore it would never be as usual. Everything had changed. The past was another country where they did things differently. But it wasn’t as simple as crossing a frontier to move into the new country. First there was unfinished business. All travellers had to pack before they left. Completing unfinished business was like packing.

  He considered the metaphor, and liked it. You could use a suitcase, or you could use –

  He lifted the Elastoplast on his wrist and looked at the row of punctures where the bitch editor had bitten him in the multi-storey car park last night. Human bites were dangerous, worse than a dog’s, worse than a rusty nail. He should have a tetanus jab, but he was so busy. How could he fit one in with everything else that had to be done?

  Through sodden eyes, he looked up from his diary entry on the computer screen to the poster of his mother on the wall above his desk. She was all around him in this room, framed photographs, posters and poems she had written to him. But this one, above his desk, was his favourite. Her face peeked sulkily through a cascade of wavy blonde hair; her lips pouted as she stared with disdain at something beyond the camera. One black-lace-stockinged leg reached out of the open passenger door of a sports car, an XK120 Jaguar, and her skirt was drawn provocatively high, revealing, or almost revealing (he could never quite make up his mind), an inch of bare white thigh.

  The caption beneath read: LAURENCE HARVEY/GLORIA LAMARK . . . IN . . . RACE OF THE DEVILS!

  She had been the leading lady. Her name was above the titles! She had starred with one of the greatest male leads of the twentieth century. His mother!

  And now she was dead, her career ruined by evil, scheming people, her worth trashed by rinky-dink little nobodies like scumbag bitch Tina Mackay, and then, finally, murdered by Dr Michael Tennent.

  His mother was lying in a fridge in a funeral home. He knew about post-mortems, he knew about the indignity. He thought of his mother, the beautiful, incredible, lovely creature, lying there, naked, her brain lifted out of her skull by some pathologist, then chopped up and wrapped in a white plastic bag along with the rest of her internal organs, and stuffed back inside her like giblets in a supermarket chicken.

  He wept silently at the thought. Dignity had meant so much to her, and now she’d been hacked open by saws and carving knives and scalpels on a steel mortuary table.

  He looked down at his desk. At Tina Mackay’s teeth. He had washed the blood off them and neatly arranged them in their correct order, to make sure he hadn’t overlooked any. A full set. In pretty good condition – she must have taken good care of them.

  Then he felt a sudden pang of guilt at the pain he had caused her. He raised the Elastoplast and inspected the row of punctures on his wrist. Then he looked at the words he had just typed on the screen.

  You have to hit back in any way that you can.

  You have to.

  They made him feel better. Cause and effect. That was the way the world worked. Tina Mackay had bitten him and now she wouldn’t bite him again.

  No need for guilt.

  Her rejection of the manuscript had caused her to be here in the first place. This was all entirely her fault.

  The human will to live is a strange thing, he thought. People will do anything to stay alive, say anything. Even when, like Tina Mackay, all you are staying alive for is more pain and the hope of death.

  His conscience clear now, he leaned across to his Bang and Olufsen stack and pressed PLAY. Immediately the psychiatrist’s voice filled the room. Thomas knew by heart every one of the words on the tape.

  He rewound it, sat back, and listened again, for the hundredth, or maybe the thousandth, or maybe the millionth time to Dr Michael Tennent’s anxious voice.

  ‘This is Dr Tennent speaking. Gloria, would you please give me a call as soon as you get this message? I’m rather afraid I upset you this morning. It might be helpful if we had a quick chat on the phone.’

  He pressed STOP, looked back at the screen, and tried to continue writing up his diary. But the words were just a blur as now, alone in his den, he wept for all that he had lost.

  Chapter Eleven

  His session with Herman Dortmund had left Michael Tennent’s mind in an even more turbulent state than when he had arrived that morning. He hadn’t been able to concentrate at all on his next patient, a forty-two-year-old woman suffering from body dysmorphic disorder, who’d had cosmetic plastic surgery on her face and body eleven times in the past five years. And the tragedy was that she’d been a beautiful woman to start with and was incapable of believing it. Unlike Gloria Lamark, who had been incapable of believing she might ever lose her looks.

  His head ached like hell. In spite of the cool beige linen suit he was wearing, he felt clammy. He ought to go home, gulp down a couple of paracetamol, sit in a darkened room. But he had a full list today, and a few were totally dependent on him. The newspaper obituary on his desk was proof of that.

  An overdose of drugs.

  He knew exactly why she had done it, that was the worst part. She had done it because –

  His
phone buzzed. His secretary, Thelma, announced the arrival of his eleven o’clock appointment. Michael asked her to have the patient wait a few moments.

  ‘Yes, Dr Tennent,’ she said, then added nervously, ‘I listened to the programme last night. I thought it went very well. If you don’t mind me saying, you sounded much more confident than usual.’

  Michael had inherited Thelma from his predecessor, and reckoned she had a bullying husband and almost certainly a bullying father. A small, trim, grey-haired woman, nervy, servile and anxious to please, she looked older than she was. He guessed she had probably learned to get through life by avoiding confrontation. She just steered a course through the rocks and stuck rigidly to it. Few highs but few lows. Existence at its baldest. That was all far too many people had to hope for.

  She rarely expressed opinions to him, which made her remark now all the more surprising.

  ‘Really?’ he probed. ‘I didn’t think I’d done a very good job last night.’

  She hesitated. ‘It seemed as if you were speaking much more from the heart than usual. I – I don’t mean that you aren’t usually good, but there was definitely something different.’

  Amanda? he wondered. He said, ‘Thanks. I’m not at all sure I’m going to continue doing it, though.’

  ‘You should, Dr Tennent,’ she said emphatically. ‘I think you help people.’

  ‘I’m not so sure.’ He paused. ‘Give me a couple of minutes, I have to make a call.’

  He replaced the receiver and stared at the framed photograph of Katy, a head and shoulders shot. Their last holiday together. They were on a boat going down the Nile, and she was leaning against a deck rail, grinning, looking at him with those trusting blue eyes. The wind had twisted her blonde hair around her neck, and strands of it lay across her pink cashmere jumper. She had a healthy tan and those three colours, the brown skin, the blonde hair, the pink jumper against the clear rich blue of the Nile sky seemed perfection. Exquisite.