The Blame Game. C.J. Cooke
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‘We were in a car accident,’ I say, and I’m trembling so badly I can hardly get the words out. ‘I’m afraid someone is going to come into the hospital and hurt us.’
She bends down in front of me and listens.
‘Who do you think will hurt you?’
‘A man,’ I say, gulping back air as though I’m drowning. ‘He was wearing black boots. He crashed into us on purpose … he’s going to come here, I know it!’
She takes my hand and I manage to take a breath. ‘Is there security at the hospital?’
She frowns. ‘Not really. But the police should help. If you had a car accident they will want to find who did this.’
This is comforting enough to help me stop shaking. ‘The police,’ I say. ‘The woman from the British High Commission said they would want a statement but they’ve not come to see me yet.’
She smiles reassuringly.
‘They will be here very soon. It is not a big police force so they may be busy. But they will help. If someone is trying to hurt you, the police will protect you.’
I lie on a cold metal table as she pulls the machine over my collarbone, then my legs and arms.
In my mind’s eye I see myself standing in our ground floor flat in Sheffield. Reuben is in his high-chair in the room behind me shouting and throwing beans across the room. The postman pushes a pile of letters through the letter box and Reuben screams at the sound.
Most of the letters are bills, but there’s a padded envelope sent on by our landlady, Lleucu, from our loft flat in Cardiff. Amongst the letters is a cream-coloured bonded envelope with ‘Haden, Morris & Laurence’ emblazoned in navy lettering across the back. It looks important, so I open it first.
K. Haden
Haden, Morris & Laurence Law Practice
4 Martin Place
London, EN9 1AS
25th June 2004
Michael King
101 Oxford Lane
Cardiff
CF10 1FY
Sir,
We request your correspondence in receipt of this letter to the address above.
Our clients desire a meeting with you regarding the death of Luke Aucoin.
The time to meet about this tragedy is long overdue. Please do not delay in writing to us at the above address to arrange a meeting.
Sincerely,
K. Haden
The letter drifts from my hand to the ground. Reuben continues to shout in the background. I feel like someone’s run through me with a sword. Slowly I sink to the ground and pick the letter up again. Five words scream off the page.
The death of Luke Aucoin.
Those words chill me to the bone, turn my guts to mush. At one point I believed Luke was the love of my life. And yet I caused his death.
I turn and look at Reuben. My first thought is: they’ll take him from me. I will lose him if I face this.
So, I hid the letter. And I persuaded Michael that it was time to move again.
I thought it would all go away.
The voices in my head remind me that there have been dozens of occasions in the past where something has gone wrong and I’ve connected it to these letters. When we lived in Belfast our cat Phoebe died. The vet said it was poison. I worked myself into a complete state, certain it was deliberate, payback for Luke, until a neighbour approached us and apologetically explained that he’d left out rat poison in the back garden and had spotted Phoebe near the tray on the day that she died. And the miscarriage I had a few years before Saskia came along … for about year afterwards I was trapped in the silent torture of being convinced that Luke’s family had done it. I even had the scenario in my head. We were living in London at the time and I took the tube to and from work every day. I was seventeen weeks’ pregnant. The first cramps started about ten minutes after I got off the tube. It would be easy to inject me with something that would start early labour. A light prick that I’d probably never notice.
It’s difficult to explain paranoia. Saying something like that aloud – though I never did, not to anyone – makes it sound ridiculous. But the suspicion was like a monolith in my head, impossible to budge. We buried our little girl in the hospital graveyard, named her Hester. And when the voices of suspicion finally died down, a new one set in: Hester’s loss was karma for Luke.
Other mishaps were similarly difficult to assign to chance: a slashed car tyre, the night I was followed home in Kent, a few week of silent phone calls at three in the morning, two bouts of severe food poisoning. On hindsight it’s unlikely any of these were related to what happened to Luke, but at the time I was sure they were, and I carried that knowledge like a knife lodged in my chest. I could tell no one, not even Michael. My hair would fall out in handfuls and the smallest thing felt physically impossible. Cooking a meal, meeting up with friends … I felt incapacitated, barely able to look after myself, never mind my children. Life stalled and sputtered, but somehow hobbled on.
There is a point when fear is no longer a protective instinct, and it becomes sabotage.
No, I tell myself resolutely through tears. The crash has nothing to do with that. It has nothing to do with what happened to Luke.
I’m trying hard to convince myself, to drown out the other voices. But they’re too loud for me to silence. They shout in my head like a Greek chorus.
But what if it is? You’re alone in the hospital, completely vulnerable. If they want to come and finish you off they only have to walk through the doors.
When I return to the ward – with the news that my wrist is broken – I breathe a sigh of relief that Reuben is there, hugging a flat rectangular object with a blue rubber casing to his chest. His iPad. The glass is cracked in one corner but otherwise it seems OK. I ask him if he’s OK, and he nods, but then tells me that a man came up to him and asked him where I was.
‘Who was it?’ I say. ‘Was he a doctor? A nurse?’
He shrugs and moves his eyes around the room. He seems agitated, but of course he has every reason to be and I can’t read him.
‘Did the man say why he wanted me?’
‘My headphones are gone,’ he says.
‘How did you get the iPad?’
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