Case Histories

In a dream, in slow underwater motion, Theo moved down the corridor and into the boardroom. He noticed coffee cups and sandwiches on the mahogany table and realized he had forgotten about the meeting. There was blood spattered across the cream walls and David Holroyd was slumped like a bloody sack near the marble fireplace, while nearer to the door, his own child lay on the floor, frothy blood bubbling gently from the gash in her throat. Theo was aware of someone sobbing uncontrollably, and someone else saying, "Why doesn't the ambulance get here?"

Theo dropped to his knees next to Laura. Cheryl, his secretary, was kneeling over her, incongruous in skirt and bra. She had removed her blouse and had tried to staunch the blood from Laura's wound. She was still holding the blouse, now a wet bloody rag, and her bare skin was slick with blood. It had run in rivulets down her cleavage – the word "bloodbath" came into Theo's mind. There was blood everywhere. Theo was kneeling in a pool of it, the carpet was soggy with it. Laura's blood. Which was his blood also. Her white blouse was now dyed crimson. He could smell the blood – copper and salt and the rankness of a butcher's shop. Theo wondered if there was a way of slitting open his own veins and arteries and siphoning off his blood and giving it to his daughter. And all the time Theo was praying, "Please, God, let her be alright," like a terrible unstoppable mantra and he felt that if he could keep on saying those words he could prevent this thing from happening.

Laura's eyes were half open and Theo wasn't sure whether she was dead or not. He remembered last year, comforting Poppy at the side of the road after she'd been knocked down by a car outside the house. The dog was small, a terrier, and he had held it in his arms while it died and had seen the same dull look in its eyes as it moved into an unreachable, inescapable place. He pressed his hand against Laura's wound but there wasn't really any blood to stem anymore so now instead he held her hand, a hand that was soft and warm, and he bent close to her face and murmured in her ear, "Everything's all right, Laura," and then he cradled her head in his lap and stroked her blood-matted hair, and his secretary, Cheryl, wept and said, "God loves you, Laura."

At the moment he stopped praying, at the moment he knew she was dead, Theo understood it would never cease to happen. Every moment Laura would be standing by the photocopier, negotiating the complexities of the land registry form, wondering when her father would be back or whether she could take a lunch break because she was starving. Maybe regretting taking this job because it was actually quite boring but she'd done it to please her father, because she liked to make him happy, because she loved him. Laura, who slept curled up in a ball, who liked hot buttered toast and all the Indiana Jones movies but not Star Wars, whose first word was "dog," who liked the rain but not the wind, who planned to have three children, Laura, who would be forever standing by the photocopier in the office in Parkside waiting for the stranger and his knife, waiting for the world to go white.

Chapter 3. CASE HISTORY NO. 3 1979

Everything from Duty, Nothing from Love

Michelle had been setting her alarm five minutes earlier every day. This morning it had gone off at twenty past five. Tomorrow it would be quarter past. She could see that she would have to call a halt eventually or she would be getting up before she went to bed. But not yet. She was only one step ahead of the baby, who woke up with the birds and the dawn, and the birds and the dawn were coming earlier every day at this time of year.

She needed more time, there simply wasn't enough of it. This was the only way she could think of making it. Not making it exactly, if you could make it from scratch – brand-new time – that would be fantastic. Michelle tried to think of ways you might manufacture something so abstract, but all she could think of were examples from her own small-scale domestic economy – knitting and sewing and baking. Imagine if you could knit time. Christ, her needles would be clacking day and night. And what an advantage she would have over her friends, none of whom knew how to knit (or bake or sew), but then none of them had saddled themselves at the age of eighteen with a husband and a baby and a bloody cottage in the middle of nowhere, surrounded on all sides by nothing but horizon, so that it felt as if the sky were a huge stone that was pressing you into the ground. No, not saddled. She loved them. She really did.