The curiosity was twofold, partly a desire for more cameras, more physical evidence, but a gnawing need to know too, what subconscious world it was he’d walked through, who he’d seen there and who had called him, if anyone.
The person in the video was almost as much a stranger to Alex as he was to Ruth, and Alex had no idea what had been going on in the depths of his mind as he’d walked through the house in sleep. It could have been triggered by something completely innocuous. At the same time though, he couldn’t help but think of the voices that might have called out to him in the night.
Finally, he said, ‘Well, as I didn’t have cameras downstairs I suppose we’ll just have to speculate.’
‘I suppose so. Though of course, I’m still not sure why you use the cameras at all.’ He smiled, because she was teasing him, making clear that she knew his sleep disturbances were more than he liked her to believe.
He was about to dismiss what she’d said but for once decided to at least open up a little, nodding as he said, ‘I try always to be scientific, you know that, but when unpleasant things happen in your sleep...’ He trailed off before saying, ‘I just like to look at these tapes, to reinforce what I already know, that these attacks are internal, products of my own mind and nothing else. It’s stupid, I know, but it makes me feel better.’
She looked surprised, even touched, by the sudden admission of fallibility, and said, ‘It isn’t stupid at all.’ She smiled then.
‘What?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, making no attempt to sound convincing. ‘Just nice to see a chink in the emotional armour. Maybe I’ll break down your defences yet, find out your secrets.’
He responded with an easy laugh and said, ‘I have no idea what you’re talking about.’ He was almost telling the truth too, because he still didn’t see himself as a secretive person.
He had an image of himself as someone who was open, and yet in truth he’d become secretive by default, never wanting to talk about anything that might lead back into the past. It was the way he had to be, always wary of unearthing the one secret that had spread its roots into every part of his life.
And it wasn’t even as if he was defending himself with this secrecy. He’d stopped caring a long time ago about the consequences on his own life of going to the police. Going to the police - it seemed laughable now after all this time, and anyway, what did he have to lose? There was nothing they could take from him that he hadn’t already shed.
But it had been a group decision, and so he’d kept it secret for them, never telling anyone. He’d kept it secret to protect four friends, and now one of those friends was dead, and Alex was beginning to wonder if he should let the remaining three know about it, and the circumstances involved.
A phobia of needles, a missing scrapbook; even given the value Luke had attached to them, these things hardly added up to a suspicious death. Luke was paranoid, and for a while it had looked like rubbing off on Alex but, like the policeman had said, Will’s death was probably exactly what it appeared to be.
He’d still tell the others though, even about what Luke had said, giving them the chance to draw their own conclusions. Possibly too, they’d simply want to know, that someone who’d once been a close friend of theirs had died in a Brighton flat with too much heroin in his blood, his life unmarked, a person almost unloved.
And the thought of Will being unloved made him feel guilty too, because he wasn’t really doing it for Will but for himself, the death providing him with a reason to get in touch again. He hadn’t spoken to any of them since graduation and it felt now as if by making contact he could turn the clock back and undo the gradual descent of the last ten years.
It was like a chance to go back to a better time and, impossible as he knew it was, a chance somehow to make things right. He could never put right the simple and devastating wrongs of that night and the days afterwards but perhaps Will’s death was offering him a chance to finally come to terms with it, and perhaps even to forgive himself.
7
He was back home early in the afternoon. He took the bag of Will’s things up to the spare room and found a spot there for it amongst the accumulated junk. A lot of it was stuff Kate had left, kept there as part of the charade they still played, that she’d come back, that Columbia was just a temporary thing.
They’d been happy together. Early on he thought maybe they’d even loved each other, but in the end they’d just been happy and that hadn’t been enough, not to counter the promise of Kate’s career, nor his own morbid determination to stay exactly where he was.