The Magpies A Psychological Thriller

Eight


Jamie sat beside Paul’s bed and stared at his friend’s motionless face. Behind him he could hear the bip bip bip of the heart monitor. He had seen enough films and television dramas to know that if the line on the screen were to run flat – to flatline – he should shout for a doctor, and then panic would render him frantic and helpless as doctors and nurses would come running, their footfall heavy in the long corridors. They would bring out the defibrillator and Jamie would stand there and watch as they fired electricity into Paul’s chest, making his body buck, rising up and falling back onto the bed, the bed where he had lain since the accident, six weeks ago.

But nothing like that did happen.

Six weeks, and nothing had happened at all. Paul did nothing except lie motionless beneath NHS sheets, his eyes closed, his body continuing to function at the most fundamental of levels (his heart beating on, his chest continuing to rise and fall, his hair and fingernails growing, skin being shed) but his mind locked away in that body, doing nothing. Nothing but dreaming. If he did dream at all.

Paul was never alone. His family and friends took it in turn to sit beside his bed: his parents, his sister, his grandmother, Heather, Kirsty, Jamie. Most of them would sit and talk to him, chatting about life as it went on outside the hospital, pleading with him to wake up, expressing regret for things said or unsaid in the past. Sometimes Paul’s parents played recordings of his favourite football matches. Paul and his dad were both Arsenal fans – it was pretty much the only thing they had ever talked about – and Mr Garner would record matches off Radio 5 and play them back to his son, hoping a dramatic moment might reach into Paul’s sleeping brain and draw him back to the surface.

That’s what it seemed like to Jamie: that his friend had slipped deep beneath the surface of the world, into a deep lake of dreams or darkness, and although he was still there – still with them – he couldn’t communicate with them. He was too deep. He had been swallowed up, and all they could do was wait and see if the subterranean place in which he now dwelt would spit him back out. Or if he might float upwards, blinking with sleep-clogged eyes as he emerged into the light.

It was what he prayed for.

Jamie barely spoke to Paul when it was his turn to sit beside him. He didn’t tell stories or jokes or play music. He merely sat and watched. He didn’t believe that his friend needed chatter and prompts; no-one could pull him back to the surface with songs or football commentary. He believed that Paul needed to rest – he was sleeping off the results of the accident like a bad hangover. Jamie and Paul used to joke that after a night on the beer, Paul would slip into a coma, and that nothing could wake him but time. Of course, Jamie knew that this coma had nothing to do with alcohol or over-indulgence, but something told him that the same principle applied. All they had to do was wait.

‘He’s suffered a serious head injury,’ said the doctor at Bromley Hospital, where the ambulance had taken Paul after the accident. ‘It’s very difficult to say at this point what the long-term outcome will be.’

After a day, Paul fell into a coma. The doctor told them that he might never come out of that coma, and if he did he might be brain damaged. He might not be able to talk. He might have lost the use of his limbs. On the other hand, he could make a full recovery, although it would not be quick. He could spend months or years in therapy.

‘All we can do,’ said the doctor, ‘is wait and hope. And pray, if you’re that way inclined.’

‘So there’s a possibility that he might never wake up?’ said Heather. She was trying to maintain her professional nurse’s stoicism, but was not succeeding. Her voice cracked as she spoke. Jamie’s parents had shuffled off to get coffee from the machine down the corridor.

The doctor spoke softly. ‘There is that chance, yes. He might slip into a vegetative state, in which case the family would have to make a decision. Or the coma could continue for a long time. If at any point his brain stopped functioning completely – if it died, in effect – we could keep him alive with machines, but as you know…well, is that really living?’

Heather, Kirsty and Jamie looked at each other. Heather started to cry, and Kirsty put her arms around her. Jamie stood there, wishing he was somewhere else, wishing life was like TiVo: that he could press rewind to change history, or even fast forward to find out what would happen.

He could still see the look of joy and cocky assuredness on Paul’s face when he first climbed into the go-kart. And then he saw Chris, standing on the other side of the track, not catching anyone’s eye.

After the accident, Chris and Lucy had driven straight home. They hadn’t visited the hospital, or even phoned to see how Paul was. Jamie hadn’t noticed at the time – he had been too preoccupied to worry about the actions of his neighbours – but afterwards, when he began to process what had happened, dwelling on it on sleepless nights, he began to feel outraged that the people who were responsible for Paul being at the track in the first place hadn’t bothered to find out how he was. They hadn’t even sent a card, or expressed any sort of regret. Chris, for God’s sake, had even been involved in the accident! And now he was hiding.

No, that wasn’t right. He was acting as if nothing had happened.

Three days after the accident, Chris came up to Jamie and Kirsty’s and asked them if they wanted their windows cleaned: he knew a window cleaner who could do it cheap.

‘I’ve noticed your back windows are looking a bit grubby.’

Jamie was speechless. He had only come home to take a bath and change his clothes. In ten minutes he would be heading back to Bromley to sit in a room with his comatose best mate.

‘I don’t give a toss about the windows,’ he said after a long pause, and Chris looked surprised.

‘There’s no need to be rude,’ he said, and he turned around and walked off, leaving Jamie, once again, speechless.

Jamie and Kirsty hadn’t spoken to their downstairs neighbours since. They saw them coming and going, but they didn’t even attempt smalltalk. Jamie was waiting for Chris to say something about the accident, or ask after Paul’s health. But it never happened. Most of the time he didn’t think about it. His annoyance and anger were there in the background, but that was all. He felt too weakened by what had happened to Paul to care much about anything else – work, his other friends, his family. Lucy and Chris were the least of his concerns.

Three weeks after the accident, Heather and Kirsty pulled some strings – calling in a few favours from consultants they knew – and got Paul transferred to St Thomas’s, which meant that they could see him every day. Heather usually spent her lunchbreak sitting with him. Now, when Jamie spent his shift beside Paul, he did so knowing that Kirsty was close by, working, dealing with her own patients. It made him feel comforted – and also gave him some perspective. Theirs was not the only unfortunate situation in the world. There were many people in the same boat. When Kirsty told him about the sick children she had to deal with, he remembered that there were a lot of people worse off. It didn’t make what had happened to Paul any less painful or easier to accept, but it made him feel less alone.

Paul’s condition continued. He was stable. There was no sign of a recovery, but nor did his condition worsen. As Paul slept on, Jamie and Kirsty’s life returned to a normal routine – normal but for the shadow of Paul hanging in the background. They started to cope. Jamie realised he was grieving, even though that grief was for somebody who wasn’t actually dead. Grief was another thing that only time could aid. By the time summer ended, he and Kirsty felt like they had re-entered the real world. Now all they wanted was for Paul to join them.





Nine


Making love felt like an affirmation of life. They hadn’t had sex for weeks, but suddenly, one evening, they looked at each other and a moment later they were pulling off their clothes and falling onto the bed, Kirsty pushing herself backwards with her heels as Jamie trailed kisses from her ankles, up her thighs, tasting her arousal, moving up to her breasts, his hands grasping her shoulder blades as their mouths met in a hard kiss. He had to be inside her, right now, and she raised herself up to meet him as he pushed into her, as deep as he could go, the headboard banging against the wall, Kirsty scratching his back, pulling him in, grinding her hips in a circular motion. He bit her neck. She pulled his hair. They turned over in a blur of limbs and she rode him, rocking back and forth with her hands gripping her own hair, his hands holding her breasts, pushing upwards with his pelvis, wanting to disappear inside her, wanting to get all of her inside him, so they could devour one another completely. Kirsty bucked and trembled and shouted his name. He rolled her off him and they fell off the bed, landing on the floor with a thump. Kirsty turned over onto her hands and knees and Jamie entered her from behind, both of them collapsing as he came. Kirsty twisted around to face him, kissing him as they lay in a tangle on the floor.

She had stopped taking the pill.

From that moment on, they made love whenever they could. They didn’t sit down together and talk about it in hushed, serious tones. They didn’t say, Is this the right time? or Can we afford it? – they just knew it was the right thing to do. It was what they both wanted.

Then, two weeks later, they received the first letter.

Kirsty was having her early morning bath. Jamie was still in bed, just waking up, dreams receding from his mind in which go-karts collided. He got out of bed, going over to the mirror to look at himself, out of damage-assessment habit rather than vanity. His body was in pretty good shape, caused by a combination of loads of athletic sex and all the working out he had been doing, putting his weights to good use. His face, though, was a different matter. He had bags like coal sacks beneath his eyes; he looked pasty and tired, his skin like the underbelly of a fish. He looked the way he did at the end of a long winter. It didn’t seem real that just a few weeks ago summer had blazed.

He wandered out of the bedroom, naked and needing to pee. Passing the front door, he looked down and saw that an envelope that had been pushed under it. He crouched down and picked it up, taking it with him into the bathroom.

Kirsty was washing her hair, leaning back in the water, her eyes closed against the shampoo, her ears submerged in water so she didn’t hear him come in. He leant over and kissed her wet face, causing her to open her eyes.

‘Oh shit, Jamie, now I’ve got shampoo in my eyes. Pass me a towel, quick.’

‘Sorry.’

She dried her face. ‘What’s that?’

He ripped the envelope open and began to read. He read the letter twice, turning it over in his hand as if he couldn’t believe it was real. Then he read it aloud.

To the Ground Floor Flat

We have become increasingly disturbed recently by the level of noise coming from your flat. The music you play at high volumes is bad enough, but recently the sound of you having sexual intercourse has become quite intolerable. We both have to get up early, and are finding it difficult to get sufficient sleep because of the noises that emerge from your flat night after night. It is quite disgusting to listen to.

We do not want to cause too much of a fuss over this. We understand that you have urges to fulfil, but we do not all want to share in your exertions. We hope that you will act to ensure that we do not need to write to you like this again.

Kirsty grabbed the letter and read it, just to make sure that Jamie wasn’t making it up. She held it at the corner so as not to get it wet.

‘It’s unsigned.’ She looked up at Jamie. ‘Do you think it’s meant to be a joke?’

‘No. I mean, I don’t know. I hope it’s meant to be a joke.’

‘Do you think it’s from Lucy and Chris?’

‘Who else could it be? There’s no-one else who could possibly hear us making love, apart from maybe Mary, and this from a we, not an I.’

‘But look at the way it’s addressed: to the Ground Floor Flat. Not even our names. It’s so cold and impersonal. It doesn’t make sense.’

‘Well, we haven’t spoken to them since Chris offered to find us a window cleaner. Maybe they think we’re no longer on first name terms. Or even second name terms.’

‘It’s ridiculous.’

Jamie took the letter back from Kirsty and read it again. ‘The noises that emerge from your flat night after night.’ He laughed. ‘It’s quite flattering, really.’

‘It has to be a joke.’

‘If not, it’s very sad. It makes me feel sorry for the person who wrote it. They’re obviously not getting any.’

Kirsty rolled her eyes. ‘Don’t you feel angry, or insulted?’

‘A bit. But, to be honest, it’s so stupid I can’t really take it seriously. I mean, what’s the point of writing something like this? If it’s meant to be a joke, it’s not funny. And if not…well, it’s just stupid.’

‘It’s horrible, though, Jamie. It makes me feel like I’m being watched. Or listened to, at least.’

She climbed out of the bath, her skin warm and pink, and Jamie took a towel from the rack and wrapped it around her shoulders.

‘We’ll have to talk about this later,’ he said. ‘I’m going to be late for work.’

While she dried herself, he cleaned his teeth and washed himself at the basin. He thought about the letter: did Lucy and Chris really have cause for complaint? It wasn’t the most pleasant situation in the world, having to listen to someone else having noisy sex. When he was a student his room in the halls of residence was next to this guy called Terry, who had a girlfriend called…Jamie couldn’t remember her name. But he could certainly remember Terry’s name, because of the number of times he had heard it called out: Oh Terry, Ter-ry, Oh God Terriiiieeeee. Jamie hadn’t had a girlfriend at the time, and the nightly orgasm-fest going on next door had driven him half-mad. But that had been different. Lucy and Chris were married, they were in their thirties. The best way to drown out the sound of someone else having sex would be to do it yourselves. That’s if the letter really was from them. But then, like he’d said to Kirsty, who else could it be from? It had come through the inner door, so it had to be from either Lucy and Chris, Mary, or Brian and Linda.

It had to be the Newtons. And if they were trying to be funny, well, he wasn’t in the mood for jokes, especially not from them.

Driving to work, he put the letter from his mind. His thoughts turned to the coming evening. Heather was coming over for dinner, and the conversation would undoubtedly centre on Paul. Jamie sighed. Heather and Kirsty were able to talk about the situation endlessly, but some days Jamie just wanted to try to forget about it. It made him feel weary and weak; helpless and afraid. He couldn’t admit this to the others, or they might accuse him of not caring as much as them, of being an emotionally-stilted male, unable to cope with feelings. Well, that was bullshit: he cared as much as – if not more than – anyone. It was just that some days – days like today – he felt too tired to deal with it. He wanted to get on with his life.

Kirsty wasn’t home yet when Jamie arrived back that afternoon. He took off his tie, threw it on the bed, then went to the fridge and tried to decide between beer and orange juice. The beer won out. He’d had a shitty day at work. His computer kept crashing, and then there were all the whispered rumours that something was ‘going on’. The managers and supervisors were called away to an important meeting and, when Jamie’s supervisor returned, he appeared worried and distracted, but would not be drawn on what the meeting had been about.

Cold beer. That was exactly what Jamie needed. He cracked open a can and took a deep swallow. He found a half-empty tube of Pringles in the cupboard and carried them over to his desk. A game of Mass Effect was in order, he decided. Blasting a few aliens would help to relieve the stresses of the day.

He was happily shooting `em up when Kirsty arrived home with Heather in tow. Jamie turned the Playstation off, kissed Kirsty on the lips, Heather on the cheek, and asked them if they wanted wine. Immediately, Heather started to cry.

‘Oh Jamie, you should have seen him today. I sat beside him and held his hand and it hit me: he didn’t even know I was there. I was telling him all these things – telling him about our future together – and I might as well have been talking to a plant. He looked like an empty shell. Oh God, it makes me feel so horrible saying that.’

Jamie put his arms around her. ‘He is in there, Heather, I promise you. And he will come back to us.’

She blinked at him, shedding tears that rolled down her cheeks. ‘But what if he doesn’t?’

‘I don’t know. I…’ He ran out of words. He had known this was going to happen, and suddenly he felt angry. He didn’t need Heather to remind him that he might have lost the person who, behind Kirsty and his close family, meant the most to him in the world. He couldn’t cope with this, not right now. He wanted to shout and scream at the injustice. But he didn’t. Instead, he let Heather cry on his shoulder, and then he opened the wine. It was going to be a long evening.

At eleven, after several hours spent trying to mop up Heather’s tears – a task much better handled by Kirsty, who held her friend while Jamie stared at the TV, feeling numb and exhausted – they called her a taxi.

‘Why don’t you take a few days off work?’ Kirsty suggested. ‘Call in sick.’

‘I might.’

They watched the taxi sail away, then went back inside. Kirsty stared at the empty wine bottles and beer cans, the crumpled, soggy tissues that lay on the floor by the sofa. ‘I’m shattered.’

‘Me too.’

‘I don’t think we’ll be giving the neighbours cause for complaint tonight.’ She smiled wryly.

‘No. I don’t think so.’

But when they had both got into bed, they somehow found themselves rolling together, clinging to one another. In the darkness beneath the quilt, they made love slowly, their hot bellies pressed together, slick with sweat, and when Jamie came he saw a flash of light behind his eyes.. Afterwards, they realised they had made love in silence. But it felt to Jamie that something had happened – something they felt no need to talk about, although he knew Kirsty knew it too.

The next morning, Jamie opened the front door and found a small Jiffy bag lying on the carpet in the hall, addressed to him and Kirsty. He picked it up and tore it open. Inside, there was a CD. He turned it over in his hand. How peculiar.

‘What is it?’ Kirsty asked. Jamie was going to give her a lift into work, as she didn’t feel like taking the Tube this morning. She wanted to keep her contact with people to a minimum.

‘We’ll soon find out.’

After they left Mount Pleasant Street and joined the traffic on the main road, Jamie inserted the CD into the car stereo and pressed PLAY. For the first ten seconds there was nothing but the hiss of silence.

‘It’s blank,’ Jamie said.

‘No, listen.’

‘I still can’t hear anything.’

Kirsty turned the volume up. ‘Now, can’t you hear it?’

Jamie could. It was a soft, rhythmic banging, plus a creaking sound further in the background. Then he heard a human sound: a gasp. The banging increased in pace and volume, and the gasping sounds got louder. At first it was just woman’s voice, and then a man joined in with a deeper grunt.

‘Kirsty.’

Hearing his voice on the CD made him stamp on the brake. The car behind stopped just in time, the driver sounding her horn angrily. Jamie pulled over to the side of the road, out of the traffic. On the stereo, the gasping and groaning grew steadily louder. It was them. Making love.

They looked at each other in horror. Kirsty had gone pale.

‘Jesus Christ.’

He pressed stop and ejected the CD. He was going to throw it out of the window but Kirsty stopped him. She said, ‘We might need it. And I don’t want anyone else to pick it up and listen to it.’

‘They recorded us having sex. I can’t believe it.’

‘Jamie, it makes me feel violated.’

‘I know. When the hell was this made? It can’t have been last night. We were quiet last night, weren’t we?’

She nodded. ‘They must have already recorded this when they sent us the letter. Maybe we did make noise last night without realising it and they sent this as, what? A warning?’ She shivered. ‘I feel like I need a bath. It’s horrible. Horrible.’

‘What are we going to do?’

Jamie looked at the CD in his hand. He felt that awful sense of weariness weighing down on him. ‘I really don’t know. I guess we’ll have to talk to them. F*cking Lucy and Chris. Christ, I thought we were meant to be friends.’

‘There was no note with it?’

‘No.’

‘So we don’t know for certain it’s from them.’

‘Kirsty, it has to be. There’s nobody else, apart from maybe Mary, who could hear us having sex. Unless somebody stood outside our front door recording it on their phone or something. Which also brings Brian and Linda into the equation.’

‘That’s ridiculous.’

‘Exactly. So it has to be the Newtons. It has to be.’

Kirsty imagined them in the flat below, holding a microphone up to the ceiling.

‘So tonight, we’ll go and talk to them, yes?’

The thought made Jamie feel nervous. He thought about Chris’s physical strength, those muscles. But he couldn’t allow himself to be a wimp or a coward. The Newtons had invaded their privacy. They had made Kirsty feel violated, as she put it. Something had to be done. So he said, ‘Yes.’

‘Hopefully we’ll be able to sort something out sensibly, like adults.’ She sighed. ‘God, we really don’t need this at the moment, do we?’

‘No.’ He put the CD in his pocket. He knew she wasn’t only talking about Paul. She was talking about the thing that had happened last night – the knowledge that had come to them in that flash of light as he came inside her. ‘We don’t.’