‘Not today,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure I’ll be going back. I think I’ve fallen out of love with it.’
‘Don’t make decisions now. Everything will seem different in the morning. Let me see if I can find a pulse.’ He took my wrist in his left hand. ‘Happy birthday, by the way.’
‘What?’
‘It says on the clipboard,’ he said. ‘Forty years young.’
‘Yes. It wasn’t much of a celebration, though. I don’t think this has been the best birthday of my life.’
Dr Siegel placed the clipboard on the bed and touched my hand gently. It felt very consoling. Then he stood up. ‘I’m not sure I’d agree with that,’ he said, ‘but, then, I don’t know what the others were like. I’ll see you tomorrow morning. Try to sleep. That is, until the nurse comes to wake you again in about twenty minutes.’
He wrote something more on the clipboard, then caught my eye and, for a moment, I was sure he wanted to say something important. But he simply muttered, ‘You did well.’ Then he shambled his way out of the room, switching off the light as he left.
As my eyes grew accustomed to the dark I saw for the first time that there was a small window. From the bed, I couldn’t see much out of it. A beam of light swept across the ceiling as a car drove past. I lay gazing out at the dark night sky. Was there a moon out there? Were there stars? Just a few miles away was the sea. The flooding tide was going down
now, the waves ebbing, sucking up the pieces of driftwood, the broken shells and the litter. Out on that desolate waste of mud and shingle, underneath the subsiding cliffs, was the pillbox, the sea seeping out, only to return once more by dawn. The body had been dragged from the black waters, the blood had been washed away. The winter sun would hang on the horizon, and everything would look the same as it always had, peaceful, vast and undisturbed.
I turned on my side and pressed my face into the pillow. I took a long deep breath and, at last, I began to cry. I was here; Charlie was here; Jackson was here. And the morning would come to us all.
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