The water widened again, slowed. There were faces she could see in its swirling course, rising up at her. Faces of young women. Weeds for hair. Calling out for help. Too late. Only Sharon Gibbs had been saved: Frieda could hear her animal cries and smell her dying flesh. In the darkness, rats with yellow teeth – what had been done to her and what had she felt? Drinking tea in the garden, smiling. Shaking his hand – what had that hand done? His daughter. Lily. Lila. Wild child. All those wild children. Lost young women. How many more were there, in their own underworlds?
She saw Ted’s young face, then Dora’s and Judith’s – motherless, fatherless children, hungry for love and for safety. Lives wrecked. Homes torn apart. What had she done? How could she bear the damage she had caused and carry the burden through the rest of her days?
Now the river was channelled between concrete banks, tamed. And suddenly the path was a road that ran alongside a red-brick, buttressed wall. For a moment, she felt that she was in a country village long ago. There was a grey church beside her, surrounded by a huddle of graves. Frieda looked at one of the names, a teenage boy dead in the Great War. She thought she saw a shape rise up from the ground, but it was only a trick of the dying day. She didn’t know what time it was. She didn’t want to turn on her mobile to see. It didn’t matter anyway. She could walk through the evening and into the night. She could walk for days and never stop. The pain in her legs and her lungs was good; better than pain in her heart.
But where was her river? It had disappeared. They had taken it away from her. She stumbled, feeling sharp pebbles under her soles. Ahead, a park stretched out, an avenue of great trees. She walked towards it and after a while saw a small stone bridge. She had found it again and it took her to a pond. Dragonflies in the dusk. A child’s sandal on the bank. But it led her to a road and then disappeared, and a car sped by with the bass thump of music coming from it, and then a man in black leather crouched low on his motorbike, and Frieda was lost in a dingy corridor of houses and flats. But she walked in the direction it had been flowing and after a few minutes there it was, merry and leaping, as if it had been teasing her. Past buildings, cottages, an old mill, and once more she was on an overgrown path, leaving the road behind. The surface of the city dropped away as she walked along its hidden corridor. You could stand ten feet away and not know it was there. You could hide there, seeing but unseen. Like a ghost.
Too many ghosts. Too many dead people in her life. Already a crowd of them behind her. The ghost of herself, young and eager. You start on your journey full of ignorance and hope. Her father. Sometimes she still saw him, not just in her dreams but among the faces she passed on the streets. There was something she wanted to tell him but she could no longer remember what it was. Darkness was gathering round her. Her head was filled with the colours of pain.
Past an old deserted warehouse, painted an ugly blue and covered with graffiti. Shattered windows. You could hide there. Perhaps it, too, was full of dead people, or of lost people. You couldn’t look everywhere. There isn’t an end, there are always others, and she was tired. Not a soft, blurred tiredness but one that was sharp and insistent. Tiredness like a knife, a millstone grinding. Sharon Gibbs was alive, but Lila was dead. The others were dead. Bones in the rich soil that fed a garden full of flowers.
The path broadened out into a wide track. The river was slow and brown. If she lay down here, would she ever get up? If Sandy were here, would she tell him? If Sasha were here, would she cry at last? Or sleep? When would she ever sleep? To sleep was to let go. Let go of the dead, let go of the ghosts, let go of the self.
Cranes. Great thistles. A deserted allotment with crazy little sheds toppling at the edge of the river. A fox, mangy, with a thin, grubby tail. Swift as a shadow into the shadows. She liked foxes. Foxes, crows, owls. A bird flitted by and she realized it must be a bat. It was night at last. How long had it been? Her river was still showing her the way and a moon rose and everyone she knew stood a long way off. Reuben, Sasha, Olivia, Chloë, Josef, Sandy, Karlsson. Her patients were reduced to a crouched figure in a chair, asking her to rescue them from themselves. Dean Reeve stood in a corner; he looked in at a window; she heard his footsteps when no one was there; and he left behind him the sickly smell of lilies and death. He was more real than anyone.
It was hard to know any longer why she put one foot in front of the other, one foot in front of the other, and kept breathing in and out, as if her body had the willpower her spirit no longer possessed. She was spent. Her waters were run dry.
But then the river widened and the path opened out and there was a fence, an iron bell hanging in a metal cage. The Wandle had guided her and now it opened out into its own small estuary and poured itself at last into the great thoroughfare of the Thames. Frieda was standing on a stone walkway, looking out at the lights of the city. She wasn’t lost any more, and somewhere in those pulsing lights lay home.
SIXTY-ONE
This was not a night for sleep. Thoughts burned in Frieda’s brain; images pulsed behind her eyes. She sat upright in her armchair and stared into the empty grate, where she saw the well-tended garden in Croydon. Now they would be pushing spades into the loamy soil, pulling the house apart. She remembered the two of them, Dawes and Collier, sitting in the garden. She felt sick and closed her eyes, but the pictures wouldn’t go away. She thought the stench of lilies still hung in the air.
At last she rose and went upstairs. She put the plug into the bath – Josef’s bath – and turned the taps, poured in bath lotion until the water foamed. She peeled off her dirty clothes and cleaned her teeth, avoiding looking at herself in the little mirror over the basin. Her limbs felt heavy and her skin stung; she was all used up. At last she climbed into the fragrant, scorching water and let herself sink beneath the surface. Perhaps she could lie here until day, her hair floating on the surface and her blood pounding in her ears.
At last she got out. It was still dark but there was a faint band of light on the horizon. A new day was starting. She dressed and went downstairs. There were things she needed to do.
First, she made a phone call, one she should have made days ago. He didn’t reply at once and when he did his voice was thick with sleep.
‘Sandy?’
‘Frieda? What? Are you all right?’
‘I don’t think so. I’m sorry.’
‘Hang on.’ There was a pause. She imagined him sitting up, turning on the light. ‘Why are you sorry?’
‘I’m just sorry. I’m so sorry. I should have told you.’
‘Told me what?’
‘Can you come over?’
‘Yes. Of course.’
‘I mean, now.’
‘Yes.’
That was one of the things she loved about him – that he would make a decision like that, without hesitation or a flurry of anxious questions that she wouldn’t be able to answer, knowing she would only ask out of extreme need. He would get up at once, book a flight, make arrangements with his colleagues, be with her before the day was out because she had turned to him at last.