Chapter Fifteen
Chadda-chadda-chadda. The now familiar sensations of lift, the seat kicking against his legs and back as the helicopter pauses in hover and the rotor chops the air.
Then they’re being snatched up and hurled towards the trees as if by a giant trebuchet. He bellows, ‘Put us down! Put us down! You idiot, why are you flying like this?’
Valerie, chewing gum, turns. Gareth’s image is reflected in her aviator glasses but she ignores his howls.
‘ Watch out, Alpha Zulu, you’re close to the Eastern perimeter trees ,’ warns the unseen air-traffic controller.
Higher, closer come the trees, thrashing, tossing in the wash from the rotor. ‘Climb. Climb. Climb! Climb now! Valerie, climb!’ Gareth clutches his seat and thinks of Diane, what she’d say if she could see him perched in this mechanical dragonfly.
‘Shut up. There’s only one pilot on this aircraft.’
‘ Alpha Zulu! You are too CLOSE—’
Abruptly, Valerie yanks the cyclic lever back until there is only sky. With horrible inevitability she shoves it forward again and grenades and rifles fill his head as the helicopter hits the trees, plunging and lurching like a furious horse. It pauses . . . then pitches earthwards as if spat from a cyclone.
Valerie screams and screams . . .
Gareth’s head snaps helplessly forward, back, and his legs and arms flail into Valerie’s as Valerie’s limbs windmill uncontrollably into his.
The engine shrieks and the machine thrashes itself to death against the unforgiving earth.
Sirens. Shouting, closer. Running feet. Panted words. ‘There’s fuel every-bloody-where. Valerie North has managed to miss the sky.’
Gareth can hear himself groaning.
A flash of high-viz clothing appears in a gap in what was left of the acrylic bubble. ‘All right, mate. You’re all right. The paramedics will have you out. Can you hear me? We’re the fire crew, and we’ll see you’re OK. You stay with me, all right? The paramedics will get you to a hospital.’
The groans get louder. Hospital! Sensation floods in — the cage of his chest is on fire, his fingers have been slammed in a car door, his arms wrenched from their sockets, a giant has stamped on his legs before giving his head a proper kicking.
Diane’s going to find out—!
* * *
Gareth smashed into sweaty consciousness with his lips stretched into a silent squeal of fear, not the rotor but his heartbeat’s whump-whump-whump filling his ears.
He couldn’t move — his fingers or his arm or his legs; he was fast in a giant spider’s web. He was paralysed, he was stuck, he was helpless . . . No. No, he was hurt.
Gradually, he focused on the pins protruding from the ends of the fingers bound into plastic troughs and at the prison of white plaster immobilising his legs. The hospital bed. And then Stella, sitting on the edge of a visitor’s chair, her eyes huge, frightened, fixed upon him. ‘You were dreaming, Gareth.’ Her voice was an uneasy whisper. Moisture glistened in the minute lines that were beginning to hatch the soft flesh below her eyes.
He licked his lips, trying to calm the galloping in his chest. ‘Yes. Yes, I must’ve been.’ His ribs ached; he’d probably been trying to flail around. Come to that, most things ached. Where was that bloody Tramadol?
Stella neatened her blonde waves with nervous fingers. ‘I was scared you might hurt yourself. I nearly called the nurse.’
‘Glad you didn’t,’ he said, shortly. ‘I don’t want a load of nurses standing round while I squeak like a guinea pig, do I?’
Stella pulled her chair closer. Her lips trembled. ‘Gareth — oh, poor you!’ She stroked his face with the back of her hand and then with her fingertips. Stella had sexy little hands and took care of them with hand cream and rubber gloves. He had a thing about Stella’s hands. They were white and soft where Diane’s were red and scratchy with housework and pins and needles. Whenever Stella touched him his skin would shiver in response.
He closed his eyes and thought of her undressing him, stroking each part of his nakedness as it was revealed so that by the time she was ready to slide his boxers off he was primed to explode and would be quite unable to undress her slowly in return. Instead he’d haul her from her clothes, making her squeal and giggle. Marvellous skin she had, soft as rose petals and as fragrant, because she was a pampering sort of woman who moisturised her entire body every day. White and velvety as marshmallow, delicious little thing.
Her soothing fingers stroked his cheekbones and what had been the hollows of his cheeks, his swollen chin and jaw line, his temples.
‘Poor you,’ she repeated. She stroked every millimetre of skin: face, neck, hands — so gently over the damaged one. The hip and thigh between gown and plaster, and Gareth felt himself sink into the bed as if it were angel hair. With him, all trace of Stella’s usual bolshiness evaporated to leave only softness and compliance. She was his indulgence.
‘You know that Diane knows?’ Her voice was still a whisper, her tip-toeing fingers still working their magic.
‘Yes.’ His lips barely moved.
‘She was lying in wait for me, all scary and sarcastic, you know how she gets. I couldn’t think of a credible lie. But . . . perhaps better that she knows? She seemed to take it quite calmly.’
He thought back to Diane hurling threats and accusations at him like flaming arrows, lighting the room with her rage, searing him with disgust, her single plait rearing from high on her head and swinging like a grumpy cobra as she strode around the room. An in-built stressometer.
Despite himself, he smiled. ‘She wasn’t very calm when I saw her.’
The stroking fingertips returned to his forehead. ‘That must have been horrible for you. But the worst’s over.’
‘Where did you get the key?’
The cool fingers halted momentarily, then returned to his cheeks, careful, soft. ‘The key?’
‘To my house, in Whittlesey.’
The caresses moved to his ears. He had sensitive ears. If she wanted to get round him she always began there with her fingertips and perhaps her warm, quivering tongue. He let himself be temporarily distracted, even wondering whether the doctor had been right about the huge number of blood vessels around the pelvic area and a broken pelvis being likely to affect the ability to get an erection.
He couldn’t make love to her. But perhaps her mouth—
No, probably not.
‘It was the key you gave me, Gareth.’
‘Once. Once to let the carpet fitters in. You were supposed to put it back in the kitchen drawer.’ He kept his eyes shut.
‘I must’ve forgotten.’ She sounded defensive. ‘Then when I heard through Megan and Ivan about your accident I thought you’d want me to go and check that everything was all right—’
He opened his eyes. ‘Even though you might bump into my dad or my wife?’
She looked anxious. ‘Not your wife, Gary. Diane didn’t know about the cottage—’
‘So how come she was sitting there waiting for you? Didn’t you think that because I was in the accident with Valerie that secrets would come out? But she needn’t have found out about you. Until you strolled in and advertised the situation.’ Of all the things he hadn’t wanted to happen, it was for Diane to find out — about his family, his money or his lover. Especially the Diane who fairly crackled with fury.
That Diane, the angry, intransigent one, rarely appeared. Rage, for her, was like a comet: it came only every few years to sear across the cosmic landscape. But then it threatened everything in its path.
That Diane could alter orbits.
And while he hated her for defying him, at the same time he had a grudging admiration for what his mother would have called her piss and vinegar.
Stella’s eyes pinkened. ‘But at least she knows now and we can be together. We can be together!’
Oh . . . dangerous .
With his good hand he covered one of hers. Her soft little hand with cute dimples over the knuckles. He sighed and made his voice as kind as he could because Stella had been his mistress for a long time. ‘It’s not Diane that I have to part from, Stell.’
* * *
After Stella had stumbled out he stared out at a colourless, hazy sky. He was going to miss her. He’d enjoyed the affair from its slap-and-tickle beginnings to its surprising metamorphosis into an actual relationship. He’d even sort of enjoyed the break in the middle, the aggro, her stubborn refusal to realise that her role was to come back to him. She’d gone too far by going off with that younger guy but he’d ended both that and her marriage with one whisper in the ear of her husband.
Stella hadn’t been right for the husband; she was too wilful, too much fun. A lot of fun, was Stella. But the unpalatable truth was that he couldn’t — for the present — have both his wife and his girlfriend.
He picked up his mobile phone, selected Valerie. She picked up curtly. ‘Yes?’
She was missing the pop; it was bound to make her grumpy, going cold turkey on both cigarettes and alcohol. Economically, he told her about Stella.
‘Sorry to hear,’ she returned.
‘I’ll miss her.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘We had a lot of fun.’
‘That’s the idea.’
He hesitated. ‘What’s up?’
She sniffed. ‘I have the arse with you, dear brother. You’ve been lying to me about your wife. She’s not a reclusive agoraphobic or a sobbing mess scarcely able to look after herself. Why did you lie? To me?’
Concern creased his brow. Valerie actually sounded angry. In the last two years he’d intrigued, interested and amused her and she’d confided in him. She had not been annoyed with him.
He gave vent to a gusty sigh. ‘Why does anybody lie about a thing like that? Because they wish things were different. I’m trapped in my marriage and I tried to pretend that I wasn’t. I’m sorry.’
‘Trapped? But I respect her. She’s a valiant sort of woman. Scraping along financially while you laze around in your cottage with your bit on the side or shoot about in the chopper with me. I like her, too.’
Alarm blossomed in his chest. Gareth admired Valerie to the point of hero worship and never felt impatient with her as he did with Melvyn and Ivan who were, let’s face it, low-achieving but high-spending. He loved them, but it was a job — his job — to keep them out of the Small Claims Court and out of the hands of the cops. Ivan was bloody silly and would buy anything from some junkie down the pub, even when it was quite obviously so hot that it glowed. And Melvyn had to have every new gadget that hit the High Street, all of it on the never-never. BlackBerry, TV, camera, DVD, MP3.
He loved his brothers but they were exasperating, the way they needed pulling out of the shit all the time.
Yet he was proud to share blood with Valerie, who he’d never had to help with a damned thing. Her mind was fast, her opinions decided, her finances awesome.
‘It’s not like you to be snotty about something so trivial as my maritals,’ he said, abruptly. ‘What’s really the matter?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Come on.’
‘Nothing unexpected.’
He waited.
Her voice filled with tears. ‘The CAA have taken my licence away. James brought the letter in today.’
Cautiously, ‘You must’ve expected that. They’d already suspended your medical certificate.’
‘But that was because I’ve suffered multiple fractures. Not because I was unfit to fly.’
He let his voice become censorious. ‘In what way were you unfit to fly?’
A pause. ‘Alcohol above the permitted limit.’
He sighed. Balls. Here he was again — listening to the troubles of a sibling. ‘I could’ve told them that. Having been the poor sod in the helicopter. You’ve told me the “eight hours from bottle to throttle” rule, and you do tuck it away, Sis. You should’ve stuck to your rule about not drinking before a flight.’
‘Like you should’ve stuck to your non-basket-case wife?’