IX. Cosima #2
She’d noticed him at the funeral – the man she couldn’t quite place.
He had seemed vaguely familiar but it was only when she overheard her mother referring to him as ‘Little Shadow’ that Cosima had remembered.
When she was young, LS had been a near-constant presence at family weekends and her parents’ Notting Hill dinner parties, always on the periphery.
Then, without a murmur, he had disappeared.
None of the children had really noticed.
He’d vanished from their life as he had existed in it – without impact.
It was curious to have seen him at the funeral.
She suspected there was more to it than a casual invitation.
Her parents always held their enemies close and their ulterior motives closer.
‘Martin. Little Shadow,’ she says.
Her father smiles and for a moment, his face loses all its stress and he looks young.
‘You remember him? Goodness! We were just catching up. Nothing important.’
‘Are you friends again, then?’
He turns away from the Economist and looks straight at her.
‘We were never not friends.’
‘What was that?’ her grandmother asks.
‘MARTIN GILMOUR, GRANNY,’ Cosima says.
Lady Fitzmaurice shudders. It is more noticeable than her usual tremors, which the doctors have told them are symptomatic of her Parkinson’s.
‘That trumped-up little oik?’ her grandmother says, voice rising. ‘What was he doing here, Ben? Trying to weasel his way back into our good graces? Pah! He’s barking up the wrong tree and I hope you told him so in no uncertain terms.’
When she’s finished, there is an uneasy silence. Even Hector stops chewing his cereal, milky spoon suspended between bowl and mouth.
‘Mother,’ Ben says, with studied calm. ‘Martin has proved his loyalty to us. He’s been a better friend than many and it’s good to have him back in the fold. Especially given my political future.’
That’s when Cosima knows he’s going to be prime minister. It’s not even a question of wanting. Wanting is only for the people who have to try.
Her phone beeps. It’s a text from Meadow with the address of the hospital. She thinks of River, his slumped body on the ground, the shouting of the truck drivers and the strange silence of everything else.
She’s going to visit him as soon as she can get out of here.
‘Cozzie,’ her father says. ‘No phones at the table.’
She puts the phone on her lap. The Oblivion Oil sticker gleams like a beacon.
As soon as she’s in the back of Abdifatah Mohamed’s 4.
89 star-rated Prius – door slammed shut, speeding away from Denby Hall, her father’s waving figure receding into the distance – her head feels clearer again.
It’s difficult to remember who she is when she goes back to her family.
The wholeness she experiences in the outside world is fractured into a million pieces as soon as she walks across the Fitzmaurice threshold.
She knows something is expected of her but is never able to work out what it might be.
All she’s certain of is that she fails to live up to it.
Again and again and again. She wonders if Felicity felt the same.
The hospital is a grey, flat building set on the edge of a provincial town filled with cheap pub chains and out-of-service ATMs. Seagulls swirl overhead, squawking disconsolately as if complaining to the manager of the sky for the terrible service.
Automatic doors swish open and Cosima asks for directions to the Montagu ward.
She waits several minutes for the lift, gripping the straps of her backpack more tightly.
She’s still in the jumper she was wearing for the action.
The right cuff is worn and has a moth hole in the seam.
She pokes her thumb through it, noticing once again how nervous she feels, her thoughts fluttery and wayward.
River is in the last bed of the ward, closest to the window. His face is turned away from her as she approaches. He is looking out at what passes for a view – a car park lit by weak sunshine, straggling hedges and concrete-ringed flowerbeds.
‘Hi,’ she says.
He shifts and meets her gaze, surprised to see her.
Both his eyes are blackened and the bridge of his nose is swollen.
A strip of white gauze across his forehead has turned a yellowy, chemical colour and is dotted with dried blood.
One leg is in a cast, one arm in a sling.
He is wearing a pale blue hospital gown with a checked pattern that reminds her of tablecloths and old ladies.
‘Pineapple,’ he says, his voice slurring. He tries to smile but she can see the pain as he does so. One side of his mouth is swollen. ‘Sorry, I lost a couple of teeth and it hurts to absolute fuck.’
He looks simultaneously older and younger than she remembers him.
On protests, he was always so assured that they all turned to him for direction.
But here, in this hospital bed, he looks vulnerable.
She has never known his actual age, although Meadow told her once that he was in his mid-twenties.
He seemed older because of the way he spoke, which was educated, smart and impassioned.
Yet here, in front of her, he reminds her of Hector – the same feeble bravado masking the unacknowledged fear of not being enough.
‘Please …’ he says, gesturing to the plastic hospital chair next to the bed. The word comes out as ‘Plsshh’.
She sits, squeezing her backpack between the chair and River’s bedside locker. On the top of the locker is an unripe banana, a notepad, an open packet of Rizlas, a tin of tobacco and a battered copy of The Communist Manifesto.
‘Catching up on your Marx?’
‘Ha! That was in my jacket pocket when I fell. Ditto the fags. The banana’ – he winces as he changes his position in the bed – ‘is hospital issue.’
‘I’m glad you’re OK,’ Cosima says, then feels stupid for saying it.
‘OK is a relative concept. But thank you. I’m glad too.’
‘Are you in a lot of pain?’
‘Yeah. But I’m also on a lot of drugs, so … y’know … swings and roundabouts.’
He tries another smile.
‘It’s nice’ – nissshe – ‘to see you.’
Her cheeks become warm. She isn’t sure why she’s come. She’s only met River a handful of times and, on every occasion, he’s been irritated by her.
‘I … I … don’t know why I’m here.’
‘Don’t know why either. I’ve been a total cunt to you.’
The elderly lady in the adjacent bed looks at River with contempt and hisses, ‘Language!’ at him. Her teeth are in a glass on her locker. A nurse comes and draws the curtain between the two beds.
‘Alone at last,’ River says drily.
‘Total cunt is a relative concept,’ she says.
His eyes crinkle at the edges.
Without knowing why, she reaches across the stiff hospital sheets and takes his hand.
He squeezes her fingers. Warmth fizzes through her like a lit fuse.
Nothing else needs to be said. She knows.
He knows. They know. A calm descends. Cosima has never felt so understood by another person than she has right now, in this moment.
‘So what’s the damage?’ she asks, still holding his hand.
‘Broken leg, broken collarbone, fifteen broken ribs, collapsed left lung and, let’s just say, quite a lot of other stuff. But the doctor said I was very lucky. Apparently I shielded my head when I fell.’
They sit quietly for a while. River slips into a fitful sleep.
She thinks this is what he must have looked like as a baby and she imagines meeting his mother one day and how that might feel.
Cosima has never had a boyfriend. She’s had sex, obviously, at parties and once in a field behind a pub, but beyond that, she hasn’t been interested in a relationship.
Anyone her own age seems trivial and immature.
She knows the age difference between her and River would horrify her parents if they ever found out about it, but it holds no anxiety for her.
They have so much in common: their outlook on the world, their values, the experiences they’ve been through together, the danger they’ve faced and the passion they’ve felt, united by a cause bigger than them.
There is no one else she trusts as much as him.
When he wakes, she is looking at him and the first thing he sees as he opens his eyes is her.
‘Hello,’ she says.
He smiles.
‘Don’t smile. It hurts you too much.’
‘It’s hard not to when you’re here.’
The visiting hours are almost over and she needs to leave soon to get back to school in time for the Sunday night registration.
‘I have to go, but I’ll come back.’
‘Cosima.’
She stares at him. She has never told him her real name.
‘I know who you are,’ River says, trying to sit up in bed. She tries to help, moving the pillows to prop him up. ‘I know who your father is.’
She stops fussing with the pillows. What?
She has been so careful to cover her traces, to ensure that no one in their group discovers her Dad’s identity.
In their eyes, he’s enemy number one: the Energy Secretary who is doing nothing to halt the advance of planetary extinction.
For River, Meadow, Broccoli and the others, Ben Fitzmaurice and his entire family are the embodiment of elitist privilege.
They’re the wealthy pillagers who don’t give a fuck about anyone else.
She has understood, from the beginning, that to reveal herself would not only be foolish but dangerous.
And yet, here River is, telling her he has known all along.
‘I’m Pineapple,’ she says, her voice shaky.
‘Yes. And you’re also Cosima Fitzmaurice. The eldest child of our energy secretary, the Right Honourable Ben Fitzmaurice, now the favourite to be our next prime minister.’
She goes to pick up her backpack but he grabs her by the wrist with his one working hand.
‘Don’t worry. I’m not going to tell anyone, but—’
‘But what? You’re going to blackmail me? You’re going to make me pay? I knew you hated me. You’re just a fucking narcissistic manipulator who—’
The old lady in the next bed tuts in disapproval.
‘I don’t hate you,’ River says. ‘I like you a lot. Really like you. I see myself in you because …’ His eyes dart around the ward, almost as if he’s trying not to be overheard. His voice drops. ‘I’m not who you think I am.’
She sits back in the chair.
‘You’re going to find out some stuff about me.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘There are going to be stories in the press, and I want you to know two things. Firstly, what I felt for you all was – and is – real. I loved you all, in my way. I believed in what we were doing. But …’
He lets go of her wrist and leans back into the pillows, looking suddenly exhausted.
‘… not the way we were doing it.’
‘Are you telling me …?’
‘Shh. I need you to know something else. It’s about your aunt.’
‘My aunt?’ she repeats, stupidly. ‘Fliss?’
River nods rapidly. There is an urgency to his movements now.
‘The way she died,’ he says. ‘There’s more to it than they’re saying.’
‘I don’t understand, how could—?’
‘I’ve seen the files.’
‘What files?’
‘Police files. It’ll make more sense when you find out.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘I know. You will. I have bosses. People I report to. They’re not particularly happy with me. They knew all about your family connections. The rest of it just took a bit of digging on my part.’
He starts coughing, as if the effort of speaking has winded him. A nurse appears at the foot of the bed with a jug of water and fills the plastic beaker on the wheeled tray next to him.
‘Visiting hours are over now, love,’ the nurse says to Cosima. ‘You can come back tomorrow.’
Cosima shakes her head and is about to say that no, no she can’t leave yet, not now, but the words don’t form and instead she finds herself standing and slipping her arms back through her backpack straps. She watches as River drinks his water. Their eyes meet.
‘You can’t come back,’ he says.
‘I know.’
‘Thank you,’ he says.
‘What for?’
He smiles. This time, his face doesn’t contract in pain.
‘For being you.’
She will never see him again.
The following week, he is front-page news: unmasked as an undercover police officer who almost died in the line of duty at an Oblivion Oil protest and who is now in a witness protection programme.
The papers are calling it ‘a national scandal’ because of the level of River’s deception.
He’s being labelled ‘a lone wolf’ and ‘a rogue agent’.
Questions are being raised in Parliament about whether he showed too much sympathy towards the activists and whether this compromised his primary duty to the police.
It turns out his real name is Ben, which would have made Cosima laugh had she not been crying when she read the article.
A few days later, when she is in her dorm at school, sitting on the bed with her laptop, she receives an email from an encrypted address. Subject heading: ‘As discussed’. A PDF document is attached. No message. She knows it’s from River.