(1998) Denial Read Online Free PDF Page B

I am here with you. Perhaps destiny sent me, to try to warn you.’
    ‘To warn me of what?’
    ‘That you are going to lose a woman whom you love.’
    Michael was tempted to say,
You are three years too late
, but he didn’t. The man’s stare was making him uncomfortable. He glanced away. When he looked back Dortmund was still gazing at him, with a strange desperation. Michael did not want this. He did not want to legitimise the man’s fantasies by asking him for details. He needed time to think about it, to come back with a measured reply. Anyhow, what other woman did he love? Only his mother, and she was seventy-nine and in rude health. If he was about to lose her, he did not want to know – and not from this man.
    Michael looked at his watch and, to his relief, the fifty minutes were up. ‘I think we’d better stop there for today,’ he said.
    After Dortmund had departed, Michael added to the man’s notes, ‘Suicide risk’.
    His next patient was late, and he had a gap of a few minutes. Despite himself, he used it to phone his mother. She sounded fine; his father was down at Lymington harbour, pottering around with his boat. She was going with a friend to see a local flower show.
    He felt cheered by her voice. Unlike his patients, and himself, his parents at least had found contentment and peace in their life.

Chapter Eight
    Sodden with perspiration, trapped on a hard metal surface, her arms, midriff, legs and ankles bound tightly, her head crushed in a vice, Tina Mackay could move her eyes but nothing else. She was dimly aware that she had a catheter in her urethra. She had no idea of the time, nor of where she was.
    ‘You want to know something?’
    She stared at the man, fearfully, trying to keep thinking straight despite the agony in her mouth.
    Thomas Lamark, holding bloodstained tooth forceps in his rubber-gloved hand, stood over her, looking down with gentle grey eyes. ‘Relax, Tina, not all knowledge is painful. This could be useful knowledge for you. My mother has always taught me the value of good manners, OK? Life is a learning curve. You learn things, you become a better person. Don’t you want to be a better
person
, Tina?’ His voice was deep and absurdly genial.
    She said nothing. She had come to realise some hours back, that down here in this place, with its bare concrete walls, sound was not going to get out. Screaming had ceased to be an option.
    Somehow she had to try to reason with the man, and she sensed that somewhere inside him was a humanity she could reach if she could establish a rapport with him.
    ‘Good manners means apologising when you are in the wrong. It takes a big person to apologise – are you big enough, Tina? I mean to
really
apologise for turning down my book?’
    It was hard for her to speak now, but she tried once more, to plead with him through her broken mouth, her voice aragged, bloodied mumble. ‘Yssshhh. Can you ftchh yrrr brrrook. Trrrgettterh. Shweee can wrrkkkk on it trrgtrrrher.’
    He shook his head. ‘Tina, I’m sorry, you saw with your own eyes what happened when I tossed the coin. I have to do what the coin tells me. You have to make rules in life and stick by them. Both our lives are out of control, right?’
    She acknowledged this with her eyes.
    ‘But you could have done something to prevent this, Tina. I couldn’t, and that’s the difference between us. I was born the way I am. I never asked to be this way. All my life people have told me I’m not right in the head. I have to accept that. I really hate being this way, but I can’t fight it. I have to accept that I do things differently.’
    He took a couple of steps back, smiled, removed his surgical scrubs, and raised his massive hands expansively. ‘Do you like what I’m wearing?’
    She looked as if she had not understood the question, so he repeated it. ‘My clothes? Do you like my clothes?’
    She stared through a mist of tears at his face. At his frame. He was exceptionally tall, at