Tumbleweed draped his arm around her shoulders. ‘Oh,’ he said gently, ‘that’s what’s bothering you.’
She shifted her gaze to the distant demarcation where the sky dripped down to meet the sea. ‘None of it makes any sense. Freaks me out when people find stuff out after someone dies.’
‘Seriously?’ Tumbleweed raised his eyebrows. ‘Like what?’
Ariel shrugged. ‘I don’t know… Affairs. Secret lives. Debts. Stuff like that.’
She saw him suppress a smile.
‘Come on, that’s not who Estelle was. And anyway, if you want to get to the bottom of that enigma, all you have to do is deliver the package like she asked. Either that, or open it yourself.’
‘No way, Tee!’ Ariel recoiled so fast, Tumbleweed’s arm plummeted like a dead weight to the ground. ‘I’m not going to open it when she specifically asked me not to. It would be –’ she paused, searching for the right word – ‘disrespectful.’
‘Fair enough. So then you know what to do. You’ll deal with it when you’re ready, right?’
‘Right.’
She watched the setting sun burn a hole in the sky, the dying embers of a red-hot fire which sparked and flared, and eventually extinguished itself as it slipped, still smouldering, into the bay.
‘Aw sod it,’ Tumbleweed cried. He raised himself up off the ground and pulled Ariel to her feet. ‘In my experience, things rarely turn out the way we think, anyway. Sometimes, my friend, they actually turn out better.’
Ariel tossed the plastic lid from her cappuccino into the waste bin and stared through the glass wall. The commuters who up until now had been congregated in a dense mass beneath the overhead departure board appeared to be mysteriously drifting apart. There was no pushing or shoving; no obvious threat, whispered or otherwise, of genuine alarm. Instead, what she was witnessing was far more subtle; more like a slow, insidious peeling away…
She moved closer to the window and followed the rift to its natural conclusion. Hovering at the end of it, about halfway between the coffee shop and the electronic screen, was a well-dressed elderly gentleman, a small brown suitcase at his feet. Judging from the empty space around him, he was alone, and to her horror, he was bleeding profusely.
‘Oh my God!’ she cried. ‘That man needs help!’
A handful of customers standing alongside her raised their heads, stared for a moment or two, looked away.
The man was leaning heavily on his walking stick, his expression dazed. The collar of his shirt and the cuffs peeking out of his coat sleeves were a brilliant white. His shoes glistened. Everything about him – from his elegant woollen coat, to his smart grey suit, pale blue shirt and tie – was immaculate; everything apart from the jarring sight of blood pouring from his nose.
‘What’s wrong with everyone? Why doesn’t anyone help?’ she muttered under her breath.
Tear-shaped droplets of blood were now running down the man’s neck and seeping into the edges of his shirt collar. Several splashes landed on his shoes. On the ground immediately before him, a widening circle of liquid was slowly beginning to pool.
Suddenly, Ariel started.
Frank…
A revolving zoetrope of images began to rotate in rapid-fire flashes to her brain:
The wound – jagged, gaping – running along the back of Frank’s head…
The blood – creeping like a scarlet inkblot between his shoulder blades, trickling along the crease of his trousers, all the way to the shards of broken glass at his feet…
The child’s face – her own face – streaked with tears, a protective grip on her arm warning her there was no permissible way to intervene…
Grabbing the handle of her wheelie bag with one hand, her cappuccino with the other, Ariel pushed her way through the door of the café and ran. Directly ahead of her, the old man lurched from side to side, as though on the brink of falling down. Ariel sped through the crowd towards him, hot coffee sloshing over the edge of her cup as she moved, burning her fingers, staining her clothes, splashing messily to the ground.
When she reached him, the old man’s eyes – a pale, muddled grey – met hers and widened in surprise.
Instinctively, they both looked down.
‘It looks like a Jackson Pollock. I think the technical term is “drip painting”,’ he said, pointing at the pooling canvas with his stick.
His voice was warm, and, Ariel noted with surprise, unexpectedly calm.
She turned the name over in her mind. Pollock. Linus would know him, she was sure; and yet ironically, during her most memorable visit to a gallery – the National Gallery, as it happened – Linus hadn’t been with them.
She thought back to the endless rows of paintings and the cathedral-like dimensions of the rooms. Now, so many years later, her most vivid recollection was of Estelle’s disappointment at finding Van Gogh’s vase of yellow sunflowers permanently obstructed by the shoulders, heads and hats of tourists conspiring to keep it hidden, on one side or another, from their view.
‘Looks to me like the inside of my head,’ she replied. ‘When I’m having a bad day. A day full of demons.’ She drew her hair back from her face and leaned her head to one side. ‘It’s dramatic, though. Like an explosion of light and dark.’
She pulled an unopened packet of Kleenex from her canvas bag and pressed it between the old man’s fingers. He was a full head taller than she was, and, she couldn’t help noticing, impressively upright for someone who was obviously more than a little reliant on his stick.
Ariel placed her hand behind his elbow and did her best to reassure him with a smile. ‘Are you okay?’
The old man nodded and tilted his head to the ceiling.
‘That’s it, keep your head back. Don’t look down.’ She slipped a tissue from its packet and began to wipe the smears of partially dried blood from his face. ‘Is there someone I can call for you? A friend or relative, maybe?’
‘No,’ he said quickly, ‘there’s no one to call. No one I want to bother, at any rate.’
His face was waxen and drawn, but his eyes seemed more focused close up – sharper, and somehow more determined.
He shifted his gaze an inch or two to the right, in the direction of the electronic screen. ‘I can’t understand what happened. It just –’ he paused, clicked his fingers – ‘came on like that! Right out of nowhere!’
Ariel guided his hand to his face and encouraged him to pinch the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger. She noticed he wasn’t wearing a wedding band, but then she wasn’t sure she’d ever seen a man as old as he was wearing a ring. She tried to imagine what it must feel like not to have an ‘in case of emergency’ person to call. And yet he was on his way somewhere; there must be someone who cared enough to know if anything happened to him, surely?
‘Are you all right, sir? There’s an awful lot of blood. I’ll call an ambulance and have someone take a look at you.’
Ariel tightened her grip on the old man’s elbow. Standing alongside them was a middle-aged man with a Station Supervisor badge pinned to his lapel. He’d come armed with a folding plastic chair which he was already in the process of opening.