Tammy Cohen (who previously wrote under her formal name Tamar Cohen) has a growing backlist of acclaimed novels of domestic noir, including The Mistress’s Revenge, The War of the Wives and Someone Else’s Wedding. Her break-out psychological suspense thriller was The Broken, followed by Dying for Christmas, First One Missing and When She Was Bad.
She lives in north London with her partner and three (nearly) grown children, plus one badly behaved dog. Chat with her on Twitter @MsTamarCohen or at www.tammycohen.co.uk.
THE MISTRESS’S REVENGE
Her sharp debut novel written as a journal addressed by a former mistress to the married lover who dumped her.
‘Gasp in recognition at this cracking tale’
Grazia
THE WAR OF THE WIVES
A happily married woman whose husband dies unexpectedly is confronted at his funeral by a woman who claims that she was his wife.
‘Moving, funny and completely absorbing’
Prima
SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING
The story of a wife and her grown-up family whose secrets come shimmering to the surface at a wedding: told in real-time over thirty-six hours.
‘Utterly gripping’
Lisa Jewell
THE BROKEN
A couple are sucked into their best friends’ bitter divorce with devastating results for all.
‘A work of near-genius’
Daily Mail
DYING FOR CHRISTMAS
A young woman is held captive over the twelve days of Christmas.
‘Packs a killer twist’
Prima
FIRST ONE MISSING
The parents of missing children club together for support. But all is not as it seems.
‘Astonishingly good’
C L Taylor
WHEN SHE WAS BAD
Nasty things are happening at work. Can they figure out who is the guilty co-worker, before it’s too late for all of them?
‘Unsettling, tense and utterly unputdownable’
Woman & Home
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Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Swan
an imprint of Transworld Publishers
Copyright © Tammy Cohen 2017
Cover photograph © Trevillion Images/Arcangel (figure)
Cover: www.headdesign.co.uk
Tammy Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.
This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473542648
ISBNs
9781784162467 (B format)
9781784163013 (A format)
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For the Tuesday Club – Ed, Steve and Jo.
Because every day should be a Tuesday.
Charlie cut her wrists last week with a shard of caramelized sugar.
We’d made the sugar sheets together in the clinic’s kitchen earlier in the day, under Joni’s beady-eyed supervision.
‘Yours are thick enough to do yourself an injury,’ I’d said to Charlie, as a joke.
‘I wonder if that’s what gave her the idea,’ Odelle commented afterwards, pointedly.
After Charlie died, Bake Off went on the banned-programmes list.
I don’t feel guilty, though, because I don’t think Charlie killed herself. Just as I don’t think poor Sofia killed herself. In a high-suicide-risk psych clinic like this, people die all the time. It’s one of the clinic’s USPs. That’s what makes it so easy for a killer to hide here, in plain sight. That and the fact that the only witnesses are us, and no one believes a word we say.
You don’t have to be mad to live here but … oh, hang on, yes, you do.
I’m frightened. I’m frightened that I’m right and I’ll be next. I’m even more frightened that I’m wrong, in which case I’m as crazy as they all think I am. Shut away in here, the only escape is in my own head. But what if my own head’s the most dangerous place to be?
Stella comes into my room and lies across the end of my bed without speaking. Her skin is stretched tight over the sharp points of her cheeks and I can’t look at it for fear it might tear.
‘It’s not true,’ I tell her.
My room is at the side of the building. I am sitting by the window in the beige armchair, looking out across the rose garden to where a half-hearted rain is drip, drip, dripping from the flat roof of the dance studio and running down the wall of folding glass doors. All the furniture in my room is a variation on beige. Ecru. Biscuit. Stone. The whole of the upstairs is the colour of a surgical bandage. To avoid us getting over-stimulated, I imagine. Not much chance of that in here.
Stella turns her head so her wide blue eyes are fixed on mine. The necklace she always wears has fallen to the side so that the tiny silver cat seems to be nestling into the duvet.
‘How do you know?’ she says at last, in her soft, smoker’s voice.
I frown at her.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘It’s Charlie.’
‘Was,’ she says. And starts to cry.
The Meadows is an old Georgian-style country house, complete with ivy growing across the front and elegant floor-to-ceiling sash windows. From the semicircular gravel drive at the front you might imagine yourself on the set of a Jane Austen adaptation where at any moment the grand front door will burst open to disgorge a gaggle of giggling young women in bonnets. But drive around to the car park behind the house and the impression is ruined by a large modern extension stuck on to the back, giving the overall effect of a stylish man with a bad toupee.
All the consulting rooms and the day room and admin and therapy rooms are in the old part, while the cafeteria and the bedrooms are in the new bit. Sofia told me once the old part was haunted, but I’ve never sensed anything weird. Mind you, I was so numb when I first arrived a ghost could have climbed right on to my lap and I wouldn’t have registered it. The thing about staying in a place like this, where we have group therapy twice a day and keep journals detailing our every thought, is that we’re so busy gazing inwards we’re blind to what’s going on all around us.
Which might explain how two women have been killed and nobody seems to have noticed but me.
The art therapy room is at the back of the old house with two huge windows giving out on to the car park and beyond to the flower garden and then the vegetable plot. The jewel in the Meadows’ crown – the manicured lawn leading down to a lake that is disproportionately large and deep, a legacy of an earlier, grander incarnation of the house – is hidden from view by the ugly jut of the new extension on the left.
It is ten o’clock on Wednesday morning and we are at art therapy. Laura gets out the poster paints and asks us to do a self-portrait. The last time we did this exercise she gave us mirrors made of plastic instead of glass, so our reflections were smudgy, like we were looking at ourselves through smoke. ‘Sorry,’ she said when we complained. ‘Regulations. You know how it is.’ But today is different.
‘I want you to paint yourselves the way you see yourselves when you close your eyes,’ she says. ‘Where are you? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Don’t overthink it. And don’t pay any heed to the camera. Just forget it’s there.’
The film crew – which most of the time consists only of director/presenter Justin Carter and his cameraman Drew Abbott – have been installed at the clinic for the last seven weeks, just one week less than me. I arrived on the third Monday in January, auspiciously known as Blue Monday, which is officially the most depressing day of the year, although, as you can imagine, competition for that title is fierce in here. Justin and Drew turned up the following week in an SUV loaded with equipment which they carted through from the rain-soaked car park, propping the door to reception open so an icy draught swept through the building and Bridget Ashworth, the clinic’s frowning admin manager, bustled about adjusting thermostats and ordering cleaning staff to mop up muddy footprints.
They’re calling it a fly-on-the-wall documentary. But Dr Roberts spun it differently: ‘An important film in breaking down the taboos surrounding mental illness,’ he said. ‘Of course, you are all perfectly entitled to opt out of the filming and at any stage you can be retrospectively edited out. But just think what your example could mean to a young woman going through what you’ve been through, feeling there’s nobody out there who could possibly understand.’
On the first day, Justin said, ‘Just imagine we’re not really here.’
‘That’s how most of us ended up in this place,’ Charlie told him. ‘For seeing things that aren’t there, or not seeing things that are there. You could seriously set back our recovery.’
Justin had smiled without committing himself to laughing, just in case it wasn’t appropriate, not understanding that appropriateness is something you leave at the door in here.
Today, in my painting, I am sitting in the low blue velvet chair in Emily’s room. Through the sash window behind me the sky is navy and I put in a perfectly round yellowy-white moon so it’s obvious it’s night-time. I am looking at something over to the right, out of sight. I’m wearing my pale blue dressing gown. My face is a pink blur, streaked with black because I didn’t wait long enough for the paint to dry before trying to do the eyes.
‘Nice dress,’ Laura says when she comes round to look. ‘Is that in your house? Your bedroom, maybe?’
I nod. I don’t want to tell her the truth because when I talk about Emily it gets noted down in a book and then I have to talk about it at Group. And then Dr Roberts will cock his head to one side and write something in his notebook and I might have to stay here longer. So I don’t tell her that the me in the picture is looking at the right-hand corner of Emily’s room, where her cot used to be.
Stella’s painting is all black, except for a tiny figure at the bottom, naked apart from her long, yellow hair, which reaches almost to the floor. Laura looks at it for a long time and then puts her hand on Stella’s narrow shoulder and squeezes before moving on to someone else.
Since Charlie died, all Stella’s paintings have been black.
As usual, Odelle has painted herself hugely fat. She’s wearing the same black top and skinny jeans the real Odelle has on today and is looking into a mirror in which a slimline version of herself is reflected back. Or maybe it’s the other way around and the slim Odelle is the real one and the fat one the reflection. Either way, it’s just another variation of Odelle’s sole enduring theme. Herself and her body.
‘It’s very … narrative, Odelle,’ says Laura. Odelle glances towards the camera at the back of the room, wanting to be sure they are capturing this. ‘But just once, I’d love to see you really let rip. This exercise is about here’ – Laura taps her chest lightly – ‘not about here,’ tapping her head.
The mild rebuke sets Odelle’s bottom lip trembling. Odelle tends to fixate on people. That’s one of the reasons she’s in here. That and the fact she weighs around eighty-five pounds. When Charlie first arrived, Odelle apparently fixated on her too for a short while, following her around, sitting too close to her at dinner and on the sofa in the lounge. But mostly it’s authority figures she goes for. Roberts is basically God as far as Odelle is concerned, and Laura comes a close second. Odelle’s always loitering in the art room after class, offering to help clear away or asking for extra, one-to-one help.
The Meadows believes in niche therapy. We have people who come in to cure us through horticulture, music, baking and movement. Last week, Grace, the aptly named movement therapist, had us fling ourselves around the dance studio pretending to be leaves blown about by the wind and Odelle actually cried. ‘I feel so insignificant,’ she said. Judith said the reason Odelle got upset was probably because she really did get blown about by the wind, on account of weighing so little.
Basically, nothing happens in here that can’t be turned into some kind of therapy. There’s even recreational therapy, which really means watching TV. Charlie and I had a running joke about that. Instead of asking if I was going to dinner, she’d say, ‘Are you coming to eating therapy?’ One time, when I was late down to breakfast, I said I’d been doing some ‘pooing therapy’ and we laughed for about ten minutes, until Odelle told us we were being childish and also ‘insensitive’ to all the people in here who ‘can’t find much to laugh about’.
But Laura is the therapist people get closest to. She used to be a nurse in her younger days, and she still emits that I-can-make-you-better aura. She has her own little office at the back of the art room, with a fan heater and a kettle and several different types of tea, and you can pop in there and curl up on the armchair and wrap yourself up in the soft woollen tartan throw for a chat without feeling like what you say will be noted down in your file somewhere. Laura can be a little bit new-agey. For those who are into that sort of thing, she offers informal meditation or relaxation therapy, which is basically hypnosis. Charlie used to love it in there. ‘It’s the only part of the clinic where I can be myself,’ she told me once. Odelle nips in there at any opportunity. She installs herself in the armchair, with the tartan blanket wrapped around all those other layers she habitually wears, and discusses her favourite subject. Namely, herself.
Laura spends a few moments murmuring something to Nina, who is slumped in front of a piece of paper which is blank apart from a faintly drawn oval. Last week in art she produced seven paintings in one class, her brush flying over the paper, colours bleeding into one another, but today she can hardly summon the energy to lift her stick of charcoal.
Frannie is crying again, tears tracking slowly down her cheeks, and she brushes them away as if she hardly notices them. Her painting has two figures in it, which, strictly speaking, is cheating, but no one is judging. Firstly, there’s a huge face with a long, fine nose and a small, full mouth and massive green eyes. The face is Frannie’s, and in one of the eyes is another face. It’s too small for the features to be identifiable but the black curls mark it out as Charlie.
‘Because she’s in your thoughts?’ asks Laura.
My chest feels tight when I look at the straight brown bob Frannie has given herself in her portrait, hanging just below her chin. The real Frannie is wearing a blue-and-white striped beanie hat, but underneath it her hair is sparse and thin with bald patches that break your heart, vulnerable as the soft part on a newborn baby’s head.
My baby was called Emily.
And now I don’t want to paint any more.
Later on, in Evening Group, we start, as always, by going round each one of us in the circle, reporting back on whether we’ve achieved the two goals we each set ourselves this morning. Mine were to start reading a proper book, as opposed to the celebrity magazines which are all I’ve read for the last two months, and to wash my hair. I failed at the first, the letters moving across the page like lines of tiny ants. But in the second goal I can claim some success, having dragged myself, finally, into the shower, so that my hair, while still a tangled mess, is at least clean for the first time in days. I hate myself for the glow of pleasure I feel when Dr Roberts says ‘Well done, Hannah,’ and everyone gives me a round of applause, as if I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something.
After about half an hour we go back to talking about Charlie. Odelle shares a story about when she first arrived here and was missing her family and had just gone through her first meal with someone sitting next to her monitoring everything that went into her mouth and was curled up on her bed, crying into her pillow – Odelle holds a hand to her face to demonstrate, visibly moved by her own story – and Charlie knocked on her door and sat on the end of the bed and chatted to her, and even made her laugh. That was the thing about Charlie. She could say things to make you laugh so hard your tea came out of your nose. Then she’d go back to her room and make bite marks on her own arm. Of all the people I’ve met in my life, she was the one who was most forgiving of others – and the least forgiving of herself.
‘But she didn’t kill herself,’ I say, when it’s my turn to speak.
Dr Roberts sits back in his seat with one leg crossed over the other at the knee and one elbow hooked over the back of the chair. He has a pen in his hand and he clicks the end in and out as he listens, and nods. His eyes are narrowed so I can’t see them, but I know they are blue in some lights and green in others. His hair, brown but liberally threaded with silver, is swept back from his face, although a lock often falls over his left eye when he gets animated. His close-cropped beard is equal measures of silver and brown, and when he smiles, two dimples appear in his cheeks and the lines around his eyes concertina into folds a person could get lost in.
The transference rate – that thing where patients end up in love with their shrinks – is pretty high in our clinic.
‘It’s a very interesting theory, Hannah.’ His voice is warm and honey-coated. ‘But you know – we all knew – that Charlie was deeply, chronically depressed. Just because we loved her doesn’t mean we could help her. It’s inevitable that we all feel some sense of failure that we couldn’t do more, and failure is a damned uncomfortable feeling. It’s far preferable to imagine she was done away with against her will, because that’s not anything we could have prevented or seen coming. But the fact is, we weren’t responsible. There’s nothing anyone could have done.’
‘Yes, we have to forgive ourselves,’ adds Odelle.
I look around the circle, where twelve women sit on chairs, one leg twisted around the other, heads bowed, hands fidgeting. I see Frannie plucking at her almost non-existent eyelashes. She studies a hair and then pops it into her mouth. I see Stella staring impassively ahead through her widely stretched eyes. She’s wearing a powder-blue dress today that has a tight bodice and a flared skirt. I try not to look at the waist, made artificially tiny by the removal of a rib, nor at the painful swell of her surgically enhanced breasts. I see Odelle, who layers clothes on to her body like she is making papier mâché, leaning forward earnestly, sniffing for approval like a blind laboratory rat. I see Judith and Nina and the eight other inmates – service users, as we’re officially known – and Justin and Drew, shadowing our every move with the camera. And though my back is towards the door, in my head I see, through the safety-glass panel behind me, across the hallway and up the sweeping wooden staircase that leads to the plush consulting rooms, to where Dr Chakraborty, the clinic’s deputy director, sits in his office, reading through notes with his sad, brown eyes, while downstairs in the therapy rooms I see Laura and Grace and the other part-time therapists. At the back of the staircase, through the door that leads to the new building, and the cafeteria and kitchen and the Mindfulness Area and the tiny staffroom where the medicines are kept, I see Joni and Darren, the psychiatric nurses, clutching their notebooks, and Bridget Ashworth, the clinic’s brisk admin manager, and the well-meaning volunteers and the kitchen staff and the orderlies. All the people charged with keeping us safe. And then my gaze is pulled back here again and I see Dr Oliver Roberts, guru, Svengali, saint, sage, saviour.
Murderer?
It could be him. It could be any of them.
But it definitely happened.
I’d have to be crazy to make a thing like that up.
Towards the end of our session, at about seven thirty, I slip away while the others are still stacking up the chairs. After eight weeks here, the grandeur of the hallway, with its glass chandelier and vast oil painting of the earl whose home this once was, no longer comes as a surprise. No one uses the front entrance anyway, unless they’re an important dignitary or there’s a fundraising event going on. The main entrance is round the back in the new wing, where a receptionist checks in visitors and politely searches their bags under the gaze of a smiling Oliver Roberts clad in a formal academic gown in the act of being awarded some honour or other.
But when I go through the door that divides the old building from the new, I don’t go straight ahead, past the Mindfulness Area and the blond wood of the cafeteria, to where the vibrant orange reception sofa calls a cheerful greeting, as if to reassure visitors this is not a place conducive to dark thoughts. Instead, I take the first door on the left, which leads to the stairwell, with its muted oatmeal walls, and hurry on up to the bedrooms.
My room is the first on the left, but I walk straight past it and continue down the corridor, with its framed photographs of nature – a close-up of dew on a blade of grass, a feather floating in a muddy puddle, sunlight glittering through a canopy of green leaves. The photographs are caulked to the walls so that we can’t take them off and use them against ourselves, or each other. The very last room is Charlie’s room.
How many times have I made this journey between my room and hers over the last eight weeks? I’m surprised my feet haven’t made indentations in the strip wood flooring. Yet now I feel strange and unease prickles at the back of my neck. I glance up into the eye of a CCTV camera. The camera has always been there, but it is the first time I’ve really noticed it. Its unblinking stare makes me anxious.
Our doors don’t have locks. For obvious reasons. Even so, I’m surprised when Charlie’s handle turns. I hesitate before stepping inside.
I’ve been steeling myself to find her room cleared and emptied of all the things that made it Charlie’s. But it’s all still there – the blown-up photograph of her and her little nieces in her parents’ garden, their three heads dark against an explosion of yellow hibiscus, the lifesize cardboard cutout of Ryan Gosling given to her by an ex-workmate, the old-fashioned patchwork quilt on the bed, a riot of colour amidst the oppressive beigeness.
Yet whereas Charlie was notoriously untidy, with paperbacks piled precariously on the floor next to her bed, and jeans and sweaters strewn over the chair or heaped on the floor, the room has been meticulously tidied. The desk has been cleared of old newspapers and magazines and empty crisp packets, its white surface bland and clean. The bed, which was always messy, as if someone had just that minute got out of it, is now perfectly made, the quilt pulled taut.
I put a hand on the pillow and it feels smooth and unnaturally cold to the touch, like a bar of soap, and I snatch it back. I slide open a desk drawer. Empty, apart from a few pens and a pad of paper. The wardrobe has no door, its edges rounded in case anyone should decide to string themselves up from a sharp corner. I almost cry out when I see her fuchsia cashmere cardigan hanging on one of the weirdly shaped cardboard hangers, suspended from a rail designed to break under ‘undue weight’. How she loved that cardigan. She’d told me about a decluttering handbook her mother had given her in a not-so-subtle hint. Charlie had refused to read it on principle but had grudgingly flicked through, taking away from it just one thing – that you should only hang on to things that spark joy. ‘This here is my joy-sparking cardigan,’ she said to me.
Now it hangs on the clothes hanger, its empty arms drooping.
The absence of joy is palpable. Rather, again, I have that sense of unease, of being watched.
Charlie has a corner room, and I cross to the window on the back wall that looks out over the sloping lawn and, at the very bottom, the dark smudge of the lake. There are days when the sun is reflected on the surface of the water, making the lake appear to be lit up from within. But not today.
A radiator runs underneath the window. On especially cold days Charlie would throw a cushion down on the floor and sit cross-legged on the carpet with her back to the radiator. ‘I can never get warm enough,’ she once told me. ‘I’m like a chicken breast that hasn’t quite thawed out, with a hard, frozen bit in the middle that refuses to defrost.’
I drop to the floor and assume her position, trying to inhabit her skin, to feel what she felt. Did she really sit here that last day with the heat against her back and think about how best to slice into her wrist, the right angle, the right point? Is it possible I could have got it – got her – so wrong?
There was a time I was sure of my own judgement, trusted in myself. But that was before.
I hug my knees into my chest and rock gently for a while. Sometimes this soothes me, but there is something about this room without Charlie in it that makes me anxious.
I hear the soft thud of footsteps outside, and voices drawing closer.
‘We’ve cleared as much as we could, and I don’t mind telling you the place was a pigsty. But there’s a limit to how much we can do before the relatives turn up.’
The woman says ‘relatives’ as though it’s something not quite nice. I stop rocking abruptly, putting my hand down to steady me. My fingers brush against a piece of paper tucked away behind the pipe of the radiator which the cleaners must have missed. The footsteps stop outside the door and my mouth goes dry as I recognize Dr Roberts’ familiar baritone, sounding unusually clipped and impatient.
‘With any luck, they won’t stay long. Quick in–out, then we can get all her stuff bagged up. We’ve a new one arriving a week on Monday.’
The door handle turns and I’ve just time to snatch up the scrap of paper and stuff it up the sleeve of my sweatshirt before the door bursts open.
I scramble to my feet, my heart hammering.
‘Right. Let’s have a quick check over … Hannah! What are you doing in here?’
Instantly, Dr Roberts reverts to his usual slow drawl and I wonder if the woman with him, who I now recognize as Bridget Ashworth, has also clocked the change in his voice.
Bridget Ashworth has a severe brown bob with a grey re-growth line along the parting and glasses with purple frames and a dark wool jacket with what appears to be a single thick white cat hair on the shoulder. She clutches her lanyard and blinks behind her lenses as if she has surprised a wild fox rifling through her kitchen bin, while I shift from foot to foot.
Who would believe I used to give presentations to roomfuls of people, scanning the crowd and making deliberate eye contact with random strangers?
Now I keep my eyes on the carpet, but still, as I mumble some story about needing to feel close to Charlie, I sense Bridget Ashworth’s disapproving gaze crawl over me.
Even when I get back to the safety of my own room, I’m still scratching, trying to get it off.
‘I thought she looked very well. Didn’t you think she looked well?’
‘I guess.’
Corinne decided to take that as a yes.
‘Definitely better, I thought. Didn’t you?’
‘Hmmm.’
Corinne knew she should stop talking. Danny never liked to chat straight after a visit. But still the words kept coming, almost as if she had no control over them.
As they waited at the roundabout, he put the handbrake on. Under cover of darkness, Corinne studied his profile. He’d lost weight. He’d always been a handsome man. When Hannah had first brought him home Corinne had worried privately that perhaps he was too good-looking. She would have struggled with a man who attracted so much attention. But Hannah had always been sure of herself. Very much her own person. Which made everything that had happened doubly shocking.
‘What’s happening to her?’
Danny’s question came out of the blue, freezing Corinne’s throat as if she’d swallowed an ice cube.
‘She’s just tired. Emotionally overwrought. The baby …’
‘This is nothing to do with the baby. This fixation on murder.’
‘Well, naturally, she would take it hard. These were her friends.’
‘They were women who were known to be high suicide risk who’d attempted suicide before and who very sadly killed themselves. Of course she’s upset, but this point-blank refusal to listen to reason is something else.’
Corinne didn’t want to hear what the something else could be.
‘It’s normal, Danny. These were women she saw every day. She doesn’t want to think of them hurting themselves. I’d be exactly the same.’
‘No, you wouldn’t. Not that same blanket denial. Not when the facts were staring you in the face. We have to look out for symptoms of paranoia. Isn’t that what Dr Roberts told us?’
‘Yes, but this isn’t paranoia, is it? It’s real.’
‘Is it?’
They were driving past Alexandra Palace, the great Victorian landmark strung out across one of the highest peaks in north London. To their left, the vast building loomed against the murky sky, while to the right the Palace’s parkland sloped down the hill into darkness, the distant lights of the city sprawled at its feet.
When Danny dropped her off outside her house Corinne gave him a dry kiss on the cheek.
‘I can’t wait for her to get out of that place,’ she told him. ‘Then everything can get back to normal.’
Danny didn’t reply. Didn’t ask her to define normal. Corinne longed to say something cheering to jolt him out of this stilted, distant mood. He was finding it hard to forgive Hannah. She could understand that. For a few months he’d been a father, and now, here he was, back to being a non-father again. How could he not feel diminished, as if something had been taken from him? Wasn’t she struggling enough herself with not being a grandmother? But Hannah hadn’t been in her right mind. The doctors had explained all that. ‘Dissociative,’ they’d said. Corinne still had the original notebook where she’d scribbled it down, underlining it and adding an exclamation mark after it.
Half in, half out of the car, she hesitated, searching for the right words to lighten the atmosphere, but nothing came. Danny could be intimidating in that way overly handsome men sometimes are.
As always, before she let herself into her little cottage at the base of the Palace grounds, Corinne had a moment of straining to hear Madge’s excited squeals before remembering, with a cold thud, that the little Jack Russell they’d rescued from the pound as a puppy and who’d been her companion for nearly seventeen years, was no longer there. It had been nearly three months since Madge’s heart finally gave up, but still Corinne kept expecting to be greeted at the door by a blur of black-and-white fur, usually with a shoe in her mouth as a gift, as if Corinne had been gone for weeks, rather than hours.
That evening, Corinne couldn’t settle. She paced through the cottage’s few small rooms, picking up objects – a book here, a photograph there – and setting them back down again. She grabbed the house phone from its cradle and stared at it for a long time. Who would she call? What would she say?
I’m worried my daughter is going crazy.
I’m worried my daughter has gone crazy.
Those were the words she couldn’t say out loud.
Sinking down into her ancient, saggy velvet sofa, still furred with the odd white dog hair that she couldn’t bear to vacuum up, she pulled out her laptop, thinking perhaps she could Skype Megs, but just as she was about to press the green phone icon she remembered the time lag. If it was 9.15 p.m. in London, it’d be 5.15 p.m. in New York. Megs would still be at work, holed up in that funny little office, surrounded by men. Her younger daughter had always been so quirky Corinne had struggled to imagine what career path she might follow but, of all the outcomes she’d envisaged over the years, writing scripts for phone app games on the other side of the Atlantic had not even crossed her radar.
She knew Megs would drop everything to talk to her, but she was forcing herself to ration her calls. When the whole awful business with the baby first happened, Megs had wanted to jump on the first plane home, and Corinne had been sure the awful rift between her daughters would be forgotten, but Hannah was in no state for visitors. And by the time she’d come back to some semblance of herself, she’d decided she still wasn’t ready to see her younger sister.
Instead, Megan did her best to support Corinne from the States, but she had a busy life there, a job Corinne didn’t fully understand, a boyfriend they’d yet to meet.
Her mobile rang, startling in the silence, and Corinne snatched it up from the coffee table, hoping to hear Megs’s voice. Instead, Duncan’s name flashed up on her screen. There was a time when he had been stored under the moniker ‘Git’ in her contacts list, but that was years ago, when the betrayal was still fresh. Nowadays, she had other things on her mind.
‘How is she?’
There was no preamble, no niceties. But really, what would be the point?
‘She’s good. She’s great, in fact.’
Corinne knew she didn’t have to talk Hannah up to her own father, but still she couldn’t bring herself to mention this new business with the suicides. Since Duncan had had his second family when already well into his fifties – his second wife, Gigi, producing two babies in indecently rapid succession – she’d felt even more protective of her own two daughters, as if they were in some unspoken competition with their infant half-siblings.
Corinne had come to terms with the fact that her husband had left her after thirty years for a woman he’d met at an Arsenal match of all things. What choice did she have after Gigi got pregnant and it was a fait accompli? But what she found much harder to accept was being the only one who now put Hannah and Megs at the centre of the universe. Duncan’s love for his daughters, hitherto unconditional, had now become qualified by having these other, needier drains on his emotional resources.
Corinne always wondered if it was latent guilt that had led him to create a job for his son-in-law, helping to establish the company’s fledgling office in Edinburgh. Hannah hadn’t been happy about her husband being away three days a week, but decent jobs in architecture were rare.
‘Have you asked her?’ Duncan wanted to know now. ‘About the baby? Have you talked to her? Have you tried to get to the bottom of it?’
So typical of Duncan. So sure that there would turn out to be a reason, a rationale. That there would be an explanation with a top and a bottom.
‘It’s too soon. We can’t push her.’
‘Too soon? She’s been in there eight weeks, Corinne. It’s not about the money—’
‘I should think not, when the insurance is footing most of the bill!’
Corinne was glad to find a peg for her anger.
‘That’s not the point. Christ, Cor, I’d pay whatever it took to see Hannah through this, but surely she ought to be making more progress by now.’
‘She is making progress. Baby steps, Dr Roberts says.’
Duncan made a noise like he was snorting something through his nose.
‘Maybe if Dr Roberts spent more time at the clinic and less time throwing lavish fundraisers, she’d be doing a lot better.’
‘He has to keep a high public profile so that they continue to get finance for the clinic. Otherwise, the insurance company would have to be paying out even more.’ Pointed. So he’d get the message. ‘They’re lucky to have him. Dr Chakraborty says he’s the reason they manage to recruit such high-quality staff.’
‘I’m starting without you,’ came a woman’s voice in the background at Duncan’s end.
He sighed.
‘I’ve got to go. We’re watching a box set.’
A box set? Corinne felt every muscle inside her tense up. She closed her eyes, sucked air in deep through her nose, waiting for the moment to pass.
‘OK,’ she said, preparing to ring off.
‘Cor?’
‘Yes?’
‘You’re not in this alone. I want you to know that. I care about Hannah as much as you do. I’m right here.’
Corinne was embarrassed to find that his clumsy attempt at comforting her had brought tears to her eyes.
‘OK, then.’
She pressed end call before her trembling voice could give her away.
Angrily, she pointed the remote at the TV. It came booming into life with a cookery programme in which harried contestants were trying to cope with the pressure of a professional restaurant kitchen. Yes, chef! No, chef! She turned it off. There was so much work she ought to be getting on with. Thirty-six mid-term papers to be marked. Five or six years ago, Corinne’s students on her pop-culture social anthropology course would all have been UK-born, with shared cultural reference points and similar backgrounds, but now eighty-nine per cent of them were from abroad. China, mostly. She was having to find a whole new way of teaching, a new focus to the syllabus, at the same time as having to fulfil all the research and publishing requirements the university bureaucrats had imposed on them to justify their students’ tuition fees.
Corinne sighed and picked up her laptop.
The screensaver was a photograph of her and Hannah and Megan on holiday in Crete ten months before. They’d gone out of season, in mid-May, on a girls’ holiday, a last trip, just the three of them, before Megs started her job in New York the following September.
They had been happy that holiday, she was certain of it. Not happy in the way one is always happy on holidays in hindsight, but really happy. This was before Hannah and Megs had their falling-out, and for once the two of them had managed to put aside long-standing niggles and patterns of behaviour that had been set in childhood – Megs inclined to be spiky and defensive; Hannah sometimes taking teasing too far. And Corinne had felt truly herself for the first time since she had found a strange text on Duncan’s phone and he’d admitted that not only was he seeing someone else but she was pregnant.
Hannah had seemed content that holiday, at peace. She’d stopped crying at odd moments about the miscarriage she’d suffered three years before and the unsuccessful attempt at IVF that had followed. She’d seemed relaxed, said she and Danny were getting on so much better since they’d agreed to stop talking about babies.
The men had flocked around them. Hannah had always attracted attention, not because she was beautiful, although she was, but because she was so at home within her own skin. Megan’s beauty was less obvious. Corinne had seen people’s eyes skim over her younger daughter, with her serious mud-brown eyes and her angular features, but then something would make them look again. That fierce intelligence you could sense even from a distance.
She’d come back from that holiday feeling a new optimism. For the first time in years, she felt excited about the future, rather than feeling as if her best years were all in the past. She had already been planning to visit Megan in New York the following spring and had even agreed to try out internet dating, if only to have a fertile fund of new anecdotes to trot out at dinner parties. She’d looked in the mirror of her tiny bathroom that first evening back, at her lightly tanned face, sprinkled with freckles, and the faint white lines at the corners of her eyes where she’d been laughing too much and too often for the sun to reach, and for once she’d liked what she’d seen. Life had seemed full of possibilities.
And then Hannah had got pregnant.
Charlie was the first person I met in here. Or the first I remember meeting. The initial twenty-four hours were a black hole of numbness where new people merged together into one faceless blur, and even after that I remained in shock, my brain dull with disbelief. I wasn’t looking to make friends because I was so convinced I wouldn’t be staying. As soon as they realized there was nothing wrong with me, I’d be off.
I didn’t let myself think about Emily, or what had happened. Instead I focused on Danny and how he’d looked in the registry office when he’d said that line about sickness and health and held my hands in his and I could feel his whole body shaking.
I didn’t – wouldn’t – think about my sister Megan and the things she’d said about him. Some things are too hard to forgive.
Danny has wavy brown hair. He likes to keep it close cropped, says it’s easier to manage, but I prefer it when it’s longer and falls across his eyes. He’s broad across the shoulders and when I clasp my hands around the tops of his arms they don’t reach. But his mouth is full and soft, and his chin has a slight dent that fits perfectly when he rests it on the top of my head.
Danny would get me out of here.
I had no idea then that it was Danny who’d wanted me in.
So when Charlie came over and introduced herself on the first full day, I wasn’t forthcoming.
‘Your first time?’ she asked. No need to ask how she guessed.
‘Uh-huh.’ Nodding. Wanting her gone so I could be alone to unpack the fog in my head and understand what had happened.
‘It’s really not so bad.’
She had a lovely soft, lilting voice with a laugh bubbling away there under the surface of it, like she was thinking of something amusing that at any moment she might share with you. Curls the colour of freshly turned soil, green eyes, high cheekbones that shone where they caught the light.
I made one of those ‘yeah, right’ faces. That first day, I couldn’t see past the locks on the doors and the rounded corners on the furniture and the fact the laces had been taken out of my Converse shoes so I had to shuffle about to keep them on my feet, and the way my jeans wouldn’t stay up because I wasn’t allowed a belt, and the skeletal girl reading a book in the corner while a machine fed her through a tube in her nose.
My body was in mourning for the baby that was gone, breasts achy, hormones ricocheting around inside me, so that one minute I was buzzing with nerves sharpened into points, the next slumped over with grief, oblivious to the tears running down my face.
Once I’d had a chance to view the clinic with dispassionate eyes, I could see that she was right. There are far worse places to be. This is a private clinic and everything about it reflects the price we pay to be here. The old building is tastefully decorated, the wide oak floorboards scattered with muted rugs and there are comfortable sofas in the TV lounge where we sit and watch movies on Friday nights. We each have our own beige bedroom with en suite bathroom. We bring photographs from home, and jolly prints to brighten up the walls, although the glass in the frames isn’t really glass so it smudges easily.
But I couldn’t see any of that when Joni brought me downstairs, even though I’d begged to stay in my room.
‘No one is going to force you,’ she’d said. ‘But I should point out that non-compliance may be flagged up as something requiring further exploration, which may mean you end up spending longer in here than otherwise.’
‘I’m not staying in this place,’ I told her. ‘There’s been a mistake.’
But when she led the way into the cafeteria I followed her.
Though I was dismissive of her attempts to be friendly, Charlie didn’t turn away from me. She’d seen it before and, anyway, she never judged people. That’s why everyone liked her. When I started to get better I’d joke that I was jealous of her popularity. ‘Good job you’re suicidal, otherwise I’d have to kill you,’ I told her once. We laughed a lot about that.
It doesn’t seem so funny now.
Odelle was the next one to approach me. In a place like this there are some people, like Charlie, whose wounds are all internal, buried so deep no one would ever guess that there were deformed places hidden there, lumpy with scar tissue. Then there are others, like Stella, whose damage is on the surface. Unmissable. Odelle was one of those. A long-time anorexic, her head, with its thinning mousy-brown hair, was balanced on her neck like the top of a lollipop. Her body was swathed in outsized clothes – T-shirts, jumpers – that revealed themselves like layers of old wallpaper through the gap at the front of her zip-up hoody (cordless, of course). Her face, close up, was covered in a soft, apricot fuzz of downy hairs, soft as suede.
‘You mustn’t be scared,’ she said. And though I hadn’t felt any fear up till then, being too mired in self-pity, now, all of a sudden, my skin began to prickle.
‘We’re all friendly here,’ she went on. ‘Stick with me, and I’ll look after you.’
As Odelle was talking, a memory was pricking at the back of my mind of the time we moved to London from Cambridge because Dad had changed job and I had to start a new school and was allocated a girl to show me around on the first day. I could still recall the showy-off way in which she paraded me around the corridors like a new pet. ‘This is Hannah. She’s new,’ she’d declare, and people would shoot me looks of sympathy.
At twenty-five, Odelle is seven years younger than me, so I try to make allowances but, sometimes, being with her feels like someone scraping sandpaper over every one of my nerve endings.
Odelle is an habituée of psychiatric institutions. If mental clinics gave loyalty points, she’d have the free drink, the coffee maker and the spa weekend. ‘There isn’t anything I don’t know,’ she announced as she shepherded me from room to room. Psychiatric patients tend to form different tribes, Odelle told me. The Emos, like Charlie, for whom life is a deep, dark void; EDies, like Odelle, battling eating disorders, swapping tips on how to bulk up on water to cheat the scales, vying with each other over concave stomachs and thigh gaps; addicts of all persuasions; OCDs, like Sofia, with their habits and their tics and their obsessive thoughts running on a loop; bipolars, like Nina, veering from comatose to manic, on a perpetual emotional bungee jump. And then there are the rest. All damaged in our own way.
‘Where do you fit?’ Odelle wanted to know.
I thought of telling her about Emily, but the words built up, unsaid, in my mouth until I feared I would choke.
‘It’s complicated.’
Sofia was crying, big sobs that tore from her lungs.
Odelle had introduced me to her earlier that first evening, explaining that she had the room next to mine. That night, I lay in my bed listening to her and wishing I was back in my own bed in our first-floor flat in Haringey, north London, with Danny’s arm around me, my face buried in his chest.
On the days we both worked in London, I used to get up earlier than him to catch a train to my job as a publicist for a children’s book publisher. Danny would still be in bed when I left for work. Lying awake in my room at The Meadows, listening to Sofia through the wall, I remembered how he used to look so alone in that big bed, his arm flung out, reaching for a me who was no longer there.
Now when he comes to visit it’s as if he’s a stranger.