14

THEA

‘Just another snowy Sunday.’

I sang the words to the tune of ‘Manic Monday’, trying to remember which Eighties band had sung it, as I shook out the duvet on my bed, then straightened up, satisfied. It was just gone ten, and Isla had popped in to say goodbye on her way back to London, leaving earlier than usual on a Sunday because, as she said: ‘Everyone’s an idiot on the roads when it’s snowy. The M4 will be a nightmare later’.

It had been a low-key weekend, but a nice one, just the two of us, and Nell would be back from Rupert’s shortly, to spend the rest of the day helping me with the photo shoot I’d finally managed to arrange. I’d been surprised he’d agreed to give her back a day early, but he knew how much she enjoyed a photo shoot, and I was grateful. A quick tidy up here, I thought, then I’d make a start on a Sunday roast for this evening. I wasn’t much of a cook, but I could manage roast chicken, which was Nell’s favourite.

Still humming, I went downstairs and began to assemble dinner. As I peeled potatoes, though, the brief feeling of contentment faded, the old gnawing sadness and anxiety returning. Isla had been here waiting for me when I got back from the doctor’s on Friday afternoon, and we’d had a pleasant evening, just a couple of glasses of white wine with our fish and chips takeaway.

I’d enjoyed our reformer Pilates session yesterday morning, too, just the two of us with an instructor who didn’t appear to recognize me, which meant I could relax and enjoy the class, relishing the feeling of my body being stretched and eased into positions I didn’t think possible on the torture-chamberesque moving platforms complete with ropes and pulleys. I’d realized that I’d barely done anything other than walking for ages. I was certainly feeling it today, as muscles not exercised with any regularity for months ached and burned in protest, but it was a good pain, a pain earned by hard work, and I liked it.

We’d stayed in again last night, watching a couple of silly romcoms back-to-back, and although Isla downed a bottle of red by herself, I managed to get through the evening on just two gin and slimline tonics.

‘You’re becoming a right wuss in your old age,’ Isla had remarked, but she hadn’t pushed it. The result was that instead of a banging hangover, a regular occurrence on a Sunday morning, today I had a clear head, into which kept popping replays of the conversation I’d had on Friday with Dr Evans, my GP.

I had a weekly appointment with her, something she’d insisted on after my diagnosis, to monitor my memory loss. When I’d realized, after Zander died, that my mind, my memory, was completely blank, it had terrified me. I’d always had a good memory, really good. I never forgot anything, and to suddenly have a gap: a huge, gaping, fourthofSe‌ptembershaped hole, made me feel as if I was going mad, losing my mind, my grip on reality. Instead, I was told, I had developed a condition called dissociative amnesia, sometimes known as psychogenic amnesia. I hated the latter term – well, it had the word psycho in it, didn’t it? – so I tended to stick to the former, if anyone asked. What it was called, though, was irrelevant. It was what it had done to me that freaked me out. I knew what I’d done, of course I did – the horrific evidence was right there in front of me. But the detail, the order of things, my arrival home, leaving him in the car – it was all a blank. In fact, I couldn’t remember anything of that day at all, not a single moment, until the point where Flora came running in from the car, white-faced and trembling, Zander in her arms. Not getting up that morning, not the lunch with Isla and the children. Nothing.

‘Your form of dissociative amnesia is called localized,’ the psychiatrist I’d originally been referred to had told me. He’d looked at me quizzically with his head tilted to one side as he spoke, little round glasses perched on the end of his nose, as if I was an interesting museum display.

‘Your memory loss was triggered by the trauma you’ve been through, and you’re actually lucky, Mrs Ashfield, that it’s just affecting a brief period, a day of your life. Others, with other forms, can forget who they are completely, not recognize friends or family. The memories will return, most likely. It’s just a matter of time. Be patient.’

‘So is there anything at all coming back yet, do you think?’ Dr Evans had asked me, gently, on Friday, as we sat in her small, bright surgery. She is a quietly spoken woman in her forties, her face kind and make-up free.

‘Anything? Do you remember waking up that day, having breakfast?’

I shook my head. She smiled, and tapped on her keyboard, making a note on my online file. I waited, eyes flitting across her desk. Tissues in a fancy floral box, a half-empty coffee mug, a potted plant. Homely and safe, like she is. She looked up and smiled at me again.

‘Well, don’t worry about it,’ she said. ‘As you’ve been told before, it’s just the way your mind is coping with the stress. For some people, dissociation just lasts for hours or days, but with a major trauma it can be months. It’s your brain protecting itself by switching off from reality. You’ll get there. It might just be the tiniest thing at first, a little flash of memory. And when that starts, the rest should follow. But don’t get stressed about it, Thea, OK? Are you all right, otherwise? How’s the drinking been this week?’

‘I’ve not had much at all,’ I said honestly. ‘I’ve realized it just makes me feel worse, act a bit … well, a bit oddly.’ I hadn’t mentioned the pram thing to her and decided there was no need to say anything about it now. I’d stopped doing it, and I wouldn’t be doing it again. ‘So I’ve cut down, quite dramatically. Only a couple of glasses at a time now, and not every day.’

She nodded, looking pleased.

‘Good. That’s excellent. And you never know, cutting down might help the memories to come back too.’

I nodded in agreement, suppressing a shudder. Of course I wanted to remember, more than anything, but there were moments when I hoped that if … when … the memories returned, they would be just the good ones, the nice bits of that day. I desperately wanted to remember my last hours with Zander, our last cuddles, the last time my lips brushed his cheek. But did I really want to know in full, graphic detail, what happened later … what I did? Everyone said it would be better for me, to have my head clear again, but would it, really? Would I be able to live with it? It was hard enough, agonizing enough, now. How would I cope if suddenly I could relive that day in my head, every single, sick second of it?

Now, potatoes peeled, I tipped them into a saucepan of cold water and started scraping the carrots. Nell loved carrots so much I was sometimes surprised she hadn’t yet turned orange, something which could actually happen, I knew – something to do with the betacarotene.

My darling Nell. I knew I spoiled her now, sometimes, but she’d suffered so much. I’d made her suffer so much. She hadn’t even escaped the police questioning, on the day it happened. I hadn’t expected that – the adults, fair enough, but Nell? My beautiful little Nell, taken aside and quizzed about what she knew, what she’d seen. She was just another witness to them, another on the list who had to be interviewed, but there seemed no doubt what had happened, and in the end it was only me who was charged, and that was only fair. It was me, wasn’t it? It was my fault, and only mine.

And … well, I admitted it. I told the police I had left Zander in the car. The sequence of events was crystal clear – Isla and Nell had run in from the car as soon as I’d pulled up outside, both shrieking about needing a wee, racing each other to the front door, laughing and jostling each other, leaving me to unbuckle the sleeping Zander from his car seat and follow them in. By the time they got back from the bathroom I was sprawling on the sofa, the pram in the corner of the living room as usual, and they assumed … well, they assumed, as everyone did, that he was in it, safe and sound, still asleep. Why wouldn’t they?

So we opened some wine, Isla and I, and started drinking again. Shit, as if we needed anymore, after all the champagne with lunch, but by then … and sometime after that, we fell asleep.

I’d gone over it over and over and over again, with the police, with my legal team, just by myself, trying to make sense of it, trying to make the pieces add up to … well, to some sort of coherent whole. Trying to work out why I had done what I had done, trying to formulate some sort of defence, outside of the alcohol and the possible postnatal depression.

And I couldn’t. Other than temporary insanity, I just couldn’t. For a start, what on earth possessed me to drive home in such a state? It horrified me. I’d never driven drunk before, not ever. I had two children in the car, for God’s sake. The memory of why I did was gone too, of course. I remembered none of it, not the drive, or finding a parking space, or parking in it, but I clearly did all of that somehow, the car parked neatly in the spot right outside the door, no indication that its driver had been half pissed in the middle of the day, the worst kind of irresponsible mother, the kind that disgusted me, would disgust anyone.

It was a miracle I didn’t kill us all. I did ask Isla why she’d let me drive, afterwards, after the police had released me. Well, I didn’t ask exactly – I grabbed her by the shoulders, hysterical with grief and fear and anger and horror, and screamed at her, shook her violently, told her it was all her fault, that if we’d got a taxi home it would never have happened, if I hadn’t driven us home Zander would still be alive and well. That Zander would still be here. And Isla, my beautiful, bold friend who never cried, crumpled in front of me, sobbed as if her heart was being torn in two, and told me she was sorry, so desperately sorry, that she didn’t know how drunk I was, that she hadn’t been counting, and that I’d insisted I was fine, that I wasn’t drunk at all, that it was only a few minutes’ drive, that everything would be OK. And then I’d crumpled too, and the two of us had slid to the floor, wrapped in each other’s arms, and cried and cried.

‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry. I know it’s not your fault. It was mine, only mine,’ I whispered, over and over, my throat raw, my eyes blind with tears, and she’d held me tightly, rocking me in her arms like a baby, murmuring unintelligible words of comfort. And after that, I let it go. I needed her, needed her desperately, and what good would it do, falling out with my best friend, trying to pass some of the blame on to her? I was responsible for this. Nobody else.

We talked about it, though, talked and talked, as I tried to remember, tried to make some sense of it all. Isla had tried to jog my memory, at my insistence – describing for me in detail how we’d chatted and laughed as we drove home, both children dozing in the back of the car, worn out by the heat. How even Zander, who woke easily, had slept throughout the short journey, his long lashes brushing his pink cheeks, tiny snores coming from the baby seat. My darling baby, my son, my little boy. And still, I couldn’t remember. Couldn’t remember his last hours alive.

Tears pricked my eyelids as the thoughts tumbled through my mind. And then, as I blinked them away, flinching as I ran the peeler over the end of my finger, dropping the carrot, it happened again. A weird, crawling sensation, like a bony hand running up my spine. It had happened earlier today too, first thing this morning while I was still lying in bed, unwilling to leave my warm cocoon. A strange, shivery feeling, that had nothing to do with being cold. A feeling of unease, so intense that it was almost a physical sensation. This morning it had come and gone in a flash, and I’d put it down to being in that odd, semi-awake state but now, as I leaned against the kitchen counter, it stayed, first that shiver up my back, then a sense that something was trying to wriggle its way into my consciousness, a voice far, far too tiny for me to hear trying to make itself audible. I squeezed my eyes tightly shut, trying to listen, but just as quickly as it had arrived, the feeling was fading again, and then it was gone.

I opened my eyes, staring down at the pile of carrots on the chopping board, aware that my finger had started to bleed. What the hell was that? A hallucination? Or could it have been a memory, trying to return, like Dr Evans said it would? But it hadn’t been a memory, had it, not exactly. More of a feeling. A weird, unsettling feeling. A feeling I couldn’t identify. But as I stood there, watching the blood drip slowly from the end of my finger and pool on the chopping board, I suddenly realized that I knew what the feeling was about. It was a feeling that something wasn’t quite right. That something was off-kilter. I didn’t know what. But I knew, suddenly and with absolute clarity, that it was something about the day Zander died.