3. Google WK
The more I stare at the third entry on Charlie’s to-do list, the more convinced I am that it holds the key to what happened to my friend. Mum has left, and I’m curled up in a padded, egg-shaped chair in the Mindfulness Area, which is a little room tucked just inside the entrance to the new building. I recall Charlie’s face after she’d told me how people in here are always hiding something. And how when I tried to push her for information, she just shook her head, with that look in her eye. That infuriating it’s-best-you-don’t-know look.
I hold the paper in my hand and close my eyes, as if I can absorb Charlie’s thoughts through her spiky handwriting on the scrap of paper.
Some days I don’t recognize myself.
I try to think back five days to the day Charlie died. I used to have a great memory. Pin sharp, past events lit up in high definition. But trauma, plus my nightly sleeping pill, have blunted my mind. Now when I try to summon up a memory it’s like trying to catch a dust mote, grabbing at the air and finding my hands always empty.
I know I saw her at breakfast and she was just as she normally was. Her hair matted on one side where she’d slept on it and hadn’t yet brushed it out. Wearing tartan slippers and blue sweatpants and a blue jumper. Not the joy-sparking cardigan. Not that day. I wonder, would that have made a difference?
We sat together, but Charlie rarely spoke much at breakfast. It took her a while to get going in the morning. Most of us are like that. We eat our toast and croissants (or just push them around the plate, in Odelle’s case) in silence while we wait to surface from our Diazepam fug.
We would have set our goals for the day during Morning Group, as we always do. I strain to remember what Charlie’s goals were, but my mind is blank. Probably something about calling her mother. Most of hers involved calling her mother.
I remember Nina was flying that day and kept shouting over everybody, rocking her chair backwards until it seemed impossible the legs wouldn’t break. Roberts has taken her off all her meds so they can observe how she is untreated, and we’re all counting the days until she gets back under the chemical cosh and the rapid mood cycling stops. Her goal was to finish writing her book, which she said had kept her up all night and was a guaranteed bestseller. ‘It’s my entire philosophy on life,’ she said. ‘It’ll change lives.’
Afterwards, Charlie and I went to the kitchen for a cooking therapy session, which is basically just cooking, but as I said before everything gets called therapy in this place. That’s where Charlie and I made the caramelized sugar and hers was thick and hard and I told her how it could do someone damage and we both laughed. Joni was on supervising duty that day. The nurses aren’t allowed to have their phones with them, but Joni always looks as if she’s composing texts and Facebook updates in her head. She’s never quite present. But when Charlie quizzed her about her new boyfriend, she came alive and told us they’d booked a summer holiday in Majorca. All inclusive, premium brands, she told us. ‘Gotta have something to look forward to, dontchya?’ I remember Charlie smiled and said, ‘That’s exactly right.’ Maybe that’s what prompted her to book the Croatia tickets.
People who are planning to kill themselves don’t look forward. Do they?
We made a chocolate cake and decorated it with the caramelized sugar. Did Charlie really break off a shard and slip it into her sock or the waistband of her trousers while my attention was elsewhere, thinking about other kitchens, other cakes, other lives?
This is where my mind goes hazy, the memories flabby around the edges.
I know at one point I looked at the finished cake and felt a sense of achievement, verging on contentment. And when I recognized that feeling I thought for a second that I might be sick. Because I’d almost let myself be happy. Even after everything I’d done. Then I wanted to punish myself, and Charlie must have seen that in my face, because she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘It’s only a cake, Hannah.’ And Joni looked up at us, sharply, not understanding what was going on, and she didn’t like it.
‘’Course it’s cake,’ she said. ‘What else would it be?’
And after cooking we had individual therapy. I was with Dr Chakraborty and Charlie would have been with Dr Roberts. Unless he was off somewhere – at a fundraising lunch in Mayfair, or giving a talk to healthcare chiefs at a convention in Palm Springs. I like Dr Chakraborty. He has a way of steepling his fingers and gazing at me from his sad brown eyes.
‘Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,’ he says. ‘How are your sisters?’ And we both smile. Neither of us finds his lame reference to the old Woody Allen movie amusing any more; still, it has become a form of greeting. A shorthand for Ah, so here we are again, we two, and nothing much can be done about it.
Then there was lunch. We always ate at the same table – Charlie and me and Stella and Sofia, back when she was still alive. Since Charlie died, Stella and I spread our plates out over the table and put jumpers on the spare chairs so no one else comes to join us. But it’s a small clinic and there’s a new person arriving every week, so we know it’s just a matter of time.
I try to think back to what we talked about that day, but the intervening hours and days have cocooned themselves around the memory, cutting it off from view. It’s a fair guess that, afterwards, when we’d drained the last trickle of lukewarm decaffeinated coffee, we’d have gone back to our rooms, as we often do. Until I arrived here, I’d never been able to sleep during the day, but now I take any opportunity I can get to lie down. The sleeping pills most of us take sacredly every evening like the holy wafer leave us hungover the next day, our mouths furred, our minds always half submerged.
Was that when Charlie sat on the floor with her back to the radiator and wrote her list? Even while the shard of sharpened sugar was digging into her calf?
The chair I am sitting in is organically shaped, the back curving overhead, a squishy cushion nestled into the half-moon base. It feels protected. Private. Besides, no one really uses the Mindfulness Area. It’s more of a status symbol for Dr Roberts. It’s one of his favourite stop-offs when he’s taking groups of private investors, or foreign dignitaries, or representatives of the media on one of his regular tours of the building: ‘This is where our residents can be alone for a little contemplative time. At the clinic, we’re great believers in the benefits of mindfulness, and the residents can come here to have a safe, quiet, comfortable space to empty their minds of everything except the here and now. Which is so important for all of us.’
Charlie’s to-do list is crumpled now from being folded and unfolded so many times.
Even so, I read it again, and that old Einstein saying pops into my head about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It strikes me as ironically funny. Seeing where I am and everything.
Google WK.
I’ve gone through all Charlie’s friends and acquaintances – the ones I know of, anyway – but none of them fits the initials. I’ve even tried combinations of words beginning with W and K, but still drawn a blank. Yet I can’t shake off the conviction that those two letters hold the key to her state of mind that last day, and how and why she died.
Then it comes to me. Sitting in that padded egg-chair that’s like a flesh-coloured womb. Charlie’s laptop. If I go on to her search history, I’ll be able to find out exactly what she was googling that last day. The clinic doesn’t have WiFi in the rooms, probably to stop the EDies poring over the pro-anorexia websites and the rest of us taking notes from www.101waystotopyourself.com. And we’re not allowed our own phones either, for the same reason. ‘The screen can become its own addiction,’ is one of Dr Roberts’ favourite lines. So when we want to talk to anyone, we all have to queue up for one of the landlines in the admin office and everyone pretends not to be listening to what you’re saying, but you know they are really.
So Charlie would have had to wait for one of the supervised WiFi sessions in the day room. We’re supposed to stay away from social media. The pressure to appear ‘normal’ or compare ourselves to our ever-achieving friends is not healthy, Roberts says. We are considered insufficiently robust to see past the shiny, shellacked selves most people hide behind on social media and too sensitive to deal with the endless charity requests, the kids with cancer, the abandoned puppies, the tug, tug, tug of the heartstrings. But she would have had no trouble logging on to Google.
Charlie had a Macbook. One of those lightweight ones that seem like they could snap in half when you pick them up. I don’t remember seeing it when I was in her room three days ago, but I’m sure it must be there somewhere. Tucked away in a desk drawer, perhaps.
I get to my feet, suddenly heady with resolve, and try not to think about the last time I was in her room, my heart hammering as Bridget Ashworth’s cool gaze slipped over me like a net. I remind myself that Charlie issued me an open invitation to visit her room any time, and ignore the little voice that adds, But Charlie’s dead.
I make my way past my own door to the end of the corridor, steeling myself against the treacherous lurch of hope that I might hear Charlie’s voice call ‘Come in!’ and enter to find her flung out across her bed or sitting against the radiator, her black-framed glasses resting halfway down her nose.
I glance up at the CCTV camera, its one-eyed stare trained upon me from the ceiling. My mouth is sand-dry and when I swallow the sound seems deafening.
I go straight to the desk. I’m doing it for her, I tell myself.
The top drawer is empty apart from a pack of coloured pens and a pad of paper. Stationery is a strange commodity in a place like this. Scissors are out, as are paperclips. Even pencils were banned after one woman, many months before I arrived, sharpened her 5H to a point and stabbed herself in the neck, narrowly missing an artery. When Mum brought me in a ring-bound notebook to keep my journal in, it was confiscated at reception. ‘A patient could take out the wire and hurt themselves with it, d’ya get me?’ said Joni.
The second drawer contains a stack of photographs in a clear plastic folder, and I am very nearly derailed by the picture on the top of the pile, which shows a young Charlie, maybe thirteen or fourteen, smiling up at the camera from a striped deckchair in a nicely kept English garden. She’s wearing jeans and a pale blue vest, and her eyes are so full of the life that lies ahead of her that I almost cannot bear it. She told me she was sixteen when she suffered her first major bout of depression, and after that everything changed, her horizons narrowing as the bouts became more intense and protracted, medication piled on medication, expert upon expert, her eyes gradually dulling.
Without stopping to think, I slip the photo out from the pile and tuck it into the back pocket of my jeans.
I hear a noise from the corridor and my heart jolts inside my chest. The noise stops when a door opens and closes again further down the corridor, and I sag with relief. The bottom drawer of the desk is stiff and I have to tug at it several times until, finally, it gives. And there’s Charlie’s laptop, scratched and pockmarked with dents. She was always so careless with her things. Sofia used to look as if she was about to cry when Charlie flung her computer down on the dining table as if it were made of rubber. ‘It’s just stuff,’ Charlie would say.
As I pull it out on to the desk top, the memories come thick and fast. Charlie and I downstairs in the day room watching Orange Is the New Black on her laptop, until Odelle spotted us and alerted Darren, who was on supervising duty. ‘I’m only thinking of Charlie and Hannah’s wellbeing. It’s so important that we make healthy choices,’ she told him. Charlie hunched over her computer, struggling to compose an email to her mum. ‘I want to be upbeat, but I don’t want to lie to her. I’ve got as far as “hello”.’
When the screen flickers into life I’m faced with the password request, something I’d deliberately put out of my mind. I try a couple of random guesses. Her middle name, Theresa? LeicesterCity, the name of her favourite football team? Still no luck. Panic is bubbling inside me. Concentrate. Concentrate.
Out of nowhere, another memory comes into my head. We are in Group and joking about our guilty pleasures. Frannie has admitted shyly that she used to be addicted to Made in Chelsea and even had a calendar of the cast on her bedroom wall. Nina has a crush on Paul Hollywood and Charlie says when she’s stressed she plays Taylor Swift at full blast. ‘What can I say? She cheers me up.’ And when someone else scoffs, she insists, ‘It’s true. I love her. I’ve even used her as my password before.’
My fingers are shaking as I type the letters. This is my third attempt. I won’t get another. It works. Hallelujah. I experience a burst of jubilation as the dark blue screen of the home page gives way to Charlie’s screensaver, a photograph of a beach in Thailand she visited in another life.
There’s another noise from outside – the sound of voices in the stairwell – and I freeze until a door clangs downstairs and it’s silent once more.
I click on Chrome and there’s an agonizing wait while the multicoloured icon bounces up and down, until, at last, it opens. There is of course no wireless signal, so I can’t call up any websites, but to my relief I can access the history bar. A quick look at the dates of the top entries shows they are all from five days ago – the day Charlie died. The first entries are all about Croatia. Loads of holiday sites and flight-comparison sites. Briefly, I feel a glow of triumph. See, Mum, I want to say. All this research proves she wasn’t just trying to make herself feel better. She really did intend to go.
I carry on searching her history, my finger freezing when I see she has googled ‘combatting loneliness’. Lonely? Charlie? Why couldn’t she have come to me? I am about to scroll on when I hear the lift doors opening back down the corridor. No one ever uses the lift. It’s small and claustrophobic and takes twice as long as climbing the two short flights of stairs. It’ll be one of the cleaners, I tell myself, not wanting to lug a heavy vacuum cleaner up the stairs. Still, as I carry on scanning the list, there’s a fizz of panic starting inside me. I hear footsteps further along the corridor. They grow louder. Breathe. Breathe.
My finger is hovering over the screen as I work down the list, and it’s shaking so much that at first I almost go past it, then I backtrack. Yes. There. William Kingsley.
WK.
But now, unmistakeably, there’s a noise outside Charlie’s door.
Heart thudding, I scroll to ‘shut down’ and icons start disappearing from the screen with terrible slowness. As I click again – why won’t you shut down? – the handle turns on the door and Bridget Ashworth comes in, accompanied by an older couple I immediately recognize as Charlie’s parents from the photograph she used to keep by her bed. I snap shut the lid of the laptop.
‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just borrowing Charlie’s computer. Mine’s playing up.’
Bridget Ashworth frowns, and a deep purple stain creeps over her sallow face.
‘I don’t think that’s really appropriate, Hannah, given the circumstances. Do you? Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’m sure Charlie’s parents would appreciate being left in peace to sort through her things.’
‘Yes, of course.’
I head for the door, but Charlie’s father steps forward to block the way. He’s a tall, broad man with close-cropped grey hair and dark-framed glasses behind which his brown eyes are magnified. He is wearing a dark navy suit and tie and I remember how Charlie said her dad had no idea how to be himself and could only be the person other people thought him to be, the person who went out to work in a suit and made decisions and gave orders. It was exhausting, she said, this colossal effort to be somebody else.
‘You’re Hannah.’
It’s a statement, not a question, so I don’t bother replying. Or smiling. Seeing as his face is set like concrete.
‘I’m Trevor Chadwick. This is my wife, Sandra. Charlotte mentioned you. She said you were a friend.’
I nod, glancing over at Charlie’s mum, who has her daughter’s face, except that its features are faded and grey, like a photo left on a windowsill. She puts a hand on her husband’s arm as if to restrain him, but he jerks it off like it’s a fly or a wasp.
‘So, as her friend’ – he over-pronounces the word as if the very notion is somehow ridiculous – ‘why couldn’t you have stopped her from doing this? You must have known her state of mind. Why didn’t you tell someone? Or is that how it works with you people? You all egg each other on?’
You people. The words feel shameful.
‘Trevor. Please!’ Charlie’s mum’s eyes, which are Charlie’s eyes, except older and sadder, are swimming with tears.
Her husband steps back and flicks his hand as if he wants no more to do with it all, and I tell them for a third time how sorry I am and hurry from the room.