After Group, I make my way back to my room, still shaken.
Dr Chakraborty said it was a breakthrough, because I’ve finally admitted there wasn’t any baby; he said I’d done really well. But I feel drained and exposed.
Phantom pregnancy. The label shames me. I might as well have ‘crazy’ tattooed across my forehead.
And yet nothing about it had felt ‘phantom’. And it certainly hadn’t felt ‘hysterical’ – the other charming name given to what had happened to me.
Phantom. Hysterical.
Crazy.
Even now, I find it impossible to accept that my body could have so completely deceived me. The weight gain, the stomach cramps, the nausea. Could it really all have been my own biology’s idea of a practical joke?
That bit I have to accept. But what I cannot accept is my own part in it. The way I colluded with my own lying body to fool myself and Danny and everyone else. The fake appointments I said I’d had. The scans I never went to. How could I have done it?
‘Was this your idea of revenge?’ he yelled at me that terrible night in the hospital.
The doctor had taken him aside then. Explained that, sometimes, if the mind wants something enough, it can trick the body into believing something that isn’t true. That my uterus was enlarged, as if I were really pregnant. I was going through as real a bereavement as if there had been a baby, she told him, and after a while he’d calmed down.
I go through the door at the back of the hallway into the new building. It’s always a shock stepping from dimly lit Georgian splendour into the bright low-ceilinged passageway, with its clean, symmetrical corners. Turning left into the stairwell, I climb the two short flights of stairs and come out on to the upstairs landing. I open the door of my room and turn on the light, which makes a kind of buzzing sound, which used to keep me awake but I now find almost comforting. I sit down in front of the dressing table. The photograph of the teenaged Charlie that I stole from her desk is tucked into the bottom of the mirror frame. She smiles up at me from her stripy deckchair with all of the older Charlie’s goodness but none of her sorrow.
I look at my reflection in the shatterproof mirror and see that I look ten years older; there are dark smudges under my eyes. I pick up my hairbrush and start brushing my hair in long, rhythmic strokes. The repetitive movement calms me and for a moment I forget Group, forget how the words ‘phantom pregnancy’ felt like electric shocks in my brain, and how someone put their arm around me and for a moment I thought it was Charlie, but when I opened my eyes it was Stella, and Dr Chakraborty was smiling at me like I’d just passed my chemistry GCSE.
I’m looking at my face in the mirror, and I’m not thinking of anything except how I need to brush my teeth and how much it pisses me off that we’re not allowed floss in here, when my attention is caught by something on the bed behind me. It is small and pale blue. I peer more closely into the blurry mirror and my stomach twists into a hard knot of dread.
Then I scream.