No one is completely sure how the rabbit got into my room. There was a temporary orderly on duty in the afternoon yesterday and there’s a suggestion she might know something about it. Maybe it arrived by courier or was hand-delivered, and she brought it up to my room thinking it to be something sentimental with its missing ears. But the agency say she’s working somewhere else now, and no one has followed it up.
In risk-management terms, cuddly toys don’t come high up on the priority list.
‘Is there a chance you might have put it there yourself, Hannah?’ Dr Roberts asks me at our one-to-one this morning.
‘Me? Why would I do that? Are you suggesting I’m deluded?’
He doesn’t answer. Just gazes at me. And then I look around at where I am and who I’m with and realize that’s exactly what he is saying. We’re all deluded in here.
‘What you have to remember, Hannah, is that you were able to compartmentalize yourself before, weren’t you? The part of you that was lying about the doctor’s appointments and the scans? You were able to detach that part off from the rest of you, to the extent that, even while all that intellectual subterfuge was going on, all those lies you made up to deceive the people around you, your body steadfastly believed itself to be pregnant.’
‘And you think that means I’m capable of having a cuddly toy brought in, hacking off its ears for my own amusement, then laying it on my bed to freak myself out with it?’
He doesn’t answer and I wonder if he’s thinking that it sounds a lot more reasonable than inventing a baby that doesn’t exist.
Afterwards, in art therapy, I can’t concentrate. I keep wondering if it’s possible that I could hide something like that from myself.
‘Are you worried about something, Hannah?’
Laura is leaning against the table, where I’m painting an abstract impression of a bowl of fruit. ‘Ignore the banananess and lemonness of them, just concentrate on the colour and the texture and the light and shade,’ she’d told us. ‘You don’t want someone to think, That’s a good likeness of a peach, you want them to be able to taste it just by looking at it. To imagine biting through the flesh and that burst of juice in the mouth. You want to capture the essence, not the lines.’
I mix up a grape colour on my palette to avoid looking into her kind eyes because I know, if I do that, I’ll be lost. I don’t want to cry. Laura reaches out, nudges my chin gently so I have to look at her.
‘Is it Charlie still?’
‘No.’
But as soon as she’s said it I realize that it is still Charlie. If Charlie was still here, I wouldn’t have gone to pieces in Group when Odelle said ‘phantom pregnancy’, or lost the plot over a stupid toy. ‘I miss her,’ I say, painting a purply-red swirl on my paper.
‘I know. We all miss her. She was the lifeblood of this place.’
All of a sudden, I have an urge to confide in someone.
‘Charlie knew something about something,’ I say incoherently. ‘About someone. She was researching something on the internet. It was—’
A scream makes me drop my paintbrush so that a splodge of paint spreads out across the paper.
The new arrival, Katy, is standing up by her table with her hands over her ears.
‘She shouldn’t have done that,’ she says, her words coming out ragged and uneven.
Next to her, Judith is concentrating on her painting, as if unaware of the commotion.
‘Judith, did you do something to upset Katy?’
Laura’s voice is as low and gentle as ever, but there is a catch in her throat and for the first time it occurs to me that the staff, too, have lost someone they liked. They, too, are grieving.
‘It was an accident. My paintbrush just flicked some paint across her paper. I put too much on. It’s only the tiniest spot.’
Laura puts her arm around Katy. Asks Odelle to clear away the spoiled paper and bring a fresh new sheet.
I look back at my own painting and the streak of purple-red paint in the middle. Laura’s voice echoes in my head.
Lifeblood.