Ever since Stella told me about the older boyfriend who used to choose her clothes for her, I’ve been feeling angry about the many ways it’s possible for a man to fuck up your life.
I’m trying to keep focused on Stella, but my mind keeps drifting back to Danny and what he did with Steffie, and I can’t go there, because that way madness lies.
‘Why are you so concerned about what Stella told you?’ asks Laura. It’s mid-afternoon, and Charlie died more than two weeks ago, and I am hiding out in Laura’s little office at the back of the art room while the others are in the dance studio doing some kind of exercise Grace has invented that mixes yoga with keep fit. She calls it Stretchercise. I call it a kind of torture.
To be accurate, Laura’s office is actually more like a cupboard. There’s a desk that’s completely covered with paintings and drawings, and art books so well thumbed their pages curl up at the corners. There’s one comfortable armchair, where I’m sitting, with a soft tartan woollen blanket covering my knees. And a swivel chair from which Laura is looking at me thoughtfully over the top of her tortoiseshell glasses. The whirring of the fan heater blocks out any external noise, making our space feel even more intimate. No window, just the orange glow from a table lamp in the shape of a crystallized rock on Laura’s desk. A lit, scented candle is releasing a heavenly smell of jasmine that feels heady in this enclosed space.
‘Maybe because it just reminds me how little I really know anyone here. I mean, even though I’ve only been here two months, it still feels as though we’re all like family, because we know each other’s secrets. But really, we’re only giving away what we want to give away.’
Laura nods, and the glasses slip back over her eyes so they appear magnified and blurry with understanding.
‘I thought I knew Charlie,’ I press on. Now that I’ve started picking at this scab I can’t seem to stop. ‘But I didn’t know her. I saw her the morning she died and had no inkling what she was planning. None at all.’
‘So you do accept she killed herself?’
I shrug.
‘I swing from knowing that she did it to being utterly convinced that she couldn’t have done it, all in the same minute. My thoughts are so disjointed at the moment. So all over the place.’
‘Your mum says you feel like you could be next.’
I look at her, then back at the ground. It sounds ludicrous when she says it.
‘I get paranoid, I guess. Isn’t that why most of us are here?’
It comes out whiny and defensive. I don’t mean it that way.
‘Would hypnotherapy help? I can’t promise to make the paranoia disappear but I can certainly help you relax.’
I consider it. I know it has helped some of the others, but I worry about the lack of control.
I shake my head.
‘Let me at least give you a massage then.’
Laura gets up and stands behind me with her hands on my shoulders, and the sudden physical intimacy is almost more than I can stand. It feels like it’s been so long since I was properly touched. To my horror, tears start to pool in the corner of my eyes.
I’m relieved when Laura sits back down again, as if she has sensed the turmoil going on inside me.
‘Your mum asked me if you ever paint your husband,’ says Laura, and my stomach lurches in shock at her mentioning Danny like that, without warning.
‘I don’t need to paint him. He’s never out of my mind.’
She looks at me, long and unflinching, until I look away.
‘Do you want to tell me about that night? The night everyone found out there was no baby? Sometimes it helps to talk about the bad stuff and confront it head on. It lessens its power.’
I don’t want to tell her. But once the memory is in my head it swells until it’s all I can think of.
‘I slipped on a Domino’s Pizza flyer,’ I tell her, as if it being Domino’s might somehow change it to a funny story, easier to tell. ‘I didn’t want to go to the hospital, but Danny insisted. He was so protective of me and Em …’
I don’t tell her how much I miss his protectiveness. Because it makes me sound weak and pathetic, and that’s not who I am. Was.
I don’t tell her either about the row we’d had just before I fell. About her – who else? Though I’d banned Danny from mentioning her name, I exerted no such control over myself. Steffie was like a form of Tourette’s for me. She came out of nowhere. We’d be eating dinner and chatting about something on the news, an election in Italy, for example, everything calm and civilized, and that would make me think of how much I’d love to visit Italy – Tuscany, Florence, all the places I’ve never been – and without warning an anger would sweep through me and out she’d come. ‘I expect Steffie loves Italy.’ Danny blinking at me in confusion.
The thing was, she was always in my head, skating across the surface of my thoughts. She was the shadow in front of my sun and, no matter where I moved and what I did to evade her, there she was, blocking the light. And because I never told Danny, because I didn’t want to give her that victory, it was always a shock to him when I couldn’t bear it any more and I’d lob her at him like a grenade, seemingly from nowhere.
We’d been watching something on telly. We used to love American box sets but now they were a minefield, with their casual infidelities and broken marriages, so we’d started choosing programmes purely on the basis that they were less likely to contain trigger elements, which basically ruled out most adult dramas. So we ended up slumped in front of anodyne shows that neither of us had much interest in. A lot of cookery programmes. That one about people building their own houses. But even then, Steffie managed to blow like dust into every crack and crevice so there was a greasy film of her over everything we watched.
On this particular night, it was a programme about an unlikely choir of former prisoners. Danny claimed it was emotionally manipulative, but I saw him wipe a tear away when he thought I wasn’t looking. One of the people taking part was a gruff, middle-aged man who’d never been able to form close relationships and wondered if it was because he’d been given away at birth. ‘It stays with you. Rejection. It’s like an invisible tattoo you don’t know you’re wearing.’
‘Have I got one of those?’ I turned to Danny, who hadn’t made the connection and gazed at me blankly. ‘An invisible tattoo? The rejection tattoo?’
Danny sighed his ‘not this again’ sigh, which just infuriated me more. ‘I’ve told you,’ he said. ‘It wasn’t a rejection of you. It wasn’t about you.’
I’ve heard that’s said quite a lot. It’s in the Cheater’s Manual, apparently. It was nothing to do with you. It was about me, something I was going through. As if it makes it better to know we didn’t even feature in the decision that shattered our lives.
I stormed out of the flat, aiming at a dramatic exit but really intending to go down and visit Marco. Only, on the landing was a stack of flyers. Sometimes I pick up the mail near the front door and sort through it on my way upstairs, leaving the stuff I don’t want outside on the landing, ready for recycling. The flyer on the top was a shiny Domino’s Pizza one, and my foot, in its smooth-soled Moroccan slipper, went sliding over the top of it, and just like that I was falling.
Danny came flying out of our flat and practically beat me to the bottom of the stairs. We both knew straight away that I’d done something to my wrist. It was badly swollen and I screamed when Danny tried to touch it.
‘How did you feel on the way to the hospital?’ Laura wants to know. ‘Did you realize on any level that things were about to come crashing down around you?’
I try to think back to that car dash. Surely I must have had some clue that my fantasy world was about to implode? But the truth is I didn’t see it as a fantasy. It was real. Emily was real. The rest of it – the appointments, the scans – they were compartmentalized. Hidden away in a pocket of my head where I couldn’t find them. I remember feeling panic, sitting there in the front seat of the car. But the panic was for her. Not for me. For her safety, not mine.
‘I had my wrist X-rayed first. Just a sprain. Then Danny insisted the doctor check over the baby. “Just to be sure.”’
‘And then?’ asks Laura.
How to describe it? The doctor, a junior with purple rings around her eyes like cartoon glasses who told us she’d been on duty for thirteen hours straight, asking how pregnant I was and her face changing when Danny told her six months. Knowing it wasn’t right. But she put her stethoscope in her ears anyway and placed the cold metal disc on my bump, and I made a joke about it being so cold and talked about when I’d gone for a smear test and how cold that had been and how the nurse told me to ‘just relax’ and every single muscle had instantly clenched. But then the doctor left the room abruptly and I knew I should warn Danny, although, even then, I couldn’t have said what I needed to warn him about, only instead I kept on about the smear test, and he must have thought I was getting hysterical. And now the junior doctor with the purple rings around her eyes was back with an older doctor who introduced herself and said she just needed to perform another check, and by now Danny was sensing something wasn’t right and looking at me in confusion, and I felt it then, a sucking of energy from my centre, and I knew.
It came in stages. ‘I’m afraid there is no baby.’ Then, after another test: ‘There never was any baby.’
Danny’s grief turned to incomprehension as the ultrasound gel dripped down my belly, and I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see him, or the lying monitor that said Emily was never there.
‘You made it all up? The scans? The GP appointments?’
‘I didn’t need them,’ I told him. ‘I know what I felt. I know what my body told me.’
I look at Laura now and say, ‘I had no idea then that my body was a big, fat liar.’
We both laugh, as if it is funny.
There’s a knock and, before Laura has a chance to speak, Bridget Ashworth pokes her head around the door, bringing with her an icy draught. Her eyes behind her glasses flit around the room, as if taking account of the messy desk and the artwork on the walls and the two of us arranged in our chairs as if at confessional, and she frowns.
‘I didn’t realize you had company, Laura. Sorry to interrupt.’ She doesn’t sound sorry. ‘Oliver … Dr Roberts … would like a quick word in his office.’
Laura’s smile never leaves her face, but four deathly white splodges of knuckle appear on the hand that grips her mug.
We follow Bridget out into the hallway. She’s wearing the same black jacket as when she caught me in Charlie’s room the first time, but I notice the white cat hair has gone.
‘Everything’s in chaos today,’ she calls over her shoulder. ‘The film crew are shooting in the admin office.’ I can tell from how she says this how much she enjoys bandying around words like ‘film crew’ and ‘shooting’. She likes how it makes her sound inside her own head, the kind of person it makes her. Stripped of the fan heater and the woollen blanket, I shiver.
While Laura follows Bridget Ashworth’s clacking heels towards the main staircase that leads up to Dr Roberts’ office and the smaller consulting rooms, I cross the hallway into the day room. The disruption of my session with Laura, just as I had forced myself to dredge up the most painful of memories, has left me feeling anxious, like there’s a line of ants marching across my chest. I head for the shelving unit at the side of the room where we each have a cubbyhole labelled with our names, to store the things we can’t be bothered to cart upstairs to our rooms. It’s where I keep the colouring books that arrive in the post from work with gratifying regularity.
The one I’m working on at the moment contains intricate patterns of flowers and leaves that interweave and wind themselves over the pages. I take it from the top of the pile, together with my felt-tip pens, which I keep in a large, zipped pencil case, and sit down at the big oval table near the window. Inès, the French woman with the lazy eye who comes in twice a week to offer horticulture therapy, is pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken branches and twigs across the drive outside, with her ancient dog waddling behind. Her wellington boots make a soft crunching noise on the gravel. A puff of black smoke in the sky overhead tells me she has the incinerator going somewhere safely away from us residents.
Darren is sitting in an armchair at the front of the room with an open file balanced on his knee, and he looks over and smiles as he catches my eye. Gradually, I feel the tension easing.
I open the colouring book. It’s a new one, with only one page filled in. The picture I did last bursts off the paper in blooms of vivid fuchsia and violet. Crayoning, echoes Danny’s voice in my head. As I turn to the next page, a flash of colour further on in the book catches my attention. Curious, I flick through until I find a page around three-quarters of the way through that appears to have already been filled in.
‘No!’
Darren looks up, startled to see me on my feet, my hand over my mouth. He crosses the room to see what I’m looking at.
‘I don’t understand,’ he says. And he picks up the book to have a closer look at the page, where, in place of a design featuring plump camellias and sprays of delicate meadowsweet, someone has taken the colours that most resemble flesh tones and, painstakingly, with minute attention to detail, mapped out the softly rounded shape of a baby.