Now that I’m not far from the date I’d decided Emily would have been due, I think I might finally be ready to let her go.
We have the easels out today and we are painting a chair on which Laura has draped a piece of fabric with a beautiful blue-and-white fleur-de-lis print.
‘Look at the way it hangs, the way the pattern changes around the folds in the material. Look at the contrast between the restrained colours of the chair itself and the vibrancy of the print. What about the textures? The hard, polished wood and the soft weave of the material. Switch on all your senses. This is the moment. Right here, right now. This glorious blue-and-white print. This earthy chair.’
Laura is in full flow this morning. It’s something she talks about a lot, switching on our senses. It’s a form of mindfulness. If we ground ourselves in the here and now and focus on what we can see, hear, smell, touch, all the blessings that surround us, there won’t be room in our thoughts for the things that have brought us here, the dark shadows that lurk at the edges of us.
I find I enjoy the limitations of our still life. The world honed to a point where only the chair and the fabric exist. I am so engrossed in my painting I don’t notice Laura is behind me until I feel her warm breath on my neck, her hand on my shoulder.
‘Well done, Hannah. Your work has come on so much since you arrived. You seem so much more alert to the world around you. Remember how dark your palette was when you first started? How everything ended up a mixture of brown?’
‘That’s because it took me ages to judge just how potent even a drop of black paint could be?’
She looks at me, and I pre-empt what she is about to say: ‘Please don’t tell me how that is a metaphor for the human condition.’
She smiles. ‘You know me too well.’
‘Laura, can you come here a sec? I’m having trouble with my perspective.’
That’s Odelle, of course, needing attention. She’s very possessive over people, but particularly Laura. The first time Laura invited me into her office for a chat, Charlie said, ‘Odelle’s not going to like that.’ And she was right. Whenever she can, Odelle disrupts my time with Laura, suddenly requiring urgent help with a self-generated art project, one time bursting into Laura’s office in tears because Joni had caught her guzzling water from the tap in the bathroom before her morning weigh-in.
I glance over to my left, where Katy is chewing anxiously on the wooden end of a paintbrush and staring down at her still-virginal paper, not daring to start in case with the very first brushstroke she commits some fatal error.
As this is a Strong Day, as opposed to one of the days when I wake up to find I have deconstructed during the night and lie scattered in little pieces all over the mattress like toast crumbs, I allow myself to think of Charlie.
It’s in the art room that I feel closest to her. She loved coming here, experimenting with chalky pastels and colour washes. One time I came in and found her bent over her paper, painting a self-portrait with the brush in her mouth.
‘Why not?’ she answered when I asked her the obvious question. ‘If we don’t try everything, what’s even the point?’
She didn’t kill herself.
The conviction is a weight I cannot shake off.
Sometimes I’d come here looking for Charlie and find her deep in conversation with Laura, talking about art or politics or just gossiping about Joni’s latest faux pas or whether or not Dr Chakraborty was hot. Or they’d be in the back office and Charlie would be curled up in the armchair with her eyes closed and Laura would be talking to her in a low, rhythmic voice and I’d back out because Charlie only wanted hypnotherapy when she was feeling tense and needed talking down.
She still didn’t kill herself, though.
After art I take my laptop to the day room. Darren glances up at the dinging sound when I turn it on. He’s scribbling notes in an A4 notebook. I remember he has exams coming up but can’t remember what they are. I wonder if his new girlfriend is distracting him from studying at home.
I check my emails, impatiently deleting all the junk. There is an email from Becs, filling me in on all the office gossip, and one from my mother telling me she’s still ‘running background checks’ on the clinic and Dr Roberts to ‘set my mind at rest’.
Out of habit, I look for Meg’s name in my inbox, before remembering that we’re all but estranged. She wanted to come and see me when it all first happened, but I told Mum she couldn’t, not until she’s ready to apologize for the things she said about Danny. But I know my sister. She won’t apologize, because she still thinks she was right.
Maybe she was right, says a voice in my head.
Clicking abruptly off Hotmail, I consider for a moment logging in to Facebook, even though we’re not supposed to. Darren is clearly preoccupied with his studying and I’d love to catch up with what my friends are getting up to. Then I remember the last time I did that, when I’d only been in here a few days, and the shock of realizing that other people’s lives were going on just as before, even while my own was shredded beyond recognition. Instead, I call up Google. Charlie has been on my mind since I allowed myself to think about her in art earlier. I feel I’ve let her down by not taking any more steps towards finding out exactly what happened to her.
Taking her to-do list from my back pocket, where I always carry it, I smooth it out on the leg of my jeans. Book flights to Croatia.
This was not someone courting oblivion.
Then I gaze for a long time at that third entry. Google WK. The last time I’d tried to search for William Kingsley, it had thrown up so many returns I’d given up after page one, but now I resolve to persevere.
Checking to make sure Darren still has his nose buried in his notes, I put the name into the search engine. My spirits drop at the sight of the 3,750,000 results. Still, I begin to work my way through, skipping over the entries about the nineteenth-century politician and the estate agents in Missouri.
It’s not until page five that I find an entry that piques my interest. It’s a link to an article in the Daily Mail about medical misdiagnosis, highlighting various infamous cases where physicians have made catastrophic errors. And there at the bottom, almost in passing, is a line that reads, ‘as was the case with the now largely discredited evidence given by Dr William Kingsley in two misdiagnosed cases of Shaken Baby Syndrome’.
Shaken Baby Syndrome? I dredge my Diazepam-dulled brain for the information I know is in there somewhere and come up with a memory of a blonde woman standing on courtroom steps, having been freed from prison after evidence proved her baby most likely died from natural causes, and not because she’d lost control and shaken him.
I add ‘Shaken Baby Syndrome’ to William Kingsley’s name in the search box and instantly get pages of results. The first few are newspaper reports from the mid-1990s, all with one-word headings like ‘FREED!’ or ‘INNOCENT!’, with a photograph of one of two shell-shocked women, and a report of how their convictions for shaking their own babies to death had been overturned, casting doubt on the evidence of key medical experts such as neurologist Dr William Kingsley.
These are followed by earlier factual newspaper reports at the time of the original trials one or two years previously, and a long in-depth feature about one of the women, illustrated with a smiling family photograph of Mum, Dad and baby, and headlined, ‘SHE WAS THE PERFECT MUM – UNTIL SHE SNAPPED’. Towards the bottom of the feature there’s a photograph of the same woman taken just after her conviction for her baby’s murder, looking blank-eyed and slack-jawed.
Studying the photograph more closely, I give a start of recognition. There on the woman’s face is the same look that greeted me in the mirror when I first arrived here. The shell-shocked stare of someone whose world has just given way under their feet.
The search engine throws up a couple of links to websites set up by the families of the women and others in the same position protesting their innocence, and also a site advocating the reintroduction of hanging for women who murder their own children as well as one that links to a blog called ‘Baby-Killers’.
I still can’t be sure that this William Kingsley is the one Charlie was researching on the morning she died, but he is the right era, the right country at least. I scroll impatiently through, looking for anything that seems like it might throw more light on Dr William Kingsley and find, tucked away at the bottom of page six, a link that looks promising – ‘The Doctors Who Play God’, but before I can click on it a hand lands on my shoulder, causing me to gasp out loud in shock.
‘Why so jumpy?’
Stella has her head on one side, so her hair, which is swept up into a high ponytail, swings around her ears, and is regarding me quizzically.
‘You startled me.’
I click the little red circle on the screen so that the Google page disappears, leaving just my screensaver, a picture of Danny and me on our honeymoon, sitting under a palm tree on a white sandy beach in Costa Rica. It was taken by one of the hotel staff who’d just brought us cocktails and we are smiling as if we can’t believe our luck.
Or maybe that’s just me. Maybe Danny’s smile means something different. Maybe his smile just means ‘This beats being at work.’ Or ‘This’ll do nicely. For now.’
‘What were you doing? You looked completely engrossed.’
‘Just reading the papers.’
‘Well, turn it off then and come and talk to me. I need saving. Judith says she’s going to teach me to play chess. I don’t want to play chess with Judith. She’s too intense. Sometimes she stares at me as if she wants to turn me inside out to see how I work.’
Stella reaches across me and clicks the sleep option so that the screen goes dark, and I don’t know why but I get the feeling she just doesn’t want to look at Danny.
As we get up, I imitate Judith’s death stare and Stella giggles but, inside, a question is troubling me.
Why don’t I trust Stella?