It’s the day after Mum’s visit and, in Morning Group, we are focusing on Stella.
Well, everyone else is focusing on Stella. I am focusing on Dr Roberts focusing on Stella.
He is leaning back in his chair with his legs straight out in front of him, imposing deep into the circle formed by our chairs. His hands are clasped behind his head, and he is half smiling, as if we are all in on the same joke.
What does it mean that they have this history together? And how can Roberts not know it? Is she really so unrecognizable from the Catherine Pryor of all those years ago?
Stella is wearing a soft black leather dress that appears seamless and stretches over her body like a second skin reaching to the knee. We’re not allowed tights so her legs are bare, despite the cold outside, and on her feet is a pair of sparkling sequin platform shoes. Her blonde hair falls loosely around her shoulders. On her perfectly made-up face there is not a hint of fat. Just jutting bones over which the skin is stretched tight, like one of Laura’s canvases.
How much pain has gone into making Stella look this way? How many hours, days, spent in consulting rooms and operating suites? How much blood has it taken to wash away every trace of her former self? How many stitches hold this new Stella together?
Stella is talking about her childhood, a time when her parents were still together and she and her mother and father went to the theatre and afterwards called in to a restaurant where the maître d’ addressed her father by his first name and found them a table in the centre of the room, and the waitress fussed around them and her mother seemed actually to like the man she was married to. And both of them seemed actually to like Stella.
‘I think it’s really sad that being liked by your parents should be so unusual that it stands out in your mind like that,’ says Odelle.
‘My parents didn’t like me much either,’ says Katy. ‘Don’t think it did me much harm.’
‘How do you work that one out? You’re in the fucking loony bin,’ says Judith.
Nina, who has been rocking backwards and forwards on her chair, shrieks with laughter, until Dr Roberts flaps his hand in a quiet-down gesture. Then he sits up straight and leans forward.
‘Stella, we’ve talked a lot in these sessions about your early childhood. Do you feel able now to take us on a bit? To when you lived with your stepfather?’
In Group, Stella tends to circle around her stepfather like a suspect package. We know he was something high up in the military, which is why Stella’s family moved around so much. Then, when he retired from the military, he became a high-level security adviser, first working for an oil company in Iraq and later for the US government.
We know he has red hair.
We know that, whenever Stella refers to him, no matter how obliquely, her voice becomes higher pitched, like a child’s.
‘He didn’t like me much. My stepfather. Gordon. My mother is very beautiful and my stepfather used to say, “Shame how looks always skip a generation, hey, Cat?”’
‘Why did he call you Cat?’ Frannie wants to know.
Stella’s flush reaches her forehead so that even the areas of skin visible between the roots of her hair are shocking pink against the blonde.
‘It was nothing. A stupid nickname my father gave me. Gordon used it sarcastically. He liked to rubbish anything to do with my real dad.’
Stella’s hand worries at the necklace around her throat.
‘And how did you feel about him?’ Roberts asks her, tapping his fingers against his thigh.
‘In the beginning, I hated him for stealing my mother from my father and making my father go away. It was my father who introduced Gordon to Mama and, after they got together, my father always referred to him as the Snake.’
‘And afterwards?’
‘After my father had disappeared from the scene and it was obvious Gordon was sticking around, I tried to win his approval by working really hard, getting top marks, but he wasn’t interested in how I did at school. It was all about appearances for him. The smart car, the stylish home, the gorgeous woman on his arm. I was chubby and plain. I didn’t fit at all. And he made that quite obvious.’
Odelle sits upright, bouncing in her seat with her arm up like we’re at fucking kindergarten or something.
‘Stella, do you think that could be why you put yourself through all that plastic surgery? Because you’re still looking for his approval?’
Judith starts a sarcastic slow handclap but Roberts merely says, ‘That’s very perceptive, Odelle. Perhaps you’d like to respond, Stella?’
But Stella has had enough of talking now and is playing noughts and crosses on her leather dress with her finger. And I think:
I wish Gordon hadn’t done whatever terrible thing he must have done to break you so completely. And:
I wonder if his name is even Gordon. And:
He can’t really be an ex-military-turned-security-adviser, or Roberts would have recognized you for sure. And I think:
What else are you lying about, Stella?
Danny looks everywhere except at me. ‘It’s weird seeing you out of that place,’ he says finally. ‘I hardly recognize you.’
We are in a bistro on the high street later that afternoon, a few doors from the café Stella and I visited a few days ago. I am facing a huge canvas print of Audrey Hepburn with a long cigarette and I look at her face whenever I’ve had enough of the frown on Danny’s. What’s a girl to do? Audrey seems to say.
‘Dr Roberts says I should take trips out now. To get used to being away from the clinic. Ready for when I come home.’
When I say the word ‘home’, Danny does something weird with his mouth so that, just for a minute, he doesn’t look handsome any more. A pebble drops down to the pit of my stomach and lodges there, hard and heavy.
I change the subject.
‘Tell me again why you don’t like Stella.’
He is so surprised by the question that he actually looks me in the eye before glancing swiftly away.
‘Everything about Stella is too much. The looks, the clothes. The way she is with you, like she wants you to be her mummy or something. She’s damaged, Hannah.’
‘We’re all damaged.’
It comes out sharper than I intended.
‘Not like that, Hannah. Not like her. You know she came on to me?’
‘I don’t believe you.’
The pebble in my gut has grown spikes and is moving around inside me.
‘It’s true. I bumped into her in the corridor when I was coming in to visit you. I mean, literally, bumped into her. And she kind of rubbed herself against me.’
‘You misread it, that’s all.’
‘For God’s sake, Hannah. I know when a woman is coming on to me.’
‘Oh yeah. Sorry. I forgot you’ve had recent experience of it. You’ve got a bloody A level in women coming on to you. You’re a leading world expert in it.’
Danny throws down the fork he’s been playing with so it clatters on to his plate. A woman at the next table looks up sharply. She has a tiny, flesh-coloured sticking plaster below one eye that looks like a wart.
‘There’s no point in talking to you when you’re like this. I’ve said sorry a million times, but you have to understand that what happened, what I did, doesn’t give you a lifetime’s membership to the moral high ground. It doesn’t make you right all the time. Or me wrong.
‘Stella is damaged, and damaged people can be dangerous. Just be careful. That’s all I’m saying.’
I go to bed early, the row with Danny still fresh in my mind. I brush my teeth in the en suite and try not to look at my pale, pasty face in the mirror. I am convinced I won’t sleep, have a magazine ready beside my bed, but I drop off almost immediately. I dream Stella is chasing me, although she has Steffie’s face. I know that she’s carrying something that will hurt me, although I don’t know what it is. All I know is that I must keep running. I must go faster, but my legs are made of lead.
I wake up panting, my muscles tensed with fear. For a moment I allow myself the delicious relief of knowing it was a dream, but then I realize it was a noise that woke me up. The noise of my bedroom door closing.
Someone is in the room.
I lie as if pinned to the pillow, unable to move or speak. The room is dark, but there’s a crack in the curtains which allows a narrow slit of light to fall into the room. While I watch, paralysed, a dark shape moves across the foot of my bed. As it passes through the slit of light, there’s a smell of coconut shampoo and a momentary glint of platinum-blonde hair.