Jack stares at his computer. The figures on the spreadsheet jump and judder before his eyes. He blinks, and the numbers steady and settle back into their rows and columns, but it’s no use. He can’t concentrate; his mind refuses to stay in work mode. Tonight, what happened with Heather… None of that was good. And then, that moment of weakness he showed, when he just… blurted it out, that thing about wishing he was normal. Why did he do that? Where did that come from?
Sometimes, he can convince himself he is normal; that the way he lives is a perfectly valid choice for someone who runs an international business. But it’s not, is it? Not really. He knows that, and everyone else does too. And yet, most of the time, he gets on with life and the job and it’s fine. Except now…
Jack stands up and starts to pace the room. It’s just before three in the morning, and he knows Rhona will be up shortly with what, if he lived in the daytime world, would be his afternoon coffee, maybe with a slice of her delicious homemade cake on the side. He’s needed that more than ever over the past few days, that little touch of—
There’s the word again.
Normality.
He’s not feeling good. His mental health is spiralling downwards and he hates himself for it. He hates feeling weak and unable to control his emotions.
He hates her.
He hates her more every day, even though it’s been more than twenty years since he last saw her. Since the day she left him.
His mother. The woman who made him what he is today, both good and bad. The woman who destroyed his life – and who gave him everything at the same time.
Carol Shannon was an extraordinarily successful businesswoman. She started Shannon Medical in the 80s and grew it rapidly. While her husband climbed the ranks of the Metropolitan Police, Carol managed to have a baby and carry on working full-time, taking a young Jack into the office with her and teaching him about the company he would later inherit from the minute he could talk.
But Carol had her demons too. When he was a child, he knew only that his mother would have days when she didn’t go to work but instead stayed in bed, sobbing, while his father wandered helplessly in and out of the bedroom, telling a fretful young Jack that Mummy was tired and needed to be left alone. As a teenager, he slowly began to understand a little more, hearing the words ‘depression’ and ‘bipolar’ for the first time. He looked them up and realised his mother was ill rather than just sad or angry. And then, came the day everything changed.
Jack was sixteen. It was summertime and they were a week into a heatwave, the soil in the carefully tended beds in their large garden cracked and dry. Jack loved the outdoors, and he’d spent the morning cycling through the local woods with a group of school mates. On their way back, they stopped for a dip in the lake, where they splashed and laughed, loving the freedom from school and rules. He arrived home just after two, expecting the house to be empty. Both his parents should have been at work, but his mother’s car was in the driveway. Although he made a quick tour of the house, calling her name, there was no response, the rooms silent and empty.
Dread began to creep over him then, starting low in his stomach and crawling upwards. It tightened his chest, making his hands tingle. He knew, somehow, what he would find when he forced himself to walk on stiff, reluctant legs down to the bottom of the garden and through the archway that led into what was always known as ‘Mum’s bit’, a quiet seating area with a gently bubbling water feature, and a timber pergola covered in jasmine and honeysuckle. He saw her as soon as he passed under the arch. She was swaying gently, the sun so bright that for a few moments it looked as if a spotlight were shining on her, turning her blonde hair into a glimmering halo. He ran to the pergola and pulled frantically at her clothes, her body; he tried desperately to free her, to stop what was happening, but he knew even as he screamed and begged that it was pointless. She was gone. She’d left them. She’d left him.
Slowly, over the next few years, Jack’s life changed. When he turned eighteen he inherited the business, although he didn’t fully take over until he’d completed his business degree at university. By then, an initial shying away from sunshine had begun to develop into a reluctance to venture out in daylight at all, and soon he began to realise he no longer needed to. It was his business, his life, and he could behave exactly as he wanted. And so he did. His father noticed, of course, and tried to understand, but he and Jack had never been as close as Jack and Carol, and although he offered help more than once, Jack’s angry refusals soon made him back off. When he got sick and died, there was no longer anyone to care what hours Jack kept, and as for the women in his life…
Jack stops pacing, and stands still, eyes fixed on the landscape on his wall. His mother had been his everything, and although logically he’s always known that she didn’t want to leave, that she didn’t reject him, it’s as if something in his brain won’t let that logic win. The sense of abandonment, of not being enough for his mother to stay alive for, haunts him, day and night. He tried, for a while, to separate these feelings from what happened with his girlfriends. He tried to understand when relationships didn’t work out. He tried to blame himself and not them. But he can’t seem to do it anymore.
He can’t seem to handle the betrayal, the feeling of being discarded, of being spurned and deserted. And that means he’s behaved badly, very badly. He’s hurt people who’ve hurt him. He’s hurt them in a way that’s so out of proportion to their perceived crimes that it’s shocked even him. He needs help, he knows that, but he also knows he’s not ready to ask for it; may never be ready to ask for it.
And then Heather came back into his life. She’s the only one who’s ever come back, and he thought, he really thought for a while—
Stop it. STOP! he thinks fiercely.
He slumps back down onto his chair and sinks his head into his hands.
Maybe after this, things can change. But not yet. Not until this latest chain of events comes to its conclusion, because it’s too late to stop it now, isn’t it? He has to see this through, and there can only be one outcome.
And it’s not going to be a good one.
Certainly not for Heather, anyway.