15 | Karen
‘Day by day, what you choose, what you say and what you do is who you become.’
— Heraclitus, 500 bc
Saturday morning
Karen woke up and for a moment she had no idea where she was. The sound of the road outside the window and slow childish breathing in the room disorientated her, until the memories of the past couple of days came back into focus and a sense of relief and purpose flooded through her. She stretched, and as she did so a shaft of sunlight landed on her arm and she lay for a moment watching the little boy next to her, his sleeping face quiet and without care. A lick of sandy-coloured hair lay across his forehead and his mouth was slightly parted. Looking at him, Karen understood why she had been led on to the path she had taken. She was there for her son, to help him, to understand him, and in doing so she would help so many more.
Jamie had been exhausted by the time he got into bed last night, but Karen had all she needed now, and had managed to get through more in thirty-six hours with Jamie than she usually managed in months working with a subject she didn’t know. Measured intelligence, social interaction, communication, repetitive behaviours, sensory responses, motor skills – Karen had tripped through the list and felt satisfied.
She smiled to herself thinking of the many times she had inwardly laughed at exactly the same self-indulgent introspection from colleagues. She had never taken decisions based on emotions, her ex-husband would have been only too happy to testify to that. She reached over to her bedside table and looked at her phone. It was Saturday morning and she had disabled her alarm, but, as she disconnected the charger and focused, she saw she had thirty-two missed calls. She had never had thirty-two missed calls in her life, and the confidence that had started to grow in her disappeared in a popped balloon of contentment and achievement. She pressed voicemail and with an unsteady hand put the phone to her ear, thinking only death or disaster could possibly have caused this, and the fury she felt for the possible loss of her embryonic plans was almost unbearable.
Karen, where the fuck are you? Your daughter needs you, she’s at the hospital.
Karen, your little protégé attacked Sarah. She’s in shock, at the hospital, and your latest lame duck has been arrested. It’s 10 p.m., where are you?
Listen, you bitch, you decided to put a severely autistic young guy to work in a morgue so that you could observe him like a lab rat and very nearly succeeded in getting our daughter killed. No one knows where you are or where Jamie is – call me. It’s one a.m.
The messages went on, culminating in one from a doctor at the hospital telling her that her daughter had been attacked and held by a man known to her, one Nicholas Peters, and that he’d been arrested for murder. Karen sat for a moment on the edge of the bed feeling as if she might cry or scream. Her plans for the future were in tatters and she walked over to the little desk, gathered up her papers and her laptop and put them away. Jamie stirred and she sat opposite him, handed him his headphones and explained that they were going to see Sarah. He put them on, then pulled on the jeans and T-shirt from the day before, and the day before that, carefully moving the iPod from hand to hand. He seemed more withdrawn and refused Karen’s offers of help, pushing her hands away and repeating Sarah’s name. They got into the car and drove towards the hospital.
Jamie kept asking for breakfast, and as Karen walked into the familiar surroundings she steered him towards the canteen. It wouldn’t help anyone to have Jamie agitated while Sarah needed attention, so they sat quietly at the same table where she had taken Nick for lunch only days before. She ordered Jamie a bacon sandwich and herself a coffee, and she carefully cut the crusts off and quartered the sandwich before putting it in front of him. He was on the third quarter of his breakfast when she heard her name being yelled across the canteen.
‘Karen, what the fuck?’
Her ex-husband was standing in the queue, a bottle of water and some magazines in one hand, and Jack attached to the other. He stormed towards the table, and Jack hung back, not greeting Karen, while Jamie carried on eating his bacon sandwiches, nibbling all the way round the edge then moving towards the centre.
‘Stop it! I had to give Jamie some breakfast or he would have been hungry, upset and fretful and I didn’t want him to be like that when we saw Sarah. Tell me what happened. Your messages were so foul that I only listened to three.’
‘Your daughter apparently thought she had bonded with you the other evening and decided to surprise you by cooking supper and rescuing her brother as I was so out of my mind with worry that I’d phoned the police. Turned out she was the one who got the surprise when your little friend Nick got her into his flat then locked her in with a rotting corpse that just happened to be in his bed. What the fuck has been going on in that house and where the hell have you been since Thursday afternoon? You’ve been gone two whole days, Karen, with a little boy who depends on us for security. We’ve been out of our minds with worry. The police have been looking for you; they finally agreed to do a phone trace yesterday and they couldn’t even trace you through that, because you switched the bloody thing off. What the hell were you thinking? Sarah needed you. We all needed you… ’
His voice trailed off and Karen couldn’t meet his eyes. She lifted one of Jamie’s headphones away from his ear, turned his chin towards her, and folded his remaining bit of sandwich into a napkin. She beckoned to him and she followed Charlie. Jamie followed her, and Jack trailed behind. It was a sorry caravan of disconnected souls, a broken family, and no one said a word. Around them people in the canteen carried on, eating, serving, texting.
Sarah looked tiny on the hospital bed, white and small and young. It surprised Karen, who was so used to seeing her as a surrogate mother to the boys, or someone who could run to the shop or let herself in after school or make her own way to friends’ houses. This was a child, and she lay on her side in the middle of the white sheet in a foetal position, eyes open, staring into the middle distance. Karen hesitated, then approached the bed.
‘Sarah, it’s Mum. What happened? Are you hurt?’
Sarah stretched out her arm towards her, but before Karen could take her hand Jamie came round from behind her and the little white limb wrapped around him. He crawled up on to the bed and lay with his back to his sister.
‘Sarah.’
‘Jamie, where have you been? I was so worried about you.’
The two of them lay together, and Sarah breathed in and out through her brother’s hair. Karen seemed to be surplus to requirements, so she beckoned Charlie outside.
‘What happened? I was trying to assess Jamie, I fell asleep, I didn’t know she was coming over. Did he hurt her? Touch her?’
Karen vaguely remembered telling Sarah she would be taking Jamie back to the flat last night. She swallowed and tried to collect her thoughts, the realisation of what she had done creeping in now.
‘It was fucking chaos, Karen. I got a call from the football club to say that Jack hadn’t been collected. I was trying to juggle the other two kids, and you disappeared in the middle of my work conference week. I got in the car and went to get him, then all hell broke loose. The police called, and I went round to yours and found the whole place under siege: tape, police cars and lockdown. Sarah inside, Nick inside, your policeman boyfriend inside, and, as it turns out, the dead body of a girl who had come to see him about a cleaning job also inside. I stood on the pavement with Nick’s parents, and our son, watching Sarah screaming through a smashed window, and you were nowhere to be found, as usual. Nick’s mother and grandfather were called, they made fuck-all difference, and eventually Tam the hero policeman emerged with our daughter. I’ve had enough, Karen. You aren’t a mother, you’re a selfish, career-obsessed bitch. I need a coffee; I haven’t slept for two nights. Go in and pretend to our daughter that you give a shit, comfort her – just keep the fuck away from me. You need to call the police and explain what happened and you need to call your lawyer when things calm down, because I want
full custody of the kids. I can’t let you put them through this any more.’
Karen wasn’t going to explain again to Charlie that she’d been helping Jamie, or that he was better off in her hands, where he would get all the help he needed. This wasn’t the time and she needed Charlie to calm down first. She put her bag down by the side of Sarah’s bed and pulled a chair across the room. Jamie was awake but Sarah’s eyes were closed. Only her hand, which was gently stroking Jamie’s back, indicated that she was conscious.
‘I need to talk to you, Sarah, I just want you to know that I’m sorry. I was trying to help Jamie, I think I know what’s wrong with him, and you know my work, how important it is. I think Jamie has exactly the condition that Mum is working on, and that’s why I wasn’t there last night, I was helping Jamie, can you understand that?’
Karen decided that was enough of an explanation for now – just keep away from the technical stuff, there was no point in trying to explain Jamie’s condition in detail while things were so fraught. Sarah’s hand stopped stroking her brother and her arm tightened around him. Her eyes opened and instead of broken and sorry, the expression Karen saw was pure fury.
‘Are you here to tell me about my brother, Mum? I’ve been telling you about him since the day he was born. You were so glad that he was quiet, and didn’t need cuddling, and was happy to sit on his own. He wasn’t happy. I tried to tell you, school tried to tell you, Dad tried to tell you. You were working. How can you sit down and not even ask me if I’m alright? All you’re worried about is excusing yourself and getting out of here. I was in a flat with a murderer, one that you experimented on by taking him to work with you, one that you probably pushed over the edge. He isn’t well, Mum – what the hell were you thinking, putting him in a morgue?’
‘I was doing it for the greater good. I’m trying to collate information, to make a firm set of diagnoses and criteria for the different types of autism, and Nick was helping me with that. It’s hugely important, Sarah.’
‘Yes, you’ve been telling us that all our lives. More important than us, more important than staying with Dad. More important than remembering my music recital, or Jamie’s first day at school, and more important than looking after any of us. We dragged ourselves up, Mum, with childminders and au pairs and after-school clubs, and all the time Jamie getting more and more detached, and finally you wake up to him and how different he is, on the night when your social experiment nearly kills me. Leave us alone. You can’t do anything for Jamie. You’ve done enough already.’
Karen was furious. She had sacrificed her personal life, her marriage and her time with her children for something more important, something that was world-changing, and she couldn’t believe that her daughter thought she should have been sitting at home making fish fingers.
‘Sarah, you aren’t old enough to understand the decisions I’ve made or how difficult they were. Don’t you think I would rather have just sat at home and played house? I live alone; I’ve given everything up for my work. It’s been a tough, tough journey but I’ve done it because I believe my work is important. I’ve got the right to choose to help others, to use my brain, to share my knowledge and my resources. Surely you can see that? You’re a bright girl.’
Sarah opened her hand. In it, squashed and bloody, was a small piece of tissue.
‘How many teeth has Jamie lost? How many times have you forgotten his birthday? I’m the tooth fairy for the boys because she never visited me; I save my pocket money from Dad to make a cake for Jack when he wins a race at sports day. You’re right, I am a bright girl, but I’ll still love my children, if I’m lucky enough to have any. I’ll make sure they know that they are more important than the faceless masses out there that you want to rescue so badly. You can choose anything you want, of course you can, you can give us the leftover parts of you when you can spare them, but you can’t just turn up here and pretend to be my mum, or steal Jamie because you suddenly think he’s interesting. You don’t have that right any more.’
Karen was exhausted. She tried to think of something to say, but a doctor came in to check on Sarah and it was easier to ask if she was OK physically, and then go and get a coffee. Karen knew she’d done enough. Things would calm down; Sarah had been through a lot. Charlie was outside with Jack and hardly looked up as the mother of his children walked past.
‘Charlie I know you’re upset – let me take the boys. Sarah seems understandably angry and it’s probably best if you can give her your undivided attention until they release her and she’s calmed down.’
His face looked different now, this man she had known for years. His expression was somewhere between despair and desperation.
‘I’ll call my mother to come and collect them. She needs both of us, Karen, can’t you see that? Have you even said sorry to Sarah? What kind of woman just checks out for two days with one of her kids and turns her phone off?’
‘Me. This kind of woman. The kind who doesn’t think life spent at NCT classes and in front of the television is enough, Charlie. Where’s your ambition, where’s your passion? You aren’t a man, for fuck’s sake. I checked in with you, I rang Sarah. Not everyone is attached to each other every minute of every day; some of us have things to do, and goals to achieve.’
Out of the corner of her eye, Karen saw a movement. She turned, and Jamie and Sarah were standing, hand in hand, in the open doorway of her room.
‘Mum, go. Do you know that last night, when I was in that room with Nick and that poor dead girl, I thought about you? I wondered if we were in your head at all. Do you worry about us? Do you care whether we’re happy? Do you think to yourself about what might make Jamie better, or what you could do to take a bit of pressure off Dad and me? Last night I decided you must love us deep down and it gave me something to hang on to, but now I think back to the nights you left us with au pairs who had just arrived and couldn’t speak a word of English so that you could go back to the hospital, and then blamed them for everything when they left because they couldn’t cope with your chaos and running the house, and feeding us, and being our surrogate mum. You told us every au pair we ever had stole from you, took our stuff, and every man that crossed your path from Dad to now was a bastard, or hit you, or was a psychopath. But you’re the psychopath. You’re a narcissistic, toxic person who just happens to be my mother and I want you to go and leave us alone. You’ve done enough now. It will take all of us the rest of our lives to get rid of the scars and you should go and write your paper on your own somewhere away from us, the idiots who happen to be your family and who you can still hurt. Just go.’
Karen looked at her daughter, and for a moment images flashed through her head. Trying to type with one hand while her baby tried to feed before she put her on a bottle at six weeks; looking at research notes while Sarah tried to tell her about the carol service, or her gold star for writing. They had even had a joke about it. Sarah used to send her emails, with a green dragon emoji and I know you won’t have time, but attached.
The gulf between her and her daughter seemed enormous now. Karen pushed down doubt as hard as she could, despite the wave of pain washing over her. How had she got here? How had any of them got here? She felt as if she was having a panic attack, and the images of her husband as a young man flooded into her mind: images of nights they had shared, images of Jack and Sarah building a sandcastle, their father turning round and smiling at Karen. That had been the week before she left, and she could remember how much she had wanted to get off that beach. Only now, now that she knew she had lost even the possibility of a family, did she see it as it really had been. She shook her head. She could still help Jamie, and this was the last chance. Jack was crying quietly behind her in his dad’s arms, and Sarah was distracted. Karen held out her arms to Jamie and tried to catch his eye.
Charlie saw what she was doing and walked, still carrying Jack, over to Sarah. They looked like a group, a family, and she didn’t belong.
Charlie put his free arm on to Sa
rah’s shoulder and looked at Karen.
‘Do one decent thing if you have a heart: fuck off and leave us to try and make a life for ourselves.’
Karen walked down the corridor alone. She tried again to think what she could say to make the situation better. Jamie needed her. She would get hold of a lawyer in the morning. In the meantime, she took the lift down to the first floor, took the key to her office out of her bag and let herself in. She had all the information about Jamie from the stay in the hotel in her bag, and she wanted to get into the database. She turned the computer on, but she couldn’t make her fingers work. Jamie’s face and Sarah’s fury were all she could think about, and she felt shaky.
She pulled her cardigan round her and stared at her screen. Something was weighing her down and she didn’t recognise it. These were faint echoes of feelings, and her certainty deserted her. Karen could feel the shadows of something lost and she was profoundly tired. Sitting in the centre of her existence, her tiny office, she tried to narrow down her thoughts and identify where this terrible feeling of despair was coming from. She tried to fall back on a scientific approach; it had never failed her before, but for the first time she doubted that was true. Her heart was heavy and she sat in the room that held in its files the purpose of her life, but she was overwhelmed by the conviction that somehow she was wandering in a maze and had taken a wrong and terrible turn. She knew it, and yet she didn’t get up to go to Sarah. It was just too hard.
The Man on the Middle Floor Page 20