‘It seems unfair not to be allowed to kill yourself humanely, don’t you think, Dr R? Why does it have to be so painful?’
‘Were you feeling suicidal when you phoned home on November 2nd? It’s important that you try and remember. Annie answered the phone … do you remember that?’
She’s looking at me intently, leaning forward, blinking a lot. I feel like I’m in a cop movie. Everything is hanging on my answer. ‘No,’ I said.
‘You rang the house phone. Annie answered. Try and remember.’
‘I don’t remember.’
But I do try. And I do remember being in the hall in the telephone queue. I wanted to talk to my children, to tell them that I loved them, that they needn’t be afraid of me. I remember some rude cow behind me in the queue told me that I stank, which was true. I was refusing to wash; it seemed about the only thing I could control. I hadn’t washed for weeks. If I put my nose down into my nightie I could smell that sweet soft seaside smell of dirty vagina and sticky skin.
‘Did you ring to say goodbye to them?’
I think I did. I nod.
‘Were you going to kill yourself, Connie?’
I nod again. Yes. ‘I missed my mum. I was saving up my medication.’
Then I remember: she was right, Annie picked up the phone. Annie and Polly used to answer the house phone in silly voices, trying to annoy the cold callers, pretending they’d been kidnapped or that they were aliens, that sort of thing. Hellooo, she said in a rather poor Scottish accent. I like eating poo poo. And I could hear Polly sniggering behind her. And I was happy she was well and getting on with things … I tried to answer her but my voice was so incredibly small that I couldn’t locate it. Annie, I mouthed because no sound came out. I love you. But I don’t think she heard me. And yet after a moment she said, Mummy? And I was floored by it, by my name, the only name that meant anything to me now …
My eyes fill with tears. I don’t want to remember all this. Dr R is staring at me; she looks frustrated, cross. It’s not working.
‘Tell me, what did Annie say …?’
‘I heard a woman’s voice in the background – “Annie, who is it?” I knew that voice very well; it was Ness. Then she took my phone in my house and asked me, “Who is this? We don’t want to buy anything.” We, she said. In my house, she said we.’
‘And how did that make you feel?’
‘Livid.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I don’t remember.’
She sighs; she’s annoyed with me. ‘Yes, you do remember.’ She looks up now, her cheeks a burning red. ‘You do remember.’
I shake my head. ‘I don’t.’
‘What did you do after this? Was this what set you off?’
‘I don’t remember.’ I want her to shut up, to stop asking me questions, to stop fishing in my brain.
‘You must remember!’ She sounds really annoyed with me. ‘What happened in the weeks after the phone call?’
‘I don’t remember! I really don’t remember!’
‘What happened, Connie?’ She’s gone puce. I’ve never seen her like this. ‘Connie, you have got to remember! None of us want to remember these things but we have to!’
‘Why?’ I’m shouting back at her.
‘Because we have to own ourselves! We have to own our actions! We have to take responsibility!’ She is really furious with me; I am quite alarmed.
And then something awful happens. Dr R turns her back on me and I can tell from the movement of her shoulders that she is crying. She is standing there at the window looking out and crying, really sobbing. I don’t move. I am silent. What did I say? I have no idea why she is in this state but I am glad it’s her, not me. I leave her to cry for a bit and then I get up to bring her some loo paper and I join her by the window. Her head has dropped and her shoulders are heaving now; she’s in floods of tears. She takes the loo paper from my open palm. She blows her nose and stares out at the tree, hiccupping, blotchy-faced, mascara running down her cheeks. Gradually she calms down but she appears to be in some kind of trance looking out of that window.
Then she says, ‘That bloody leaf won’t let go, will it?’ as if that is why she is crying. She’s talking about my leaf. I too watch it waving about all alone on the tree now. I’m happy to share it with her. It can be our leaf now.
‘I’m sure the Squeak will make you some tea if we ask …’ I say, which is highly debatable – she’s unfathomably lazy – but I need to say something reassuring.
‘No, I’d rather no one saw me like this,’ she says, glancing at me, and I’m flattered that she doesn’t count me as anyone. Her eyes are the most beautiful turquoise blue – the tears have made them luminescent, her sadness lighting her from within.
‘Sit down!’ I say, pulling up two chairs to the window, and she does as she is told. I get her a plastic cup full of water and she takes it. She sips at it, still dabbing her eyes. I sit down next to her and look out at the naked tree and we sit like that for ages.
‘Can I tell you a story, Connie?’ she says, just when I think it might be the end of the session. Her voice is calm now. She’s finished crying.
‘Sure.’
‘OK.’ She blows her nose again and is quiet for so long that I think she must have changed her mind. But then she begins the story in a quiet, detached voice, like she’s giving a police statement.
‘So, there’s this young man and this young woman. They meet and fall in love. They are both materially successful people, they have always worked hard and they have good careers. They own their own flats and are used to a certain kind of lifestyle; they take good holidays and buy fancy things. They can indulge their whims. And then comes the time for settling down. They sell their flats and buy a house further out and have a small but tasteful wedding. For a long time they are very busy with their important careers and they are no longer quite so young when they decide that it is the right time to start a family. But life has other plans and it turns out that she’s got a problem with her tubes – his sperm is fine – and that conceiving will not be easy. They start to obsess about it. Well, she does, he doesn’t, because let’s face it, he’s OK and he’s got all the time in the world, but her clock is running out. She really wants this baby and will do anything to get pregnant, from headstands to two rounds of IVF. It’s expensive and unpleasant. She injects herself daily and gets fat, something she hates, something she really hates. And then bingo! The white stick says Yes, You’re a normal woman now! She’s pregnant. They’re elated; she cannot believe it.
‘But she is terrified something will go wrong during the pregnancy. She knows all the risks, she cuts down on her workload, she eats all the right food, takes all the right supplements, and she grows this baby as if it were a pearl inside her. But they don’t buy any clothes or paint the nursery room because they’re so scared that they’ll jinx it somehow. The birth is utterly awful but it turns out that they are the luckiest couple in the world and they leave the hospital with this beautiful baby girl in their arms. She’s perfect. She’s exactly what they dreamed of. She’s just beautiful …’
Dr R pauses, licks her lips and takes another sip of the water from the plastic cup. ‘Even the woman’s mother can find no fault with this baby. And they’re so happy. The woman is already exhausted, of course, because she barely slept for the last few months of the pregnancy, which was then followed by a forty-eight-hour labour, an emergency caesarean and chronic mastitis. But the woman is on a high and she daren’t complain because most of womankind has gone through this before her and because this is exactly what she wanted.
‘As the months go by the woman becomes more and more exhausted. She has to take more time off work because she can’t focus any more. The baby doesn’t sleep – well, never for more than an hour and a half in a row and never, not once, does the baby sleep through the night. She becomes so tired that she cannot sleep. She has one night of respite when she takes a Temazepam having breast-pumped her milk out
like a cow so her husband can feed the baby. But she feels guilty, stupidly worried that the baby may suffer. She becomes depressed, which she feels deeply ashamed about because she has everything that she ever wanted. This is a woman who can usually solve problems: she has patience, she can manage other people, fix her own computer, she can assemble flat-pack furniture, she can change a tyre, she can cook for ten, but there is no instruction pamphlet that came with this baby and she feels a total failure that she cannot cope.
‘And the baby becomes a toddler and still doesn’t sleep. She is like any toddler: adorable but a handful, sweetness and tantrums. The mother is in this strange new endless exhausting hamster-wheel cycle of washing, cleaning, feeding and crying. She doesn’t know how to deal with these tantrums – the child is a ball of fury and rage – and any of her usual strategies and logic fall on deaf ears. Her threats are hollow because she simply does not have the energy to carry them out. She is on medication now, belatedly self-diagnosed with post-natal depression. She is angry with the father because he sleeps soundly in the spare room, because his work is somehow more important than hers, because his body has not been sucked, stretched and mauled beyond recognition. Anyway, thank God for play-dates and mothers’ clubs and friends in the park, because otherwise this mother, who is truly grateful for the blessing of her daughter, would be driven round the bend …’
She pauses here again and takes another sip of her water and wipes her nose. She turns her chair a little, so she is talking to the tree.
‘Then one day, the mother and the toddler are meeting friends in the play area of the local park. She’s pushing the pushchair up the crescent, the swings and slides visible through the railings and the bushes. She can feel the stretch in the back of her legs, the fumes from the traffic; the toddler is kicking her legs with excitement, her little red wellies going up and down, because she too can see the swings and slides, better from her height because she only has the trunks of the bushes to see through – she can probably see her little pals already playing.
‘But just as they get to the entrance gate, the mother bumps into an acquaintance, another doctor, who is leaving the park. They stop at the gate to chat about the bad nights. This other doctor has been trying a new herbal remedy that seems to be working and she starts looking up the name of it to share when the toddler – who is justifiably furious with her mother for stopping right here to chat, so tantalizingly close to their destination – starts whining and trying to get out of her seat, but she can’t because she’s strapped in. The mother tells the toddler that she will just have to wait. Well, the toddler won’t wait, she is a toddler after all, and she wants to go on the swings. She starts to scream now and the mother, who has had enough of this and, who knows, is perhaps eager to demonstrate that she has some authority over this crazy screaming miniature human being, tells her child with a firmness she has no energy for to Stop it! But the toddler kicks off – she goes purple in the face and screams like a demon. She is now having a full-blown tantrum and the mother, beside herself with exhaustion and some embarrassment now at her own utterly useless parenting, loses it completely. “Shut up! I’ve had enough of this, Abigail!” And she manhandles the pushchair, roughly swivelling it one hundred and eighty degrees to face the opposite direction so that the toddler can no longer see the playground. And then the mother turns her back on the child, pointedly ignoring her, teaching her a lesson that she will not always get her own way by screaming.
‘It seems to work. She’s aware, as she chats with the doctor, that the tantrum is subsiding. They talk about one of the families in the playground whose children sleep through the night. But what neither the mother nor the doctor notice is that the pavement is on a gentle slope and the pushchair is moving, and right at that moment a lorry is speeding round the crescent. And when the brakes screech and the mother turns around it is too late. It takes for ever for the lorry to stop, dragging the pushchair in its front wheel as it spins across the road. And when it does eventually come to a halt maybe fifty yards away, the pushchair is tipped forwards and there is no movement at all. There are no more tantrums.’
I stare at Dr R. She’s gazing out of the window without looking at anything, eyes glazed, tears all shed.
‘You didn’t put the brake on?’ I say.
Dr R turns to me and very slowly she shakes her head. ‘No. I didn’t put the brake on.’
Chapter 19
Tom, Tatchwell’s clinical director, had left a message on Emma’s phone asking that she come straight to his office before she visited Connie that day. He’d sounded preoccupied, worried about something, inordinately formal. When she got to his door she sensed his secretary was being cagey with her, and she worried that it was bad news about the girls.
‘Ah, come in, come in, Emma!’ Tom said, holding his office door open for her and shutting it gently behind her. His office was a mess but he seemed unaware of it. He bowed his head and was rubbing his beard thoughtfully.
‘Are the girls all right? Annie and Polly?’ she asked.
‘I haven’t heard otherwise …’ he said, making a perfunctory effort to tidy up his desk.
‘Right,’ she said, waiting for him to elaborate, but he didn’t.
‘Do sit down,’ he said, gesturing to an uncomfortable-looking plastic chair.
‘Is something wrong?’ she asked.
He smiled using only his bottom lip and neck muscles before taking his place behind his desk. ‘How are you, Emma?’
‘Well,’ she said, taking the proffered seat and putting her bag down. ‘I think we’re getting somewhere. Both her verbal and non-verbal behaviour indicate no positive malingering. I’m undecided about her fitness to stand trial at the moment. The amnesia seems to have had a sudden onset and is blurry around the edges, which is to be expected, according to what I’ve read, in these rare cases of family annihilation. The psychotic episode seems to have been triggered by a number of events. In fact, there are serious questions to be raised concerning the benzodiazepine prescriptions from her GP and particularly the Clonazepam at Milton House—’
‘Um,’ he interrupted. ‘That’s not really want I meant.’
‘Oh?’
He looked like he’d rather be anywhere else on earth. ‘Emma, I was never made aware of your situation before assigning you to this case.’
‘My situation?’
‘This was always going to be a very sensitive case. I wasn’t aware of your … personal bereavement.’
Emma felt herself harden up inside; it wasn’t appropriate to hear him talk of Abigail. It wasn’t in his remit. She smoothed her skirt and looked him straight in the face. He shifted his glance.
‘My personal situation has nothing to do with this case,’ she said.
‘Right, no,’ he said, backtracking. ‘Except I don’t know if that is entirely true. Had I known—’
‘Had you known I had lost a child you wouldn’t have given me the case?’
‘Emma, there have been formal complaints made about you,’ he said, changing tack.
She looked puzzled. ‘I’m sorry? From who?’
‘Two members of staff have complained about you.’
‘Complained about me? In what way?’
‘There is going to have to be a formal review.’
‘What are you talking about?’
‘They say you’ve been turning up to see Constance Mortensen, a very vulnerable patient …’ He paused and licked his lips. ‘Under the influence.’
Emma was speechless.
‘“Reeking of alcohol,”’ he added, making patronizing quote marks with his plump fingers.
She didn’t move a muscle but a deep blush rushed through her.
‘May I ask who complained?’
‘You see how this doesn’t look good …?’ he said, ignoring her, fiddling about on his laptop. ‘I was prepared to let one incident slip by but they sent me this.’
He turned his computer screen around so that Emma could appreciate the
full impact of herself in muted colour lurching across Connie’s room and throwing up in the toilet while Connie, the very vulnerable patient, held back her hair and rubbed her back, and then took her over to the sink and cleaned her up before lying her down on the bed, taking off her shoes and stroking her hair. He had the grace to fast-forward through Emma falling asleep and Connie clearing up the vomit. He slowed it down again as Connie put on Emma’s jacket, shoes and bag and then, bizarrely, performed a little tap routine, all tits, teeth and jazz hands. Connie then tired of this, sat down and began rootling through Emma’s bag, checking her phone, going on her iPad and finally sitting by the bedside until Emma woke up.
It was truly shocking; there was no denying it.
‘I see,’ she said. ‘I apologize profusely. I came to …’ She petered out. There was no excuse.
‘I’m afraid, Emma, I’m going to have to take you off the case.’
Emma panicked. ‘Please, Tom. I’m so nearly there with her. She won’t talk to the social workers or the other doctors. If you take me off, she’ll have to start all over again. I know I can get there.’
‘No, Emma, I just can’t.’
‘Please. She needs me, Tom. I’m all she has right now.’
‘I’m so sorry.’
‘Yup.’
She thought of him playing Call of Duty, lying here with his duvet in the office. What sort of a profession is this, are we supposed to be superhuman? ‘I understand,’ she said. She would have done the same in his position.
‘Perhaps you should consider a well-earned sabbatical …?’ he said, sounding cheerfully relieved that it had all gone in a reasonably painless fashion.
‘Yup.’ She just wanted out of there. She felt utterly humiliated; up until now hers had been a faultless career. The repercussions of this were too enormous to take in. She stood up and smiled at him. ‘Can we talk another time?’ she said briskly.
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