Copycat

by Gillian White

  After I’d made my decision, I sat up until long after midnight deciding which method to choose. Hilary Wainwright had rung me earlier, saying she had spoken to Martha. She tried to be gentle but it was obvious that she had been snubbed.

  Martha refused to become involved.

  But she was involved.

  Up to her neck.

  So I lay down on the kitchen floor, sobbing. Desperate for a way out.

  What good was Hilary’s common-sense concern? It was the caring of a vicar’s wife – polite and sincere but horribly limited – baskets of plums and new-laid eggs. Martha was the only person who could actually share my feelings.

  My hand slipped on the wet razor blade. I firmed my grip, bending my fist so the blue vein stood out gorged with blood. And then I knew I must slice it in half, like a fat garden worm. My teeth were clenched. I looked away, sickened by my brutality.

  ‘So sad, so sad, she was in her twenties when she died.’ That’s what people would say when they heard.

  Stella, my mother, had done much better: she had reached her fifties. Guns would go off in heaven for Stella.

  I couldn’t do it like that, not a slash to the skin. I was too much of a coward, although that particular stigma didn’t bother me. I wasn’t a man, though I wanted one woman as badly as any man ever had. But Martha’s feeble friendship was not unconditional. And nor was it, as I’d hoped, everlasting.

  I had pushed it to the limit. I knew, then, where that limit was.

  There was no question in my mind that I could live with her as my enemy.

  She hated me.

  She abandoned me.

  And, according to Hilary, she wasn’t even willing to talk.

  And I can’t describe the anguish of that.

  When thoughts of my children crossed my mind, they were like wildebeest on a dusty plain, on the far side of the river, half hidden in a haze of heat, and nothing to do with me.

  I must die.

  I’d kept the painkillers after Josh’s birth. I had them because of a swelling in my breast – something to do with that word lactation. The pills were massive, monstrous things you had to dilute in water. I had never used them, the pain and the swelling went on their own, but I guessed they were strong enough to be lethal. I took the lot, twenty-four in all, in two foul-tasting, sludgy glasses of water, and then I crept up to bed.

  I woke up in hospital.

  ‘Where’s Martha?’

  Graham leaned forward and took my hand. ‘Martha’s not here, Jennie.’

  ‘Does she know?’

  He shifted on the bed uneasily so his carrier bag slipped off, and he said, ‘Yes, I told her.’

  ‘What did she say?’

  He answered as kindly as he could, but I saw his eyes filling with water no matter how hard he tried to prevent them. ‘Well, I spoke to Sam. Jennie, it sounds as if they have both had enough. They can’t take any more. I’m sorry, Jennie, I really am sorry.’

  And wordlessly he buried his head in my lap.

  So I had not died. I was not in heaven. I would not have to face my mother. Things were exactly as they were, just as unbearable, just as hellish.

  I knew all about Graham’s pain – that’s what makes me so detestable. Of course I ought to have woken up and asked about the children at once, hugged him, blessed him for staying so staunchly beside me and wept with mortification over how I was hurting the person who loved me most.

  He looked so tense and distracted. He took the grapes from the carrier bag and tried to set them out temptingly on the nasty table across the bed. He unfolded two of my favourite magazines – as if I was in there for appendicitis. ‘The Wainwrights have been bricks,’ he said. ‘Hilary’s at home now, minding the kids till I get back.’

  I listened vacantly to what he was saying, unable to meet his sad eyes. I should be saying more, giving some explanation for my behaviour. I firmly believed that suicide was the most vengeful action anyone could take; I thought that until I did it myself… Mine hadn’t felt like revenge.

  There was no reason on earth for me to inflict my revenge on Graham, the man who had saved me the day we met. He needed an answer to his unspoken question, but he wouldn’t understand if I gave it. I knew why I was here. There was nowhere else for me to go.

  Every day was like Sunday. The ward was soporific and it was crowded with creeping women. It was named after Dame Maud Bell, a name which made her sound more like a patient to me – and a dangerous one at that – even though she was a doughty far-sighted woman, who must have set up this ancient unit in the days when fruitcakes were baited like bears.

  Since then, the old Victorian wing had been replaced by a red-brick asylum, and the one redeeming feature about it was that everyone could be mad as they pleased. Compared to most of my fellow patients, I was as together as the Queen.

  Swept from the streets for a brief interlude, here were the shufflers, the dribblers, the self-abusers and the nodding buffoons. And there was I calling out silently, ‘Make her love me, God, make her love me.’

  When I told him I was in love, Mr Singh, the consultant, gave a bored, patient shrug.

  ‘And I’ve been like this for years.’

  He tapped his pencil quietly and waited.

  ‘But the person I’m in love with loathes me.’

  ‘And that must be painful for you,’ he said.

  ‘She’s tired of all the attention-seeking. She’s got her own worries, her own life. She’s sick of my dramas, she needs other people…’

  ‘And what d’you think made her loathe you? Hatred is a strong emotion, every bit as exhausting as love. By assuming she hates you, you are suggesting that you dominate most of her thinking.’

  ‘Oh God, I wish I did.’

  Mr Singh was not being sarcastic, merely stating the facts. ‘So she doesn’t hate you, does she, Jennie? Let’s get that straight from the start. Perhaps what makes you so unhappy is that this person you love is indifferent?’

  God, that hurt. He was right.

  ‘But from what I understand, apparently you were once close friends.’

  My eyeballs ached and my head throbbed. ‘I must sound so ridiculous when there’re people out there with children dying, loveless people, handicapped, the victims of disasters, and here I am losing the plot because of some freakish passion. We were never equal, that was the trouble – in my eyes she was always special and I worshipped her.’ I nodded as if my head was on springs, like a toy dog in a car’s back window. I bit my lips, I pulled at my fingers, in the perfect role of deranged patient. ‘And I can’t understand how this happened, or what I can do to stop it. I’ve got kids, I’ve got a husband who loves me…’ It was just too much. I collapsed in a storm of tears, a spasm of ugly crying, while Mr Singh sat back and observed me from behind his sane brown desk, over the top of his gold-rimmed glasses. ‘And I’m so tired of it all,’ I cried lamely.

  After a calculated pause to allow me to regain some control, the consultant passed me a tissue and asked, ‘Tired enough to die?’

  ‘Yes, yes I am. Tell me, does my illness have a name? Is it somewhere in a book which I can read and understand? Is it chronic? Is it fatal?’ But I didn’t have much faith in him because he was not of my culture. And, to be fair, even someone from my own background would find it hard to get to grips with my dilemma, let alone a man from the East with such inscrutable eyes.

  I found a quiet place in the hubbub. Beside a radiator next to the coffee machine.

  Time heals, I told myself, drinking somebody’s stone-cold tea.

  She lowered her voice. ‘How are you, Jennie?’

  Hard to answer when you resent your visitor and the answer she is wanting is ‘fine’.

  I wished Hilary would stop coming. We’d run out of subjects to talk about and we had nothing in common.

  Hilary Wainwright was ‘nice’ and there aren’t many people like that. She brought an air of decency into this sad and hopeless place. Her eye contact was all about tr
ust. In some ways she was inspirational, she made you want to rise to her level: it was important to please her. This depressed me. I was not nice; I was cunning and deceitful. Hilary’s eyes were kindly, she had an air of nurture about her and she didn’t seem to mind my lack of interest or conversation.

  But what was even worse was that she’d started to bring Angie Ford along, dressed, as ever, in pink denim – jacket, skirt and even bag matching – and her hair streaked with a purplish blue. Was there safety for me in numbers, in the knowledge that the Close was not one hundred per cent against me?

  I wanted to talk about Martha.

  They sometimes brought me snippets, and they were better than nothing.

  ‘Martha asked after you… she says Poppy’s settled at school. Little Josh is fine, of course, but then Graham must tell you all this.’

  ‘Did Martha say she was coming to see me?’

  Hilary took evasive action; I saw the shift in her honest brown eyes. ‘I get the impression that Martha has rather a lot on her plate right now, managing the children and working two days a week, as well as taking care of the house. She doesn’t have a cleaner, you know.’

  ‘I suppose she is busy, yes.’

  ‘You’ll see her soon, when you get home, and by then she might not be feeling so raw.’

  ‘Is that what she’s feeling – raw?’

  ‘Jennie, dear.’ Hilary leaned forward to impart some new wisdom. I did the same in anxious response and my nose brushed against Angie’s freesias. I so needed to understand exactly how Martha was feeling, so that I might start the process of planning my next campaign. ‘You have to understand that some people find it easier to deny life’s unfortunate realities. They would rather stick their heads in the sand than confront situations that threaten them. And do you know, I think Martha is rather like that. Certainly that’s the impression I get. So you really must stop upsetting yourself by imagining she is being personal. It is your illness that bothers Martha, not you.’

  Jesus Christ.

  The humiliation of my position.

  At the mercy of naive do-gooders.

  But I finally had to face the fact that I was getting no better and Martha was not going to come.

  When I arrived home she wasn’t there.

  The house next door was empty. They were at Martha’s mother’s place in Dorset.

  Was this because they knew I’d be home?

  There was no message.

  No instruction to feed the cats.

  No welcome home card – not from them at any rate, and no-one else’s counted. We had kept my illness from Ruth and Howard, Graham’s bungalow parents.

  No nothing. A slap in the face.

  Graham took Josh to his minder, and poor little Poppy, conditioned by now, went off happily to her nursery.

  But it’s no good wishing time back, as Hilary repeated so tediously, you must live life from day to day.

  So I was home alone with pills in my pocket, but not enough and not the kind to do any damage even if I downed the lot. They might as well have been homeopathic, hardly worth taking. But I didn’t need pills any more. I knew what I must do.

  Taking care not to be seen, I let myself into Martha’s house with the key I always used. After I stepped inside there was a stirring around me, as if the house itself was aware of the sudden intrusion. I moved from room to room, disturbing only the weary petals from flowers left to stagnate in their vases. I smiled fondly at the mess. When Graham and I went away everything had to be left spotless, as if we might die and someone would criticize the state of the place when we were no longer there. We’d defrost the fridge, change the sheets, tidy the airing cupboard, disinfect the loos and, last thing, just before leaving, we would hang a brand-new dishcloth over the gleaming taps.

  My last memory of my home would be an aroma of undiluted lemon or pine.

  But when we returned, time after time, we found the smell homely and familiar, whereas Martha’s house smelled of garlic and herbs, unwashed bedding, cats and blocked drains.

  What I was doing felt far more right than anything I had ever done.

  I was her servant and her slave. I was not worthy. I would make myself worthy. Maybe then she would love me.

  My feet padded on the fur-strewn carpets, and clicked on the varnished pine. I paused as I went, touching everything – it all had the feel of Martha about it. I fingered the towels in the bathroom, still wet, and the closeness of Martha made goose pimples rise on my arms and my legs.

  Love me!

  My own face was haunting as I passed Martha’s mirrors like a watching ghost, or a cat creeping through the house all alone. I listened and heard her clocks ticking, her curtains breathing, and the rustling of Martha’s wild garden pushed by me into the house.

  Nobody saw me.

  Love me!

  The linen basket was typically full, so I moved the lid and lifted the bundles, and then buried my face inside them as if they were as refreshing as water. And nobody saw me.

  Love me!

  I sat at Martha’s dressing table, an altar within the shrine: eyeshadows, gold and purple, silver, amber and jade. I unscrewed the jars and bottles and sniffed each one in turn until I was hypnotized, stupefied and entranced by Martha’s perfume. And nobody saw me.

  I started at the top of the house and worked my way down, beginning each day after Graham left for work and not stopping until the children were delivered home by taxi at half past three. Progress was slow, bearing in mind that I had to stop again and again whenever anything grabbed my attention. Compulsively I had to investigate every detail of her life, or be left unsatisfied and wondering. I daren’t overlook the slightest clue that might give me more insight into Martha’s secrets, lift the veil from my own eyes, and take this fantasy away.

  Martha was only human.

  I must dig for the flaws that might relieve me.

  How could I spend the rest of my life obsessed by an ordinary person?

  How could I spend the rest of my life being thought of as pathetic?

  TWENTY

  Martha

  HOW COULD SHE SPEND the rest of her life being thought of as pathetic?

  ‘Poor Jennie.’

  Incredibly, this came from Sam. But if Jennie had smashed our house up in our absence, to me that would have been less sinister.

  Instead, the house was one big public convenience, undiluted pine from the kids’ bedrooms to the downstairs loo, from bathroom to utility room, and every drawer had been tidied so fastidiously it looked like a Benetton window display. Every item had been washed, ironed and pressed.

  I noticed with awe that she’d dusted the light bulbs. The hundred-watt bulbs shone eye-achingly and even the sixties gave a garish glare. There were no familiar fingerprints left round the switches, no dull sheen to the pictures, and even the cat tray sparkled with a kind of grey sterility.

  The curtains had been washed and rehung, the wooden floors resealed to a glow. The sofa covers had a brand-new look and a fluffy conditioner smell about them. You name it, it had been through the washing machine, Jiffed or Pledged. But my house was not my house. I felt like I’d been invaded.

  Jennie’s act of penance: the stifling constraints of duty again, those little tasks that Jennie, with her lack of self-esteem, excelled at. And there on the cooker, all prepared and ready for heating up, sat a delicious-smelling, home-made asparagus soup.

  ‘They didn’t help her then,’ I said distractedly. ‘So it looks like there isn’t a cure.’

  But Sam was impressed. He had never imagined our house could approach these heights of perfection and neither had I. ‘I think she’s entitled to a little compassion. The poor sod’s trying to make amends and this is the only way she knows how.’

  My laugh was a short sharp bark. ‘Sam! What are you saying? You’ve been doing nothing but slagging her off for the last few weeks…’

  ‘But remember the article Alice found. If that was right Jennie can’t help what she’s doing
, and it has got a name even if it is too long to remember.’

  In Dorset I had jumped at the chance of confiding in Mum, someone detached from this crazy mess, a stranger to the goings-on in the Close.

  Alice remembered an article she’d read in the Observer: a terrible story about a woman who made a spectacle of herself obsessing over her evening-class art teacher – stalking him, pestering him, lying in wait to see him. He took out an injunction in the end, so the article said, and I thought, how cruel to do that no matter how dreadful she’d been. And it went on to say how her life had disintegrated from happily married with kids to abandoned and poverty-stricken, washing up in a transport cafe. There was a picture of her, too, Alice said, like a hag, and it was obvious that she’d been to hell and back.

  I wanted to find out more, but apart from the fact that this syndrome had only recently been discovered and that there was no easy cure, Alice couldn’t remember its name.

  ‘She’s not doing this from choice,’ said Alice. ‘She is ensnared in this ghastly phenomenon. They thought it was some kind of transference.’ She seemed concerned and disappointed at my lack of sensitivity, and particularly with my sneering attitude towards Jennie’s suicide attempt. ‘You, with your intelligence, Martha, you ought to be able to rise above this.’

  ‘You haven’t lived with it, Alice,’ said Sam. ‘You can’t begin to imagine how stressed out Martha has been.’

  Being back in Dorset for just a fortnight had been more refreshing than going to the Seychelles. I adored going home, sleeping in my own bedroom again, although I’d never quite come to terms with making love in my room overlooked by my childhood pictures and shone on by the innocent light of my Eeyore bedside lamp. The smell of gym shoes and ironed cotton still hung around in there, along with my precious sticker albums. The only downside was my mother’s refusal to let me smoke in the house.

  How different my childhood had been from Jennie’s. And what an important role in development I was certain surroundings could have. Look at all this space and countryside, a parkland of woods, meadows and streams before whose beauty I had stood in awed silence, even as a small child. Here was peace. Here, even the fronds of bracken held sunlight in their hands.