The Confusion of Karen Carpenter

by Jonathan Harvey

EVIE CARPENTER-FLETCHER

  And the date. The date that is inked on Michael’s skin. There are fresh flowers poking out of the silver circle. Mum must have put them there. God love Mum.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I say again, almost inaudibly I want to cry but find that I can’t. I am too scared. What am I scared of?

  But it appears I am mistaken: this is not what they have brought me to see. Gently they pull and push me a foot to the left. I don’t want to look down. Why should I have to look down? Because . . . because . . . this is what I’m scared of.

  ‘Karen,’ Dad says gently, and he motions to the ground.

  OK. I look down.

  Another discarded phone book. Fresh flowers again. The stone is still new, sparkling. I’m not sure if it’s because of the quality of the stone or if it’s been raining.

  And then I see the words, chiselled into the stone. And I am even more ashamed.

  MICHAEL FLETCHER

  1976–2012

  The fear, the shame, it all gets too much. Reality hits me round the face, and as I recover from their sting, the tears fall.

  They have brought me to Michael’s grave.

  TWENTY-ONE

  Mum is shouting at the receptionist at the GP’s surgery. Usually I wouldn’t mind – as a breed, I find them just a bit to the right of Jabba the Hut. Or is it Attila the Hun? Either way, today her remonstrations leave me a bit mortified and I go and sit on one of the plastic sofas in the waiting room and flick through a nearby OK! magazine. I try to drown out her cries of ‘The doctor’s expecting her! She needs help!’ I feel all eyes in the waiting room on me. ‘She might need sectioning!’ I bristle, but the eyes look away and I turn the page.

  I curse that there is a leak in the roof and the rain is getting in; the page beneath me is becoming sodden. Then I realize there is no leak. What’s wetting the shiny paper is my tears.

  A minute or two later, with an efficacy unheard of in GP’s surgeries, a few people come out of doctors’ rooms and the receptionist says I can see Dr Bhatia. I head to the nearest open door and feel Mum grabbing my arm. I look at her, startled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘You’re not coming in too.’

  ‘Oh, yes I am. Goodness only knows what claptrap you’ll tell the doctor.’

  The way she keeps saying ‘the doctor’ puts me in mind of Dr Who. It’s incredibly annoying. I shrug her off and insist, ‘I’ll see her on my own.’

  I push her away with some force. She falls backwards into a spinning display of pamphlets, a bit like the sort that would house greetings cards in a corner shop, and before she can get it or herself up again, I hurry in and slam the door.

  A middle-aged Asian woman is sitting in a sari doodling on a notepad with the name of what looks like a logo for the morning-after pill on the top when I sit down and smile.

  She looks up. ‘Wodda madda wid you?’ she says with a thick Pakistani accent.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘Wodda madda wid you?’

  ‘Well,’ I say, not sure how to reply, ‘I was rather hoping you might be able to tell me that.’

  Suddenly the door swings open. Bloody Mother! Before I can say anything, she announces, ‘That’s not Dr Bhatia – that’s a locum. Come on, next door.’

  I get up.

  Mum can’t help shouting at the locum, ‘My daughter needs professional help!’

  The locum continues to doodle.

  Dr Bhatia has a kindly face, and a nicer sari than the locum. Plus she doesn’t doodle. I can’t stop crying and she doesn’t seem to mind. I’ve lost the will to argue with Mum and she is now sat next to me, voice raised again.

  ‘She needs professional help!’

  ‘I know, Mrs Carpenter, and I’m going to make sure she gets it.’

  ‘She needs sectioning!’

  I can’t be bothered to argue. Maybe I do. Maybe if they take me to a mental home, I can just sleep and ignore all the horrible things going through my head.

  ‘I don’t think she does,’ Dr Bhatia replies. ‘Not from what you’ve told me already.’

  ‘What’s she told you?’ I gasp between sobs. She passes me a box of tissues. I take one and pass the box back, but she waves it away with her hand, clearly thinking I might get through the lot.

  She doesn’t answer my question but instead says, ‘I think you could benefit from some grief therapy, to help you process your feelings.’

  Right.

  ‘What you’re experiencing is something sometimes called “abnormal grief reaction”.’

  Oh God, I’m abnormal. I knew it.

  ‘But I dont like that term. I prefer “complicated grief”’.

  ‘So she doesn’t need sectioning?’ Mum jumps in.

  ‘No,’ says Dr Bhatia, with more than a hint of exasperation. ‘She has been functioning normally, functioning well. I just feel something is blocking her grief.’

  I expect Mum to be cross, but what she actually looks is relieved.

  ‘What has she told you?’ I ask again, quieter, as if I don’t think she’ll ever answer. I know it’s not that important, yet I know I need to hear the words because I can’t actually voice them myself. Not right now. And that’s not just complicated; it is abnormal. Dress it up how you like. I’m a freak.

  Dr Bhatia clears her throat. ‘She told me that your partner committed suicide in December . . .’

  The words hit me like a bullet in the chest. They do – I actually feel winded. I hunch over, gasping.

  ‘. . . and that since then your coping mechanism has been to . . . well . . . to pretend that he didn’t, that he just left you. This is not unusual.’

  She carries on. She’s talking about how a middle-aged businessman might lose his job yet pretend to his family he’s still at work and leave the house at half eight in the morning and head for the commuter train, briefcase in hand . . . but eventually I stop listening. She’s told me something I already knew, but it still overwhelms me. That’s how I feel, overwhelmed. Michael didn’t leave me. Well, he did. He walked out on me, but he walked out on me, then took his own life. And although I know this – of course I know this – I have buried the information for so long, hidden it away in one of the drawers in my brain, marked ‘Too Painful to Deal With’, that hearing it now is like hearing it for the first time. I have been lying. I have been lying to myself, to everyone. I’ve been saying that Michael has just gone somewhere else and isn’t interested in me, when actually, the truth is far too excruciating to even consider. He is dead.

  When we eventually leave, with an appointment booked with a clinical psychologist in a few days’ time – apparently Mum has had me on a waiting list for over a week and there’s now a vacancy – I am crying a little less. Plus Dr Bhatia has convinced me that I’m not mad, which is good. I’ve just been doing some mad things, which is less good.

  What of course I haven’t told her is that Michael is currently hiding in the wardrobe at home. I must get back there and tell him. But tell him what? Tell him he’s dead? Oh God, he’s going to be devastated. But . . . if he’s dead . . . how can I have been having conversations with him? How can I see him? He held me. I touched him. I smelt him. He looked after me. I try to bury these thoughts, for fear that Dr Bhatia’s diagnosis might actually be wrong. That it’s not just mad things I’ve been doing; that I’ve actually lost the bloody plot.

  Michael’s not there when I get back. I pretend I need a lie-down, which isn’t far from the truth, but when I open the wardrobe doors, he’s nowhere to be seen.

  Of course he’s nowhere to be seen. He’s dead.

  But he was definitely there, this morning. He was. He talked to me. He was there.

  Maybe I just imagined him.

  I didn’t realize what a good imagination I have.

  I found him in the loft. I ran away from him.

  He followed me to the swing park. He followed me on my date with Kevin. He sat on the wall opposite.

  Or did I imagine all that? Was that as much a
pretence as the laughable one that all he did was walk out and move on?

  I feel completely desolate. I can’t even cry now. I lie on the bed and feel so hollow I’m not sure I am human. I can’t be this hollow and still have vital organs inside me. It’s like I’ve only just discovered he’s dead. I don’t want him to be dead. Don’t get me wrong – many’s the time I’ve lain on this bed and wished he wasn’t here, but now he isn’t, and there’s a finality to it, it’s almost unbearable. No, scrap that – it is unbearable. I have wandered around for the last few months pretending everything was fine, insisting on it, when actually it wasn’t, and now I am exhausted. I have expended too much energy on sidestepping conversations so that no one would mention Michael’s death. Sometimes it was easy. No one likes to talk about death, much less so suicide. There’s a stigma attached to it. But the constant fear of confronting it, and the active subject-changing, and the desperate deployment of euphemisms have completely worn me out.

  If I had any more energy, I would feel relieved – no more lying, no more pretence, no more madness. Truth and honesty from now on – but I can’t. I can’t feel positive or hopeful or like there is light at the end of the tunnel. Because none of that takes anything away from the awful truth about Michael’s departure that thus far I’ve been avoiding.

  I might have felt better if I’d been honest with Kevin. When he acknowledged that I’d lost someone like him, I just batted it away, reducing it to something inconsequential, on a par with ‘Oh, it didn’t work out.’ How many times recently have I said, ‘Oh, can we talk about something else?’ I might even have gained some common ground with the secretary from school. I couldn’t understand her reaction to his leaving, like it hadn’t happened; it had left me cold. And yet she was behaving eerily similarly to me, making out everything was OK when in fact she was crumbling. As was I.

  Mind you, at least I didn’t kill Michael.

  I didn’t need to. He killed himself.

  Oh, here they come again. The tears. This crying doesn’t feel normal. It’s like it’s emanating from my core, whatever my core is, coming from deep inside me and spreading out in convulsive waves, causing my whole body to judder with each seal-like bark. My skin tingles as if it’s been peeled away and the atmosphere is piercing it with electric currents in time to my barks and convulsions. The actual crying bit, the tears, seems secondary to the jerking pain, which I’m powerless to stop. I fear I’ll never stop. I fear I might die like this. It must be taking up so much energy. And indeed it does. And eventually I’m too wounded by it to continue. And I lie there, heroin-numb.

  The clinical psychologist I’m to see works from the front room of her semi-detached house in the far reaches of East London, which is a bit of a schlep on the Docklands Light Railway, but apparently she is going to make me better, so frankly I’d be happy to hotfoot it to the moon if it meant I was to get some sort of resolution to this mess I’ve created. I know I am going to like her, I just know I am. And why? Because her name is – get this – Roberta Flack.

  When Dr Bhatia first mentioned her earlier this week, I remember thinking, Ooh, I’ve heard of her. I wondered if she was one of those psychologists who pop up on telly, interpreting the body language of contestants on Big Brother. I always like those psychologists, and they’re more often than not quite trendy and wear blouses that make me go into chat rooms to try and find out where they came from. When I Googled the name, though, I realized that Roberta Flack is the name of some singer from the 1970s. Now, unless Ms Flack has had a change of career, which, according to Wikipedia, she hasn’t, then my Ms Flack will also have had a lifetime, or a childhood at least, of mickey-taking about having the same name as a 1970s pop star. This is kismet. This was written in the stars. I am so excited about meeting her that I almost forget the reason why I’m there when she opens her front door to me.

  OK, so it’s not the 1970s singer, famed for hits like ‘Killing Me Softly’. I know from Google that that lady is black, and this lady is so pale she actually looks a bit crepuscular and corpse-like. How apt that she deals so much with grief. She’s seen it from the other side, I titter to myself as she shows me through to her light, bright front room. She smiles questioningly, as if encouraging me to share the joke. So I blurt out something about us both having the names of 1970s singers and she smiles and nods.

  I talk a little bit too much before she interrupts with: ‘Actually, Karen, we only have fifty minutes, so it might be better to limit our discussion to the real reason you’re here – to work through your complicated grief.’

  I nod courteously and settle down on a nice big leather armchair.

  ‘Actually, that’s my seat.’

  I get up again quickly and she points to a couch with scatter cushions on it. They have famous paintings cross-stitched on them. I clock Munch’s The Scream nestled between Gainsborough’s The Blue Boy and the Mona Lisa, and turn The Scream round to face the other way before sitting demurely on it. I think this is what’s expected. I’m certainly not the sort to kick off my slingbacks, put up my feet and open a bag of crisps like I’m watching The X Factor. She sits opposite me and places her hands in her lap. She’s wearing some smart capri pants in olive green, matching Birkenstocks and a very pretty grey cardigan. I’m almost tempted to take a picture on my phone and then do some research online when I get in. Her hair is cut in a smart bob, dyed red, and she could be any age from late forties to mid-fifties. She’s still very pale, though – that’s not changed in the last few minutes. A silence pervades the room. Fortunately she breaks it.

  ‘So, Karen, maybe you’d like to tell me why you’ve come here.’

  And so I tell her. About the day at the cemetery. And how I’d been fooling myself that Michael wasn’t dead when he was, and how I’d been pretending to others that he’d just left me, and how I’d seen him and he’d—

  Damn. I promised myself I wouldn’t say that!

  Her eyes immediately fire up and her body language changes, sitting bolt upright in the chair. You don’t have to be a Big Brother psychologist to tell that this psychologist knows a mad one when she sees it. She interrupts me.

  ‘You’ve seen him?’

  I nod and offer nothing more.

  ‘In your dreams?’

  I pause, then shake my head slowly. ‘In a sort of . . . daydream, I suppose.’

  She slouches down again. Maybe not as mad as she’d hoped.

  ‘It is very common, and a very normal part of the grieving procedure, to see the dead person in your dreams.’

  I brush over this and twitter on for a bit longer, till the words run dry and I feel I’ve said enough, or possibly too much. I tell her about Evie. Immediately she straightens herself in her seat again, like she’s just heard the juiciest bit of gossip. She wants to know how I coped after Evie died and I bluster a few words. We’re not here to talk about Evie.

  God, I’m crying again.

  We’re here to talk about Michael.

  ‘In order to understand your reaction to Michael’s death, we will need to explore how you grieved for your daughter and how you coped in the aftermath.’

  I blow my nose, and she says something about talking about Evie next week.

  ‘This might be painful for you,’ she goes on, ‘but I’d like you to tell me how you discovered that Michael had died.’

  I nod. I can do this. I know I can do this. I can tell her. It’s not like she can tell me. I nod again and then realize I’m nodding incessantly like Woody Woodpecker hammering a tree. Then I dissolve into a tsunami of tears. She cocks her head on one side and, without even looking at her trousers, irons out an imaginary crease with her fingers. And between sobs, gasping for breath, I tell her.

  I tell her how I came home from work and found the letter on the kettle. How it said that he’d left me and not to try to find him, how I was better off without him. How I was devastated and tried calling him, only to discover he’d left his phone in the kitchen drawer. How confused I was that he
appeared not to have taken anything with him apart from his laptop. And then how a few hours later I had been lying on my bed, catatonic with shock, wondering if I should tell someone, but thinking no, as he might come back tomorrow, when the phone rang. The landline. I grabbed it, thinking it was him. Only it wasn’t. It was Rita, his mum, and she had some terrible news. How a woman walking her dog late at night had found Michael. He had hanged himself from a tree in Central Park – Roberta looked confused by this, so I explained it’s the name of our local park – and how he’d left a note in his pocket saying to contact her, so the police had. And how I’d dropped the phone and run out of the house and run and run and run to the park to see if I could find him. To see if I could see him. To see if the police had got it right or got it wrong. To tell them they must have. As I got there, though, I saw an ambulance driving away without its lights flashing, and a police car driving off. And I just stood there, dazed.

  ‘What did he do with the laptop?’ she asks. And I actually laugh. I do. I find it funny that after telling her the most tragic thing in my life, she’s homed in on the one thing a lot of people have asked as it is so bizarre.

  ‘Turned out he’d given it to a friend at work because she needed a new one.’

  She nods. That makes sense. (Completely ignoring the fact that maybe I needed a new laptop. Even though I didn’t.) Then she asks me to describe how I felt when I was standing in Central Park. I can think of only one word: confused.

  ‘What were you confused about, Karen?’

  Isn’t that completely obvious? Maybe not.

  ‘Well, you know . . . how one minute he was there, then the next minute he wasn’t. And how he’d just said he was leaving, nothing else. And how he’d told them to contact his mum and not me. And how I’d not even seen him and yet I was supposed to believe he was dead.’

  She nods, her eyes narrowing as if she’s picturing me stood there in the park. I feel a desire to tell her what I was wearing, make something stylish up to impress her, but then I decide that’s inappropriate.

  ‘And I thought it was typical. That even though he’d died, I felt like the last person to know.’