Clean Break

by Tammy Cohen

And now I don’t want to paint any more.

  Later on, in Evening Group, we start, as always, by going round each one of us in the circle, reporting back on whether we’ve achieved the two goals we each set ourselves this morning. Mine were to start reading a proper book, as opposed to the celebrity magazines which are all I’ve read for the last two months, and to wash my hair. I failed at the first, the letters moving across the page like lines of tiny ants. But in the second goal I can claim some success, having dragged myself, finally, into the shower, so that my hair, while still a tangled mess, is at least clean for the first time in days. I hate myself for the glow of pleasure I feel when Dr Roberts says, ‘Well done, Hannah,’ and everyone gives me a round of applause, as if I’ve climbed Mount Kilimanjaro or something.

  After about half an hour we go back to talking about Charlie. Odelle shares a story about when she first arrived here and was missing her family and had just gone through her first meal with someone sitting next to her monitoring everything that went into her mouth and was curled up on her bed, crying into her pillow – Odelle holds a hand to her face to demonstrate, visibly moved by her own story – and Charlie knocked on her door and sat on the end of the bed and chatted to her, and even made her laugh. That was the thing about Charlie. She could say things to make you laugh so hard your tea came out of your nose. Then she’d go back to her room and make bite marks on her own arm. Of all the people I’ve met in my life, she was the one who was most forgiving of others – and the least forgiving of herself.

  ‘But she didn’t kill herself,’ I say, when it’s my turn to speak.

  Dr Roberts sits back in his seat with one leg crossed over the other at the knee and one elbow hooked over the back of the chair. He has a pen in his hand and he clicks the end in and out as he listens, and nods. His eyes are narrowed so I can’t see them, but I know they are blue in some lights and green in others. His hair, brown but liberally threaded with silver, is swept back from his face, although a lock often falls over his left eye when he gets animated. His close-cropped beard is equal measures of silver and brown, and when he smiles, two dimples appear in his cheeks and the lines around his eyes concertina into folds a person could get lost in.

  The transference rate – that thing where patients end up in love with their shrinks – is pretty high in our clinic.

  ‘It’s a very interesting theory, Hannah.’ His voice is warm and honey-coated. ‘But you know – we all knew – that Charlie was deeply, chronically depressed. Just because we loved her doesn’t mean we could help her. It’s inevitable that we all feel some sense of failure that we couldn’t do more, and failure is a damned uncomfortable feeling. It’s far preferable to imagine she was done away with against her will, because that’s not anything we could have prevented or seen coming. But the fact is, we weren’t responsible. There’s nothing anyone could have done.’

  ‘Yes, we have to forgive ourselves,’ adds Odelle.

  I look around the circle, where twelve women sit on chairs, one leg twisted around the other, heads bowed, hands fidgeting. I see Frannie plucking at her almost non-existent eyelashes. She studies a hair and then pops it into her mouth. I see Stella staring impassively ahead through her widely stretched eyes. She’s wearing a powder-blue dress today that has a tight bodice and a flared skirt. I try not to look at the waist, made artificially tiny by the removal of a rib, nor at the painful swell of her surgically enhanced breasts. I see Odelle, who layers clothes on to her body like she is making papier mâché, leaning forward earnestly, sniffing for approval like a blind laboratory rat. I see Judith and Nina and the eight other inmates – service users, as we’re officially known – and Justin and Drew, shadowing our every move with the camera. And though my back is towards the door, in my head I see, through the safety-glass panel behind me, across the hallway and up the sweeping wooden staircase that leads to the plush consulting rooms, to where Dr Chakraborty, the clinic’s deputy director, sits in his office, reading through notes with his sad, brown eyes, while downstairs in the therapy rooms I see Laura and Grace and the other part-time therapists. At the back of the staircase, through the door that leads to the new building, and the cafeteria and kitchen and the Mindfulness Area and the tiny staffroom where the medicines are kept, I see Joni and Darren, the psychiatric nurses, clutching their notebooks, and Bridget Ashworth, the clinic’s brisk admin manager, and the well-meaning volunteers and the kitchen staff and the orderlies. All the people charged with keeping us safe. And then my gaze is pulled back here again and I see Dr Oliver Roberts, guru, Svengali, saint, sage, saviour.

  Murderer?

  It could be him. It could be any of them.

  But it definitely happened.

  I’d have to be crazy to make a thing like that up.

  Towards the end of our session, at about seven thirty, I slip away while the others are still stacking up the chairs. After eight weeks here, the grandeur of the hallway, with its glass chandelier and vast oil painting of the earl whose home this once was, no longer comes as a surprise. No one uses the front entrance anyway, unless they’re an important dignitary or there’s a fundraising event going on. The main entrance is round the back in the new wing, where a receptionist checks in visitors and politely searches their bags under the gaze of a smiling Oliver Roberts clad in a formal academic gown in the act of being awarded some honour or other.

  But when I go through the door that divides the old building from the new, I don’t go straight ahead, past the Mindfulness Area and the blond wood of the cafeteria, to where the vibrant orange reception sofa calls a cheerful greeting, as if to reassure visitors this is not a place conducive to dark thoughts. Instead, I take the first door on the left, which leads to the stairwell, with its muted oatmeal walls, and hurry on up to the bedrooms.

  My room is the first on the left, but I walk straight past it and continue down the corridor, with its framed photographs of nature – a closeup of dew on a blade of grass, a feather floating in a muddy puddle, sunlight glittering through a canopy of green leaves. The photographs are caulked to the walls so that we can’t take them off and use them against ourselves, or each other. The very last room is Charlie’s room.

  How many times have I made this journey between my room and hers over the last eight weeks? I’m surprised my feet haven’t made indentations in the strip wood flooring. Yet now I feel strange and unease prickles at the back of my neck. I glance up into the eye of a CCTV camera. The camera has always been there, but it is the first time I’ve really noticed it. Its unblinking stare makes me anxious.

  Our doors don’t have locks. For obvious reasons. Even so, I’m surprised when Charlie’s handle turns. I hesitate before stepping inside.

  I’ve been steeling myself to find her room cleared and emptied of all the things that made it Charlie’s. But it’s all still there – the blown-up photograph of her and her little nieces in her parents’ garden, their three heads dark against an explosion of yellow hibiscus, the lifesize cardboard cutout of Ryan Gosling given to her by an ex-workmate, the old-fashioned patchwork quilt on the bed, a riot of colour amidst the oppressive beigeness.

  Yet whereas Charlie was notoriously untidy, with paperbacks piled precariously on the floor next to her bed, and jeans and sweaters strewn over the chair or heaped on the floor, the room has been meticulously tidied. The desk has been cleared of old newspapers and magazines and empty crisp packets, its white surface bland and clean. The bed, which was always messy, as if someone had just that minute got out of it, is now perfectly made, the quilt pulled taut.

  I put a hand on the pillow and it feels smooth and unnaturally cold to the touch, like a bar of soap, and I snatch it back. I slide open a desk drawer. Empty, apart from a few pens and a pad of paper. The wardrobe has no door, its edges rounded in case anyone should decide to string themselves up from a sharp corner. I almost cry out when I see her fuchsia cashmere cardigan hanging on one of the weirdly shaped cardboard hangers, suspended from a rail designed to break under �
�undue weight’. How she loved that cardigan. She’d told me about a decluttering handbook her mother had given her in a not-so-subtle hint. Charlie had refused to read it on principle but had grudgingly flicked through, taking away from it just one thing – that you should only hang on to things that spark joy. ‘This here is my joy-sparking cardigan,’ she said to me.

  Now it hangs on the clothes hanger, its empty arms drooping.

  The absence of joy is palpable. Rather, again, I have that sense of unease, of being watched.

  Charlie has a corner room, and I cross to the window on the back wall that looks out over the sloping lawn and, at the very bottom, the dark smudge of the lake. There are days when the sun is reflected on the surface of the water, making the lake appear to be lit up from within. But not today.

  A radiator runs underneath the window. On especially cold days Charlie would throw a cushion down on the floor and sit cross-legged on the carpet with her back to the radiator. ‘I can never get warm enough,’ she once told me. ‘I’m like a chicken breast that hasn’t quite thawed out, with a hard, frozen bit in the middle that refuses to defrost.’

  I drop to the floor and assume her position, trying to inhabit her skin, to feel what she felt. Did she really sit here that last day with the heat against her back and think about how best to slice into her wrist, the right angle, the right point? Is it possible I could have got it – got her – so wrong?

  There was a time I was sure of my own judgement, trusted in myself. But that was before.

  I hug my knees into my chest and rock gently for a while. Sometimes this soothes me, but there is something about this room without Charlie in it that makes me anxious.

  I hear the soft thud of footsteps outside, and voices drawing closer.

  ‘We’ve cleared as much as we could, and I don’t mind telling you the place was a pigsty. But there’s a limit to how much we can do before the relatives turn up.’

  The woman says ‘relatives’ as though it’s something not quite nice. I stop rocking abruptly, putting my hand down to steady me. My fingers brush against a piece of paper tucked away behind the pipe of the radiator which the cleaners must have missed. The footsteps stop outside the door and my mouth goes dry as I recognize Dr Roberts’ familiar baritone, sounding unusually clipped and impatient.

  ‘With any luck, they won’t stay long. Quick in– out, then we can get all her stuff bagged up. We’ve a new one arriving a week on Monday.’

  The door handle turns and I’ve just time to snatch up the scrap of paper and stuff it up the sleeve of my sweatshirt before the door bursts open.

  I scramble to my feet, my heart hammering.

  ‘Right. Let’s have a quick check over … Hannah! What are you doing in here?’

  Instantly, Dr Roberts reverts to his usual slow drawl and I wonder if the woman with him, who I now recognize as Bridget Ashworth, has also clocked the change in his voice.

  Bridget Ashworth has a severe brown bob with a grey re-growth line along the parting and glasses with purple frames and a dark wool jacket with what appears to be a single thick white cat hair on the shoulder. She clutches her lanyard and blinks behind her lenses as if she has surprised a wild fox rifling through her kitchen bin, while I shift from foot to foot.

  Who would believe I used to give presentations to roomfuls of people, scanning the crowd and making deliberate eye contact with random strangers?

  Now I keep my eyes on the carpet, but still, as I mumble some story about needing to feel close to Charlie, I sense Bridget Ashworth’s disapproving gaze crawl over me.

  Even when I get back to the safety of my own room, I’m still scratching, trying to get it off.

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  About the Author

  Tammy Cohen is a journalist who writes for magazines and newspapers. She is the author of eight highly popular novels including The Mistress’s Revenge and The Broken. Her latest book is the thriller They All Fall Down.

  She lives in North London with her partner and three (nearly) grown children, plus one badly behaved dog.

  Chat with her on Twitter @MsTamarCohen

  Also by Tammy Cohen

  THE MISTRESS’S REVENGE

  THE WAR OF THE WIVES

  SOMEONE ELSE’S WEDDING

  THE BROKEN

  DYING FOR CHRISTMAS

  FIRST ONE MISSING

  WHEN SHE WAS BAD

  THEY ALL FALL DOWN

  and published by Black Swan

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  Transworld is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com

  First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Black Swan

  an imprint of Transworld Publishers

  Copyright © Tammy Cohen 2017

  Extract from They All Fall Down © Tammy Cohen, 2017

  Cover design by Sarah Whittaker/TW

  Cover image © arcangel/Christopher Grey

  Tammy Cohen has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work.

  This book is a work of fiction and, except in the case of historical fact, any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illus
trative and quoted. We apologize for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgements in any future edition.

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Version 1.0 Epub ISBN 9781473543669

  ISBN 9781784162917

  This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

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