by Ruth Dugdall
I possess classical beauty. No moles or freckles, no irregularities or bumps. Just smooth porcelain and rose, pale hair and peridots for eyes. My looks have made it hard for me to be comfortable with women, and harder still to avoid men. If I could have chosen, I’d be plain.
The bathroom door opened. I could hear Smith in the spare room. I imagined him standing over his bag, naked, selecting a shirt. The image was hazy, as I didn’t know what his body looked like. Not yet. It was only our first day together.
We met most weekends after that, but we really got to know each other via the internet. Each evening I would log on, and he would usually be there, waiting. It was our conversations in cyberspace that mattered, more than our real meetings. It was on the screen, instant messaging, that we talked about Smith’s final journey:
Robin: Pleasure and pain are two sides of the same coin. You can’t have one without the other. Are you up for that?
Smith: I think so. But I want to know more about you. It bothers me that I don’t.
Robin: Why?
Smith: I don’t know. It’s like marrying a stranger. It feels as if the order’s wrong. Does that make sense?
Robin: Not really. Would knowing what my favourite flower is make any difference?
Smith: Maybe. I don’t want us to be strangers. I want you to be the love of my life.
Robin: Tulips.
Smith: Colour?
Robin: White. Or red. You?
Smith: I don’t like flowers, they make me sneeze. Hobbies?
Robin: Books, naturally. And art. Both are ways to achieve immortality, that’s the appeal. Eternity on a vase.
Smith: I’d like to know about art. I feel like such an ignoramus, sometimes! I’ve been to art galleries, but they leave me cold. What am I missing?
Robin: Lots. Like diving into a picture, a scene and feeling it, actually living it. Being able to exist in the image without the need to rationalise or reason. Negative capability, Keats called it.
Smith: Will you teach me? To feel without thinking. That’s what I need.
It was like the beginning of any relationship, I suppose. But it was always there, behind everything we talked about or did: Smith’s intention to die. He’d put a message in a bottle, and I’d plucked it from the sea. It was so improbable, our being together. It was fate.
Cate Austin gives the memory of a smile. “All lovers believe that,” she says. “Until time and experience proves them wrong.”
And I could kiss her. “Now you see! The truth about love. You understand! Who wouldn’t choose to preserve that feeling, if they could? If they dare. So you see, Miss Austin, if this is the extent of my madness then surely I don’t belong here, in this hospital. You will help to get me released, won’t you? You’ll speak with Dr Gregg?”
She says slowly, “Helping David to die was an act of love?”
I’m happy she understands but I still can’t answer her question. It’s too soon. She looks exasperated, like a parent with a disobedient child. I find that I don’t mind.
“Okay, maybe you’ll answer this one,” she says. “Why did Dr Gregg section you? What happened to make you put the glass to your neck?” Just then the door opens and Shane enters, ignoring my visitor.
“Tea time, Alice.”
Cate looks at the large clock on the wall. It’s only four thirty. “Can we have a few more minutes?”
He shrugs, already turning away. “It’s up to you, but her food’ll be in the bin. The cook can’t stand stragglers.”
These people have no respect.
“I think it’s best if I go,” she says, “But I’ll come back tomorrow.”
“And make sure you talk to that quack doctor who got me locked up in here. Before I lose my temper and show him what real madness looks like.”
Seventeen
“Okay, so what are the options?” asked Paul, putting his arms behind his head and sinking lower in his chair.
Cate toyed with a pen, opening the file with it and thinking. Supervision was a time to mull through cases, and she was glad her manager was Paul, that she could speak so freely. “Well, if Dr Gregg recommends it, I can see a judge being attracted by a hospital order. It suggests that Alice acted because she was ill, something that can be cured. A far more palatable idea than the alternative.”
“But when you saw her at St Theresa’s she was fine? No mental health problems?”
“Not that I could see. She seemed as sane as I am! Which leaves a Community Order.”
“Talk me through that. What would you do with her on a community order?”
“I’d look at her attitude to relationships, for one. Love and this idea of sacrifice seem to be quite twisted in her mind – I thinks it’s only by working through that, that we’ll know if she’d do it again.”
“Christ, Cate, I hardly think she’s a risk to the general population. She was lucky to find one nutter who wanted help to die, I don’t think they’ll be lining up!”
“I hope not, but that doesn’t mean she won’t try. She’s so cold, so unemotional. She says helping Smith to die was an act of love. I want to feel something for her, Paul. Get some kind of connection, but I just can’t. It’s like talking to a hologram – it looks real enough, but really it’s just an image. I just can’t seem to get to the real Alice.”
Paul shrugged, leaning back in his chair, the supervision notes forgotten on his desk. “So she’s a cold fish. Let’s cut to the chase, Cate – what are you going to recommend to the judge?”
“Christ knows. I’m still thinking that a prison sentence is the only real option. If I can’t make any headway in the next few days I’ll just have to conclude that she’s unresponsive and wouldn’t be suitable for a community order. If she won’t open up, what good would that be to a probation officer?”
“But she’s talking to you.”
“Yes. But I still feel that she’s holding back. Like the motive – I still don’t have a grasp on why she wanted to help David Jenkins end his life. And if I don’t know that, how can I come up with a plan that would satisfy a judge? Unless I can be certain that whoever ends up working this case would be able to make significant headway in ensuring Alice Mariani never re-offends, then I’m just going to have to propose a prison sentence. I won’t be able to offer an alternative.”
“Well, Cate, it’s your call. But don’t be too rash – after all her victim did want to die. It’s not like she murdered anybody.”
Eighteen
I’m in the nut house but I’m not a nut. A nut can be cracked but I will not be broken. Think about that psychology experiment in the sixties, the students faking mental illness to get admitted to a psychiatric hospital. Once they were inside they behaved normally and no-one noticed. Label someone as mad and that’s what they are. Give a dog a bad name and it’ll bite you. I’m surprised that I remember such things, lessons that I learned when I was a student myself, years ago now, and in a different discipline, psychology. My mother’s subject. Had she lived, had she not had me, it’s what she would have studied at university. Maybe I am a chip off the old block, after all. I wonder if my grandmother thinks this, as she reads the morning paper across from her husband, staring at a headline about her dead daughter’s daughter. Alice Mariani convicted. She sweetens her black coffee remembering when we met, all those years ago, and wonders if what has happened to Smith has anything to do with her. That had she shown me some love, it may not have happened. I’m inventing this, of course; I’ve no way of knowing if she thinks of me at all. About the bribe: she bought my silence. So very Catholic, she bought redemption for her sin, and I bought a house where I could be alone, and nice things like my precious blue vase. I call it blood money because there was blood on her hands. My mother’s.
After I took the cheque, I never saw my grandmother again. She’d already abandoned her only daughter, it could only have been easier to abandon me. Once you walk away from love and survive, it must be easier the next time. That is one thing I can’t
do. I’m incapable of leaving someone I love. But those who walk away are survivors. They know what it takes to get over it, to move on. It’s a gift.
Wherever my grandmother is, she can hardly have missed reading about me. And if, by some fluke, she hasn’t seen the paper or watched the TV news, surely some well-meaning busybody will have asked her. ‘That woman on the news, her name is Mariani too. Are you related?’ To anyone who knew my mother, how could she deny the thick mane of blonde hair, the green eyes? Living apart does not stop you from looking like your kin, despite your best efforts. Children resemble their parents, one way or another. So taking the surname Mariani, that impulsive decision I made when I was sixteen, has become my final revenge. Forcing my grandmother to think of me, when she would rather forget.
Cate Austin thinks of me, I’m sure. Trying to work me out. She arrives with her notepad, her chewed pen. She’s interested in me, I see it in the way her pen stops writing, her eyes watch for too long as she forgets to take notes. She is wondering if she is like me. How different am I really?
All lovers think like that, she told me when I said that meeting Smith felt like fate. She spoke like someone who’s loved and lost. She knows something of my fear, but has she ever had a man willing to be her sacrifice? In the same place, what would she do? I’d like to ask what she thinks of my crime, to see if she gives the easy knee-jerk reaction: ‘I would never do that! I could never help someone to die, never eat someone’s flesh… ’
But how do you know? Has anyone ever asked you? Have you thought about it? Really? Other people have chosen death as an expression of love. Smith and I are not unique. There are other cases, ones that don’t reach the media, in other countries. Who will have heard of me in France, in America? And there was that case that made the news in Germany, Armin Miewes, who killed his lover at his request. After reading about it in the newspaper, I wondered how it had been done. So now, maybe, somebody is reading about me and thinking they could do the same.
Is it so very improbable?
I dream I’m in bed, but not this bed in the hospital. I’m at home. I dream I’m asleep.
From above, as I look down, I see my sleeping body, wound in a white sheet. I turn and toss in the night, and every motion winds the sheet tighter and tighter around me, like a snake constricting. Then I see I’m not alone. Next to me is Smith; or rather, what was once Smith. His body, his shell, the house his soul sub-let, if you believe in such nonsense. It is rotting; I can smell it even in my dream, the stench of decomposing flesh. His mouth is open and I’m drawn closer, into the blackness. Flies buzz round him, the smell makes me want to gag, and still I go deeper and deeper into him, into his body. When I wake, the sheet is pinned around me and a watery light intrudes through the curtains, telling me it is morning.
The doctor will arrive after breakfast and I have my best smile ready. I’m wearing a cashmere jumper and jeans, Chanel No.5 behind my ears and on my wrists. I no longer look mad. My hair is neat. Dr Gregg looks at me as if I’m someone he doesn’t recognise.
“I see someone brought your clothes, Alice. That must be a relief. You certainly look well.”
He’s at a loss about how to categorise me in these clothes. A different uniform, it confuses him. Just a few days ago I was mad, but today I’m sane. Which is it to be then? I hope his pride won’t get in the way of my freedom. He should have started to assess me for a hospital order, started to prepare the way, not have me locked up! He made a mistake in sectioning me but admitting so is within his gift. I hope he’s feeling generous.
He lifts a pen from his lapel and clicks the end, smiling pleasantly, inviting me to confide. “You seem much calmer today, Alice.”
I decide to remain submissive. “I feel much better, thank you. I don’t know what came over me.” I hear myself, like some heroine in a Victorian novel, and think of the word swoon. That is what my voice is doing.
“I’m glad.” He sounds doubtful, peering at me like I’m something in a petri dish. His glasses are half circles and his jacket corduroy. He’s the very caricature of a trendy physician. I’d laugh if there were not so much at stake.
“But the staff tell me you’ve been complaining of headaches and dizziness?”
“It’s nothing. Just the worry of being here, probably. I want to go home, now,” I tell him, biting back the ‘please’ that nearly escapes my lips. I will not beg. I don’t belong here. Freedom is my right.
“I’m sure you do, Alice.” Condescending. Using my first name without asking. To him, I’m a child asking for sweeties. I can hear the refusal already. “But although you seem well at the moment I think it would be wise to keep you here a while longer, just to be on the safe side.”
“But… ”
“It’s for your own good, Alice. You were in quite a state on Tuesday. Let’s see how you progress. The sedative from yesterday will have worn off now. I’ll prescribe something else to keep you stable. And some more painkillers for that headache.”
He’s not talking to me. The speech is for his own benefit, the routine drone of a doctor doling out pills. Prozac or some other serotonin cocktail.
I shall not take them. I won’t be tricked into madness, when sanity is all I have.
“Do you remember what happened on Tuesday, Alice?”
I think back, but my memory is a wasteland. I see outline but no details. What sedative did they give me, that I can’t catch the day in my mind? I hear broken glass, and I wonder if it was my patience or my sanity that was shattered.
Nineteen
On her way to the secure ward Cate asked a passing nurse where she would find Dr Gregg and was told his office was in the main part of the psychiatric hospital, near the Brain Injury Rehabilitation Unit. After she had thanked him, she headed to the crossroad of signs, scanning for BIRU. She dodged patients on the way, men and women who shuffled along or loped alarmingly, the very picture of madness. Alice wasn’t like that and, even after thinking about what Dr Gregg had said about egomania, she still wasn’t convinced that Alice was suicidal. Determined not to make any mistakes with this case, she wanted this decision explained to her. She’d made a mistake once before. She wasn’t going to let that happen again. This part of the hospital was open – no-one here was held against their will, and Cate found her way to a general staff room, with a coffee machine and several desks. Two nurses and a woman in a flowing skirt with a nervous laugh were chatting while they wrote in files.
Cate knocked on the open door and said, “I’d like to speak with Dr Gregg, please.” One of the nurses took her name and picked up a phone. Cate heard her tell Dr Gregg that Alice Mariani’s probation officer wanted a word.
“He’s on his lunch break,” the nurse said, replacing the receiver, “but he’s happy for you to go in if, you don’t mind that he’s eating.”
Cate was directed along the corridor to a door below a sign that announced, in gilt letters on a black board: DR CHARLES GREGG, Forensic Psychiatrist. Cate knocked and waited.
“Come in.”
Dr Gregg was seated behind an oversized desk, on which an open packet of crisps and a half-eaten sausage roll had been laid out on a serviette. He looked in his early fifties, silver peppered his brown hair and he wore half-moon glasses, his eyes framed by laughter creases. He stood, wiped his hand on the serviette, and offered it to her, “We meet at last, Miss Austin.”
“Cate,” she said, taking the hand briefly.
“Take a pew, Cate. And call me Charles. I hope you don’t mind if I carry on?” he gestured to his sausage roll, and Cate shook her head, “If I don’t grab something now I’ll miss my chance.”
The seat was fairly low and placed her on eye level with a framed picture of a smart looking woman with a helmet of dark hair, who must be his wife. There was also a picture of a dog, a giant St Bernard slobbering on a ball.
“I’m just on my way to see Alice Mariani. This is my second visit; I came yesterday to bring her belongings.”
There was a pau
se as Charles swallowed, “Yes, I noticed she was looking smarter this morning. You should have seen her on Tuesday. How did she seem to you yesterday?”
“Very well, I think. At first, I thought she looked strained but then, when she’d got herself dressed and we started to talk, I couldn’t see that she was any different from Monday.” Cate hesitated, “As you pointed out, I’m not medically trained.”
Charles finished his lunch and leaned forward on his arms. He lowered his head and peered over the half moons of his glasses, listening.