‘Hold it up,’ says Mum. ‘We all want to see it, don’t we, Geoff?’
‘Dad wouldn’t know a Chongololo dress from a watering can, Mum,’ says Fran.
And he never answers you when you ask him a direct question. Haven’t you noticed, in all the years you’ve been married to him? He speaks to you only when it suits him, not in response to any need of yours.
I stand up, shake out the dress so that Mum can see it. It isn’t only blue, there’s pink in it too. A pattern. Wavy lines.
Wavy lines, short fluted sleeves…
No. No, no, no.
Darkness creeps in from the edges of my vision, towards the centre. ‘Are you okay, Con?’ I hear Fran say.
‘What’s wrong, Connie?’ Mum’s voice distorts on its way to me. By the time they reach me the words are stretched out and twisting, like the lines on the dress.
I have to do something to push away the dizziness. So far, I haven’t had an attack in front of Mum, and I can’t allow it to happen now. In 2003, in a moment of weakness, I confessed to her about my hair loss and vomiting, the facial paralysis. I never told anyone, not even Kit, but I found it frightening the way she latched on to my new invalid status. It gave her a story to tell herself, one she liked: I made myself ill by pretending I wanted to move to Cambridge when, deep down, I didn’t – I was only saying I did to please Kit. Now I was suffering for my stupidity, and she was going to nurse me back to health. The moral of the story? No member of the Monk family must ever think about leaving Little Holling.
‘Connie?’ Through the haze, I hear Kit say my name, but there’s no connection between my brain and my voice, so I can’t answer.
Don’t give in to the greyness. Keep thinking. Grasp a thought and focus all your energy on it, before it dissolves and leaves you floating in darkness. You didn’t tell Kit because you didn’t want to admit it to yourself, did you? It’s one thing to bitch about your mother being a paranoid control freak, quite another to say…Go on, say it. It’s the truth, isn’t it? You know it is. She was glad you were ill; she thought you deserved it.
She’d rather you were sick than free.
The clouds in my head start to clear. When my vision returns to normal, I see that Fran and Kit are both poised to spring out of their chairs and catch me, but they needn’t worry. The dizziness has gone, and it won’t be back. Nor will my lies, any of them – not the ones I tell myself, and not the ones I tell other people. I’m sick of poisoning myself with dishonesty.
I throw the dress at Kit. ‘This is the dress the dead woman was wearing,’ I say.
Mum, Dad and Fran all start to protest loudly. I hear‘…blue and pink…ridiculous…strain of all this police…can’t be…’
‘It’s the dress she was wearing,’ I repeat, keeping my eyes on Kit. ‘You know it is. That’s why you bought it for me – part of your plan to destroy me.’ Mum makes the sort of noise a horse under attack might make. I ignore her. ‘I’m supposed to go properly mad now, am I?’ I spit the words at Kit. ‘Fall apart? Because you can’t possibly have bought me the same dress for my birthday that a murdered woman was wearing in a picture I saw on Roundthehouses, so I must be insane, I must be losing it – is that about right?’
‘Why’s Auntie Connie upset, Daddy?’ Benji asks.
‘Connie, think about what you’re saying.’ Kit’s face is pale. With his eyes, he gestures towards Mum as if to say, Do you really want to do this in front of her?
I couldn’t care less any more. I’ll say what I have to say, whoever happens to be listening, whether it’s Mum, Dad, the Pope or the Queen of England.
‘You said the dress you saw was green and mauve.’ Kit’s eyes are on me, but his words aren’t for my benefit; he wants our audience to hear that he has proof of my inconsistency, and therefore my madness. ‘This dress is blue and pink.’
‘You did say green and lilac, Con,’ Fran weighs in on his side.
I pick up my bag. As I leave the room, Mum calls after me, ‘I don’t know what you think you’ll achieve by running away!’
I’ve already achieved it. I’m gone.
‘The design was exactly the same,’ I tell Alice. ‘There must have been a green and lilac version and a blue and pink version.’ It’s my second emergency appointment in less than a week. Last time, I was worried in case she minded my imposing on her. Today, when I turned up as she was about to leave work for the day, I didn’t apologise or give her a choice. I told her she had to see me.
‘The woman who was murdered at 11 Bentley Grove was wearing a dress from a small, independent boutique that makes all its own clothes and has only one branch – in Silsford.’ I pause to allow the significance of this to impress itself on Alice.
‘Let’s zoom out a little.’ She makes the shape of a camera with her hands, pulls them back towards her body. ‘Leaving the dress aside for a moment…’
‘Even Fran believes Kit, and she thinks he’s a liar,’ I blurt out. ‘She told me the other day that any doctor who said there was nothing wrong with me can’t have been looking very hard.’
‘Forget Fran,’ says Alice. ‘I want us to talk about you and Kit. Nobody else is important. You say Kit’s trying to make you doubt your own sanity. Why would he do that?’
I open my mouth, then find I have nothing to say, no answer. I play it all back in my head: finding the address in the SatNav, Kit denying all knowledge of it; the virtual tour of 11 Bentley Grove, the woman’s body, the police, Jackie Napier seeing the body too; Fran looking on Street View and spotting Kit’s car; me unwrapping my birthday present from Kit and finding that dress.
I recognise nearly all the characters in the story: guarded, intelligent Simon Waterhouse; kind and modest Sam Kombothekra; practical, insensitive Fran; Selina Gane, angry and frightened. I can even find adjectives for Jackie Napier, whom I saw for only five minutes: sanctimonious, superior, charmless. And the dead woman on the carpet: she was dead, drained of blood, still. Those were her defining characteristics. There’s only one person I can’t bring into focus, however hard I try.
‘Connie?’ Alice prompts me.
‘I have no idea who or what Kit is,’ I say eventually. ‘It’s as if he isn’t a person at all, just a…an image, or a hologram. A collection of behaviours.’
‘You mean you don’t trust him.’
‘No.’ It’s hard to describe something that’s missing. An absence only has a clear shape when it was once a presence, when you know what’s gone. ‘I don’t trust him, but that’s not what I’m saying. When I’m with him, I don’t sense a…a person there, under the skin.’ I shrug. ‘I can’t explain it any better than that, but…this isn’t new. It didn’t start with me finding 11 Bentley Grove in his SatNav. I’ve known it for years, I just haven’t allowed myself to admit it.’
Alice is waiting for me to say more.
‘When Kit was a student in Cambridge, he fell in love with someone. He sort of let it slip, but when I asked him about it he clammed up and denied it. He’s always resented his parents, but would never tell me why. He pretended he didn’t, but I could see that he did – I heard it in his voice whenever he spoke to them. Then he disowned them altogether, and I’m pretty sure he lied about the real reason.’
‘And then came the SatNav, his car on Street View, the woman’s body, the dress,’ says Alice. She twists her swivel chair round to face the window. ‘Connie, I wouldn’t normally say something like this to a patient, but I’m going to say it to you: I think you’re right not to trust Kit. I have no idea what he’s done, but I think you need to stay away from him.’
‘I can’t. Selina Gane won’t speak to me, and the police have said they aren’t taking it any further. The only way I’ll find out what’s going on is if I can persuade Kit to tell me the truth. What?’
Is that pity in her eyes?
‘You don’t think I’ll ever find out, do you? You think I should give up.’
‘I know you’re not going to.’ She smiles at me. ‘I wou
ldn’t either, if I were you.’
‘Before all this happened, I was like Kit,’ I tell her. ‘I wasn’t real either. Now I have a characteristic: I’m the woman who won’t give up.’
‘You weren’t real?’
I’m not sure it’s something I can explain, but I have to try, however crazy it sounds. ‘In 2003, when Kit and I were looking at houses in Cambridge, I felt…non-existent.’
Alice waits for me to elaborate.
‘Most people have a type of house they prefer: townhouse in the centre of a city, stone cottage in the middle of nowhere. Some people always buy new-builds, some would only ever consider a house that’s more than a hundred years old. The house you choose says something about the sort of person you are. When Kit took me to see a cottage in a village called Lode, just outside Cambridge, I thought, “Yes, I could be a rural cottage sort of person.” Then he took me to a penthouse flat on a main road in the city centre, and I thought, “This could be me – maybe I’m a townie at heart.” I didn’t know myself at all, or what I wanted. After three or four viewings, I started to panic that I didn’t have an identity. I was transparent – I saw through myself and there was nothing there. I thought, “I could live in any of these places. I can’t say about any of them that they’re ‘me’ or ‘not me’. Maybe I don’t have a personality.”’
Alice leans back in her chair. It creaks. ‘You were openminded. Kit took you to see lots of beautiful houses, and you liked them all in different ways. Perfectly understandable, and nothing to worry about. Perhaps each house spoke to a different aspect of your character.’
‘No.’ I wave away her reassuring words. ‘Yes, it was silly of me to panic about not knowing what sort of house I wanted, of course it was, but I did panic – that’s what’s worrying. Each time I saw a house and wasn’t instantly sure if it was “me”, I felt more and more unreal. As if any self that I might once have had was draining away, drop by drop.’ I chew on my thumbnail, afraid that I’m admitting too much and will somehow be made to suffer for it. ‘And then we found this amazing house, 17 Pardoner Lane – the best of the bunch by far, I can see that now – and I was in such a state, I had no idea whether I loved it or hated it. Kit adored it. I pretended to – don’t know how convincing I was. I felt like I was falling apart. All I wanted was to be able to say, “Yes, this house is absolutely me” and…know what that meant.’
Alice bends down, reaches into the open brown suitcase under her desk. It’s where she keeps her remedies; the inside of the case is divided into tiny square compartments, each one containing a small brown glass bottle. ‘You were anxious and depressed, overwhelmed by your family’s unreasonable expectations,’ she says, picking up one bottle, then another, reading the labels. ‘That sense of your self diminishing came from trying to stifle your own needs for your parents’ sake, because they found them inconvenient. It had nothing to do with being flexible about what sort of house you wanted to buy, I promise you.’ She has found the remedy she was looking for. For extra, extra mad people.
I want to say more about the house I should have fallen in love with, but was too neurotic to see clearly. I need to confess to all of it: how I set out to ruin things, chipped away at Kit’s conviction with my paranoia. ‘17 Pardoner Lane was next to a school building – the Beth Dutton Centre,’ I tell Alice. ‘I lost sleep – whole nights – over the bell. How ridiculous is that?’
‘The bell?’
‘The school bell. What if it rang between lessons and was too loud? The noise might drive us mad, and we’d never be able to sell up and move on because we’d have to be honest with prospective buyers – we couldn’t lie about a thing like that. Kit said, “If the bell’s too loud, we’ll ask them to turn the volume down.” He laughed at me for worrying about something so stupid. He laughed again when I got cold feet a few days later for an equally ridiculous reason: the house had no name.’
‘I’m giving you a different remedy this time,’ says Alice. ‘Anhalonium. Because of what you said about feeling as if you were transparent and having no personality.’
‘I’d never lived anywhere that didn’t have a name,’ I say, not listening to her. ‘Still haven’t. First I lived at Thorrold House with Mum and Dad, then I moved in with Kit. His flat in Rawndesley was number 10, but the building had a name: Martland Tower. Anyway, that was different. Neither of us thought of the flat as home – it was temporary, a stop-gap. Now I live in Melrose Cottage, Fran and Anton’s house is Thatchers…In Little Holling, all the houses have names. It’s what I’m used to. When Kit was so keen on 17 Pardoner Lane, and I tried to imagine myself living in a house that was just a number, it seemed…wrong, somehow. Too impersonal. It scared me.’
Alice is nodding. ‘Change is incredibly scary,’ she says. She always sticks up for me. I’m not sure it’s what I need, not any more. It might do me more good to hear her say, ‘Yes, Connie. That’s really mad. You need to stop thinking in this crazy way.’
‘One night I woke Kit up at four in the morning,’ I tell her. ‘He was asleep, and I kept shaking him. I think I must have been hysterical. I hadn’t slept all night, and I’d worked myself into a state. Kit stared at me as if I was a maniac – I can still remember how shocked he looked. I told him we couldn’t buy 17 Pardoner Lane unless we gave it a name – I couldn’t live in a house with no name. I wanted us to look on the web, find out if it was possible to give a house a name if it didn’t have one already. You know, officially.’
Alice smiles, as if there is something understandable or endearing about my insanity.
‘Kit saw I wasn’t going to calm down or let him get any sleep until he’d come up with a solution to the problem I’d invented, so he said, “Come on, then – let’s go and investigate.” He soon found enough on the internet to convince me there was no need to worry: we could give number 17 a name if we wanted to. It’s easy – all you have to do is write to the Post Office. He said, “How about The Nuthouse?”’
‘You must have been hurt,’ says Alice.
‘Not at all. I started laughing – thought it was the best joke I’d ever heard. I was so relieved that everything was going to be okay – Kit would get the house he loved, and I’d be able to make it feel like home by naming it. Course, on one level I must have known I’d now have to come up with some other obstacle…’ I shake my head in disgust. ‘I wonder what it would have been: that I didn’t like the doorknob, or the letterbox. My hysteria would have attached itself to some other random thing, given half a chance, but I didn’t see that then. Kit was relieved too. We were almost…I don’t know, it was like we were celebrating. We didn’t go straight back to bed – we stayed up looking at house name websites on the internet, laughing at the ridiculous suggestions: Costa Fortuna, Wits End. Apparently names like that are really popular – that’s what the website said. I found it hard to believe, but Kit said he could imagine some of his colleagues calling their houses things like that. “It’s a common affliction, thinking you’re funny when you’re not,” he said. “Wits End. Might as well call your house, ‘I’m a Dullard’.” I asked him what he wanted to call ours.’
‘What did he say?’
‘Oh, loads of stupid things – things he knew were stupid, to wind me up. I don’t think he tried too hard – he knew it wasn’t up to him. The name needed to be perfect, and it had to come from me – something that would say “this is home” and make all my anxiety go away. Kit started talking rubbish. “I’ve got an idea,” he said. “Let’s call it the Death Button Centre. Do you think the people at the Beth Dutton Centre’d be pissed off? Or the postman?” I told him not to be ridiculous. Should’ve known that’d only make him worse.’ The memory, absent from my mind for so many years, is suddenly more vivid than reality. I can see myself clearly, sitting at the desk in the Martland Tower flat, Kit kneeling down beside me, both of us in our pyjamas. We only had one computer chair in those days. I was howling with laughter, so loud I could hardly hear Kit’s voice, tears pouring down my face
. ‘He pretended he was deadly serious, said, “It’s growing on me the more I think about it: the Death Button Centre. We could get a plaque made for the front door. No, I know, even better – let’s call it 17 Pardoner Lane…”’ The words evaporate in my mouth as new fear surges through my body. What? What is it?
The Death Button Centre. The Death Button Centre…
I stand up, stumble, steady myself against the wall.
‘Connie? What’s wrong?’
I know what I saw – the missing detail that I haven’t been able to bring to mind until now. Yes. It was there. It was definitely there, in the picture with the dead woman and the blood. But not in the photograph of the lounge, the one without the woman, the one I would see if I looked at the tour of 11 Bentley Grove now. In that picture, it’s missing. ‘I’ve got to go,’ I tell Alice. I grab my bag and run, ignoring her pleas for me to stay, leaving behind the bottle of remedy she has prepared for me that’s standing on the corner of her desk.
POLICE EXHIBIT REF: CB13345/432/25IG
VOLCANO
by Tilly Gilpatrick, 20 April 2010
Very hot lava
Over all the land
Like a big hot wet blanket
Covering the world in
Ash
Nobody can fly home from their holiday
Orange hot lava!
Super work, Tilly! Some lovely images!
No, it’s an appalling poem, even for a five-year-old. This is a good poem:
When first my way to fair I took
Few pence in purse had I,
And long I used to stand and look
At things I could not buy.
Now times are altered: if I care
To buy a thing, I can;
The pence are here and here’s the fair,
But where’s the lost young man?
– To think that two and two are four
And neither five nor three,
The heart of man has long been sore
And long ’tis like to be.
The Other Woman’s House Page 25