by Mark Edwards
A thin pink gown wrapped around a bundle of bones.
Tears sliding down a hollowed-out cheek.
Blood-stained fur and two pairs of glassy eyes . . .
I stood up and paced the room. When I was coding, working on an app, I would do this to work through problems. Moving helped me to focus, to dislodge the blockages and untangle the knots in my head. I picked up a DVD case, a rom-com, forced myself to remember the plot, the funny scenes, sunshine and beaches and kisses. Finally, the real memories were displaced, shoved back in their box, the lid slammed shut.
I put the DVD back on the shelf and returned to the present moment, sitting back down with my laptop.
Why had my burglar returned it?
Was it possible that I had imagined the break-in, in the same way that Laura thought she was seeing ghosts? No one else had seen evidence of the burglary because I had cleaned up before my only visitors, Jake and the police, had come round. I hadn’t even taken any photographs. Was it a fantasy brought on by too much alcohol and too little sleep? Did I damage the door myself then forget I’d done it? When I thought back across the past few weeks, there were holes there, black spaces in my memory, pockets of time that I couldn’t account for. I paced back across the room.
No, it had to be real. Somebody else had damaged the front door. My bank account had been defrauded, and that was because my burglar had cloned my card.
Unless it was me who used the cards.
I shook my head. No, that was impossible. I hadn’t withdrawn that cash, or gone to the Apple Store. Unless I was losing my mind . . . When I closed my eyes, I saw a flash of myself surrounded by iPads and computers and speakers. Could I really have gone to the Apple Store and spent £1600 on a new laptop without remembering? And where was that laptop? Because the one sitting here now was definitely my old one, with the exact same scratches and marks.
Tomorrow, I decided, I would tell Dr Sauvage the rest of what had happened in Romania. I had to take the memories out of their box, expose them to sunlight, get them out of my head. I had to share them with someone who wouldn’t be driven crazy by them before they drove me crazy. Only then would I be able to move on with my life.
Chapter Twenty-Two
After an hour of thrashing about in bed, my brain whirring like a helicopter, waking dreams in which I alternately ran through a forest and wandered through the glass temple of the Apple Store, I got up and opened a bottle of red wine. I craved oblivion.
I set the glass of wine—full to the brim, the liquid thick and dark as blood—on my desk and sat down. I opened Spotify and put on one of my favourite albums, drowning out the ticking clock and the rumbling voices of the couple who lived upstairs, who often stayed up late into the night, alternately arguing and having noisy sex, and decided to try to catch up with some emails. Most of them were junk. I deleted these and moved the numerous messages from Skittle into a folder to deal with when I felt more alert.
The last time I had sat up in the middle of the night with my laptop was when I was working on my app, Heatseeker. Skittle were confident it was going to be the next big dating app. Some acquaintances thought I had lucked out when I’d done the deal, but although there might have been some luck involved, I had worked hard to achieve my good fortune, sitting up through the night while Laura slept in the other room. I had poured hundreds, perhaps thousands, of hours into creating what I thought of as my baby.
I gulped down wine and carried on working through my emails until I spotted one from Laura that had arrived earlier that day, a few hours before her suicide attempt.
I thought you might want to see this. Laura x.
Attached to the email was a photograph. I double-clicked on it and the iPhoto software, which was set to automatically start when I clicked on a picture file, opened up and displayed the picture. It was a photo of a pair of kittens, wrestling each other. I sat back. Why had Laura sent me a photo of kittens? That was weird. But if she’d done it just before trying to kill herself, she clearly hadn’t been acting normally. I scrutinised the photo for a few moments, trying to figure out if there was some kind of secret message hidden in the picture. But it was just a pair of cats.
Now that iPhoto was open I did something I didn’t normally allow myself to do, not wanting to torture myself, and began to flick through old photos. Here was the record of my and Laura’s time together.
When Laura and I were first together, we took photos of each other all the time. There she was lying back on the grass in the park, sunglasses on, a huge grin lighting up her face. Here we were with our cheeks pressed together on our trip to Alton Towers, the camera held at arm’s length. There were dozens of pictures of us just hanging around at home.
As time went on, there were fewer spontaneous, everyday shots, but there were still hundreds taken at parties and friends’ weddings and on days out. With changing hairstyles and clothes, lines spreading on our faces, an inch or two added to our waists, I watched us grow a little older together over the five years of our relationship. Of course it hadn’t always been idyllic. No one photographs the bad times—the arguments, the periods of boredom, the blips when we took each other for granted or I neglected her for work. But this was our life together . . . the life that we hadn’t been able to maintain.
There were very few pictures from our European trip because our camera had been in one of the backpacks we left behind in Breva.
The only photos from the trip that remained were those I’d taken with my phone. These had been automatically synced to my computer when we got home and my laptop and phone started talking to each other. I had never dared look at these photos, but now I felt my finger drift across the computer’s trackpad until I was looking at the first photo I’d taken: a selfie with both of us on the Eurostar to Brussels. We had been so happy that day, setting off on our amazing journey, free from worries and responsibility. I flicked through the photos, smiling at the memories of France and Spain and Italy. I emptied my wine glass and fetched the bottle.
I reached a picture of Laura in the café near Budapest Station where we had eaten before taking the train. I had snapped a picture of her when she wasn’t looking. Her face was in profile and she was brushing a strand of hair away from her eye, pensive, pretty. I stared at the photo for a long time, taking another swallow of wine to deaden the pain. This was the last picture of her before the calamity.
Or it should have been. For when I tapped the cursor key, expecting it to take me back to the first picture in the album, a new photograph of Laura appeared.
As soon as I saw this new picture I dropped my wine glass, the shattering sound distant beneath the thrumming in my ears, oblivious to the red stain that spread across the carpet by my feet.
In the photo, Laura was lying on a bunk, asleep, her arms wrapped around her chest, knees drawn up. The photo had been taken in the sleeper compartment of the Romanian train.
Hand trembling, I clicked.
In the next picture, I was asleep in the other bunk, mouth ajar.
I snatched my hand away from the laptop like it was on fire. The headache from earlier had returned. Out of the corner of my eye I could see the fresh red wine stain on the carpet, the colour of dried blood.
I thought back to that night. I had fallen asleep holding my phone. It had been dead when I woke up but there had still been a few per cent of battery life left when I fell asleep.
The person who snuck into the carriage and stole our passports and tickets must have used my phone to take photos of us sleeping.
Hand trembling, I clicked back to the first photo, and found myself looking at the picture of Laura at Budapest Station. Confused, I clicked again. Back to the first photo, of us on Eurostar. I went back to the album, scoured the thumbnail photos.
The two pictures from our night on the train weren’t there anymore. They had vanished.
I thought I would never feel as s
cared as I had been that night in the forest. But now I started shivering, unable to move, my mind shutting down into pure instinct mode, aware of the shadows around me, the darkness outside.
I stood up, and the room spun around me. I was drunk, so drunk, more than I had realised. So pissed that I was hallucinating photographs.
Drunk and crazy, a little voice in my head said. Or just fucking crazy.
Something thumped above me and a woman cried out. I clutched my chest. But it was just my neighbours, fucking noisily again. I staggered across the room, my heart skittering crazily. I picked up my phone and called Laura’s mobile, hanging up after two rings when I remembered what time it was and that Laura was in hospital. She was seeing ghosts and I was imagining phantom photographs. I started to laugh. We really were the perfect couple.
Chapter Twenty-Three
An elderly woman with a face that looked like it had been in the tumble-drier too long stood outside the hospital entrance in her dressing gown, attached to a drip that hung from a metal stand on wheels, smoking a cigarette down to the butt. I kept a wide berth; the smell of smoke was liable to turn my stomach after the night I’d had. I felt wretched, poisoned by alcohol and lack of sleep, but visiting hours were 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. and I needed to see Laura. Even the cloudless ice-blue sky and the wintry sunshine couldn’t make me feel better.
I walked through the hospital quickly. I carried a bunch of yellow and apricot tulips: her favourite. I was eager to see her, though I had decided not to tell her about my weird episode in the night.
My eagerness waned as I approached her bed, which had a thin curtain drawn around it, and heard voices. The hectoring boom of her mother, Sandra, and the reedy whine of her dad, Frank. My heart sank. I had hoped I would miss them.
I took a deep breath and ducked through the curtain. Both of Laura’s parents turned, frowns etched on their faces. Laura was propped up in the bed, a pillow behind her back, her skin as white as the bedsheets. She stared into the middle distance, her face blank. Seeing her like that made me want to put my arms around her and, somehow, make it all better. An instinct that should have been even stronger in her mother.
‘Daniel,’ said Sandra, a hint of reproach in her voice. She air-kissed me—she had the faint scent of lavender talc; I hoped I didn’t still stink of alcohol—and I nodded hello to Frank, who appeared to be dressed for a winter’s day on the golf course.
‘My daughter’s been a very silly girl, hasn’t she?’ Sandra said. She tutted and looked at Laura like she’d been called into the headmaster’s office to be told that her daughter had been caught snogging a boy behind the bike shed.
I went over to Laura and leaned over to kiss her cheek but she flinched away, refusing to meet my eye.
‘I thought you’d come last night,’ I said, addressing Sandra.
‘Frank had a very important dinner meeting. We simply couldn’t get out of it.’
I swallowed. While Laura and I had been a couple, I had bitten my tongue in her parents’ presence, practised deep breathing exercises and made as many excuses as I could to avoid their company. When I first met them I could scarcely believe they were for real, had thought Laura’s stories about how they cared more about money and status than they did about her must be exaggerated. They weren’t. The Mackenzies had got lucky buying a couple of cheap houses in London in the eighties before selling them on for a ridiculous profit at the peak of the property boom. Since then they had moved to Cornwall and set up a ‘lifestyle consultancy’ business, advising rich people how to maximise their work–life balance.
They’d never hidden their disappointment in Laura. ‘Working for a charity is all very . . . noble,’ Sandra had said on that first meeting, her nose wrinkling. ‘But don’t you think charity should start at home, Laura? That you should look after your own needs first? What do you think, Daniel?’
‘I think it’s great that Laura is doing something she’s passionate about. There’s more to life than earning loads of money.’
Sandra had looked at me with disgust.
‘They’ve always been the same,’ Laura had once told me. ‘If I came home from school and told them I’d got eighty per cent in an exam, my dad would ask me what went wrong with the other twenty. Mum was always pointing out my physical flaws—if I bumped into something it would be “typical clumsy Laura” or if I had a spot on my face she would point it out to all her awful friends. I couldn’t wait to escape.’ A big sigh. ‘They’re still my parents though.’
So there were the bi-annual trips down to Cornwall to stay at their huge, tasteless house, filled with expensive ornaments and horrible modern art. Frank was usually at the golf course or at work while Sandra endlessly recounted the exploits of the next-door neighbours, two gay black men who were, outrageously, going through the process of adopting a baby.
‘I’ve heard they might get a white one,’ she’d said, in a hushed, horrified voice.
It was beautiful there, though, the rugged coast and sandy beaches a short stroll away. One of my favourite memories was a time when Laura ran shrieking along the beach, listing at the top of her voice all the things her mum was appalled by: ‘The gays, the blacks, the Arabs, single mums, the state of the NHS, the Guardian, trade unions, Russell Brand, next door’s cat, the cost of parking in town . . .’ Afterwards, she had flopped exhausted on the sand and yelled, ‘Fuck you, Mother!’, much to the amusement of a passing surfer.
I felt like saying ‘fuck you’ to Sandra right now, and I guess it would have been easy to vent my frustrations on this aggravating woman and her husband. Instead, I said, ‘So how long are you staying?’
‘We have to get back today. Cassie’—that was their dog, a cocker spaniel—‘is with the neighbours . . .’
‘Not the gay black neighbours?’ I gasped.
‘Peter and Laurence. Yes. They’re very nice, actually, even though they are . . .’ She trailed off, looking around, suddenly aware that many of the nurses and other patients were black.
‘We’re not in Cornwall anymore, Toto,’ I muttered under my breath.
‘Laura understands we must get back, don’t you, poppet?’ Frank said.
His daughter nodded, staring towards her knees beneath the sheet.
‘Laura’s friend, Erin, the unmarried pregnant one, was here earlier,’ Sandra said. ‘She asked if Laura could come and stay at ours for a while.’ She tutted.
‘Can’t she?’ I asked.
‘No! It’s impossible. We’ve got the builders in at the moment. And I’m so busy.’
With what, bitching about the neighbours and counting your money? I wanted to ask.
‘Laura will be fine with Erin. She seems like a decent young woman, I suppose.’
‘But she’s about to have a baby,’ I said.
‘Maybe Laura could stay with you, then.’ Sandra clucked her tongue. ‘I don’t know why you two ever split up. Weren’t you supposed to be getting married? Young people today don’t stick at anything. The first sign of a bump in the road and they abandon ship.’
‘I think that’s a mixed metaphor, my sweet.’
‘Oh, shut up, Frank.’
I was still concentrating on the first thing she’d said, about Laura coming to stay with me. What was I supposed to say? It was what I wanted more than anything, not for her to come and stay with me but to come back, to move in again.
I glanced at Laura, whose eyes remained fixed on the bedsheet. Suddenly, she looked up at us. ‘I want you to go,’ she said.
I was about to smirk at Sandra and Frank when Laura added, ‘All of you.’
‘Poppet,’ said Frank. ‘We just got here.’
‘We haven’t had a chance to talk some sense into you yet,’ said Sandra.
Laura picked up the bunch of tulips I’d laid on her bedside table and chucked it at her mother. As Sandra groped for something to say, Laura picke
d up an empty water glass and pulled her arm back. I grabbed her wrist to stop her from flinging it, too.
Sandra and Frank stood there, mouths flapping.
‘Go home,’ Laura said, apparently drained by the exertion. ‘I don’t need you. And you don’t need to worry about paying for a funeral—I’m not going to kill myself.’ Her voice grew even quieter. ‘Not now.’
Sandra and Frank exchanged a look and gathered their things. Unbelievable: they would rather take this excuse to make an exit than argue. Before they went, Sandra produced a paper bag and handed it to Laura.
‘I bought you this, thought it might . . . help.’
After they’d gone, Laura pushed the paper bag towards me and I took out a paperback book. It was called Finding Your Happy Place: 21 Practical Ways to Beat Depression and Keep Smiling!
I put it in the bin.
‘Do you really want me to go too?’ I asked softly.
She closed her eyes and nodded. ‘I’m sorry, Danny. But I’m so tired. I didn’t get much sleep.’
‘OK.’ I hesitated. ‘I’m so worried about you, Laura.’
There was a long silence before she said, ‘I’m not going to kill myself. OK?’
‘Please don’t. I couldn’t bear to live in a world that you’re not in.’
A smile flickered. ‘God, you’re so corny sometimes.’
‘Are you still going to take the drugs you were prescribed?’
She cast her eyes downwards and shook her head.
I stood there a moment longer then said, ‘All right. I’ll come back later, if that’s OK? I’ve got a meeting with my therapist now anyway.’
She nodded again, the blankness in her eyes creeping back.
‘You should come with me to see her. She said it would help us. Especially . . .’ Especially now, I was going to say. Now that you’ve tried to commit suicide. ‘It wouldn’t be like the therapist you saw when you were a kid, I promise.’