They All Fall Down

by Tammy Cohen

  They had been happy that holiday, she was certain of it. Not happy in the way one is always happy on holidays in hindsight, but really happy. This was before Hannah and Megs had their falling-out, and for once the two of them had managed to put aside long-standing niggles and patterns of behaviour that had been set in childhood – Megs inclined to be spiky and defensive; Hannah sometimes taking teasing too far. And Corinne had felt truly herself for the first time since she had found a strange text on Duncan’s phone and he’d admitted that not only was he seeing someone else but she was pregnant.

  Hannah had seemed content that holiday, at peace. She’d stopped crying at odd moments about the miscarriage she’d suffered three years before and the unsuccessful attempt at IVF that had followed. She’d seemed relaxed, said she and Danny were getting on so much better since they’d agreed to stop talking about babies.

  The men had flocked around them. Hannah had always attracted attention, not because she was beautiful, although she was, but because she was so at home within her own skin. Megan’s beauty was less obvious. Corinne had seen people’s eyes skim over her younger daughter, with her serious mud-brown eyes and her angular features, but then something would make them look again. That fierce intelligence you could sense even from a distance.

  She’d come back from that holiday feeling a new optimism. For the first time in years, she felt excited about the future, rather than feeling as if her best years were all in the past. She had already been planning to visit Megan in New York the following spring and had even agreed to try out internet dating, if only to have a fertile fund of new anecdotes to trot out at dinner parties. She’d looked in the mirror of her tiny bathroom that first evening back, at her lightly tanned face, sprinkled with freckles, and the faint white lines at the corners of her eyes where she’d been laughing too much and too often for the sun to reach, and for once she’d liked what she’d seen. Life had seemed full of possibilities.

  And then Hannah had got pregnant.

  3

  Hannah

  Charlie was the first person I met in here. Or the first I remember meeting. The initial twenty-four hours were a black hole of numbness where new people merged together into one faceless blur, and even after that I remained in shock, my brain dull with disbelief. I wasn’t looking to make friends because I was so convinced I wouldn’t be staying. As soon as they realized there was nothing wrong with me, I’d be off.

  I didn’t let myself think about Emily, or what had happened. Instead I focused on Danny and how he’d looked in the registry office when he’d said that line about sickness and health and held my hands in his and I could feel his whole body shaking.

  I didn’t – wouldn’t – think about my sister Megan and the things she’d said about him. Some things are too hard to forgive.

  Danny has wavy brown hair. He likes to keep it close cropped, says it’s easier to manage, but I prefer it when it’s longer and falls across his eyes. He’s broad across the shoulders and when I clasp my hands around the tops of his arms they don’t reach. But his mouth is full and soft, and his chin has a slight dent that fits perfectly when he rests it on the top of my head.

  Danny would get me out of here.

  I had no idea then that it was Danny who’d wanted me in.

  So when Charlie came over and introduced herself on the first full day, I wasn’t forthcoming.

  ‘Your first time?’ she asked. No need to ask how she guessed.

  ‘Uh-huh.’ Nodding. Wanting her gone so I could be alone to unpack the fog in my head and understand what had happened.

  ‘It’s really not so bad.’

  She had a lovely soft, lilting voice with a laugh bubbling away there under the surface of it, like she was thinking of something amusing that at any moment she might share with you. Curls the colour of freshly turned soil, green eyes, high cheekbones that shone where they caught the light.

  I made one of those ‘yeah, right’ faces. That first day, I couldn’t see past the locks on the doors and the rounded corners on the furniture and the fact the laces had been taken out of my Converse shoes so I had to shuffle about to keep them on my feet, and the way my jeans wouldn’t stay up because I wasn’t allowed a belt, and the skeletal girl reading a book in the corner while a machine fed her through a tube in her nose.

  My body was in mourning for the baby that was gone, breasts achy, hormones ricocheting around inside me, so that one minute I was buzzing with nerves sharpened into points, the next slumped over with grief, oblivious to the tears running down my face.

  Once I’d had a chance to view the clinic with dispassionate eyes, I could see that she was right. There are far worse places to be. This is a private clinic and everything about it reflects the price we pay to be here. The old building is tastefully decorated, the wide oak floorboards scattered with muted rugs and there are comfortable sofas in the TV lounge where we sit and watch movies on Friday nights. We each have our own beige bedroom with en suite bathroom. We bring photographs from home, and jolly prints to brighten up the walls, although the glass in the frames isn’t really glass so it smudges easily.

  But I couldn’t see any of that when Joni brought me downstairs, even though I’d begged to stay in my room.

  ‘No one is going to force you,’ she’d said. ‘But I should point out that non-compliance may be flagged up as something requiring further exploration, which may mean you end up spending longer in here than otherwise.’

  ‘I’m not staying in this place,’ I told her. ‘There’s been a mistake.’

  But when she led the way into the cafeteria I followed her.

  Though I was dismissive of her attempts to be friendly, Charlie didn’t turn away from me. She’d seen it before and, anyway, she never judged people. That’s why everyone liked her. When I started to get better I’d joke that I was jealous of her popularity. ‘Good job you’re suicidal, otherwise I’d have to kill you,’ I told her once. We laughed a lot about that.

  It doesn’t seem so funny now.

  Odelle was the next one to approach me. In a place like this there are some people, like Charlie, whose wounds are all internal, buried so deep no one would ever guess that there were deformed places hidden there, lumpy with scar tissue. Then there are others, like Stella, whose damage is on the surface. Unmissable. Odelle was one of those. A long-time anorexic, her head, with its thinning mousy-brown hair, was balanced on her neck like the top of a lollipop. Her body was swathed in outsized clothes – T-shirts, jumpers – that revealed themselves like layers of old wallpaper through the gap at the front of her zip-up hoody (cordless, of course). Her face, close up, was covered in a soft, apricot fuzz of downy hairs, soft as suede.

  ‘You mustn’t be scared,’ she said. And though I hadn’t felt any fear up till then, being too mired in self-pity, now, all of a sudden, my skin began to prickle.

  ‘We’re all friendly here,’ she went on. ‘Stick with me, and I’ll look after you.’

  As Odelle was talking, a memory was pricking at the back of my mind of the time we moved to London from Cambridge because Dad had changed job and I had to start a new school and was allocated a girl to show me around on the first day. I could still recall the showy-off way in which she paraded me around the corridors like a new pet. ‘This is Hannah. She’s new,’ she’d declare, and people would shoot me looks of sympathy.

  At twenty-five, Odelle is seven years younger than me, so I try to make allowances but, sometimes, being with her feels like someone scraping sandpaper over every one of my nerve endings.

  Odelle is an habituée of psychiatric institutions. If mental clinics gave loyalty points, she’d have the free drink, the coffee maker and the spa weekend. ‘There isn’t anything I don’t know,’ she announced as she shepherded me from room to room. Psychiatric patients tend to form different tribes, Odelle told me. The Emos, like Charlie, for whom life is a deep, dark void; EDies, like Odelle, battling eating disorders, swapping tips on how to bulk up on water to cheat the scales, v
ying with each other over concave stomachs and thigh gaps; addicts of all persuasions; OCDs, like Sofia, with their habits and their tics and their obsessive thoughts running on a loop; bipolars, like Nina, veering from comatose to manic, on a perpetual emotional bungee jump. And then there are the rest. All damaged in our own way.

  ‘Where do you fit?’ Odelle wanted to know.

  I thought of telling her about Emily, but the words built up, unsaid, in my mouth until I feared I would choke.

  ‘It’s complicated.’

  Sofia was crying, big sobs that tore from her lungs.

  Odelle had introduced me to her earlier that first evening, explaining that she had the room next to mine. That night, I lay in my bed listening to her and wishing I was back in my own bed in our first-floor flat in Haringey, north London, with Danny’s arm around me, my face buried in his chest.

  On the days we both worked in London, I used to get up earlier than him to catch a train to my job as a publicist for a children’s book publisher. Danny would still be in bed when I left for work. Lying awake in my room at The Meadows, listening to Sofia through the wall, I remembered how he used to look so alone in that big bed, his arm flung out, reaching for a me who was no longer there.

  Now when he comes to visit it’s as if he’s a stranger.

  The next morning, when I went into the cafeteria for breakfast, Sofia was already there at the buffet table, her eyes puffy. After piling food on to her tray (not one of the EDies, then), she started making her way towards one of the three round pine tables, all perfectly laid, as if in a top-class hotel. Halfway there, she stopped, still, for a few seconds. Then, with a resigned air, she retraced her steps to the buffet station, replaced her yogurt pot and the banana, scraped the cereal into the bin, stacked up her plates next to the rest of the dirty dishes, and began making her selection again, choosing exactly the same items.

  ‘She had a bad thought,’ said Charlie, reading the question in my face. ‘Probably about something horrible happening to one of her children. It usually is. So then she has to get rid of everything infected with that bad thought. Sometimes it’s the clothes she’s wearing. This time it looks like it’s the food she’s carrying.’

  I opened my mouth to say, ‘But that’s crazy,’ then closed it again.

  When I had come to know her better, Sofia told me, I’d be disgusted by her if I knew the things that went through her head, the thoughts she had about strangers, friends and family. Not fantasies. The opposite of those. Nauseating sexual thoughts that came unbidden into her head. I told her that nothing disgusted me any more. But that’s not what I meant. What I meant was that nothing surprised me any more.

  At least, not until my friends started dying.

  Sofia was in her late thirties, but time hadn’t been kind to her and at first I put her at a decade older. Capillaries had burst like fireworks under the pale skin of her face, so her cheeks had a rough, ruddy edge to them, and her shoulder-length frizzy hair, which she wore pushed back from her face with a velvet band, was the faded orange of a canvas deckchair at the end of a long, hot summer. She was large-boned and wide-shouldered and wore baggy cardigans and shapeless mid-calf skirts.

  She had two children – a son of nine and a daughter of twelve – who dutifully trooped in to see her on Sunday afternoons, ushered in by Sofia’s husband, Rob, a short, slight man with a perpetual air of having boarded the wrong bus. On those occasions, Sofia would make a Herculean effort to curb her behaviours – the repetitions, the doubling back, the constant changing of clothes. But the effort of holding herself in would show and, after a few hours, she’d be leaning forward rigidly in her chair, her lips moving as she counted the taps of her hand against the side of the chair.

  After they’d left, Charlie or I would hold her while she sobbed until our T-shirts were soaked through.

  I know what you’re thinking, but you’re wrong. She didn’t want to kill herself.

  She wanted to get better. For them.

  4

  Laura

  The flower was quite lovely. Fat yolk-yellow petals reaching up from the soil like an open hand. Winter aconite. A sign that spring was not far off.

  Thank God for that.

  Laura stepped over the flower bed that bordered the car park and inhaled deeply, welcoming the cold air that made her breath cloud around her mouth, the scent of this morning’s rain on the damp gravel mixing with the odour of boiled vegetables that wafted over from the vents. In her experience, no matter how expensive or exclusive a place was, the kitchens always had that institutional smell.

  Flicking the switch on her key fob, she felt the usual lift at the sight of her bubblegum-pink VW Beetle, winking its lights as if in greeting. In her job, you often needed all the cheering up you could get, and her car never let her down, giving her a warm jolt when she saw it waiting patiently for her at the end of another emotionally draining day.

  Laura was worried about Hannah.

  She’d thought it would be Stella who took Charlie’s death hardest, but Hannah seemed unable to process it. Today in class, she’d asked them all to incorporate their names into a design on separate sheets of paper that she intended to bind together and turn into a book for Charlie’s parents. She’d thought it would be a thoughtful gesture instead of everyone giving a shop-bought card. And most of them had thrown themselves into it. Odelle had come up with an intricate, lace-like pattern into which she’d woven the letters of her name. Frannie’s card was like the cover of a fantasy novel, the ‘F’ a tower with castellated top, the ‘N’s a mountain range, topped with snow and cloud.

  Only Hannah had struggled to come up with anything. She had half-heartedly doodled the first three letters of her name, tried out different effects – swirls and flowers, a leafy vine that wound itself around the ‘H’ – only to rub them all out. In the end, her page was just those three letters, grey and blurred.

  ‘Don’t worry, you can finish it next time,’ Laura told her. But after they all left the art room, she had paused for several minutes, gazing at those three letters: ‘HAN’. Roberts would relish the opportunity to ponder the meaning of Hannah leaving herself half formed.

  Her core muscles tightened at the thought of Roberts, his maple-syrup voice and hard blue eyes, and her fingers clenched around the pink leather steering wheel. Deliberately, she forced her thoughts along a different channel. She had taught herself how to do it. You had to imagine you were herding sheep and corralling them into changing course. Thought visualization. It was a useful technique.

  Despite having been here so many times over the years, Laura was struck afresh by the disconnect between the kind of place she’d have imagined Annabel living in and the reality. There was nothing wrong with the small, neat modern house on the executive housing estate, and it was certainly convenient that it was in a part of outer north-west London where one could still park immediately outside. It was just that Annabel was so smart, so educated. If you’d only just met her, you’d picture her in a rambling old house in the countryside with piles of books on every surface and a row of wellies by the front door.

  Laura was surprised by the intensity of her relief on seeing Annabel’s curiously flat, square face, with its wide-apart hazel eyes and the snub nose that was almost recessed so that, in profile, everything was in unbroken alignment from forehead to chin.

  ‘You have no idea how glad I am to see you,’ she said, flinging her arms around Annabel’s neck.

  Annabel smiled and gently detached herself.

  ‘Drink?’ Annabel called, leading the way through the narrow hallway, where a single hook held just one coat and one scarf.

  ‘Water’s fine,’ she said, as she always did.

  While Annabel was in the kitchen, Laura walked through to the lounge and threw herself down on to the pale blue sofa, dropping her keys on the wooden table next to her. She rested her head back and allowed the peace to settle over her.

  ‘You look tired,’ said Annabel, studying her fro
m the armchair opposite, and a lump formed in Laura’s throat. Recently, she’d worried that Annabel wasn’t quite as attentive to her feelings as she’d always been in the past, so today’s welcome solicitousness caught her by surprise.

  ‘Do you think you’re getting too involved again?’

  ‘No. Yes. Oh, you know what I’m like. I try to keep up barriers but a few always get past.’

  ‘We’ve talked about this.’

  ‘I know. I know. And I’m working on it. It’s just that things have been so strange there since Charlie’s … passing … There’s a heavy, thick atmosphere, and if you stay there too long it feels like it might choke you. And of course he’s using it as an excuse to play the strong leader calm in the face of adversity.’

  She glanced over at Annabel to see how this new conversational tack had gone down, but the older woman’s expression remained blank. As usual, the lack of response just made her talk more.

  ‘It’s not doing his reputation much good. Two deaths in as many months. One set of parents have already withdrawn their daughter because they don’t think it’s safe. And loss of revenue is something Dr Roberts takes extremely seriously.’

  She shot Annabel a sly smile that wasn’t reciprocated.

  ‘Maybe it’s time to remind yourself exactly what you’re doing there, Laura. Remember all those conversations back when you decided to become a therapist? What made you take that leap from nursing? What made you decide to help people suffering mental rather than physical illness?’

  Laura sat back and ran both hands through her spiky black hair, as she’d done since childhood when faced with difficult questions. Annabel always had this effect on her, turning her back into the anxious child she’d once been, desperate for love and approval.

  ‘Because they need me,’ she replied eventually.