by Tammy Cohen
Annabel sat back. Blinked. Said nothing, in that way she had.
5
Corinne
Hannah’s first pregnancy had been an accident. She and Danny had only been together a year and were still in that magical period of finding things out about each other. It had been a shock, but Danny had said he’d go along with whatever Hannah wanted. And once she’d decided to go ahead, they’d both thrown themselves into it. ‘I know I’m supposed to be feeling sick and tired and ill, but I bloody love being pregnant,’ Hannah had told Corinne after her twelve-week scan. Less than a fortnight later, she started bleeding heavily and another scan revealed the baby had been dead for several days.
It had hit everyone hard, including Corinne. Though it wasn’t something she’d planned for so soon, for a few weeks she’d imagined herself as a grandmother, glimpsing a future of babysitting weekends and finger-painting, her kitchen table splattered with colour, her little cottage alive with noise. After the miscarriage, she’d folded that new self away and crammed her into the very back of a drawer.
Her focus had been on Hannah, who seemed shrunken following her return from hospital, as if the machine that had sucked out what that doctor referred to as the ‘aftermath of pregnancy’ had removed some essential part of her as well.
Corinne had assumed that Hannah would dust herself off after a period of grieving and conceive again. It was common enough, she knew, for first pregnancies to end suddenly. She herself had suffered a miscarriage before Hannah came along, so she understood all too well that particular agony, the grief over the little being that no longer was. But Hannah’s relatively late miscarriage, which involved delivering the tiny foetus herself, left her bludgeoned by grief. Doctors had failed to offer a satisfactory explanation, telling her only that there was no reason for her not to go on to have a healthy child.
Having stumbled into her first pregnancy by accident, Hannah became fixated upon a second. But the much longed for second baby had never arrived. And over the following three years Hannah’s wild grief had transmuted into a quiet, persistent sorrow which an unsuccessful attempt at IVF had served only to deepen.
‘You know, I’ve never really failed at anything, Mum,’ Hannah told Corinne. ‘I did well in my exams, passed my driving test first time. Do you remember? I ended up with Danny, even though people thought he was out of my league. And now to fail at something most women do without even thinking about it … It feels like some kind of cosmic practical joke.’
Comments like these broke Corinne’s heart, so she was both encouraged and relieved when Hannah finally stopped talking about babies and gradually became once more the outgoing young woman she’d been before. Their regular phone calls were again full of parties she’d been at, book signings she’d organized, movies she’d seen.
As she parked her Fiat in the car park of The Meadows two days after her previous visit with Danny, Corinne found herself hoping her son-in-law wouldn’t be there. They had always got on in the past, Corinne refusing to take sides during his and Hannah’s frequent rows. Just as well, given what had happened the one time Megs spoke out.
But since Hannah’s breakdown she’d found Danny’s presence intimidating. He rarely volunteered any conversation and she couldn’t help noticing that his visits to his wife were becoming increasingly sporadic. On one hand, she was relieved to be spared his taciturn awkwardness but, on the other, she felt worried his absence might set back Hannah’s progress.
You can’t hold what happened against her, she wanted to say to him. She wasn’t well. Think of it like a fever.
Except it wasn’t a fever.
As she signed the visitors’ book, Corinne scanned the other signatures. No Danny Lovell. Hannah would be upset that he hadn’t come.
Corinne frowned when she saw the names Justin Carter and Drew Abbott. When Hannah had first told her the clinic was being filmed for a documentary, Corinne had been horrified and tried to insist that her daughter be left out of the filming, but she had reckoned without Dr Roberts’ persuasiveness and Hannah’s boredom. ‘At least it’s something to do,’ Hannah had snapped, as if it were Corinne’s fault that she was there in the first place. ‘And we can always say no afterwards if we don’t like it.’ Even Duncan had overcome his initial misgivings once he found out Roberts was offering a discount in the fees to cover the ‘inconvenience’.
The young woman on reception told Corinne that Hannah was outside, and she made her way around the back of the building, stopping to admire the velvet lawn leading down to the vast lake, which, legend had it, contained the rusting wreck of a motor car driven into it by a drunken party guest back in the days when it was still a private house.
Though it was a chilly day, with pewter clouds gathering ominously in the sky, Corinne found Hannah sitting beside Stella on the bench just inside the rose garden. Corinne frowned when she saw the cigarette in her daughter’s hand. Hannah hadn’t been a smoker before she came here, but now she spent hours outside, shoulders hunched against the cold, sharing cigarettes with the others.
‘Everyone does it here, Mum,’ she’d said the first time Corinne brought it up. ‘It’s the one vice we’re allowed. I’d be a fool not to make use of it.’
‘Hi, Hannah! Hi, Stella!’ she called out as she made her way towards them.
Hannah got up to give her a kiss, but Stella, who’d been sitting with her back to the arm of the bench, drew her knees up and hugged them tightly to her chest.
‘Hello, Corinne,’ she said, in that strange, breathy voice of hers.
She had on a tight red knee-length dress that emphasized her tiny waist, and high red platformed shoes which glittered as she rocked back and forth. Her long blonde hair was tied up in a high ponytail.
Looking at her beautiful face, with the skin stretched tight over exaggerated cheekbones, that rosebud mouth, that tiny, pointed chin, those outsized blue eyes, Corinne felt the usual conflicting sensations Stella induced: appalled fascination coupled with a fierce desire to protect her.
The first time they had come to the clinic, that awful first week when Hannah sat and wept and repeated, ‘I’m sorry, I’m sorry,’ over and over, until Danny had got up and left, Corinne later finding him in the car with his forehead resting on the steering wheel, she hadn’t been able to stop staring at Stella. So pretty, but something not quite right. The eyes just a little too wide. The features just a little too symmetrical.
Later, Corinne risked asking about the disturbing blonde girl and had been taken aback by the offhand way in which Hannah replied: ‘Oh, Stella. She’s addicted to plastic surgery.’ As though it was nothing unusual, just another interest, like training for a marathon or studying Mandarin. Still later on, she learned that Stella’s wealthy mother in America had had her referred to The Meadows after medical experts warned that additional surgery could kill her.
Corinne had felt suddenly totally out of her depth. This kind of thing didn’t happen to people like her. Or families like theirs.
Or women like Hannah.
‘She didn’t do it.’
Corinne could understand why Hannah didn’t want to believe that Charlie had killed herself. Death is always brutal, but some deaths startle more than others. Charlie’s had been one of those.
‘I know it seems impossible to take in. But Charlie had her demons, just like the rest of us.’
‘You.’
Corinne didn’t understand.
‘That’s what you really want to say. She had her demons, like the rest of you.’
Corinne hated it when Hannah got like this. Playing the mental-illness card. Making it us against them.
‘I don’t think your mama meant anything by that,’ said Stella mildly, and Corinne felt a warm rush of gratitude towards her. As far as she could tell, Stella’s family was as remote emotionally as they were geographically, preferring to shower her with money rather than affection.
Corinne tried to make her tone conciliatory. ‘Why?’ she asked her daughter. �
��Why would anyone want to hurt Charlie?’
She couldn’t say kill. The preposterousness of it made the word stick in her throat.
Hannah shrugged. ‘Maybe she upset someone. People in here take offence easily. We’re all hiding things. Every one of us. Charlie told me that.’
Hannah was sounding paranoid and Corinne felt a tug of nausea. Every time she convinced herself her daughter was getting better, something would happen to make her realize just how far there still was to go.
‘Look.’ Hannah reached into her jeans pocket and pressed a piece of paper into Corinne’s hand.
Corinne gazed at it blankly.
1. Switch phone provider
2. Write up journal notes for Dr Chakraborty
3. Google WK
4. Book flights for Croatia(!)
‘I don’t understand. It looks like someone’s to-do list.’
‘Exactly. It’s Charlie’s to-do list. From the day she died. I found it in her room.’
Now Corinne got it.
‘But sweetheart, this doesn’t prove anything. Maybe she wrote this in an attempt to force herself to look ahead. Maybe she was trying to convince herself that if she kept things normal she could make herself feel normal. What’s that phrase – “fake it to make it”?’
Corinne watched the skin on the bridge of her daughter’s nose concertina like a paper fan and knew she’d said the wrong thing.
‘Croatia, Mum!’ Hannah exclaimed. ‘Next summer. Why would she spend hundreds of pounds on flights if she knew she wouldn’t be going?’
Corinne knew she should back down now. But old habits are hard to break.
‘If she was feeling desperate, she might have booked flights as a way of tethering herself to life. Surely you can see that, Hannah?’
But Hannah had closed herself off, drawing a curtain across her face.
‘The day I first tried to kill myself, I ordered a new dress from ASOS,’ said Stella in her dreamy way, as if she were spinning a story from the ether, rather than relating something that actually happened.
‘I was looking for a sign, I think,’ she went on. ‘If they have my exact size, or if they offer free next-day delivery, then I won’t do it. But, you know, I still went ahead. Now I think the only sign that would have made a difference is if I’d been able to unzip my skin and find a whole new different person underneath. And that didn’t happen.’
Stella said things like that all the time. As if it were normal to talk about unzipping your own skin.
‘You see?’ Corinne turned to Hannah, over-eager to make her point. ‘Charlie was testing herself. Looking for signs. You can’t read too much into this note.’
Hannah gazed back at her, blank-faced, and Corinne saw that she had lost her. Regret flooded through her.
After Hannah was first admitted to The Meadows and Corinne was having to face up to the awful truth about what her daughter had done, she’d almost snapped under the weight of her own self-reproach. What kind of mother was she, not to notice what was going on? If only she could have another chance, she’d do everything differently.
Yet here she was, and Hannah was once again slipping through her fingers and she had learned nothing.
6
Hannah
3. Google WK
The more I stare at the third entry on Charlie’s to-do list, the more convinced I am that it holds the key to what happened to my friend. Mum has left, and I’m curled up in a padded, egg-shaped chair in the Mindfulness Area, which is a little room tucked just inside the entrance to the new building. I recall Charlie’s face after she’d told me how people in here are always hiding something. And how when I tried to push her for information, she just shook her head, with that look in her eye. That infuriating it’s-best-you-don’t-know look.
I hold the paper in my hand and close my eyes, as if I can absorb Charlie’s thoughts through her spiky handwriting on the scrap of paper.
Some days I don’t recognize myself.
I try to think back five days to the day Charlie died. I used to have a great memory. Pin sharp, past events lit up in high definition. But trauma, plus my nightly sleeping pill, have blunted my mind. Now when I try to summon up a memory it’s like trying to catch a dust mote, grabbing at the air and finding my hands always empty.
I know I saw her at breakfast and she was just as she normally was. Her hair matted on one side where she’d slept on it and hadn’t yet brushed it out. Wearing tartan slippers and blue sweatpants and a blue jumper. Not the joy-sparking cardigan. Not that day. I wonder, would that have made a difference?
We sat together, but Charlie rarely spoke much at breakfast. It took her a while to get going in the morning. Most of us are like that. We eat our toast and croissants (or just push them around the plate, in Odelle’s case) in silence while we wait to surface from our Diazepam fug.
We would have set our goals for the day during Morning Group, as we always do. I strain to remember what Charlie’s goals were, but my mind is blank. Probably something about calling her mother. Most of hers involved calling her mother.
I remember Nina was flying that day and kept shouting over everybody, rocking her chair backwards until it seemed impossible the legs wouldn’t break. Roberts has taken her off all her meds so they can observe how she is untreated, and we’re all counting the days until she gets back under the chemical cosh and the rapid mood cycling stops. Her goal was to finish writing her book, which she said had kept her up all night and was a guaranteed bestseller. ‘It’s my entire philosophy on life,’ she said. ‘It’ll change lives.’
Afterwards, Charlie and I went to the kitchen for a cooking therapy session, which is basically just cooking, but as I said before everything gets called therapy in this place. That’s where Charlie and I made the caramelized sugar and hers was thick and hard and I told her how it could do someone damage and we both laughed. Joni was on supervising duty that day. The nurses aren’t allowed to have their phones with them, but Joni always looks as if she’s composing texts and Facebook updates in her head. She’s never quite present. But when Charlie quizzed her about her new boyfriend, she came alive and told us they’d booked a summer holiday in Majorca. All inclusive, premium brands, she told us. ‘Gotta have something to look forward to, dontchya?’ I remember Charlie smiled and said, ‘That’s exactly right.’ Maybe that’s what prompted her to book the Croatia tickets.
People who are planning to kill themselves don’t look forward. Do they?
We made a chocolate cake and decorated it with the caramelized sugar. Did Charlie really break off a shard and slip it into her sock or the waistband of her trousers while my attention was elsewhere, thinking about other kitchens, other cakes, other lives?
This is where my mind goes hazy, the memories flabby around the edges.
I know at one point I looked at the finished cake and felt a sense of achievement, verging on contentment. And when I recognized that feeling I thought for a second that I might be sick. Because I’d almost let myself be happy. Even after everything I’d done. Then I wanted to punish myself, and Charlie must have seen that in my face, because she put a hand on my arm and said, ‘It’s only a cake, Hannah.’ And Joni looked up at us, sharply, not understanding what was going on, and she didn’t like it.
‘’Course it’s cake,’ she said. ‘What else would it be?’
And after cooking we had individual therapy. I was with Dr Chakraborty and Charlie would have been with Dr Roberts. Unless he was off somewhere – at a fundraising lunch in Mayfair, or giving a talk to healthcare chiefs at a convention in Palm Springs. I like Dr Chakraborty. He has a way of steepling his fingers and gazing at me from his sad brown eyes.
‘Hannah, Hannah, Hannah,’ he says. ‘How are your sisters?’ And we both smile. Neither of us finds his lame reference to the old Woody Allen movie amusing any more; still, it has become a form of greeting. A shorthand for Ah, so here we are again, we two, and nothing much can be done about it.
Then there w
as lunch. We always ate at the same table – Charlie and me and Stella and Sofia, back when she was still alive. Since Charlie died, Stella and I spread our plates out over the table and put jumpers on the spare chairs so no one else comes to join us. But it’s a small clinic and there’s a new person arriving every week, so we know it’s just a matter of time.
I try to think back to what we talked about that day, but the intervening hours and days have cocooned themselves around the memory, cutting it off from view. It’s a fair guess that, afterwards, when we’d drained the last trickle of lukewarm decaffeinated coffee, we’d have gone back to our rooms, as we often do. Until I arrived here, I’d never been able to sleep during the day, but now I take any opportunity I can get to lie down. The sleeping pills most of us take sacredly every evening like the holy wafer leave us hungover the next day, our mouths furred, our minds always half submerged.
Was that when Charlie sat on the floor with her back to the radiator and wrote her list? Even while the shard of sharpened sugar was digging into her calf?
The chair I am sitting in is organically shaped, the back curving overhead, a squishy cushion nestled into the half-moon base. It feels protected. Private. Besides, no one really uses the Mindfulness Area. It’s more of a status symbol for Dr Roberts. It’s one of his favourite stop-offs when he’s taking groups of private investors, or foreign dignitaries, or representatives of the media on one of his regular tours of the building: ‘This is where our residents can be alone for a little contemplative time. At the clinic, we’re great believers in the benefits of mindfulness, and the residents can come here to have a safe, quiet, comfortable space to empty their minds of everything except the here and now. Which is so important for all of us.’
Charlie’s to-do list is crumpled now from being folded and unfolded so many times.
Even so, I read it again, and that old Einstein saying pops into my head about the definition of insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. It strikes me as ironically funny. Seeing where I am and everything.