They All Fall Down

by Tammy Cohen

  Google WK.

  I’ve gone through all Charlie’s friends and acquaintances – the ones I know of, anyway – but none of them fits the initials. I’ve even tried combinations of words beginning with W and K, but still drawn a blank. Yet I can’t shake off the conviction that those two letters hold the key to her state of mind that last day, and how and why she died.

  Then it comes to me. Sitting in that padded egg-chair that’s like a flesh-coloured womb. Charlie’s laptop. If I go on to her search history, I’ll be able to find out exactly what she was googling that last day. The clinic doesn’t have WiFi in the rooms, probably to stop the EDies poring over the pro-anorexia websites and the rest of us taking notes from www.101waystotopyourself.com. And we’re not allowed our own phones either, for the same reason. ‘The screen can become its own addiction,’ is one of Dr Roberts’ favourite lines. So when we want to talk to anyone, we all have to queue up for one of the landlines in the admin office and everyone pretends not to be listening to what you’re saying, but you know they are really.

  So Charlie would have had to wait for one of the supervised WiFi sessions in the day room. We’re supposed to stay away from social media. The pressure to appear ‘normal’ or compare ourselves to our ever-achieving friends is not healthy, Roberts says. We are considered insufficiently robust to see past the shiny, shellacked selves most people hide behind on social media and too sensitive to deal with the endless charity requests, the kids with cancer, the abandoned puppies, the tug, tug, tug of the heartstrings. But she would have had no trouble logging on to Google.

  Charlie had a Macbook. One of those lightweight ones that seem like they could snap in half when you pick them up. I don’t remember seeing it when I was in her room three days ago, but I’m sure it must be there somewhere. Tucked away in a desk drawer, perhaps.

  I get to my feet, suddenly heady with resolve, and try not to think about the last time I was in her room, my heart hammering as Bridget Ashworth’s cool gaze slipped over me like a net. I remind myself that Charlie issued me an open invitation to visit her room any time, and ignore the little voice that adds, But Charlie’s dead.

  I make my way past my own door to the end of the corridor, steeling myself against the treacherous lurch of hope that I might hear Charlie’s voice call ‘Come in!’ and enter to find her flung out across her bed or sitting against the radiator, her black-framed glasses resting halfway down her nose.

  I glance up at the CCTV camera, its one-eyed stare trained upon me from the ceiling. My mouth is sand-dry and when I swallow the sound seems deafening.

  I go straight to the desk. I’m doing it for her, I tell myself.

  The top drawer is empty apart from a pack of coloured pens and a pad of paper. Stationery is a strange commodity in a place like this. Scissors are out, as are paperclips. Even pencils were banned after one woman, many months before I arrived, sharpened her 5H to a point and stabbed herself in the neck, narrowly missing an artery. When Mum brought me in a ring-bound notebook to keep my journal in, it was confiscated at reception. ‘A patient could take out the wire and hurt themselves with it, d’ya get me?’ said Joni.

  The second drawer contains a stack of photographs in a clear plastic folder, and I am very nearly derailed by the picture on the top of the pile, which shows a young Charlie, maybe thirteen or fourteen, smiling up at the camera from a striped deckchair in a nicely kept English garden. She’s wearing jeans and a pale blue vest, and her eyes are so full of the life that lies ahead of her that I almost cannot bear it. She told me she was sixteen when she suffered her first major bout of depression, and after that everything changed, her horizons narrowing as the bouts became more intense and protracted, medication piled on medication, expert upon expert, her eyes gradually dulling.

  Without stopping to think, I slip the photo out from the pile and tuck it into the back pocket of my jeans.

  I hear a noise from the corridor and my heart jolts inside my chest. The noise stops when a door opens and closes again further down the corridor, and I sag with relief. The bottom drawer of the desk is stiff and I have to tug at it several times until, finally, it gives. And there’s Charlie’s laptop, scratched and pockmarked with dents. She was always so careless with her things. Sofia used to look as if she was about to cry when Charlie flung her computer down on the dining table as if it were made of rubber. ‘It’s just stuff,’ Charlie would say.

  As I pull it out on to the desk top, the memories come thick and fast. Charlie and I downstairs in the day room watching Orange Is the New Black on her laptop, until Odelle spotted us and alerted Darren, who was on supervising duty. ‘I’m only thinking of Charlie and Hannah’s wellbeing. It’s so important that we make healthy choices,’ she told him. Charlie hunched over her computer, struggling to compose an email to her mum. ‘I want to be upbeat, but I don’t want to lie to her. I’ve got as far as “hello”.’

  When the screen flickers into life I’m faced with the password request, something I’d deliberately put out of my mind. I try a couple of random guesses. Her middle name, Theresa? LeicesterCity, the name of her favourite football team? Still no luck. Panic is bubbling inside me. Concentrate. Concentrate.

  Out of nowhere, another memory comes into my head. We are in Group and joking about our guilty pleasures. Frannie has admitted shyly that she used to be addicted to Made in Chelsea and even had a calendar of the cast on her bedroom wall. Nina has a crush on Paul Hollywood and Charlie says when she’s stressed she plays Taylor Swift at full blast. ‘What can I say? She cheers me up.’ And when someone else scoffs, she insists, ‘It’s true. I love her. I’ve even used her as my password before.’

  My fingers are shaking as I type the letters. This is my third attempt. I won’t get another. It works. Hallelujah. I experience a burst of jubilation as the dark blue screen of the home page gives way to Charlie’s screensaver, a photograph of a beach in Thailand she visited in another life.

  There’s another noise from outside – the sound of voices in the stairwell – and I freeze until a door clangs downstairs and it’s silent once more.

  I click on Chrome and there’s an agonizing wait while the multicoloured icon bounces up and down, until, at last, it opens. There is of course no wireless signal, so I can’t call up any websites, but to my relief I can access the history bar. A quick look at the dates of the top entries shows they are all from five days ago – the day Charlie died. The first entries are all about Croatia. Loads of holiday sites and flight-comparison sites. Briefly, I feel a glow of triumph. See, Mum, I want to say. All this research proves she wasn’t just trying to make herself feel better. She really did intend to go.

  I carry on searching her history, my finger freezing when I see she has googled ‘combatting loneliness’. Lonely? Charlie? Why couldn’t she have come to me? I am about to scroll on when I hear the lift doors opening back down the corridor. No one ever uses the lift. It’s small and claustrophobic and takes twice as long as climbing the two short flights of stairs. It’ll be one of the cleaners, I tell myself, not wanting to lug a heavy vacuum cleaner up the stairs. Still, as I carry on scanning the list, there’s a fizz of panic starting inside me. I hear footsteps further along the corridor. They grow louder. Breathe. Breathe.

  My finger is hovering over the screen as I work down the list, and it’s shaking so much that at first I almost go past it, then I backtrack. Yes. There. William Kingsley.

  WK.

  But now, unmistakeably, there’s a noise outside Charlie’s door.

  Heart thudding, I scroll to ‘shut down’ and icons start disappearing from the screen with terrible slowness. As I click again – why won’t you shut down? – the handle turns on the door and Bridget Ashworth comes in, accompanied by an older couple I immediately recognize as Charlie’s parents from the photograph she used to keep by her bed. I snap shut the lid of the laptop.

  ‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘I was just borrowing Charlie’s computer. Mine’s playing up.’

  Bridget
Ashworth frowns, and a deep purple stain creeps over her sallow face.

  ‘I don’t think that’s really appropriate, Hannah, given the circumstances. Do you? Now, if you’ll excuse us, I’m sure Charlie’s parents would appreciate being left in peace to sort through her things.’

  ‘Yes, of course.’

  I head for the door, but Charlie’s father steps forward to block the way. He’s a tall, broad man with close-cropped grey hair and dark-framed glasses behind which his brown eyes are magnified. He is wearing a dark navy suit and tie and I remember how Charlie said her dad had no idea how to be himself and could only be the person other people thought him to be, the person who went out to work in a suit and made decisions and gave orders. It was exhausting, she said, this colossal effort to be somebody else.

  ‘You’re Hannah.’

  It’s a statement, not a question, so I don’t bother replying. Or smiling. Seeing as his face is set like concrete.

  ‘I’m Trevor Chadwick. This is my wife, Sandra. Charlotte mentioned you. She said you were a friend.’

  I nod, glancing over at Charlie’s mum, who has her daughter’s face, except that its features are faded and grey, like a photo left on a windowsill. She puts a hand on her husband’s arm as if to restrain him, but he jerks it off like it’s a fly or a wasp.

  ‘So, as her friend’ – he over-pronounces the word as if the very notion is somehow ridiculous – ‘why couldn’t you have stopped her from doing this? You must have known her state of mind. Why didn’t you tell someone? Or is that how it works with you people? You all egg each other on?’

  You people. The words feel shameful.

  ‘Trevor. Please!’ Charlie’s mum’s eyes, which are Charlie’s eyes, except older and sadder, are swimming with tears.

  Her husband steps back and flicks his hand as if he wants no more to do with it all, and I tell them for a third time how sorry I am and hurry from the room.

  7

  Corinne

  Corinne was sitting down in the low blue velvet chair with her head bent, holding a tiny white romper suit stamped all over with pale blue rabbits pressed to her nose. Inhaling. But there was nothing there, of course. No milky, talcy baby smell.

  She laid it down carefully on her lap and smoothed it out, folding it neatly in at both sides and then over in thirds. Then she added it to the pile on the floor.

  She had already been there over an hour and, so far, she had taken out just seven little outfits from the white wooden chest of drawers. The trouble is that they each had a story, each caused her heart to grow heavier and the memories to catch in her throat like toast crumbs.

  Hannah’s face when she first told her about the pregnancy, a smile stretching her cheeks out till they seemed like they would burst. ‘I’ve even bought something for it, Mum. For her. I’m sure it’s a her.’ Corinne’s own misgivings at celebrating too soon had melted in the face of her daughter’s obscene happiness. And then Hannah had produced a velvet tiger-print babygro with a hood with little ears on it and held it up. ‘How could I resist?’

  So much happiness, now folded up and neatly stacked on the floor ready to be put away in the two big plastic carriers. For a moment, Corinne surveyed the pile with all its memories and thought that she could not bear it.

  Danny hadn’t been able to face packing it all up himself. He’d rung Corinne the night before and she’d been surprised at her own slight thud of dismay when she’d seen his name flash up on her screen.

  Recently, things had been strained between them. Even if he understood in theory why Hannah had done what she did, he couldn’t entirely forgive it. And that bothered Corinne. That lack of unconditionality.

  Corinne stood up and pulled on the lowest animal on the pastel-coloured mobile that had belonged to Danny as a baby and now hung over the empty space where the cot used to be. She watched as it swung into motion, twirling round and round with a momentum of its own, the sheep and cow and horse and pig shapes swinging gracefully from their different-length cords.

  Danny had been so childishly excited when he’d brought it home from his parents’ house in St Albans and hung it proudly in the nursery. ‘You know, I’m sure I even remember this,’ he’d said, and Hannah had told him not to be such a knob, but he’d insisted. ‘No, really, I have a subconscious memory of these shapes.’

  Corinne had been amazed at how Danny’s mum had managed to hang on to it for all those years, and in such perfect condition as well.

  She gazed at the mobile and sighed. That would have to come down next, she supposed.

  All of a sudden, the realization hit her again of what she was doing and what it meant. Packing up every trace of Emily. Folding away all Hannah’s dreams.

  And her own.

  She stood up abruptly and went to the window. Danny and Hannah had the top-floor flat in a neat little Victorian terraced house on a quiet road which was part of a grid of streets known as the Ladder because they were abutted at each end by main roads, along which the traffic inched painfully at all times of day. It was rented, of course. The ridiculous cost of living in London meant they’d never managed to put by enough for a deposit for a place of their own, and Hannah’s insistence on saving to have more IVF at a private clinic hadn’t helped.

  It had been such a relief when Hannah announced they were giving up on the whole idea. And then she’d got pregnant naturally. It had seemed like a miracle.

  The door to Hannah and Danny’s bedroom was open, and Corinne wandered in. The room was painted white, with high ceilings and two sash windows looking out on to the garden. One wall was crowded with blown-up photographs of Hannah and Danny’s wedding. A black-and-white montage of friends and confetti and smiles.

  Happy.

  The bed was vast with plump white bedding, the pillow closest to her still bearing the imprint of Danny’s head. The bedside table on this side, a low, wooden chest of drawers with peeling white paint, more shabby than chic, was piled with various objects, marking it out as definitely Danny’s. A fat book claiming to be a social history of the entire human race, lying page-down and open so the spine was cracked, a beer bottle, still with a couple of inches of amber liquid inside, a scattering of loose change, as if he’d just emptied his pockets straight on to the surface, a phone charger, its white cable looping over the other items.

  Corinne wandered around the foot of the bed to Hannah’s side, which was neatly made up, the duvet cover smoothed down over the pillow, suggesting that Danny still clung to his own side, despite his wife’s lengthy absence. Hannah’s bedside table was no neater than her husband’s. Assorted make-up, two hair elastics (Corinne’s heart constricted when she saw the long fair hairs caught up in one of them), a novel that Corinne immediately recognized to be one she herself had lent her. They often swapped books, texting each other to find out which bit the other had got to.

  She sank down on to the white expanse of duvet and picked the book up, opening it on the page that had its top-right-hand corner folded down, remembering how cross she used to get when Hannah would return a book she’d borrowed and the pages bulged with tell-tale creases. How petty that seemed now.

  Corinne snapped the book shut and was surprised to see a white corner poking out from between two pages.

  She took hold of the edge and pulled out a photograph.

  ‘Oh!’

  The sound of her own exclamation, tearing through the silent flat, shocked her. But her attention was fixed on the picture of a young woman Corinne had never seen before, looking up from a sofa as if someone had just called her name, half surprised, half smiling, so that one cheek only was sporting a dimple as large as a ten-pence piece. She had wild, dark curls tucked behind her ears and was wearing a white vest and faded cut-off denim shorts, with her bare feet resting on the coffee table in front of her.

  But it was her eyes that had caught Corinne’s attention, her eyes that had made Corinne cry out in surprise. Or rather, the absence of them. Because just above the woman’s nose, i
n the space where her eyes should have been, someone had taken a red pen and drawn a line through from side to side over and over again, hard enough to gouge a hole in the middle.

  The violence of it shocked Corinne and she turned over the picture with a sense of deep unease. There was just one word, written in the same red pen, the letters gone over several times, leaving an indentation in the paper.

  BITCH.

  8

  Transcript

  Filming. Day Thirty-eight. Interview with Dr Oliver Roberts, Director of The Meadows, a small, women-only private psychiatric clinic. Shot: outside in the grounds of the clinic. Dr Roberts is sitting at a picnic table.

  JUSTIN (out of shot): Dr Roberts, you’ve had two suicides in six weeks in a clinic of just fifteen women. That doesn’t reflect too well on the clinic, does it?

  ROBERTS: Obviously, all deaths in the clinic affect us very deeply. As you say, we’re a small clinic, which means we become almost like family, and to lose two of our members is a tremendous blow for us all. But you know, Justin, this is a high-risk clinic. Most of the women who come here have either attempted suicide or threatened it, so unfortunately the chances of this kind of thing happening are always going to be high. And if you look at our long-term record you can see we hadn’t had any casualties at all for the four years before these two recent deaths. Of course, even one death is too many, but it’s important to put this into perspective.

  JUSTIN: Isn’t it worrying that, after so long without a single incident, two vulnerable women in your care have taken their own lives within six weeks of each other?

  ROBERTS: Naturally, that’s of concern, and we’re in the process of investigating very thoroughly the circumstances surrounding these two tragic incidents. But I would say that copycat behaviour is not uncommon in clinics such as ours, where some of the residents are highly suggestible and the bonds built between them can be very strong.