by Tammy Cohen
‘Was it my fault?’ she asked Megan now, even though they’d been over this so many times it was just picking at an old wound.
‘Don’t talk bollocks, Mum.’
‘But why didn’t I notice it was odd? That the doctor’s appointments and scans all seemed to fall when Danny was away? That she cut out scan pictures and pasted them on to cards instead of showing us the whole printout?’
Hannah had printed them off the internet, it transpired. Cropping out the bit that said ‘Baby Jenkins’ or ‘Baby Cooper’.
‘All the signs were there,’ said Megan. ‘She looked pregnant. We saw her stomach, for fuck’s sake. And her tits. We couldn’t have known.’
The first psychiatrist they’d seen, a woman with blonde highlights and a sympathetic expression that made Corinne burst into tears within seconds of meeting her, had told them that some women’s bodies literally fool them into believing they are pregnant, imitating the hormones of pregnancy. They’d probably be surprised how often it happened.
But the deliberate deceit, that’s what Duncan had fixated on. The doctor’s appointments that were never made, the scans Hannah never had. How could she explain that?
The doctor wasn’t sure, but she would hazard a guess at some kind of dissociative disorder. Had Hannah had any major life crises recently? That kind of thing could make someone’s behaviour erratic and cause her to distance herself from reality. So the rational part of Hannah could put the lies in a little box and shut it away somewhere so deep and dark she didn’t even know it was there.
‘If you hold this fervent, emotionally driven wish, it’s possible you might disconnect yourself from the part of you that knows the wish is not reality,’ the doctor said.
Corinne hadn’t been able to think of any life crises at the time. Because Megan hadn’t told her about Danny and this other woman.
‘What else do you know about her, this – Steffie?’ Corinne pronounced the word as if it were a lie, and they both knew it.
Her eyes travelled back to the photograph lying on the sofa next to her. The bare brown legs in the cut-off shorts. The white vest over the perfectly flat stomach.
Megan shrugged. ‘She had family in Tunbridge Wells, Hannah said. Maybe she went back there to live. Maybe she is honing her husband-stealing skills on the unsuspecting men of Kent as we speak. Mum …’
There was a pause.
‘Mum, I wish Hannah would let me come and see her. Have you talked to her?’
Corinne nodded. ‘She’s still hurt, Megs. About the things you said about Danny.’
‘Someone had to tell her the truth.’
‘Darling, I’m afraid you’ll find out that, most of the time, the truth is the very last thing any of us want to hear. Hannah will come round. Just let her get out of the clinic and back home.’
Most of Corinne’s other Skype calls ended awkwardly with no one wanting to be the first to cut the other off, but as always Megan cut out with a cursory ‘Bye’, so one minute Corinne was looking at her face and thinking again how tired she looked and the next there was just that wallpaper photo of the three of them in Crete.
A different lifetime, it felt like.
Without thinking about what she was doing, Corinne called up the Google home page and typed in ‘Steffie Garitson, Tunbridge Wells’. Not much. A Facebook profile that led to a page with a picture showing the same photograph Corinne had already seen – only this time with eyes – and everything else set to private.
She tried ‘Stephanie Garitson’ and found a couple of entries. One was a 192 entry that kept the address hidden but listed the other occupants of the house. Jeremy Garitson. Patricia Garitson. Jacob Garitson.
Corinne googled ‘Jeremy Garitson, Tunbridge Wells’. She found a LinkedIn profile but couldn’t access it. There followed a quote in a local newspaper piece canvassing opinion about Brexit, on why he’d voted Leave.
Nothing identifying.
Patricia Garitson, on the other hand, was more forthcoming. She ran her own catering company and the company address was listed, and it looked very much like a residential address. Bingo.
Corinne copied the information down carefully underneath the words ‘Steffie Garitson’, neatly underlined.
She closed down Google and gazed again at the smiling photograph of her and her daughters on the screensaver.
Then she looked at the name and address written on the piece of paper in her jagged, sloping hand.
There was a nugget of hatred inside her, dense and hard and solid as a bullet.
18
Hannah
After Group, I make my way back to my room, still shaken.
Dr Chakraborty said it was a breakthrough, because I’ve finally admitted there wasn’t any baby; he said I’d done really well. But I feel drained and exposed.
Phantom pregnancy. The label shames me. I might as well have ‘crazy’ tattooed across my forehead.
And yet nothing about it had felt ‘phantom’. And it certainly hadn’t felt ‘hysterical’ – the other charming name given to what had happened to me.
Phantom. Hysterical.
Crazy.
Even now, I find it impossible to accept that my body could have so completely deceived me. The weight gain, the stomach cramps, the nausea. Could it really all have been my own biology’s idea of a practical joke?
That bit I have to accept. But what I cannot accept is my own part in it. The way I colluded with my own lying body to fool myself and Danny and everyone else. The fake appointments I said I’d had. The scans I never went to. How could I have done it?
‘Was this your idea of revenge?’ he yelled at me that terrible night in the hospital.
The doctor had taken him aside then. Explained that, sometimes, if the mind wants something enough, it can trick the body into believing something that isn’t true. That my uterus was enlarged, as if I were really pregnant. I was going through as real a bereavement as if there had been a baby, she told him, and after a while he’d calmed down.
I go through the door at the back of the hallway into the new building. It’s always a shock stepping from dimly lit Georgian splendour into the bright low-ceilinged passageway, with its clean, symmetrical corners. Turning left into the stairwell, I climb the two short flights of stairs and come out on to the upstairs landing. I open the door of my room and turn on the light, which makes a kind of buzzing sound, which used to keep me awake but I now find almost comforting. I sit down in front of the dressing table. The photograph of the teenaged Charlie that I stole from her desk is tucked into the bottom of the mirror frame. She smiles up at me from her stripy deckchair with all of the older Charlie’s goodness but none of her sorrow.
I look at my reflection in the shatterproof mirror and see that I look ten years older; there are dark smudges under my eyes. I pick up my hairbrush and start brushing my hair in long, rhythmic strokes. The repetitive movement calms me and for a moment I forget Group, forget how the words ‘phantom pregnancy’ felt like electric shocks in my brain, and how someone put their arm around me and for a moment I thought it was Charlie, but when I opened my eyes it was Stella, and Dr Chakraborty was smiling at me like I’d just passed my chemistry GCSE.
I’m looking at my face in the mirror, and I’m not thinking of anything except how I need to brush my teeth and how much it pisses me off that we’re not allowed floss in here, when my attention is caught by something on the bed behind me. It is small and pale blue. I peer more closely into the blurry mirror and my stomach twists into a hard knot of dread.
Then I scream.
19
Laura
In the narrow hallway outside her mum’s flat, Laura took a deep breath, counting to four, then holding for seven and exhaling for a count of eight. While she was practising this controlled breathing, she tried to clear her mind, but still her thoughts snagged on things around her – the mat outside her mum’s neighbour’s flat, with its cheery ‘Welcome’, belying the fact that, as far as Laura knew, Mr
s Papadakis never had any visitors; the flickering strip lighting that bathed everything in a sickly yellow light; the fading notices in the locked glass case: ‘IN THE EVENT OF FIRE’, ‘COMMUNITY RULES’, ‘SITE MANAGER EMERGENCY DETAILS’. Nothing ever changed in this hallway. Not the blue vinyl floor tiles or the metal door numbers or the pervading smell of Cup-a-soup.
As soon as she let herself in through the door and heard the television blaring from the living room, Laura knew Katya was here. Sure enough, she found the young woman lying back in the leather easy chair, her feet in her bunny-ear slippers resting on the matching leather footstool in front of her. She was clutching a balled-up tissue to her face and her cheeks were tracked with tears.
‘Is Long Lost Family,’ Katya said, barely raising her eyes from the television. ‘Davina just find this lady’s mother. Thirty-five years searching. Is very sad.’
Laura glanced at the screen, where a heavy-set woman with dyed blonde hair and eyebrows halfway up her forehead like migrating birds was sobbing, as if in sympathy with Katya.
‘I’ll go and say hello,’ she said. Katya nodded without looking up.
Her mother’s room was directly across the hallway from the living room. Someone – Laura suspected it had been Femi – and once made a door plaque from a photograph of Laura’s mother as a young woman stuck on to pink card surrounded by flowers cut out of magazines. The card and the photograph had since faded, and some of the flowers had dropped off, revealing the yellowing Sellotape underneath.
Something heavy descended inside Laura. Still, she arranged her features into the semblance of a smile as she went in.
‘Only me! Just thought I’d pop in to see how you’re doing today, Mummy. You look pretty! Has Katya been doing your hair again?’
Laura’s mother was propped up in bed, wearing the orange pyjamas Laura had bought her to cheer her up. Her sparse brown hair had been pinned back with two pink plastic clips in the shape of bows. Her head lolled to one side and there was a thin string of drool coming out of the left corner of her mouth. Laura wiped it away with the cloth on the hospital tray over her mum’s bed.
‘That’s better, isn’t it?’
Laura perched on the bed and took her mum’s hand, which was as soft as cotton wool. It was impossible to believe there were bones in there. It felt like holding hands with one of those floury baps you find in old-fashioned bakeries.
‘So, you remember the client I told you about? Hannah? Well, I’m still concerned. You know I said two of the girls had killed themselves. How tragic it was? Remember I said that? Well, Hannah can’t accept it. Won’t accept it. Total denial. And that’s led to some worryingly obsessive behaviour.’
Her mother made a noise like a low moan and Laura leaned forward to dab at her mouth again with the cloth. Sitting back to survey the result, she sighed.
‘You’re right, Mummy. I have to step back and not get so involved. It’s not healthy. I must accept the things I cannot change. Annabel always says that. But these poor girls in the clinic. They are so terribly lost. They find the world so frightening. At least I have you. And you have me. We are so blessed.’
20
Hannah
I am still screaming, looking at the reflection of the thing in the mirror. I recognize it immediately, of course.
I ought to. I bought it.
I’d run out at lunchtime for a sandwich. Five months not-pregnant. Can’t eat Brie. Is there raw egg in the mayonnaise? No coffee for me. No alcohol.
Idiot.
It was in the window of a toy shop I’d walked past a million times and never really noticed. Pale blue velvet and black crinkly eyes that made it look like it was telling you a tremendous joke. And the longest, softest ears. I’d gone in and bought it, even though Danny had made me promise to stop buying baby things. ‘It’s tempting fate,’ he’d said. But still I couldn’t resist showing Danny the cuddly rabbit that evening. He raised his eyebrows and shook his head, but said nothing. Later, I saw him in Emily’s room; he’d picked it up and stared at it for a good long time.
And now it’s here on my bed, a reminder of all the things I’d once hoped for.
Except where the ears used to be there are now just two little blue stumps through which the white stuffing shows obscenely.
I fall silent and turn around. My hand is trembling when I reach out to pick up the mutilated rabbit. I haven’t touched any baby things since that night in hospital. Instantly I’m engulfed by a tidal wave of grief that seems to travel up from the toy through my fingers and into my bloodstream. I curl up on the bed, as if I can make myself small enough to disappear.
Darren arrives, alerted by my scream. He’s on the late shift this week, the punishing hours coating his skin in a pasty, unhealthy-looking sheen.
‘What happened?’ he asks, out of breath.
Still keening, I hold up the soft toy by way of reply.
‘It’s a message,’ I babble, incoherent. ‘From her. My baby.’
When I’ve calmed down, I let Darren examine the rabbit. I search his face, looking for evidence that he’s finding the whole thing funny, but I don’t find any.
‘Somebody left it here for me to find,’ I say, calm at last. ‘To upset me.’
Not a message then, from the baby I’d made up, as I’d originally decided.
‘Could it just have been a present?’ suggests Darren. ‘Might someone have been wanting to cheer you up?’
‘By chopping off its ears?’
Now I look at it closer, I can see it’s not exactly the same one as was in the nursery at home. It’s bigger, for a start, and not velvet at all but a kind of fluffy fake fur. Still, it’s too similar to be a coincidence. I want to know how it got in my room. By now, one of the night orderlies is here too. Janice. An older woman with plump wrists and a kind face. They’re supposed always to come in twos, but Janice is out of shape and arrives minutes after Darren, red-cheeked and breathing heavily.
‘What happened to its ears?’ she wants to know.
Janice has no idea how the earless rabbit came to be on my bed, but then she’s only been on duty a couple of hours. She thinks it’s a crying shame someone has done that to a brand-new toy. ‘There’s plenty of sick kiddies in hospital who would have loved that rabbit,’ she says.
They leave, with Darren promising to make enquiries to find out how the toy got into my room as soon as the daytime staff arrive. He’s respectful and reassuring. But I know what he’s thinking. At the end of the day, it’s just a toy, right?
They leave, taking the rabbit with them, Janice clutching it to her bosom as if it were a real pet.
I listen to the soft pad of their footsteps in the corridor. The clanging of the door to the stairwell. Then I lie down on the far edge of my bed, careful not to touch the bit in the middle where the rabbit was.
21
Corinne
Queueing in traffic along a narrow main road just outside Tunbridge Wells, Corinne was doubting the wisdom of her mission.
When she’d set out that morning, she’d been buzzing. After all these weeks of feeling helpless, it had felt good to be taking positive action. But with each passing minute spent parked up, watching the brake lights of the car in front, her sense of purpose was draining from her, until now she could hardly remember why this had ever seemed like a good idea.
She tried to focus on the town. Such beautiful buildings. So many antique shops and quirky little tea rooms.
So much traffic.
She got lost around a one-way system and pulled over to shout at Google Maps, to the amusement of a passing cyclist, but finally she turned into a wide road with houses set well back. She pulled up in front of a large semi-detached stucco Georgian villa with a neat front garden almost obscured by a giant sycamore tree which cast a dark shadow over the front of the house, in contrast with the neighbouring properties, which were bathed in weak sunshine. As she walked up the path, the single multi-paned window in the front elevation stared at her like
a giant eye and Corinne felt her skin prickle.
She had been borne here by anger and by the knowledge of how Steffie Garitson’s fat black curls and bare brown knees had destroyed her family. She’d pictured that smile turning to shock and then shame as Corinne spelled out to her the consequences of what she’d done. She’d imagined Steffie’s mother, this Patricia Garitson, coming in from the kitchen, dusting off her floury caterer’s hands on her apron. Her father, home from work for the weekend, would be sitting reading the paper. Probably, they had no idea what their daughter had done, the havoc she had wreaked. How readily Corinne would put them in the picture.
But now she was here, she was less certain. What if Steffie denied everything? Her parents would take her side, wouldn’t they? She could imagine how tawdry it would get. How Jeremy Kyle.
As she approached the front door, along a path laid with square paving slabs set out in an oppressively regimented grid, her steps slowed. For a moment she considered turning back, or at least repairing to the car to phone ahead, but before she had a chance the large front door swung open, revealing a slight figure in a soft grey sweater dress with an arm full of cut red roses.
‘Can I help you?’ The smile was the same as the girl in the photograph’s, but the brown eyes were wary.
Corinne took a deep breath.
‘Is Stephanie … Steffie … here, please?’
The woman paused, shifting the bundle of flowers as if they were about to fall, and Corinne noticed for the first time that she was carrying a large pair of stainless-steel scissors in the other hand.
‘Sorry,’ she said, waving them around. ‘Just trimming these.’ She had a dimple in her cheek like her daughter and something flashed gold in the back of her mouth as she spoke.
‘Steffie isn’t here, I’m afraid. She hasn’t been for months.’
‘Who is it?’ A man’s voice calling from inside the house.
‘A friend of Steffie’s.’