by Tammy Cohen
I stormed out of the flat, aiming at a dramatic exit but really intending to go down and visit Marco. Only, on the landing was a stack of flyers. Sometimes I pick up the mail near the front door and sort through it on my way upstairs, leaving the stuff I don’t want outside on the landing, ready for recycling. The flyer on the top was a shiny Domino’s Pizza one, and my foot, in its smooth-soled Moroccan slipper, went sliding over the top of it, and just like that I was falling.
Danny came flying out of our flat and practically beat me to the bottom of the stairs. We both knew straight away that I’d done something to my wrist. It was badly swollen and I screamed when Danny tried to touch it.
‘How did you feel on the way to the hospital?’ Laura wants to know. ‘Did you realize on any level that things were about to come crashing down around you?’
I try to think back to that car dash. Surely I must have had some clue that my fantasy world was about to implode? But the truth is I didn’t see it as a fantasy. It was real. Emily was real. The rest of it – the appointments, the scans – they were compartmentalized. Hidden away in a pocket of my head where I couldn’t find them. I remember feeling panic, sitting there in the front seat of the car. But the panic was for her. Not for me. For her safety, not mine.
‘I had my wrist X-rayed first. Just a sprain. Then Danny insisted the doctor check over the baby. “Just to be sure.”’
‘And then?’ asks Laura.
How to describe it? The doctor, a junior with purple rings around her eyes like cartoon glasses who told us she’d been on duty for thirteen hours straight, asking how pregnant I was and her face changing when Danny told her six months. Knowing it wasn’t right. But she put her stethoscope in her ears anyway and placed the cold metal disc on my bump, and I made a joke about it being so cold and talked about when I’d gone for a smear test and how cold that had been and how the nurse told me to ‘just relax’ and every single muscle had instantly clenched. But then the doctor left the room abruptly and I knew I should warn Danny, although, even then, I couldn’t have said what I needed to warn him about, only instead I kept on about the smear test, and he must have thought I was getting hysterical. And now the junior doctor with the purple rings around her eyes was back with an older doctor who introduced herself and said she just needed to perform another check, and by now Danny was sensing something wasn’t right and looking at me in confusion, and I felt it then, a sucking of energy from my centre, and I knew.
It came in stages. ‘I’m afraid there is no baby.’ Then, after another test: ‘There never was any baby.’
Danny’s grief turned to incomprehension as the ultrasound gel dripped down my belly, and I closed my eyes so I couldn’t see him, or the lying monitor that said Emily was never there.
‘You made it all up? The scans? The GP appointments?’
‘I didn’t need them,’ I told him. ‘I know what I felt. I know what my body told me.’
I look at Laura now and say, ‘I had no idea then that my body was a big, fat liar.’
We both laugh, as if it is funny.
There’s a knock and, before Laura has a chance to speak, Bridget Ashworth pokes her head around the door, bringing with her an icy draught. Her eyes behind her glasses flit around the room, as if taking account of the messy desk and the artwork on the walls and the two of us arranged in our chairs as if at confessional, and she frowns.
‘I didn’t realize you had company, Laura. Sorry to interrupt.’ She doesn’t sound sorry. ‘Oliver … Dr Roberts … would like a quick word in his office.’
Laura’s smile never leaves her face, but four deathly white splodges of knuckle appear on the hand that grips her mug.
We follow Bridget out into the hallway. She’s wearing the same black jacket as when she caught me in Charlie’s room the first time, but I notice the white cat hair has gone.
‘Everything’s in chaos today,’ she calls over her shoulder. ‘The film crew are shooting in the admin office.’ I can tell from how she says this how much she enjoys bandying around words like ‘film crew’ and ‘shooting’. She likes how it makes her sound inside her own head, the kind of person it makes her. Stripped of the fan heater and the woollen blanket, I shiver.
While Laura follows Bridget Ashworth’s clacking heels towards the main staircase that leads up to Dr Roberts’ office and the smaller consulting rooms, I cross the hallway into the day room. The disruption of my session with Laura, just as I had forced myself to dredge up the most painful of memories, has left me feeling anxious, like there’s a line of ants marching across my chest. I head for the shelving unit at the side of the room where we each have a cubbyhole labelled with our names, to store the things we can’t be bothered to cart upstairs to our rooms. It’s where I keep the colouring books that arrive in the post from work with gratifying regularity.
The one I’m working on at the moment contains intricate patterns of flowers and leaves that interweave and wind themselves over the pages. I take it from the top of the pile, together with my felt-tip pens, which I keep in a large, zipped pencil case, and sit down at the big oval table near the window. Inès, the French woman with the lazy eye who comes in twice a week to offer horticulture therapy, is pushing a wheelbarrow full of broken branches and twigs across the drive outside, with her ancient dog waddling behind. Her wellington boots make a soft crunching noise on the gravel. A puff of black smoke in the sky overhead tells me she has the incinerator going somewhere safely away from us residents.
Darren is sitting in an armchair at the front of the room with an open file balanced on his knee, and he looks over and smiles as he catches my eye. Gradually, I feel the tension easing.
I open the colouring book. It’s a new one, with only one page filled in. The picture I did last bursts off the paper in blooms of vivid fuchsia and violet. Crayoning, echoes Danny’s voice in my head. As I turn to the next page, a flash of colour further on in the book catches my attention. Curious, I flick through until I find a page around three-quarters of the way through that appears to have already been filled in.
‘No!’
Darren looks up, startled to see me on my feet, my hand over my mouth. He crosses the room to see what I’m looking at.
‘I don’t understand,’ he says. And he picks up the book to have a closer look at the page, where, in place of a design featuring plump camellias and sprays of delicate meadowsweet, someone has taken the colours that most resemble flesh tones and, painstakingly, with minute attention to detail, mapped out the softly rounded shape of a baby.
27
Corinne
Whenever Corinne thought of Oxford, she envisaged honey-coloured stone and rambling detached houses overrun with ivy, and bikes with wicker baskets leaning up against the walls.
The Oxford Geraldine Buckley lived in wasn’t like that at all.
Around five miles from the city centre, it was in an area of housing estates and ring roads where the only greenery was on the hoarding of the local betting shop, and any bike leaning against a wall was unlikely to be there long, as the smattering of lone front wheels still locked to lamp posts attested.
If you’d asked Corinne what she was doing here, she wouldn’t have been able to tell you. The fact was, as with the visit to the Garitsons in Tunbridge Wells, doing something felt better than nothing.
Hannah, having appeared to be getting better, now seemed to be regressing in her recovery, with Charlie’s death triggering a deep-seated and worrying paranoia. When Corinne had visited the day before, Hannah had been barely coherent, rambling on about a toy rabbit with broken ears and something about her wretched colouring book, and distrusting everyone from Dr Roberts down to the woman who cleaned her room (this last one linked to the sudden appearance of the rabbit). But when Corinne had said, ‘So discharge yourself. We’ll find somewhere else if this place upsets you,’ Hannah had yelled at her, ‘I can’t. If I discharge myself, Danny will leave me. And I know that’s what you want. You’ve never liked him. You don’t w
ant me to be happy. You want me to be single and miserable like you.’
Well. That had surprised them both.
Without mentioning Steffie, which would entail admitting she’d snooped in Hannah’s room, there was little Corinne could say to explain her recent antipathy towards her son-in-law, which Hannah had clearly picked up on. Instead, she’d tried to reassure her by promising to investigate the background of the clinic and its staff, making doubly sure that this was the safest place for Hannah to be.
It wasn’t until she’d come home from the clinic, called out a cheerful ‘hello’ to her next-door neighbour and let herself in through her front door that she’d allowed herself to slide down the wall of the hallway with her head in her hands.
The savagery of Corinne’s despair had taken her by surprise. Even at the start, when she’d first found out about the pseudocyesis, she hadn’t felt this level of bleakness. Then it had been about shock and the search for solutions and reasons; she’d been sure that, if she looked hard enough, researched thoroughly enough, she’d find the key that unlocked the door back into Hannah’s old life. The diagnosis was traumatic, but at least it held within it the possibility of cure. If you knew what was wrong, you could find out how to fix it. But this new downturn, just as they’d seemed to be making progress, seemed so bitterly unfair.
Nevertheless, by the time she’d hauled herself to her feet off the hallway floor, weak from crying and something in her knee making an ominous clicking noise as she straightened it, Corinne was flooded with new resolve.
She hadn’t managed to find a phone number for Geraldine Buckley, but she’d sent her a message on Facebook and, within two hours, she had a message back. And now here she was, on a dismal road on the outskirts of Oxford, piling coins into a parking meter and being shocked all over again at how much it was possible to be charged for the privilege of parking your car outside an off-licence and a kebab takeaway.
Geraldine Buckley’s flat was in a modern block that was set back from the road through a metal gate next to a wall with a notice on it saying ‘NO DUMPING’ that someone had vandalized so it read ‘NO HUMPING’.
Once the intercom had buzzed her in, Corinne was relieved to find the block was well maintained and smelled reassuringly of bleach.
Geraldine Buckley also wasn’t as Corinne had imagined. She’d been expecting to find her wild-haired and drink-ravaged, with shaking hands and egg stains down her top, but instead, the former clinic manager was a neatly groomed woman in her late fifties with well-cut brown hair framing a pleasant, squarish face.
‘Three years sober now,’ Geraldine told her after she’d made them both tea and shown Corinne to a sofa in her small but bright open-plan living room. ‘Well, three years, five months and two weeks, give or take a day or two.’
‘Good for you.’
‘Don’t get too carried away. It’s still a full-time job. Staying off the booze.’
‘So you never went back to work after you left Westbridge House?’
‘Oh yes, I had a couple of other jobs. One in a leisure centre, one in a dentist’s surgery. But I lost those. It seems customers don’t like being greeted by a receptionist who reeks of last night’s vodka.’
In her Facebook message, Corinne had again fallen back on her bogus British Medical Journal profile story, reasoning that Geraldine Buckley would be more likely to share information with a journalist than a worry-stricken parent she’d never heard of. She’d been hoping for a few background details and had been taken aback when Geraldine suggested she drive over in person.
‘I expect you’re wondering why I asked you to come all this way,’ said Geraldine, reading her thoughts. ‘I wanted to be sure you were who you said you were. I could be in a very vulnerable position if certain things ever got out but, at the same time, I’m glad people are digging around into what went on at Westbridge House. Lives were destroyed and, so far, no one has had to pay for it.’
Corinne didn’t know how to react to this information. It startled her. All she wanted was confirmation – that Dr Roberts was exactly as he represented himself, that Hannah was in the best hands. Cold needles of unease began to prick at her spine.
‘I took the files.’
Corinne couldn’t at first work out what it was Geraldine was saying.
‘The filing cabinet that contained all the clinic’s records – the staff details, the patient case notes. I took it.’
There was a flare of pink in each of Geraldine’s cheeks, and Corinne formed the definite impression that this was the first time the former clinic manager had confessed to what she’d done.
‘I was so furious when they sacked me. I hadn’t even admitted to myself that I had a drink problem, so for them to imply I was an alcoholic was something I couldn’t stomach. I’d already had two written warnings and I’d managed to come up with a rebuttal for both of them. I hadn’t been drunk that afternoon, I’d been taking antidepressants that made me slur my words. I hadn’t been drinking at breaktime – the smell of booze was because I’d been out at a friend’s leaving do the night before. In my own head, I’d squared it all, so when they told me I had to leave I flipped. I had a spare set of office keys at home because I often came in at weekends, when there was just a skeleton staff.
‘So I came back with my brother and we loaded the filing cabinet into the back of my Golf. Nearly broke my back into the bargain!’
Corinne was hearing the words but not following their meaning. Why would Geraldine Buckley steal a filing cabinet? ‘I’m afraid I don’t really understand,’ she said.
‘Sorry. I don’t have a lot of company these days. I alienated a lot of friends during my drinking years. I’m a bit out of practice in holding a proper conversation.
‘The filing cabinet was my insurance policy. I had some wild notion of claiming for unfair dismissal, so I wanted all the records. I thought I could make a case that they were getting rid of me because I knew too much about what had happened there. In the end, the lawyer I went to see took one look at me, smelled my breath and said there was nothing he could do. Uptight little sod he was. He said the disciplinary procedure had been followed to the letter. So the bloody filing cabinet has just festered here ever since.’
‘You’ve still got it?’
‘Of course. I’m too scared to try to get rid of it. This is all off the record, by the way, isn’t it?’
For a moment, Corinne teetered on the edge of the truth. She found that she liked Geraldine Buckley, with her square chin and her tidy little flat. She was eternally thankful that she hadn’t been born with the addiction gene, because she didn’t know how she’d be able to resist the lure of the cold bottle of wine in the fridge on days when the world seemed out to get her. Recovering addicts had to do battle each and every day, and Geraldine’s struggle was written into every fine line of her face.
But if she told her the truth, she might never find out what had happened at Westbridge House. If the Meadows’ director had any secrets lurking in his past that made him unfit to care for her daughter, Corinne needed to know about them.
After hesitating, she said, ‘Of course it’s off the record. So what’s the big secret?’
Geraldine bit down on her lower lip, as if debating a point inside her head. Then she began:
‘The first director of Westbridge House was a very controlling individual called Professor Dunmore, who ran the place like a kind of Svengali. Incredibly smart and ambitious, but no room for dissent.’
‘And Oliver Roberts? I’m assuming he did work there, right?’
Geraldine nodded.
‘He was the professor’s protégé. I think he was already in his mid-thirties when he worked with us.’
Mid-thirties? Corinne was thrown.
‘So we’re not talking about the late 1980s?’
Geraldine shook her head. ‘Sorry. You’re about a decade out. Dr Roberts had come to psychiatry late. I seem to remember something about him starting in a different branch of medicin
e but switching direction. Surely you’d know all about that, if you’re writing a profile piece on him?’
Geraldine frowned, and Corinne quickly tried to move the subject on.
‘Of course. So Professor Dunmore took a liking to Dr Roberts?’
‘In as much as Dunmore ever really liked anyone. Roberts moulded himself into a mini version of the professor. And Professor Dunmore was arrogant enough to be flattered by that.’
‘So what went wrong?’
‘The time period we’re talking about was just after the False Memory Syndrome scandal had erupted.’
‘False Memory Syndrome?’
Corinne had heard the phrase, but her mind was frustratingly blank.
‘It’s when a therapist, all too often poorly qualified, asks leading questions of a vulnerable patient so that he or she comes to believe their problems are down to abuse that happened in their past; abuse that is so traumatic their subconscious has buried it. The therapist will say something like “I’ve seen symptoms like yours before, always triggered by abuse. Could that have happened to you? Try to think who might have been in a position to do that to you.” It’s amazing how quickly repeated suggestion can become fact.’
Now it came back to her. An article she’d read somewhere years ago about a middle-aged woman who’d accused her elderly father of abusing her forty years before, after a therapist had ‘unlocked’ those memories. By the time the false memories had been debunked – using old diaries and photographs to prove that the events described could not possibly have taken place – the old man had died, distraught and estranged from his family.
‘Professor Dunmore had treated a case of False Memory Syndrome in which a once close, loving family had been torn apart by an allegation that later proved to be false. The professor was hugely affected by it, becoming convinced that many of the cases we were seeing at the clinic where the patient was alleging childhood abuse could actually be cases of FMS, where the memories had been planted by a previous therapist. In the mid- to late 1990s, this was a really “sexy”’ – here Geraldine made ironic quote marks in the air with her fingers – ‘topic. There were lawsuits in which therapists were sued for implanting false memories of sexual or even satanic abuse. I think Dunmore, who like I say was quite a cold, ruthless person, saw it as a way of grabbing media exposure. And Roberts followed where his master led.’