by Tammy Cohen
Ber-ring.
The noise of the doorbell cut through Laura’s good mood. Annabel’s house was usually so quiet, but any disruptions were an unwelcome reminder that Annabel had a life outside of her. In the beginning, Laura regularly used to suggest they went out for coffee, so that they could give each other their undivided attention, but Annabel was never keen.
‘Sorry, Laura.’ Annabel stood up, smoothing down the creases in the green dress. ‘I won’t be a moment.’
Laura heard the door open and a woman’s voice shout, ‘Well, hello!’ Then Annabel must have told her she had company because, after that, their voices were lowered to a mumble.
Laura crept to the doorway on her stockinged feet and peered out.
Annabel was standing in the hallway with a short, rotund woman dressed in a long raincoat, which emphasized her spherical shape, and brown hiking boots. They were so close together that some strands of Annabel’s greying hair stood up where they were brushed by the edge of the raincoat’s hood. The woman was pressing a card into Annabel’s hand. It looked like an invitation. There was a dog, on the end of a red rope lead, a large Labrador covered in mud as if fresh from a long walk. The end of the animal’s tail left a dirty mark on the wall. Laura saw Annabel glance at the mark then look away again. ‘Thank you. I look forward to it. Look, I’d better go.’ Annabel nodded her head in the direction of the sitting room, where Laura was.
The short woman leaned forward and gave Annabel a quick embrace, then opened the door and was gone.
Laura quickly ducked back inside and was installed on the sofa by the time Annabel reappeared.
‘Now, where were we?’
The interruption couldn’t have lasted over three minutes, but it seemed to Laura that the mood was broken. She couldn’t recapture the intimacy she’d felt, that urge to probe further. Now all she could think about was the stiff card of the invitation. The knowledge of life being lived without her.
‘I’d better be off now myself,’ she told Annabel. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
‘No, but—’
‘I’m looking after Mum tonight, as Katya has a family do.’
‘OK. If you’re sure.’
Laura was touched and gratified that Annabel looked genuinely taken aback to see her leave so abruptly.
It was raining again and puddles were forming on the neat, quiet road where Annabel’s house was, gleaming in the gathering dusk. As Laura drove slowly out of the modern estate, her headlights picked up the woman who’d been at the door, walking along with her dog, her raincoat billowing behind her. There was a large puddle just ahead and, as the woman came level with it, Laura put on a burst of speed so that her tyres sent out a heavy spray of dirty water. When she looked in her rear mirror, the woman was standing still, her arms held out to her sides. Even through the dim, slate-grey light, Laura could tell that she was soaking wet. The woman gazed after the receding car with an expression of profound disbelief.
40
Hannah
‘Why are you acting so weird with me?’
Stella and I are on the high street, at the pub rather than the coffee shop. The pub – which is modern but done up to look old-fashioned, a pub-themed pub, with carefully distressed wooden floors, faux-leather armchairs and little green shaded wall lights – is off limits, but I’ve decided to risk the ‘setting back your own progress’ speech from Dr Roberts for the sake of a bottle of cold Peroni.
I didn’t ask Stella to come. The shock of her creeping into my room last night still hasn’t completely worn off, although it’s not the first time she’s done it after having a nightmare. Stella isn’t supposed to leave the clinic grounds but when I said I was going for a walk earlier she just tagged along. And I obviously haven’t done a very good job of disguising my dismay. I’m not frightened of Stella. It’s just …
I am frightened of her.
I’m frightened of the history she has hidden from me.
And why she’s hidden it.
‘I’m not acting weird.’
Stella stares at me over the top of her beer. Now that I know the truth about her, I can see the joins. The almost imperceptible clear ring around her irises where the blue lenses end. The tell-tale dark strip at the roots of her blonde hair. So it turns out that Stella is not Stella but an imposter grafted on to the stalk of poor, broken Catherine. And the Charlie who baked with me and then booked her flight to Croatia and then slit her wrists is not the Charlie I thought I knew. And the Danny who can’t look me in the eyes when he comes to visit is not the Danny who promised to love and cherish me in sickness and in health.
None of them are the people they first pretended to be. But which version is real?
‘Hannah, you can’t even look at me. What’s going on?’
I try to look at Stella then, to meet her challenge, but my eyes slide off hers. Who are you? The question rebounds in my head. Who are you? Who are you?
‘Who are you?’
I didn’t mean to say it out loud but, suddenly, the words are there, suspended between us.
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean is, you’re not who you say you are. What I mean is, everything you’ve told me is a lie. Your name is Catherine and you and Dr Roberts have history, and now I know that, I’m wondering why you’re hiding it, and whether your history with Dr Roberts has anything to do with Charlie and Sofia dying.’
It’s more than I thought I was going to say. More than I even let myself admit I was thinking. But now it’s out and there’s no stuffing the words back into my mouth so I have to just sit here, with my heart hammering in my chest like a flamenco dancer’s feet and my fingers clasped so tightly around my bottle that I wonder it doesn’t shatter into a thousand little pieces. For a moment she is silent and I think she will refuse to reply. Then:
‘I won’t ask you how you found out. I’ve been waiting to be uncovered ever since I arrived. I think that might even have been what I wanted. But when Roberts didn’t recognize me, and no one challenged me, I just thought, Well, maybe I am Stella, after all.
‘Don’t you think identity must be more fluid than we are always told? I mean, if this is all there is, this one life, wouldn’t it make sense that we could be more than one person? Maybe all our different selves are inside us, one inside the other, like a Russian doll. So maybe Stella was inside Catherine all the time, or maybe Catherine is still tucked away inside Stella. And maybe there are others in there too. Don’t you think that would make sense?’
Stella’s breathy, beer-soaked voice has a dreamy quality and I find myself contemplating for a moment whether she has a point before remembering that she’s a liar and quite possibly dangerous.
‘And was it Stella or Catherine or one of your other Russian-doll selves who hacked off a toy rabbit’s ears and left it on my bed and drew a newborn baby in my colouring book and sent me a printout of an antenatal scan?’
‘No!’
Stella is looking as horrified as it’s possible for someone to look when their skin has already been stretched into an expression of perpetual surprise.
‘Hannah, no. I would never do anything to hurt you. You’re my friend.’
‘And Charlie and Sofia?’
‘Of course not. I haven’t hurt anyone. Not ever.’
‘Only yourself.’
‘Isn’t that why we’re here, all of us? Because of the damage we do to ourselves?’
And now I look at her, finally, at her eyes which appear blue but I now know to be grey, and her face which isn’t her face but a mixture of features selected from a surgeon’s catalogue, and I see suddenly that she is still who she was and that she is right and we are all too busy hurting ourselves to do harm to anyone else.
‘So what then?’ I ask her. And she hears the softening in my voice and leans back in her faux-vintage leather chair and she tells me her story.
‘It was my stepfather, of course,’ she starts. ‘But then you knew that.’
The s
tory is the one we’ve all heard before, featuring a critical stepfather and an eager-to-please girl desperate for approval. Pointed comments about her weight, her hair, the way she walked hunched over with her arms crossed over her chest. The visits to her room while her mother was in a Xanax coma. She’d started cutting herself.
‘I was trying to slice off the weight,’ Stella says. ‘I wanted to slice off the skin his fingers had touched.’
As she speaks, she makes a blade of the side of her hand and slices at the air.
Stella’s self-destruction repelled her stepfather, and the abuse stopped, though the cutting didn’t. After two years of self-harm, her mother took her to see a therapist, to whom she gradually told her story. The therapist advised her to talk to her mother.
‘Mama didn’t – wouldn’t – believe it. Her response was to find a different therapist and then a different one again. Looking for a different truth. What’s that quote? “The definition of being crazy is to do the same thing and expect a different result?”’ I’m not surprised to hear Stella repeat the Einstein quote. It’s a favourite among residents of The Meadows. ‘My mother thought she could change the therapist and get a different result. Even though it was the same old truth. And, of course, he denied it completely.’
‘Didn’t she have any doubts at all?’
‘She couldn’t. She needed to believe him. She needed to hold on to what she had.’
Finally, Stella’s mother found what she was looking for. False memory. That was Roberts’ diagnosis. The original therapist might have planted the seed of abuse, he suggested, and Stella’s overactive imagination had allowed it to blossom.
‘Gordon was vindicated,’ says Stella.
‘Tell me you didn’t go back to living with him.’
‘Where else would I go?’
‘But surely your mother wouldn’t have made you stay with him? Not when you were still accusing him of doing that?’
‘Ah, but I’d retracted by then.’
Stella sees my face.
‘What was I supposed to do, Hannah? I was twelve years old. I trusted Roberts. Wanted him to be pleased with me. And he told me the memories weren’t real. And all the other adults in my life – my mother, my stepfather himself – told me they weren’t real.’
‘And your father?’
‘He’d remarried by then, to a younger woman who didn’t much like kids. He wanted to believe Gordon hadn’t done the things I’d said he’d done because the status quo suited him.’
She is playing with her necklace as she talks, twisting it around her finger.
‘He gave you that?’ I ask her. ‘Your father?’
She nods. ‘A cat for my Cat,’ she said. ‘Cat was his name for me.’
‘So you went back?’
‘I went back. And the abuse started again. Except, this time, I kept it to myself. And when I was fourteen they moved to the States, and I stayed behind at boarding school. That’s the year my mother bought me a nose job as a birthday present. Guilt money, I guess.’
We fall silent and drink our drinks, and I think about little Catherine Pryor, whose sense of self was eroded so brutally and thoroughly by the adults in her life that the only way forward was to become someone else.
‘What are you doing here, Stella?’
Stella has kicked off her shoes – the sparkly platforms again – and tucked her feet under her in the faux-leather chair, so she looks like a child. Her eyes when she raises them to me are varnished with tears.
‘I want him to know me, Hannah. Can you believe it still matters so much, after all these years? I want him to recognize me and what he did to me. I want him to beg my forgiveness. But do you know what the worst thing is?’
I shake my head.
‘The worst thing about the whole bloody messed-up situation is I still want him to be pleased with me.’
Emerging from the pub forty-five minutes later, I’m surprised to find it has been raining while we’ve been inside, and the air smells heavy and damp. There’s a puddle by the kerb where we wait to cross the main road, and the car wheels send out a spray of rainwater over our legs. The sky is the colour of slate and the cars’ headlights reflect yellow in the wet sheen of the tarmac.
The conversation with Stella has churned me up inside, forcing me to think of things I don’t want to think about.
I’m beginning to feel breathless and panicky. Is this what I’ve done with Danny? By sweeping aside the reality of his affair with Steffie and focusing instead on what seemed to be the greater crime of my own false pregnancy, have I set myself up to be like Stella, losing sight of my own self in my determination to keep hold of him?
A huge lorry, its headlights like bright, staring eyes, approaches from the distance and I gaze at it, transfixed. Stella says something, but I do not hear her because my mind is taken up with the beams of light on the front of the lorry, which seem to be sucking me in towards them.
‘Hannah?’
Stella’s voice is coming from a different galaxy, light years away. The only real things are the lights on the lorry; they are like a rope of energy pulling me in. The lorry is nearly here now, and the reflections of its beams on the road are clouds of light that I want to lose myself in. Go towards the light, I tell myself. Move towards the light.
I step off the kerb, just as the first of the lorry’s eighteen wheels hit the puddle to the right of us.
The squeal of brakes sounds like an animal dying.
41
Corinne
‘Are you completely sure you’re OK now? I didn’t mean to creep up on you. I was sure you’d heard me coming through the gate after you.’
In the flesh, Steffie Garitson’s eyes were a deep, warm brown, although ringed with purple, as if she hadn’t slept in a long while. After so long knowing them only as a series of angry red pen marks, Corinne couldn’t help staring.
‘I’m fine. I feel like an idiot, screaming like that.’
‘I have to say it’s not the normal reaction I get from people I haven’t met before.’
Steffie had a way of talking and smiling at the same time, as if the two things were actually one single smooth, effortless action. Corinne stopped herself just at the beginning of a reciprocal smile, reminding herself that this young woman standing in her hallway had all but destroyed her daughter.
‘I was shocked to find you on my doorstep,’ she said, keeping her voice cool. ‘After everything you’ve put my family through.’
Steffie furrowed her brow, although her smile remained in place.
‘You’re talking about Danny. Let me explain—’
‘Explain what? How you had an affair with my daughter’s husband and got pregnant by him and turned up at their flat to taunt her with it, until she was driven crazy enough to imagine herself to be pregnant, because she couldn’t bear not to be?’
Now Corinne remembered about the weird things that had been happening at the clinic.
‘And what about the stuffed toy in Hannah’s room? The rabbit with the missing ears? And the colouring book?’
The smile was gone, replaced by a look of – Corinne narrowed her eyes – could that be fear?
Steffie Garitson was afraid of her.
‘I shouldn’t have come. You’re clearly distraught,’ Steffie said, turning to leave in such a rush the bag she was carrying on her shoulder knocked over the vase of spring flowers on the little shelf by the door.
‘Shit. I’m sorry. Have you got something I can clean it up with?’
Steffie dabbed at the pool of water with the tea-towel Corinne fetched for her, her bag still hooked over her back, a draught blowing in through the front door which had been left ajar.
‘Danny told me they were separated.’ Dab, dab, dab. ‘He said they were only living together in the flat because they had such a massive mortgage. He said they were leading separate lives, but Hannah didn’t want her dad to know so they were keeping it secret. I would never have given him the time of day if I�
�d known they were still a couple, let alone shown up on his doorstep. It makes me sick how gullible I was.’ Dab, dab, dab. ‘Do you know, I even bought him a present, a silver bangle? I used to imagine him wearing it in his London life and thinking of me.’
Corinne remembered the bangle Danny had been wearing in the pub, the way he’d kept touching it like a talisman, and a bit of her heart splintered.
‘And you expect me to believe all that?’ she asked, hardening herself.
‘Believe what you want.’
Steffie tossed the tea-towel on the shelf and glared at Corinne.
‘And as for the rest of it – cuddly toys and colouring books – have you any idea how totally crazy you sound?’ Suddenly, she looked stricken. ‘No offence,’ she added.
Corinne found herself wavering. She was so convincing, this Steffie. No wonder she’d been able to cause so much devastation.
‘So why are you here then, if it isn’t you who’s been tormenting Hannah? Why have you come to my home? This could constitute harassment, you know.’
‘Oh, and you driving halfway across the country to turn up at my parents’ house is perfectly fine, is it?’
‘That’s different. I was protecting my daughter. And after I’d had a chat with your mother, I realized I was absolutely right to think she needed protecting.’
Steffie’s features sagged.
‘That’s why I came. My mother told me you’d been to see them. I don’t generally keep in contact with my parents, but they have a number for emergencies and my mother called to say you’d been there. She took great pleasure in letting me know you’d had a “long chat”.’ Steffie curled her fingers in the air to make speech marks.
‘She warned me about you.’ Corinne was scrabbling to hold on to the moral high ground, but it seemed to be crumbling beneath her feet. ‘She told me about all the awful things you’ve done.’
‘My mother is a narcissist and delights in causing me grief.’ The words came out in a rush, and for a split second the two women stared at each other in surprise. Then Steffie took a deep breath and continued.