by A J Waines
We shared an unspoken look that signalled we still had work to do and stood up. Our footsteps echoed in the dim corridors until we reached my office.
‘I bet you were all exemplary in your family, weren’t you?’ he said.
‘What makes you say that?’
‘You seem composed, well-adjusted, as they say. Refreshingly on top of things.’
‘I wish. It might surprise you to know that my sister is schizophrenic.’
‘Ahhh,’ he said, drawing out the sound. ‘Sorry. I’ve really put my foot in it. But you seem so unruffled. You’re obviously well-practised at looking like everything’s fine.’
I unlocked the door. ‘I’m not the only one, am I?’
He gave me a sad smile and disappeared back into the shadows.
Chapter 15
The next couple of days slid past in a blur. Miranda finally moved out – she’d yet to give me the details – and quiet sacrosanct evenings to myself were possible again.
So, when I heard loud music one evening as I climbed the stairs, I was decidedly put out. It wasn’t like my elderly neighbour, Mrs Willow, to have her radio turned up high. It was even less likely that she’d be listening to Get this Party Started by Pink. As I got to the landing I stopped sharply. A strip of light was shining under the door to my flat, not hers.
My first thought was that I had a burglar. A rather overconfident one judging by the volume of the music. There was, of course, a more obvious explanation.
I slid the key into the lock and as an after-thought, rang the doorbell.
They were sitting on the sofa playing cards. Miranda, Con and Justin. Justin cheered when I came in.
‘You scared the life out of me,’ I said, pressing my hand to my chest. ‘What’s going on?’ I was trying to maintain a degree of levity, but I was furious, not just at the scare, but at the intrusion.
‘I came back for the rest of my things,’ said Miranda. ‘Don’t you remember?’
‘Snap!’ said Con, slapping a card down next to Justin’s six of hearts. ‘Got you.’ Con looked up and gave me a cheery smile.
‘I thought you’d left your key,’ I said to Miranda, still stunned.
She didn’t answer. I stood and watched them. There were smells of cooking coming from the kitchen. They had put my music on and opened a bottle of my wine. It felt like I was the one who didn’t belong. They looked like a happy family I was observing from behind a glass partition.
Con got up and came towards me as Miranda shuffled the cards expertly to impress Justin.
‘I dropped by on the off-chance,’ said Con, helping himself to a packet of jammy dodgers that I hadn’t noticed before, open on the coffee table. ‘Miranda let me in. We’ve been getting to know each other. We’ve—’
‘I’ve been showing Conrad some of my drawings,’ interrupted Miranda.
‘At the project?’
‘No – the ones I did here.’
She pointed to a large folder, open in the corner of the sitting room.
‘You didn’t show me,’ I said.
‘You saw…one of them…’
I knew she meant the one we’d torn in half in the kitchen. After that, I wasn’t sure either of us had felt like looking at any others.
Miranda emptied her glass in one gulp.
‘Should you be drinking?’ I said.
‘It’s fine. It’s only a little bit and I’ve been great lately.’
I was disconcerted. I felt like something was going on. My estranged sister and my boyfriend were in my flat making themselves at home without me.
I went into the kitchen to gather my thoughts and noticed my green lava lamp had been installed on the ledge over the radiator. Miranda must have seen fit to bring it out of the cupboard and switch it on. Globules floated up from the base and collected at the top like a deep ocean landscape. It was meant to be soothing, but right now it merely irritated me.
I poured myself a drink as no one else was bothering to offer. Con came in as I was about to take a large sip.
‘All right?’ he asked cheerily.
‘Tired, that’s all.’ I snatched my much-needed slug of wine, then put the glass down and let the hit of alcohol swill through my veins. He came up behind me, pulled me hard into his thighs. He didn’t ask about the suicide. It seemed like he’d forgotten. There was a hollow silence. ‘What’s up?’ he asked.
I stepped away. ‘It’s been a difficult week, Con. I need an early night and I come home to find a party in full swing.’ He tucked his thumbs into the pockets of his jeans and leant against the table.
‘Do we need to talk?’
‘What do you mean?’
He made a sucking sound with his teeth. ‘Miranda told me.’
‘Told you what?’
‘The other night you were with a bloke in a bar somewhere.’
I stretched my eyes wide. ‘It wasn’t like that. He’s a surgeon at the hospital. His wife is dying.’ Con was waiting for more. ‘You get so jumpy when I just talk to other blokes – I feel like I can’t breathe sometimes.’
The kitchen door opened and Miranda’s head popped round, a quizzical look on her face. She swiftly retreated when she caught my expression.
Con screwed his face up. ‘I can read the signs, Sam.’
‘What signs? What are you talking about?’
He broke into a singsong voice. ‘For God’s sake Sam, just admit it.’
I was aghast. ‘Admit what?’
‘There’s someone else, isn’t there?’
I felt like I was being charged at by an angry bull. I had to sit down. ‘There isn’t, Con. Honestly.’
All of a sudden, the world was in league against me. ‘You’re the one who’s been mysteriously disappearing.’
Con opened his mouth to say something when Miranda burst in again.
‘Sorry, love-birds – but the pie is going to burn.’ She slung on the padded gloves and opened the oven door. Justin wandered in.
‘Smells great,’ he said, making himself at home at the kitchen table. He stared at his empty plate, standing his knife and fork on end. ‘I love shepherds’ pie.’
The meal was delicious in spite of the tension, and afterwards Justin talked me into a few rounds of Charades. Con was brilliant, of course. Amusing and clever. Miranda was surprisingly unselfconscious, but I was nervous and dithery, mixing up my books with my films and breaking words down into too many syllables.
At around nine-thirty Justin started yawning. I was tempted to suggest it was getting late for him, but didn’t want to get into an argument. I was glad when Miranda was the first to make a move to go. She gathered up all her remaining belongings and said goodbye to Con and Justin.
‘By the way, I’ve got a room in a shared flat,’ she said, as I opened the door to see her out. Not the hostel, then. I didn’t ask. ‘I’ll let you have the address once I’m settled, but you can always reach me on my mobile.’
She turned and held up the door key, before leaving it, like a payment, on the window ledge by the front door.
Justin was busy tying his shoelaces when Con took me to one side.
‘I’ll see you over the weekend?’ he said. I was standing on the mat, fiddling with the security chain.
I took hold of his hand. ‘Sounds good.’
He hesitated. ‘I’ve got someone in doing the decorating, so I’ll come to you,’ he said. ‘Don’t bother to cook – I’ll bring something.’
‘That would be lovely. Just the two of us.’
He pressed his lips into my hair and I held the door open as he led Justin out.
‘You’re crap at party games, by the way,’ Con shouted up at me as they disappeared down the stairs.
Jane LaSalle was just as nervous as she’d been in her previous sessions. She came into my office before lunch, pressing her bag to her stomach as if it was her only possession. She sat down and brushed her fingers nervously against her lips. I cut straight to her mental state. After what had happened to
Jake, I needed to highlight the suicide issue with every patient.
‘I ask everybody this on a regular basis, so please don’t be alarmed. I know you’ve been having disturbing thoughts and flashbacks, but have you had any suicidal thoughts since I saw you last?’
Her head dipped down and back up a fraction, but she didn’t say anything.
‘It’s perfectly normal, especially after a very distressing experience. Can you say – on a scale of one to ten – how you would score your feelings about suicide? If one means it barely crosses your mind and ten is that you’ve got a plan all thought through?’
‘I don’t know.’ She stared at her trainers.
‘Have a try.’
She curled a strand of hair around her finger. ‘About seven.’
Alarm bells. That was high. That was in the red-flag zone. My heart rate shot up a couple of notches.
Tread carefully. ‘And can you tell me what kind of plan you’ve got in mind?’
‘I don’t know yet.’
She didn’t know – a good sign. Either that, or she didn’t want to tell me, which was definitely a bad sign. Once again, I hadn’t been given Jane’s full notes to show her medical and mental-health history, but the form from her admission session gave me no cause for alarm. No history of self-harm, no history of depression, no medication.
‘What sort of thoughts have you had? Can you say?’
‘I…er…it feels weird talking about it.’
‘I know – but it’s important. We need to make sure those kinds of thoughts are taken very seriously.’
She froze, her mouth tight, looking like she wasn’t going to utter one more word.
‘Shall we come back to it before we finish today?’ I asked.
She nodded. I also asked if she was comfortable with me recording the session and when she agreed, I switched on the microphone.
‘Did you want to tell me how you’ve been coping?’
She watched her fingers as she nipped the fabric of her jeans into little folds. ‘I keep remembering weird bits of it. Silly things like looking down and seeing I was wearing open-toed sandals and my feet were wet with the rain. Everyone had wet umbrellas pressing against my legs. I could feel the rubber rail under my hand and the picture boards as I climbed the static escalator. There were a lot for that musical, The Lion King. I can’t get the images out of my head.’
I could see sweat forming a silky sheen on her forehead.
‘I keep feeling the bodies around my feet at the top of the escalator, people clawing at me. I was trampling on them in the crush, shaking them off, trying to stay on my feet. I knew if I fell, I’d get suffocated. I had to hoist myself up to get over the barrier. There were flames everywhere. Someone grabbed me to shove me out of the way and I nearly fell down. I managed to pull myself free. I could see the daylight then and I was out.’
She said it all in one breath, then sucked in air as if she’d been trapped underground there and then. ‘I didn’t deserve to survive.’
I wanted to ask questions about the fire itself – how there could have been flames by the barriers, how the barriers could have been shut – but didn’t want to commit the therapist’s worst sin of taking over.
‘You were terrified – you wanted to get out,’ I said, reflecting back her experience, instead. ‘You did what anyone else would have done.’
‘No – you’re wrong. I should have helped people. I could have pulled people to their feet. There was a little black boy, about six. I remembered he was holding his mother’s hand on the step behind me on the escalator.’ A sob sent a shudder through her shoulders. ‘All the lights went out and I could hear him crying. People were rushing past me and he was pushed, he ended up at my feet. I could have picked him up, carried him.’ Her voice tailed off to a whimper. ‘I didn’t – I pulled away.’
‘You’re ashamed?’
‘I was a coward. I should have a “story to tell” about how I helped someone. Instead I’m just… worthless.’
She seemed to be in a genuinely tormented state. It went against all my instincts to question her version of events.
‘You need to remember that you weren’t to blame for what happened,’ I said. ‘You were completely innocent, caught up in a horrible situation.’ She was staring with her mouth open. ‘You’re prepared to come to me and talk about it – admit how you feel. That’s not the act of a coward.’
She made a small squeaking sound.
I looked down. ‘It says here you gave blood last week. That’s about going out of your way to help save someone’s life.’
She shrugged, unimpressed. ‘It’s a bit late now, isn’t it?’
At the end of the session, I checked Jane’s suicidal intent again. It was now between five and six on the rating scale. Better, but not out of the woods. She was still unable to discuss a plan with me.
‘Can you be honest with me, Jane?’ I said softly.
‘I’ll try.’ She fiddled with a loose thread on the hem of her T-shirt.
‘Do you think you might hurt yourself?’
Her eyes were dry, but there was strain in her forehead. ‘I don’t want to,’ she said. ‘But I’m not sure I deserve to be here.’
Unless you’re convinced a person is about to take their own life, you’re limited in the precautions you can put in place. You can’t section them just because they have suicidal thoughts.
With Jane’s permission, I rang her flatmate and asked her to keep an eye on Jane and make sure there were no stockpiles of painkillers in the bathroom cabinet. I managed to get Jane to agree to ring me, every day, on my mobile and promise to call me or a friend, if she found herself starting to take steps towards harming herself. Then I got in touch with her GP. It was all I could do without stalking her.
‘See you next week,’ I said, as she left.
I sat back in the silence, running over what she’d told me, then clicked on the audio file we’d just recorded to play it back from the start.
Alarm bells were ringing loudly inside my mind as I listened.
When I’d taken the trip over to Liverpool Street, a shop-owner and newspaper seller had both confirmed it had been a fine, sunny evening on May 28th. There was no rain. So why had Jane described wet umbrellas?
I picked up my phone and rang through to Liverpool Street Underground and asked to speak to Perry again. He was just about to go off duty, but agreed to talk to me.
As he answered my questions, another piece of the picture twisted out of shape. He told me the billboards beside the escalators hadn’t advertised The Lion King since March 28th. Two months before the fire. When I’d been over there myself, the advertising was for Mamma Mia. It had stayed in my mind, because the same poster was repeated beside the full length of the escalator.
There was one further point. Jane described having to climb over the ticket barriers at the exit. Perry assured me categorically that as soon as the fire was discovered the barriers were opened. They remained open until 9pm.
Jane hadn’t been there either. She was faking it, too.
Chapter 16
Present Day
I’m on automatic pilot. How long can I function like this? I laugh and smile, but the cracks are starting to show and I don’t know if I’ve got enough strength to hold it all together.
I have people around me, but no real friends. No one to talk to. What I’m involved in is hardly a subject I can drop into conversation at the dinner table. People would be disgusted – even though it’s not really my fault. They wouldn’t see it that way – they’d find me repulsive.
I think about the people I’ve been mixing with and I know I should keep my dark secrets hidden under the table. I can’t talk to anyone – not about this kind of thing.
Not a soul.
Just as well really. If I start opening up, the truth might come spilling out. Then all hell will break loose. What’s happened is certainly not something to be proud of.
Chapter 17
I needed to
get some air. Thankfully, it was lunchtime, so I hastily left the building, half ran along Tooley Street and cut through Hay’s Galleria to reach the water’s edge. I was desperate for a sense of space. Everyone was outside enjoying the dazzling summer’s day. I heard the clink of dishes, watched waiters bow their heads at tables, smelt wafts of fresh fish and minted potatoes.
Tourists were lifting their wine glasses and pressing cheek against cheek, taking selfies. I wished I could share their sense of carefree abandon. I wished my greatest concern was whether to choose the salmon or the cod.
In spite of the sunshine, it was a breezy day and the water was choppy. I leant against the railing and tried to think.
What was going on?
Everything was starting to feel surreal. Now a second patient was taking me for a ride. Two pathological liars in the same week, how common was that? Perhaps I needed to check some statistics.
I pulled out my sandwich and took a bite, then took in the view. The breeze caught my hair and I rolled my shoulders, trying to ease away the tension that had gripped me as Jane had left.
As I scanned the path, people-watching, I spotted a group pointing to the river, jumping and shouting. I followed the direction of their arms and saw something bobbing in the water alongside HMS Belfast.
Had a dog jumped in? Had someone lost their rucksack?
The tide was swiftly going out and the shape was picking up speed in the water, heading towards Tower Bridge. Someone screamed and one or two members of the group were racing up and down, horror on their faces. Instinctively I broke into a run, dropping my sandwich. As I got closer, I heard snatches of shouts.
‘He’s drowning – I’m sure of it.’
‘I saw him jump – from London Bridge.’
‘Someone should go in.’
A man started stripping off his jacket and shoes. ‘I can’t get down,’ he said. He was darting back and forth trying to find a way to reach the water.
‘Don’t risk it. The tides too dangerous.’
‘We’ve called the river police – they’re getting a boat over there.’