Before I Let You In

by Jenny Blackhurst

  That was when it dawned on Karen the seriousness of the situation Eleanor was in. Not only had she left her son in the car where she couldn’t possibly see him from the doors of the school, but she’d then forgotten where she’d parked the car and sparked a manhunt for Noah and an imaginary car thief.

  ‘Okay, so she forgot where she’d left her car and panicked; that could happen to anyone. Especially anyone with a three-month-old baby. And perhaps she shouldn’t have left Noah, but if she hadn’t forgotten where she’d parked the car, she wouldn’t have been out of sight for long.’

  The policewoman sighed. ‘Look …’ She hesitated.

  ‘Karen,’ she offered.

  ‘Look, Karen. We’re not worried about Eleanor’s safety, or the safety of her son. It’s an easy mistake to make, and as you say, she panicked – I’m sure I would have done the same.’ Looking at her, Karen thought that probably wasn’t true. ‘We just wanted to make sure she wasn’t going home on her own in a state, to dwell on what’s happened here and make herself feel worse.’

  Karen let out a relieved breath. ‘Thank you. I’ll take her home; I’ll look after her.’

  ‘But …’ Oh Christ, Karen hated that but. ‘I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t inform someone at social services what happened here.’

  ‘Is that really necessary? You said yourself it was an easy mistake.’

  ‘Yes, and I do believe that. However, if something were to happen to Eleanor or her son, it’d be my neck on the line. They’re going to want to have a quick chat with her, just to check everything is okay. She needs to be prepared for that.’

  ‘Fine.’ Karen turned to look back at where Eleanor was sitting, clinging on to Noah as though someone might walk in at any second and take him away from her. ‘Of course you need to do your job. Just let me take her home and prepare her.’

  ‘That’s exactly why we called you. Support your friend, Karen. I get the feeling she needs that more than anything at the moment.’

  ‘What did they say?’ Eleanor asked as they walked across the car park to her damaged car. ‘Are they going to take Noah?’

  Karen shook her head. ‘They said it was a simple mistake, but they have to let someone at social services know. It’s part of their job.’

  Eleanor looked as though she might burst into tears again. ‘I knew it. I knew she hated me, that female one. She looked at me like I was shit on her shoe.’

  Karen stopped, and turned to face her full on. ‘She doesn’t hate you, she was worried about you. Why did you park so far away, Els? When you had to leave the car?’

  ‘I didn’t park there.’ Her voice was low and urgent. ‘I had to pretend I did to get them to stop treating me like I was mad, but I know, Karen, I parked exactly where I always park. Toby will tell you. I could see the car from the school.’

  ‘But you didn’t see anyone move it?’

  ‘I was waiting for that bloody secretary to finish her fag. I went into the reception, but I was only gone for a few minutes! Someone did this to make me feel like I was losing my mind. I swear, Karen, you’ve got to believe me.’

  ‘I do,’ Karen promised, and the look of relief on her friend’s face told her it was the right thing to say. ‘I’ll look after you. I promise.’

  34

  Eleanor

  ‘Oh come on, Eleanor, who the hell would want to steal your car to move it fifty bloody yards? It doesn’t make any sense! And how could you be so fucking stupid as to leave Noah unattended? What if the car really had been stolen?’

  ‘It was stolen, Adam; you’re not listening to me!’ Eleanor tried to keep her voice low to avoid waking Noah, but she could feel panic rising in her chest again. ‘You heard Toby! He told you we’d parked close to the school!’

  What he’d actually said, under close questioning from both Eleanor and Karen, and with a shrug of his shoulders, was that he was ‘pretty sure’ they’d parked in their usual spot. But it had been a long day, his friends had all been talking about the police coming to school to arrest his mum and the shine had been taken right off his amazing project. Once again Eleanor was the bad guy, and she could tell he was in no mood to jump to her defence.

  ‘Toby doesn’t remember what he had for breakfast,’ Adam snorted. ‘Assuming you remembered to give him breakfast.’

  ‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

  His face was bright red from the effort of not yelling, but despite his quiet tone his words tore at her chest. ‘You’ve not exactly been yourself lately, Els. You always seem so frazzled, you lose things on a daily basis, you don’t know if you’re coming or going. And now this …’ He waved his arm. ‘We need to decide what we’re going to say when social services turn up.’

  ‘What do you mean, what we’re going to say? I’m going to tell them the truth. Someone moved the car, Adam, whether you believe me or not.’

  He sighed. ‘I’m not saying I don’t believe you, sweetheart; what I’m saying is that it sounds pretty unbelievable. And if it sounds unbelievable to me, it’s going to sound crazy to them.’

  She flinched, and to his credit, he noticed.

  ‘I’m not calling you crazy, Els, I just think you should tell them you made a mistake. Surely that’s going to sound better than some conspiracy theory that someone’s out to get you?’

  Eleanor nodded, defeated. He was right. What she was saying sounded crazy. And she believed it a hundred per cent, which meant she was crazy. But there was no way she was going to let anyone else know that.

  35

  Tell me about the day Eleanor lost Noah …

  I’ve told you what happened. She insisted it was a mistake. That she’d forgotten where she parked.

  Did you believe her?

  It didn’t seem like her. And she was so insistent when I got to the school that she’d parked in her normal space – I believed her then so I didn’t know what to believe when she changed her story. She’d been so distracted, so unlike her usual self.

  Where were you when the police called you?

  I was at work.

  The police said you arrived very quickly.

  They said it was urgent. Are you going to arrest me for speeding?

  It was important to you to get to Eleanor quickly. To be there for her.

  Is that a question?

  Would you disagree?

  No. Wouldn’t you want to get to a friend who had lost her child?

  But you didn’t know that at the time.

  I knew it was urgent. That was enough.

  Didn’t you ever worry about putting your friends’ needs before your own? Leaving work at their slightest call, getting embroiled in their squabbles?

  Not at all. They needed me. It’s what any good friend would do.

  At your age? Some would say they are adults now, old enough to take care of themselves …

  Well they aren’t. They needed me.

  And now? Do they need you now?

  I think we’re done for today.

  36

  From my vantage point behind the large tree outside the gates I watched Eleanor’s car enter the school. I waited as it came to a stop in its usual spot and watched Eleanor climb out. Toby got out of the front passenger side, then hauled his project out, nearly letting it topple to the ground under its own weight. I’d considered moving it close to the log burner in their front room when I’d spied it through the window last night, letting the heat melt the plastic tubes and rendering the hours they had spent on it useless, but I was glad I hadn’t now. Toby’s disappointment at his mother’s carelessness would have been nothing compared to Eleanor’s confusion at losing her car, the panic I could imagine in her eyes when she returned with the baby to find they had no way of getting home. But it turned out better than I could have imagined. Because when Eleanor left the car to help Toby carry the project into the school, she gave a furtive look around before locking the car door with Noah still inside.

  For a second I considered abandoning the plan.
Stealing the car was one thing – I had Eleanor’s spare keys and it would only take me a few seconds to move it once she was safely out of the way – but stealing Noah … that felt like it was going too far.

  But I might not have to actually steal the car for the plan to have maximum effect. What if I just moved it? Even if Eleanor spotted it straight away, those few seconds when she realised it wasn’t where it was supposed to be would be enough, all the more so now she’d been stupid enough to leave her son in it. I had to move fast, though; if she just dumped the project inside the front doors, she might return quickly and I’d be seen. I had no explanation ready for that eventuality, but crossing the car park and slipping the key into the lock, I knew I would think of something.

  Sliding into the driver’s seat and turning the key in the ignition, I could feel the adrenalin surging through my veins. All I had to do was ease the car slowly around the corner of the school to the far side of the parents’ parking. I threw a glance at the corner of the school. No sign of Eleanor anywhere. I should get out, make my escape now, but my attention was drawn to the sleeping baby in the back, his breathing gentle and silent. He looked so still and peaceful – how was it that this tiny human being was able to reduce a grown woman to the blubbering, stressed-out mess that Eleanor was becoming?

  I reached out a hand to stroke his cheek. It would be so easy to uncouple his straps and lift him from his seat. I could hold him close, snuggle into that warm body. I could show him what a mother should be like; not a resentful, harried shell but someone who would give him everything he needed; someone who would never let a man control her life so completely that she would become useless without him; someone who had no need of another person’s love to make her feel real, rather than a ghost who disappeared when her husband wasn’t looking.

  My fingers fumbled with the clasp of the straps, a big red button that was damn near impossible to push in all the way. I knew in that instant that my mind was made up. I was taking him away from all this negativity and betrayal. He wouldn’t grow up a spineless, cheating worm of a man like his father, or married to a needy control freak like his mother. His future would be defined by who he was, not by his fucked-up family.

  And that was when he started to stir, his eyes fluttering, his eyeballs rolling back and forth in their sockets, fighting wakefulness. From beneath his dummy came a low moaning noise. I froze. It was like waking up from a dream, one that you desperately wanted to fall back into but you knew the moment was gone. My senses returned. I’d been too long as it was; my luck had been stretched thin, and if I wasn’t careful, it would snap like overloaded elastic.

  Without waiting to see if he woke, I shoved open the car door and jumped out, throwing it shut behind me. Clicking the central locking system and cramming the key back into the pocket of my hoody, I jogged back to my tree to wait and watch.

  37

  Karen

  ‘How did it go?’

  Karen had put her next client on hold to sneak in a phone call to Eleanor between sessions. She’d had her visit from social services that morning, and as far as Karen could tell, she seemed a lot less anxious about it than she had the other day.

  ‘It was fine.’ Eleanor sounded distracted but calm. ‘I told them the truth: that I’d made a stupid mistake and I’d learned my lesson. There’s no way I’ll let Noah out of my sight again. Adam has offered to cut his hours down for a few weeks and help out a bit more here, let me get a bit of rest. Things will be back to normal in no time.’

  ‘Do you really believe that?’

  ‘Of course, why wouldn’t I? It was a stupid thing to do and I won’t let it happen again.’

  Karen tried not to sound too judgemental, but she failed to keep the tone from her voice. ‘Because the other day you were convinced that someone had moved your car to try and make you think it had been stolen. Now you’re saying it was all your mistake.’

  ‘That’s because it was. I didn’t want to admit it the other day, not even to myself, but I made a stupid decision because I was tired. I must have thought I was parking in my usual spot but parked in a different space. When I came out and couldn’t see the car, I panicked, overreacted. It’s not a big deal.’

  It had certainly seemed like a big deal on Friday, when she was hyperventilating into a brown paper bag while Karen held Noah and tried to calm her best friend down.

  ‘Okay, that’s great.’ There was no point in arguing now that Eleanor had made her mind up. If she wanted to believe it was a misunderstanding, that was fine – it made more sense than the wild story she had concocted on Friday about it all being an elaborate scheme by persons unknown to drive her crazy. ‘Let me know if you need anything. I have patients all day today, but if you leave a message with Molly, I can call you again between sessions.’

  ‘Thanks, and thank you again for the other day. Sorry I was so mental.’ Eleanor tried to keep her voice light, but Karen heard it crack slightly as she said, ‘See you Friday.’

  ‘Love you.’ Karen signed off with their usual goodbye, but Eleanor had already hung up.

  Karen’s last client that morning had been one of her more interesting ones. At the age of forty-two, he’d undergone hypnotherapy to try and find the cause of his issues with food, only to find out that when he was four years old, his mother would alternate between force-feeding him and starving him as a punishment for the smallest slight. Given that his mother had died three years previously, he had no way of knowing if this was a real or false memory, and no way of getting closure. The hypnotherapist had panicked at the implications of the discovery and swiftly referred him to Karen, and they were making slow progress using letter therapy. These were the types of cases she had always wanted to deal with – ones where she could really make a difference to a person’s life. That was all she’d ever wanted to do.

  Michael arrived after that session to take her to lunch. Karen still wondered how he managed to turn up at the most perfect times, exactly when she needed him, like the proverbial lucky penny. He’d looked amazing, as he always did, and as she leaned into his dark grey suit she inhaled his aftershave, trying to imprint the scent on her mind for when she had to let him go again. The weeks went so much faster than the weekends; it felt like the twelve-month wait for one day of Christmas.

  ‘How’s work?’ he asked, trying – and failing – to look suave as he wound noodles around his chopsticks and they fell off for the third time in a row.

  Karen laughed, motioning to the woman behind the Chinese takeaway counter. ‘Can we get a fork, please?’

  The place had only three tables for a handful of eat-in customers, and the other two were empty, so she had no concerns about being overheard as she answered his question. Michael knew she couldn’t go into specifics about her patients, so they had code names for them and their situations. Her professional ethics allowed this game on the grounds that it wasn’t any different from all the scholarly articles she was permitted to publish as long as identities were concealed.

  Karen nodded. ‘Mmm, okay. Travis is still referring to me as “boss” in every other condescending sentence, even though I’m not going to start my training until after Ken’s retirement. The high-class Hail Mary was a bit intense this week,’ she continued, keeping her voice neutral as she referred to Jessica Hamilton. A high-class Hail Mary was a woman who didn’t have a real problem; usually they had done something they wanted to get off their chest and used therapy as a confessional rather than a way to explore why they behaved the way they did. Changing their behaviour was usually not on the cards.

  ‘She still coming?’ Michael nodded his thanks to the pretty young waitress who brought his fork.

  ‘Yep. And she’s no closer to figuring out that the reason she hates her lover’s wife is because she feels guilty that she’s screwing a married man with children.’ Karen longed to mention Adam’s name. You don’t have any evidence. Remember your ethics. Remember your promotion.

  ‘She sounds like a charmer. I’ve s
aid it before, Karen, I just don’t get your profession. You know the exact reason this woman is beating herself up. Why can’t you just tell her?’

  ‘Believe me, I’d love to.’ She managed to inhale the rest of her beef noodles without any slopping down the front of her beige shirt. ‘But people refuse to believe that they might be responsible for their own disordered feelings. If I tell her straight, that means admitting she’d have to break up with him in order to fix the problem. Which she has no intention of doing. So she’ll come to her sessions and go away convinced that it can’t be her head that’s screwed up, because she saw a psychiatrist and it didn’t fix her.’ Or she’ll try to find another way to break up Adam and Eleanor.

  ‘Which works out better for Robert, I guess. How would he make his money if you fixed all his clients after one session?’

  ‘And how would you cope with me having to be a kept woman?’

  Her voice was light-hearted, but Michael’s face darkened and neither of them said any more.

  ‘How’s Eleanor doing after the other day?’ he asked when he finally spoke again.

  Karen grimaced. ‘I called her this morning. She sounded weird.’

  ‘Weirder than usual?’

  ‘Arse. You don’t have to be so mean about them, you know; they love you.’

  He smiled. ‘Who doesn’t? You know I like them, I just think it’s weird how they depend on you so much. I mean, you’re all in your thirties; shouldn’t they be grown up by now? Eleanor’s got two kids of her own and she’s still dragging you out of work at the slightest problem.’

  ‘You don’t get it because you’re a man. Men don’t have these kinds of friendships. They rely on me because that’s what they’ve always done, since we were five. I’m the stable one. The sensible one. The one they can depend on.’