*
Jessica’s limping, making slow progress along the path.
“Broke my toe tripping over Bobby,” she says. “I heard it break. That’ll teach me to go around without shoes on. The doctor won’t do anything. You just have to grin and bear it and it’ll get better on its own apparently. Hurts, though.”
“Do you need help walking Bobby?”
“No, thanks, really, it’s fine as long as I take the painkillers. I’ll just take it slowly. I’m so glad Christmas is over. It’s such hard work having visitors. And Mike being home all the time. I suppose I’m too used to being on my own. Only a few more days to go. What are you doing for New Year’s Eve?”
“Trying my best to ignore it. Earplugs, Riley and a duvet over my head.”
“We’re going down to the Hare and Hounds – they’re doing a special party night. Why don’t you come with us?”
“Oh, no, I’m fine, thanks. I’ll be much happier at home with Riley.” Her reply was a little too quick, and she hopes Jessica doesn’t take offence. She winces at the mention of a New Year’s party.
They negotiate a narrow section of the path. The cold weather has hardened the ground and it’s less muddy than usual. The winter-grey trees look frozen, barely alive, the water in the lake, black and dangerous.
“If you need company, ever, you will ask, won’t you?” Jessica glances at her sideways, the ponytail brushing her shoulder, as if she’s nervous of the reply.
“Thanks.” She feels awkward, as if she should explain. “It’s just… at the moment…”
“Sure.”
But again she asks herself, as she trudges back home, is it just at the moment? Or is this how life will be?
*
She sinks into the chair, her hands cold and clammy.
“How are you getting on with the diary?” He nods towards her bag, which isn’t quite doing the job of concealing the notebook. She wishes she hadn’t brought it.
“I haven’t written anything. Sorry.”
“Do you think you can start using it?”
“Yes.” Her voice sounds uncertain, even to her, though she means to be convincing.
“Don’t feel it’s like homework. Just note down what comes up – any new memories, any particular details of the memory. What triggers a flashback, or anything you think of that might be useful in these sessions. Also how you feel when it happens. It’ll help to write at a regular time each day, and date each entry, so you can keep track over time of what’s happening. Do you think you can do that?”
She looks at the picture behind him, then back at his face.
“I’ve got to.” She draws breath, then hesitates.
“Is there something else?”
“Something happened the other day which made me realise I’ve got to change things.”
“Things?”
“The way I’m living - how I’ve reacted to what happened.”
“Do you want to tell me about it?”
“It was a small incident really. At the station. My dog peed in the ticket office and the station guard shouted at me. That’s all. But I nearly fell apart.”
“In what way?”
“I was horribly embarrassed, like anyone would be. But also I was terrified. He was quite aggressive but my reaction was out of all proportion. He wasn’t going to hit me or anything, I knew that, but I couldn’t help panicking.”
“Why do you think you panicked?”
“Possibly because it was a man. I feel threatened by men. The confrontation, too. I felt like a child, weak and powerless. Unable to defend myself. I tried to clear the pee up, with a tissue – which was useless, I got it all over my hands. He watched me the whole time. I was so frightened, I was trembling.”
“And now, how do you feel about it?”
“I feel like I can’t handle the slightest thing. I’ve got to fix this. I’ve got to.”
There’s a pause. “It wasn’t slight, though, that incident. Anyone would have been embarrassed. How do you think you should have reacted?”
“It’s the disproportionate reaction. I was in pieces for hours, shaking and scared. I can’t go on being this fragile.”
“Any more nightmares or flashbacks?”
“Both.”
“Anything new or different about them?”
“Not really. Actually, I feel worse, if anything. More guilty.”
“Let’s explore that for a moment. Do you feel guilty in the moment – in the nightmares and the flashbacks – or is the guilty feeling constant?”
“Both. He was my friend.”
“He was a friend?”
She’s surprised at her own willingness to voice this. It’s the first time she’s allowed herself to even think about the man behind the crime since the night it happened. “One of the crowd at the pub. We hadn’t just met him that night.”
“Had you or Ali had a relationship with him?”
“I don’t think so. It’s weird. I can only remember that we knew him when we saw him in the pub, and then again in the street. I felt uncomfortable sitting close to him. I remember that. I’ve tried, but apart from that, any other memories of him have gone. Maybe we didn’t know him that well. I don’t know.”
“So, you feel you’re to blame because you sat with him, spoke to him?”
The knot inside her tightens. “Not because of that.”
“Go on.”
“Ali shouldn’t have died! It should have been me!” It comes out as a strangled sob. “But what gets to me the most is I can’t even remember what happened. She’s just gone!”
His voice is calm, balanced against the anguish in hers. “Many people in your kind of situation experience this feeling. It’s called survivor guilt. You feel guilty because Ali died and you lived, is that right?”
She nods, unable to speak, tears filling her eyes.
There’s a pause as she searches in her bag and tries to compose herself. He hands her a box of tissues and she takes one without speaking.
“Should anyone else take responsibility for Ali’s death?”
For a moment, she goes blank. “Well, Fergus…”
“So Fergus has some responsibility?”
“I believe she died because of what he did, yes. But I still feel I should have been able to save Ali.”
“Could you have stopped him? Can you remember what happened?”
“I don’t know. I just think – surely I could have done more?”
“Did you know what he was going to do?”
“No. I’d never have thought he’d do something like that.”
“And yet you still feel guilty.”
“Yes. I can’t explain it.”
“Is there something else that makes you feel it was your fault?”
“I… no, nothing.”
He looks at her intently, as if he suspects there might be more, then leans back and glances at the clock. It’s close to the end of the session, she notices with relief, wanting only to escape.
She walks slowly back to the station. In the waiting room on the station platform she sits with her back against the wall, her eyes on the door.
*
It’s New Year’s Eve. As she sips her first cup of tea, the cold air of her bedroom nips at her hands and she snuggles up to Riley for warmth, who looks at her with sleepy eyes, then settles back down.
“A long walk today, then, Riley.” He sleeps on and she looks at her watch, hoping that the time has unexpectedly rushed by. It’s still only seven o’clock, though, and she wonders how on earth she’ll fill the hours that stretch ahead.
She wakes again with a start. 9.20am. It’s a long time since she was in bed so late in the morning and she was sleeping deeply, undisturbed by dreams. She feels strangely groggy and stretches out to clear her head. The diary lies on the bedside table beside her and she picks it up, flicking through the empty pages thoughtfully. Perhaps I’ll have a go. Or not. With a sigh she puts it back down again and struggles out of bed as
Riley leaps up expectantly, knowing a walk is imminent.
As they head out into the cold, frost glistens on the ground and the air has a sharpness that bites at her face. She pulls her scarf up around her neck and her hat down over her ears as they head off. She’s glad of the anonymity of her warm clothes. She’s going to head further out today but decides to do a circuit of the lake first. The sun is bright in her eyes as they reach the footpath and the lake reflects the blue of the sky, little ripples spreading out as the breeze catches the surface. Halfway round there’s a small beach where the edge of the lake has worn away. Riley stops there for a drink. A wooden bench stands on the bank and Lisa decides to sit for a while to watch the ducks foraging for food under the surface. She feels better for the extra hours’ sleep and the calm of the countryside; she resolves to start the diary when she gets back to the house. One very small step, she thinks, but she does feel slightly more positive, more determined.
When they get back to the house, they’ve been out for more than four hours and her cheeks are tingling. She puts some wood into the stove and goes up to the bathroom, abandoning her hat and coat on the end of the banister. Glancing into the bedroom, she notices the diary again and decides to take it downstairs as a first step towards getting started. She spots the bag from the flat, which she’d placed under the bed when it first came back, waiting for a better moment to look through it.
Suddenly curious about it, she takes it downstairs, scooping up the diary on the way. The bag sits on the kitchen table as if waiting patiently for attention while she makes herself some tea. She looks at it for a while and then, putting her mug to one side, opens it and empties the entire contents onto the table.
Well, there’s her life as it was. It was only a few short months ago, but the items in the bag look like things from years before, barely remembered yet so familiar. There are three jumpers, some jeans and a few T-shirts. A couple of cotton shirts for going out in and some smarter work clothes. She doesn’t expect to need those again. There’s underwear, a small photo of her mum in a frame and some assorted jewellery. Her shower radio. Some books: lightweight novels, already read. A few bits and bobs from her bedside table.
Then, at the bottom of the bag, in a large brown envelope, she finds photos and notes from the noticeboard in the kitchen, and the contents of the top drawer in the sideboard, where they threw all sorts of stuff when they didn’t know where else to put it.
She steels herself, clears a space on the table and empties the contents into a heap. A pink sticky note says: Mum’s birthday present with an asterisk next to it, and Collect dry cleaning!! Another says: Bins – FRIDAYS. There’s a torn-out ad for a local plumber – they used him when the landlord asked them to find someone to fix the immersion heater – and a card from a hairdresser in the city. There are rubber bands, sandwich bags, candles for birthday cakes and tea lights all jumbled up together.
Then there’s a small pile of photographs. She picks them up and looks through them. Tears threaten from the first: Lisa and Ali, making silly faces into the camera. The two girls on holiday in Spain, tanned and long-limbed. They look young and carefree. There’s one of Lisa at the flat, caught unawares with a piece of bread in her mouth, and one of Ali smiling directly into the camera.
Then she finds, under all the rest, a strip of photos from a booth. It’s the two of them again, in winter scarves and woolly hats, blowing kisses. At least, it’s the two of them in the first two pictures. The third shows the back of a man’s head, with the girls either side, kissing his cheeks, their eyes laughing, peering into the camera. Two female hands adorned with rings and dark nail polish point down at him from above. In the fourth picture the mystery man has turned round. It’s Fergus, she realises with a shock. He’s grinning as Ali kisses his left cheek and Lisa kisses his right, and their two hands are still pointing at the top of his head.
Lisa’s mystified. She stops rummaging through the contents of the envelope, now spread out all over the table, and sits back, trying to clear the mist from her eyes, the fog from her brain. She has no recollection whatsoever of the photo booth, the occasion, or the pictures. She turns the strip over, studies the backdrop in the booth, but there’s nothing to jog her memory. Like the event itself, there seems to be no recollection of Fergus except the encounter in the pub and later in the street, and she realises that this is the first time she’s even thought about how they knew him. Or how well they knew him. Perhaps her unreliable memory has erased more than just the event – it’s erased almost everything else about Fergus. Perhaps she’ll uncover other random things missing from her memory that will surprise and unbalance her as she attempts to recover from the trauma. Or perhaps it’s because Fergus was so intimately bound with Ali’s death in her mind, she’s erased as much as she can of his history. With a sigh she tosses the strip of photos back into the jumble of items from the flat and retrieves the one of Ali, smiling.
She takes it with her into the sitting room and crawls onto the sofa, where she curls up into a ball, tears soaking into the cushion under her head.
She must have dozed for a while because when she rouses herself, it’s already getting dark and the logs in the wood burner have settled into a red glow. She adds more fuel and goes round the house closing the curtains against the gloom. Riley wanders out into the garden and when he gets back to the door he’s damp and cold with the beginnings of a new frost.
In the kitchen the contents of the bag are still strewn about on the table. She bundles it all back into the bag, except for Ali’s photo, and carries it upstairs, where she puts it away at the bottom of her wardobe.
Back in the warmth of the living room, she retrieves the diary, sits and looks at it for a long time. Eventually she writes on the first white, empty page, in big letters: WHY? She slides the photo into the back of the diary.
After she’s fed Riley and warmed some soup for herself, she selects the longest film she can find from her collection and settles down for the evening. It’s only later, when she hears the crackle of fireworks at midnight, that she remembers it’s New Year’s Eve. Riley growls, his ears pricking. “It’s okay, Riley. In fact, it’s good. Good riddance to last year.”
*
A couple of days later, the winter wind seeping round the edges of the old doors and windows in the cottage, Lisa’s throat feels dry and sore. After a couple of hours she has a streaming cold. Sneezing and coughing, with heavy legs and a thumping head, she heads out for the daily walk. Jessica is nowhere to be seen but perhaps the injury has stopped her walking. She feels so ill herself that she retreats under the bedclothes with a hot-water bottle. She cancels the week’s session with the psychotherapist; she can barely speak, let alone travel.
Riley is happy to doze with her, though after two days of lying around he jumps up every time she moves, hoping for a walk, or at least some play. She throws a ball for him in the garden one day, but can’t stay out long, despite wrapping herself in layers.
Her nose won’t stop running and she’s coughing badly now, neither of which is helping her sleep. Her dreams are unsettling: part-nightmare, part-fragments of her past, with school friends, boyfriends and Ali drifting in and out of empty rooms in dilapidated, unfamiliar places. One night she has the same flashback dream with the knife and the blood. She wakes often, sweating and coughing.
One morning, as she shuffles around the kitchen making breakfast, the letter box clicks and a large envelope slaps onto the mat in the hallway. It’s a work project with a tight deadline, and as she reads through the brief, sniffing and blowing her nose, she realises she won’t get it done in her current state of health.
It’s her first time at the doctor’s surgery, which is a few minutes’ walk from the cottage, down a side street. The building is modern and practical, in contrast to the houses around it, and is surrounded by a small car park. The surgery seems clean and efficient and she signs in on a computer screen next to the reception desk. Sitting in the waiting room, she’s embarrasse
d by her constant coughing and sniffing; her nose and mouth are now red and peeling with all the blowing and the freezing wind.
The doctor is sympathetic. “Looks like you have an infection,” she says, feeling the glands at the sides of Lisa’s neck.
“What happened here?” She gently touches the still-angry scar. Lisa covers it quickly with her scarf and as she hesitates, the doctor scans her notes. “Ah, I see. Let me just update myself…”
Lisa blows her nose to give herself time and manages to answer the practical questions about her medication (anti-depressants), her therapy (ongoing) and her frame of mind (it depends on the day). Antibiotics are prescribed and the doctor recommends rest and a sensible diet. “How are you sleeping?” The inevitable question.
“Not too bad.” She’s reluctant to get into that discussion.
She’s in a hurry to leave, not wanting to break down with a stranger, even her doctor.
As she leaves, prescription in hand, she passes the next patient going in. It’s Jessica, in dark glasses, her coat collar high against her neck, scarf covering her mouth. “Oh, hi…” But she’s gone, the door to the doctor’s room closed.
The short wait at the chemist’s and the walk back home are exhausting, so she feeds the fire, takes a tablet and lies down in the sitting room, coat still on, blanket tucked around her.
Twenty-four hours later she feels well enough to work for a couple of hours. She emails to rebook her therapy and calls home.
“Have you got enough food?”
Dare to Remember: Shocking. Page-Turning. Psychological Thriller. Page 5