I spread the treasures out over the floor and started with the Dairy Milk, peeling back the silvery wrapper and catching a glimpse of what lay beneath: the deep-brown spread of a smooth chunk of chocolate, as longed-for as Hope. My jaw fell open as my mouth began to water. I broke the first chunk and ran it over my lips. It melted and I licked it off. I kept on doing this until the chunk had almost disappeared and I could bear it no longer. I put the last of it into my mouth, swallowed, and felt the familiar ache of my stomach as it opened up for more.
I couldn’t stop then. I pulled off the wrapper and bit into it, again and again until it was gone. Then I did the same to a Flake and a bar of Turkish Delight, and set about the Pringles. I ate quickly, leaving no time to think. I just enjoyed the sensation of biting into all this and feeling it slip down my throat, as if it were rain on desert sands.
I sat back for a while, looked at the mess on the floor, and felt sweetly sick. I cracked open a can of Fanta and drank a long, fizzy mouthful, then belched. It was a relief to belch like that, to let the air out, create space and start again.
By the time I finished, I’d eaten my way through:
Four Dairy Milks
Three Flakes
Two tubes of prawn cocktail Pringles
One tube of salt and vinegar Pringles
Three bars of Turkish Delight
Two packets of Scampi Fries
Two packets of Chipsticks
One packet of pickled onion Monster Munch
One can of Fanta
One can of Coke
For a while, I lay still on my bedroom floor, full and heavy as a cow. I closed my eyes and imagined all that sugar, all that fat, all that salt, hardening in my stomach. The urge to get rid of it started slowly. It was too late, I thought. I’d done it. I’d eaten this junk and now it was there inside me like a trapped rat, making me ill.
I wanted it out. I stood up and started pacing the floor, the way my mother used to do in her madder moments. It needed to go quickly, because even as I walked, I could feel it settling there, ready to turn into thick, white fat.
I needed to bring it all back up now, the way I’d sent it all down – urgently, with force.
I went to the bathroom and locked the door. Afterwards, I knew the relief would be deep and vast. Cleansing, like confession.
We were mad, she and I. There could be no question of that.
66
Here’s the thing about Annie: she’s secretive. She plays with the truth – holds it back, or only reveals part of it. She had my entire life in her hands before she told me anything about hers, and even then, I had to get back into the office and read her files to work out the truth of it. She told me how her mother was mad and they’d been poor and how miserable she’d been. She even told me she wanted her to disappear, or die.
She said her mother had gone missing eventually, that Caitlin had convinced herself she was the son of God and gone off to save the world. She lied. Caitlin died at home. Suicide the files said. But I knew Annie had given her the final push herself.
67
Annie
My illness started when my mother went mad that last time, but I’d been getting better since coming here and meeting Hope. Much better. She was good for me. Until she wasn’t.
She’d wrecked me. Those words of hers were as sharp as knives, and the pain as real and physical as a wound to the heart. No one could make this better now. She’d emptied me out and left me hollow. I was as dead as Lara.
You’re a murderer. It’s in your blood.
I couldn’t get her words out of my head. I covered my ears with my hands, trying to block them out, but it didn’t work. The drama of my mother kept unfolding in front of me. I saw her that morning, lying in her unwashed sheets, mad as any Victorian hysteric.
‘You need to keep up with your medicine, Caitlin,’ I said.
‘I’m not ill,’ she told me feebly, exhausted from all her night-time ravings. ‘The Lord is coming for me. He will show me the way. He’s already brought me those feathers. I’m just waiting for the next sign.’
‘You’re ill, Caitlin,’ I said. ‘You’re really ill. God isn’t coming for you. It’s one of your delusions because you haven’t been taking your pills. God isn’t coming for you,’ I repeated, and felt myself becoming angry and upset so tears sprang into my eyes. ‘There probably isn’t even such thing as God.’
She hadn’t been violent for a while, not like she used to be when I was younger. Now, her attacks were shorter lived – slaps to the face, which were sudden and hard but over quickly, and so frequent, I accepted them as normal, barely worth mentioning. This time, though, she bounded out of bed, and before I’d even realised what was happening, she had a tight grip on my hair and was pulling me down to the floor. Then she sat astride me and delivered so many blows to my face, I thought she wouldn’t stop until she’d killed me.
‘Caitlin…’ I said breathlessly, between punches, ‘Stop. Please stop…’
She did. Then she stood up, gazed contemptuously down at me and said, ‘That’s what happens when you slander the Lord. Don’t do it again.’
I didn’t leave the house for days after that. My face was a mess, purple and swollen. I bathed it in witch hazel and took paracetamol for the pain.
While looking in the medicine cupboard, I found the sleeping pills the doctor had prescribed my mother months ago. She hadn’t taken any of them. There were twenty-eight in the pack. For a minute, I thought about taking them, right there and then, and putting an end to this misery of living with her. But I didn’t want to die. I just wanted my mother to be gone, far away from me, never to return.
My mind drifted to an article I’d read in a newspaper a while back, about a man who’d killed his wife by crushing sleeping tablets into her food. He’d lovingly made her breakfast every morning and taken it to her on a silver tray while she was still in bed. He’d started out with just three or four and gradually increased the dosage until finally it was enough to kill her.
Twenty-eight pills, I thought. A four-week supply. Would that do it? Would that be enough?
My mind began to race and my hands were shaking as my thoughts took form. Could I do it? And could I get away with it? If I gave them to her all at once, how long would she take to die? Maybe, if I made her dinner, then left the empty packet by her bed, the police would think she’d done it herself…
68
Hope
We both knew it was falling apart and neither of us had a clue how to mend it. Ace, the baby, her mother, the home closing down … it had all become too much.
‘Maybe Helen’s right,’ she said. ‘Maybe we’re too young. I haven’t got what I need to deal with this. I can’t handle it.’
I said nothing to that. She was probably right. I was ashamed of how badly I’d hurt her, but I couldn’t make it better. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said afterwards. ‘I didn’t mean it.’
She looked at me, the turmoil inside her clear on her face. ‘Then why did you say it?’
‘I don’t know.’
It was true. I didn’t know. Hateful, terrible, unspeakable things came out of my mouth and I had no control over any them. Of course, I knew it was happening. I could hear my words filling the room, every one of them like a bullet through the heart of this girl I loved, but I couldn’t make it stop, not even when she was crying so hard she could barely breathe.
She’d opened herself up to me, heart and soul, and I couldn’t stop stamping on her. She was a mess now, a broken, beaten mess. All I wanted was to put her back together, but she wasn’t going to let me, and besides, I had no idea how to do it.
I said, ‘Shall we walk down to the church?’
She shrugged. ‘OK.’
We took the short-cut through the village. It was late autumn now, and I was more than eighteen weeks’ pregnant. Beneath my clothes was the slight swell of the baby I had done nothing about.
She shivered as we walked into the woods, where the path dropped dow
n to the lakeside. The autumn rainfall had swollen the lake, and we could see it through the gaps in the trees, its rippling grey spread silvered in the November sunlight.
I took her hand in mine. She didn’t move away.
It was windy and cold on the shore. I pulled my coat tight around me. Annie said, ‘Let’s go in the church. It’ll be warmer there.’
We creaked open the old oak door. Inside, there were only four rows of pews, a font and a small table lit with the flames of three gently glowing tealights. A notice to one side read, ‘Please feel free to light a candle in prayer. Suggested donation: 20p’.
Annie took a candle and lit it from the flame of one already burning. She placed it beside the others and closed her eyes briefly.
‘What are you praying for?’ I asked.
‘For you,’ she said.
I seized on her word. I couldn’t help it. ‘Not us?’
She shook her head. ‘For you,’ she repeated.
We stayed there for a long time, aware that darkness was falling outside, watching the flames in the slowly fading light. We held hands and she wept now and then in the silence. Sometimes, I brushed the tears from her cheeks or lowered my lips to the crown of her head.
The love between us was perfect, and terrible.
Part Four
69
Helen
Ace had been charged, Annie was off the hook, and things were meant to be calming down, getting back to some kind of normality. But nobody could settle, and one by one, staff were handing in their notice. Gillian was first, then Clare, quickly followed by the others who hadn’t been on shift when Hope died, but who’d still had their worlds rocked by it and decided there were other jobs they could do for £13,000 a year that didn’t plunge them into catastrophe and trauma, and a need for therapy.
On top of that, senior management had announced that, under the circumstances, they now saw fit to close the home down as soon as they could. The staff would work out their notice; they would recruit no replacements and Helen would be given a small redundancy package and a promise to help her find new employment, perhaps in one of the organisation’s other, less expensive properties.
But Helen wasn’t sure she wanted this work anymore. It was all too bleak, too hopeless. She was thinking of doing something drastic. Already, she could see her fiftieth birthday, just five years ahead of her. It loomed like the summit of a mountain, and she needed to put something on the other side of it, or she’d just end up freefalling to old age: divorced; the children grown up and gone; her whole life lived in silence, waiting for their Sunday-afternoon duty visits…
Maybe, she thought, she should go back in time, get the education she’d missed out on in her youth because she’d been too busy getting married and having babies.
It was something to think about, although for now her energy had to go into Annie and Lara. What would become of them? She tried to think of this as a chance for their lives to move forwards positively. Annie was moving to Edinburgh, and Helen was ready to fight to get Lara where she needed to be – in a community that specialised in children’s mental health, and screw the cost of it.
Lara was outside now. Helen could see her from the kitchen window, scrabbling about the dry-stone walls that separated the home from the farmland. In the summer, she’d collected five caterpillars and brought them into the house. Helen had given her a pot to keep them in, along with leaves to feed on, and they’d watched as they grew rapidly fatter and fatter until one of them successfully hardened into a chrysalis and eventually a small grey moth had emerged. They’d been hoping for a butterfly, but Lara seemed unbothered. The rest of them had died.
‘You know her room is filled with dead stuff, don’t you?’ Hope told Helen once. ‘That’s why the whole of upstairs fucking stinks.’
It had been a problem, this habit Lara had of looking after the dead. Every day now, Helen had to go up to her room and remove the corpses of small animals and insects that she hoarded in her cupboard, like someone stockpiling food in case of nuclear disaster. She’d only found out about it when Hope told her, although for weeks she’d been aware of the putrid smell of decay and made all the girls deep clean their rooms, although as soon as you stepped into Lara’s, you knew that was where it all came from. But you couldn’t be seen to single someone out, especially someone like Lara. Helen had helped her, going into her room and talking to her easily while she dusted and wiped and vacuumed. There was never any response. Lara just fixed her with those wide eyes that looked so empty but were filled with terrible knowledge. They were like black holes, sucking everything she’d ever witnessed deep inside her, and letting no light back out. Even when Helen had opened the wardrobe door and the smell had hit her so hard she’d had to cover her face with her hands, Lara hadn’t flinched.
‘Oh, dear,’ Helen had said briskly, pulling down an old, damp shoebox and peeling it open. There inside were the rotting leftovers of birds, their wet feathers mingled with the sodden cardboard, like the hidden remains of a small yet terrible disaster.
She was full of questions: What was this? How long had it been there? Why on earth did she hoard death like this? But of course, Lara was never going to answer. Never. And if she did, Helen wasn’t the person to drag the reasons for this dark desire out of her and heal it. That was the work of the therapists, the mental-health specialists.
It would be connected to the murders of her mother and sister. Anyone could see that.
‘It’s like self-harming,’ Hope said, with authority. She’d been trying to befriend Lara in those last few months before her death, and considered them closer than they really were. ‘Like when you have to drag a razor down your arm to let the pain out. It’s like that. She needs to watch things die, over and over, to let the grief out. I bet you anything that’s what it is.’
It was a plausible theory, Helen thought.
Now, while Lara was out, she decided to head up to her room and clear it of any other gruesome collections. She took some disposable gloves from under the sink. Although nothing had ever been as bad as that first discovery – she’d felt the contamination on her hands for days after that – she didn’t ever want to risk the touch of death against her skin again.
She called Danny to come with her as a witness, so he could ensure the balance was maintained between ensuring good hygiene and not invading Lara’s privacy, and then searched the room in all its usual spots – under the bed, in the wardrobe, inside every drawer. But there was nothing this time. When she opened the only box she found hidden at the back of the wardrobe, there was just a single sheet of paper, scrawled over in blue biro. Helen knew that messy, badly formed writing immediately. It was Hope’s:
Lara,
Life is shit. Me and Annie are going to kill ourselves. You should join us.
Hope
In silence, she passed the note to Danny. He took a deep, sharp breath. ‘Fuck,’ he said. ‘Now what?’
70
Annie
Her pregnancy was starting to show now – only slightly, but enough for us both to know she wouldn’t be able to hide it for much longer. I didn’t know the legal time limit for abortion, but began to wonder now whether the date had already passed. Probably, that was what she wanted – to keep the secret until it was too late and there was no choice but to let her go ahead and have the baby.
Never once did I mention abortion to her. I wouldn’t have dared, but she knew I saw it as the only possible solution to this mess. Abort the baby, get Ace out of her life, start again.
It was simple, when you looked at the situation coldly. But Hope wasn’t cold, and everything was chaos.
I couldn’t hide from her. She knew I was sick now, and she knew my mother hadn’t gone missing – that she was dead and that I’d killed her. Sometimes, I imagined the police finding out somehow and there being a trial. I could hear the judge’s voice in my head: ‘This was no moment of desperation, but a cool and premeditated act. It must have taken you quite some ti
me to plan this – to find those tablets, to pop them out of their foil wrappers, to crush them into her food – time in which many people would have been able to see the wrong in what they were about to do. But not you…’
One morning, the fear took over me and I lay on my bed, burying my face in my pillow. Guilty, I thought. Guilty, guilty, guilty.
I didn’t know how I was going to carry this guilt through the rest of my life. Loving Hope had helped. If I were capable of the deep and selfless love I had for her, then I couldn’t be bad. I couldn’t be a murderer. I was just…
I was a murderer.
The door opened. Hope came in and sat down on the edge of my bed. I knew it was her, even though I didn’t look up. Everything about her was familiar to me. I knew the sound of each footstep, the mood of the air shifting as she entered it, the exact weight of her beside me.
‘Are you alright?’ she asked. Then, when I didn’t answer, she rested a hand on my back and said, ‘Sit up, Annie.’
I sat up.
‘We can’t go on like this,’ she said.
I shook my head. ‘No.’
‘Shall we…’ she began, and I knew what she was going to say. ‘Shall we put an end to it, like we’ve been thinking of doing?’
She stopped talking for a minute, then stood up, restless and agitated. ‘I can’t have this baby without you,’ she said. ‘I don’t think I can live without you.’
I watched her as she picked things up from my shelves – a lipstick, a notebook, a couple of hairbands – fiddled with them for a while and then put them down again. ‘And what’s your life without me? It’s nothing, Annie. How are you going to live with your guilt, and your illness? How can you recover from either of them?’
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