by John Marrs
‘You told me she was getting better!’ Barbara snapped, making no effort to disguise her bitterness towards me. ‘You lived with her, couldn’t you see she was getting worse?’
‘She said she was feeling better.’
‘Why didn’t you talk to her doctor and explain she needed a higher dose of antidepressants?’
‘She was limited to what she could take because she was pregnant.’
Barbara shook her head, refusing to accept my answers. The whites of Patrick’s eyes were bloodshot and the sockets dark. ‘I don’t understand any of this,’ he muttered. ‘All I know is that you promised me you’d look after my little girl, and you failed.’
‘I know and I am so sorry . . .’ My voice trailed off.
I recalled months earlier, when Charlotte and I should have been at our happiest, and how a sort of darkness had descended within weeks of her becoming pregnant. I put it down to the morning sickness at first. It wasn’t just at breakfast when she was ill, it was often after lunch and dinner, too. Sometimes she couldn’t even keep a slice of dry toast down. But when that eventually passed, I thought things would start getting better and that she’d share my enthusiasm as a parent-to-be. Instead, she remained in her funk.
The NHS website explained prenatal depression was pretty common. Her symptoms matched those listed – she felt down a lot of the time, she was generally apathetic, she was tearful, she couldn’t sleep and she was often agitated.
I suggested mentioning it to her midwife at her next appointment, but Charlotte insisted on managing her mood swings herself and shunned medication. I tried to lift her spirits by changing our diets, cutting out all processed food and replacing them with more mother-and-baby-friendly foods packed with antioxidants. It didn’t work; in fact, it just got worse.
The slightest little thing seemed to upset her, even watching the news. Each terrorist attack, war or natural disaster had her hooked to the screen, like she couldn’t get enough of the rolling headlines and fretting about what it might mean to our baby.
‘What kind of world am I bringing my child into?’ she once asked. ‘One where people are burned alive in cages or thrown from buildings because of their religion or sexuality?’
‘Well, firstly, it’s our baby, so the responsibility isn’t just on your shoulders,’ I replied. ‘It’s our job to keep him or her safe and to look after each other.’
‘What if I can’t even carry it properly? Look at me, I’m barely even showing.’
‘The scans say everything is perfectly all right.’
‘Every morning I wake up with this horrible feeling and I can’t stop crying. That glowing pregnancy period all mums talk about? Mine just makes me ache.’
I brushed away a tear rolling down her cheek. ‘Think for a moment about the millions and millions of people to whom nothing horrible has ever happened . . . those who’ve never been blown up on a bus or washed away by a tsunami. Who’s to say we’re not going to be one of those families?’
It wasn’t the first time we’d had that conversation and it wouldn’t be the last. And each time it cropped up, Charlotte nodded in agreement as if she believed my reassurances. Looking back, I should have known she was just trying to shut me up. She didn’t think I understood her and I guess she was right. I could have done more. I should have done more.
Charlotte’s parents continued firing questions at me that I couldn’t answer. As each one came, I felt more and more like a failure as a husband. However, it pissed me off that they were pretending Charlotte’s depression came as news to them. They’d seen how bad it had become on their last visit home, yet they didn’t think it was serious enough to leave the balmy Spanish climes. They accepted no responsibility; apparently it was all my doing.
I remembered that later, when Charlotte’s bad days were still outweighing the good, I went from feeling concerned to scared for her. After much persuasion, she began cognitive behavioural therapy. Three sessions later she dismissed her therapist as ‘a dick’ and never returned. Finally, when she’d hit rock bottom, she gave in and agreed to her doctor’s suggestion of a low dosage of antidepressants.
That’s when the Charlotte of old gradually began to emerge like a butterfly waking from hibernation. She started leaving the flat again, she smiled without being prompted and she’d disappear to our bedroom to chat for ages on the phone. Shortly before Christmas, she replanted the window box with spring bulbs and chose colours and fabrics for the nursery while I decorated it. She also spent time on online message boards where she said she was talking to other women who understood what she’d been going through. She was engaging in the world she’d shied away from.
She suggested we book our first holiday abroad as a three instead of a two; we mulled over which of our friends would make suitable godparents and wondered if we’d ever find a house like the one she loved in Kenton. Only now could I see that none of this mattered to her; it was all a brilliant disguise. She’d no longer wanted any of it. She no longer wanted us.
The morning she died, she’d told me she loved me. How could she say that to me and then throw it all away hours later?
CHAPTER FIVE
EIGHT DAYS AFTER CHARLOTTE
With the exception of two grandparents whom we’d lost to cancer when I was a kid, I’d been lucky to have reached my early thirties and remained relatively unscarred by death. Now I wondered if the Grim Reaper had simply been biding his time until he could make the maximum fucking impact on my life.
I was learning what many other people my age already knew, that grief is the worst place in the world to be trapped in. In fact, it’s a kind of sub-world that you believe only you inhabit. You aren’t alone, of course, because those you’re close to share your pain. But it’s not really their pain, is it? It’s yours. And it’s a million times worse for you than it is for anyone else. Sometimes I thought that if I stretched out my arm, I could physically touch it.
While grief had me caught like a rabbit in headlights, I was also floating in a kind of limbo waiting for the police to release Charlotte’s body into my custody. Without it there couldn’t be a funeral. I didn’t understand what the delay was, because the mystery wasn’t how she died, it was why. But an autopsy needed to be carried out regardless.
Until that was completed, I had no choice but to fill my days by going for aimless walks around the park with my parents’ dog, or staring at the television watching endless quizzes, soaps and reality shows until, before I knew it, a whole evening had passed and I hadn’t registered a single thing I’d watched.
One morning I awoke before six and found myself driving to Northampton railway station. I bought a ticket from a machine and caught a rush-hour train to London Euston, and then took the Hammersmith and City line to Shepherd’s Bush Market in the west of the city. By 9 a.m., I was sitting at a plastic table in a bustling McDonald’s staring through the window at a second-floor flat above a row of shops along a noisy high street.
Inside the filthy pea-shingled exterior was an equally shabby home, the first one Charlotte and I had rented in the capital as twenty-one-year-old university graduates. I recalled black and blue patches of mould crawling up and fanning out across the bathroom walls, and how we’d take it in turns to scrub them with a fungicidal liquid. The glass in the windows was so thin that the frames rattled when a bus or lorry drove past. And the boiler was so unpredictable that in winter, we’d sometimes turn on the oven and keep the door open just to stay warm. But the rent was cheap and the landlord had only asked for two weeks’ deposit.
The material things didn’t matter back then. In fact, nothing had mattered to Charlotte as long as we were happy. And we were happy. Weren’t we? Or had I read her wrongly? Because now I was doubting everything. Every grin in a photograph, each text message with a kiss at the end . . . was it all just pretend?
Maybe even back then depression had been lying dormant under Charlotte’s skin. Perhaps she’d always had it inside her, but she’d been better able to
mask it. Then when pregnancy and her hormones shook everything up, the illness broke through the surface and leaked like a foul-smelling gas.
Whatever its cause, whatever its reason, it didn’t really matter. It had killed her and now it felt like it was threatening to spread through me. If I wasn’t crying, I was numb. If I wasn’t numb, I was suffocating. If I wasn’t suffocating, I was crying. And so on and so on. A never-ending circle of shittery.
I took a sip from a cup of milky tea and pushed my McMuffin and hash browns around my plate with a plastic fork. I couldn’t finish more than a couple of bites from either.
My reflection in the window caught me by surprise. My short, dirty-blond hair was flat and without product, and my cheeks were gaunt. I was pale and my eyes vacant. At five-foot-ten I was neither tall nor short, but I felt myself shrinking by the day. Despite our two-year age difference and his glasses and beard, Johnny and I had been the spitting image of each other. Now, if you put us next to each other, you wouldn’t know we were brothers.
A staff member brushed my shoulder with his arm as he passed, and I recoiled so sharply that he glared at me for my overreaction. ‘Chill, blud,’ he muttered.
So many people had tried to console me with hugs that I could no longer stand physical contact. Being touched by anyone, no matter how emotionally close we were, felt like acid burning holes into my skin.
I dumped the half-eaten food on my tray in a bin and loitered by a bus stop, unsure where to go next.
‘Borough Market,’ I suddenly blurted out, and ran my finger up and down a bus timetable fixed to a lamp post.
With little money to spend on activities, and surviving on cheap microwaveable meals, Charlotte and I had made sure to hold enough money back each week in the house kitty to treat ourselves to fresh produce at the market every Saturday morning. Then we’d stretch it out to make an organic lunch and dinner, our only healthy meals of the week. We were broke, but we were content. Well, at least I had been.
I hopped on the red Routemaster bus and made for the back row of seats on the top deck. That’s where Charlotte and I would sit. I imagined she was by my side and, for a moment, I felt loved again.
I looked at my phone to check the time. I’d kept it on silent and saw I’d missed seven calls – three from my mum’s mobile and four from Dad’s. In addition, there were a handful of text messages from familiar names.
Once the news of Charlotte’s death broke within our friendship groups, they all wanted to know what had happened, and it was horrible explaining to them that I wasn’t really sure but it appeared Charlotte had ended her life. I might as well have said, ‘It was so fucking awful being married to me that she’d rather die.’ They’d try to analyse what she’d done, searching for reasons, but they were never going to get their answers. If I had a pound for everyone who said ‘I just don’t understand it’ or ‘She had everything to live for . . .’, I’d have had enough money to pay for her funeral in cash.
Her friends fell into two camps, each connected to the other by a common loss. On one side were the people racked with guilt for not recognising or reacting to how much pain Charlotte was in. Without fail, they wanted me to know how responsible they felt for letting her slip between the cracks. They pitied me and my loss, and in return I hated them for it.
Then to the others, I was an object of suspicion: a convenient get-out clause for their own failings. Blaming me was much easier than blaming themselves or Charlotte.
The bus reached Southwark Street and I got off and stood on the opposite side of London Bridge, staring at the glass roof and art-deco-style green metal arched beams of Borough Market Hall. I pictured myself crossing the road with Charlotte’s arm linked through mine, two hessian grocery bags in our hands and inhaling delicious food aromas wafting from all the stalls. Then we’d wander from trader to trader, choosing vegetables and meats and bickering over whose turn it was to cook. This used to be Charlotte’s and my playground, but those days were gone and there was no point in me going any further inside. There was no point to anything anymore.
CHAPTER SIX
TWELVE DAYS AFTER CHARLOTTE
He was a boy. He was a boy. The baby Charlotte and I were expecting was going to be a boy.
Throughout her pregnancy, we were adamant we didn’t want to know its sex. We’d just felt so lucky that while some couples struggled for years to conceive, IVF had succeeded for us on our second attempt. So we didn’t care if it was a boy or a girl. But after her death, and while I tortured myself trying to imagine how our family might have looked, there was a gap in my mental picture. I needed to know if I’d have been standing on the sidelines cheering him on in a rugby match, or being the proud dad watching her playing netball.
The desire to know became an obsession that dominated everything. A day after I called DS Carmichael, she phoned back.
‘According to the coroner’s preliminary findings, Charlotte was expecting a boy,’ she said.
‘Thank you,’ I muttered, and hung up before she could try to console me.
Now I was picturing him in my head. His name would have been Daniel, like we’d decided. He had my dark-blond colouring and Charlotte’s clear blue eyes. He had dimples in his cheeks like mine, but a smile that could melt a polar icecap like his mother. He had my athletic build and her speed. I imagined teaching him how to sail, like my dad had with my brother and me at Pitsford Reservoir. Or maybe he’d be more creative and I’d teach him how to play the piano. I shook my head, and he disappeared into a thousand tiny fragments just as quickly as he’d arrived.
I was alone in my parents’ house for the first time since I’d temporarily moved back in. Mum had returned to work at the shoe shop in town, and Dad had gone back to the printworks. Johnny was at the bank playing God with who could have mortgages, while I remained in quicksand, clutching a flimsy branch for dear life and waiting for it to snap. All around me, other people’s lives were beginning to restart and edge forward. Not quite back to how they were before Charlotte, but they were in gear and moving in the right direction, at least.
I walked to the local corner shop to buy some cheap lager. People are right when they say alcohol takes the edge off things; too much of it, though, can distort your reality. I wanted just enough to get me through a particularly tough day. Mrs Verma served me from behind the counter with a sympathetic smile, but I was grateful she stopped short of asking me how I was. I was sick of that question.
It must have been the end of the school day because I kept passing mums and dads holding their kids’ hands on the way home from the nearby primary school. I wanted to yell at them, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are!’ because if I had Daniel’s hand to hold on to, I’d never let go of it.
My thoughts gravitated again towards Charlotte. I couldn’t fathom why, when she knew how much I wanted to be a dad, she would rip the opportunity away from me so cruelly? She had murdered my longed-for boy. If she really, truly hadn’t wanted to live anymore and was convinced dying was the only option, maybe I could have understood if she’d done it after Daniel was born. I’d still have been gutted but he’d have given me the strength to carry on. Now she’d murdered my son, I had no reason to carry on.
I carried my six-pack home in a plastic bag and chose to drink it in the back garden. Conifers, large green and red bushes, and six feet of wooden fencing ensured privacy from the neighbours, not that I’d have cared if they’d seen me boozing away the afternoon. I didn’t bother to pull the canvas cover from the patio furniture and flopped onto a chair, sinking two cans and watching dragonflies skim the pond. My parents’ dog kept me company, but the buzz of the third drink on an empty stomach was starting to cloud my brain. Instead of mellowing me out, my thoughts were becoming more sombre.
I started thinking about my son again, questioning if he’d picked up on the chemical imbalance in Charlotte while he was still in the womb. I speculated how much pain he’d felt when she’d jumped. Months ago, I’d read that at just twenty weeks
an unborn baby can feel pain more intensely than an adult. Did he notice the difference in gravity in those few seconds as she fell through the air? I’d been told Charlotte’s traumatic head injuries had probably killed her instantly. Had Daniel died immediately, too? Or was he trapped inside her, in pain and slowly being starved of oxygen? It was almost too unbearable to think about, yet I couldn’t stop. I began to cry for him.
The compressed gas in the fourth can hissed then effervesced when I pulled back the ring pull. I took a long swig but vomited it up almost immediately across the lap of my jeans and the lawn. I brushed Oscar’s head away when he came to investigate the smell, and I remained there on all fours, heaving until every last drop was out of my pathetic body and dissolving into the grass.
‘I hate you, Charlotte,’ I mumbled. ‘I fucking hate you for what you did to us.’
CHAPTER SEVEN
THREE WEEKS AFTER CHARLOTTE
‘Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance.’
My eyes skimmed the website Johnny had emailed me a link to. He was trying to be helpful and make me realise everything I was feeling was typical, but instead it pissed me off. I didn’t need anyone to tell me how to feel. According to the experts the site quoted, those were the five stages of grief. But I was struggling to make it past anger. It advised that the angrier you get, the more ownership you take of that emotion and the faster it’ll disappear. Then you’ll be ready to move on to the next stage.
Bullshit to that. I don’t want to move on. I know where I am, I’m angry because I’m grieving the loss of my son, and I loathe his mother who killed him. If I forgave her and accepted what happened, then where the hell would I be? I’m better off where I am now because this has become the familiar. And the unfamiliar scares me.
My bitterness was that sharp I was struggling to even speak Charlotte’s name. And I’d not even started trying to come to terms with the affair she’d been having with another man that led to their suicide pact. I was festering, and with no one but a ghost to blame I directed my anger towards my parents, her parents, our friends, the police investigating her case and a God I’d stopped believing in.
