by A J McDine
His eyebrows concertinaed. ‘But Rose…’
‘Don’t you see?’ I said urgently. ‘I wanted to be a doctor so I could fix people. I can’t fix Mother if I’m at university. I’m going to stay at home and help you. Help her. And there’s no point trying to talk me out of it. I’ve made up my mind.’
A week later, my mother arrived home in an ambulance. My father had moved into the spare room so their old bedroom could be kitted out with all the equipment she’d need: a specialist hospital bed with side rails and chair and tilt functions, a commode, a walking frame and grab rails. He’d built shelves on the wall opposite her bed to accommodate her ghoulish collection of stuffed birds and had painstakingly cleaned every single display case, so the birds’ glass prisons gleamed in the sun. Our bathroom was to be converted into a wet room, but until then the carers my father had organised to come in three times a day would have to wash her by hand.
She’d shrunk in the five weeks since her stroke. It was as if she’d folded in on herself. She was sixty-one but looked twenty years older. There was a look of bewilderment in her eyes, a look that said she couldn’t quite understand how she, Shirley “Queen Bee” Barton, who played bridge four times a week and was chair of the local bowls club, had been reduced to a frail heap of bones and skin who spent her days staring aimlessly out of the window.
When my father’s compassionate leave from the Post Office ended, he took early retirement to look after her.
‘It’s what you do when you love someone,’ he said, when I questioned his decision. ‘You’ll find out for yourself one day.’
Little did he realise that I already knew all about love and the sacrifices it demanded. By then I hadn’t seen Juliet for eight weeks and three days. The day after her graduation, she and Danny had flown to Ibiza, where they’d found jobs in a bar, working all day and partying all night. She sent me the occasional postcard, announcing in her familiar scrawl they were having a blast and might never come home. She never once said she wished I was there.
The days bled into each other, each as tedious and oppressive as the last. I’d been intent on becoming a doctor for so long that everything I’d done had been geared towards getting the grades, then winning - and keeping - my place at med school. Nothing else had mattered. Now, for the first time in my life, I had no goal, no purpose. I felt cast adrift on a flat sea. Directionless. Aimless. Useless.
And then Danny fucked up a second time, and suddenly I had hope.
Chapter Twenty-Five
The moment I turned off my bedside light, my brain shifted gear into full-on paranoia. Downstairs, I had Eloise to distract me. Alone in my bedroom, I only had my thoughts to keep me company. Dark thoughts that crowded into my head one after the other, each more sinister than the last.
Faceless men with baseball bats; the pretty features of a pregnant woman smashed to a pulp; the grip of a claw-like hand on my arm, pulling me into a sinkhole whose depths I could only imagine. But one image kept forcing its way back into my brain, no matter how hard I tried to push it away: Theo’s lifeless body growing cold in the stale, dusty air of the pillbox.
I’d dropped off his food just before dusk. Telling Eloise I was popping out to feed Mary’s fish, I’d hurried through the woods, poked the bag of food through one of the window slits, and retraced my steps without even looking in on him. I knew I was burying my head in the sand, but I couldn’t deal with him alongside everything else. I just wanted to forget about him.
But of course I couldn’t, and so for the second night running, sleep was impossible.
My limbs were heavy, yet my heart raced, the stress hormones cortisol and adrenalin surging through my bloodstream like an incoming tide. I tried counting backwards from a thousand but gave up at nine hundred and twenty-eight. I pictured sheep jumping over a stone wall, but that didn’t work, either. I turned on the radio by my bedside, but even the soporific murmur of Today in Parliament failed to work its magic.
After a couple of hours staring, puffy-eyed, into the darkness, I swung my legs out of bed and went downstairs in search of a glass of water. As I felt my way along the hallway and into the kitchen, my foot came into contact with something warm and furry. Stifling a scream, I patted the wall, feeling for the light switch.
Dinah lay catatonic on the floor by my feet.
‘Dear God, you scared the living daylights out of me,’ I said, crouching down. She raised her head half-heartedly, then let it sink back onto her paws.
She offered no resistance as I scooped her into my arms and carried her into the kitchen, flicking on the light as I went. When she hadn’t appeared for her tea, I’d assumed she was out hunting. It wasn’t unheard of for her to disappear for a day or two, then turn up on the doorstep demanding attention as if she’d never been away. But she’d been listless that morning, I remembered. Hardly moving from the bottom stair. I glanced at her bowl. Her tea was untouched.
‘We’d better get you to the vet’s in the morning, old girl,’ I said, stroking her under the chin. She began purring and, reassured, I deposited her gently into her bed by the radiator, ran myself a glass of water and went back up to bed.
This time, when I turned off the light and pulled the duvet under my chin, I didn’t chase sleep. Instead, I tried to remember the visualisation technique a therapist had taught me when I was plagued with insomnia after my father died.
‘Imagine there’s a desk in front of you with lots of folders spread all over it,’ said the therapist, a wide-hipped woman with a penchant for shapeless cardigans and a soft Aberdeen accent. ‘Can you picture it?’
I nodded. ‘Black lever arch files on a walnut desk with a green leather top.’
‘Excellent,’ she said. ‘Keep that image in your head. Now imagine every file has something that is making you anxious written on its spine. An argument with a loved one that’s preying on your mind. A time when you felt you let someone down. The grief you carry after the death of your father. Money worries. Fear of failure. Anything that makes you anxious, no matter how trivial it might seem, gets its own file.’
I closed my eyes and did as I was told, not because I was convinced it would work, but because I wanted to squeeze every penny out of the eye-wateringly expensive counselling session. I pictured the desk - my father’s desk - in a book-lined room with sunlight streaming through the window. I sprinkled in some dust motes for good measure. A cliché, but why not? On the desk was an untidy pile of lever arch files. I peered at the spine of the first. Grief, it stated in uncompromisingly thick black marker pen. All at once, a feeling of desolation swept over me, squeezing my heart until it threatened to burst. I took two deep breaths and looked at the next file. Medicine. Regret replaced the grief. Regret that I’d walked away from my degree, abandoned my dreams of becoming a doctor, choosing instead a stultifying, colourless life in which I was trapped in my childhood home like a prisoner in jail, but with no time out for good behaviour.
I moved around the desk to look at the next file. Juliet. More regret plus a stomach-churning embarrassment when I recalled the revulsion on her face when I kissed her the night of the Snow Ball. How naïve I’d been. I should have realised she would never love me the way I loved her.
‘How are you getting on with those files?’ the therapist said, startling me. I’d forgotten she was there.
‘Just a couple more,’ I said, picking up the next file in my mind’s eye and lifting it to examine the spine. Smokey. No guilt or regret this time, just a low-level anxiety that at nineteen he didn’t have long for this world, and when he died, I would well and truly be on my own.
And finally, the one file I didn’t want to look at. But I took a deep breath and picked it up anyway, because I was paying seventy quid an hour to see this therapist and I wanted my money’s worth.
I stared at the spine. Danny. The sight of his name still made me tremble, with anger or guilt I couldn’t be sure. I replaced the file carefully on the desk and put him out of my mind.
‘When you’re struggling to sleep, I want you to picture the desk and all the files,’ the therapist said. ‘I want you to pick each file up, one at a time, acknowledge how important it is, and file it away for the night in a cabinet beside you.’
I pictured a pewter-grey filing cabinet, pulled open the top drawer and pushed the rack of dividers to the back.
‘Upright or in a pile?’ I asked.
‘It doesn’t really matter, Rose,’ the therapist said. ‘As you file away all the things that are on your mind, you are telling your brain that nothing is wrong, and you are giving yourself permission to relax and go to sleep.’
To say I was sceptical was the understatement of the year, but I was on my knees with exhaustion, so that night, feeling a little silly, I visualised the files strewn across my father’s desk. One by one I picked them up and placed them in the filing cabinet, and before I knew it, my alarm was waking me at eight the next morning after the best night’s sleep I’d had for months.
Now, with Dinah curled up in her bed downstairs and Eloise asleep across the landing, I conjured up my father’s leather-topped desk and the heap of lever arch files. Curious to see what concerns they contained fourteen years on, I sifted through them. Medicine was still there, and so was Grief. I placed both files in the filing cabinet and picked up a third from the table.
Menopause. Fair enough. Because what woman over fifty didn’t obsess about the hot flushes and night sweats, the palpitations and spikes in anxiety caused by their plummeting oestrogen levels? Into the filing cabinet it went.
I wasn’t surprised to see a file each for Eloise and Theo. There was a fragility to my goddaughter that made me worry about her future happiness. And as for her psycho boyfriend, well, I felt little remorse for what I was doing, just unease that I might be found out.
I was clasping Theo’s file to my chest and attempting to push the image of his huddled body to the back of my mind when the therapist’s words came back to me as clearly as if she was sitting at the end of my bed. Acknowledge how important it is and file it away. I placed both files in the cabinet.
That left one file. I didn’t need to pick it up to know what was in it. Because fourteen years may have passed since my sessions with the softly spoken therapist from Aberdeen, but there wasn’t a day went by when Danny didn’t dominate my thoughts and invade my dreams.
Chapter Twenty-Six
OCTOBER 1991
* * *
The trees that guarded our house were turning russet when Juliet and Danny flew home from Ibiza to start the next chapter of their lives. The country was in deep recession, yet they’d fallen on their feet. A friend of Juliet’s dad had offered her a position as a gallery assistant at the Victoria and Albert Museum, and Danny had talked himself into a job in the gym of a Kensington health club.
I tried to sound pleased when Juliet rang to tell me they’d decided to flatshare with John and had found the “perfect, dreamy little maisonette” in Pimlico. ‘Short commutes for us all. Honestly, Rose, I’m so excited.’
‘Sounds ideal,’ I said, waiting for her to ask how I was, but she was too full of her plans for the flat. I let her ramble on, hoping some of her joy would rub off on me.
‘Oh, I nearly forgot! You’re not doing anything a week Friday, are you? We’re having a flat-warming.’
I swallowed the snort of bitter laughter that threatened to reveal me and instead said casually, ‘A week Friday? Um, no, I don’t think so.’
‘Cool.’ She rattled off her new address. ‘We’ll see you about seven, yeah?’
And just like that, I had something to look forward to. I borrowed my father’s Land Rover, drove into Canterbury, and spent the last of my grant on a haircut at the trendiest salon I could find. I ordered half a dozen new outfits from my mother’s Kays catalogue and went on a strict thousand calories a day diet so I could fit into them.
The day of the party, my father dropped me at the station just after lunch. As the train pulled into the platform, I gazed at my reflection in the window. My hair framed my face pleasingly, and my white long-sleeved T-shirt, beige jacket and bleached jeans screamed smart-casual, which was the very look I was aiming for. My overnight bag felt as light as a feather as I slid it into the overhead luggage rack before settling into a window seat.
My confidence was given a further boost when a lad about my age boarded the train at Chatham and spent the rest of the journey chatting me up. As we approached Victoria, he asked if I fancied joining him for a drink.
‘That would be lovely, but I’m going to a friend’s flat-warming in Pimlico,’ I informed him. I liked the way I sounded. Sophisticated, hip. Urbane. ‘Maybe another time.’
He scribbled his number on the corner of an abandoned Evening Standard, tore it off, pressed it into my hand, and disappeared through the throng of people on the platform. I scrunched the paper into a ball and dropped it in the nearest bin, then headed for the underground. One stop later, I emerged at Pimlico. From there it was a short walk to the stucco-fronted, four-storey building in Claverton Street that Juliet, Danny and John now called home. Juliet had told me their maisonette was on the top two floors. I stared up at the windows looking for signs of life, then ran my hands through my hair and pressed the buzzer.
‘Yes?’ said a familiar voice through the intercom.
‘John, it’s me, Rose,’ I said.
‘Rose!’ he said, with such warmth in his voice that I forgot about my nerves. ‘Come on up.’
The door clicked. Pushing it open, I stood in the narrow hallway for a moment, taking in the scuffed terracotta tiled floor, the high ceilings and the dusty chandelier. The place would have been grand once. Now it was a little shabby around the edges, but I liked it all the more for it. I wondered what it would be like to work in London and to live at the top of this down-at-heel yet genteel building. I pictured myself arriving home from my stressful but rewarding job, a tissue-wrapped bottle of wine in one hand, my briefcase in the other. I imagined climbing the stairs to a flat filled with voices and laughter. The clink of glasses. Dissecting my day over a Rioja or three with my flatmates. Easy banter between old friends. Being independent. Confident. Capable. Responsible for no one but myself.
But the vision blurred, then vanished before I could lock onto it, because it was nothing more than a chimera, so far removed from my day-to-day life that it could never be. Reality for me was a suffocating existence in a damp, dingy cottage in the middle of the woods with my aged parents for company. Financial dependence. No job. No future. Nothing.
‘There you are!’ John cried, bounding down the stairs and jerking me from my self-pity fest. He held out his arms and I let him hug me. He drew back and regarded me, his hands still clasping my shoulders, then gave an appreciative nod. ‘Nice hair,’ he said. ‘Suits you. In fact, you look amazing. Very chic.’
I could have kissed him, but instead I let him take my case and I followed him up the stairs to the flat he shared with the person I loved most in the world, and the person I most despised.
‘Jules and Danny are on a booze run. They won’t be long,’ John said as he pushed open the door to the flat.
‘I’m a bit early,’ I admitted. ‘But I thought I could help with nibbles and things.’
‘No nibbles tonight. It’s strictly alcohol only.’
I plonked my handbag on the kitchen counter next to a couple of packets of plastic glasses and some cocktail umbrellas. ‘Are many coming?’
‘About thirty if everyone shows. A few nerds and some traders from my place, some of Danny’s workmates and clients at the gym, and some people from Juliet’s new work. She said something about her old school crowd dropping in later, too.’
I groaned inwardly. I’d met a few of Juliet’s school friends while we were at uni. They all had swishy hair, white teeth, braying voices and a propensity to look right through me as if I was invisible.
‘I assume the bag means you’re staying the night?’ John asked.
For a mo
ment, I was filled with doubt. Juliet hadn’t actually offered to put me up, but surely she wasn’t expecting me to catch the last train home on my own? It would be full of sleazebags and drunks. I told myself not to be so stupid. This was Juliet we were talking about. My best friend. Of course she wasn’t.
‘Yes, I’m staying,’ I said. ‘She mentioned something about a box room?’
‘It’s full of Danny’s crap, but I’m sure we can squeeze you in.’
John led me up a second flight of stairs. ‘My room’s on the right and yours is here,’ he said, opening a door to his left. ‘It’s supposed to be Danny’s, but he shares Juliet’s, obviously.’
‘Obviously,’ I said, gritting my teeth.
Danny’s room was kitted out as a home gym, with a rowing machine, workout bench, freestanding punch bag and an array of barbells and dumbbells. A sink was tucked behind the door and the single bed was almost hidden under a pile of sports clothes and kit bags, a couple of pairs of boxing gloves and a stack of bodybuilding magazines. I shuffled around the clutter on the floor to the sash window. It looked out over a vast red-bricked block of flats.
‘That’s Dolphin Square,’ John said, joining me. ‘It’s art deco. Quite famous. Here’s an interesting fact: Oswald Mosley and Christine Keeler both lived there.’
‘Not at the same time, I hope,’ I said, tugging the window open to rid the room of the sour smell of Danny’s stale sweat.
‘Fortunately not. Look, I need to pop out for half an hour. Will you be all right on your own?’
‘Of course.’
‘The bathroom’s next to Juliet and Danny’s room if you want to freshen up. Won’t be long.’
I waited until I heard the door to the flat close, then opened my case and took out the black velvet dress I’d ordered from Kays for tonight’s party. I’d chosen it partly because the model wearing it had the same shade of red hair as me and partly because even I knew every girl needed a little black dress. I hung it on the back of the door and went to explore the rest of the flat.
