by Tammy Cohen
FIRE THAT KILLED LOCAL MAN STARTED FROM LIT CIGARETTE
I am in the clear.
Twenty hours on, and my hands have almost stopped shaking.
Still holding my phone, I flick through all the cameras, half expecting to see police coming through the front door and up the stairs, but there is nothing. You are all in the kitchen. You are taking the kids to your parents later, and Amy and Ben are already arguing about who will have the front seat in the car. You are pale and there are dark rings around your eyes. But you tell them to shush and make themselves sandwiches, as if this is a normal day.
I could cry from relief.
I hadn’t planned to kill him. It was a split-second thing. When I crept in through the unlocked back door, I was only going to scare him. But then I saw he’d fallen asleep in the chair in the living room. With a half-empty bottle of whisky in front of him. I remembered what he was doing the night before with you to make him so tired, and a red mist came down.
There was only one smoke alarm downstairs, in the kitchen, so I took the battery out of that and left it hanging open, as if someone had meant to replace it but not got around to it. Then I went around making sure all the doors were closed. I set fire to the living room curtains first. Then the Sunday paper, with all the different sections. I arranged most of them on the floor around the legs of the chair he was sitting in. I lit a cigarette from the packet on the coffee table and laid it carefully on the newspaper directly underneath his hand, which was hanging down over the arm of the chair.
Then, I crept back through the kitchen. The blaze was crackling around me and the smoke was already making it hard to see two feet in front of me. I took the key from the inside of the back door and stepped out into the garden. I didn’t know air could taste so good. I closed the door behind me and locked it with the key before pushing the key back under the door.
The back door was the most obvious escape route from the living room, and I was sure he would try to get out that way. He wouldn’t see the key because of the smoke. And with any luck, the police would think he had knocked the key to the floor in his panic to get away.
After I ran off, I stood at the corner of the road and watched as the first licks of black smoke came snaking out of the building. My heart was still pounding, my thoughts racing. Only when the front door opened and a woman came out with her hand to her mouth, did I stop to think about the people in the other flats.
I didn’t want anything bad to happen to them.
I’m not a monster.
As luck would have it, the only person who got hurt was him. Really, things couldn’t have worked out any better.
I spent the night pacing the streets, my nerves jangling. Every time I heard a car behind me, I thought it was the police coming to arrest me.
It was six o’clock in the morning before I snuck back home while you were all asleep. It is the first day of the Easter holidays. I knew no one would be up early. No one heard me hook the ladder down and climb back up to the loft.
Through the kitchen camera, I watch you talking to the kids. You are telling them that you can’t set off to Cornwall until later, as there is a problem with the electrical wiring in the house. You say you don’t want to leave it as it is while you are away, in case of fire. Something flickers in your pale face when you say the word fire. Then it is gone.
You have called Mel’s brother, Gaz, in to do the wiring, and that makes me grit my teeth until they hurt. Gaz calls himself a handyman, but he is useless. Why didn’t you ask me to do it? I always did everything around the house.
I have calmed down a little by the time Gaz arrives. Now Croissant Man is out of the way, it is only a matter of time before you come running back to me. And once I am back home, there will be no more calls to Gaz.
Also, I am looking forward to having the house to myself while you are all in Cornwall. Sleeping in my own bed. Taking a bath.
When Gaz switches off the electrics, the cameras stop working, so I put down my phone and think about us. We have been through the worst. From now on, everything will be better. This has been a test of our marriage, a test of me. And I have proved myself. There is nothing I will not do for you. For us.
Till death do us part.
Chapter Nineteen
KATE: Monday afternoon,
twenty-two days after the split
Gaz is starting to pack up his tools when Kate says, ‘Oh, there is one more thing, Gaz.’
She leads him up to the landing, where they look up at the hatch to the loft.
‘Are you sure?’ he says, when she explains what she wants. He looks doubtful. ‘All that useful space?’
‘I don’t use it,’ says Kate. ‘And there’s always a draught coming from there. And now the squirrels with their endless scratching. It gives me the creeps.’
So Gaz gets started. And when he finishes, the ceiling is plastered over so smoothly you can’t see there was ever a hatch there.
An hour later, Kate packs up the car with her still arguing children and their bags and the cat box containing a furious Sid. She double-locks the door behind her.
After the pure grief of yesterday and last night, she feels strangely calm. Numb. As if she has felt so much, so strongly, she has now run out of feelings.
As she watches the house grow smaller in the rear-view mirror, she wonders vaguely how long it will take Jack to realize the plastic water bottles in the corner of the loft are all empty. And the boxes of crisps and biscuits, too. And that the hatch opening has been sealed shut.
She thinks of the smooth white walls that slope right down to the floor. The ceiling that is too low to stand up straight.
It is a bit like a tomb, up there in the loft.
By the time she turns the corner, the kids have stopped arguing and the house is no longer in view.
Kate wipes her mind clear, as if she is cleaning a whiteboard.
Then she turns the radio on and settles back into her seat.
She has a long trip ahead.
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Keep reading for an extract from
They All Fall Down
1
Hannah
Charlie cut her wrists last week with a shard of caramelized sugar.
We’d made the sugar sheets together in the clinic’s kitchen earlier in the day, under Joni’s beady-eyed supervision.
‘Yours are thick enough to do yourself an injury,’ I’d said to Charlie, as a joke.
‘I wonder if that’s what gave her the idea,’ Odelle commented afterwards, pointedly.
After Charlie died, Bake Off went on the banned-programmes list.
I don’t feel guilty, though, because I don’t think Charlie killed herself. Just as I don’t think poor Sofia killed herself. In a high-suicide-risk psych clinic like this, people die all the time. It’s one of the clinic’s USPs. That’s what makes it so easy for a killer to hide here, in plain sight. That and the fact that the only witnesses are us, and no one believes a word we say.
You don’t have to be mad to live here but … oh, hang on, yes, you do.
I’m frightened. I’m frightened that I’m right and I’ll be next. I’m even more frightened that I’m wrong, in which case I’m as crazy as they all think I am. Shut away in here, the only escape is in my own head. But what if my own head’s the most dangerous place to be?
Stella comes into my room and lies across the end of my bed without speaking. Her skin is stretched tight over the sharp points of her cheeks and I can’t look at it for fear it might tear.
‘It’s not true,’ I tell her.
My room is at the side of the building. I am sitting by the window in the beige armchair, looking out across the rose garden to where a half-hearted rain is drip, drip, dripping from the flat roof of the dance studio and running down the wall of folding glass doors. All the furniture in my room is a variation on beige. Ecru. Biscuit. Stone. The whole of the upstairs is the colo
ur of a surgical bandage. To avoid us getting over-stimulated, I imagine. Not much chance of that in here.
Stella turns her head so her wide blue eyes are fixed on mine. The necklace she always wears has fallen to the side so that the tiny silver cat seems to be nestling into the duvet.
‘How do you know?’ she says at last, in her soft, smoker’s voice.
I frown at her.
‘Come on,’ I say. ‘It’s Charlie.’
‘Was,’ she says. And starts to cry.
The Meadows is an old Georgian-style country house, complete with ivy growing across the front and elegant floor-to-ceiling sash windows. From the semicircular gravel drive at the front you might imagine yourself on the set of a Jane Austen adaptation where at any moment the grand front door will burst open to disgorge a gaggle of giggling young women in bonnets. But drive around to the car park behind the house and the impression is ruined by a large modern extension stuck on to the back, giving the overall effect of a stylish man with a bad toupee.
All the consulting rooms and the day room and admin and therapy rooms are in the old part, while the cafeteria and the bedrooms are in the new bit. Sofia told me once the old part was haunted, but I’ve never sensed anything weird. Mind you, I was so numb when I first arrived a ghost could have climbed right on to my lap and I wouldn’t have registered it. The thing about staying in a place like this, where we have group therapy twice a day and keep journals detailing our every thought, is that we’re so busy gazing inwards we’re blind to what’s going on all around us.
Which might explain how two women have been killed and nobody seems to have noticed but me.
The art therapy room is at the back of the old house with two huge windows giving out on to the car park and beyond to the flower garden and then the vegetable plot. The jewel in The Meadows’ crown – the manicured lawn leading down to a lake that is disproportionately large and deep, a legacy of an earlier, grander incarnation of the house – is hidden from view by the ugly jut of the new extension on the left.
It is ten o’clock on Wednesday morning and we are at art therapy. Laura gets out the poster paints and asks us to do a self-portrait. The last time we did this exercise she gave us mirrors made of plastic instead of glass, so our reflections were smudgy, like we were looking at ourselves through smoke. ‘Sorry,’ she said when we complained. ‘Regulations. You know how it is.’ But today is different.
‘I want you to paint yourselves the way you see yourselves when you close your eyes,’ she says. ‘Where are you? What are you doing? What are you wearing? Don’t overthink it. And don’t pay any heed to the camera. Just forget it’s there.’
The film crew – which most of the time consists only of director/presenter Justin Carter and his cameraman Drew Abbott – have been installed at the clinic for the last seven weeks, just one week less than me. I arrived on the third Monday in January, auspiciously known as Blue Monday, which is officially the most depressing day of the year, although, as you can imagine, competition for that title is fierce in here. Justin and Drew turned up the following week in an SUV loaded with equipment which they carted through from the rain-soaked car park, propping the door to reception open so an icy draught swept through the building and Bridget Ashworth, the clinic’s frowning admin manager, bustled about adjusting thermostats and ordering cleaning staff to mop up muddy footprints.
They’re calling it a fly-on-the-wall documentary. But Dr Roberts spun it differently: ‘An important film in breaking down the taboos surrounding mental illness,’ he said. ‘Of course, you are all perfectly entitled to opt out of the filming and at any stage you can be retrospectively edited out. But just think what your example could mean to a young woman going through what you’ve been through, feeling there’s nobody out there who could possibly understand.’
On the first day, Justin said, ‘Just imagine we’re not really here.’
‘That’s how most of us ended up in this place,’ Charlie told him. ‘For seeing things that aren’t there, or not seeing things that are there. You could seriously set back our recovery.’
Justin had smiled without committing himself to laughing, just in case it wasn’t appropriate, not understanding that appropriateness is something you leave at the door in here.
Today, in my painting, I am sitting in the low blue velvet chair in Emily’s room. Through the sash window behind me the sky is navy and I put in a perfectly round yellowy-white moon so it’s obvious it’s night-time. I am looking at something over to the right, out of sight. I’m wearing my pale blue dressing gown. My face is a pink blur, streaked with black because I didn’t wait long enough for the paint to dry before trying to do the eyes.
‘Nice dress,’ Laura says when she comes round to look. ‘Is that in your house? Your bedroom, maybe?’
I nod. I don’t want to tell her the truth because when I talk about Emily it gets noted down in a book and then I have to talk about it at Group. And then Dr Roberts will cock his head to one side and write something in his notebook and I might have to stay here longer. So I don’t tell her that the me in the picture is looking at the right-hand corner of Emily’s room, where her cot used to be.
Stella’s painting is all black, except for a tiny figure at the bottom, naked apart from her long, yellow hair, which reaches almost to the floor. Laura looks at it for a long time and then puts her hand on Stella’s narrow shoulder and squeezes before moving on to someone else.
Since Charlie died, all Stella’s paintings have been black.
As usual, Odelle has painted herself hugely fat. She’s wearing the same black top and skinny jeans the real Odelle has on today and is looking into a mirror in which a slimline version of herself is reflected back. Or maybe it’s the other way around and the slim Odelle is the real one and the fat one the reflection. Either way, it’s just another variation of Odelle’s sole enduring theme. Herself and her body.
‘It’s very … narrative, Odelle,’ says Laura. Odelle glances towards the camera at the back of the room, wanting to be sure they are capturing this. ‘But just once, I’d love to see you really let rip. This exercise is about here’ – Laura taps her chest lightly – ‘not about here,’ tapping her head.
The mild rebuke sets Odelle’s bottom lip trembling. Odelle tends to fixate on people. That’s one of the reasons she’s in here. That and the fact she weighs around eighty-five pounds. When Charlie first arrived, Odelle apparently fixated on her too for a short while, following her around, sitting too close to her at dinner and on the sofa in the lounge. But mostly it’s authority figures she goes for. Roberts is basically God as far as Odelle is concerned, and Laura comes a close second. Odelle’s always loitering in the art room after class, offering to help clear away or asking for extra, one-to-one help.
The Meadows believes in niche therapy. We have people who come in to cure us through horticulture, music, baking and movement. Last week, Grace, the aptly named movement therapist, had us fling ourselves around the dance studio pretending to be leaves blown about by the wind and Odelle actually cried. ‘I feel so insignificant,’ she said. Judith said the reason Odelle got upset was probably because she really did get blown about by the wind, on account of weighing so little.
Basically, nothing happens in here that can’t be turned into some kind of therapy. There’s even recreational therapy, which really means watching TV. Charlie and I had a running joke about that. Instead of asking if I was going to dinner, she’d say, ‘Are you coming to eating therapy?’ One time, when I was late down to breakfast, I said I’d been doing some ‘pooing therapy’ and we laughed for about ten minutes, until Odelle told us we were being childish and also ‘insensitive’ to all the people in here who ‘can’t find much to laugh about’.
But Laura is the therapist people get closest to. She used to be a nurse in her younger days, and she still emits that I-can-make-you-better aura. She has her own little office at the back of the art room, with a fan heater and a kettle and several different types of t
ea, and you can pop in there and curl up on the armchair and wrap yourself up in the soft woollen tartan throw for a chat without feeling like what you say will be noted down in your file somewhere. Laura can be a little bit new-agey. For those who are into that sort of thing, she offers informal meditation or relaxation therapy, which is basically hypnosis. Charlie used to love it in there. ‘It’s the only part of the clinic where I can be myself,’ she told me once. Odelle nips in there at any opportunity. She installs herself in the armchair, with the tartan blanket wrapped around all those other layers she habitually wears, and discusses her favourite subject. Namely, herself.
Laura spends a few moments murmuring something to Nina, who is slumped in front of a piece of paper which is blank apart from a faintly drawn oval. Last week in art she produced seven paintings in one class, her brush flying over the paper, colours bleeding into one another, but today she can hardly summon the energy to lift her stick of charcoal.
Frannie is crying again, tears tracking slowly down her cheeks, and she brushes them away as if she hardly notices them. Her painting has two figures in it, which, strictly speaking, is cheating, but no one is judging. Firstly, there’s a huge face with a long, fine nose and a small, full mouth and massive green eyes. The face is Frannie’s, and in one of the eyes is another face. It’s too small for the features to be identifiable but the black curls mark it out as Charlie.
‘Because she’s in your thoughts?’ asks Laura.
My chest feels tight when I look at the straight brown bob Frannie has given herself in her portrait, hanging just below her chin. The real Frannie is wearing a blue-and-white striped beanie hat, but underneath it her hair is sparse and thin with bald patches that break your heart, vulnerable as the soft part on a newborn baby’s head.
My baby was called Emily.
