Look Behind You

by Sibel Hodge

  ‘Commit suicide?’ My mouth flaps open and closed like a fish. ‘Is that what the police told you, too, that I tried to commit suicide?’

  She shifts in her chair, looking uncomfortable. ‘They didn’t mention suicide, they just mentioned the reaction you’d had to some sleeping tablets, and that you couldn’t remember what happened. They told me you were found wandering along a road in the middle of the woods and asked if I could shed any light on anything.’

  ‘Right. And what did you think when you heard that?’ I rub at a tic under my right eye that’s jumping and twitching in my line of vision.

  ‘That we should of course send some flowers to cheer you up.’ She gives me a beatific smile.

  ‘You didn’t think it all sounded odd?’ I say, aware my voice is sounding harsh.

  ‘Not after talking with Liam, no. He explained everything. He’s such a compassionate and caring man. You’re very lucky to have him.’ She smiles. ‘I was going to wait until you felt stronger to talk with you about your position at the college, but now you’re here, it may be a good time.’

  ‘My position? What do you mean?’ I clasp and unclasp my hands repeatedly, unable to keep them still in my lap.

  ‘If you’re having difficulties like this, I’m afraid it’s not very healthy for the students. We have a good reputation here, and we’re up for the Standon Award for County Sixth Form College of the Year. We can’t afford to jeopardize our chances by having tutors who are unstable or suffering from mental illness. Imagine the uproar if the parents found out! I discussed this at length with Liam the other day, and we both think it’s in your best interests if you resign. It’s the most sensible course of action all round.’

  I clench my fists so tight my fingernails dig into my palms. ‘Why should I resign?’

  She reaches a hand across the desk and clasps my wrist. ‘So you can spend more time at home getting well, of course. This is for your benefit, you know. You’ve had a terribly difficult time with the miscarriage and depression. Everyone is thinking of your welfare—the doctors, the police, Liam, me. Once you get better, then we can talk again.’

  Best course of action for them, maybe. Not for me. I want to howl at her, scream and shout at the top of my lungs, but that would just prove how unstable and unfit I was. So I bite back the anger igniting inside. ‘Aren’t I entitled to sick leave?’

  ‘Yes, of course, but I don’t feel that extended sick leave is an option here.’ She pats my hand as if to reassure me it’s all for the best then sits back in her chair. ‘You must see it from my point of view. Our tutors have to set a good example to the students.’

  ‘I didn’t try to kill myself, Theresa,’ I say with as much conviction as I can. I feel like I’ve become invisible. I’m talking, but no one is actually listening to what I’m saying. ‘Liam is wrong, the police are wrong, and so are you.’ I stand up, unable to contain my anger any longer. If I stay here, I’ll probably say or do something I’ll regret. ‘What if I don’t resign?’ I lift my chin in the air and meet her unsympathetic gaze.

  ‘Then I’m afraid we’ll have to take other action.’

  ‘Meaning?’

  ‘Meaning we’ll terminate your employment on medical grounds.’

  ‘You can’t do that. You can’t just sack someone for being off sick. It’s discrimination. I’ll take it to an Industrial Tribunal if I have to. This job is all I have left.’

  ‘Do you really want to go down that route in such a fragile state? Trust me; this is the best solution for everyone.’ She picks up a stack of papers from her in tray and shuffles them in front of her, signalling the meeting is over.

  I storm out of her office without looking back, cheeks burning with anger. Fucking Liam, going behind my back and making out I’ve tried to kill myself! I want to kill him. Stab him through the heart, or set the house on fire with him in it, or…I don’t know, something. Something painful. The amount of times he’s tried to get me to give up working so he can keep me to himself, and now he’s finally got what he wanted.

  ‘I’ve worked hard to give you everything you need. Is it too much to ask you to look after me for a change?’ is a favourite saying of his. Yes, this is the perfect solution for Liam.

  I’m practically running down the front steps of the college when I hear someone calling my name behind me.

  ‘Chloe?’

  I swing around, and there’s Jordan, hurrying in my direction. He’s taller than Liam is and leaner. But where Liam is blond and blue-eyed, Jordan is dark. His thick hair is cut short and shimmers in the sunlight. His eyes are an unusual hazel colour, like autumn leaves, and seem to change depending on his mood—sometimes green, sometimes golden or brown. He prefers casual clothes. Jeans, T-shirts, sweatshirts. I don’t think I’ve ever seen him in a suit.

  He’s looking at me with such intense concern I feel a shift inside, like my heart is clenching.

  ‘It is you. I wasn’t sure at first. Shit, I’ve been so worried. How are you?’ Lines crinkle his forehead as he studies every part of my face.

  ‘I’ve been better.’ I try to laugh nonchalantly, but it comes out sounding more like a strangled cat.

  ‘What’s going on?’ He reaches out and gently touches one of the scratches on my forehead with his thumb. ‘How did you get those? Was it Liam? Did he hit you or something?’ His eyes narrow. ‘Are you OK?’

  I don’t really know where to start. The rational part of me thinks if I pour everything out to him, he’ll believe I’m as nuts as everyone else does. But being here, with him so close, all the fear crumbles away. I feel my shoulders relaxing. Find it easier to breath without the constant pain knotted in my stomach.

  He puts a hand on my shoulder. ‘Are you in trouble? Tell me what’s going on.’

  My eyes water, and I blink back the tears. ‘Can we go somewhere and talk, or do you have a lesson?’

  Jordan teaches A Level Maths, and it’s not surprising the sixteen-to-eighteen-year-old female students swoon after him.

  He doesn’t hesitate. ‘Yes. Yes, of course. I’ve got a class in an hour and a half. I was just going to mark some papers, but that can wait. Do you want to go to the canteen or somewhere off campus?’

  ‘Definitely off campus.’

  ‘Let’s go to Kelly’s Bistro.’ He turns on his heels, and I swing into step beside him.

  It takes us ten minutes to walk to the café, and from the corner of my eye, I catch him shooting worried glances at me, but he doesn’t ask what’s wrong.

  ‘You’ve cut your hair. It makes you look really different,’ he breaks the silence.

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘I’ll tell you about it when we get to the café.’

  ‘OK. It really suits you.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Not that it didn’t suit you before, of course.’ He smiles, and despite everything, I find myself smiling back at him.

  He buys me a cappuccino, and we sit in the corner of a little courtyard garden at the rear, away from the two other occupied tables. He waits patiently for me to talk, sipping his coffee slowly, watching me awkwardly over the cup.

  ‘Oh, God, this is just so awful I don’t know where to start.’ I bury my head in my hands and want to leave it there forever.

  His chair scrapes against the tiled floor as he drags it closer, so close his arm brushes against mine. ‘Whatever’s happened, you can tell me.’

  I drop my hands, and they fall uselessly into my lap. ‘What do you know about me being off sick?’

  ‘Well, I know you were signed off with depression after your miscarriage.’

  I think about my baby then, and a fresh wave of grief almost crushes me. Tears sting my eyes, and I blink rapidly to clear them. I’m sick of crying. Sick of my life. Sick of being Chloe Benson.

  ‘And you had some kind of bad reaction to the antidepressants you were prescribed and ended up in hospital having treatment. When you came out, you were recuperating.’

/>   I nod wearily.

  ‘I called you,’ he carries on.

  ‘You did? When?’ I lean forward, ears pricked.

  ‘About ten days ago now, but you made it pretty clear you didn’t want me to get involved.’ He reaches across the table, about to touch my hand, then he seems to think better of it and lets it fall back onto his thigh. ‘I’ve been so worried about you.’

  I open my mouth to start. Close it again. Then I just decide to go for it. ‘Involved in what? You see the thing is, I’ve lost part of my memory, and I don’t remember what’s happened.’ I blurt it out before I can change my mind.

  ‘What?’

  I tell him the whole story, from what I remember about waking up in that underground place, to escaping and being discovered on the road in the middle of nowhere. Then I tell him what I’ve found out so far, about Liam having an affair, my missing clothes, the letter I wrote ending our relationship, my mobile phone smashed and left in the bin, Liam’s lies.

  He sits back in his chair, eyes wide. ‘Shit. That’s… bloody awful,’ he says so loudly an elderly man in the corner reading the paper looks over. He does take hold of my hand then. His touch is soft and subtle, and his skin is so warm against mine I feel a kind of strength seeping into me. ‘What are the police saying? Do they have any idea who could’ve abducted you?’ he says more quietly, and the man watching goes back to his paper.

  I shrug. ‘That’s just it. They don’t believe me, either.’

  ‘Surely they don’t think you’ve made up something like that? How could they?’ he asks incredulously.

  ‘They all think I’ve had some sort of new psychotic reaction to a few sleeping pills that were in my system when they found me, and I hallucinated the whole thing. It’s what the doctors think, too. Most of them think I was still so depressed I apparently tried to kill myself.’

  He shakes his head, too shocked to speak, so I fill the silence.

  ‘But I didn’t. I wouldn’t try to kill myself; it would just feel like giving up.’ I think about Mum then. Is that what she did? Just gave up on me, on herself? Or was her overdose really an accident? ‘And I wouldn’t take any sleeping tablets. I tried them once, and they made me feel so awful I’ve never taken once since. Plus, the hospital told me not to take any more medication after what happened with the Zolafaxine. And I know it all sounds so weird and very similar to everything before, when I ended up sectioned, but I know what happened. I remember vividly being in that place underground. It couldn’t have been a paranoid hallucination. It was real.’ I shudder. ‘Very real and very scary.’

  Looking aghast, he squeezes my hand. ‘I can’t believe the police aren’t doing anything. The person who took you is still out there somewhere, and you could be in real danger.’

  ‘I’m scared.’ My voice is so strange it doesn’t sound like it belongs to me.

  ‘I’m not surprised. What can I do to help?’

  ‘I’m trying to piece together exactly what happened and how I ended up somewhere in the middle of those woods. I asked Theresa if she knew anything that might help, but she didn’t. In fact, she’s told me I have to resign.’

  ‘What? Why would she do that?’

  ‘Because she believes what Liam has told her. That I tried to kill myself because I was depressed, and now I’m apparently mentally unstable and not fit to be around the students.’

  ‘She can’t make you resign. It’s discrimination.’

  ‘No, maybe not, but she can make things very difficult for me. Anyway, I suppose that’s the least of my problems at the moment. The most important thing is trying to stay alive.’ I grip his hand tight and it feels like a lifeline. ‘Maybe you might know something since you phoned me shortly before I went missing. What did I say? What kind of state was I in?’

  He removes his hand and runs both of them over his now pale face. ‘God, I can’t believe this.’ He rests his jaw in his hand as he studies me for a moment. It looks like he’s hoping I’m going to say this is all just one big joke. Ha ha, Jordan, not really, only kidding! When I don’t say a word, he shakes his head again slowly. ‘You told me Liam was having an affair with his boss. You said you’d found out about him lying to you when he stayed in that hotel instead of going to Scotland, and about the locket he’d bought for Julianne. You said that was the last straw. You were going to leave him.’ He bites his bottom lip, as if weighing up exactly what to say. ‘Look, I know you’ve never told me exactly what he’s done to you in the past, but I could guess there was something going on. I never saw any bruises on you, but…’ He trails off and glances at the ground, his dark lashes casting shadows over his tanned skin. ‘When you first started working here, you seemed so bubbly and lively. Then when you met Liam, something changed gradually, like a switch had been flipped off inside you. You made excuses not to go to work parties. If you were going to be late home because of a staff meeting, you panicked about the time. Your phone was going off all the time in the staff room when we had our breaks. Just little things like that made me wonder.

  ‘I knew Liam didn’t deserve you, but that’s something you had to work out on your own.’ He gives me an uncertain smile. ‘And it seemed like you finally had. When I spoke to you, you were going to call your friend Sara about moving into her place while she was away. You said you were going to leave while Liam was in Scotland to avoid any problems.’

  I stare at the sky and think about all the little things that add up, and before you know it, you’re stuck. Trapped. Your confidence and self-esteem have withered away, but the very person you want to get away from is the one you rely on most. And you don’t know when it happened. Can’t pinpoint an exact day, week, or month, because it’s a gradual, subtle process. It creeps up on you slowly. So slowly that you don’t realize you’re bending, breaking, and becoming a different person. A woman who’s not happy, not living her own life, but the life her husband wants instead.

  Sara once asked me why I stayed with him, and I didn’t know how to answer. Maybe it was because I loved him, even if things weren’t perfect. I tried to be what he wanted me to be, and the urge to please was like a cancerous disease ingrained deep in my soul. He wasn’t all bad, either. We had plenty of times in between when he was loving and caring. When we’d take long walks around the lakes, hand in hand, have romantic dinners out, or snuggle up in front of the TV with a film, share a bottle of wine in a candle-lit bath. Those moments made me think he’d change back to how he was in the beginning. And I thought it was my fault. I rubbed him up the wrong way. He was too stressed with work. I wasn’t trying hard enough.

  Why does anyone stay in a relationship that deep down they know isn’t right? You don’t know why until it happens to you. It’s easy to fool yourself. To stuff things under the surface where they can’t hurt you. To persuade yourself it’s all just normal. Make excuses.

  There’s a fine line between craziness and love.

  If he’d been violent, maybe I would’ve left the first time he hit me. But he wasn’t. Unlike bruises and broken bones, it was something invisible. And Liam always filled the calm after the storm with flowers and sweet attentiveness. If he was happy, he rewarded me with love and affection, until the bad days eventually outweighed the good.

  No, I couldn’t really put a name to what he was. How do you sum it up in just one word? As I say, it’s just the little things. And a lot of pressure and time to get to the point where you finally blow.

  In the beginning, I used to complain to Sara about what Liam would do, but eventually I stopped telling her stuff, which made me even lonelier. There was no point in moaning. She couldn’t change things, only I could, and I was obviously too weak to try. So I hid it from her. From everyone, or so I thought. Because I’d always seen myself as failure and didn’t want everyone to know I was failing at my marriage, too.

  In the end, though, it looked like I’d finally stood up for myself. But then what had happened? Did I make it to Sara’s? Did I actually leave Liam? Did he find
me, or was it someone else?

  ‘It happened with my mum and dad,’ Jordan carries on. ‘My dad was an alcoholic. He was a mean bastard. He never hit her, but who needs fists when words can slice through you like a scalpel? Physical wounds can heal, can’t they? But it takes a long time to recover from having your self-confidence and self-esteem crushed to nothing. I watched him smother the life right out of her day by day.’

  ‘I’m sorry.’ I touch his arm gently. ‘What happened to her?’

  ‘She left him in the end. She took my sister and me and ran away one day when he was passed out drunk. She worked three jobs to support us. Eventually, she got strong again. And there was never another argument in the house. We didn’t have to walk round on eggshells all the time. There was no more trying to anticipate his moods that controlled the whole family. I think my childhood really began the day we moved out.’

  ‘She sounds brave.’

  ‘She is. It’s just such a shame it took her so long to realize it.’ He looks straight into my eyes, and I get the feeling he’s not just talking about his mum.

  I glance away for a moment. ‘So what else did I say? When you phoned me?’

  ‘I wanted to help you to move some of your stuff to Sara’s, since you don’t drive and I have lots of room in the campervan, but you said you wanted to do it on your own. You said you didn’t need me pressuring you, and not to call because you had to get your head sorted out.’ He looks at me, a wistful expression on his face.

  ‘Did you pressure me?’

  ‘No, of course not.’ His gaze flits away for a second before settling back on my face. ‘But I told you how I felt about you. I couldn’t keep it a secret any more. When you first started working here, I thought something might happen between us.’ He shakes his head. ‘No, that’s not quite right. I wanted something to happen. But I was seeing Holly, even though I knew I could never see myself settling down with her, and then by the time I ended things with her and plucked up the courage to ask you out, you’d met Liam.’