What Goes Down: An emotional must-read of love, loss and second chances

by Natalie K. Martin

  ‘I didn’t mean you should go and kill yourself,’ Laurel replied, still unable to look into his eyes.

  ‘I thought it would be better for everyone if I did. I went there intending to jump, but I couldn’t do it.’ He sighed again, shaking his head. ‘The only reason I stayed on that bridge was Seph.’

  ‘Then why not just come back?’

  Finally, she let her eyes lock with his and a tear rolled down her cheek. It was the one question she both ached to know the answer to and was terrified of hearing.

  ‘Because you’d have left anyway. We were at the end of us. We were never meant to be a forever thing, you knew it and I knew it. It was only a matter of time. But I never meant to hurt you, or Seph. Really, I didn’t. Call it cowardice or whatever you want, but I just couldn’t face you again, not until I was better. It’s hard to explain what life’s like when you’re in a place like that, but I’m sorry.’

  Laurel looked down at the ground, hating herself for letting tears fall from her eyes. She’d be the first to admit to holding onto a mountain of anger and bitterness as far as Nico was concerned, but it wasn’t easy to let go of something that had defined her entire life, or the guilt that had shadowed her ever since for walking out on him and pushing him to contemplate suicide.

  ‘I made my parents give up contact with their first grandchild. I’ve had to explain to my ten-year-old daughter why she has a sister nobody’s ever mentioned before. I haven’t got out of this scot-free, Laurel. And I haven’t just decided to turn up and act like I care. I do care. But I’m telling you that Seph is sick. I don’t want her to go through what I went through, what we went through, when she doesn’t have to.’

  Pressure mounted in Laurel’s chest and she choked down a sob. She’d been so driven to do her very best by Seph, always trying to make up for Nico’s absence, even though Tony was around and did everything he could and more. She was a good mum, wasn’t she? She loved her daughter. She’d wrapped her up in cotton wool and cushioned it with hugs and love.

  But now she was faced with the possibility that it still hadn’t been enough to protect her.

  The sounds of the station amped up around her – the shoes clicking against the ground, the ticket barriers opening and closing, the hum of voices. None of them were as clear as the words Nico had just said.

  Seph is sick.

  Laurel looked up at him and blinked away the tears before swiping her palms across her cheeks. ‘I have to go.’

  ‘We need to talk about this, Laurel.’

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know. Just…not right now.’

  ‘This isn’t really something that can wait.’

  ‘Nico, please. Just…’ She shook her head. ‘I can’t just go round there and tell her she needs to see someone. And I need to speak to Tony, figure out what to do next.’

  Nico nodded. ‘Fair enough. But I can help, Laurel. I know it seems like a minefield, but I can help.’

  Laurel swallowed and nodded back. ‘I’ll call you.’

  *

  The next day, Laurel closed the front door with her foot.

  ‘Tony?’

  The house was silent in reply but his jacket was slung across the newel post at the bottom of the stairs and his Ford Focus was parked up outside. Unease began making an unwelcome home for itself in the pit of her stomach. Tony never came home early. She quickly made her way through to the kitchen, weighed down with shopping bags. She dropped the bags onto the countertops, looking through the back door into the garden. Her eyebrows pulled together as she saw him, wandering around the lawn as he spoke on the phone.

  She kept an eye on him as she unpacked the shopping. Maybe he’d come home early to talk about Seph. After telling him about the conversation she’d had with Nico yesterday, they’d agreed to talk over their options. Laurel had pulled as much information about bipolar as she could find in the library, and spoken to her GP. The upshot of it all was that Seph needed to see a doctor, to rule the disorder out if nothing else. The question was, how to bring it up with Seph.

  As Tony hung up, Laurel couldn’t help but notice the strange slump of his shoulders, as if he were gearing himself up to deliver bad news. She knew it because she’d seen it before. It had been him who’d got to the phone first the night George had called to tell them their dad had died of a heart attack just a month after their mum had passed away. Her heart leapt to her throat when he turned to come back inside and she quickly opened a cupboard to put a packet of rice away.

  ‘Hi,’ Tony said behind her.

  Before she had time to try and analyse his voice, his hands were on her shoulders, soft and tender. He planted a kiss on the skin by the collar of her shirt and she sent a prayer of thanks up to the heavens. His greeting was a normal one and she’d obviously read too much into things.

  ‘Hi,’ she replied, letting her body relax as she turned to him. ‘You’re home early. You had me worried for a second there when I saw your car parked up outside.’

  But when she looked up she realised she’d been a little too quick to reassure herself. There was a barely perceptible pull between his eyebrows and a hint of trepidation in his eyes. After twenty-five years together, she could read him like an open book.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I’ve been trying to reach you.’

  ‘I know, I forgot my phone this morning and then I went shopping straight after work,’ Laurel kept her eyes trained on his. ‘Why?’

  ‘When did you last speak to Seph?’

  ‘Last night. I called and she texted back that she’d call later this evening.’ Laurel instinctively backed into the counter behind her and curled her fingers around its edge. ‘Why?’

  Tony looked away for a millisecond. ‘Ben called me at work today. She hasn’t been returning any of his calls.’

  ‘Well they live together, so-’

  ‘He moved out,’ Tony replied softly.

  She shook her head a fraction. ‘What? Since when?’

  ‘A couple of days ago. It’s probably nothing to worry about but -’

  Laurel pushed herself away from the counter and stepped around him, frowning as she thought back to her visit to London. She’d known she’d interrupted something - Seph and Ben had seemed tense around each other - but it hadn’t seemed like anything serious. Had he really moved out? And had Seph really not said anything about it? Laurel quickly walked out of the kitchen, through the living room and up the stairs to their bedroom. Her phone was still lying on the dresser where she’d left it that morning.

  ‘Of all the days to leave it at home,’ she muttered, picking it up.

  ‘Anything?’ Tony asked, coming in behind her.

  Laurel looked at her screen but all she had were alerts for missed calls from Tony and Ben.

  ‘I’m sure it’s fine,’ she said breezily. ‘She’d have called if something was wrong and like I said, we’re supposed to talk tonight. She was probably going to tell me about Ben then.’

  It was true, wasn’t it? She knew their relationship had suffered lately but she was close with her daughter. They used to speak about everything.

  ‘I’ll call her,’ Laurel said. When Seph’s voicemail clicked in, she tried to inject her voice with normality. ‘Hello love, it’s your mum. Give me a call back when you get this.’

  Panic began to flit about in her stomach, like a swarm of disorientated bees, and what made it worse was that she’d felt this way before. She’d had this exact same sickly feeling her mind was plagued with images of every conceivable horror that might have happened in her head when Nico went missing.

  ‘Oh, God.’ Laurel sat on the edge of their bed, unable to fight against it. ‘Anything could have happened to her.’

  ‘It’s out of character, I know,’ Tony said as he sat next to her. ‘But Ben’s calling around all of her friends. She’ll turn up somewhere. She’s probably sitting at a friend’s house with a glass of wine, talking this all out.’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Laur
el replied. ‘You didn’t see her, Tony. She was…’ A sickening lurch racked through her body as she recalled how strangely Seph had acted. Laurel shook her head. ‘I should have known something was wrong.’

  She swallowed against the anxiety building and picked up the phone again. Seph was an adult. She was her own person and free to do whatever she wanted. So why was Laurel’s skin prickling with fear as she held the phone to her ear?

  ‘Mrs Powell?’ Ben answered.

  ‘It’s Laurel,’ she corrected on autopilot. ‘Tony just told me about Seph. What’s happened?’

  Tony went back downstairs as Ben filled her in on what had been going on in their unassuming warehouse since Seph had returned from France. The intense, almost obsessive way she’d been working, the lack of sleep, the irritability and uncharacteristic anger and jealousy. It was all so much worse than Laurel had dared to think. She put a hand to her mouth, sickened as Ben relayed the familiarity of what she’d seen herself all those years ago.

  ‘She left me a couple of weird voicemails earlier and I’m worried about her,’ Ben said. ‘I know she’s been through a lot lately but she’s just being so…’ He let out a loud sigh. ‘She slept with someone else while I was in Cannes.’

  Laurel frowned. ‘Are you sure? Seph loves you, she’d never cheat on you.’

  ‘She told me herself,’ Ben replied. ‘After everything else, it was just too much. And it wasn’t the fact she’d done it that got to me. It was that she didn’t seem bothered at all. Like she couldn’t see what was wrong about it.’

  Laurel looked up at the ceiling, remembering that little flat in Brixton and the nights she’d lie in bed with Seph in the cot next to her. She’d pretend to be asleep while she waited for Nico to come home from wherever he’d been, waiting to see if he’d bring in the smell of another woman with him. She’d never voiced her suspicions about his infidelity because it was a question she’d been too afraid of knowing the answer to. She’d been afraid that he would’ve admitted it, and wouldn’t have been sorry.

  ‘She loves you, Ben,’ Laurel said. ‘I’m sure she wouldn’t do anything to hurt you.’

  ‘I’m calling around to see if anyone’s seen her, and I’ll go back to the house in a bit to see if she’s turned up,’ he replied, apparently ignoring her comment. ‘I just need a number for Nico.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She might have contacted him. She could be with him right now, for all we know.’

  ‘I have his number. I’ll do it.’

  ‘One more thing,’ Ben added. ‘You might have more experience with this than me from being with Nico and I really don’t know much about it…I might be jumping to conclusions from being so angry with her, but I really think Seph needs to see someone. Like a psychiatrist.’

  ‘I know,’ Laurel said quietly, closing her eyes.

  It was the second time she’d said those words in relation to the possibility that Seph could have bipolar disorder in twenty-four hours. When she’d said them to Nico, it had still seemed strangely abstract. That was why she’d told him she’d call him. It had only been an idea, a theory about something that could be. But things had changed. Now, Laurel knew everything about what had been going on for the last few weeks, the parts Seph hadn’t shared with her. It wasn’t something they might have to watch out for, something that they could catch before it happened. It was already happening, right now.

  Bipolar disorder had undoubtedly explained certain things about Nico’s behaviour, but she’d never thought to apply it to Seph. She knew the chances of her having bipolar might be higher than someone else but the concept was like a load of dots that had no connection at all.

  Laurel clamped a hand over her mouth. How could she have been so blind? She’d tried to convince herself that the mannerisms Seph had displayed could have been down to the stress of her upcoming exhibition and finding out about Nico. She was a bad mother. She’d been so distracted with hurt and anger against Nico, that she’d lost sight of the bigger picture. Maybe if she’d listened to his explanation months ago instead of walking out, they wouldn’t be here. Maybe Seph wouldn’t be missing, in a deteriorating mental state.

  Laurel took her hand away and sucked in a desperate breath. She had to calm down. The most important thing was finding Seph. She could chastise herself all she wanted later. Laurel picked up her phone again and scrolled through her recent call list to find Nico’s number. She’d always told herself that he’d made the choice to leave them. That he had no right to lay any claim to Seph, or to try and burst his way through the seemingly perfect bubble she’d worked so hard to build around her family.

  Laurel’s hands trembled as she held the phone to her ear. It was only now, with her maternal instinct telling her that the very thing she’d considered to be poison might just be part of the remedy, that she realised how wrong she’d been.

  SEPH

  Twenty-Seven

  They called New York the city that never slept, but whoever they were, they were wrong and needed to check their facts because, as far Seph could see, it was London that never slept.

  Pigeons pecked at the ground everywhere she looked, the sound of their flapping wings like a defective heartbeat. Yellow “For Hire” lights on black taxis swam in a sea of traffic. There were people everywhere, walking past, posing for photographs, laughing, drinking, eating, talking, swarming. Seph clutched her stag pendant as if it could project a protective cloak around her and form a barrier against it all. She hugged her arms around herself, squeezing them tightly. Who were all these people? Where had they all come from and what were they doing here? Why were they looking at her so strangely? What did they want?

  She tucked her head down, hunching her shoulders to her ears against the constant jarring noise. It was like being followed by a two-year-old, banging a spoon against a pan. Every sound sent a jolt right through her skin, muscles and organs, right into her very core. Two men came out of a pub to her right and their barrelling laughter was so strong and forceful that she physically flinched. Seph scurried away, keeping her eyes down to avoid the bright lights everywhere she looked - flashing neon, blinking bulbs and static white shop fronts - they all assaulted her eyes so strongly that she had to squint against them.

  She knew she looked crazy.

  Maybe she was crazy.

  Why else was she here?

  Why else was she doing this?

  Someone walked past her, leaving a scented trail of Joop!, the same aftershave Ben wore. For a sweet second, it felt like he was right there next to her. She tried to grab at the scent and keep it near, but it disappeared as quickly as it had come along.

  Her eyes smarted and her throat tightened as the blackness of guilt and the sickening of shame swooped down on her. It had been two days since Ben had walked out, two days since she’d last slept or ate, and two days since she’d begun to spiral out of control.

  The constant quickening of her heart made her chest hurt, but she knew it was only a fraction of the hurt she’d heaped on Ben, the man who’d done nothing but love her. He didn’t deserve what she’d done. She didn’t deserve him and now he’d left her. She put a hand to her breastbone. Her heart was beating so fast it was almost inhuman. Maybe it was trying to tire itself out and give up. She wished it would.

  Seph stood at the edge of the curb and looked up at the traffic lights. Having to stand so still when everything inside her body was moving so fast pulled up a sense of irritation from depths she never knew possible. She didn’t want to have to stand still. She couldn’t. Not when her head felt so full and her skin felt so itchy underneath, and especially not with these people around her. All she wanted was to be alone but she’d tried that. She’d tried to sit with her thoughts, to really unravel them, to figure out why the hell she’d told Ben, why she’d cheated, why she’d booked a holiday she couldn’t afford on a whim, why she’d had the gall to think she’d be able to pay for it with the sales of her paintings, why anybody would buy them or even bother to tur
n up to the exhibition at all, why anybody would believe in her when she couldn’t believe in herself, why her mum had come all the way to London to check up on her, why Ben had told her he thought she had bipolar disorder, why Nico had it, why she’d picked up the phone to call him for the first time, why he’d left in the first place.

  She’d sat in the middle of the floor in the living room, losing all sense of time as she’d asked why, over and over again, until she couldn’t even remember where she’d started or hoped to go. And the terrifying result of it all was that she couldn’t trust her mind. She couldn’t trust her thoughts because she couldn’t keep up with them and they kept morphing and changing from one thing to the next before she could catch them. And if she couldn’t catch them, were they even real to begin with? She’d decided to go for a walk, to occupy herself, to stop herself from thinking. She’d had no destination in mind and had been walking for hours. She hadn’t stopped since.

  A gust of wind brushed over her as a bus roared past and brought with it a sense of something that felt like calm. It was the first time in two days that she’d had a moment of quiet in her head. The jarring noise and pain in the backs of her eyes stopped. For a few heavenly seconds, she felt clear.

  You can’t trust it. You’ll go back to feeling awful before you can blink.

  Seph shook her head, trying to push the voice in her head away.

  Do you really want to go back to that? To feeling nasty and dirty and ashamed and angry and wrong?

  She clenched her eyes shut as panic clawed its way around her neck. The idea of having to go back to how she’d been feeling for the last two days made her want to disintegrate into a trillion pieces and be carried away. It would be better, surely. Anything would be.