Whatever You Love

by Louise Doughty

  The next day, I am tired but coherent and the first thing I say to the psychiatrist who interviews me that morning is that I won’t take drugs. Why don’t I try a course of Venlafaxine? asks the psychiatrist, a young Asian woman with a wary air, clearly uneasy about dealing with another professional. Later, I hazard a guess that she has discussed my stubbornness with other staff members on the unit because that afternoon, when I am back on the ward, a nurse comes and sits next to me and says, ‘You know, there’s nothing shameful about admitting you need a bit of help, now and then. Think about what you would say to yourself if you were one of your patients.’ When I don’t reply, she rises from her stool with a sigh and mutters resentfully, turning to go, ‘If you were diabetic you’d take insulin, wouldn’t you?’ They think I am refusing because I am wallowing in grief or just proud or some vastly annoying combination of the two. Perhaps they think I am doing it to spoil their day, to make them feel less successful. I don’t bother telling them that when you have watched your mother disintegrate after many years of dopamine you develop a passionate hatred of long-term medication. Besides, I have a new resolution. Everyone thinks that after many weeks of coping, I have finally imploded but I know the reverse to be true.

  Eventually, they send in David.

  I am sitting in the day room when he arrives. As soon as he comes through the door, I announce that they have agreed to discharge me. I have been brought in on an emergency section but am now a voluntary patient. They have suggested I stay but reluctantly conceded I may leave.

  David looks like he is in pain. He draws up a straight-backed plastic chair and sits down next to me. I am seated on a high, orthopaedic armchair, designed to allow infirm people to lower themselves and rise again. It feels throne-like. The day room smells perceptibly of cigarette smoke even though nobody is allowed to smoke in here. In the far corner, an elderly man sits in a chair similar to mine, talking to himself. Most of the time his words are no more than a mumble but every now and then he hollers a phrase that makes it clear he is having an argument with a long-dead wife.

  Every time I see David I think he looks older – but if that were true he would look ancient. Perhaps it is simply that, between times, I forget how old we both are now and it is a shock to be reminded. I look at him and feel empty of emotion – no, not empty, but my feeling for him is no more than a background note, a slight, dull, pointless aggression. I would rather talk to Toni than him, any day. He rests a hand on the arm of my upholstered chair. ‘Look, I know you really want to go home. I know you must be desperate to see Rees.’

  At the sound of Rees’s name, I feel a stab of pain. ‘How is Rees?’ I say. I don’t want him to see me in the ward. It would frighten him.

  David pulls a face that indicates, okay, sort of. Rees will not be traumatised by his stay with his father. He has done it often enough before. At least he will have regular meals, distractions.

  David grimaces. I know you so well, I think, and I know you are building up to something.

  ‘Laura,’ he says. ‘You left the door open.’

  I look at his hand on the arm of my chair. I think, he has put it there as a substitute for putting it on my arm. He is gripping the chair tightly. He looks at the floor. In the far corner, the old man shouts, ‘Jezebel! Harlot! Cunt!’ An auxiliary wanders in with a watering can and tops up the water in the vase of fading tulips on the windowsill.

  ‘When you left the house in the night,’ David continues, ‘you left the front door open. Anyone could have walked in. Rees was asleep upstairs, Laura. He stayed asleep and the police came and got me so I was there when he woke up in the morning but what if he’d woken up? Laura…’

  It comes again, the stab of pain at the mere thought of Rees, of my inexcusable desertion of him, not just that night but ever since Betty was taken from me. Something inside me folds inwards and I feel a dark, maternal panic – I close my eyes briefly and squash the feeling down. I cannot allow myself to love Rees, to even think of Rees, I cannot, or the separation from him will be unbearable. I give a deep sigh. I look at my hands and pick at some rough skin around my right thumbnail. But nobody did walk in, I want to say to David. Rees didn’t wake up. Rees is fine. He’s fine with you and Chloe.

  David draws breath and says, ‘I want you to let Rees stay with us for a bit, just for a bit, Laura. I can take him to nursery on the way to work and Julie has said she doesn’t mind having him after like she does now. Chloe is happy to do the other afternoons. She’s got her mum around a lot to help anyway. If you don’t like that then I’ll do short days for a bit. I can ask for whatever I like at the moment.’

  So that was what he was anxious about. ‘Of course,’ I say, turning my face away. ‘Of course you can keep Rees for a bit.’ I don’t need to be looking at him to feel his relief. It radiates from him, like body heat.

  ‘What about you?’ he says, tenderly, and lifts his hand from the arm of the chair and places it on mine. ‘I’m so worried about you. We all are.’

  We? Which ‘we’ is this, then? He doesn’t sound all that desperate to me. He sounds relieved. He has got what he came for, custody of Rees. ‘Well, Toni seems to be keeping a pretty close eye on me.’

  He presses his lips together. ‘She’s good, isn’t she? I didn’t know they did that.’

  ‘Liaison, it’s called.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘Well, there probably isn’t much call for it round here.’

  David shakes his head and speaks with what seems to me to be unwarranted bitterness. ‘Christ, I don’t know how you can say that with everything that’s been going on.’

  You’ve got what you want. You can leave now, I think as I rise, but what I say is, ‘Better go and clear out my locker.’ The old man in the corner is quiet now, staring toward the window. His lips are moving methodically but they make no sound.

  *

  Back home, I toss my handbag and a plastic bag of clothing on to the bottom of the stairs and run up to change and shower. David offered to drive me back but I had to wait to be seen before I could be discharged and in the end he had to leave, so I got a minicab home.

  I have been alone a lot recently but this is the first time I have not had to think of and prepare myself for Rees’s imminent return. I realise what a weight it has been, having to perform for him. As I pass his bedroom door on the way to my room, still wet and wrapped in a towel, I feel a pang of guilt as I glimpse a collection of trucks lined up neatly on his bedroom floor. Rees likes to have all his trucks ready to be driven at any moment. He drives each one in turn, methodically, pushing it around the room before returning it to its place. I have overheard him talking to them, explaining why they have to take it in turns. Will he be missing me? Will he be confused? Not yet, I think; it’s only been two days, and anyway, he is robust. If I have learned anything since Betty went away, it is how robust Rees is. I will make it up to him, one day, I think vaguely. If I have the opportunity to miss him, maybe I will be capable of doing that sooner. As I dress in fresh clothes, I try to analyse my briskness. Am I really so indifferent to how my son is managing without me? No, it is simply that I know that at the moment David and Chloe can look after him better than I can, and I have plans.

  I clatter down the stairs. I toss the plastic bag towards the kitchen and check my handbag for keys, purse, mobile phone. I lift the car key from its hook by the mirror. I slam the door shut behind me as I go.

  *

  I park in the car park at the back of the High Street and stay in the car for a moment. I can feel my energy, my courage, begin to fade. I need coffee before I go in – I get one to take away from Gregg’s on the High Street and then walk slowly back through the car park and into the atrium of the modern building that houses the council offices, sipping the coffee through the tiny hole in the lid which makes it burning hot and plastic-tasting. The library is on the second floor of the council offices and I take the stainless-steel lift, just as I used to when I had Rees in his buggy. The lift
doors open directly opposite the glass doors into the library and I will be able to see immediately who is behind the Enquiries desk.

  I know one of the librarians quite well. Naomi has children at Betty’s school and works in the library part-time. Her youngest was in the same year group as Betty but a different class. I have avoided other parents from the school successfully up until now. I can’t go in if Naomi is working today – this way, if I see her, I can press a button quickly and stay in the lift.

  The lift doors open. There is a young woman I don’t know behind the desk. I step out of the lift, clutching my Styrofoam cup. The coffee is not allowed inside, of course, so it gives me a good excuse to hover in the hallway while I finish it, glancing through the wide swing doors. No sign of Naomi behind the Loans and Returns desk either. Good. The coast is clear.

  There is no bin, so when I have drained my cup I squash it and stuff it into my coat pocket. As I push through the swing doors, a man in an electric wheelchair approaches so I hold the door for him. ‘Do you want me to call the lift?’ I say as he passes through.

  ‘I can manage,’ he snaps in reply.

  I stride past the Enquiries desk. To the right of it is the children’s books section. I have spent many an hour there over the past few years. The section I want is at the back, just past the encyclopaedias.

  The library doesn’t keep back copies of the national newspapers but it keeps copies of all three of the local papers – the broadsheet for the whole region, its trashier, tabloid rival, and a free paper for the town which has some news on pages one and three but is mostly advertisements for local shops and restaurants. Only the broadsheet is available online but even if they all were I would still have wanted to come and see the hard copies. It is layout I want, photos, column inches and size of headings. What has happened to Betty has ended my world but the world has not ended; the world is still going to school or work, eating, sleeping, watching television. I want to know what the end of my world means to the rest of the world. I am ready for that now.

  The newspapers are filed the old-fashioned way, in wide wooden drawers, in reverse date order, the most recent edition on top. I move swiftly, knowing that if I stop to think about it I will lose the ability to do it. I pull open the drawer for the broadsheet. The most recently filed paper is last week’s – this week’s will be lying on a table somewhere. The headline is about plans to build a new secondary school on the edge of town. I lift the papers one by one, turning back the clock. Working this way, the first glimpse I see of my girl – and it makes the breath catch in my throat – is a small headline in the bottom right-hand corner of the front page: Council probes road safety. I know it is a follow-up story about Betty and Willow because in the first sentence I catch sight of the phrase double tragedy.

  I work backwards and as I do, the girls spread and populate the front pages. They gain importance. I carry on past Second Victim Dies. Willow is resurrected. I pass over, Hit and Run: Man Arrested – I will come back to that one later – until I reach the day when the news broke. There is my daughter. It is a large school photo, not the most recent one. They must have got it from David. My eyes swim and my vision blurs.

  It takes me a moment or two, then I lift the papers, one by one again. I extract the relevant half dozen and lay them on top of the drawer unit. Then I turn to the drawers for the other papers.

  When I have selected the ones I need, I peer carefully around the unit. There are chairs grouped around a set of tables in the open area in the centre of the library but that is far too public an arena. I could go and ask for a key to one of the three carrels by the windows but that would be drawing attention to myself. In the end, I sit down on the floor, out of sight, behind the units.

  I read methodically, and I discover that a nine-year-old girl was killed instantly on Fulton Avenue on 18 February at 4.35 p.m. She had left school late after her Capoeira club and was on her way to a tap dance lesson at the Methodist Church Hall on Holly Road, where her mother was waiting for her. It was the first occasion she had been allowed to walk round on her own. Her friend, who was crossing the road with her at the time, was injured and is being cared for in hospital but is expected to make a full recovery. The driver of the vehicle stopped after the accident but then drove off. He later attended the local police station where he was arrested. Police are appealing for any witnesses to the incident.

  It is only after Willow’s death that the local papers gave free reign to an angle they must have considered from day one. The driver was a recent immigrant to the town, aged fifty-four. He lived in the caravan park on the clifftop that sprang up five years ago to house the migrants who work mostly on the industrial estate beyond Eastley: there is a pet-food processing plant there that takes local fish waste, a sofa factory, a packaging centre, enough businesses to replace the industrial agriculture that used to make our town viable. I can’t remember whether the businesses came first or the migrant workers. There has been some bad publicity about enmity between different groups of workers, the Koreans versus the Eastern Europeans, I seem to remember. One report refers to a statement from the Upton Centre.

  The tabloid appears twice a week and the free sheet is every weekday. Their coverage is so brief it is barely literate but I get more of a day-by-day account from them. Two days after Willow died in the District General, a group of youths went up to the caravan park on the cliff and threw bricks through the windows of one of the mobile homes. An altercation between the youths and a group of men ensued. Several men are helping police with enquiries. The following night, in the small hours, someone threw a metal bin through the window of Mr Yeung, the chippy.

  Mr Yeung the chippy has been on the esplanade for as long as I can remember. The family who run it now are Korean but they are the third owners in recent years, nothing to do with Mr Yeung, whoever he was, who opened the chippy decades ago. On the same night, another bin was thrown at Ranmali’s shop. The window was damaged but did not smash. That explains the corrugated iron.

  Now I understand Toni’s solicitousness. Now I understand how the rest of the world is viewing what has happened to my girl through its own particular prism. The reports make the attacks sound co-ordinated but I doubt it. I have seen the lads who hang around, the same bunch you get in every town, too old to be taught anything, too young to learn. It was probably the same ones who punched the bonnet of my car.

  I am avoiding what I don’t want to see but eventually am forced to face it. I turn a page, innocently enough. It is an edition of the broadsheet that appeared three weeks after Betty was taken away from me. There, relegated to page two, is the same photograph of my girl, wearing the same strained expression she always adopted for school photos. And next to it, right next to it, is him, the man who killed my daughter. Underneath, the caption reads. Hit and run: girls to blame. He has a heavy-set face, large-browed – the photograph is black and white and his eyes are strangely pale and bleached-looking. He is dressed in a jacket over a thick jumper. He has a slight smile. His name is Aleksandar Ahmetaj; I think of him immediately as Mr A. He was driving a black Toyota land cruiser, with bull bars.

  I close my eyes. What I cannot bear is that the photographs are equal size.

  *

  As I leave the building, I scrabble in my handbag for my mobile phone. When my fingers locate it, they close around it and turn it over a couple of times, confirming its shape. I lift the phone out and turn it on. It plays me a merry tune as I cross the car park. I am so impatient, I don’t even unlock my car and get into it. Instead, I sit on the low wall at the back of the library and flick through the contacts list on my phone. I dial Jan H.

  I am expecting her voicemail but she picks up the phone herself.

  ‘Jan,’ I say, ‘it’s Laura.’

  The briefest of pauses, then, ‘Hello,’ she says warmly. ‘How are you?’

  Of course. Poor Jan. This is the first time I have spoken to her in person since what happened. It must sound odd to her that my voice is so
bright, so normal. ‘It’s okay,’ I say quickly, ‘it’s not, I mean, I’m ringing for a favour, a practical favour. Thank you for the card. All of them. I’m sorry I haven’t – well, I know you won’t mind about that, I’m okay. How’s everything going?’

  ‘Well it’s going,’ she gives a false little laugh. ‘Fucking awful, if you want the truth.’ Her voice becomes low, simple. ‘We miss you, hon.’

  ‘I know,’ I say, looking down at the toes of my boots, then up at the sky, ‘I miss you too.’ It comes to me that that is true. I do miss my workmates, and I don’t mean I am just missing them because they were part of the life I had before Betty went away. They were, are, a good bunch, a gang. Work was the one thing that sustained me through David and Chloe. My husband and his shiny new love: to Jan H and Jan M and Maurice and Andrew and Sunita they were nothing more than a cliché, a sick little soap opera, something I must be consoled about in the same way I would be consoled over a nasty bout of flu. My husband’s infidelity, so all-consuming, so painful to me, was no more than a story to my team, fit for mockery, derision: but what perspective can they offer me now? The routine tragedy of my marriage could be tumble-dried by gossip, emerging clean and shrunken, but the loss of Betty cannot be reduced without insult. They will know that as surely as do I. It is why I have been avoiding them, why I avoid everybody.

  ‘Listen, I’ve been thinking about coming back…’ This is not true, but under the circumstances, I don’t feel guilty. Jan H would not blame me for the lie.