They All Fall Down

by Tammy Cohen

  Murderer?

  It could be him. It could be any of them.

  But it definitely happened.

  I’d have to be crazy to make a thing like that up.

  Towards the end of our session, at about seven thirty, I slip away while the others are still stacking up the chairs. After eight weeks here, the grandeur of the hallway, with its glass chandelier and vast oil painting of the earl whose home this once was, no longer comes as a surprise. No one uses the front entrance anyway, unless they’re an important dignitary or there’s a fundraising event going on. The main entrance is round the back in the new wing, where a receptionist checks in visitors and politely searches their bags under the gaze of a smiling Oliver Roberts clad in a formal academic gown in the act of being awarded some honour or other.

  But when I go through the door that divides the old building from the new, I don’t go straight ahead, past the Mindfulness Area and the blond wood of the cafeteria, to where the vibrant orange reception sofa calls a cheerful greeting, as if to reassure visitors this is not a place conducive to dark thoughts. Instead, I take the first door on the left, which leads to the stairwell, with its muted oatmeal walls, and hurry on up to the bedrooms.

  My room is the first on the left, but I walk straight past it and continue down the corridor, with its framed photographs of nature – a close-up of dew on a blade of grass, a feather floating in a muddy puddle, sunlight glittering through a canopy of green leaves. The photographs are caulked to the walls so that we can’t take them off and use them against ourselves, or each other. The very last room is Charlie’s room.

  How many times have I made this journey between my room and hers over the last eight weeks? I’m surprised my feet haven’t made indentations in the strip wood flooring. Yet now I feel strange and unease prickles at the back of my neck. I glance up into the eye of a CCTV camera. The camera has always been there, but it is the first time I’ve really noticed it. Its unblinking stare makes me anxious.

  Our doors don’t have locks. For obvious reasons. Even so, I’m surprised when Charlie’s handle turns. I hesitate before stepping inside.

  I’ve been steeling myself to find her room cleared and emptied of all the things that made it Charlie’s. But it’s all still there – the blown-up photograph of her and her little nieces in her parents’ garden, their three heads dark against an explosion of yellow hibiscus, the lifesize cardboard cutout of Ryan Gosling given to her by an ex-workmate, the old-fashioned patchwork quilt on the bed, a riot of colour amidst the oppressive beigeness.

  Yet whereas Charlie was notoriously untidy, with paperbacks piled precariously on the floor next to her bed, and jeans and sweaters strewn over the chair or heaped on the floor, the room has been meticulously tidied. The desk has been cleared of old newspapers and magazines and empty crisp packets, its white surface bland and clean. The bed, which was always messy, as if someone had just that minute got out of it, is now perfectly made, the quilt pulled taut.

  I put a hand on the pillow and it feels smooth and unnaturally cold to the touch, like a bar of soap, and I snatch it back. I slide open a desk drawer. Empty, apart from a few pens and a pad of paper. The wardrobe has no door, its edges rounded in case anyone should decide to string themselves up from a sharp corner. I almost cry out when I see her fuchsia cashmere cardigan hanging on one of the weirdly shaped cardboard hangers, suspended from a rail designed to break under ‘undue weight’. How she loved that cardigan. She’d told me about a decluttering handbook her mother had given her in a not-so-subtle hint. Charlie had refused to read it on principle but had grudgingly flicked through, taking away from it just one thing – that you should only hang on to things that spark joy. ‘This here is my joy-sparking cardigan,’ she said to me.

  Now it hangs on the clothes hanger, its empty arms drooping.

  The absence of joy is palpable. Rather, again, I have that sense of unease, of being watched.

  Charlie has a corner room, and I cross to the window on the back wall that looks out over the sloping lawn and, at the very bottom, the dark smudge of the lake. There are days when the sun is reflected on the surface of the water, making the lake appear to be lit up from within. But not today.

  A radiator runs underneath the window. On especially cold days Charlie would throw a cushion down on the floor and sit cross-legged on the carpet with her back to the radiator. ‘I can never get warm enough,’ she once told me. ‘I’m like a chicken breast that hasn’t quite thawed out, with a hard, frozen bit in the middle that refuses to defrost.’

  I drop to the floor and assume her position, trying to inhabit her skin, to feel what she felt. Did she really sit here that last day with the heat against her back and think about how best to slice into her wrist, the right angle, the right point? Is it possible I could have got it – got her – so wrong?

  There was a time I was sure of my own judgement, trusted in myself. But that was before.

  I hug my knees into my chest and rock gently for a while. Sometimes this soothes me, but there is something about this room without Charlie in it that makes me anxious.

  I hear the soft thud of footsteps outside, and voices drawing closer.

  ‘We’ve cleared as much as we could, and I don’t mind telling you the place was a pigsty. But there’s a limit to how much we can do before the relatives turn up.’

  The woman says ‘relatives’ as though it’s something not quite nice. I stop rocking abruptly, putting my hand down to steady me. My fingers brush against a piece of paper tucked away behind the pipe of the radiator which the cleaners must have missed. The footsteps stop outside the door and my mouth goes dry as I recognize Dr Roberts’ familiar baritone, sounding unusually clipped and impatient.

  ‘With any luck, they won’t stay long. Quick in–out, then we can get all her stuff bagged up. We’ve a new one arriving a week on Monday.’

  The door handle turns and I’ve just time to snatch up the scrap of paper and stuff it up the sleeve of my sweatshirt before the door bursts open.

  I scramble to my feet, my heart hammering.

  ‘Right. Let’s have a quick check over … Hannah! What are you doing in here?’

  Instantly, Dr Roberts reverts to his usual slow drawl and I wonder if the woman with him, who I now recognize as Bridget Ashworth, has also clocked the change in his voice.

  Bridget Ashworth has a severe brown bob with a grey re-growth line along the parting and glasses with purple frames and a dark wool jacket with what appears to be a single thick white cat hair on the shoulder. She clutches her lanyard and blinks behind her lenses as if she has surprised a wild fox rifling through her kitchen bin, while I shift from foot to foot.

  Who would believe I used to give presentations to roomfuls of people, scanning the crowd and making deliberate eye contact with random strangers?

  Now I keep my eyes on the carpet, but still, as I mumble some story about needing to feel close to Charlie, I sense Bridget Ashworth’s disapproving gaze crawl over me.

  Even when I get back to the safety of my own room, I’m still scratching, trying to get it off.

  2

  Corinne

  ‘I thought she looked very well. Didn’t you think she looked well?’

  ‘I guess.’

  Corinne decided to take that as a yes.

  ‘Definitely better, I thought. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Hmmm.’

  Corinne knew she should stop talking. Danny never liked to chat straight after a visit. But still the words kept coming, almost as if she had no control over them.

  As they waited at the roundabout, he put the handbrake on. Under cover of darkness, Corinne studied his profile. He’d lost weight. He’d always been a handsome man. When Hannah had first brought him home Corinne had worried privately that perhaps he was too good-looking. She would have struggled with a man who attracted so much attention. But Hannah had always been sure of herself. Very much her own person. Which made everything that had happened doubly shocking.
/>   ‘What’s happening to her?’

  Danny’s question came out of the blue, freezing Corinne’s throat as if she’d swallowed an ice cube.

  ‘She’s just tired. Emotionally overwrought. The baby …’

  ‘This is nothing to do with the baby. This fixation on murder.’

  ‘Well, naturally, she would take it hard. These were her friends.’

  ‘They were women who were known to be high suicide risk who’d attempted suicide before and who very sadly killed themselves. Of course she’s upset, but this point-blank refusal to listen to reason is something else.’

  Corinne didn’t want to hear what the something else could be.

  ‘It’s normal, Danny. These were women she saw every day. She doesn’t want to think of them hurting themselves. I’d be exactly the same.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t. Not that same blanket denial. Not when the facts were staring you in the face. We have to look out for symptoms of paranoia. Isn’t that what Dr Roberts told us?’

  ‘Yes, but this isn’t paranoia, is it? It’s real.’

  ‘Is it?’

  They were driving past Alexandra Palace, the great Victorian landmark strung out across one of the highest peaks in north London. To their left, the vast building loomed against the murky sky, while to the right the Palace’s parkland sloped down the hill into darkness, the distant lights of the city sprawled at its feet.

  When Danny dropped her off outside her house Corinne gave him a dry kiss on the cheek.

  ‘I can’t wait for her to get out of that place,’ she told him. ‘Then everything can get back to normal.’

  Danny didn’t reply. Didn’t ask her to define normal. Corinne longed to say something cheering to jolt him out of this stilted, distant mood. He was finding it hard to forgive Hannah. She could understand that. For a few months he’d been a father, and now, here he was, back to being a non-father again. How could he not feel diminished, as if something had been taken from him? Wasn’t she struggling enough herself with not being a grandmother? But Hannah hadn’t been in her right mind. The doctors had explained all that. ‘Dissociative,’ they’d said. Corinne still had the original notebook where she’d scribbled it down, underlining it and adding an exclamation mark after it.

  Half in, half out of the car, she hesitated, searching for the right words to lighten the atmosphere, but nothing came. Danny could be intimidating in that way overly handsome men sometimes are.

  As always, before she let herself into her little cottage at the base of the Palace grounds, Corinne had a moment of straining to hear Madge’s excited squeals before remembering, with a cold thud, that the little Jack Russell they’d rescued from the pound as a puppy and who’d been her companion for nearly seventeen years, was no longer there. It had been nearly three months since Madge’s heart finally gave up, but still Corinne kept expecting to be greeted at the door by a blur of black-and-white fur, usually with a shoe in her mouth as a gift, as if Corinne had been gone for weeks, rather than hours.

  That evening, Corinne couldn’t settle. She paced through the cottage’s few small rooms, picking up objects – a book here, a photograph there – and setting them back down again. She grabbed the house phone from its cradle and stared at it for a long time. Who would she call? What would she say?

  I’m worried my daughter is going crazy.

  I’m worried my daughter has gone crazy.

  Those were the words she couldn’t say out loud.

  Sinking down into her ancient, saggy velvet sofa, still furred with the odd white dog hair that she couldn’t bear to vacuum up, she pulled out her laptop, thinking perhaps she could Skype Megs, but just as she was about to press the green phone icon she remembered the time lag. If it was 9.15 p.m. in London, it’d be 5.15 p.m. in New York. Megs would still be at work, holed up in that funny little office, surrounded by men. Her younger daughter had always been so quirky Corinne had struggled to imagine what career path she might follow but, of all the outcomes she’d envisaged over the years, writing scripts for phone app games on the other side of the Atlantic had not even crossed her radar.

  She knew Megs would drop everything to talk to her, but she was forcing herself to ration her calls. When the whole awful business with the baby first happened, Megs had wanted to jump on the first plane home, and Corinne had been sure the awful rift between her daughters would be forgotten, but Hannah was in no state for visitors. And by the time she’d come back to some semblance of herself, she’d decided she still wasn’t ready to see her younger sister.

  Instead, Megan did her best to support Corinne from the States, but she had a busy life there, a job Corinne didn’t fully understand, a boyfriend they’d yet to meet.

  Her mobile rang, startling in the silence, and Corinne snatched it up from the coffee table, hoping to hear Megs’s voice. Instead, Duncan’s name flashed up on her screen. There was a time when he had been stored under the moniker ‘Git’ in her contacts list, but that was years ago, when the betrayal was still fresh. Nowadays, she had other things on her mind.

  ‘How is she?’

  There was no preamble, no niceties. But really, what would be the point?

  ‘She’s good. She’s great, in fact.’

  Corinne knew she didn’t have to talk Hannah up to her own father, but still she couldn’t bring herself to mention this new business with the suicides. Since Duncan had had his second family when already well into his fifties – his second wife, Gigi, producing two babies in indecently rapid succession – she’d felt even more protective of her own two daughters, as if they were in some unspoken competition with their infant half-siblings.

  Corinne had come to terms with the fact that her husband had left her after thirty years for a woman he’d met at an Arsenal match of all things. What choice did she have after Gigi got pregnant and it was a fait accompli? But what she found much harder to accept was being the only one who now put Hannah and Megs at the centre of the universe. Duncan’s love for his daughters, hitherto unconditional, had now become qualified by having these other, needier drains on his emotional resources.

  Corinne always wondered if it was latent guilt that had led him to create a job for his son-in-law, helping to establish the company’s fledgling office in Edinburgh. Hannah hadn’t been happy about her husband being away three days a week, but decent jobs in architecture were rare.

  ‘Have you asked her?’ Duncan wanted to know now. ‘About the baby? Have you talked to her? Have you tried to get to the bottom of it?’

  So typical of Duncan. So sure that there would turn out to be a reason, a rationale. That there would be an explanation with a top and a bottom.

  ‘It’s too soon. We can’t push her.’

  ‘Too soon? She’s been in there eight weeks, Corinne. It’s not about the money—’

  ‘I should think not, when the insurance is footing most of the bill!’

  Corinne was glad to find a peg for her anger.

  ‘That’s not the point. Christ, Cor, I’d pay whatever it took to see Hannah through this, but surely she ought to be making more progress by now.’

  ‘She is making progress. Baby steps, Dr Roberts says.’

  Duncan made a noise like he was snorting something through his nose.

  ‘Maybe if Dr Roberts spent more time at the clinic and less time throwing lavish fundraisers, she’d be doing a lot better.’

  ‘He has to keep a high public profile so that they continue to get finance for the clinic. Otherwise, the insurance company would have to be paying out even more.’ Pointed. So he’d get the message. ‘They’re lucky to have him. Dr Chakraborty says he’s the reason they manage to recruit such high-quality staff.’

  ‘I’m starting without you,’ came a woman’s voice in the background at Duncan’s end.

  He sighed.

  ‘I’ve got to go. We’re watching a box set.’

  A box set? Corinne felt every muscle inside her tense up. She closed her eyes, sucked air in deep through her
nose, waiting for the moment to pass.

  ‘OK,’ she said, preparing to ring off.

  ‘Cor?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘You’re not in this alone. I want you to know that. I care about Hannah as much as you do. I’m right here.’

  Corinne was embarrassed to find that his clumsy attempt at comforting her had brought tears to her eyes.

  ‘OK, then.’

  She pressed end call before her trembling voice could give her away.

  Angrily, she pointed the remote at the TV. It came booming into life with a cookery programme in which harried contestants were trying to cope with the pressure of a professional restaurant kitchen. Yes, chef! No, chef! She turned it off. There was so much work she ought to be getting on with. Thirty-six mid-term papers to be marked. Five or six years ago, Corinne’s students on her pop-culture social anthropology course would all have been UK-born, with shared cultural reference points and similar backgrounds, but now eighty-nine per cent of them were from abroad. China, mostly. She was having to find a whole new way of teaching, a new focus to the syllabus, at the same time as having to fulfil all the research and publishing requirements the university bureaucrats had imposed on them to justify their students’ tuition fees.

  Corinne sighed and picked up her laptop.

  The screensaver was a photograph of her and Hannah and Megan on holiday in Crete ten months before. They’d gone out of season, in mid-May, on a girls’ holiday, a last trip, just the three of them, before Megs started her job in New York the following September.