by Tammy Cohen
‘Look, I don’t know you, and I don’t have to explain myself to you, but I want you to understand. Mine was not a happy childhood. When I was born, my mother couldn’t stand the fact that my father loved anyone except her. She was jealous of her own baby. Can you imagine? My father had affairs because he couldn’t stand my mother, and she took it out on us. We were terrified of her.’
‘But your brother followed me to the car, specifically to warn me about you. “She hurts people.” Those were his exact words.’
‘He’d be talking about her. Our mother. Do you know he used to drag his chest of drawers against his bedroom door to stop her coming in?’
Corinne felt nauseous. Could she really have got this so wrong?
‘My brother and I are really close. Look at my text messages.’ Steffie waved her phone in front of Corinne’s face. ‘They’re mostly from him. He’s the only reason I ever go back there. He’s not well.’
Corinne remembered Jacob Garitson’s clammy yellow skin and the way he looked at her as if from the end of a long, dark tunnel.
‘He has medication. Lithium. And when he’s taking that he’s like a different person, but my mother says it makes him like a zombie.’
Corinne warned herself not to be taken in. Steffie Garitson was dangerous, she reminded herself. And yet her words felt solid, as if studded with heavy rocks of truth.
‘What about the needle in the pie?’
‘Pardon?’
‘Your mother told me she was doing a catering job for your neighbour’s birthday dinner and you slipped a needle into one of the apple pies.’
‘A needle? Are you serious? Don’t you think I might be taking a long vacation at Her Majesty’s pleasure somewhere if I’d done that? Shall I tell you what really happened? Mum agreed to do the catering job but then the client criticized the hors d’oeuvres, said they didn’t taste of anything. So my darling mother crushed five laxatives in with the mixture in one of the pies and stuck a candle in the top to make sure the birthday girl got it. Ruined the evening, apparently, though no one else got ill, so they couldn’t prove anything. And by the time the neighbour could tear herself away from the bathroom, all the evidence had been thoroughly cleared away. By the way, did you see that photograph?’
‘What photograph?’ Corinne’s head was spinning.
‘The one in the hallway, showing our perfect family? The one Mummy Dearest stage-managed to the nth degree, making us all wear white, like something out of a washing-powder advert?’
‘Yes, I saw it. But what has that—’
‘Did you notice there was a line across my neck?’
Corinne nodded slowly, remembering the faint silver line she’d at first mistaken for a choker.
‘When I said I wanted to stay home to revise for exams instead of going out clothes shopping with her, she cut my head out of the photograph with a Stanley knife. I came downstairs and it was lying on the floor. Dad was the one who stuck it back in place.’
Corinne remembered Patricia Garitson standing in her sterile kitchen in Tunbridge Wells and describing her daughter as selfish, and how, when they’d met in the café in London, she’d said that thing about Jacob being scared of his sister and then stared so greedily at Corinne’s shocked expression, as if she would gulp it down whole.
But from Steffie herself there was none of the same chill Corinne had felt with the rest of the Garitsons. And yet, if she accepted Steffie hadn’t done those things in the clinic – the rabbit, the colouring book, the scan – the only other option was that Hannah had made them up, that they were a sign of a new delusion. The thought froze the breath inside her. Corinne’s mind raced, trying to find an alternative explanation, one that pinned the blame on Steffie once and for all.
‘You were here!’ she blurted out suddenly. How could she have forgotten? ‘You rang my doorbell and then ran away, leaving a baby’s knitted hat on my doorstep for me to find.’
Relief flooded through her. Hannah hadn’t made it up. Steffie had been taunting both of them, leaving reminders of the baby that never was. How unutterably cruel.
Yet instead of denying it, or crumpling into an abject heap and confessing all, Steffie stared at Corinne with a strange half-smile.
‘Was it red?’ she asked at last.
‘Was what red?’
‘Never mind. Wait here.’ Steffie stepped through the still-open front door.
‘Hang on,’ Corinne shouted after her. ‘You can’t just …’
There was the sound of the gate creaking and the bipping of a car electronically unlocking. Just as Corinne had convinced herself Steffie was planning to make a dash for it, there came the unmistakeable noise of a car door slamming shut and, seconds later, Steffie was walking back into the house.
‘We’ve been looking for that hat everywhere,’ she said. ‘It was …’ But Corinne didn’t hear the rest of what she said because all her attention was focused on the thing Steffie was carrying in her arms. A thing that was wrapped in a red knitted blanket to match the hat Corinne had hidden away in her kitchen drawer and stretching its tiny arms as if freshly woken from sleep.
‘Meet Eleanor,’ said Steffie.
The baby started to cry.
42
Hannah
‘I just wasn’t thinking. That’s all. I was in a world of my own and just didn’t see the lorry.’
‘How can you not have seen it? Stella says it was practically on top of you.’
‘I was in a daze.’
‘Because you were drunk.’
‘I wasn’t drunk. I’d had two bottles of beer.’
I glare at Dr Oliver Roberts across his desk, resenting being made to feel like a naughty schoolchild, although, the truth is, I do feel guilty. I can’t explain that I did see the lorry but somehow didn’t register it. I can still hear the screech of brakes and the sound of shattering glass as the car behind smashed into the lorry’s tail-lights; still remember the painful jolt of my heart as Stella grabbed my shoulder, wrenching me backwards. The lorry driver was furious, but it could have been a lot worse. It was just bad luck that Joni was walking past at the time and saw the whole thing, including us coming out of the pub. And, of course, she couldn’t wait to report back.
Dr Roberts leans back in his chair so that he’s almost horizontal, never taking his cold eyes off me. But whereas a week ago I might have looked away, now I dig my fingernails into my thigh and hold his gaze, refusing him power over me. This is the man who sent Stella back to her abusive stepfather and then failed to recognize her when she presented herself again, seeking validation.
No, I will not be the first to break eye contact.
‘What you need to remember, Hannah, is that my job is to keep you safe. I cannot recommend that you leave here until I believe you’re not a danger to yourself.’
‘It was an accident. I’ve told you. Anyway, you can’t stop me leaving. It’s up to me.’
‘Unless I have reason to believe you pose a threat to your own safety, or the safety of other people. Remember how it was when you first arrived, Hannah? We wouldn’t want to return to that, but we could if we had to.’
The inside of my mouth feels coated with dust as his threat sinks in. He could keep me in here against my will. There was a detention order on me when I was first admitted here. For my own safety. But then, I was in such a state the implications didn’t even register. Now it would be different. Surely he’d need some kind of consent from my next of kin? Mum would never agree to it, I’m sure of it. To have my own agency taken away from me. And neither, surely, would Danny.
I picture Danny sitting opposite me in the bistro, unable even to look at me. When was the last time he held me, without me reaching for him first? When was the last time he called me on the office phone without wanting anything in particular, just to hear my voice? When was the last time I looked at him and thought, My Danny?
I can no longer be sure what Danny would say or do in any given situation. I’m starting to wonder
if he was ever ‘my Danny’.
I find Laura in the art room, conferring with Odelle, who has a streak of orange paint across her downy face. They are both scrutinizing a selection of groceries – jam, margarine, a box of herbal tea-bags, a tin of beans, a bar of chocolate – that have been arranged on a tray. Laura steps forward to clasp one of my hands in both of hers.
‘Hannah,’ she says. ‘You must remember, I am always here for you. Any time, day or night.’
‘I didn’t do it on purpose,’ I say, feeling like I am stuck in some sort of groundhog day, doomed to justify for the rest of time that momentary impulse that led me to step off the kerb.
‘Never apologize. Never explain,’ says Laura, and smiles.
We remain there like that, hand in hand, for what seems like an age though is probably only a few seconds, until Odelle says, very pointedly, ‘Laura, you said you’d help me with my still life.’
Laura winks at me and lets go of my hand, which suddenly feels very cold.
‘Coming, poppet,’ she says.
As I head for the door I glance at Odelle’s painting, which features the tray of products on one side and on the other a woman who looks a lot like Odelle. Over the woman’s mouth there’s a pattern of small black lines, as if someone has sewn her lips together.
In the day room, Joni looks at me and shakes her head.
‘I thought you were a goner then,’ she says. She’s talking about the lorry.
‘Sorry to disappoint.’
‘You should have asked me,’ hisses Judith across the table. ‘I can think of loads of better ways of doing it than that.’
I get out my laptop, angling the screen away from Joni, who is supervising the morning internet session, so that, if she wants to check what I’m doing, she has to stand up and move her lazy arse over here.
I’d almost forgotten about the list Charlie made on the morning she died and the mysterious WK she was researching. Now I’m determined to make amends.
I type ‘William Kingsley’ into the search box and scroll impatiently until I come to page five and the reports on the two mothers jailed for shaking their babies to death, largely on the evidence of neurologist Dr William Kingsley, only to be sensationally cleared when the evidence was found to be flawed.
Near the bottom of the next page is the link I was prevented from reading before by the untimely arrival of Stella. I click on the headline ‘The Doctors Who Play God’ and wait for the page to load.
Joni keeps glancing over at me, and I can tell she’s been told to keep a careful watch and that makes my fingers tingle with rage, because there’s no need for any of it. I made a mistake. (I saw the lorry yet didn’t see it. Go figure.) On my computer screen, the infuriating circle keeps going round. The WiFi connection in here is pathetic. I’m sure they do that deliberately, to discourage us from spending too long online. Finally, a magazine spread appears on my screen, illustrated with snippets torn out of newspapers about cases where medical staff have been accused of overstepping their remit.
There’s the private fertility expert struck off for removing all the male embryos from the sample of a mother of five sons who is desperate for a daughter. And the parents of a teenager left unable to walk or speak after falling from a balcony who are suing the doctors intent on keeping him alive at all costs. But I don’t read the details of those, because my eye is drawn to a photograph in a newspaper cutting on the bottom-left corner of the page.
The cutting is about Dr William Kingsley, whose evidence helped send two women to jail for murdering their babies.
The photograph is of Oliver Roberts.
43
Corinne
As she queued at traffic lights to cross the North Circular Road, the afternoon after the encounter with Steffie Garitson, Corinne’s thoughts were still racing.
It was so long since she’d held a baby. She’d forgotten just how small they were, and the funny little grunting noises they made, and how their whole faces scrunched up when they cried.
Eleanor had needed changing and feeding after her long nap in the car and, by the time that had been accomplished and Corinne had finished telling Steffie off for leaving her unattended, even if the car was directly outside and the front door open, the moment for anger seemed to have passed.
It wasn’t until later that the inappropriateness of the whole situation had struck her. Her son-in-law had had a baby with another woman and then kept it secret from his wife. What was this news going to do to Hannah?
Steffie had apologized for shocking her. She’d assumed Corinne already knew about Eleanor. Though she admitted she’d at first told Danny she’d lost the baby, reeling from discovering he was still married, she’d relented and told him the truth once Eleanor was born, nearly a month ago. Even so, she hadn’t given him the option of coming to visit, nor had he asked. She had considered herself completely done with the man who’d lied to her so blatantly. In fact, it was only Corinne’s ill-fated trip to Tunbridge Wells that had brought Steffie back into their lives. ‘I knew my mother would have been filling your ear with poison,’ Steffie had said. ‘I just wanted to see you, to give you some context.’
Corinne had looked at the dark rings around her eyes, and the practised way she paced and rocked her screaming daughter, as if they’d done this particular dance many times before, and she felt sorry for the girl. How could she not?
She’d tried to call on Corinne before, she said. Ringing the bell repeatedly before deciding no one was in and hurrying away, not realizing she’d dropped Eleanor’s hat on the doorstep. Corinne remembered being in the shower. The insistent ringing of the bell. Her worry that it could be the clinic calling about some emergency.
After Steffie left, Corinne had tried to call Duncan, but his phone went straight to voicemail, and the idea that Gigi might have seen her name flashing up on his screen and ordered him not to answer made her hang up without leaving a message.
Then she’d FaceTimed Megan, who had only just got up and had seemed bewildered when Corinne mentioned Steffie, which then meant having to explain about going to the house in Tunbridge Wells, at which Megan’s face sharpened to a point and she yelled at Corinne for having kept her in the dark about what was going on.
Perhaps not surprisingly, Megan had spared little sympathy for Steffie, no matter how many times Corinne tried to tell her that she hadn’t known Danny was married. She saved most of her vitriol for her brother-in-law, and Corinne felt a creeping sense of dread as she realized how irreparable the rift would be between her daughters when Hannah finally moved back home.
If she moved back home.
Unsurprisingly, sleep had been hard to come by and, now, parking her car in the near-deserted car park of The Meadows, Corinne felt as if her brain had been scooped out and replaced by cotton wadding.
Her phone rang as she was waiting to be buzzed through the front door, and she answered, only registering too late that she didn’t recognize the number.
‘Yes.’ It was her clipped ‘don’t you dare engage me in conversation’ voice. Already she could feel fury bubbling inside her, looking for release. Whoever wanted to talk to her about PPI or that car accident she’d never had was going to get more than they bargained for.
By the time she’d belatedly recognized the voice on the line, the tone had been set.
‘I can tell I’ve caught you at a bad time,’ said Paddy, coming to the end of a rambling question about a text he couldn’t decide whether or not to include.
‘Yes, it is rather.’
Even as she was speaking, Corinne realized she was coming across as cold. Rude, even.
‘I won’t take up any more of your time then.’
And before she had a chance to explain herself, he’d hung up.
Afterwards, she couldn’t help wondering how necessary it had really been for him to call her. Surely an email would have done? Might he actually have been trying to find an excuse to talk to her?
Well. He wouldn’t make th
at mistake again.
‘Mrs Harris?’ Bridget Ashworth had a habit of materializing out of the blue. She hovered by the entrance to the old building, twiddling her lanyard and blocking Corinne’s path to the day room.
‘Dr Roberts was wondering if you could just pop in to his office. It won’t take long.’
She was smiling, but it was that kind of default smile that could mean good news or ‘sorry to tell you …’ news.
Corinne’s feet, as they followed Bridget’s up the staircase, felt leaden.
‘Ah, thank you for coming, Corinne.’
Dr Roberts got up from his chair as Corinne came in, and walked around his desk to clasp her hand in his, which immediately put her on her guard.
What now?
‘I’ll get straight to the point. I’m sorry to say that, after making great progress recently, there’s been a slight glitch in Hannah’s recovery.’
‘Glitch?’
‘Hannah went to the high street yesterday with Stella. To a pub.’
Corinne breathed again. A pub? She could deal with that.
‘And when they came out of the pub, Hannah stepped off the kerb in front of a lorry. Don’t be alarmed, Corinne – Stella managed to pull her back out of the way and she is completely unharmed. But, as you can imagine, we’re rather concerned.’
‘Surely you don’t think she did it on purpose? Hannah would never—’
Roberts held up his hand.
‘We are not jumping to any conclusions. Hannah insists it was an accident and she was just distracted. But either way, it’s something we have to pay very close attention to. Let’s not forget, Hannah is still a very vulnerable young woman. We know she has taken the death of Charlie Chadwick very hard. It’s not unheard of in such cases for someone to display copycat behaviour.’
Now the shock was wearing off, Corinne was conscious of a dull pain under her ribs.
‘I’m afraid this means she needs to be with us slightly longer than we initially thought,’ Dr Roberts continued.
