They All Fall Down

by Tammy Cohen

  ‘Hannah?’

  The sound appears to be coming from only a few feet away, near the doorway of the art room. I don’t think I have ever heard Drew speak, and his high-pitched, reedy voice comes as an unpleasant shock. I hold my breath, as if he might be able to hear me breathing through the wooden door of Laura’s office.

  For thirty seconds or more, I remain like that, not moving or breathing. When there is no further noise from outside I allow myself to exhale.

  Then the door handle turns.

  Before I have a chance to react, the door is flung open, light flooding in.

  I close my eyes.

  45

  Laura

  ‘I’m so happy Hannah has agreed to let me help her. She has such unhappiness stored up inside her. It’s like a tumour. You know how you hear about cancer patients being cut open revealing tumours the size of a grapefruit or a football or a small child? Poor Hannah. There are some people who are too sensitive for this world.’

  Her mother moaned and listed to the side and Laura leant forward across the bed to gently right her, feeling glad she’d made time for this rushed morning visit. She was due at Annabel’s in twenty-five minutes and then The Meadows at one, but even the briefest chat was enough to brighten her mother’s bleak life.

  ‘It’s all right, Mummy. I know you don’t like to think about all the unhappy girls. But I’m looking after her now. Don’t you fret. She already looked lighter when she walked out of my room yesterday. I won’t leave her alone. You don’t need to worry about that. I won’t leave them to him.’

  Outside in the lounge, Katya was eating a microwaved lasagne, still in its plastic tray. Her feet, still in the bunny slippers, were resting on the leather footstool. As ever, the television was blasting out.

  ‘Is Midsomer Murders. Is about village where all the days people are dying. I would not like to live in this village.’

  ‘Mummy seems more agitated than usual, Katya. Have you noticed anything?’

  Katya shook her head, without taking her eyes off the screen.

  ‘She just the same like always. District nurse come yesterday. She say your mother have red bottom. I explain her, your mother have red bottom because she have poo like yellow soup and is not possible to be all the time changing nappy.’

  Katya had a round, doughy face framed by stringy brown hair, and a fleshy bottom lip that protruded when upset or affronted, as now.

  ‘I am only one person, I say her. I have just two hands.’

  Katya held up her pudgy palms in demonstration.

  Driving to Annabel’s through the cheerless hinterland of suburban north-west London, Laura was lost in thought about her mum.

  She’d done what you were supposed to do. Left photographs prominently displayed around the flat showing her mother in her glorious youth, with her lovely dark hair curling around her shoulders and her wide, gap-toothed smile. And another with Laura as a baby, holding her up above her head and laughing, wearing paint-spattered shorts, her hair held back by a scarf and her bare feet planted firm and strong on the ground. It was supposed to help carers remember that there was a person there, who’d had a life, and laughed and loved, and held their baby up to a cloudless blue sky. There wasn’t just this creature in the bed.

  Yet sometimes she wondered if Katya, and Femi, who covered the night-time shifts three times a week, ever really believed her mother was human, like them. Because then they’d have to believe that what happened to her could happen to them, that they too could end up sitting in a nappy of yellow-soup poo. And that prospect was too terrifying to allow.

  Normally, at this time of day, the roads near Annabel’s house were relatively traffic free, but Laura noticed a queue of cars up ahead. As she drew closer, she realized she must have just missed an accident. A mangled bicycle was lying on the tarmac, one wheel completely buckled, and a white van was parked across the road, the front door hanging open. Laura turned off the ignition and hurried from her car. There were two men leaning against the back of the van and, as Laura came near, she heard one of them repeating, ‘I didn’t see him. I just didn’t see him,’ again and again.

  Up ahead, she saw a small knot of people gathered round a shape on the ground and she gasped when she realized it was a young man, around sixteen, with an uncommonly beautiful face – on one side. The other side was pulverized, the skull above it caved in like the top of a boiled egg. Someone had placed a jacket over him like a blanket and Laura was astonished when she saw it move up and down. He was alive! And they were all just standing there, gawping.

  She flung herself down next to him, seizing hold of his hand.

  ‘You’re all right,’ she told him. ‘You’re going to be fine.’

  She could see straight away that he wasn’t all right at all.

  Without thought to her clothes or to the watching spectators, who clapped their hands over their mouths in shock, she lifted his pulpy head on to her lap. ‘You shouldn’t move him,’ someone said, but she ignored them. He was somebody’s son. Somebody’s baby. At least his mother would know he died knowing love and kindness and that he wasn’t afraid.

  ‘You rest now, lovely one,’ she said to him, in a low, calm voice. ‘There’s nothing to be scared of. Everything is peaceful. Everything is love. You’re going towards the light. You’re going towards the love.’

  It was just like hypnotherapy. Repeating key phrases and words. It was all about the voice, really. You wanted to make your voice into a warm bath they’d happily submerge themselves in.

  It appeared to be working. The young man’s breath was quieter and the half of his face that was capable of expression looked calmer.

  She leaned further over him, so they were cocooned in their own world and he didn’t have to see the rubbernecking onlookers who’d done so little to help, or the swollen, grey sky above them. Somewhere in her consciousness she registered the sound of a siren approaching, but she blocked it out, giving her whole attention to the broken boy in her lap.

  ‘You’re feeling so peaceful,’ she told him. ‘It’s the most wonderful, blissful peace you’ve ever known. You feel calm and full of love and totally unafraid as you move towards the light, move towards the—’

  ‘Miss!’

  The man’s voice was inches from her ear and, now, people were surrounding them, rough hands yanking her away.

  ‘For God’s sake, what were you playing at?’

  The police officer who hauled her to her feet was overweight and flushed with anger.

  ‘I was soothing him.’

  ‘You were suffocating him!’

  But as Laura got back in her car half an hour later to drive the rest of the way to Annabel’s, having given her details and a witness statement to the police, she felt suffused in a warm glow of satisfaction. The police and paramedics didn’t know anything. They hadn’t seen the suffering on the boy’s face.

  She was the one who’d stepped in to help him.

  And she’d do it again in a heartbeat.

  46

  Corinne

  In her office at the university, Corinne gazed through her window at the man in the apartment facing her who appeared to be dancing. Raising one arm up in front of him and the opposite leg out behind. His bare foot was just visible over the top of the window frame, twitching like a tail.

  He raised both arms up over his head and then bent over, disappearing from view. Not a dance then. Exercise. Suddenly, she was overwhelmed with tenderness for him, this middle-aged man trying to make the best of what he had.

  On the desk in front of her was a thick volume called Unpopular Culture: The Politics of Creativity in an Adversarial Society, the latest academic tome from a visiting professor from University of California, Berkeley whom she’d invited to give a guest lecture.

  She opened it determinedly and started reading. ‘Aesthetic validation’, ‘urban ethnicity’ – the phrases danced in front of her eyes, blurring into one incomprehensible line. She turned to the end of the b
ook: 763 pages.

  Concentration eluded her, thanks to a persistent tug of anxiety, made worse by her being unable to pinpoint the cause.

  The encounter with Steffie two days before had been unsettling. Not least because she’d found herself sympathizing with the woman who’d, knowingly or not, set off the chain of events that led to Hannah’s breakdown. And Corinne dreaded having to tell her daughter about Eleanor’s existence. But the sense of menace she’d felt after finding the baby hat on her doorstep had lifted now she knew that Steffie had dropped it by accident, the first time she’d tried to call on Corinne.

  And although it was disturbing that Dr Roberts had started out practising medicine under a different name, he hadn’t been struck off, so he wasn’t breaking any law by continuing his medical career. And indeed, you couldn’t argue with the results he got. She understood why Hannah wanted to delay the decision of what to do with the information they had. There would be time enough once she was well again.

  But while there was an explanation or a resolution to each of Corinne’s individual concerns, when you put them all together they formed a pattern of strange events that seemed too sinister to ignore.

  And that was without Hannah’s near-miss with the lorry. Though she seemed to be getting so much better, Corinne had to consider the possibility that her daughter might have stepped off that kerb on purpose.

  Corinne had known enough friends and colleagues and students with depression to understand that mental health was not a linear construct. Mental health was like those crazy kaleidoscopic patterns that went round and round and folded in on themselves and then out again. And they were all just points of light in the pattern, coming in and out of focus, bigger, smaller, up, down. The lucky ones rode it out. The unlucky ones got sucked inside. There was no finish line with a big banner across it reading ‘CURED’. There was just waking up one morning and realizing you didn’t mind so much about having to get up.

  But she still couldn’t bring herself to believe Hannah had deliberately stepped in front of a lorry. Not her daughter. Please, God. Not Hannah.

  The noise of an incoming email came as a welcome intrusion. In her inbox was a message from Paddy asking for a suggested reading list. It was polite and respectful, but distant, as if they’d never met in real life.

  Awareness of having hurt his feelings was like a cheese wire around her heart. She thought about sending an explanation of what was going on, got as far as pressing reply but was stuck for the right words. Everything she wrote felt like a betrayal of her daughter. In the end, she deleted the draft and closed her inbox.

  Through the window, the man in the opposite block was holding what looked to be a tin of beans in each hand and pumping each arm in turn into the air as if he were doing a routine to music that Corinne couldn’t hear.

  She thought again about Hannah, over there in The Meadows, under the care of Dr Roberts, who, it turned out, had not only returned a young girl to her abuser but also helped send two women to prison for crimes they did not commit, so shattering three families.

  This was the man who got to decide whether to detain Hannah there against her will.

  She called up her search engine.

  What was the name Hannah had given her yesterday? William something. The surname was tantalizingly close – Corinne could almost taste it – yet every time she tried to pin it down, it moved out of reach at the last second. Had it always been like this, or was her memory getting worse? Like many of her peers, Corinne was always on the look-out for signs of a blunting of mental faculties, the dreaded flag staked into the top of the slippery slope.

  She typed ‘William neurologist shaken baby syndrome’ into the search box and waited for the results to load.

  Kingsley. That was it.

  The links were mostly to newspaper reports and magazine features. Reading them tore at Corinne’s heart. Grieving mothers, falsely imprisoned for killing their own babies. How would one survive such a thing?

  Several of the reports carried photographs of Dr William Kingsley, the expert witness for the prosecution, arriving in court, and Corinne stared at these for a very long time. Even almost quarter of a century younger and clean-shaven, with short dark hair in place of his longer, white-streaked mane, Oliver Roberts was still just about recognizable if you knew what you were looking for, though Corinne suspected a person coming across his photograph randomly would be hard pressed to connect the two men.

  Corinne skipped down the results, clicking on links that looked particularly informative. One of the two falsely accused women, Lucy McDermott, had a husband who’d stuck doggedly beside her after the arrest, spearheading the movement to get his wife’s name cleared.

  ‘I will never believe Lucy did anything to hurt our son,’ he had told a tabloid paper, ‘and I will never stop fighting for her release.’

  The husband had thick fair hair that sprung up on one side but not the other, and his expression was a mixture of defiance and sadness that made Corinne’s eyes blur with tears.

  The second woman, Barbara Phillips, had been married just eight months at the time of her arrest. Her new husband was more non-committal than Lucy McDermott’s and it didn’t surprise Corinne to learn the marriage had ended while Phillips was still in prison. Phillips had an older daughter, then twelve years old, and one of the tabloids went to town on the circumstances surrounding the girl’s conception. The father, it seemed, was a married man who’d begged his lover not to proceed with the pregnancy. ‘Barbara is the most self-centred person I have ever met,’ this man said when the media tracked him down. ‘I actually think she got pregnant deliberately to try to force me to leave my wife.’

  Talk about trial by media.

  All the reports were dated 1994, when the women were first convicted, or 1996, when they were released, after it was proven the babies could have died from blood clots brought on by infection, but towards the middle of the third page there was a more recent link:

  ‘The conviction was quashed but the nightmare never ends.’

  She clicked and found herself looking at a feature from a Sunday-supplement magazine from 2009 investigating the human legacy of wrongful conviction. There was a case of a man who’d been falsely convicted of armed robbery until CCTV footage was tracked down showing him at a petrol station fifty-three miles away at the time the crime was committed. And another man who’d spent nineteen years behind bars for rape and murder before advances in technology showed the DNA found on the victim couldn’t have come from him. Both were interviewed about the long-term psychological effects of being incarcerated for a crime they didn’t commit.

  Finally, there was an interview with Lucy McDermott, the first woman jailed for shaking her baby largely on the flawed evidence of Dr William Kingsley.

  ‘I was grieving for my baby and I was in prison with women who believed I was a baby-killer. Even after I was completely exonerated, there were still people who believed there was no smoke without fire. That man destroyed my life.’

  Corinne was so affected by Lucy McDermott’s testimony and the raw pain in her words, even fifteen years after the event, and by the sheer devastation Dr Oliver Roberts had left in his wake, that it took her a few seconds to collect herself enough to read the next paragraph.

  ‘Just how shattering the experience was can be gauged by the fate of Barbara Phillips, the second woman wrongly convicted on the evidence of Dr William Kingsley of shaking her own baby,’ the newspaper feature continued. ‘Following her release from prison, Phillips attempted to pick up the pieces, setting up home in a new town with her older daughter, who’d been taken into care while her mother was locked away, and reverting to her maiden name to disguise her past.

  ‘However, she never completely recovered from her ordeal, suffering prolonged bouts of depression. In 1997, she attempted to take her own life by taking an overdose of the tablets prescribed for her depression. Though she survived, she suffered a devastating stroke which has left her unable to speak or ca
re for herself.’

  Instantly, Corinne was back in that poky flat, staring at the grubby pink ears of Katya’s rabbit slippers as she shouted over the top of the television.

  ‘Is long time since she had stroke. Maybe twenty year.’

  Laura.

  47

  Laura

  There was a gorgeous smell coming from Annabel’s kitchen.

  ‘Banana bread,’ Annabel explained when Laura asked. ‘I baked a quick batch just before you came.’

  ‘Lovely,’ said Laura, but the longed-for offer of a slice never arrived, not even after Laura told Annabel about the accident and how she’d nursed that poor broken boy. She could remember a time when Annabel used to bring her tea and home-made cakes and biscuits, but she’d been becoming increasingly distant recently, which only made Laura more needy. It sometimes seemed to her that, no matter what she did or how hard she tried, she would always be on the sidelines of other people’s lives.

  The smell of home baking was like a physical ache in Laura’s stomach, a reminder of a life she’d never had.

  ‘I used to bake with Mummy,’ she said. ‘She was the most wonderful cook.’

  That was an exaggeration. Her mother had been a competent cook, nothing more. But Laura enjoyed the idealized version of her mum she’d created in her own head.

  ‘And when I was still nursing and living in the shared house with Tania and Nat and the other girls, we’d bake all the time.’

  This was also a lie. It was true that Tania and Nat used to cook together sometimes, sequestering themselves off in the kitchen with Amy Winehouse playing at full volume and erupting in peals of laughter that would tail off when Laura went in to see what was going on. But Laura had rarely made anything. So little point cooking for oneself.

  ‘I’m thinking of going back to nursing, actually.’

  There. That got Annabel’s attention all right. Laura could tell by the way the other woman sat upright in her armchair and the new focus in her wide-set eyes. When Annabel spoke, however, it was in her usual measured tone.