The Mystery of Mercy Close

by Marian Keyes

  Not huge. Medium-sized. But very impressive. A wooden-framed Frank Lloyd Wright sort of place with double-height sheets of glass and a cantilevered deck overlooking the lake.

  We parked close to the front porch and I got out, speedily cataloguing everything I could see. No sign of a car. In fact there were no signs of life at all. The house was in darkness but this was no reason to be discouraged. Wayne and Gloria might have switched the lights off and hidden behind the couch when they heard us at the gate.

  More sensor switches clicked on automatically and we were drowned in white light. I pressed myself up against a window, trying to see in, and found myself looking into a living room tricked out in brown, red and orange. The interiors person seemed to have gone with a Western theme. The broad floorboards were strewn with animal-skin rugs and the man-height fireplace was made of rough-hewn stones. Cow horns poked out of the wall and there was a lot of horse stuff. Rough-woven horse blankets were thrown on the leather sofas and I saw something that might have been a decorative bridle. Ornate metal things, again something to do with horses – reins, perhaps? – dangled from the ceiling. Most egregious of all was a three-legged stool fashioned from a saddle.

  No sign of Wayne, though. No sign of anyone. But maybe in a room that disgusting you couldn’t expect to find a human being.

  I wasn’t sure what we should do. We didn’t have a plan. We’d spent so long driving through the empty countryside that I’d become convinced we’d never find the house, never get to this point.

  I had the solution. ‘Ring him,’ I said. ‘Ring him and let’s try to talk him out.’

  ‘Okay.’ But when Jay took out his phone, he said, ‘No signal.’

  I grabbed my phone; no signal either. What a horrible feeling.

  ‘We need to get in there to talk to him,’ Jay said. ‘He’s probably upstairs in one of the bedrooms. Can I shout up to him?’

  ‘Let me think for a second. Okay, go for it.’

  ‘Wayne!’ Jay called. ‘WAYNE. It’s Jay.’ His voice sounded astonishingly loud in the still, pure air. ‘Listen, Wayne, everything’s okay, you’ve done nothing WRONG. We can sort this all OUT. Just come home to us.’

  The silence – the lack of answer – reverberated in the lakeside night. The air around a lake always seemed to me to be abnormally still and spooky and never more so than at that moment. I’d readily admit I wasn’t fond of lakes. I’d always found them a bit, well, smug. As if they knew everything about you and you knew nothing about them. Lakes tended to withhold, I found. Played their cards close to their chests. You never really knew what was going on with lakes, what secrets they were hiding in their closeted navy depths; they could be up to all sorts and you’d never know, like suburban swingers. Whereas with a sea you knew what you were getting. A sea was like a puppy (not that I liked them either). A sea was exuberant and open and couldn’t hide anything from you even if it wanted to.

  ‘We need to get into that house,’ Jay said.

  I was starting to have unexpected misgivings. If Wayne really didn’t want to be found, maybe I should respect that. But then the adrenaline overtook me, the rush of being so close to him, and suddenly I didn’t care; all that mattered was getting into the house.

  ‘How do we get in?’ Jay asked.

  ‘We just open the door,’ I said with a flourish.

  I went to the front door and tried the handle – because you never know. But it was locked.

  Well. That was a little exercise in mortification.

  ‘What now?’ Jay asked.

  ‘We ring the doorbell.’

  But there was no doorbell.

  ‘We knock politely,’ I said and I rapped my knuckles against the glass front door until they started to hurt.

  ‘What now?’ Jay asked again.

  ‘We break in. Obviously. You gom.’

  It might sound like fun but it wasn’t very nice breaking into a house. The practicalities can be challenging – usually you have to find something heavy, then break a window, open it, slide yourself in without catching any of your arteries on a stray shard of glass, then run through the house, all the time with the alarm screeching like the clappers and melting your head.

  Handily enough, in this case the front door was made of glass so I didn’t have to engage with any windows. And I had a can of strawberries in my car boot.

  ‘What are you doing driving around with them?’ Jay asked.

  ‘Shush now.’

  I was feeling a bit sick. This was agonizing, to be so close to Wayne and to have all these obstacles in our path. Or to consider that he wasn’t in there at all …

  I smacked the can hard on the glass and it bounced back at me. I smacked it again, harder and more focused this time, and was rewarded by the sound of glass shattering – a small hole had opened up, with big cracks leading out from it in all directions. I hit it one more time and most of the door just fell out of its frame and on to the hall floor, sending lethal little shards flying everywhere.

  I used the can of strawberries to knock away the jagged pieces that were still holding on around the lock, then I put my hand in and twisted open the lock on the inside.

  ‘As soon as I push this door,’ I said to Jay, ‘the alarm will go off and our ears will still be vibrating this time next week. But ignore the noise and move fast. You think he’s upstairs, so we’ll start there. Are you ready?’

  I pushed the door open and we raced in, crunching over the shattered glass, but no alarm started screeching. All there was, was silence. Unexpected, disconcerting silence. Which meant one of two things. Someone was in the house, which was good (but also bad because they clearly didn’t want anything to do with myself and Jay). Or the alarm had been triggered remotely and was currently bringing the roof in at the local cop shop. Which meant that in short order a squad car full to bursting with rasher-fattened guards would come belting along the road, yelping like dogs and brandishing their truncheons.

  Or maybe it meant a third thing, actually. Maybe it meant that because Docker had never even visited this house he’d never bothered to get an alarm. Maybe he’d thought the gates would be enough of a deterrent and then lost interest in the whole thing.

  ‘Move,’ I said to Jay.

  We both belted up the stairs. Something strange was happening each time our feet hit the wooden steps. We’d arrived on the landing and were moving from room to room so quickly – there were three bedrooms, all very ranchy – that it took a few moments to realize what the strange thing that was happening was. It was dust – inch-thick dust that had lain undisturbed for a long time – rising into the air as our feet slapped the ground.

  There was no one in any of the bedrooms, no one under the beds, nothing but dust. Losing more and more hope, I clattered back downstairs, my last bit of optimism pinned on the kitchen.

  I promised myself there would be signs of life there. We’d find lots of fresh food: milk, eggs, cheese, chocolate Swiss roll. But there was nothing. And when I saw that the fridge wasn’t even plugged in, it was like I’d hit a wall.

  There was no one here. No one had been here in a very long time.

  Not Wayne. Not Gloria. Not anyone.

  32

  The anticlimax was so appalling that I couldn’t speak and neither could Jay.

  All urgency left us and we walked, like people in shock, out to the deck. We stood looking down at the still black waters of the lake.

  For a long time we stared in silence into its inky depths.

  ‘Funny that,’ I said. ‘It does actually look like ink. It’s got the same texture, almost viscous.’

  ‘You could drown in that,’ Jay said. ‘There’re always ads on telly saying how easy it is to drown.’

  ‘They’re wrong,’ I said. ‘It’s very hard to drown.’

  I should know.

  I’d thought of everything that time I’d tried and I still hadn’t been able to pull it off. I’d actually packed a bag for it. I’d loaded up a rucksack with little han
d weights that I’d bought in another life when I’d cared about bicep definition. I’d filled my pockets with cans of strawberries and I’d worn my heaviest boots. I’d waited until it was late at night and dark and I walked right to the end of Dun Laoghaire pier, over a mile, as far away from land and people as it was possible for me to get, and climbed down the slimy, seaweedy stone steps into the black water.

  The water was cold enough to make me reconsider – only for a moment – but the biggest shock was that it only came up to my waist. I had expected I’d be engulfed immediately and carried off to the land of no pain.

  For the love of God! Was life going to humiliate me right until the very end?

  Defiantly, I struck out towards the mouth of the bay, to where the water was deeper – had to be deeper, how else did they get those massive ferries in? – but all the weights I was wearing were slowing me down.

  ‘Hey!’ a woman’s voice called from the pier. ‘You in the water, what are you doing? Are you okay?’

  ‘Fine,’ I said. ‘Just swimming.’

  She must have been a dog-walker. What else would she have been doing there at that time of night?

  I kept on going, moving sluggishly and slowly, hoping I’d fall off some underwater shelf and be dragged to the depths. But the water wasn’t getting any deeper. All that was happening was that I was getting colder. My jaw was chattering uncontrollably and my feet and legs were feeling thick and numb. Maybe this was how it would play out. Instead of drowning maybe I’d just get colder and colder and eventually get overtaken by hypothermia. I didn’t care how it happened, I just wanted it done.

  Words reached me on the cold, still night. Disembodied people were having a conversation about me.

  ‘… out there in the water. Look!’

  A man’s voice. ‘I have a torch.’

  A dog woofed and a beam of light cut across the water and landed on my head. For the love of God! Could they just not leave a person in peace to try to kill herself!

  ‘Are you okay?’ The man with the torch sounded alarmed.

  ‘I’m just swimming,’ I called, with as much authority as I could muster. ‘Leave me alone. Walk your dog.’

  A second man spoke. ‘She’s not swimming. She’s trying to kill herself.’

  ‘Is she?’

  ‘It’s dark, it’s freezing, and she’s got all her clothes on. She’s trying to kill herself.’

  ‘We’d better get her out, so.’

  The next thing the two men and – the ultimate humiliation – their fecking dogs were bounding down the steps and swimming out to me. When they reached me one of the men slipped the rucksack off my back and let it sink to the sea floor.

  ‘Leave me alone,’ I said, almost in tears. ‘Mind your own business.’

  But together they pushed and floated me back to the steps, the dogs gasping and panting and forming a happy little flotilla around me.

  The woman who had spotted me, who had kick-started the whole rescue mission, helped me up the last few steps. ‘What could be so bad?’ she asked, her face a picture of concern. ‘That you would do something like this?’

  I have always found dog-lovers to be irritatingly devoid of imagination.

  ‘We should ring the police,’ one of the men said.

  ‘Why?’ I said. I was crying now, crying my eyes out. I wasn’t dead. I was still alive and I’d been so looking forward to being dead. ‘It’s not a crime to attempt suicide.’

  ‘So you were trying to kill yourself!’

  ‘We should ring for an ambulance,’ the woman said.

  ‘I’m fine,’ I said. ‘Just wet and cold.’

  ‘Not that sort of ambulance.’

  ‘You mean the men-in-white-coats sort of ambulance?’

  ‘Well, yes …’

  ‘She’s freezing,’ one of the men said. ‘Drenched and freezing. And come to think of it, so am I.’

  These poor people – they’d saved my life and now they weren’t sure what to do with me.

  ‘I’ve a blanket in the car,’ the woman said.

  ‘Might as well head back,’ one of the men said. ‘We won’t achieve much by standing here.’

  Off we set, three of the four of us dripping wet. It took us about twenty minutes to cover the mile back and we were an awkward little band. From what I could gather, none of the others knew each other; they’d just been out for a peaceful late-night walk with their dogs when they’d happened upon me trying to top myself, and now they were obliged to make conversation with total strangers. The dogs, however, were having a great time: new friends, an impromptu swim – life didn’t get much better.

  ‘Do you have a home?’ the woman asked me. ‘Is there someone I can ring for you?’

  ‘No, no, I’m grand.’ Tears were still pouring down my face.

  ‘Maybe you could ring the Samaritans?’

  ‘Maybe I could.’ I pitied the Samaritans. I’m sure they wanted to hang up every time they realized it was me on again.

  ‘Did you lose your job or something?’ one of the men asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Did your boyfriend run off with another girl?’ the other man asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Have you thought about the people you’d have left behind?’ the woman asked, suddenly sounding angry. ‘Your parents? Your friends? Why don’t you think about their feelings? How they’d have felt if the tide hadn’t been out and we hadn’t been here?’

  I looked at her tearfully. ‘I’ve depression,’ I said. ‘I’m sick. I’m not doing this for the laugh.’

  Talk about adding insult to injury! Like, if someone gets lupus or cancer, they don’t have to put up with people accusing them of being selfish.

  ‘Well, it sounds to me,’ one of the men said, ‘that you need to go into someplace for a rest.’

  33

  Three months it had taken me, roughly three months, from my very first visit to Dr Waterbury, when I’d mocked his prescription for antidepressants, to me trying to drown myself.

  Within a week of first seeing him, not only had I got the drugs, but I was back in his office, begging for a higher dose and desperate to know when they’d start working.

  The descent into hell had begun about three or four days after his diagnosis. I hadn’t been feeling too sunny anyway but the trajectory was suddenly a lot steeper. Maybe because he’d put a label on it.

  I began to feel like I was splitting apart.

  Huge chunks of anxiety began to break free inside me and rise to the surface, like an iceberg calving. Everything looked ugly and pointy and strange, and it was like I was living in a science fiction film. As if I’d crash-landed into a body that was similar to mine, and on to a planet that was similar to earth, but everything was malign and sinister. It seemed like all the people around me had been replaced with doppelgängers. I felt very, very not safe. Uneasy was the most accurate description of how I felt, uneasy to the power of a million.

  All day long my stomach would buzz with bees and broken glass and I couldn’t eat a thing, then late at night a voracious hunger would come over me and I’d devour biscuits, crisps and bowl after bowl of cereal.

  I started taking the tablets, but within days I was back with Dr Waterbury, looking for a higher dose, and he – kindly, but firmly – told me it would take three weeks before they started working, so not to be expecting any miracles.

  ‘Oh God, don’t tell me that.’ I wept and writhed in front of him. ‘I need something to help me and I need some sleep. Please give me sleeping tablets.’

  He reluctantly gave me ten Stilnoct and warned me till he was blue in the face that they were highly addictive, that if I got too fond of them I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

  ‘But I can’t sleep anyway!’ I said.

  ‘Did something happen to you?’ he asked. ‘To trigger this … state of mind you’re in?’

  ‘No.’ There had been nothing, no trauma, recent or past. No relationship break-up. No one close to me had died. I ha
dn’t been mugged or burgled or anything. The whole thing had just come out of a clear blue sky.

  I wished there had been something. Because if I didn’t know what was wrong with me, how could I get fixed and be normal again?

  ‘Have you ever felt like this before?’ he asked.

  ‘No.’ I did a quick scan of my life. ‘Well, actually, maybe … A few times. But not as bad. Nothing like as bad. And the bouts didn’t last long, so I didn’t really notice, if you know what I mean.’

  He nodded. ‘Depression is episodic.’

  ‘What does that mean?’

  ‘It means that if it happens once, it tends to recur.’

  I stared at him. ‘Is that meant to make me feel better?’

  ‘It’s just information.’

  I went home and waited for the three weeks to pass, and while I was waiting I spent hours and hours on the internet, Googling depression, and it alarmed me to discover that my symptoms didn’t entirely fit. With classic depression, as far as I could see, it slows you down and seizes you up so you can’t do anything. I read a blog from one poor woman who had been lying in bed needing to do a wee, and it took her sixty-seven hours before she could drag herself from under the covers and into the bathroom.

  It wasn’t like that for me. I was really agitated, I needed to have things to do, I had to keep moving. Not that I was able to accomplish anything because my concentration was utterly destroyed. I couldn’t read anything, not even magazines. If it hadn’t been for DVD box-sets, I don’t know what I would have done.

  I didn’t deliberately decide to stop answering emails, it was just that it would have been easier to climb Mount Everest than construct a sentence. And I didn’t make a hard-and-fast decision to never answer my phone. I fully intended to do it later or tomorrow, just as soon as I’d remembered how to speak like a normal person. It wasn’t that I took sick leave from my job; it was nothing as dramatic as that. But sick leave took me. Somehow I’d managed to offload the few cases I’d been working on and I just slid into a place where I didn’t have any current work, and it was a situation that I was determined was merely temporary, but temporary began to go on for a while.