Stop at Nothing

by Tammy Cohen

  Well, good. Far easier to cope with the guilt of leaving her here if she was oblivious to what was going on around her.

  ‘I’m going to have to go now, Mum,’ I said, reaching over to give her a hug.

  Already I could feel my guilt at leaving and my relief at getting away pulling in opposite directions, forming a tourniquet around my heart.

  At first I thought she wasn’t even going to reply, leaving me free to slip quietly away, but as I reached the door she called out, stopping me in my tracks.

  ‘You’re leaving me, then, are you, just like he did?’

  Remorse skewered me to the spot while the care assistant shot me a sympathetic look, which I ignored. But before I could explain again to Mum about Dad being dead rather than just having gone AWOL, she continued.

  ‘Went to answer the door, didn’t he? And then, pfffff. Silly old fool.’

  Something niggled at the edges of my mind.

  ‘Who was it, Mum? At the door?’

  But now her attention had wandered. She looked at me, blinking. Then stared at the door to her room, which was open to the corridor.

  ‘Well, there’s no one at the door. Who were you expecting?’

  Her pale eyes were wide, making her appear as guileless as a baby, and I was seized again by the depth of my treachery in leaving her in this place.

  ‘She’ll be fine,’ said the care assistant, seeing something stricken in my face. ‘We’ll take good care of her.’

  By the time I let myself into my parents’ house an hour later, having spent the intervening period ensconced with the home’s manager, filling in interminable forms and trying not to look at the monstrous amounts of money I was committing to every week, I’d talked myself into a more objective frame of mind. My mother was in the very best place for her, I told myself. I’d visit regularly. I’d done the right thing.

  I walked into the living room, pleased with the way I was managing to put a distance between myself and my emotions. Here I was, aged fifty-two, quietly competent, getting on with the things that had to be got on with.

  I set about tidying the place up. Though my parents had a cleaner who came in once a week, my mother would often get agitated at the thought that a stranger – she always claimed not to recognize the cleaner from one visit to the next – was handling her things. ‘Don’t touch that, it’s worth thousands!’ she’d shriek when the poor woman tried to pick up an Ikea fruit bowl to dust underneath, or the novelty ashtray they brought home from a tacky Corfu souvenir shop. As a result, the house had a tired, surface-clean feel, as if ornaments had been wiped around and things swept hastily into drawers.

  My smugness at the way I was coping with everything lasted right up until I made myself a coffee and opened the kitchen cupboard and saw the mug I’d given my dad on his birthday a few years before, with a photo of him and Mum on their fortieth wedding anniversary, flanked by a heartbreakingly young Em and Rosie, all smiles and laughter lines and gratitude for everything they had. He’d been so pleased with that mug, insisting on drinking his morning coffee from it. And Mum had teased him, calling it his kingly tankard.

  A dagger of loss sliced through me, cleaving apart my skull and chest, leaving my heart exposed, and I dropped to the floor, curling up there and howling with pain.

  I would never see my father again. The blunt fact of it sucked the air from my lungs.

  Nor would Mum ever again be the laughing, teasing woman in the photograph – the one who’d brought me up. Life had lurched forward into a different gear and there was no reverse, no going back.

  I’d never felt so alone. Not only was I missing my parents, but also my friends. I’d been so hurt when Kath and Mari had failed to show up to the funeral four days before. I’d waited for them to get in touch to apologize, but there had been nothing. Just a text from Mari the next day, saying, Hope yesterday wasn’t too traumatic x, and one from Kath with just a kiss. No ‘sorry’, no explanation. Nothing. It was as if they didn’t consider my father’s death to be that much of a big deal.

  Well, I wasn’t about to make the first move, if that’s how little they cared. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t devastated by their behaviour. Even Frances, who I hardly knew at all, had made the effort to come, invited or not.

  After I’d cried myself out, I dragged myself to my feet, my eyes coming to rest once again on the drawer that held Dad’s diabetes equipment.

  I opened it and stood gazing in. Dr Ali had taken the insulin pen my dad had been using. But here were test strips and lancets, plus a meter to test his blood sugar levels, a packet of glucose tablets and a box to dispose of the old needles.

  Something snagged in my mind as I slid the drawer shut, and I went back into the living room to dig out my laptop, which was charging on the floor next to the television.

  Guilt stopped me from sitting in my mother’s usual chair, as if I might find it still warm.

  Instead, I sat on the floor with my back against the sofa they’d hardly used and double-clicked on the icon that launched the webcam. For a crazy second when the picture came on I wondered who on earth that was making themselves at home in my parents’ sitting room, until I remembered that, of course, it was me.

  When I’d first got the Granny-Cam app, I’d subscribed to an extra video-recording function which meant footage could be stored for up to thirty days. It was only a year since I’d been made redundant and I still expected to go back into full-time work, so I wanted the option of coming home from work and being able to replay the footage of whatever had happened during the day so I could check that the carers had been doing what they were supposed to.

  I started rewinding the footage, speeding backwards to the day of my father’s death (could it really be just two weeks ago?). Once I’d reached the right day, I pressed play at a random point in the afternoon. There was my father, kneeling on the floor in front of my mother’s chair, helping her on with her shoes while she gazed vacantly ahead. The sight of him, living, breathing, still so alive, splintered me into tiny, sharp pieces.

  He was wearing the jumper I’d bought him for Christmas two years before, pale blue and kitten soft. I knew exactly how it would smell. That mix of the sugar-free mints he liked to suck and the peanut butter he would eat directly from the jar when no one was watching, the Head & Shoulders shampoo he used every morning on the full head of hair he was so vain about. And that other, sweet, musky smell that was completely his own.

  My head was full to the brim with missing him.

  For a few seconds, I almost gave in to the temptation to sink back to the floor, rocking, as I had done in the kitchen, but then I steeled myself, knowing how easily a spontaneous outpouring of grief could turn into abject self-pity.

  I started fast-forwarding the tape, looking for the point when someone came to the door, holding down the forward-arrow button so long my finger started to go numb. Nothing. I sighed. Another one of my mother’s flights of fantasy. I was about to give it up when something caught my attention.

  I rewound the tape. The clock in the top-right-hand corner said 16.47 when my father looked up from the book he was reading and exchanged a few words with my mother, whose expression had suddenly become one of sly coquettishness, and who was patting the back of her thinning hair as if in anticipation of a gentleman caller.

  I saw my father get stiffly to his feet, turning down the corner of the page in his book before placing it face down on the chair. I smiled to myself when I saw that he was reading Bleak House yet again, despite all the new books I’d sent his way over the years, accompanied by effusive descriptions of why he’d enjoy them.

  Dad made his way out of the living room. Though the door he exited through was ajar, frustratingly, it wasn’t open wide enough for me to have a view into the hallway.

  A minute went by. Two. Then Dad reappeared in the living room, walking with purpose to the sideboard, where he opened a drawer and withdrew an old Oxo tin where he and Mum had always collected change they didn’t want
to carry around with them. My heart broke as I watched him rummage around inside and realized someone must have come collecting for charity.

  He always was a soft touch.

  Dad was facing the camera as he picked out coins. I could tell by the stiffness of his fingers that his arthritis must have been playing up that day. He’d pulled the door half closed behind him, obviously so the visitor couldn’t see what he was doing, though his innate politeness wouldn’t have allowed him to shut it completely.

  Mum was saying something. Twisting around in her chair to speak.

  And that’s when I saw it.

  A dark blur moving in the background.

  I pressed stop, and then rewound, and something hard and sharp lodged in my throat.

  There! There it was.

  Quick, but unmistakable. A shadow moving across the open doorway to the hallway, too dark to see clearly, but tall and obviously human. Then, a few seconds later, the same thing in reverse, a shadow passing the other way, back towards the front door.

  I didn’t know what it meant, but something felt badly wrong. Had my parents been victims of a callous conman, pretending to be collecting for some good cause or other, taking advantage of my dad’s brief absence to mount a lightning-fast robbery?

  Getting up, I checked that the webcam in the corner of the living-room ceiling was recording, then crossed the room and went out to the hall, making sure the door was open at the same angle as it had been in the footage from the day my dad had died. Then I crossed from the front door to the bottom of the stairs, which were to the right of the hallway, assuming an opportunistic thief would have nipped up to the bedrooms to pocket some jewellery or bedside cash.

  But when I played back the footage of the last few minutes, I realized the angle of the open doorway made it impossible to see any movement at all.

  That only left the kitchen, which was to the left of the front door as you came in, the side closest to the living room. But what on earth would a thief be hoping to steal from a kitchen?

  Even then, dread was crawling over me like a rash, but I refused to acknowledge it. I made my way once again into the hallway and crossed from the front door to the kitchen.

  Watching the footage back was like a replay of the original film.

  Someone had come to the front door, created an excuse to distract my dad, then slipped into the kitchen while his back was turned.

  Less than an hour later, my father had taken his insulin pen out of the drawer and injected himself with a fatal overdose.

  It couldn’t be true. I must be imagining things. Grief was making me paranoid, so I saw connections that weren’t there, just as I had when I thought Stephens was Rosie’s new boyfriend.

  But it didn’t matter how hard I tried to rationalize it, or how ridiculous I told myself I was being. My mind kept coming back to the same conclusion, as if drawn there by a magnet.

  Stephens had been in my computer. He’d seen the letter I’d written for the new carer, which set out every detail of my parents’ lives.

  He knew where they lived.

  He knew where my dad kept his medication and what the correct dose was.

  What if it was him?

  40

  ‘Do you think maybe you should see someone?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Like a counsellor.’

  Nick saw my face and immediately added: ‘It wouldn’t be surprising if you’re not thinking straight after everything you’ve had to cope with recently.’

  ‘You think grief has made me bonkers?’

  ‘Not bonkers. Just very sad and perhaps a little bit paranoid.’

  We were sitting in Soho Square, on one of the few patches of grass that hadn’t been commandeered by achingly trendy media types – men with bushy beards and long shorts and colourful T-shirts with tasteful logos, women whose skin and hair gleamed, and whose eyes were hidden behind dark glasses, their lips fuchsia or flame red – or by the kind of scabby pigeons urban England specializes in.

  Nick had nipped out of work for lunch so we’d bought sandwiches from Pret A Manger to eat in the grubby mid-May sunshine. The air was thick with fumes and ambition, the heady promise of a London summer.

  ‘I know it sounds far-fetched.’

  Nick shook his head.

  ‘Listen, you just lost your dad. That’s hard enough on its own. Then you learn he might have done it deliberately. Of course you’re going to want that not to be true. Of course you’re going to look for other explanations. Anyone would. But don’t you think it might be the grief taking over? And probably a bit of misplaced anger as well. You’re mad at your dad for dying and for leaving you with the guilt about putting your mum into a home. But you can’t let yourself admit that because he’s dead and you miss him so much.’

  Instantly, my eyes were blurred with tears, my Pavlovian response to any scrap of sympathy. I was already realizing that losing my dad was never not going to hurt. Bereavement wasn’t something you could be cured of with a course of antibiotics.

  Nick shifted towards me and put his arm around me and I leaned my head gratefully on his shoulder. It was embarrassing how much I craved human contact. Not in a sexual way, just in the way of having someone care, someone put their arms around me and give me the comfort I could no longer get from my parents.

  I missed Kath and Mari more than I could say, but their behaviour made me question just how close we really were. After the texts they’d sent the day after the funeral, I’d waited for them to contact me, expecting to pick up the phone and hear Kath’s voice: ‘Sorry I’ve been such a dick.’ But there was nothing. And their silence hurt me in a fundamental way I couldn’t express, like I was a giant game of Jenga and someone had taken the bottom bricks out so now the structure of me appeared to be built over an empty space.

  ‘But what about the blurry figure in the hallway?’ I asked Nick.

  My voice sounded small and whiny to my own ears.

  ‘It could have been anything, Tess.’ His thumb stroked my shoulder while he spoke. ‘The shadow of the front door swinging in the wind or a person passing on the road outside. Look, go to the police. Tell them what you saw. Show them the video. Then at least you’ll have done what you can.’

  ‘But you think they’ll think I’m crazy. Like you do.’

  Nick gave my shoulder a squeeze.

  ‘I don’t think you’re crazy, Tess. I think Stephens is a nasty piece of work and you’ve zoned in on him because it’s too painful to focus on all the other things – your dad, your divorce, everything.’

  He put his hand on my chin and gently turned my face towards his so he could kiss me on the lips, and all my fears and sorrows temporarily melted in the hot rush of my body’s response.

  ‘You’re not crazy at all,’ he repeated softly when we finally pulled apart. ‘You’re gorgeous.’

  His eyes were so blue I had to look away.

  The thing about grief is it doesn’t follow a neat, linear pattern, starting off at a peak and then tapering off to nothing over time. Grief is like one of those lines on a monitor you see on TV medical dramas, with jagged spikes that come out of nowhere. You can’t plan for it. You can’t anticipate it. It’s not like packing an umbrella for a predicted shower.

  You can have a couple of days where the world seems almost back to normal. You’re actually interested in what’s going on around you. Things exist in their own right, not just in reference to the person who is no longer around to experience them. I’m getting over it, you think, relieved. The worst has passed.

  Then, the very next morning, you awake feeling as if an elephant is sitting on your chest, crushing your ribs so your breath comes out in painful, thin gasps, and nothing has any point. Not the eggs you were going to make for breakfast, or the make-up you were going to put on to face the day.

  After I said goodbye to Nick on the southern corner of Soho Square, I felt better than I had done in days. Of course the shadow I’d seen at my parents’ house th
e previous week would turn out to be nothing. And I was sure he was right that blaming Stephens was just a diversionary tactic to spare myself from facing the things that were still so raw.

  I could still feel the warmth of Nick’s arm around my back, and my lips tingled from our goodbye kiss.

  So I was fine, relatively speaking.

  Until I started wondering about Nick and whether this might actually turn out to be the start of something. And that got me thinking about Phil and how badly that had ended, and how sad my father had been to see me floundering in the aftermath. ‘I’d love to see you find someone to make you happy,’ he’d said. And now, no matter what happened, he never would. Whoever I found next, whether it was Nick or someone else, they’d be someone my dad would never know.

  The realization came out of the blue, poleaxing me as I came out of Dean Street ready to cut down Old Compton Street. I turned towards the plate-glass window of the old-fashioned whisky and cigar store that had been there for as long as I could remember, as if fascinated by the bottles on display. But really, I felt lacerated by grief.

  Things would change, and I would become a different person from the person my father knew. Yet he would stay always the same.

  After I’d collected myself I walked briskly on to Leicester Square Tube, but grief was a stalker, dogging my footsteps. No matter how fast I walked, it stayed right behind me.

  Leaning against the glass partition on a crowded Piccadilly Line train on the way home, I spotted a man further down the carriage who looked just like my dad when I was young – broad-shouldered and thrumming with purpose, bouncing softly on the balls of his feet. I closed my eyes to block him out, but now I found myself thinking again about that shadow moving across the doorway behind my father’s back as he scrabbled in his old coin tin.

  It couldn’t be Stephens, I told myself. Nick was right – that was just me inventing wild theories to take my mind off the fathomless chasm of loss that had opened up like a trapdoor in the centre of my life.