House of Small Shadows

FOURTEEN

Catherine got to her bedroom with a bottle of lemon vodka and yanked the curtains closed. Outside, a group of laughing men walked under her window.

She freed herself from the skirt that had been a hobble the moment she put it on, a fool’s tapered manacle. She tugged both stockings down her legs and fell upon the bed. Rolled on to her side and choked as much as cried.

A sudden thought made her snatch at her BlackBerry and she scrolled through menus to delete the folder that contained all of his messages. Get them out now so there would be no time spent trawling through them and imagining clues in the coming months, or even years. But her hands were shaking too much to operate the ridiculous keypad. She let it drop to the floor.

How could he? Why? Is there someone else? Who? It’s not possible, because of… started until her head hurt and she ran out of conspiracies and clues.

She stayed on the bed until it was dark, sipped the vodka. When her phone chimed the arrival of a text message, she scrambled undignified amongst the detritus of her outfit, shoes and underwear on the floor. It was a message from a company asking her to claim compensation for being mis-sold insurance. She sent the word CUNTS back to them. Then felt the urge to send messages to Mike.

Tell him you’re pregnant again.

Silence and indifference are the greatest weapons.

She deleted the three lines of text she’d composed. Even in her grief, their churlish and pathetic sentiment shocked her into the first assault of self-loathing. And that’s when it really went wrong. She felt her own gears changing and the engine of her heart revving to reach despair as quickly as possible. Nought to sixty in three seconds.

Put me in a case with the kittens. So I can be safe from the pain. I can wear a pretty dress and have big open eyes and never have to go out again. Because there’s not enough of me left to take any more pain. I’m done.

She stood up and tried to run for the kitchen and the scissors with the orange plastic handles. But weaved. Her legs felt useless. ‘Fat bitch,’ she said at herself. She’d been brought back down to size, so it was time to cut herself down to an appropriate stature. At least he’d know why she did it.

And in no time at all, she found herself standing on the kitchen lino in bare feet and holding the scissors that had almost leapt out of the rattling utensils drawer beside the sink. She held the points of the scissors before her belly. Stared at them with horror. She knew she wouldn’t do it again. But at the same time a reckless hateful desire to punish herself made the closed blades twitch.

Each hand around the handles fought with the other. She imagined the metal going in, deep, and then she would turn it around inside and sever all the relevant tubes and she would put an end to her useless body. The desire to do this was getting hot and urgent. But the other hand went white-knuckled to keep the scissors out of her flesh. Some curious instinct for survival had made an unexpected appearance and she was almost impressed with herself.

Some of you is normal.

She threw the scissors and they struck the microwave and bounced back within reach. That evil force you always knew was there wants you cut.

Patsy Cline. Get Patsy on the stereo. Top yourself to Patsy.

No one’s getting topped, you melodramatic twat. You can’t go yet. The suffering isn’t over and you have to take it, and take it, and keep on taking it, because that’s what life is, bitch.

She laughed horribly. Then sank to the lino and sobbed so hard she couldn’t breathe.

The clock on the DVD player said 6:49. Saturday morning. She moved from the floor to the sofa and stayed there until Sunday night.

Eventually, slowly, the shock retreated like a briny tide and left mudflats behind. Above them was a grey horizon. The activity in her mind was no longer frenzied, it was dispassionate. It was as slow and dreary and monotone as sleep-deprived acceptance usually is. It was acknowledgement through exhaustion. And in acknowledgement there was some relief. It got you to the bottom faster. On the bottom you suddenly saw everything clearly and as it was.

On Sunday morning, she opened the filing cabinet inside herself and got out every folder for a thorough scrutiny. By Monday morning she’d reached the last file. It took that long to re-examine the evidence.

With a remarkable clarity and in forensic detail, her memories were all waiting in Technicolor with an audio track. She drew the inevitable conclusions from them and unravelled the six months of psychotherapy her parents had recently paid for.

First, she revisited the London years and the swivel chair in the ticket office of the children’s museum, and the boredom that became a physical pain before she made assistant curator. The flat in Walthamstow appeared next, with the determinedly upbeat girls who were prancing at 5:30 in the morning with their blonde ponytails swinging (shoulder-length blonde highlights at the weekend), to do Pilates and body pump, but with whom she never made it past small talk.

She watched herself undermined by a bitch in the specialist antique publishing company who stole her ideas for two books. She saw again the bulbous features of the fat male colleague, who made two rebuffed passes before she left that job for a junior position at an auction house, while renting a room for five hundred pounds a month in Kilburn and trying to live on the remaining three hundred of her salary.

Then there was an auction house for two miserable years and a bad break-up from a long relationship with an older man she could not love, who tried to throttle her when she finished with him.

Two years at an independent television production company followed, Handle With Care, and a year full of exclusion and spite from a consensual coven of quick girls with wannabe Kate Moss wardrobes, who she still wanted dead.

When her recall arrived at the incident with one of them, their leader in effect, she put her memories on fast forward through the resulting crisis that made her parents come and fetch her, although they were on holiday in Portugal, before she began six months on antidepressants in her teenage bedroom at her parents’ house, right here in dear old Worcester. You couldn’t cut it so you had to be brought home by your parents at the age of thirty-six.

But there was Mike. Mike had been there for her when she came home to Worcester. He limited her slide and shortened the downward spiral.

She meandered ahead to the job as an estate agent, before a chance meeting with Leonard, a specialist in toys, which led to her dream job as a valuer in Little Malvern. Thirty-seven by then and things were looking up. She found her own flat and was strong enough to inhabit it. She’d never been happier. Not ever.

Miscarriage. Fast forward for God’s sake.

She clutched her hands to her face and began a slow rhythmic moaning, wretched in a towelling robe with two-day-old make-up blackening her cheeks.

Single again. Childless.

A moan of anguish came out of the pit of her stomach. The sound terrified her, so she cut it short and stared at the wall instead, until the fabric of the cushions started to burn her legs and bum.

She moved back to her bedroom and stayed there until Wednesday morning. Sometimes she slept but always hated waking up. At noon she had wanted to die again, but only briefly.

Leonard had left eight messages since she’d called in sick. The sound of his kind voice only made her cry more. An old man in a wheelchair with a bad wig was the closest thing she had to comfort.

On Wednesday afternoon she suffered an ‘episode’ of the kind she had not experienced since her first year at university. A trance. One of her old episodes that began the day Alice Galloway went missing.

When she broke from the trance she lay on her sofa in the same position she remembered herself to be in when conscious. Her mouth and chin were sticky with blood.

The television screen and V&A poster of Renaissance Marionettes came into focus on the wall on the other side of the living room. The sun was no longer pouring through the net curtains. Outside, dusk had fallen and turned her unlit flat blue-grey. A car reversed and a distant chime of an ice-cream van faded to silence.

Against the sofa fabric her skin was hot, her jogging bottoms were damp and creased under her buttocks and thighs. Catherine stayed still for a while until the swoops of nausea subsided. If she tried to walk she would fall.

Black sky over a meadow. Plastic boy outside the sweet shop. Row of children standing on a hill, clouds moving over them swiftly. Boy with a painted wooden face. Bright-red roses in shimmering golden air.

Some of the images faded when she chased the final fragments of the trance. Other parts stayed as if the past was yesterday, pieces that had returned from a far distance inside her; the part of herself where what she thought were memories were dreams, and what she thought were dreams were memories.

The last time she’d suffered an episode was on a Sunday afternoon in her parents’ conservatory. That day she came out of a trance and back to the world with her head hanging between her shoulders and a chin wet with blood and saliva. It had been the summer holiday before her second year at university. She must have been nineteen. So this was the first trance in nineteen years.

Sat in shock, the idea that she had not just drifted away in a daydream, but had been engulfed, was paralysing. It had come back, all over again.