‘Don’t you start.’ Once Ali goes, he’ll go himself.
Michael steps forward and reaches out his arms to Ali. They thump one another on the back, once, twice, and break apart.
‘You stay in touch,’ says Ali.
‘I will,’ Michael says, although he doesn’t know if he can bear to.
He climbs into his MPV, gives a quick wave and drives off.
It’s a gloomy, overcast day; there’s no breeze to carry away the clouds and the air is heavy. Back in Rottingdean, the bungalow feels pointedly empty. As Michael steps over the threshold, his footsteps echo on the parquet floor. He’s not told Chrissie this is his last day yet; he decided to hand over the keys first, then say, so she isn’t expecting him home this early. She must have gone out.
He goes into the living-cum-dining room; there’s a letter addressed to him lying in the middle of the polished oak table.
He opens the envelope, scans the contents. It takes a few seconds to process. He reads it again to make sure, but yes.
They want the car.
He stands there, letting the shock wash over him.
After a few moments, he pulls open the French windows, steps outside. The path is lined with daffodils leading down to the end of the garden and there, against the back wall – the shed.
His shed.
No sooner has he clapped eyes on it than it’s as if the energy he’s pent up from so many weeks sitting in front of the telly comes back in a flood of adrenalin and testosterone. He isn’t fifty-three. He isn’t tired and grey-haired and living in Rottingdean. He’s seventeen. He’s a peroxide punk, from Croydon. And he’s livid.
FUCKING livid.
He throws open the door. BAM! The thin wooden walls shake. With robotic determination he reaches for his sledgehammer; the very same sledgehammer he used to knock through the hatch from the kitchen to the dining area. Then, like a warrior wielding a weapon as if his life depended on it, he brings it down on one of the shelves. The chipboard isn’t strong and neither is the bracket. Jars tumble with a tinkle of nails and screws.
BAM! He thwacks the shelf above. Boxes of electrical wires and plugs jump high into the air then thud onto the floor.
BAM! He hits the wall itself. Years of damp air and sea salt have taken their toll – the wood is soft, like tissue paper.
BAM! He strikes his workbench – the wood is laminated, stronger. So he goes at it again – BAM! BAM! – and eventually it splits in two, jagged with splinters.
Far away he hears someone calling his name, but he simply turns to the rear wall.
The sledgehammer goes straight through the old Formica dresser; the doors ping from their rusted hinges. He turns his arm to use the sledgehammer as a hook, and in one movement scoops the pots of paint and white spirit and putty and filler from the inside of the cupboard, with a clatter of tin on tin, to join the chaos on the floor. The lid comes off some ancient white gloss; it gloops, sticky as honey, coating the broken shards of glass and a roll of wallpaper.
‘MICHAEL!’
Michael spins round. There’s a figure standing at the open door of the shed but he can barely see through the red mist.
He turns back, raises the sledgehammer above his head and – BAM! – brings it down.
The dresser is demolished. Good. He never liked it anyway.
‘WHAT ARE YOU DOING?’
But Michael moves to face the third wall.
‘MICKEY, STOP!’
Out of the corner of his eye he’s vaguely aware of Chrissie, dressed in her coat and scarf. Just as he’s about to bring the sledgehammer down once more, she grabs his right arm.
‘NO!’
He bats her away with his elbow. She stumbles but just manages to steady herself. He’s dimly aware she can’t be badly hurt and is glad, but he’s gladder still when she hurries off up the garden path. He carries on until he’s razed the shed to the ground.
*
‘So what happened then?’ asks Gillian.
‘Chrissie rang the police,’ says Michael.
‘I see.’
To his mortification, Michael finds himself too choked up to speak. ‘She must have been very scared to call 999,’ he says, after a while.
‘Maybe,’ says Gillian. ‘But it was a good thing to do in the circumstances.’
‘I’ve never raised a hand to my wife though, honestly. I wouldn’t have hurt her.’
‘Perhaps she was worried you’d hurt yourself.’
‘I was just so far gone . . .’
‘I understand.’
Do you? I can’t imagine you ever getting that angry, thinks Michael. He glances up at Gillian; her face seems to have softened. Perhaps she isn’t that much older than he is, after all; she just appears that way. ‘You seem pretty patient to me,’ he says.
Gillian gives a half-smile.
‘You’ve waited a long time for me to say anything.’
She raises an eyebrow. There’s an understated humour in that gesture, he thinks. I like it. ‘Aye, well . . .’
‘Chrissie says it’s not helping that I bottle stuff up.’
‘Do you think she’s right?’
‘I find it hard to talk about . . . er . . . my feelings.’ Though it wasn’t as hard as I thought it would be, he realizes. ‘I guess when I do let it all out, it’s quite spectacular, isn’t it?’ He laughs. ‘I hope it was worth waiting for.’
‘It was.’
Michael feels a small burst of satisfaction. ‘Reckon that’s why the doctor got me admitted here – he was concerned I’d trash all of Rottingdean.’
‘Might I ask why you chose the shed, in particular?’
He is silent, casting his mind back. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘It’s purely, from how you’ve described it, you were in the house when you opened the letter. So why not – I don’t know – turn over the table or the sofa or break the TV in there? You must have been pretty fed up after watching so much television.’
Michael pictures the living-cum-dining room at their bungalow. He shakes his head. ‘I couldn’t do that. Not with all those family photographs watching me.’ In his mind’s eye he can see Chrissie’s carefully dusted china ornaments, the plumped cushions on the sofa, the freshly vacuumed rug by the hearth. ‘It’s Chrissie’s room.’
‘It’s not yours, too?’
‘Yeah, but Chrissie works really hard to make the house nice . . .’ Michael sighs. His wife’s dedication both touches and dismays him. On the one hand he’d hate for her to let things slip; on the other it seems to underline his own shortcomings. ‘I guess I went outside because . . .’ He struggles to recall the sequence of events. ‘When I read that letter, I was so angry . . . I’ve had run-ins with mates as a teenager, punched the wall, that sort of thing, in the past . . . But that afternoon – I can’t remember ever feeling like that before. My skull was going to burst. I had to do something.’
Gillian nods.
‘All those people, wanting a piece of my business. Tim and Lawrence from the hotel, Bob, even Jan . . .’ He can feel sweat breaking out on the back of his neck at the memory. ‘They shafted me.’
‘It sounds as if you feel circumstances really conspired against you, Michael.’ Gillian stops, then says, very deliberately, ‘And I do appreciate it must have been horribly frustrating. But all these reactions you’re talking about – the anger, the sense of injustice – are just thoughts, or that’s where they start out. And thoughts can be changed. I’d venture to suggest if you look at what happened from a different perspective, you could see that you were very gallant.’
Michael shakes his head, confused.
‘I mean, you didn’t smash up the house, which would have upset Chrissie and your children much more, or the car, which some folk might have been tempted to do, to stop the receivers having it.’
‘I suppose.’
‘So the person who was going to suffer most as a result of your actions wasn’t someone you owed money to, or even ultimately your fa
mily, was it?’
It was me, thinks Michael. I hadn’t seen it like that. He nods slowly.
‘Yeah . . . Chrissie was quite understanding about it, considering. Of course she was upset, but I’d have expected her to go completely mad.’ He laughs. ‘Guess she left that one to me.’
28
Abby taps on the door of the nurses’ office.
‘Sorry to interrupt,’ she says to Sangeeta, who’s busy on a computer. ‘I was wondering if you’ve seen Lillie?’
‘She’s in the art room.’
Sure enough, Lillie is sitting at the large table in the studio, painting.
‘Can I have a word?’
Lillie lifts her brush from the canvas and turns to Abby. Her make-up has been repaired – expertly applied eyeliner and mascara mask the obvious signs, but her cheeks are still swollen and blotchy. She has obviously been crying for a while, thinks Abby, filled with remorse.
‘I’m really sorry about earlier. I didn’t mean to upset you.’ Abby holds her breath, fearing her apology is inadequate.
Lillie smiles. ‘It’s OK. You weren’t to know you’d hit a nerve. And I was being out of order, or from your point of view it must have seemed that way. I’m just so keen for people to value themselves properly. Gillian would say I was “projecting”—’ she mimics the therapist’s Scottish accent, ‘ – and my real issue is valuing myself.’
Lillie resumes painting, and although Abby is curious to know what sparked her tears, she assumes it’s not her place to ask. Still, she doesn’t feel like leaving yet. She looks around the room. Works of art line the walls – patients have contributed everything from childlike daubs to painstakingly stitched samplers. Boxes of crayons, coloured pencils, felt tips and tubes of paint are piled on top of a large chest of drawers; the drawers themselves, according to the labels, contain sewing materials, wool, paper and plasticine. In the corner are a couple of easels. It reminds me of primary school, thinks Abby. Except for a large sign that says NO SCISSORS – even children would be trusted with those.
She turns her attention to Lillie’s painting. In the centre is a large black hole, surrounded by circles which lighten gradually through maroon to a bright, blood red. Lillie is focused on adding what looks to be a bird to the top left corner.
‘Do you mind if I watch?’ asks Abby.
‘Not at all.’
She pulls up a chair, taking care not to knock over the plastic cup of water Lillie is using to dilute her paints.
‘Are those acrylics?’ Abby peers at the chipped china plate being used as a palette. Round the outside are freshly squeezed blobs of red, yellow, blue and white; in the centre is a large swirl of scarlet.
‘Yup. I’m not that good at this—’ Lillie nods at her sheet of paper, ‘ – but I enjoy it.’
‘Oh, I think it’s lovely,’ says Abby, and whilst the abstract picture is not something she would want hanging in her home, she means it, if for no other reason than that it seems to be giving Lillie pleasure. As Abby watches Lillie dab tiny dots of white with seemingly little forethought, she has a hankering to give it a go. I can’t remember when I last allowed my imagination to roam like that, she muses. Photojournalism was a long way removed from such free creative expression, but years ago, when I was doing my degree, I used to paint all the time.
They sit in companionable silence, save for the occasional swish of Lillie cleaning her brush in water, until Lillie says, ‘I’m sorry I didn’t explain earlier – I didn’t feel up to sharing it in group, and I guess I’ve been trying to move on, to put it behind me. It’s not something I’ve told that many people here. But you know I was admitted before?’
Abby nods.
Lillie drops her brush into the cup and turns to face her. ‘I had trauma therapy.’ She takes a deep breath of air into her lungs and lets it out slowly, exactly as they’ve been taught, to help calm herself. ‘I know I’ve been in a few times, but when I came in here initially, they just got me back, stable, then let me go again. I say “just”, but that was a big enough job – I was in a bad way. I wasn’t sleeping at all and I was completely manic – drinking, not eating. I blew five grand in a single day in Churchill Square.’
Abby is agog. She’d find it hard to spend a tenth of that in one trip to the shopping centre.
Lillie continues, ‘I didn’t really let any of the staff here in then. But the second time, maybe it’s because I trusted them more or maybe I was so desperate I was willing to try anything. Certainly I was terrified, as it was the second psychotic episode I’d had in less than a year. Anyway, as luck would have it, Gillian was allocated to be my therapist from the outset – she’s the only one here qualified to do trauma therapy. So I ended up doing some really deep work with her, because we realized there was still loads of stuff that was fucked up in here.’ She taps the side of her head.
Abby nods. I’ve an idea how that feels, she thinks. Though I’ve never been as bad as Lillie. ‘I gather trauma therapy is very intense,’ she says.
‘You’re telling me – you have to re-look at past events, so it’s horrible . . .’ Another deep breath. ‘I find it hard to talk about even now . . . But when I was small, right from the age of about seven through to when I left home, I was abused by my stepfather and two of his friends. My mum worked shifts, and they used to come to the house when she was out.’
Abby is so shocked she can’t think what to say. Eventually she blurts, ‘How awful,’ but the words seem hopelessly inadequate.
‘I don’t want to go into detail, but so you understand, what triggered me in the group was what you said about having kids. Because what finally brought everything to a stop was that I got pregnant.’
Abby flushes with guilt. ‘Oh God, I really am so sorry.’
‘You weren’t to know,’ repeats Lillie.
‘No, but . . . I should have been more sensitive. What’s that saying – until we’ve walked a mile in someone else’s shoes? I can’t remember exactly, but it’s about not judging others, and I did. I assumed you were being preachy. I get a lot of it, what with Callum, and people who think they know all about autism . . .’ This isn’t about you, Abby, she reminds herself. ‘Anyway, I can’t apologize enough.’
Lillie shrugs. ‘As I said, it’s OK.’
‘So can I ask, did you . . . er—’ Abby hesitates, choosing her words carefully, ‘ – terminate the pregnancy?’ Lillie’s made no mention of having a child.
‘I didn’t, no. Even though my stepfather wanted me to. Even though I had no idea who the father was . . .’ Yet another exhalation. ‘I lost the baby. Maybe it was my body’s way of saying I couldn’t be a mum to this particular child . . .’ Her eyes well up.
‘Maybe,’ Abby nods. ‘Miscarriages happen for all sorts of reasons.’
‘No . . .’ Lillie’s voice is small. ‘The pregnancy ran full term. Everything seemed to be OK. Then the baby was stillborn. So you see, I do have experience of having children, in a way . . .’ She brushes away tears with the back of her hand.
Abby feels herself welling up too. This is even worse than I realized, she thinks. Poor Lillie. How I wish I could rewind the last few minutes of the morning’s session.
‘I was trying to express my feelings in this picture. It’s something Beth suggested in group – you know how into creative outlets she is – and I do find it helps.’
Abby examines the painting again.
‘That’s my baby girl, there,’ says Lillie, regaining her composure. She points at what Abby had assumed was a bird. The trail of dots in its wake suggests it has emerged from the dark core.
‘She looks like an angel,’ observes Abby.
They are both silent, staring, absorbing. After a while Abby asks, ‘Do you think your bipolar illness could be connected to everything you’ve been through? Though, please—’ she holds up a hand, ‘ – you don’t have to answer if you don’t want.’
Once more Lillie shrugs. ‘I’ve no idea. My sister, Tamara – she was abused too, a
nd she’s fine . . . Well, not fine, obviously, but she’s not bipolar. Who knows? Different people react differently to similar events, Gillian says. Although she did tell me damage from emotional trauma can result in actual physical changes inside the brain which can affect someone’s response to stress and stuff. There was probably something in me, something chemical, that was misaligned already . . . But yes, maybe without all that shit—’ she spits the word, ‘ – I might not have been so bad.’
‘You’re doing really well,’ says Abby. She hesitates, then adds, ‘I admire you. To be honest, I did already, but this only makes me even more.’
Lillie starts. ‘Seriously?’
‘Yes. And actually, the way that Callum responded to your stickers is unusual. I’ve never seen him engage that way with a complete stranger around. He doesn’t react enthusiastically that often even with me.’
‘Oh,’ says Lillie. ‘That must be hard for you.’
‘Some days it is.’ Abby hesitates. She doesn’t want to sound too effusive; nonetheless it seems Lillie’s not grasped what she’s trying to convey. ‘You have a gift, you know, Lillie. The way you connect with people, it’s rare, and you take time to be welcoming and kind to everyone. I don’t think I’d have got through my first few days without you.’
‘Aw, Abby. Stop – you’ll set me off again.’ Lillie’s bottom lip quivers. ‘But thank you.’ She hesitates. ‘Can we have a hug?’
‘Sure.’ And as they embrace, Abby breathes in the sweet apricot of Lillie’s scent.
29
‘So how are you?’ asks Johnnie, once Karen has settled into a chair opposite.
‘Is Lillie OK? I feel really bad about what happened in group.’
Johnnie shifts in his seat. ‘If you’re concerned, perhaps have a word with her? I’m not at liberty to discuss Lillie’s situation, I’m sorry.’ He looks as if he wishes there was another way. ‘Plus we’re here to talk about you, Karen, and how you’ve been since our session last week.’
I’m doing it again, aren’t I? she realizes. Focusing on other people.
She glances round the room. It’s an exercise in neutrality. There’s nothing to distract her; doubtless that’s the point. ‘I’ve been a bit up and down,’ she says, then becomes aware that sounds as noncommittal as the decor. ‘Though it’s been good to come here and have somewhere to talk.’ Other than this morning, she adds to herself. That made me uncomfortable. But she refrains from saying so. It might come across as criticism and instinctively she wants to shield Johnnie.