We all maintain the fiction that Mum had an ‘accident’, but the truth is, she tried to kill herself four years after she lost my father. I remember her when I was little: she was beautiful and smart and funny, the kind of funny that made you snort milk through your nose. When he died, it was as if she died with him. I didn’t realise I’d been holding my breath, waiting for something terrible like this to happen, until the day I came home from school not long after my fifteenth birthday, and found her hanging from the bannister in the hall.
I wasn’t strong enough to cut her down. Instead, I propped her feet on a kitchen chair to take the weight while I called 999, trying to loosen the tie – my father’s tie – from around her neck. I thought she was dead. Her face was purple, her eyes bloodshot and bugging from her head, her tongue protruding from between blue lips. I had no idea she was still alive until the paramedics got her down and started CPR.
She was in hospital for four months, the first week in a coma in intensive care, and then afterwards in a psychiatric ward. They put me in foster care; the family I stayed with were perfectly nice, but they didn’t have much interest in me beyond the cheque they received for taking me in. Eventually, Mum was released, and they let me go home to her. Social services kept an eye, of course, but physically, she was fine. They put her on antidepressants, she saw a shrink once a week for a few months; everything seemed, if not normal, no worse than a thousand other dysfunctional, damaged families.
The memory lapses started about a year later. At first, I didn’t really pay much attention; she’d forget small details, talk about events that had happened several years ago as if it’d been last week, that sort of thing. I was too caught up in my own life at the time to really notice. But then I came home from Bristol at the end of my first term at university, and Mum thought I was still studying for my GCSEs. After weeks of tests, the doctors were no closer to a diagnosis, but speculated she’d suffered some kind of brain damage during her suicide attempt. Either way, she couldn’t live alone, so I sold the house and found her a care facility she was prepared to tolerate. At the age of eighteen, I was on my own.
Mum abruptly grips my hand, her fingernails digging into my skin. ‘I see it in you,’ she says. ‘I see what you are.’
I try to pull away, but she’s stronger than she looks. ‘What do you see, Mum?’ I ask wearily.
‘Me,’ she says. ‘I see me.’
Chapter 22
Louise
I know Caz will retaliate for me moving in on her patch, and that it won’t take long for her to make her next move. But what takes me by surprise is that Andrew’s the one to deliver the blow.
‘You’re taking me back to court?’ I demand, when I receive the letter from his solicitor and ring him at work. ‘You know I’m barely getting by as it is!’
‘You’re earning three times the amount at Whitefish compared to what you were getting from the university,’ Andrew says coldly. ‘You’re on a consultant contract; you’re taking home more than Caz. It’s only fair we look at your maintenance and child support again.’
‘You don’t need to take me to court! We could talk about it, and come to some—’
‘Caz is very upset,’ Andrew snaps. ‘If you insist on hounding her like this, you can’t complain when there are consequences.’
The gloves are really off now. Andrew’s taking a risk, going after me like this. Not that I’m about to land him in it with Caz and tell her what really happened the night of the storm; I can’t prove it, and he’s an accomplished liar. But he’s relying on my decency not to cause trouble between them, and there’s a limit to how much punishment I can take.
If I’m going to do this job at Whitefish, I’m doing it on my terms. Hiding out at Chris’s office when I go to London isn’t going to work if I want to beat Caz at her own game.
‘You want an office at Whitefish?’ Chris exclaims, when I ask her to arrange it. ‘I thought you didn’t want to be anywhere near Caz?’
‘Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer,’ I mutter. ‘I want to keep an eye on her, and make sure she doesn’t screw things up on your account just to get back at me.’
I don’t get an office, but I get a desk on the open-plan mezzanine floor, right in the hub of things. I’m a journalist: rooting out the real story behind the headlines is what I do. I soon discover Caz is smart and undoubtedly good at her job, and great with the clients, but she’s a terrible manager. She puts people’s backs up, she’s autocratic and high-handed, and the creatives don’t like working for her. It’s AJ who follows behind her and cleans up her mess, smoothing troubled waters and using all his charm to ensure her directives are met on time. Without him, she’d be sunk. I can use this, I think cautiously. If I need to.
But I truly don’t want it to come to that. I’m tired of this tit-for-tat nonsense. I can’t afford to go to court; it’ll cost thousands of pounds, and I earn just over the threshold to qualify for legal aid. If Andrew doesn’t back down, I’ll end up in even more debt. Taking the job at Whitefish was meant to make Caz think twice about messing with my livelihood. Instead, she’s upped the ante yet again. I’m starting to wonder where this is all going to end.
I pick up the children from school, feeling angry and despondent. Tolly is his usual sunny self, but Bella doesn’t even speak to me as she gets into the car. She’s still sulking over that wretched tongue piercing. Andrew is the one who made her remove it, but it’s me she blames. She’s been even more sullen and uncommunicative this week, if that were possible.
When we get home, I pull into the driveway and wait for Bella to get out and open the garage door. ‘Why can’t we get an electric one?’ she complains, as she does every single time I ask her to perform this chore.
‘Same reason as yesterday,’ I say evenly. ‘Same reason as tomorrow.’
Tolly leans forward in his car seat, straining against the restraints. ‘Let me! Let me!’
‘You can’t reach the handle, darling.’
Bella reluctantly slouches towards the garage, opening it with agonising slowness, and I tamp down a rising tide of irritation as she then stands in the middle of the drive, blocking my way, to check her mobile. When she finally moves, she drops one of her Bluetooth earbuds – a ridiculously extravagant gift from Andrew – and takes her sweet time picking it up, while I drum my fingers on the steering wheel and suppress the urge to scream.
Eventually, she gets out of the way so that I can park. I help Tolly out of the car, and go around the house. The builders are still working on the porch, their scaffolding preventing us from going in through the front, so we have to enter through the back door. I must admit, Gary Donahue’s doing a good job. The front of the house no longer sags drunkenly forwards for the first time since we bought the place.
‘I found this on the drive,’ Bella says, rudely shoving something at me as she pushes past me into the mudroom.
It’s an earring. Some sort of semi-precious blue stone: topaz, maybe, or aquamarine.
‘Whose is this?’ I ask, dumping my bag on the kitchen table.