For the first few days I felt curiously empty, hollow, as though I’d done something immense and it hadn’t sunk in properly. At the same time I felt afraid. I double-locked the front door as soon as I came in every night. I looked for signs that he’d been in the house as soon as I came home, but nothing had been moved or changed. At least, nothing that I could put my finger on.
I thought it had all been easy—I thought that he’d seen sense, maybe he hadn’t been as bad as I thought, and I found myself thinking that maybe I’d made a mistake; he was great in bed, able to make every time we had sex different, exciting. I considered texting him and asking him to come back, but in the end I just put my phone in my bag, out of sight, and left it there.
I didn’t see him for two weeks after that night. I had been crying at night, missing him, in a bizarre sort of way. It was my problem, I realized, I was the one who was a complete commitment phobe—no wonder he’d found it hard to be with me. No wonder he’d left and not looked back. I sent him a couple of texts but they remained unanswered. When I called his cell it went straight to voice mail.
Two weeks after he’d gone, I had a phone call from Claire.
I was at work, in the middle of completing a presentation that needed to be ready for the afternoon, and suddenly Claire was on the phone. Her voice was strange, tight. She asked me how I was.
“I’m okay, love. Are you okay?”
“I just think you’ve made a huge mistake, that’s all.” I could hear tears, somewhere not too far away, although she was fighting to keep her composure.
“A mistake? What do you mean?”
“With Lee. He told me you’d finished with him. I couldn’t believe it. Why on earth would you want to do that?”
I was about to say something, but she didn’t give me time to get a word in.
“He told me he was going to take you away on vacation. He said he was so looking forward to it, how you’ve changed his life, how you made him happy when he thought he’d never be happy again. Do you know about his last girlfriend, Catherine? Did he tell you about Naomi? Do you know she killed herself? She left a note asking him to meet her and made sure it was him that found her. He’s never gotten over it. He told me he still has nightmares about seeing her body. And then he told me that you’d ended it with him, told him you wanted to go out and start seeing people again—how could you do that, Catherine, how could you do that to him?”
“Wait, Claire—it wasn’t like that—”
“Do you have any idea,” she continued, and she was crying now, gasping in between words, struggling to get them out; I could picture her perfectly, her beautiful complexion mottled with fury, fat tears running unchecked down her cheeks, “do you have
any
idea at all how unfair all this is? I would give anything to have a man like Lee. I would give anything at all, anything in the world, to have someone be as devoted to me as he is to you. He
loves
you, Catherine, he loves you more than anything. You have absolutely fucking everything in the world, and you’re just throwing it all away, and—and—breaking his heart in the process. I can’t bear it.”
“It’s not like that, really,” I said at last.
She’d finally run out of things to say, just the odd sob and endless sniffing. At least she hadn’t hung up.
“You don’t know what it’s like with him. He follows me around. He lets himself into the house when I’m not here . . .”
“You gave him a
key
, Catherine. Why would you give him a fucking key if you only wanted him to go in the house when you were already inside it?”
I didn’t have an answer for that. Even I knew it didn’t sound bad, put like that.
“Do you know what makes it all worse? Even after what you’ve done to him, even after you’ve broken his heart, he’s still completely madly in love with you. He told me all about all the things you said to him, and straight after that he said if I saw you I was to ask you if you’d go and see him. He’s back working at the River. He said he wanted to see you, to check you’re all right. He said he wasn’t going to come to the house because you’d asked him not to. So, you going to go?”
I told her I’d think about it.
Clearly that had been more or less what she’d been expecting, because she gave me a final shot of, “I still can’t believe what you’ve done, I hope you’re proud of yourself,” and hung up.
I cried after that, shutting the office door and hoping to God nobody would come in. Claire had never spoken to me like that before. She was a loyal friend, someone who understood that friends always came before guys, that whatever a guy said to you was not usually to be relied on, especially not when a bloke was bad-mouthing a friend.
I went through the rest of the day in a haze of misery. I finished my presentation as quickly as I could and delivered it without any real thought or enthusiasm. Claire’s words spun around and around in my mind. I must have been really wrong, for her to talk to me like that. I thought about what she’d said, about how unhappy he was without me, how much he loved me. I thought about his last girlfriend, this Naomi—he’d never mentioned her name again after that one whisper in the middle of the night—and about why he’d chosen to talk to Claire about her, and not me. And I thought that he must have been through such a lot of misery, and how he’d been
happy.
How I’d made him happy.
I left work as soon as the presentation was finished, telling them I had a headache, which was the truth. I went home and cried some more, thinking about Claire and how I couldn’t afford to lose one of my dearest friends, one of my oldest friends.Later, when I’d been lying in bed for hours, thinking about it all, I got out of my pajamas and into the red dress. It didn’t fit me as well as it had done last time I’d worn it—it was baggy around the waist and the chest, as though some large person had stretched it when I wasn’t looking. But I wore it anyway. Slapped on some makeup, and went to the River looking for him.
What I really wanted, despite everything, was a repeat performance of that time when he’d fucked me in the office at the River. I wanted him to look at me as though I was the most perfect creature he’d ever laid eyes on, I wanted him to take me by the hand and haul me down the corridor to the office, as though he couldn’t wait another second to get inside me.
He was laughing and joking with Terry, the door supervisor, when I walked past the line of people and up to the VIP entrance. My chest tightened when I saw him, short blond hair cropped close to his head, still improbably tanned despite the cold and the rain; that dark suit, well-cut, defining the muscles and the shape of his taut body.
“Hi,” I said.
“Catherine. What are you doing here?” he asked. He was trying to sound cold, but already I’d seen the reaction in his eyes.
“I was hoping you might let me in so I could join my friends,” I said, giving him a smile and a barely perceptible wink.
Terry came over. “Sorry, love, it’s packed in there tonight. You’ll have to line up like everyone else.”
I wasn’t about to be joining the ranks of the waiting public. “It’s okay,” I said, “I’ll go somewhere else instead.” I gave Lee one last lingering look, and walked in the direction of the town center.
In fact I found the nearest taxi and went straight home. Sure enough, at three in the morning, I heard him knocking at the door.
“Why didn’t you use your key?” I said as I opened the door. I didn’t get time to ask anything else, and he wasn’t going to reply.
He took my upper arms and pushed me backward into the living room, not bothering to turn the lights on, not bothering to shut the front door behind him. He was breathing hard, and when I touched his face it was wet. I kissed him, licking the tears away from his cheeks. He let out a rasping sob and devoured my mouth, kissing me so hard I could taste blood. With a grunt he gave me a forceful shove that sent me sprawling onto the sofa, and before I could say anything else he’d pulled my pajama bottoms off, undone his suit pants so quickly and clumsily that I heard the button ping off. I just had time to think, this is going to hurt, and then he was fucking me. When he pushed into me, I cried out.
Did I say no? Not that time. Did he rape me? Not really, not that time. After all, I’d opened the door to him. Earlier in the evening I’d been to the nightclub with the intention of getting him to fuck me. Now he was fucking me, and I didn’t feel I had any right to complain about it.
But it hurt. The inside of my lip was cut from where his mouth had invaded mine; the next day I was so sore I could barely walk. But he was back, at least for a few hours; when I woke up the next morning, he’d already gone.
It’s time to refocus.
I had my assessment today, and it felt as if I’ve turned some kind of corner with this.
The Community Mental Health Team was based in Leonie Hobbs House, in the next street to Willow Road. It was a normal-looking house from the front, not unlike ours—imposing bay windows and a front door in need of a lick of paint. There was a brass sign on the gatepost and posters in the front windows advertising everything from Smoking Cessation Clinics to a Self-Help Group for Post-Natal Depression.
It was raining outside, which made the whole place look grimmer than it might have otherwise. The windows looked as though they were crying.
I pushed open the door and the hallway held a reception desk and some stairs going up to the first floor. Behind the reception desk the former front room of the house was crammed with desks and women, shuffling paper from one tray to another, talking and sipping from mugs. The walls were covered with posters. If you’d come for information about something in particular you wouldn’t have had a hope of finding it.
“I have an appointment for an assessment,” I said to the woman at the reception desk.
“That’ll be upstairs. That’s not a local accent, is it? Where are you from?”
She must have been in her late forties, long gray hair in a big plait down her back, wisps of it in a cloud around her face. “The north,” I said. Usually I said this to anyone in London and they accepted it without question, as though the north was a single amorphous blob that began somewhere beyond the Toddington Services.
This woman was going to be an exception.
“You’re from Lancaster,” she said, fortunately not waiting for my response. “I lived there for twenty years. Then I moved down here. Better pay, but the people aren’t as nice.”
I glanced into the crowded room behind her and the six or seven ladies sitting tight-lipped listening to every word.
I climbed the stairs. At the top a dog-eared piece of paper with the words “CMHT turn left” helpfully written in black marker was taped to the wall. Along a short corridor to the left I found another reception area, this one freshly painted in comforting shades of beige and mushroom. There was nobody behind the desk, so I sat on one of the comfy chairs and waited. I was early for the appointment.
A woman came out of a door to the right. She was dressed in a loose top and jeans, her hair pulled back in two bunches that stuck straight out on both sides of her head. She had a lip ring and a beautiful smile full of even white teeth.
“Hi,” she said. “Would you be Cathy Bailey, by any chance?”
“Yes,” I said.
“He’ll be ready in a minute. I’m Deb, one of the CPNs,” said the woman. She was still smiling. “Did you bring your questionnaires?”
“Oh—yes . . .” I rooted around in my bag.
Deb took them. “Saves time when you’re in there, you know.”
I waited. From down the corridor, out of sight, came the sound of a door opening and footsteps getting closer and closer until a man’s head appeared around the corner. “Cathy Bailey?”
I got to my feet and followed him. I kept thinking about Stuart. I thought about him all the way through the questions the consultant psychiatrist asked. Dr. Lionel Parry, his name was. He looked like a roughly shaved badger, a gray and black beard morphing seamlessly into gray and black hair at the sides of his head and growing copiously out of his ears. When he asked me how much time it took me to check the door, how much time it took to check the windows, the drawers, everything else, I thought about lying. It feels so goddamn stupid, checking the doors. I know it doesn’t make sense. But I can’t stop myself doing it.
So I told the truth. Sometimes it’s hours. Sometimes, I’m hours late for work and I have to stay late to make up for it. Social life? Don’t make me laugh. It’s a good thing I don’t actually want to go out in the evenings, isn’t it?
After that he asked me about Lee. I told him about the flashbacks, the sudden thoughts, like flashes of memory, of things he’d done. Things I’d tried to forget about. And all the rest of it. The nightmares, the panic attacks, the lying awake at four in the morning too scared to go back to sleep. The things I try to avoid: social events, crowded places, the police, red clothes.
He listened and wrote notes and looked at me from time to time.
I was shaking.
I wasn’t crying, not yet; talking about it was just making me feel shaky.
“I’ve been trying deep breathing,” I said, in a rush. “I’ve been trying to control the panic. It works sometimes.”
“That’s good,” he said. “Then you already know that you are in charge of this. If you can control the panic sometimes, then it’s just going to take practice and a few other techniques until you can control it all the time. You’ve made a start, you’ve done really well.”
“Thanks. It was Stuart, really, not me.”
“Stuart?”
“A friend. He’s a psychologist.”
“He might have pointed you in the right direction, but you made the choice that you were going to try to control your panic. Nobody could have done that except you.”
“I guess not.”
“And don’t forget, if you’ve done that already, it means you can do more. This means that you should be able to bring your checking under control too. It won’t happen right away, it will take time, but you can do it.”
“So what happens next?”
“I’m going to refer you for some cognitive behavioral therapy. In addition to that, I think you should try some medication to help with the panic attacks. They take a while to kick in, though, so don’t be concerned if you don’t feel the benefit immediately. You need to give it a good few weeks.”
“I tried drugs before. I’d rather avoid them if I can.”
“I’ve had a look at your notes, and the drugs they gave you in the hospital were different. These ones won’t make you feel drowsy or spaced out. I’d like you to try them because your assessment indicates that there may be some elements of post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, as well as obsessive compulsive disorder.”
“Stuart said it would be good if I could be referred to Dr. Alistair Hodge.”
“Yes, I was going to suggest that. He does a clinic here, or one at the Maudsley. You’ll get a letter and then you’ll need to give his secretary a call. You should be able to get to see him quite quickly, I expect. In the meantime, I’ll get Deb to give you the numbers for the Crisis Team, in case you need them. But I doubt you will.”
“How long do you think it will take? To get better?”
He shrugged. “That’s very difficult to judge. Everyone is different. But you should be able to see some positive effects within a few sessions. You have to be prepared to put in some work with it—it’s like a lot of things in life: the more you put in, the more you get out.”
When I finally got back out into the street, it was dark. The rain had stopped at last. The traffic outside was at a standstill, probably some accident on the North Circular jamming everything up. The buses were relatively free as far as the bus lanes went, but they weren’t going to go anywhere fast.
I felt as if I’d turned some sort of corner, as though there was absolutely no turning back. It had been this that had frightened me the most, after the hospital; after being so out of control, so completely in the hands of strangers I neither liked nor trusted, having to follow their timetable and their instructions, being told when to eat and when to sleep and when to go to the bathroom.
Once I’d gotten out of the hospital the second time, I knew I’d die before going back there. I moved from Lancaster, with a bright vapid smile and empty promises of engaging with the local mental health services as soon as I could. I moved away from the doctors and the nurses and social services and the terrifying system that made no sense to me. It had served its purpose. It had hauled me to my feet and pointed out rather bluntly that, actually, I hadn’t died at all, I was still very much here and I’d better pull myself together and get on with it. Not for the first time, I thought that it would have been kinder if I
had
died, rather than going through the process of recovering. But moving away made me realize that, if anyone was going to be in control of my life, it had to be me. There was no alternative. I took control, I controlled every moment of my day, timing things to the second, counting my steps, planning my cups of tea; it gave me purpose, gave me a reason to put one foot in front of the other every single day no matter how shitty, no matter how grim, no matter how lonely.
I don’t want to give that up. It makes me feel safe, if only for a while.