Too Close For Comfort (5 page)

When I left I could feel three pairs of eyes boring into my retreating back.

I normally saved this trick for teenagers – the reluctant ones, forced to see me by an irate parent. I’d take them to Hampstead Heath or the Natural History Museum,
walk and talk – see if they plumped for a linear path or a chaotic zigzag across the grass, a brontosaurus or a can of Coke – little clues that oiled the hinges and opened the door.

When I’d suggested a walk to Helena she’d readily agreed, and now she had texted from outside, the hazard lights on her ostentatiously large black BMW flashing an invitation. I tried
to persuade Lysette to come to the door with me, but she shook her head mulishly, reminding me acutely of Saffron, minus the bee-faced wellies. She’d been sitting at the kitchen table for the
past hour, hands tightly wrapped around a mug of tea, barely communicating with me. Some pans were piled up in the sink, and the plastic carton of milk was growing warm on the kitchen counter. At
least she was dressed.

I put the milk back in the fridge, wiping up a trail of it with a grey-looking sponge. Her mood had got gradually darker over the last twenty-four hours. When Helena followed up with a staccato
toot of her horn I was almost grateful.

‘I’ll see you in a bit,’ I said, leaning over her to kiss Lysette’s hot cheek. She looked up at me, her eyes almost pleading.

‘I know you’re going to listen to her, but don’t . . . don’t listen to everything.’

‘What do you mean?’ I said. I kept going back over the conversation we had that first night, chastising myself for how quickly I’d shut down what it was she was trying to say.
With clients, I simply tried to listen without judgement and then work outwards from where they were starting from. Could she honestly believe that Sarah hadn’t killed herself? The funeral
was the next day – horrible though it was, it might at least make what had happened start feeling real. I’d wait until she’d got through it before I risked trying to reason with
her again.

‘Things about me.’

‘Lys, I’m not going to talk about you behind your back!’ I said. ‘How old are we?’

‘
Too
old,’ she said, and we both finally smiled.

‘She loves you! They all do.’ Her eyes flashed: not like Sarah, they said. ‘You sure you don’t want to just ask her in for tea?’ Lysette shook her head, took a gulp
of her own tea like we might threaten her supply. ‘I thought you wanted me to talk to her?’ I said, trying not to let a note of exasperation creep into my voice.

‘Yeah, no. It’s really kind of you.’

‘I think you should try and see them before the funeral,’ I said, then cursed my own bossiness. She didn’t reply. ‘Whatever you think. I’ll be back by
six.’

‘See you then,’ she said, voice small, her sadness making me sad.

*

The weather was less filthy today but it still didn’t feel like real summer. It was warm in a muggy kind of a way, grey clouds scudding about like playground bullies.
Helena was leaning against the door of her 4×4, pulling deeply on a cigarette. She threw it down as soon as she saw me, even though it was only half gone, grinding it into oblivion with the
heel of a high-heeled chestnut leather boot.

‘Don’t worry, I brought trainers,’ she said. She smiled at me, but it was brisk and efficient, lacking the overblown warmth of our last encounter. Ridiculously, I felt
underdressed. My jeans were on day two, my options running short now I’d stayed on, my long-sleeved blue T-shirt a cast-off of Lysette’s with tiny holes puncturing the armpits.

‘Are we heading for rocky terrain?’

Everything I said to these women sounded as though I’d been practising it in my head beforehand, like it deserved a little drum roll.

‘No,’ she said, climbing into the driver’s seat. I hopped in too. The inside smelt of Chanel No 5, and I wondered if she sprayed it around to disguise the underlying whiff of
cigarette smoke. The radio came on as she flicked the key, a loud blast of Katy Perry. She didn’t turn it off. ‘Thanks for doing this,’ she said, over the top.

‘Of course. You’re Lysette’s friend.’

‘I keep thinking of Rex,’ she said, ‘my little one’. Katy was reaching a crescendo by now, and I wondered if it would be rude to turn her down. ‘I can’t
imagine it, just being gone.’

It was hard to say anything meaningful when all I was communicating with was her profile. Just like last time she was fully made up, her eyelashes so lush that they didn’t convince. Her
skin was taut, almost pinched, and I unconsciously traced the subtle lines that arced from my nose down to my mouth. When I waste time peering at them in the mirror, I find it hard not to
experience the double punch: hating them, then hating myself for the shallowness of hating them. The mirror is not always my friend.

‘Do you know how they’re coping?’ I asked. ‘Has Joshua got people staying with them?’ We’d left the village now, nothing but green fields either side of
us.

‘Lisa and Kyle will be helping, I’m sure.’

‘Who are they?’

‘His ex and her husband. They’ve got one of those civilised divorces,’ she said, voice dripping with sarcasm. ‘His older two live with them. Jack’s in the top
juniors at St Augustine’s still.’

‘Didn’t he leave her for Sarah?’

‘Yup. Tell you what, if Chris dumped me for someone half my age, there’d be no conscious uncoupling, not unless it was me pulling his dick off.’

I laughed, the relief making me aware that laughter had been in short supply since that first night. Patrick always made me laugh, but when I’d called him the evening before, neither of us
had been in that space. He was stuck at work, his distraction palpable, whilst I was perched on my inflatable bed in Saffron’s room, wanting and not wanting to tell him that my period had
crept up and ambushed me.

‘That’s very grown-up of her,’ I said.

‘Lisa said in the long run she was grateful. Apparently she says she knows now the marriage was dead anyway – the affair was just the straw that broke the camel’s back. Sarah
was pretty bolshie about it – she said they all ended up better off.’

‘Wow.’ I wanted to ask more, but I checked myself. I didn’t like the way I was starting to analyse Sarah, the sly mental notes I was taking.

‘I guess she had to say something like that though, didn’t she?’ said Helena. ‘Lisa, I mean.’

‘Maybe. Particularly if you’re all still living in the same place.’ The thought of it made me shudder: it was another thing that recommended a sprawling, impersonal metropolis.
I looked out at the endless-seeming fields. ‘Where is it we’re going?’ I asked.

‘There’s a forest. That’s a bit of an overstatement – it’s a little wood. It’s round to the left.’

She swung the huge car off the main road, the turn sharp and sudden. We were on a narrow lane now, trees looming on either side. She mashed the horn with the palm of her hand as the lane curved
to the left, the long hoot making a couple of pheasants soar upwards in a squawking flurry. A denser patch of trees was up ahead, and she pulled the car onto a grass verge. I unbuckled my seat
belt, feeling slightly sick. I opened the door and clambered out, grateful for the fresh air.

‘So how old is Rex?’ I asked her, following her round to the back.

She was pulling off her boots now, pristine white trainers ready to go on. She reminded me of my childhood Sindy Doll, with the perfect, interchangeable outfits – ski jackets, riding boots
– that I used to hoard all my pocket money to buy. There was a reason for Sindy’s outfits never wearing out; Helena’s trainers also looked as if they’d never been within a
hundred feet of a patch of grass.

‘He’s eight now. Got far too much to say for himself.’ She beamed automatically as she said it, love softening her edges.

‘So he’s a couple of years above Max at the school?’

‘Yeah. And that’s like – a century – at their age.’ She finished lacing her trainers, looked up at me. ‘Have you got any kids?’

‘No. No, I haven’t,’ I said, the words sounding metallic in my mouth.

I Googled statistics obsessively, cheered or terrified, depending on who it was presenting the data. Thirty-eight was either a complete fertility disaster or no biggie. We’d only been
– not exactly trying, but not trying not to – for six months, and Patrick was completely relaxed about the lack of success. Lack of success and relaxed have never existed in the same
sentence for me. Helena slammed the boot shut, started off towards the trees.

‘So what made you want to meet up?’ I asked her.

‘I just feel so . . . anxious.’ She stopped, thrusting her hand towards me. Her fingers were wide and stubby, a contrast to the perfect wine-red manicure her nails had
been treated to. I could see the tremor running through them. ‘I don’t know how to stop feeling like this.’

Helena set off into the dense greenery, thick branches soon forming a canopy over our heads. I hurried my pace in an attempt to keep up with her.

‘It’s completely natural that you’re feeling this way. But if you’re asking me if talking to someone can help, then yes, I think it can, particularly once the dust
settles a bit. Though obviously I’m biased.’

Helena shook her head, frustrated.

‘It’s
not
natural,’ she snapped.

‘I know . . . sorry, if that sounded crass, but . . .’

‘None of this is natural.’ She looked at me again, her eyes dark. ‘None of this is normal.’

Her voice dropped as she said it, and I felt a shiver of unease that I couldn’t pin down. Lysette reared up in my mind – was this the ‘everything’ she was referring
to?

‘What do you mean?’ I asked, too quickly. ‘I certainly wasn’t saying that it’s normal for a young woman to kill herself . . .’

‘I don’t know when the questions will stop going round my head. Rex has got his hamster – he stinks, but he loves him – Mr Whiskers. He just goes round and round on his
stupid wheel, claws going, can’t stop.’

She’d nudged slightly ahead, more sure of the winding path than I was, but now she turned to me and pulled an ugly hamster face, her features screwed up tight, her hands clenched like tiny
paws. I laughed, immediately warming to her.

‘What’s the one that tortures you the most?’ She didn’t reply. ‘How she could have wanted to do something like that?’

Helena gave a little snort of a laugh that came through her nose.

‘I wish.’ It was an odd response. Her eyes darted towards me, then darted to the ground. The silence prickled and spat. ‘She was lovely, Sarah,’ she added.

‘I only met her once, but Lysette can’t stop saying how kind she was. How funny.’

‘Yeah. no. She had a sharp tongue on her.’ She saw my expression. ‘She was quick,’ she added, even though we both knew they were totally different things.

I drew level with her, twigs snapping underfoot. We were going deeper into the green now, the light shaded out of the sky.

‘Do you think she was depressed?’

‘Stupid word, isn’t it?’ There was a cheeky sort of challenge in the way she said it, like a convent girl swearing in church. ‘We’re all depressed, aren’t we,
every day? If Rex says I’m the meanest mummy in the world in the morning I feel like shit, but then he hugs me goodbye at the gates and I feel amazing.’

I wondered where her husband figured in her happiness ratio: there didn’t seem to be much mention of him. Was Rex her first, her last, her everything? I didn’t even know if she had a
job.

‘So she didn’t seem particularly down to you?’

‘She was all of it, Mia,’ she said, tone devoid of warmth. ‘Four seasons in one day, you know?’

‘Sort of,’ I said, deliberately leaving a gap in my understanding for her to fill.

Helena paused, thinking. We took a few paces, going still deeper into the closely packed trees, the path more unruly, less distinct.

‘She worked in this café in Cambridge, just part-time, she was a supervisor. It’s really pretentious, you know. All olde worlde, full of tourists. There was a don from Trinity
who used to come in and behave like a total cock. Ordering the staff around like they were his slaves, and wanting his scones all neatly arranged with the jam on the side and his cream all whippy.
Used to leave shrapnel for a tip.’ Helena plunged down a path that took us still further into the density of green. ‘He came in with his wife and kids on his birthday, and laid into one
of the other girls about his tea being cold. Sarah iced
you’re a
 . . . you know, a C word – on his cake, and put it down in front of him with
candles, and everything. She was singing happy birthday at the top of her voice, making all the staff join in so the whole restaurant was looking over. She got the sack on the spot.’

‘Wow,’ I said, trying to imagine it. ‘Good for her, I suppose.’

‘Thing was, she was gutted. I mean – of course she’d get fired. But she was furious about how unfair it was.’

‘Why, because she’d been standing up for someone else?’

‘No,’ said Helena, looking at me, eyes troubled. ‘I think she thought she could get away with it. I think she thought she could get away with
anything
.’

‘Anything?’ It could mean so many things. Helena looked down at the muddy ground, the set of her jaw telling me she wouldn’t be elaborating: the push–pull of our
conversation was becoming as jarring as a fairground ride. ‘So your hamster wheel . . .’ I paused, searching for the right words. ‘Is it like – a cosmic
hamster wheel – how can this happen? Or is it about what Sarah might’ve been hiding? What else she thought she could get away with?’

Her head turned sharply towards me.

‘Is that what Lysette says? That she was hiding stuff? From her?’

‘No. I think . . .’ I looked at Helena, mindful of Lysette’s paranoia about what we might share. ‘She’s struggling to believe she would’ve
killed herself.’

Helena’s eyes looked bright and wet. She stared down at the ground, quiet, and I silently chided myself. I shouldn’t have been there. When I was ensconced in my treatment room
diligently following the rules of patient confidentiality, there was no danger of me causing this kind of trouble. This – this was starting to feel more like the sixth form common room.