‘Hardly. He asked me to leave.’
‘He threw you out?’
‘Yes, if that’s how you want to put it. Nearly ten days now. So, you see, I have nothing left to lose.’ That is not true, of course. The kids don’t know. And I am hoping to get him back, but she doesn’t need to know that. Because right now, I have been thrown out.
‘So why did you come here, then?’ she asks.
‘Because you obviously need someone to talk to. And I thought I might be able to . . . I don’t know. Not help, exactly, but . . .’
Her face twists dramatically. ‘You came out of pity? Pity!’
If she wants to look at it that way, then she can. I came because I can’t help myself.
Poppy used to look at me at lot with resentment. She wanted him all to herself and she wanted me to disappear. Around the time of her sixteenth birthday she changed. I think it started to get to her. She started to see that he wasn’t perfect. Or maybe she knew and she stopped thinking I was the cause of his imperfections.
October, 1987
‘Serena,’ he barked, ‘into the kitchen.’
I did as I was told, too emotionally exhausted to even ask why. He held Poppy’s hand tenderly as they followed. He went to the side of the kitchen table nearest the sink and pulled out a chair. ‘Sit,’ he ordered me, his tone reminding me of Barbara Woodhouse. Good dog, I expected him to say any second. Good dog, Serena.
Ten minutes earlier, before she arrived, he had held a knife to my throat, and reminded me that leaving him wasn’t an option. I had felt the bite of the knife as he pressed it to my flesh, then he took it away. Now, he was caressing her, stroking her, reminding me he had someone else. I did not want to watch. I did not want to watch because I did not want to feel jealous over a man who wanted to kill me. It was not logical, it was primordial. He was supposedly my mate and I wanted to leave him, but I still felt bad when he went with another woman. When he went with her.
He was torturing me to get a reaction. I would not give him one, I would not show him how I felt about what he was doing. He would hurt me no matter what I did, but I would rather I got beaten for not reacting than reacting. He would get less satisfaction from that.
Suddenly he was pushing her forwards and lifting her white pencil skirt. Confusion and embarrassment exploded in Poppy’s eyes. We locked gazes, and I realised she was asking for help. She wanted me to do something to help her. I felt sorry for her, I really did, but the last time I helped her he discovered a new way to punish me. After last time, ‘let’s make up’ had entered his repertoire of torture, his latest way of prolonging the suffering of a beating. I could not risk making him that angry again.
‘Make sure you keep your eyes open,’ he told Poppy as he started to move inside her.
She nodded and stared at me for a second, then she screwed her eyes up tight.
‘Are her eyes open?’ he asked me.
I nodded. Even though they weren’t. She had found a way to escape what was happening, a place to hide while he humiliated her in front of me, but I didn’t have that place. I couldn’t do anything but watch.
‘Good girl, Poppy,’ he said tenderly, afterwards. He stroked his hand over her hair, and kissed her neck, kissed her cheek. ‘Good girl.’
Whenever he was that nice, that loving to her in front of me, it meant he intended to hurt me as much as he could later.
It didn’t matter as much, though, because I had managed to defy him. He would never know it, but I had defied him and that was all that counted. Because that meant I could slowly find a way to escape from him completely. I could maybe find a way to set myself free.
After that incident, Poppy was a little bit nicer towards me. She started to act as if she wanted to be my friend but it was a little too late for that. And that’s why I feel responsible. I wonder sometimes if I had tried to be friendly back, if we had found a way to be friends, could I have stopped her from doing what she did? Could I have stopped her from killing him?
‘Now isn’t that the joke to end all jokes?’ Poppy’s bitterness spews out of her like lava. ‘Serena pities me. She lets me rot in prison for two decades for something she did, and then manages to feel pity for me.’
‘Poppy, I didn’t do anything.’ Even with my unstable memory I know I didn’t do it.
She slams her hand down on the table, rattling all the cutlery and crockery, making everyone around us turn and stare. ‘STOP LYING!’ she screams at me. ‘JUST STOP LYING!’
I stumble to my feet. I have already paid, so I do not need to hang around here a moment longer.
‘WHY WON’T YOU TELL THE TRUTH?’ She is on her feet, too; she is raging, flaming, her body rigid with anger. I have woken the volcano. By trying to do good, by trying to help her, I caused the volcano to erupt. ‘WHY ARE YOU STILL LYING? JUST TELL THE TRUTH. JUST TELL THE WORLD YOU DID IT.’
The wooziness comes over me in huge waves, I am floaty and lightheaded, my head feels as if it is a giant balloon that will float away from my neck. But my chest is tight and small and I cannot get air into it. I cannot breathe. I push my hand on to my chest again, feel the wild gallop of my heart beneath my fingers, the tensed muscles of my chest. I cannot breathe. I cannot breathe.
My legs stop working, stop being capable of holding up my body and they give way. As I fall, I hear a loud CRACK! That’s my head hitting the table. That’s my head ushering in the blackness . . .
poppy
Please don’t die, Serena. Please don’t die.
Everything is moving so fast and people are talking at a million miles an hour and I feel like I am on a television set, starring in an episode of Casualty.
I have a single mantra repeating and repeating itself in my head: ‘Please don’t die, Serena.’
I do not care at this moment in time if she confesses and clears my name. I just do not want her to die.
Please don’t die, Serena. Please don’t die.
I am clinging on to her handbag and know that inside is her mobile phone and I should go through it and find her husband’s number and call him and tell him. But I don’t know what to tell him. I don’t know how to explain who I am. And I do not want to speak to him. Not like this. It was all very well threatening her with telling him, but doing it is another matter. If pushed I would have done, I’m sure. But this is not such a time. I am not being pushed, I am being punished; being threatened with having another death on my conscience.
I am told by a senior-looking nurse to wait in the waiting area and to give details to the receptionist about my friend.
She fires questions at me:
‘Name?’
‘Serena Gillmare.’
‘Date of birth?’
‘Twentieth of September, 1970.’
‘Address?’
‘93 Blues Point Road, Preston Park, BN3 VCZ.’
‘Next of kin?’
‘Dr Evan Gillmare.’
‘Any children?’
‘Yes, two: Verity, thirteen; Conrad, eight.’
‘Any known illnesses or allergies?’
‘She sometimes suffers from lapses in memory, and she’s only really allergic to button mushrooms.’
As I speak, answering each of the questions without having to think, a nest of snakes has been crawling and slipping and sliding inside me. I know too much about Serena. I have been stalking her. I have been doing a horrible, horrible thing. And I knew what I was doing. I knew and I thought nothing of it. I felt justified because I wanted justice, I wanted a confession; I wanted to clear my name. And so I have managed to justify violating someone’s space and life. Who am I? What am I?
‘Have you contacted your friend’s next of kin?’ the receptionist asks.
I shake my head. ‘We’re not really friends.’ I have to come clean now. She is a complete stranger and has no idea what I have been doing, but I have to start being honest somewhere and she will do. ‘I knew her a long time ago.’
Such anger that could drive me to do
what I have done was never part of my life until I entered prison. Now, I feel anger all the time, I’m always about two minutes from snapping. That has to stop. Right now. And I need to start putting things right. I need to be a better person: first by being honest, second by doing the right thing.
I push Serena’s handbag through the little plastic cubbyhole behind which the receptionist sits. ‘I think her mobile will be in there,’ I say. ‘I think it’s better you look. You’re a complete stranger, she probably won’t mind as much.’
Efficient and calm, the receptionist unzips the black leather bag and reaches inside, while twisting the bag towards the not overly bright light hanging in her office area. It doesn’t take her long to locate the small black square of Serena’s mobile and flip it open. ‘I wonder if she’s got Ice on her mobile?’ she says.
That’s probably a cool new programme that everyone has these days that I’ve never heard of. That wouldn’t surprise me. I’m still playing catch-up with the whole mobile thing. When I was with Alain I’d be looking around at other people when my mobile rang because I wasn’t used to having a phone ring when I was away from home. I’m still a little ‘witchcraft’ about them, if I’m honest. I don’t get how they work or why they’re such a good idea – except maybe at times like this. But how many times in an average person’s life do they have times like this? The receptionist twiddles with a lock of her grey-smattered red hair as she presses buttons and comes up with something, because she says, ‘Good woman. She has Ice right here.’
‘OK,’ I say. Weird, weird time to be playing a game on someone else’s mobile, but who am I to judge?
She smiles endearingly at my blank expression. ‘It’s a new thing: you put an entry on your mobile under “ICE” – which stands for In Case of Emergency – with the number or numbers of people to be contacted in such situations. That stops a lot of faffing around for us trying to work out who to call. She has this entry, which is very useful.’
‘I see,’ I say. You mean faffing around like you’ve just done in telling me all that when you could have been dialling?
The receptionist picks up her phone and dials a number. I take a few steps back because right now I do not want to be in hearing distance when the fall-out from her call begins.
Dr Evan Gillmare is not a happy man when he strides into the casualty department. His brown eyes dart around him, taking everything in, but I’d imagine he’s been here several times before – he is a doctor, after all. He has rushed here, maybe run all the way, because his broad manly-man chest is heaving as he walks, and his face is set in a grim, determined expression.
Last time I saw him, he seemed so gentle and kind and concerned – everything you want from your GP, really. Now he is not a GP, he is a concerned husband of a woman who may or may not be at death’s door, who may or may not be dead.
He speaks to the receptionist and I’m sure he’s asking lots of technical, doctory questions, and receiving answers that may or may not be satisfactory. At the end of the conversation, the receptionist points to me. He turns and strides towards me, and I stand to greet him.
I should not be here. I should be at home, at my beach hut, on the beach, at the bottom of the sea, anywhere but here. I should not be about to speak to the husband of the woman I was stalking and, who for all I know, collapsed because of me.
‘What happened to her?’ Evan Gillmare asks brusquely. No greeting, no let up in the grim – almost aggressive – expression on his face. Not the bedside manner I was expecting of him after last time but, then, he is talking about the wife he recently split up with and he has no idea what my role in her collapse has been.
‘We . . . we were talking and she collapsed. I don’t know much else. They won’t tell me because I’m not family.’ I’m not even a friend.
He frowns a little, then says carefully, suspiciously, ‘Don’t I know you?’
‘Erm . . .’ Why did I decide to become a better person thirty minutes ago? Why can’t I still be the person who lied and stalked, because then I wouldn’t be forced to tell the truth right now.
‘You came in to see me recently. You’d just moved to the area. Penelope . . . ? Penelope . . . ? Penelope Argyle?’
‘I said my name was Penelope Argyle. It’s actually Poppy. Poppy Carlisle.’
His body stiffens as a dozen little memories click into place as he matches the name to the face to the situation. I’m sure mine is a name he never wants to hear again, a face he’d never wanted to see in the flesh. And now he knows what I was doing, he would be well within his rights to have me arrested. If I’m arrested, I’m going straight back to where I came from – whether I deserve to be there or not.
‘What happened?’ he asks through gritted teeth, obviously deciding that finding out about Serena is more important than dealing with me. ‘What really happened?’
‘Like I said, we were talking . . . OK,’ I sigh, I can’t keep this up. ‘OK, we were arguing. Things got a bit heated because I was trying to get her to confess. And right in the middle she just collapsed. That’s the truth. She got wound up, and the next thing I knew she was lying on the floor, not moving. I don’t know why. I swear, Sir. I didn’t touch her. I swear.’
‘And did she? Confess?’
‘No.’
‘Did it ever occur to you that she’s innocent?’ he asks.
‘Did it ever occur to you?’ I reply. ‘She told me that you’d virtually thrown her out of the house. Her home. You wouldn’t have done that if you didn’t think she was guilty.’
‘You know nothing about my marriage or my wife,’ he says, tersely. I have not only touched a nerve, I’ve clawed at it with long, jagged nails. ‘I haven’t got time for this. I’m going to see how she is. Don’t be here when I get back.’
‘But I need to know if she’s going to be OK,’ I protest.
‘So that you keep on stalking and harassing her and her family?’
‘I haven’t done that!’ I object. It sounds so sinister when someone says it aloud. I can think it and it is bad, but it is far worse reflected back at me in the words of others.
‘What would you call it then?’
‘I . . . I just . . .’
‘Go away, Poppy, or whatever your name is. Just leave my wife and my family alone.’
Before I can complain, he has turned his back on me and is striding towards the inner area of casualty. I stand where I am, not sure of what to do next. I do not want to go home. I do not want to be alone. I want someone to tell me it’s going to be OK. That she isn’t going to die and I will be OK. That it’s not too late for me to become a good person again.
The large, glass circular doors at the entrance of Brighton A&E hush as they open to expel me into the warm air.
I don’t want to be alone. I’ve spent so many years alone and I don’t want it now. I’m tired of it. I’m scared of it. Alone makes me cut up. Alone makes me do things I do not want to do. Alone makes me remember that Tina is gone.
I reach into my pocket and my hands cover my little box of witchcraft and I pull it out, hold it up in front of me. My fingers go to ‘I’ on the keypad, hoping that when I press it I will find an entry has been added under ICE, an entry that will be there for me to call in case of emergency. But there is nothing. Of course there is nothing.
I type in another letter and a number comes up on the screen. I stare at the number, I stare at the name. This is an emergency – there would be no way on earth I would be calling otherwise.
‘Hi,’ I say when the phone is answered after two rings that seem to last a lifetime. ‘It’s me. I really need your help.’
serena
Evan is sitting by my bed. His fingers are steepled together and he has a very serious, deep-thought-induced look on his face. He smiles when he sees I am awake, then he remembers he’s furious with me, that we’ve separated and that he basically thinks the worst of me, so he tucks away the smile and instead wears his serious face again.
Sighing, I sh
ift my line of sight to the ceiling. I’d like to move, but I can’t. I feel like a herd of elephants has danced the chorus to ‘Come On Eileen’ on my body over and over again, and my head has been inflated with a canister of helium gas.
‘What are you doing here?’ I ask, not moving or breathing too much because it hurts. It hurts like the time his fist slammed into me over and over because I’d left a smear of lipstick on a white towel, and I’d ended up with three bruised ribs. But it’s not as bad as the two broken ribs. That is how I judge pain sometimes, from the pain he caused me and how I managed to endure it.
‘You collapsed, do you remember?’ Evan says in his best doctor voice – reassuring, kind but ever so significantly removed.
Poppy. Shouting. Cement in my stomach, pain in my helium-inflated head, car parked on my chest, peace. ‘Yes, I remember,’ I manage.
‘They think you fainted as a result of an extreme panic attack. But they’re going to run more tests to make sure it’s nothing more serious.’
‘OK,’ I say, still not looking at him. He’s my best friend, my husband, my soulmate – and he is talking to me like I am a patient.
‘How long have you been having panic attacks?’ he asks. ‘Because this sounds like it’s the end of a whole series of them, not a one-off.’
How long have I been having panic attacks? How long have I been on the edge of terror? ‘Long enough,’ I say. That’s the sort of answer I’d give to a stranger, which is what he wants to be from the way he is behaving. I’ve known him visit patients in hospital, and I’m sure he isn’t like this with them. I’m sure he is kind and caring and human.
‘And how long have you had lapses in memory?’
‘Long enough,’ I say again.
‘Long enough,’ he repeats, quietly. I don’t think he even realises he’s spoken it aloud.
‘How did you know I was here?’ Did she do it? Did she call him and compound my troubles?