That had been hellish. Even worse than usual.
Every night, as soon as she closed her eyes, her brain seemed to take this as a cue to go back over her clients’ traumas, but not with Lulu as an objective observer. Oh, no. Lulu was her clients, as she imagined the events they’d experienced happening to herself. And when she eventually managed to drop off, this often bled into her dreams.
She felt like she’d only just fallen asleep, but it must be 7:30 already. Instead of an alarm, Nick set a different track to come on for her each morning. But she didn’t feel ready to face the day. As Nick had slept like a baby through the night, she had lain awake for hours, battling against the urge to take a zolpidem. On the advice of the private doctor Nick had insisted she see, she was trying to wean herself off her prescription sleeping pills. She was currently allowed one tablet every three nights, and this hadn’t been one of those blissful occasions. She’d grabbed her phone at intervals to chart the progress of her wakefulness – ten to one, quarter past two, half past three, four o’clock.
That meant she’d had a maximum of three and a half hours’ sleep.
Not enough. She knew that wasn’t enough to get her through the day in anything like decent shape. Her head ached already. But at least tonight was a pill night – not that she generally felt any better when she woke after taking one, her head muzzy and stupid, her mouth dry and sticky, her bowels rebelling. There was no easy answer, it seemed, to what the doctor had referred to as the ‘chronic anxiety-related insomnia’ caused by the stressful nature of her work. Nick had pounced on that, of course, as yet another reason why she should give it up and do something else.
But she couldn’t help but smile as she listened to the song.
Nick was a big fan of cheesy retro romantic stuff.
She forced herself upright and padded across the soft white carpet to the wall of glass which gave an uninterrupted view across the wide brown expanse of the Thames to the new high-rises that loomed above the old brick buildings of Battersea. Standing here was like you were floating right over the river. The master bedroom floor formed the roof of the big balcony underneath, so between this window and the riverbank there was only the width of the walkway.
Showered and dressed, she stumbled downstairs and into the maze, as Nick called it, the series of right-angle turns in the white-walled and mirrored corridor that took her past all the other bedrooms and the study and out into the big open-plan living space, which Lulu always secretly thought was a bit like walking into an upmarket department store – all clean white lines and marble and glass and tasteful soft furnishings in shades of beige and grey. Light was streaming in through the slanted glass roof above the double-height area in the middle of the room, from which you looked up to the gallery that led to the master bedroom. She had worried, when she’d seen that on the house tour, that it would be triggering for Nick, but when she’d tentatively broached the subject, he’d assured her that the apartment was so different from Sunnyside in every way that it wouldn’t pull any ‘triggers’ on him. ‘You don’t have to worry that you’ll come home one day to find me chewing the back of the sofa like a neurotic spaniel you’ve left home alone.’
But I do worry! she’d wanted to yell at him. Stop using humour to deflect!
All this light was making her head pound.
She crossed the expanse of white floor to the glass wall looking over the little marina that was Chelsea Harbour, and then she turned and paced the length of the room – all forty-six feet of it – to the opposite glass wall overlooking the Thames. An apartment this size was obscene in London, she’d discovered after they’d bought the place, when she’d been giving Jenny and Beth, her two best friends from Leonora, a virtual tour on Zoom. They had sat there with their mouths open. ‘Is Nick some sort of oligarch?’ Jenny had said in wonder, peering through her geek-chic, heavy-framed glasses. ‘How much was it?’
Just over six million pounds was the answer. Lulu had still been getting used to converting to Australian dollars, so it was only then that it had struck her just how wealthy Nick must be. ‘I suppose that is a lot of money,’ she had said sheepishly as the two of them had done their usual ‘Oh, Lulu!’ She had a – totally undeserved – reputation as the ditzy dreamer of the group, who went around with her head in the clouds.
‘No, but really, how can Nick afford it?’ Glamour-puss Beth had broken her own no-frowning rule (‘Frowns give you wrinkles, people!’) to glare at Lulu. ‘Is he a mafia boss?’ They knew he was a City trader at the London Stock Exchange, but this was Beth’s none-too-subtle way of saying that Lulu should be careful, make sure she knew what she was getting into before she married some bloke she’d only known four months.
Lulu had frowned sternly at Beth across nine thousand miles of Zoom. ‘He’s eight years older than us, remember – he’s had seventeen years since he left Oxford to make “obscene amounts of money”, as he puts it.’ What she hadn’t mentioned to her friends, because it would have felt like a breach of his privacy, was that she was sure that Nick’s undiagnosed PTSD meant he’d been obsessed with making himself ‘safe’ by accumulating wealth – until he’d met Lulu.
Now, it was her actual, physical safety he was obsessed with.