Maggie didn’t wait to hear any more. She marched along the path and across the lawn and onto the gravel, her C-section scar nipping like a bastard. There was a wee stone urn by the door with bonnie flowers in it. She kicked the fucker.
It went over, and all the earth and flowers fell out.
‘Maggie, are you okay?’ said Duncan’s voice behind her.
Fuck.
She turned. Duncan was there with the pram, and Nick right next to him. They’d followed her.
‘Fine. Tripped.’
‘Let me do that.’ Nick got down on his knees and scooped everything back in the urn. As he patted the earth in place around the plants, he whispered, ‘Nice one. QED, Mags. QED.’ He got to his feet with a smile. ‘There we are. No harm done.’
7
Lulu - January 2019
Lulu stood in the middle of her office looking at the view of the brick wall. Probably some sort of metaphor for what she was feeling. But how could she be standing here thinking of herself and metaphors when Paul . . . when Paul . . . But if she allowed herself to think about Paul, about what he must have gone through as he positioned the chair, as he tied the length of blue nylon twine around his neck, as he said goodbye to Milo, she would lose it again.
She’d had no idea he could be suicidal.
What sort of therapist did that make her?
Typical Lulu.
Typical ditzy Lulu. Always losing things.
Karla, her old tutor at Sydney Uni, had reassured her in several tearful Zoom conversations that she shouldn’t blame herself. ‘Our clients, by definition, are troubled souls. People undergoing therapy are more likely to go through with suicide, but studies have shown that there isn’t a causal relationship. They’re in therapy because they’re troubled, and they complete suicide for the same reason, not because of the therapy.’
And Lulu knew, with her head, that this was true. But her heart . . .
Nick had been trying to persuade her to take a break from work. Last night, he’d held her in bed when the tears had come, yet again. He’d gently chided her for taking a zolpidem off-schedule, and she’d half-yelled at him that she knew she wouldn’t sleep without it. He had hugged her tight and murmured reassurances. ‘The human mind is a mysterious thing. You keep saying yourself that even the most brilliant neurologists are only beginning to understand it. Don’t be so hard on yourself. There’s no way you could have seen this coming.’
But she should have seen it coming.
She stared at the wall.
Maybe she should take a break from work. She’d already stopped taking on any new clients.
She picked up her tablet and slipped it into her bag. She’d downloaded papers on risk factors for suicidal ideation but hadn’t been able to face looking at them. She needed to do that. She had half an hour before her next appointment. She owed it to her existing and possible future clients to work out where she’d gone wrong with Paul.
She went across the road to Ravenscourt Park, found a quiet bench in the shade of three big trees in the middle of the grass, and started to read. The papers told her what she already knew – that one of the main risk factors for suicide was having a family member who’d killed themselves. There was a genetic component to it, apparently, but there was also the problem that it loomed large if someone close to you – your father, for instance – had completed suicide.
Oh God.
She knew that, so why hadn’t she seen it coming with Paul? He hadn’t displayed any of the warning signs. He hadn’t, as far as she knew, attempted suicide before, in all the thirty-odd years since finding his dad’s body in that bath. He wasn’t depressed or particularly anxious. He didn’t have a problem with alcohol. He hadn’t expressed feelings of hopelessness – quite the opposite, in that last session.
The screen blurred.
She couldn’t stop thinking about Milo, cowering under the table. She had wanted to take him, when the police and the paramedics had arrived, but they wouldn’t let her. After she’d made her statement, she’d browbeaten one of the police officers, a DC called Tariq Akhtar, into revealing where Milo had been taken. He wasn’t, as she’d hoped, with friends or family. He was in a dog shelter. In one of those concrete cells, probably, watching everyone who went past, his little tail starting to wag in the hope that it might be his dad come to get him.
‘Can we take him?’ she’d asked Nick impulsively.
‘Pets aren’t allowed here,’ he’d said quickly, but with a grimace, trying to make out he wished it were otherwise. ‘You know that. Which makes sense, with no garden. Someone will take him. If he’s as adorable as you say he is, he’ll be snapped up pretty quickly, I’ll bet.’
But Milo wasn’t an attractive dog. The chances were that people walking past his cell would just keep on walking.
Oh God!
She looked away from the screen across the park.
A man was coming up the grassy slope towards her.
Harry.
Wasn’t it?
Yes, it was porter Harry!
He must have been staking out her office and had followed her in here!
Heart bumping, she looked around.
There was no one nearby.
She grabbed up her bag and started to run across the grass, skirting a line of shrubs on the other side of which, she knew, was the pond. There would be people there. She had opened her mouth to shout something when a hand clamped across it and she was being knocked sideways into the bushes.
She landed hard on the packed, dusty earth, with Harry on top of her. His hand was still over her mouth. She kicked out behind her and had the satisfaction of feeling him wince.
They were in a cave-like space roofed by thick vegetation – invisible, probably, to anyone out there walking past.