The facts are unarguable. Except that my parents were not suicidal. They were not depressed, anxious, fearful. They were the last people you would expect to give up on life.
‘Mental illness isn’t always obvious,’ Mark says, when I raise it, his voice giving no hint of impatience that the conversation is, once again, circling back to this. ‘The most capable, the most upbeat people can have depression.’
Over the last year I’ve learned to keep my theories to myself; not to give voice to the cynicism that lies beneath the surface of my grief. No one else has doubts. No one else feels unease.
But then, maybe no one else knew my parents the way I did.
The phone rings. I let the answerphone pick up but the caller doesn’t leave a message. Immediately I feel my mobile vibrate in my pocket, and I know even before I look that it’s Mark calling.
‘Under a sleeping baby, by any chance?’
‘How did you guess?’
‘How is she?’
‘Feeding every half an hour. I keep trying to start dinner and not getting anywhere.’
‘Leave it – I can do it when I get home. How are you feeling?’ There’s a subtle change of tone that no one else would notice. A subtext. How are you feeling today, of all days?
‘I’m okay.’
‘I can come home—’
‘I’m fine. Really.’
Mark would hate to leave his course halfway through. He collects qualifications the way other people collect beer mats, or foreign coins; so many letters they no longer fit after his name. Every few months he prints new business cards, and the least important letters fall off the end into oblivion. Today’s course is The Value of Empathy in the Client–Counsellor Relationship. He doesn’t need it; his empathy was evident the second I walked through his door.
He let me cry. Pushed a box of tissues towards me and told me to take my time. To begin when I was ready, and not before. And when I stopped crying, but still couldn’t find the words, he told me about the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and I realised I hadn’t moved past first base.
We were four sessions in when Mark took a deep breath and told me he couldn’t treat me any more, and I asked if it was me, and he said there was a conflict of interest and this was terribly unprofessional but would I like to have dinner some time?
He was older than me – closer to my mum’s age than my own – with a confidence at odds with the nerves I now saw hovering beneath the surface.
I didn’t hesitate. ‘I’d love to.’
Afterwards he said he felt guiltier about interrupting my counselling than about the ethics of dating a patient. Former patient, I pointed out.
He still feels uncomfortable about it. People meet in all sorts of places, I remind him. My parents met in a London nightclub; his met in the frozen food section at Marks & Spencer. And he and I met in a seventh-floor apartment in Putney, in a consultation room with leather chairs and soft woollen throws, and a sign on the door that said MARK HEMMINGS, COUNSELLOR. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
‘If you’re sure. Give Ella-bella a kiss from me.’
‘Bye.’ I hang up first, and I know he has the handset pressed against his lips, the way he does when he’s deep in thought. He’ll have gone outside to make the call, forgoing coffee, or networking, or whatever thirty counsellors do when they’re released from the classroom. In a moment he’ll rejoin the others, and he’ll be lost to me for the next few hours, as he works on displaying empathy for a made-up problem. Pretend anxiety. A fictional bereavement.
He’d like to work on mine. I don’t let him. I stopped seeing a therapist when I realised all the talking in the world wasn’t going to bring back my parents. You reach a point where the pain you feel inside is simply sadness. And there’s no cure for that.
Grief is complicated. It ebbs and flows and is so multi-faceted that unpicking it makes my head hurt. I can go for days without crying, then barely be able to breathe for the sobs that wrack my body. One moment I’ll be laughing with Uncle Billy about something stupid Dad once did; the next I’ll be filled with rage for his selfishness. If Dad hadn’t killed himself, Mum wouldn’t have done, either.
The anger is the worst part of all of this. The white-hot fury, and the guilt that inevitably follows.
Why did they do it?
I’ve gone over the days preceding my dad’s death a million times; asked myself if we could have done anything to prevent it.
Your dad’s missing.
I’d frowned at the text, looking for the punchline. I lived with my parents, but I was away overnight at a conference in Oxford, chatting over morning coffee with a colleague from London. I excused myself to call her.
‘What do you mean, missing?’
Mum wasn’t making sense. The words came slowly, as though she was dredging them up. They’d had an argument the night before; Dad had stormed off to the pub. So far, so normal. I had long since accepted the storminess of my parents’ relationship; the squalls that would pass over as quickly as they blew in. Except this time Dad hadn’t come home.
‘I thought he might have slept at Bill’s,’ she said, ‘but I’m at work now and Bill hasn’t seen him. I’m out of my mind, Anna!’
I left the conference straight away. Not because I was worried about Dad, but because I was worried about Mum. They were careful to keep the causes of their arguments from me, but I’d picked up the aftermath too many times. Dad would disappear – off to work, or to the golf course, or to the pub. Mum would hide in the house, pretending to me she hadn’t been crying.
It was all over by the time I got home. Police in the kitchen, their hats in their hands. Mum shaking so violently they’d called a paramedic to treat her for shock. Uncle Billy, white with grief. Laura, Mum’s goddaughter, making tea and forgetting to add milk. None of us noticing.
I read the text Dad had sent.
I can’t do this any more. The world will be a better place without me in it.
‘Your father took a car from work.’ The policeman was about Dad’s age, and I wondered if he had children. If they took him for granted. ‘The cameras show it heading towards Beachy Head late last night.’ My mother let out a stifled cry. I saw Laura move to comfort her, but I couldn’t do the same. I was frozen. Not wanting to hear, but compelled to listen all the same.
‘Officers responded to a call-out around ten o’clock this morning,’ PC Pickett stared at his notes. I suspected it was easier than looking at us. ‘A woman reported seeing a man fill a rucksack with rocks, and place his wallet and phone on the ground, before stepping off the edge of the cliff.’
‘And she didn’t try to stop him?’ I hadn’t meant to shout, and Uncle Billy put a hand on my shoulder. I shook him off. Turned to the others. ‘She just watched him jump?’
‘It all happened very quickly. The caller was very upset, as you can imagine.’ PC Pickett realised his poor judgement too late to bite his tongue.
‘She was upset, was she? How did she think Dad was feeling?’ I whirled round, searching for support in the faces around me, then fixing my gaze on the police officers. ‘Have you questioned her?’
‘Anna.’ Laura spoke quietly.
‘How do you know she didn’t push him?’
‘Anna, this isn’t helping anyone.’