If things aren’t going to get any better for him, I might need to reassess our situation.
The thought came out of the blue. I wanted to dismiss it, even told myself off for thinking it. But then, like thoughts do, it expanded to another until it spiralled into a full-on conversation in my head.
There is always a way out of his suffering. Who better to help him than you?
Tony was the last thing I wanted to lose from my life, but he wasn’t the man I’d married.
Don’t rush into a decision yet. Just know that the next candidate might be closer to you than you thought.
I was beginning to wonder if I’d always be the one to suffer, so other people didn’t have to.
I was about to join Tony in the garden when my phone vibrated. An email icon appeared on the screen. There was nothing in the subject line, but the address gave me a chill. [email protected]
I hurried into the garage for privacy and opened the message. Only three words had been typed.
More to follow, it said.
‘More to follow?’ I said out loud. What did that even mean? I was about to delete it when I noticed the email had an attachment, a sound file.
The fluorescent lightbulb above me began to flicker like a Morse-code light show. I waited anxiously for the file to download, wondering what on earth it could be. Nothing could have prepared me for the answer.
‘I’ll do it,’ I heard a recording of my voice say. ‘If you are serious about wanting to end your life, then I will be with you in person when you do it. I will be on your side from the beginning to the end of this process, but this is a business relationship. We both have our parts to play, Steven. Yours is to tell me who you are and mine is to ensure your transition is a smooth one.’
The phone slipped from my grasp and fell to the floor. The protective plastic case prevented the screen from cracking, and I scrambled to pick it up and listen to it again. Were my ears playing tricks on me? Was I imagining this? I pressed play again. No, it was for real.
Blood filled my head and made me woozy. I felt as if I were rocking back and forth, but my body wasn’t moving. I feared I might collapse, so I grabbed hold of a shelf too hard, pulling it from its wall brackets and sending it crashing to the floor. Paint spilled across the concrete like lava, splashing my shoes and bare legs. I needed to calm myself, but I couldn’t. This clip had the potential to destroy everything I had spent so long working towards.
I had deleted every file from that Dictaphone, so where in God’s name had this come from? And why today, five months later?
Think, Laura, think. There must be a way out of this.
Only there wasn’t.
In the blink of an eye, somebody else had taken control of me.
What do you want? I replied, and pressed the send button. Ten anxious minutes passed and still there was no response. I struggled to breathe, as if I were having a panic attack.
Anchor, Laura, I told myself. Think of your anchor.
I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and pictured Henry’s face, but not even he could keep me tethered this time. I held my hands over my mouth, bent double and screamed until my throat was raw.
EPILOGUE
EFFIE
I watched upstairs from behind the blind in my bedroom window as Dad stood at the end of the garden, alone and lost in thought.
Once again, he was staring aimlessly across the playing fields, like he wanted to be anywhere but trapped in this prison we were supposed to accept as our home. I couldn’t remember the last time he’d given us one of his big beaming smiles that made everyone around him feel warm and fuzzy. Nowadays he looked as miserable as I felt. Mum had done this to him. She had turned him into a ghost I scarcely recognised.
I couldn’t bear to see him like this any longer. It was time to set the wheels in motion and put an end to this, before she killed him. I attached the file stored in my Cloud to the email and hit the send button.
I lay back on my bed, slipped my noise-cancelling headphones on and picked a Best of R & B playlist on Spotify to listen to. What I really wanted to do was creep downstairs and watch Mum completely freak out over why a dead woman was emailing her clips of a conversation she’d had months ago with a dead man. I wanted to see how long she could hold it together before she cracked. It had happened before, when she went schiz over Henry. I hoped she wouldn’t fall apart immediately, though – I wanted her to suffer. I wanted to make her life as hellish as mine and Dad’s.
I missed living with just Dad and Alice. Everything had been so much easier without Mum in the picture. It hadn’t always been that way. In fact, at the start, it had been hard to accept, especially for Alice. Before Mum’s sudden reappearance, the last we’d seen of her was Dad holding her back as two paramedics resuscitated my unconscious brother on a trolley. Mum was hysterical, screaming and with spit flying from her mouth like little white bullets.
‘I’ve killed him! I’ve killed my baby!’ she kept repeating, and made deep, horrible moaning noises I’d never heard anyone make before. I guess that’s the kind of shit that happens when you almost burn your son alive. Anyway, in the end she was sedated and driven away in an ambulance.
Alice and I stayed the night with an elderly couple across the road. They kept offering us drinks and snacks, as if that would make everything okay. They put up two camp beds in their spare room, but at some point during the night, Alice crept under my covers and welded herself to me.
‘Are we going to die in a fire, too?’ she asked, but I couldn’t truthfully tell her that we weren’t.
Over the next few days, Dad’s eyes became redder and redder, and while Mum remained in a psychiatric evaluation unit, Henry came out of his coma and we were told it was unlikely he’d ever be the brother we remembered. At Dad’s suggestion, Alice and I didn’t visit Henry or Mum.
To give him credit, Dad treated us like adults and levelled with us about what Mum had done. He explained that she’d confessed to starting the fire because she blamed the house for all the arguments they’d been having. But she didn’t know Henry was upstairs and Dad had yet to tell the police.
I was much more of a daddy’s girl than a mummy’s girl, but I still hated the thought of Mum going to prison for what had been an accident – albeit a pretty fucking major one. Eventually we agreed it was best if Dad lied to the police and said Henry had a fascination with matches. In return, Dad didn’t want us to go anywhere near Mum, and we agreed not to have anything to do with her until we were older.