Page 85 of Pictures of Him

‘Getting drunk isn’t a crime. What he did is. He’s a sick bastard. He preyed on you when you were asleep. When you were drunk and defenceless.’

‘When I last saw Lucian, the night Ling died, I told him about me and Jack. I told him we’d slept together.’

‘You really believed that? That it was sex and not rape?’

‘That’s what Jack told me the next day. He said I’d started it, that I’d been all over him. And I was so sick and ashamed I chose to believe him. It didn’t fit with my memories of it, though; the thing I remembered most clearly was just wanting it to be over.’

‘Oh Catherine.’

Sam took hold of my hands, the two of us standing there in our newly painted sitting room, surrounded by the history of you. In Sam’s face now, comprehension. At last I am understood.

‘Go and find him, Catherine. Go and tell him the truth, just like you’ve told me.’

‘Why are you doing this, Sam? You hate him, don’t you?’

‘I hate what happened to you. It wasn’t your fault and you’ve spent your whole life regretting it. You’ve made yourself ill with it. I think you’ll feel better once he knows the truth.’

I am buoyed up by the anger Sam hands me, and afterwards I will not be able to recall a moment of my journey to your house, not a road or a tree or a passing car, sopreoccupied am I with my justice. Jack took my life from me and now I’m taking it back. I’m turning the hands of the clock myself: once, twice, fifteen times. We will be that girl and boy again, only this time we’ll get it right.

Now

‘Big day today, my darling. You’re going home.’

Alison is helping me to get dressed in jeans and a T-shirt and a pair of silver flip-flops, which are brand new; she snips off the plastic loop that holds them together. She trims my toenails and paints them carefully, three even stripes to each nail, no smudges, a brilliant orange.

‘Daisy chose that colour for you,’ she tells me as she works. ‘She says it used to be your favourite.’

I know what she’s doing; they’ve all been doing it, day after day, night after night, trying to prepare me, trying to rehabilitate me back into family life.

Greg was here, sitting on the scratchy brown visitors’ chair first thing, hoping to convince me that I’ve made enough progress to survive in the outside world. I’m not speaking yet but I soon will, he says. He’s sure of it.

‘You lived through all those memories, Catherine. You won’t have to do that again. You can focus on the present now, on Sam, Joe and Daisy.’

‘How about you say hello to your man when he comes, darling?’ says Alison, sticking to her theme. ‘It would mean so much to him. Promise me you’ll try, won’t you?’

I feel as if I’m standing on the edge of a cliff, waiting to jump. The moment I speak, I allow the truth to come rushing back in, I let go of my dream world, of you and me, the girl and boy who drift from beach to café to bed, marooned in memory, but beautifully so, I like to think. I try to speak, I do, but what happens is that my throat becomes locked and my chest feels tight and my voice remains stuck in my mind, stuck on two words I do not wish to say.

Greg comes back for one last pep talk before I leave.

‘Now, are you feeling all right about going home? I’m going off in a minute, so I just wanted to take this last chance to say goodbye.’

I give him a small approximation of a smile, a bit like your smile, your minimal, downturned one, your defining characteristic it seems to me now.

‘That’s good, Catherine,’ Greg says. ‘I’m so happy to see you smiling. It would change everything if you’d start speaking, just a word, just one word to give us all something to hold onto. Think of Joe and Daisy, think how it would turn their lives around if you’d speak to them. Can’t you do it for them, Catherine?’

I turn my face away and stare out of the window at the apple tree in the corner of the garden. When I first came here, it still had a few squashy brown apples clinging to its branches; once or twice I saw them fall to the ground. I’ve seen that tree naked and grey through winter, and the cloudburst of saccharine colour that marked its springtime flowering. When I first came here they thought I’d lost my mind, though those weren’t the words they used.

‘She doesn’t remember the accident because she disconnected from it. We call it dissociative amnesia.’

Now they’ve worked out I live in my head because I want to, because it’s the only way I can stay with you. And they don’t keep beds here for that.

Sam comes around the corner with Alison. She’s holding a huge bunch of flowers, crimson roses and sprays of white lilac; he’s always been good at flowers.

‘I’ll miss her beautiful face, that’s for sure,’ Alison says.

‘You’ve been so good to her, Alison. To all of us.’

‘Hey,’ Sam says to me in his method-husband-to-wife voice, and I flash him with my eyes, a silent acknowledgement. ‘Look at you in your outside clothes.’

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