shakes – mouth like a mouldy sock and mild paranoia – but the screaming reel of memories like a ghoulish episode of This Is Your Life. A punishment for the blissful hours during which her emotions had been numb. She spent so many days locked in her bedroom, tears flooding down her cheeks and the TV so loud that her head pounded to the beat of whatever daytime junk she was using to stop her parents hearing her cry. And every time she would tell herself that the short reprieve wasn’t worth the pain she would go through the next day. That it was getting harder and harder to pull back the Karen she was trying to be.
But she never stopped. Not until the evening it had all gone wrong. The evening that had brought her past rushing up to meet her present. The others, Eleanor and Bea, laughed about it now, albeit nervously, with the giddy hindsight of people who had never had the worst happen to them, but she couldn’t bring herself to join in, because to her it was more than just a silly near miss. To her it was fate trying to send her a message: Look what happens when you try to be normal. Look what happens when you try to forget. You can never forget, because when you do, people die. She stopped drinking.
She lifted the remote and flicked on the TV, her fond memories tainted now, like a child who had picked up a pretty stone to find a woodlouse stuck to the bottom. It seemed to her sometimes that on darker days, usually when Michael was away, she couldn’t allow herself to think about the past at all. And she definitely couldn’t allow herself to contemplate the future. So it was easier to distract her mind with trashy TV and Sudoku. Those things were much less painful.
45
Karen
Karen prepared for her next session with Jessica Hamilton as though she was going into battle. Her conversation with Robert yesterday had rattled her – if she was honest with herself, his comments about how she was dealing with things scared her. Every time she closed her eyes she could picture Jessica sitting with her dirty pumps on the sofa, and the look on her face when she’d been talking about the pregnant woman stuck in the rocks. ‘They blew her up.’
Well if Jessica thought she was going to get the better of her, she could think again.
She checked the clock: fifteen minutes to go before their session, plenty of time to pop to the toilet. Nerves. Get a grip, she told herself.
Molly was at her desk when she passed, and Karen smiled a greeting without trusting herself to speak. The toilet was empty, but as she sat in the stall she heard the door swing open and someone throw themselves into the cubicle next to hers. Seconds later there was the sound of sobbing.
Unable to ignore what was obviously a woman in distress, she spoke.
‘Molly?’
Their PA was the only other woman on this floor, and Karen’s assumption proved correct when she heard her squeak a reply. She flushed the toilet, washed her hands and waited for Molly to appear. When she did, her eyes were red and her face was glistening with tears.
‘What’s wrong?’ Karen asked, putting out a hand to touch her shoulder. ‘Has something happened at home?’
Molly shook her head and looked embarrassed.
‘It’s Joe,’ she said, not meeting her eyes but instead pretending to fix her hair. ‘I think he’s going to finish with me. He says he needs space.’
Karen couldn’t help thinking that it wouldn’t be a terrible thing if Joe did finish with her, but that wasn’t going to help the situation. The only time she’d met Molly’s boyfriend he’d been sprawled in the waiting room and had barely looked up when she’d opened the door and introduced herself. He spoke in a language made up of single syllables and grunts, and Karen wondered how this weedy, barely literate man could be the cause of so much grief for pretty, clever Molly.
‘Men always say that,’ she said instead. ‘Then they almost never want it when they’ve got it. If he loses you, he loses the best thing in his life and you get to demand an extra-large bouquet of flowers when he realises his mistake. And jewellery.’
It sounded like something Bea would say, which was a lot more helpful than what she herself usually came out with at times like this.