Don't Stand So Close (26 page)

He nodded.

‘I’m happy I didn’t screw it up for you.’

‘Of course you didn’t.’

She felt a small lump in her throat. The way they stood, so stiff, the awkward way they spoke to each other, it was as though something was lost; as though they hadn’t been friends for years. She could barely remember what they used to laugh about when they were together. Rude, stupid, inappropriate jokes.

‘That was some second date,’ she said.

He didn’t laugh.

‘Whenever you’re ready, I’ll come and get you,’ he said.

‘Ready for what?’

‘To make a police report. To go home.’

‘I’m not going to report what happened. And I’m staying here, for now.’

‘You can’t be serious,’ he said.

‘I’m dead serious. I’m not up for a fight. I’m tired and I’m sick of being poked and prodded and I don’t want to be interrogated. And you of all people know there is a good chance the case won’t even make it to court.’

‘There’s a specialist unit for rape victims. They’ll help you. It might make you feel better in the long run – even if it doesn’t get to court.’

‘Please don’t quote police propaganda.’

‘I’m trying to help you.’ He held out his hand, palm facing upwards. She placed her palm on top of his.

‘Why is this so important to you?’ she asked.

‘Stop being so stupid,’ he said. ‘And stubborn.’ He closed his hand around hers.

Peter could be terribly persuasive.

‘I don’t want to argue with you or to frighten you. But think, Stella: he’s out there, free to do as he pleases. He could still fight for custody of his daughter, he could hurt someone else.’

‘Are you trying to scare me?’

He reached for her other hand. ‘I’m trying to protect you. I think he belongs behind bars.’

‘It will never happen,’ she said.

‘You can’t be sure. And this isn’t a real life – hiding in this flat. Reality is going back to your flat and feeling safe. If you report what happened, it’s a start.’

‘I’m happy here.’

‘I find that hard to believe. You’ve worked so hard to get where you are.’

‘You’re wrong about me.’

Stella was not unhappy in Max’s Hampstead Village apartment. Peter expected her to behave like a grown-up, to take full responsibility even when she was the one who had
been hurt. But she had chosen Max. And Max did not pressure her. And Stella was tired of fighting.

‘I want to be taken care of. Max is happy to do that for the meantime.’

‘You’re letting him influence you.’

‘So what?’

‘It will hurt you in the long run. I’ve worked with victims. So have you.’

Her hands were beginning to feel clammy inside his. She pulled them away, disentangling herself. She dug them back into her pockets. She knew she was being rude and unkind, making him stand in the gloomy hallway.

‘Max isn’t forcing me to do anything. I make my own choices. None of this is his fault. If anything he’s helping me with a bad situation that I was responsible for.’

‘You blame yourself?’

‘Partly. I made an appointment with a client after hours and I didn’t let anyone know. I violated the safety codes of the practice.’

‘Has it occurred to you that Max has a lot of influence over you and he’s using it to cover his own sorry arse? That he could be sacrificing you for his clinic?’

‘That’s ridiculous. You’re wrong. I know him.’

Peter meant well. He just didn’t understand her.

‘If anything,’ she said, ‘Max has shouldered the burden of all of this, having me here. He isn’t the one to blame, Simpson is the psychopath.’

‘You can’t stay trapped in this weird limbo with your boss. You have to face what’s happened, Ellie.’ He was the only person who knew the nickname.

‘Don’t.’ She didn’t want to think about her mother.

‘You know I can report this myself.’

‘You wouldn’t do that to me.’ She had to make him understand.

He stood stubbornly in front of her. He was furious about what Simpson had done; his judgement was swayed by his feelings for her. He wanted revenge, maybe more than she did.

‘Peter, you have to listen to me. There are things you don’t know. About my history. I have good reason to believe that I haven’t got a hope in hell of winning a court case.’

He waited. She pushed her unruly hair behind her ears and glanced down at her bare feet. She looked like an invalid.

‘I spent time in a psychiatric hospital,’ she said. She cleared her throat. ‘In my teens. I was an in-patient for a whole year. I have a diagnosis, it’s in my medical records – which they will of course request. It will all come out. My mother was schizophrenic and I was in and out of foster care from the time I was born. She was sectioned, several times, under the Mental Health Act. They would force her to go into hospital, force her to take her medication. She’d improve and she’d go into remission, for a few months, even a couple of years sometimes. And I’d be sent back home. But when she started feeling better, she’d think she didn’t need her medicine and she’d stop taking it. I don’t blame her, it has horrific side-effects. The whole cycle would start again. Each psychotic episode got worse. She was slowly losing her mind and she knew it. The drugs they gave her were almost as bad as the illness itself; in the end it was hard to tell what was worse, the illness or the cure. There is no cure for schizophrenia, not really, it’s a downward slide. The drugs kill you off in a different way: they make you feel blunted, stop your thoughts, slow down your movements, give you all these
terrible tics. It was like my mother disappeared over a period of years. So – when I was fourteen, she killed herself. I found her. I had a kind of breakdown and I was admitted to a secure adolescent unit. I was delusional. I made all kinds of claims that my teachers had raped me and I thought the doctors in the unit were trying to poison me. They thought I was prodromal – that I was having a psychotic episode and coming down with schizophrenia myself. Anyway, it seems I wasn’t, because I recovered. But I still have that diagnosis on record: delusional disorder, psychosis.’

Peter had a good way of being quiet. She could see he was taking it all in, thinking about what to say. She supposed it wasn’t every day he found out he’d slept with a crazy woman. He reached for her again, and stroked the back of her hand with his thumb.

‘That was a long time ago,’ he said. ‘You were a child. It was only the one episode.’

‘It doesn’t matter. I’m screwed. I’ve made these claims before and they were false. I nearly destroyed someone’s life – my poor English teacher who tried to help me. So you see: I have no credibility. His lawyers will dredge it all up and use it against me. I know it and he knows it.’

‘You’ve been well for years. You’ve done brilliantly in your job.’

‘I’ve been rethinking everything. Maybe my choice of career was a huge mistake. I’ve just stayed, stuck in the hell of my childhood, working with abusers and abused children. Maybe that’s what’s destroying me.’

He looked sceptical. ‘You love your work,’ he said.

She was grateful for the pressure of his thumb against the back of her hand.

‘The point is, it will be my word against his, because that’s
all there is. They’ll ask for my medical records. They’ll want a psychological evaluation. I’m not going through with all of that. It’s not worth it. And at the end of all of it, best case scenario he’ll get a year or two in jail. I’ve worked with these cases, I know.’

She held his face, she forced him to look at her. ‘Promise me you won’t report this. Promise you won’t tell
anyone
without my permission. Promise me. I want to hear you say it. Right now.’

It took him a few moments, but he said it: ‘I promise.’

He didn’t look happy about it, but she believed him.

Her hands dropped from his face. She felt self-conscious, in her robe, barefoot, her hair gone wild. ‘I think you’d better go now,’ she said. ‘I’m feeling tired.’

He gave her a big bear hug. She wanted him to scoop her up and take her with him. She could go back outside and face the world, like a grown-up. But it was a brief spark and it passed quickly. She let him leave and she put the chain back on the door behind him. She returned to the empty flat, feeling a familiar loneliness descending.

Max had given her three bottles of pills. One contained industrial-strength painkillers she no longer needed. The second was filled with tranquillizers and the third with sleeping tablets. According to Max, it was safe to take the sedatives three times a day. Stella allowed herself one sleeping tablet before bed. She needed the pill to wipe out her thoughts and anaesthetize her troubled consciousness. She would close her eyes, put her head on the pillow and sleep without dreaming.

The supply of tranquillizers and sleeping tablets lasted precisely one month. Stella had assumed that when the pills
ran out, her time would be up and Max would expect her to return home. He might also expect her to return to work. Stella had no idea how she was going to manage any of it, since she still had not been able to take a single step further than the front door of his Hampstead flat. She decided not to think about her future prospects. She hoped each day that the panic attack would not come, testing it out at exactly eight in the morning, after Max had left for work. Each day, she experienced the same set of symptoms. On the twentieth day, she gave up hoping.

The night of Peter’s visit, she experimented with taking half a sleeping pill instead of a whole one. Falling asleep wasn’t so difficult. It wasn’t the usual plummet into blissful oblivion, but the dose was enough to relax her, and after lying with her eyes closed and forcing herself to stop ruminating – about how she would ever live alone again, about naked photographs of herself surfacing on the internet, about her job – she drifted down to sleep.

At two in the morning, she sensed something. A presence, moving, at her bedside. She crept out of bed and cowered at the side of the chest of drawers, closing her eyes, like a child, hoping she was invisible. When she opened her eyes, the darkness in the room was absolute. Blackout blinds blocked out any brightness from the streetlights and she could see nothing. She held her breath and stayed completely still. He was in the room, moving towards her. She felt him brush past her, his flesh, cold and scaly like a reptile, grazing her shoulder. She was terrified.

As her pupils adjusted, benign shapes of furniture emerged from the darkness. She knew the intruder had been a nightmare, but the racing heartbeat and the terror remained as she crouched with her head in her hands, waiting for something
terrible to happen. She managed to stand, went into the bathroom and splashed water on her face. She felt better, but she couldn’t bear to be alone. Softly, she opened the door to Max’s room. She felt her way over to his double bed and eased her way in under the duvet. He lay with his back to her and she spooned up behind him. He adjusted himself slightly and then his hand took hold of hers and pulled it up to his chest.

Stella doubted she would find a window-repair service willing to come out to Hilltop any time soon. As she rummaged through the cupboards to find masking tape and black bags in order to attempt some makeshift repairs, she came across her boxes of pills, as she had known she would.

She could not last one minute more. She lifted the box of benzodiazepines. One would take the edge off her restlessness, would pull her back from the cliff-edge, would keep her paranoia at bay.

She swallowed. She didn’t care that Peter was watching.

In the living room, he wrapped a cushion cover around his hand and smashed out the remaining pieces of glass from around the sides of the window frame. Stella cut open a few black bags and together they stretched them across the open space and taped them to the sides. It was pretty much a hopeless endeavour: the wind battered the thin plastic membrane and it was obvious that the temporary fix would not last long.

Peter was still covered in Blue’s blood. It was all over his sleeves, and down the front of his shirt. ‘You look terrible,’ she said. She managed a weak smile.

‘Thanks. I’ve been in touch with the Met,’ he said. ‘Simpson’s ex-wife has given them some more details about what’s been going on.’

He did not seem as furious with her, or as disappointed, as she had feared. Maybe, despite his antipathy for her husband, Peter was relieved that Max had taken responsibility for the troubled girl.

Stella reached up and held the corner of the plastic bag steady as Peter put on yet another layer of masking tape. The minute she lifted her hand, the wind began its assault on their work.

‘After Simpson … attacked you,’ Peter said, ‘it seems the relationship with the new girlfriend didn’t take too long to break down. Apparently he is back to his old ways – he’s been stalking his ex-wife, with emails and phone calls, sometimes following her when she leaves the house. She claims he tormented them, drove her back to drink after she’d got her life back on track. She didn’t bother to report him. She doesn’t have too much faith in the police.’

‘That’s what Blue was trying to tell me last night. Except that she didn’t tell me the name of the man she was describing, or that he was her father.’

Even with the help of tranquillizers, she didn’t know how much more of this conversation she could take. ‘Why are you going on about this? Don’t you think I feel guilty enough already? Yes. You were right. I should have reported him.’

The roll of masking tape was empty and Peter dropped it to the floor.

‘I didn’t mean it like that,’ he said. ‘The point I’m trying to make is that Max has been treating Blue, as well as her mother. He probably knew. And yet he didn’t mention to you
that Simpson is still at large. Don’t you find it strange that Max has had contact with the family the whole time, without telling you?’

Yes, she did find it strange. More than strange. Max had broken boundaries by treating both mother and daughter – while married to another of Simpson’s victims. Stella couldn’t get her head around all of the implications, there were so many potential pitfalls. And yes, Peter was right: Max’s decisions were questionable. But then she hardly had a right to sit in judgement, when she had been so utterly passive. She herself had done nothing at all to try and resolve anything. At least Max had tried to do something to help mother and daughter.