The Hypnotist's Love Story (48 page)

“What?” said Patrick.

Ellen realized her mistake too late. She opened her eyes. Patrick had stopped pacing and was standing frozen in the middle of the room. “What ‘last time’?”

She opened her mouth to speak and closed it again. She was desperately trying to find the right balance between honesty and enraging him further. She gave up.

“She left biscuits on the doorstep when we went up to the mountains,” she said. “I think she might have cooked them in my kitchen.”

“
What?
She broke in before and you neglected to tell me?”

“Well, I might have been wrong.” Ellen sat up and folded her arms protectively across her stomach. “I just had a feeling.” Patrick was looking at her almost as if he wanted to hit her. An image came into her mind of the way he’d grabbed Saskia by the shoulders as if he was about to throw her up against the wall.

“I’m not Saskia,” she said involuntarily.

“I know you’re not,” he said with an impatient, disgusted move of his hand. “But why did you not mention this to me?”

“I didn’t want to upset you,” said Ellen. “I know how much it upsets you.”

“You threw them out straightaway, of course.”

“Of course,” said Ellen. Honesty was often overrated.

“Because they probably had rat poison in them. Or, Christ, I don’t know, anthrax!”

“She doesn’t want to kill you, Patrick. She loves you.”

“How do you know what she wants?” said Patrick. “You have no idea what she wants. God Almighty, the woman watched us sleep last night!”

“I just talked to her at the hospital,” said Ellen. “I think it’s finished. I really do. She promised me. Anyway, she’s going to be stuck in bed for a long time.”

Patrick sat down on the chair in front of Ellen. It was the chair where her grandmother always used to sit to watch TV. Patrick looked too big and rough for it. Ellen had to stop herself from saying,
Don’t sit there.

“
You talked to her,” said Patrick slowly. “Why would you do that?”

“I just felt if I talked to her, I might be able to make a difference.”

“Right,” said Patrick. He ran the palm of his hand roughly across his face, pulling at the stubbled skin. “So, you two girls have a nice chat?”

“I really think she’s hit rock bottom,” began Ellen.

“Oh, dear, the
poor
thing,” said Patrick.

Ellen went silent. He’d earned the right to be sarcastic.

They locked eyes for a few seconds and then Patrick looked away and shook his head.

He took a deep breath. “You’re meant to be on my side.”

“I am!” said Ellen immediately.

“It feels like you’re on her side.”

“That’s—silly.”

“If you had some ex-boyfriend stalking you the way Saskia stalks me, I wouldn’t hesitate. I’d knock his head off.”

“You’re saying I should have
punched
Saskia?” said Ellen, unfairly, but needing all the points she could get.

“Of course not,” said Patrick tiredly. He sat back and closed his eyes.

There was a pounding sensation at the very center of Ellen’s forehead. Her wrist itched unbearably.

Guilt. That’s what she was feeling, because he was partly right. She’d tried harder to understand what it must be like to be Saskia than she’d tried to understand what it would be like to be Patrick.

The mature thing would be to say nothing, to not try to defend herself and to certainly stop aligning herself with Saskia.

Instead she said, “Are you thinking it now?”

“Thinking what?” Patrick opened his eyes.

“Are you thinking about Colleen?”

“What are you talking about? Why would I be thinking about Colleen? What has she got to do with anything?”

He looked completely, innocently baffled.

So much for her virtuous decision in the car. Part of her longed to rewind and take it back, but the other part, her basic, instinctual self, wanted everything, every single thing, out in the open.

“You said last night that sometimes you look at me and you think about Colleen, and you think that it’s not the same and that you’ll never love anyone as much as you loved Colleen.”

“I said that?” said Patrick. He paused. “I never said that!”

“You were in a hypnotic state,” admitted Ellen.

He didn’t say: I would never have said that.

“
So it was like I was sleep talking,” said Patrick slowly.

“Sort of,” said Ellen. “You were somewhere between asleep and awake.”

“So when we do these hypnosis sessions, do you ask me stuff?” said Patrick. “You ask me stuff about Colleen? Is that why you do it? So you can go ferreting about in my head?”

“Of course not,” said Ellen. The phone began to ring. She wondered if she should use it as an opportunity to escape from this conversation, which did not seem to be going well. She looked down and saw that she’d been scratching at her wrist so hard that there were little flecks of blood.

“Let them leave a message,” said Patrick.

They sat there looking at each other while the phone rang and rang.

The morphine made everything melt. The ceiling softened and swirled; the white blanket covering my body rippled like water.

When I closed my eyes to get away from the melting room, I saw images from my life slapped in front of me like playing cards, one after the other, in rapid succession.

Patrick, waiting for me outside the movie theater, deep in thought, looking so sad, and then his face changing, lighting up, when he saw me arrive; my mother, when her hair was still blond, driving me home from school, looking at the road ahead and laughing over something I’d said; the
kids who moved in next door, looking up at me with their trusting, nonchalant eyes; Lance from work, standing in my office, eagerly handing over
The Wire
DVD series.

I opened my eyes and remembered I had a job and that I should probably let them know that I wouldn’t be coming in for a while.

I called on the phone next to my bed. Nina answered, and when I heard her familiar, cheery voice I had a sensation of horror, as if I was in a dream and I’d walked into the office naked. The game was up. They were going to find out the truth.

I heard myself say, “Nina, it’s me, Saskia.”

“Oh, hey, Saskia, I didn’t know you were out this morning. Look, I’ve been wanting to ask you about—”

“Nina,” I said. It felt like I was talking underwater. I gripped the phone hard. I must have waited too long to speak because she said, “Are you still there?”

“I hit rock bottom,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I don’t know what to say to you,” said Patrick. His eyes looked glassy. “My head is too full of last night. I have no memory of saying that, that thing about Colleen.”

“I shouldn’t have mentioned it,” said Ellen. She was desperately disappointed with herself. Her mobile phone began to ring somewhere in the house.

“Can we talk about it later?” asked Patrick. “I want to go to the police station while Jack is asleep and make that report.”

“Of course,” said Ellen. “Actually, let’s just forget I ever—”

“We’re not going to forget it,” said Patrick. “We’re going to talk about it later.” He smiled at her and the unexpectedness of it made her want to cry. “I promise, we’re going to talk about everything at
length
later and we’re going to fix it.”

“Right.”

Now her office phone was ringing again.

“Sounds like someone needs to talk to you,” said Patrick.

“Yes,” said Ellen, and then the air rushed from her lungs. “Oh, God, I forgot. I completely forgot.”

“What?”

Ellen looked at the clock above Patrick’s head and tried to will the hands to move backward. It was two-thirty p.m. “That journalist. I was meeting her at a café at eleven this morning.”

She imagined the journalist sitting in the café, tapping her fingers and irritably checking and rechecking her watch. She was already ill-disposed toward Ellen. Now she would think that she’d deliberately not turned up. She would think that she had something to hide.

“Reschedule,” said Patrick. “Tell her there was an accident. It’s not your fault.”

“Yes,” said Ellen, because of course that was logical, but she already knew that it was going to be a disaster, and when she listened to the messages on both her office phone and mobile, she knew she was right.

“I’m waiting in the café you suggested,” said Lisa, with a faint emphasis on the word “you,” and the sounds of the café in the background adding to Ellen’s guilt. “I’ll be filing this story this afternoon, so if I don’t hear from you soon, I’ll assume you have no comment, and you’re not interested in responding to the issues raised by your former clients.”

As Ellen hung up, the phone immediately rang again, and she snatched it up, desperate for the chance at redemption. It was her mother.

“I’ve been trying to call you all morning,” she said accusingly. “I really need to talk to you.”

“I can’t talk,” said Ellen. “I’ll call you back.”

The phone rang again. It was Julia, her voice low and throaty. “Guess who just left my bed.”

“I can’t talk right now,” said Ellen again. This was becoming like some sort of awful comedy. “I’m sorry.”

She hung up.

“Breathe,” said Patrick, standing at her office door.

“Shut up.”

She called the journalist’s mobile number. The phone went straight to voice-mail. Ellen tried to keep the panic out of her voice as she left a message.

“My stepson had an accident,” she said. “I’ve been at the hospital.”

Her voice didn’t sound authentic. It sounded forced and fraudulent. She felt like she was lying, because she’d never called Jack her “stepson” before and because she hadn’t been at the hospital with him, she’d been at the hospital seeing Saskia.

Patrick mimed deep breaths at her. Ellen waved him away.

The guilt she was feeling was all out of proportion: She hadn’t murdered anyone. In fact, she hadn’t actually done anything except forgotten an appointment.

As she completed her message—
I’d still love the opportunity to talk to you!
(“love the opportunity”; she sounded like a telemarketer)—she heard the doorbell ring.

Patrick went downstairs to open the door, and Ellen’s heart sank as she recognized the client’s voice. It was Mary-Kate turning up late as usual for her two-thirty p.m. appointment. Mary-Kate certainly deserved a paragraph in the article exposing Ellen. The journalist could calculate how much Mary-Kate had spent over the last few months without any progress. Then they could mention how much Ellen had spent on those boots she’d only worn once.

I’m a bad person, thought Ellen. A bad, bad person.

(He’ll never love me the way he loved Colleen.)

(He’ll eventually leave me and I’ll be a single mother like Mum.)

(Without a job.)

(And to top it all off, in five very short years I’ll be forty.
Forty!
)

“Mary-Kate,” she called out, filled with decisiveness. She walked briskly
down the stairs as Patrick ushered Mary-Kate inside. “I’m very sorry but I can’t see you today. In fact, I can’t see you again.”

Mary-Kate looked startled. Ellen registered that there was something different about Mary-Kate today. Her face didn’t look as doughy as usual. Also, she was carrying a bunch of flowers, and she was wearing a long buttercup yellow scarf.

“I’ll just check on Jack before I go out.” Patrick raised his eyebrows questioningly at Ellen over the top of Mary-Kate’s head, his tired eyes clearly trying to communicate something along the lines of,
Are you sacking all your clients now?
He gave a minute shrug and disappeared up the stairs.

“Is everything OK?” asked Mary-Kate.

“Not really,” said Ellen. “I think there’s going to be an article in the paper tomorrow that’s going to destroy my reputation.”

“Which paper?” said Mary-Kate immediately, as if she was going to rush out and buy a copy.

“The
Daily News
,” said Ellen. “I’d really rather you didn’t read it, to be honest, but look, my point is—”

“Well, let’s see what we can do about it,” said Mary-Kate. “Oh, and by the way, these are for you.” She handed over the flowers.