Page 60 of Insomnia

“Emma.”

It’s only when she appears in front of me that I realize she’s been calling my name. Miranda Stockwell.

“Miranda.” This I do not need. “I’m having a shit day—no, in fact I’m having the mother of all shit days—and I really don’t have time for—” I try to barge past her, but she stops me.

“Please. I don’t want to cause any trouble, I just want to apologize. I’m so sorry for how I spoke to you. How I’ve behaved. And following you to the restaurant and threatening you. I was—well, frankly, I was out of order and drunk. And hurt. I appreciate you were just doing your job, and I shouldn’t have behaved that way. Now I’m sober and—” she stops and frowns, bright eyes studyingme. Her eyes linger on the dried blood, and then looks at my face. Maybe I’ve got some there too. “Are you okay?”

I almost laugh at that. “I am so, so far from okay, Miranda. So if you’d move, I can get on with examining the wreckage of my life.”

She doesn’t move. “Do you want a coffee? You look like you need a coffee.”

“Actually, what I need are some answers. And I need you to be honest, because I’m not going to do anything about it, but I really have to know. Did you key my car and leave a note calling me a bitch? And slash my tire and leave false Google reviews about me?”

Her eyes widen. “No, I didn’t. Is Parker saying I did, because that’s exactly the sort of game—”

“No, no, he didn’t say anything. I just presumed...”

“It wasn’t me. I can understand why you might think it was, but it really wasn’t.” She takes the small box of possessions I’m carrying from me. “I may havebeenstupid when dealing with my divorce, but I’m not stupid. You look like shit. Come on.”

Twenty minutes later and we’re in a trendy bar-cum-diner that has enclosed booths that give us some privacy, so no one will stare at my bloodstained clothes. My surreal day has taken a turn into something weirder. Here I am having lunch with Miranda Stockwell. And she’s the one pitying me. How times change so quickly.

We’ve got coffees and I’ve also got a large brandy—I needed it, telling Miranda about my morning—and we’ve each got roast beef sandwiches. I don’t feel at all like eating, but Miranda insisted—especially when I added the brandy to the order—and I’ve got to drive so I probably should. Energy. I definitely need energy. I’m forcing it down as she speaks. It’s a revelation to hear her side of the divorce story, but it all kind of makes sense.

“I expected him to behave like an adult,” she’s saying. “Instead, I let him wind me up like some toy and play games with me that made everyone think I was crazy. He’d get me to a point that I’d be ranting down the phone and coming in the house looking for him, and then when I left, he’d pay one of the staff to cut up all his clothes and then it looked like I’d done it. So many things like that until I believed Iwascrazy. A jobless crazy nearly forty-year-old having a breakdown.”

“That would make two of us.” I raise my brandy glass in a toast as my coffee goes cold.

“And he did it all to keep our boys. He doesn’t even want them around, but he doesn’t want me to have them. He wants them to hate me. And I’m the crazy one? Thankfully, my boys are bright, I’ve realized. They bought themselves disposable phones, so they can speak to me without his knowing. I try not to say awful things about him—I feel bad enough for all the fighting that came before and everything we, as parents, have put them through, but god, it’s hard because he’s such a bloody psychopath.”

“Why did you marry him?” My mind is half here and half watching the large train-station style feature clock in the center of the room as it ticks past two fifteenp.m. I take a sip of brandy and it sounds like her words are underwater. “Ah there you are,” I hear myself whisper as the hand finally clicks toward the twenty. For a moment, all I can see is darkness and I think that maybe Iammy mother or she is me, and then I’m back in the bar and Miranda is saying something about being young and easily impressed and how he was handsome then.

“I think I’m going mad,” I say, suddenly. “Not just a breakdown. Fully insane. It’s in my blood. DNA. Whatever. Runs in the family. My charming husband thinks I am too.” I look at her, expectingher to interject with the usual platitudes, but she doesn’t. She just listens.

“I have this feeling,” I continue, “right in the core of me, that someone is out to get me and hurt my family. It’s stopped me sleeping. But now I think maybe everyone’s right. Maybe it is all in my own head? Maybe I am the one I’m afraid of. You know, I have no idea if I pushed my sister in front of that van. I don’t think I did, but I don’t know. That’s got to be a definition of madness, hasn’t it? And last week, when I wanted to take Will to school instead of Robert, he went out to get the milk and cut his feet on broken milk-bottle glass. I said it was probably kids. But it’s too coincidental.”

“Coincidental how?” She’s not eating her sandwich now either. “I don’t get you.”

“My mum kept all our milk bottles, some still sour with milk, stacked up on the kitchen side. She wouldn’t put them out. She said someone might smash them and then we’d get glass in our feet and we wouldn’t be able to go to school.”

I look at her and sip some more brandy. “And then that’s what happens to Robert when Iknowhe always goes out there barefoot to get the milk. I wasn’t sleeping. I wanted to go into school. I’ve been thinking about my mum and all her crazy and I must have used that tic of hers as some kind of inspiration for some madness of my own. I must have smashed the milk bottle, knowing he’d probably stand in it.”

“Or,” she says, “someone smashed your milk bottle and it was just one of those things.”

“There have been so many of those things.”

“Then maybe you are going mad.”

She’s brutal in her honesty, I’ll give her that.

“How would you slash a car tire?” she asks.

“What?”

“Quickly. How’d you do it?”

“Bread knife,” I say suddenly, and she snorts with laughter.

“Okay, maybe not. I don’t know, a Stanley knife?”

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