Page 64 of Insomnia

“It was only in the last few weeks that things began to build. It probably felt longer to you, because you were so small, but it really wasn’t very much time at all. I loved Patricia, but if I’d thought you were in any danger, I’d have called the social services in a heartbeat. And so would the school. And she would have thanked us for it. No, it all happened fast. She started locking the back door, which I took as a sign that she didn’t want me around so much. I think she’d stopped looking after the house properly by then, so maybe it was partly that, but then it became something else to her.”

“What do you mean?”

“She came to see me a week or so before it happened. She’d lost weight and she was tearful. She said she was going to get some help—medical help at a mental health facility like the one they’d put her great-aunt in or something. She wasn’t sleeping, she said. She had a sense something was coming. She said she’d become obsessed by things. Broken milk bottles. These numbers she was always muttering. Checking the back door. She often wasn’t sure who she was or where she was. She was having more blank space moments, as if her entire head emptied, and then when she came back to herself she was in a different room. She said she’d been so worried that something bad was coming, or someone was going to hurt you, and now she was starting to think that the bad thing was her.”

Oh god, oh god, oh god.I wish I hadn’t come here.

I don’t know what answers I was expecting, but everything Nina says is like a knife in my gut. Iamgoing mad exactly like she did. The same tics. The same fears. The same blank spaces. I’m my mother’s daughter. The second child. Somewhere deep in my mind, I’ve remembered it all and now I’m repeating it. Like an abused child who becomes an abuser.

“I told her that this was probably all down to her insomnia. I’d known a speed freak who didn’t sleep for a week and they got paranoid and sleepwalked in the day and basically nearly had a full breakdown until we got some downers in him and he slept for forty-eight hours straight. She said she’d tried pills but they weren’t working. She said she felt like she didn’t know who she was anymore half the time, and there were things filling her head that she didn’t understand.” She looks down at the ground. “I told her to give it another couple of days and if she still wasn’t sleeping, then I’d go back to the doctor’s with her and you girls could come and stay with me for a bit while she sorted herself out.”

She looks up and I’m not sure if it’s because of the cloud cutting across the late afternoon sun or the weight of her story, but she suddenly looks older. “Of course that didn’t happen,” she continues softly. “We ran out of time. She loved you so much, you know. I think that’s probably what caused her to collapse when you found her with Phoebe. The realization of what she’d been doing was too much for her fragile mental health to cope with.”

“Maybe,” I say. “I don’t suppose we’ll ever know. But I wish I’d remembered you. And I wish I’d got to thank you for looking out for us before this.” She looks up at me with such relief that I don’t blame her for anything, and it breaks my heart. The ripples out from what our mother did touched so many lives. “And I wish we’d got to come and live with you. It would have been really good for us and I think you’d have given us both really happy childhoods.” Tears spring in her eyes and she takes my hand in hers across the table.

“Thank you for that,” she says, voice full of emotion. “Seeing you has brought it all back. She’d be so proud of you. Of both of you. I know she would.”

I smile back, but I’m sweating under my top. I can feel thedamp in my bra line. I know I should probably do the same as my mum was going to. Check myself in somewhere. If I needed any more evidence before this visit, the conclusion is obvious. I’m the danger to my family. I’m the one going mad. But still,but still,even after hearing all this, my body hums with paranoia that someone is out to hurt me or my family. If I’m locked away, what will I be able to do about that? I’ve seen enough movies and TV shows to know what these places are like. Even if you check yourself in voluntarily, it doesn’t mean you can leave when you want, and so what would happen if I changed my mind? I can’t be that far away from my children. I just can’t.

“...and of course once she’d moved to the low-security wing I was allowed to visit her more freely.” I realize Nina is still talking, and I try to focus while taking subtle deep breaths to calm myself down from my panic.

“I hoped that maybe chatting to her would bring her back to us, but although there were odd glimpses in her eyes that something was registering, I never felt like she was truly present. She’d locked herself up so tightly in her mind that I don’t think she could get out even if she wanted to. And then of course I saw Phoebe there a few weeks ago. I’m surprised she didn’t tell you? She was leaving as I was arriving. I went to say hello and introduce myself, and she got so angry at me for abandoning her. She called me all sorts of names. I felt so bad. It’s why I chickened out of actually coming into your office after seeing that piece about you in the paper—the divorce case. I loitered outside in an alley but then changed my mind.”

“I saw you!” I say as the memory slots into place. “From my window.” It was the day Michelle came in. I saw the older woman in the alley opposite. “I wish youhadcome inside. I really do.”

“Well, fate brought us together anyway. And after the way Phoebereacted to me, I didn’t want to cause any more problems. Thankfully her husband was with her and calmed her down and I—”

“Sorry, wait,” I cut in, not sure I’d heard correctly but fully focused on her now. “Did you say she was with her husband?”

“Yes. Although maybe just her boyfriend? Good-looking man with sandy, kind of blond hair? Late thirties? Probably about six feet tall?

I stare at her, all thoughts of my own psychosis evaporating, my shock overriding everything else.

A good-looking man with sandy-blond hair in his late thirties.

Robert. Phoebe was at Hartwell House with Robert.

51.

For now, at least I am wide-fucking-awake. I’m parked and pacing beside my car as my brain races. I can’t take it in. I’m looking at everything through a prism. I lay the new information out in clear sentences so I can grasp it.

Phoebe took Robert to see our mother weeks ago. Robert had known Phoebe was back. Robert had known about our mother and what she did. Even as he asked me why I’d never said anything, feigning surprise that she’d been alive all this time after the police visit, making me feel bad, hehad knownall along. Why didn’t he tell me?

Secrets.

Pieces of the puzzle fall into place in my head, forming an awful picture. I’d been thinking that Phoebe’s been out to get me on her own. What if she was in it with someone else?

What if my sister and my husband planned this together?

I lean against the car, dizzy, as thoughts come thick and fast. If Robert was with Phoebe at Hartwell, then he kneweverything. The numbers. What my mother did.Hecould have told Will about the suffocation. He could have encouraged him to do those drawings, and if he knew our family history, he’d know what it would do to me, seeing them. He’d know I’d worry I was going mad. And more than that, other people would think it. No wonder Will hasn’t been himself—torn between two parents.

Robert’s with him all the time. If anyone knows how to manipulate our little boy, it would be him.Don’t tell Mummy.It’s not such a leap that Will wouldn’t say anything. All childhood abuse stories are about secrets kept. We didn’t tell anyone how bad our mummy had got. If Robert told Will not to say anything to me, he wouldn’t. He’d be scared and confused, but he wouldn’t tell.

The cooling evening breeze is fresh against my hot face as my brain races. If Robert and Phoebe were in it together, she could have snuck in during the night when I was upstairs and written the numbers on the board and recorded over my Dictaphone letters. Robert could have given her a key. It’s a big house, I wouldn’t necessarily have heard her if I was so tired and finally falling asleep.

I was sure someone was watching me from outside. It could have been Phoebe. Maybe Robert’s been putting something in my food to make me stop sleeping. What was it Nina said? She knew a speed freak once who stopped sleeping. Something like that? Just enough to make me paranoid that I’m going the same way as my mum did?

Even what Sandra said about Phoebe makes more sense now. Was she saying awful things to our mother to try to prompt some kind of reaction? To do something that would get her into the hospital and force me to face her? Another thought strikes me. Robert was late to the school for the meeting after I’d seen my mother in the hospital. No one checked forhimon CCTV. What if he went in and suffocated her while Phoebe was drinking her coffee?

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