Page 69 of Insomnia

She closes her eyes again, as if this has brought her some peace, and I can see her sinking back into oblivion. I won’t be here when she wakes up again. I’m going to get the nurse and then go to Bayside Residential, hand over my credit card, and get myself locked in. Happy birthday to me.

I’m just about to carefully pull my hand free of Phoebe’s when she speaks again, soft and sleepy, her eyes barely open.

“You were singing Mum’s special song,” she says. “Weren’t you? Or did I dream that?”

I freeze. “Mum’s song?”

She sighs, caught between waking and the sleep that’s dragging her back down. “Hmm, yes. She sang it all evening that last night. You were in the cupboard, you probably didn’t hear.”

“How did it go?” I ask, my heart pounding in my rib cage. “Can you remember?”

For a moment there’s only silence, and I think I’ve lost her to sedated sleep, and then very quietly, she starts to hum, whispering the lyrics I know so well.

“Look, look, a candle, a book and a bell, I put them behind me. Look, look a candle, a book and a bell, there to remind me...” She smiles, a drugged half laugh. “When I heard it, I thought it was then and she was here with me. But when she was good.”

And then she’s gone again, leaving me with my head spinning.

55.

I go into the corridor, my breath coming fast, trying to make sense of what Phoebe said. How can my song be our mother’s song? It can’t be. I tell a passing nurse that Phoebe’s woken up and she goes to get a doctor and I retreat to the family room to Google the lyrics again. I see a text from Robert sent hours earlier.

“For god’s sake give Caroline her spare house keys back. And why would you threaten her? Please get help. Anything else like this and I’m going to have to call the police.”

I stare at it. What’s he talking about? I don’t have her keys. And I never threatened her. What’sshetalking about? I’m about to text a tirade back when I stop. I need to check my bag in my car first. Maybe I did somehow pick the keys up or something. I haven’t slept at all in two days and barely at all for nearly two weeks. I can’t be sure of anything. I didn’t push Phoebe though, and this makes me feel stronger. I didn’t kill my mother and I didn’t hurt my sister. Whatever is wrong with me, the only person I’ve damaged thus far is me. Robert can wait, and Caroline’s keys can wait. The song is bugging me. It can’t be the same one. It just can’t. I click on the info link.

It’s not a cover. Sweet Billy Pilgrim, “Candle Book and Bell.” Released 2015. Written by Tim Elsenburg. It doesn’t make any sense. How can a song written in 2015 have been sung by mymother back in the mid-eighties? She couldn’t have known it. How can this song that fills my head have filled hers too? It doesn’t make sense.

A nurse pops her head around the door. “A policewoman is on her way in case Phoebe wakes up again. She’ll probably want to ask you some questions too when they take her statement.”

“Sure,” I say. “I just need to get something from my car. I’ll be back in a minute.”

Those keys are bugging me almost as much as the song. Why would Caroline lie?She recorded you.The thought swirls in the background.She recorded you and then went to your husband’s house and played it back. That’s not normal either.I need to know if I have them, and if I don’t, what does that mean?

Why would Caroline be out to get me? She’s just a random woman who brought my stolen wallet back. I want to punch myself in the face. This is the paranoia everyone tells me I have. Caroline is a stranger. Why would she want to hurt me? It doesn’t make sense. And how can my mother’s song be the same as mine? Fresh air is what I need. And to find those keys. No one is out to get me. I’m having a breakdown.Call the clinic. Check yourself in.

I don’t want to bump into the police coming the other way, so I head up toward the geriatric department, because I know the way out to the car park from there. It’s late and although the lights in the corridors are bright, the hospital feels out of time in the stillness of the night, patients asleep or quietly awake in the gloom listening to the struggling breaths of those around them, the smell of disinfectant trying to suffocate the stench of sickness. The occasional cough or cry. Everyone waiting for the optimism of dawn to roll around. I know how they feel. The lights are dimmer in the corridor that leads down to the private ward. I pause. It feels like a lifetime ago that I fled from my mother’s grip.

I stare down the corridor and my skin prickles. Everything started going wrong after I came to see my mother. Internally, I may have started feeling odd the night before I knew she was hurt—and that’s something else that’s taking shape in my thoughts—but all the physical things started after that hospital visit. The note. The scratch on my car. My wallet being stolen. The sense someone was watching me. My alarm bells started ringing then and they haven’t stopped.

I push open the door to the ward and creep forward, my heart in my mouth. Up ahead, a door to one of the rooms is open and I can hear nurses soothing a patient. I hurry to the desk and quickly scan the visitors’ book. I don’t have to look far. She was here a few hours ago.

Caroline Williams.

I go back through the pages—she comes here every day. Caroline. The random stranger. She was here the day I first visited. I look behind me at one of the rooms near the entrance. I remember shouting my name at the nurse who wanted me to sign in. I remember there was a woman reading to an old lady in a bed, and she paused. I thought I’d disturbed her, but was it mynamethat had disturbed her?

My whole body is shaking. But why? Is she the ex-wife of a client? Was I focusing on Miranda when a different crazy ex was in front of me the whole time?

I quickly leave the ward before the nurses return and then hurry out to my car. The night air is thick with moisture and from the distance comes a rumble of thunder. Just as the first heavy raindrops fall, I open the trunk and empty my bag. I check through all the sections and in my washbag and makeup bag and then check my coat pockets. In the car, I look behind the back seats in case the keys have slid down there, and do the same in the front footwellsand then the side wells. It doesn’t take long—it’s a hire car, there’s none of the clutter that gathers in a family car. There are no unusual house keys here. I haven’t stolen anything.

So why is she lying? Who is she? What have I done to hurt her?

Something is scratching at the inside of my exhausted brain. Something someone said. Something that almost got my attention, and then I got distracted. What was it? What— My eyes widen as lightning flashes overhead. Nina. It was Nina.

“They wouldn’t let me foster you. Especially after the tragedy with that family.”

I had been so surprised that she’d wanted to give us a home, I hadn’t paid attention to the rest. What tragedy? I get out my phone, only one bar of signal remaining. It’s nearly one o’clock in the morning, but there are things I need to know, and she’s the only one with answers.

A tragedy.

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