Page 46 of Pictures of Him

Harry saved my life. He’d seen me in the evening, vehemently drunk, violently morose, and though he’d gone home and got into bed, he had lain awake worrying. Eventually he got dressed again, walked over to our house and found me unconscious on the bed, thirty minutes from fatality, apparently.

It wasn’t Catherine I was thinking of when I popped out two strips of temazepam (stolen from my uncle’s house forrecreational purposes) and ground them into powder. It was my father, who had chosen the same route to escape. In those final moments I understood with piercing clarity what had made him do it. It wasn’t that he wanted to die; simply that he no longer knew how to live. I felt the same.

When I came to in the hospital, weak, sick, appalled at what I’d done, Harry was sitting in a plastic chair pulled up close to the bed. He saw that I was awake and started to speak, then couldn’t.

‘Harry,’ I said. ‘Sorry.’ My throat was raw and my voice just a whisper.

‘No,’ Harry said, eventually. ‘I’m sorry. For the pain you’re in.’

‘You saved my life, Harry. What made you come back?’

He dragged one hand across his face. He looked shattered, a whole night without sleep.

‘I just knew,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how but I did. I couldn’t sleep, I had this feeling that you were right on the edge.’

‘I’m an idiot.’

‘I’m going to get you through this,’ Harry said. ‘We’re going to break it right down. We’ll take it minute by minute to begin with.’

A thought occurred to me, something that seemed so horrific I tried to sit up in my hospital bed.

‘Can you promise me something?’

Harry rested a hand against my chest, pressing me back down.

‘Take it easy. Yes, of course. Anything.’

‘Catherine can never know. No one can know. Promise me that.’

He did promise. But he also made me see that I couldn’t keep it from Jack.

‘Jack is like your brother,’ he said. ‘He has to know.’

Harry didn’t leave my side for the next few weeks. He moved into our house and sat with me through the days and nights like a mother nursing a sick child. He kept telling me I was better even before I was. He kept a log of each hour we’d got through, then each day.

‘Two and a half weeks since you’ve seen Catherine,’ he’d say in his upbeat nurse-like voice. ‘I’d say that’s something of a record.’

We had an agreement: no one other than the three of us would ever find out what had happened, not even the girls. Jack, of course, directed all his concern over me into vitriol at Catherine.

‘How could she leave you? How could she do that to you?’

He called her names I couldn’t bear to hear, and in the end Harry asked him to stop.

‘Let’s just agree never to mention her again,’ he said.

And now Catherine is back, in the midst of my friends, sensing their wariness, their defensiveness, without knowing the real reason why. It’s a little unfair on her, I guess.

‘It was all a very long time ago,’ I tell Harry. ‘No matter what happens with Catherine, I’ll never do that again.’

It’s the first time we’ve spoken of ‘that’ in a long time.

‘OK,’ Harry says. ‘I’m sure you can understand why I worry.’

At the other end of the room, Jack, Alexa and Rachel are shooting their way through Harry’s tequila, watched byCelia, who sits hunched up on the sofa. She seems to be having a miserable time.

‘Let’s go and rescue Celia,’ I say.

Rachel, in particular, is wildly drunk. She’s leaning against the beam above the fireplace, breasts jutting upwards, a sort of inverse downward dog. Too drunk to stand by the looks of things.

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