Читать книгу Love Me, Love Me Not: An addictive psychological suspense with a twist you won’t see coming - Katherine Debona, Katherine Debona - Страница 13

New Forest, six and a half years ago

The lines on my arm were darkening, day by day, and I was spending more and more time alone. A haphazard picture of my grief, a reminder that, no matter how hard I tried, I would always be a little strange, a little out of place.

My time had been spent hibernating, either at work or in the rancid pit that was my new abode. A soulless studio at the end of a corridor where all the doors looked the same. Two rooms within a steel structure where only a handful of lights were ever turned on at night because no one really lived there. They were investment properties owned by people with more money than they knew what to do with. If I opened the bathroom window wide and leant right out I could just about see the Thames, boat lights winking in the distance.

The first time I cut myself was by accident. I was trying to recreate one of my father’s terrariums and dropped the glass dome, shattering it against the workbench in his shed. At first the pain didn’t register and I watched my sliced flesh as it slowly pooled with red. Then the sharp sting of recognition as air hit the inside of my arm, cold on warm making me draw in breath, then sink to the earthy floor.

The second time was deliberate. A way to control my feelings. To decide when and where the pain would occur. Not when someone pushed me over in the playground or took my bag and dropped it into an icy puddle. This was my pain to bear. My blood to spill.

It was a coping mechanism, a way to block out all the hurt and anger, to channel it into a single, sharp point that I would run over my skin, creating patterns with red. Replacing the voices in my mind that told me I wasn’t worthy, letting them out of my veins, spilling them to the ground below.

Over the years I have read all sorts of theories about self-harm. A mixture of benign and idiotic for the most part, but one study nearly came close to giving me the answer I craved.

In 2013, a doctor named Franklin carried out an experiment that showed most people felt better after experiencing pain and how, over time, self-harm could become addictive because of the association of relief with pain. The high after the low. It fascinated me, not because of any kind of revelation about my scars; it was more that any one of us could learn to enjoy pain. Anyone at all.

After Patrick told me to leave I had no way of lessening the ache inside that would not leave me be. No matter the hours I worked, the bottles of gin I emptied or the amount of times I opened my skin. Until I became nothing more than a pretence. A memory of the person I wanted to be, thought I could become. Someone with a life, a love, a purpose.

For it felt as if each and every person who found it in their hearts to love me was slowly slipping away and I could not escape the voice that told me it was all my own doing. It felt as if every time I got close to someone, my demons would snatch them back, and now they had set their sights on my beloved grandfather. The man who’d helped raise me, who’d taught me how to ignore the darkness when it cried out in my mind.

I looked back towards the bed where Gramps was sleeping. My substitute father, the only man who truly knew me and loved me just the same, was sick.

Dark splotches of bruise on one side of his restful face. There was a sling holding a broken collarbone in place and bandages wrapped around a sprained wrist. But the doctor had told me the real damage was hidden beneath his skull. That there was an illness lurking within the synapses of his brain which we hadn’t been able to see. Or was it that we didn’t want to see? Had we allowed his stubborn refusal to ask for help to blind us to his illness?

Had I been too caught up in my own distress to realise he was in need as well?

A hand on my arm made me stop the pacing I was unaware of. A hand I knew was now more accustomed to touching someone else.

‘What are you doing here, Elle?’ I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, didn’t want to see the happiness that should have been mine.

‘The care home still have Patrick’s number on file. When they couldn’t reach you…’

‘Of course.’ So many things left unfinished. So many things I ran from, had been hiding from, until fate intervened and threw us back together once more.

‘I’m so sorry. I know how much Gramps means to you.’

‘Do you?’ At this I spun round with every intention of striking out, of making her feel some semblance of the pain she had caused me. Of smashing her head against the wall, plunging my hand into her chest and ripping out her still-beating heart. Of making her understand what it was that she had done to me, and how she had taken away my belief that I too deserved to be happy.

Instead all I could do was stare at her, at the sorrow on her incredible face, and curse myself for wondering what the matter was.

‘I never meant to hurt you,’ she said, taking a step closer, then another, watching to see how I would respond. When I didn’t move she pulled me into a hug I didn’t know I wanted until it happened. Let me wet her with my tears, my remorse, my absolute bewilderment at the power she had over me. ‘You’re my best friend, the sister I never had, and I miss you.’

Some people seem to be blessed, others cursed, by an invisible hand I didn’t know how to understand or appease. For why shouldn’t I have a share of life’s elusive wonders? Why did she get to have it all?

‘I want to help,’ she said as she released me, searching my eyes for an inch of forgiveness. ‘What does Gramps need? What do you need?’

I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do with all the new information. With Gramps being debilitated by an illness no one paid any attention to. With my mother nowhere in sight, choosing as always to bury the problem under a mountain of ignorance. With Elle standing so close I could feel the warmth of her skin. With her offer of help, of returning to my life, catapulting any resolve I’d had to stay away far beyond my reach.

She was always so impossible to resist and I hated myself because of it.

‘I’m still mad at you,’ I said, walking away as a smile formed on her lips.

Going out into the hospital courtyard I sat on a bench next to a whitewashed wall covered with ivy, the twisting tendrils reaching ever outward, seeking new places to stretch and grow. It made me think of the story about Tristan and Isolde. How King Mark buried them in separate graves so that even in death they couldn’t be together. Except ivy vines grew from their graves to meet and entwine. Proof that nothing can break true love’s bond.

‘Why didn’t you return my calls?’ Elle sat beside me and I noticed her looking at the scratches on my arms. Marks I could have easily explained away as a gardening accident, except I hadn’t been anywhere near a garden for months. No, those marks were my way of feeling something, anything, other than wretched. Wretched because he left. Wretched because I led him straight to her. Wretched because I thought they both loved me the most.

‘Why do you think?’

Elle took out a packet of cigarettes. Lit one then crossed her legs as she blew smoke into the sky. The scent of tobacco mixed with a sweet perfume that once upon a time I had inhaled every day. So many years, so much time spent with one person, all tossed aside in favour of another.

‘Nothing happened between us that night, Jane. Nothing happened until after you had broken up.’

‘I know.’ I knew because Patrick told me. In a letter no less, left by the side of the bed for me to find when I woke next morning. Telling me too much had changed, that the life we were living wasn’t the one he wanted. That he didn’t think he could forgive me for what I had done. That he would give me until the end of the week to move out.

As if he was completely innocent. Because there was no denying the inevitable. The irresistibility of something, someone, so precious.

The first year of university I had missed her with such ferocity it terrified me. I would lie awake, listening to other students revelling in their freedom, wishing I could go back to the home I had spent the past decade trying to escape. I wrote her letters that I never sent, afraid she would laugh at my neediness, my immaturity, my intrinsic desire to have her in my life.

‘Are you okay?’ She was looking again at my arms. No doubt trying to recall when I had last decorated myself with such skinny lacerations.

‘I’m fine.’ Except I wasn’t fine. The voices wouldn’t leave me be. Voices that had taken hold during my second year at university. Telling me I wasn’t worthy, following me around the cobbled streets, into lectures and libraries and everywhere I went. That woke me in the night to remind me that anyone I loved would eventually leave, that no matter what I did it would never be enough. Voices that laughed when I stood on a bridge, looking down at another river, wondering how long it would be before someone realised I was gone.

It was only when I met Patrick in my final year that the desolation began to melt and I felt there was a purpose for me after all.

‘I never intended for it to happen. You have to believe that?’

‘Still doesn’t make it right.’

Who was the one to make the first move? I couldn’t imagine Patrick diving in for a kiss, or perhaps he had. All teeth and awkwardness, like a teenager whose balls are so swollen they take over from any rational thought.

My brother, Robin, had called a week, perhaps two, after I left. Telling me how he’d bumped into them both at a party. At how they had sat, huddled under a rug on the rooftop while Patrick pointed out the constellations. About how he was unable to look at anyone else.

My little brother thought he was doing me a favour. Telling me not to waste my life on people who didn’t feel the same way. But he didn’t see me lying on the bathroom floor, night after night, wetting the tiles with tears.

‘I’m not asking for your forgiveness, Jane, because I didn’t do anything wrong.’

‘He was my boyfriend, Elle.’

‘And you slept with someone else.’

‘Because of you.’

‘You slept with Carter because of me?’

It sounded ludicrous. I knew this, but it was her fault as much as mine. If she hadn’t been at that fundraiser then maybe we would have stood a chance. If she’d never met him. If I’d never met him. Who knows? Maybe things could have been different.

Or maybe it was the wake-up call I needed.

‘It doesn’t matter anymore,’ I said.

‘Which part?’

She meant us. Her and me. Best friends forever, wasn’t that the way it was supposed to be? Because you can’t stop a heart that’s made up its mind. But how does it choose? How does it know? How can we stop it from breaking?

‘Do you love him?’ I looked at her and found her eyes already locked on mine. Staring. Searching. It made me want to gouge them out, stop her from ever looking upon anyone ever again. Stop her from invading my every thought.

‘Love is a little word that people throw around too much without thinking about what it actually means.’

So that was a no. Or at least she hadn’t quite decided yet if he was worth anything more to her than a part-time distraction.

‘Does he love you?’

I have no idea why I asked this. No idea why I invited her to add more weight to the feelings of inadequacy multiplying like some kind of swarm inside me. The feelings of rage and frustration that, no matter what I did, I would never be good enough. For I had tried and tried to be someone more, someone other than me. To have for myself what so many others took for granted.

She looked away, gave a half-hearted shrug as she tossed her cigarette to the ground, grinding out the embers with her shoe. ‘You know how he is. Outward expressions of emotion don’t exactly come easily to him.’

He’d never actually said the words to me, but I thought he didn’t need to. I thought his agreement to be part of my life, to bind himself to me, was proof enough that he was mine.

Stupid to think I was worthy, even more so to hope he wouldn’t be drawn to her. He was blindsided by her beauty, but I was confident she held little other appeal. He was so far removed from her world, too intellectual, too well-read, too disinterested in the fabric of society and all the show of wealth Elle held dear.

But it was his very otherness that made her want him.

‘Are you still seeing Carter?’

‘He’s moved to Hong Kong.’

‘Was it serious between you?’

As serious as casual sex ever could be. Sex that had become more aggressive, more urgent, every time I turned up at his flat in the middle of the night, with gin on my breath and demons in my mind. Sex he wanted to turn into something more, but I knew my heart wasn’t ready for that.

Carter claimed to be leaving for the sake of his career. But part of me admitted I had pushed him away. One more person incapable of loving me.

‘How’s your placement going?’ I asked and her face reassembled itself into a genuine smile.

‘It’s incredible. To see them every day. To know I’m part of their developmental journey, that I’m making a difference in their lives, it’s just so special.’

So it would seem one of us at least had found their calling, their raison d’être, their place in this world. Who would have thought the prom queen would end up teaching five-year-olds their ABCs?

As I sat there, letting her words fall over me, watching the true delight on her face as she spoke about her pupils and all their little foibles, the beginnings of an idea seeped into my mind. Slowly at first, then with greater presence, as if unsure of its weight, its significance.

Elle loved children. Despite the battles with her own mother about how to live her life, Elle had never made any secret of the fact she wanted babies. Lots of them. But Patrick didn’t. He and I had both agreed they were an unwelcome distraction, the very antithesis of what was needed in order to be successful. That there was no guarantee which part of your gene pool would make its way into the bodies of your offspring, so why take the risk of having a mediocre one?

There was still time to win him back. To change the hands of fate. To show him that while Elle might fulfil all his basal male fantasies, she wouldn’t make sense in the long term. I would forgive him for straying. Allow him his moment of weakness. A reflex reaction to learning I had slept in another man’s bed.

Every moment of every day gives us a choice.