Too Close

  About the Book

  Connie and Ness met in the park while their children played. As they talked, they realised they were neighbours. Perhaps it was only natural that they and their families would become entirely inseparable.

  But when Ness’s marriage ends in a bitter divorce, she is suddenly at Connie’s house all the time. Connie doesn’t have a moment to herself, no time alone with her husband, not a second to chat to her kids. It’s all too much. Something has to give.

  Connie has woken up in a psychiatric hospital. They say she committed a terrible crime but she says she can’t remember a thing.

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Copyright

  For Chus, with all my love

  Who can stop grief’s avalanche once it starts to roll?

  Euripides, Medea

  It’s odd because everyone always calls her beautiful. Her beauty has become a fact; it has been said enough times for any doubt to have been forgotten. But the first time I saw her in the park all those years ago, I have to say she didn’t strike me that way; her beauty took a while to floor me. She was small with wispy blonde hair and pale blue veins that ran down her temples. She had dark bags under her dark eyes – which I know is just called parenting – and from a certain angle her freckled nose looked like someone had given her a good punch. She had a peculiar way of looking at you from the corners of those big dark brown eyes. And she blinked too much. All in all, she struck me as an anxious sort of person. No, I wouldn’t have called her beautiful at all. Not then.

  I’d been late picking Annie up from nursery and had found my daughter sitting alone on the bench underneath the empty coat hooks, holding a wooden lollipop stick with a scrunched-up piece of red tissue bodged on to the end.

  ‘Darling, sorry I’m late,’ I said sitting down next to her, glad to get my breath back. ‘What have you made?’ I asked, looking at the lolly stick in her hand. Karl was better at this sort of thing than me; every shite offering they brought home from school he marvelled at as if the kids were little Leonardos. Left to his own devices, the house would look like one of those hoarder’s places you see on TV, full of clay rubbish and splodges of paint on crinkled paper.

  ‘It’s a poppy.’

  Of course it was. Remembrance Day was coming up and Annie’s nursery never missed a chance to get creative. ‘That’s lovely! Do you know why you’ve made it? Who is it for?’ I might be late, forget carol concerts and barbecue days, but my God, I do a bit of educating when I can.

  She looked up at me and passed me the lolly stick. ‘For you?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I mean, why have you made it? Who is it for?’

  ‘It’s for remembering,’ she said.

  ‘That’s right.’ She was a genius, my child. ‘Remembering who?’

  She had no idea. She shook her head, her cherubic curls bouncing this way and that. Not for the first time I marvelled that such a sweet being came from me.

  ‘It’s for all the soldiers who died in the war,’ I said, sounding incongruously cheerful about it. She looked up at me, eyes wide with wonder, lips opening in surprise as the mini cogs in her brain whirred. She frowned and turned slowly to examine the wall behind her, reaching out her little fingers to gingerly touch the bumps of roughly applied plaster beneath the clothes pegs.

  ‘In this wall?’ she asked.

  Sometimes she was so adorable I could eat her. ‘Let’s get some sweeties and go to the park!’ I said.

  So Annie had scooted ahead, cheeks full of Smarties. She was a kamikaze kind of child. By the time I caught up she was at the top of the slide, bottom lip out, face brimming with misery, staring down at the brightly coloured trail of Smarties bouncing off the ladder and on to the spongy tarmac. Another little girl was standing at the bottom of the ladder picking up the Smarties and popping them into her mouth as fast as she could.

  ‘No! No! No!’ Annie cried, furious at the nasty little opportunist below her.

  The mother was oblivious to the scene; she was busy making something on the bench with an older girl. I started picking up the Smarties and was shortly joined by the mother, who was looking down at her fat-cheeked child and making the right remonstrating noises. ‘Naughty, Polly. They are not yours.’

  I’ll tell you something peculiar: I remember there was something about her voice that put me on alert; it wasn’t her tone, which was low and calm, or what she said, which was nothing unusual. It was a more intangible feeling: there was something about it that I found deeply comforting yet deeply disturbing at the same time. Church bells do that for me too. I’m not making any sense, am I?

  For many years, I would remember that day as a fine example of how we must not trust our first impressions, how foxing they are. Because the truth was, just at the very beginning of it all, I felt an inexplicable and powerful aversion to her, like a tug from the wings, as if I were receiving a warning signal from the great puppet master.

  We made polite child-soothing conversation for a while and were then forced to sit together on the bench as the three girls struck up an immediate kinship and went off to look for snails, dropping their grievances with that enviable childhood ease.

  ‘Do you live nearby?’ I asked.

  ‘Just beyond the swimming pool,’ she said, nodding vaguely in the direction. ‘We’ve just moved in.’

  ‘Oh! Which street?’

  ‘Buxton Road.’

  ‘Really? Which end?’

  And so we discovered that we were neighbours. She lived just around the corner from us – only four doors away. In fact, I could see her house from the back windows of my own. Our conversation shifted then, as it became evident our lives would be impacting on each other’s – screaming children, rows in the garden, perhaps noisy once-in-a-blue-moon lovemaking on a hot summer night. Why do we women feel impelled to forge intimacies? Two men probably wouldn’t have struck up a conversation at all.

  I’d opened Annie’s snack box by now and was picking at some soggy strawberries as our talk moved smoothly from our surroundings and our progeny to ourselves.

  ‘What do you do?’ she asked me.

  ‘I write,’ I said.

  And without a pause or a further question she said, ‘I write too!’ Something about the way she said it, so rapid a response, seemed rather competitive – I got that tug again.

  ‘What do you write?’ I asked, offering her a sweating strawberry which she declined.

  ‘Poetry.’ I looked at her afresh. That was interesting; no one admits to writing poetry. ‘When inspiration strikes,’ she added.

  Well, excuse me for being a snob but that is not a writer. That is a dabbler. A writer doesn’t have the luxury of waiting for inspiration; a writer plods on regardless, a writer takes the gamble, lives in penury, gives everything up to be a slave to her art. I didn’t let my feelings show, but I suppose in my own way I went straight for the jugular.

  ‘Do you make a living from it?’

  ‘No, no.’

  Precisely my point: she was not a writer. (We writers have to do any writing we can to f
und the writing we want – I ghost-write, I interview, I copy-edit, in order to afford the time to write books that no one wants to publish.)

  ‘I’m—Or rather, I used to run galleries. You’ve got some …’ She gestured that I had some strawberry juice on my chin. I wiped it. She shook her head and gestured again so I wiped it again.

  And then – perhaps you’ll disagree, perhaps you’ll think this is what any mother does – she did something that seemed strangely intimate to me: she licked her finger and gently started to rub my chin with it. And as she did so – it was a stubborn stain – I couldn’t help but take her in: the freckles, the contrast of the blonde hair with those dark eyes. I was just going to ask her about this gallery business when she said, ‘You smell really good. What perfume are you wearing?’

  Again, oddly intimate, no? But I’m a sucker for a compliment and I must have visibly brightened.

  ‘Thank you! It’s Jo Malone: Lime Basil and Mandarin.’

  She smiled. She had good teeth, neat and white, like an advert mouth. ‘It’s gorgeous.’

  I thought so too but it was very nice to have it pointed out. Looking back, it was probably the compliments that blinkered me to those palpable warning signs. How pathetic is that?

  ‘What does your partner do?’ she asked me.

  ‘He’s a consultant in communications,’ I said, which never fails to shut people up. ‘What about your husband?’ I asked, after the pause.

  ‘Wife, actually. She works in TV.’

  Well, that shut me up. She was a lesbian. How refreshing. This neighbourhood needed a bit of diversity wherever it could find it; the school had got whiter and blonder with each passing year, the parents more homogeneous – a growing number of men in salmon cords with hearty laughs and women with salon-shiny hair being walked by dogs that didn’t moult. I immediately wanted to ask her about the girls: who was the biological mother? Who was the father? What do they call you? All those obvious questions that no one likes to ask but everyone wants to know. Then all the unobvious questions I wanted to ask, like how she knew she was gay. I was intrigued. I’d always been straight as a die. The idea of making love to a woman had never held any allure for me. I loved men. I loved their bodies, I loved their differences, I loved their masculinity. But I didn’t ask her anything, of course; I tried to give the impression of being cool.

  ‘I like your hair … your fringe,’ she said. ‘You’ll have to tell me where a good hairdresser’s is around here … I don’t know the area at all.’ She was patting her wispy locks, looking at me in that sideways way. I have to say, I’d only just had my hair cut and was feeling rather self-conscious about it. Potentially I looked a bit 1974 – and not in a good way. The hairdresser had been somewhat gung-ho and on leaving the salon, I’d caught a glimpse of myself from the side with what looked like a well-groomed guinea pig perching on my forehead.

  ‘Sure! There’s a good place up by the library,’ I said, leaning over to get a better view of Annie, who was roaming about in a way that made me suspicious – she had been known to squat down for a crap in the bushes. She’s too feral, that child of mine.

  ‘I’m Ness, by the way!’ she said, holding out her hand.

  ‘I’m Connie,’ I replied, shaking hers.

  And so the bond was made.

  This all seems a very long time ago now. Six long years ago; like a different lifetime, back in the days when I would pass homeless people in the street curled up in urine-drenched corners and carelessly think how on earth did your life go so wrong? Well, now I know. The answer is: quite easily, as it turns out. You’d think it might be a slow process of deterioration but the truth is it can turn in a moment, maybe even on a stranger’s whim – with a neighbour accepting an offer on a house in Buxton Road, for example.

  Chapter 1

  I am looking out of the window at the naked, groaning tree and am taken by surprise, once again, by the state I find myself in. It is as if I have been misplaced; I’ve no idea where I’ve gone. Even my body is unrecognizable; I have deep open wounds on my left wrist beneath the creamy bandages. Every now and then they wink up at me, a wet pinky-red. My right arm, torso and right thigh are an angry bumpy mass of redness, scabbed in places; my thigh is vermilion-raw in the shape of a huge pear, my shin shiny and taut, my foot itchy and peeling. And yet these walls are becoming familiar. I know it is eleven o’clock because I can hear the Squeak coming down the corridor; I am in the last room. She’s very punctual. I don’t think I’ve been here very long but I might be wrong. Perhaps a week or so but there is little variety to the days so it’s hard to tell. This place is even worse than the other place; here they have bars on the windows. The Squeak is under the impression that I do nothing in the mornings. She is wrong. It is a blustery day out there; a day when the weather can’t focus, keeps changing its mind. My attention, however, is acutely focused. In the mornings, I study this one particular leaf. I have done ever since I got here. It sits right at the top of the tree, which is in my sightline. The gardens slope downwards towards a stream, so I’m told. I say a stream – it’s probably more of a litter-filled brook; we are in London after all. This single leaf flutters furiously in the wind; for some reason it is clinging on to life. I have the greatest admiration for its bravado.

  Squeak squeak, rattle rattle, here she comes. I can’t take my eyes off the leaf. I worry that it is waiting for me to do so before it will let go. Sometimes I find myself worrying so much in the night that I get out of bed and lift the blind to check on it in the orange glow of the streetlight from the other side of the wall.

  The Squeak unlocks the door, gives a perfunctory knock and enters regardless. I don’t care. There is nothing I would not do in front of her. I listen to her cross the room. Her shoes are sensible, crêpe-soled; she sacrificed style for comfort a long time ago. It is in fact her trolley that squeaks. She stops in front of me and I’m forced to drag my eyes away from my leaf. She is looking particularly unattractive today; her forehead is a mound of bumps and blotches and there is a cold sore at the corner of her downturned lip.

  ‘Morning,’ she says cheerlessly, handing me my medication, pouring me water from the institutional plastic jug that must have been transparent once but now is a filmy grey. The water is tepid and tastes of jug. I swallow the pills.

  ‘It hurts to swallow,’ I say. I don’t even recognize my own voice. I’m all raspy.

  ‘Well, it would, wouldn’t it, Connie,’ she says. She is standing, I am sitting, and my head comes up to her shoulders. She has dark circles under each armpit on the pale blue of her uniform. I myself am something of a sweater.

  ‘Perspirex. It works. For problem perspiration,’ I say. ‘You should try it. You can get it in Boots.’

  She is immune to pretty much anything I say. Besides, she is half reading her Daily Mail, which sits on the trolley. She’s not meant to let me see newspapers. ‘And why would I take any tips from you, Connie?’

  She’s such a cow.

  ‘You shouldn’t speak to the guests like that,’ I say.

  ‘You’re not a guest,’ she says, not unkindly, passing me another two blue pills, her attention still on her paper. She’s reading the cover story, which is accompanied by a photograph of a bushy-bearded bomber. Or maybe he’s a celebrity. I have to say I’m surprised how the fundamentalist look has really caught on. Since when did it become trendy to blow people up? Now I sound like my mother.

  ‘Is anyone bringing my mother to visit?’

  She pauses, looks up from her paper and stares at me. ‘When are you going to stop playing dumb?’ she says, which obviously reminds her of something because she bends over, her ample thighs stretching her polyester trousers to the max, and produces a flimsy old laptop from the lower shelf of the trolley. ‘Dr Robinson wanted me to give you this – she wants you to write it all down,’ she says, sighing with disapproval. She puts it on the little table beside me. ‘It’s fully charged.’

  I look at the laptop and wonder if I can
get online.

  ‘You can’t get online,’ she says. She likes to remove breaths of wind from scraps of sails.

  ‘No donkey porn then.’ I notice that I am feeling in quite good spirits today.

  The Squeak bares her teeth at me. She’s not smiling; it’s more of a snarl. Not for the first time I notice that she has rather pleasing teeth. They go slightly inwards, like a shark’s. Then I remember that I’m in her bad books.

  Yesterday, or was it another day, Mental Sita and I were watching telly in the telly room. The telly room contains nothing but a telly, which is screwed into the wall, a sofa and a plastic chair, both of which are screwed to the floor. Mental Sita is in love with that blond doctor on the reruns of Embarrassing Bodies. She’s obsessed with him. She wants to be in an enclosed white space with him in some city centre, suggestively sharing her psoriasis. We both love that show. No one can be uncheered by other people’s embarrassments. It is a winning formula.

  That particular episode involved Blond Doc rummaging around Sharon-from-Hartlepool’s folds of flesh in an elusive search for some vaginal warts. Sharon herself could barely reach her own nether region, let alone see it. Mental Sita and I, however, got an eyeful. And found it mesmerizing for different reasons. Sharon was a hirsute lady, a natural blonde. To me, her vagina resembled some sort of small sleeping creature, a dormouse perhaps, snugly curled up in the cranny of a haystack. Yet there was also something so neglected and lonesome about it that it made me feel a little sad. Not Mental Sita; she was sprawled out on the blue sofa, idly masturbating at the sight of the Doc near a vagina of any sort. I was perched on the plastic chair. I’d been desperate to pee since Sharon had weighed down the trailer, but I was so engrossed by what lay between those head-crushing thighs and Blond Doc’s capable plunging hands, and somewhat lulled into a stupor by Mental Sita’s rhythmic fingers working away, that I was unable to rise from my seat. In fact, I took a leaf out of Mental Sita’s rule-less book – and realized that I no longer had to get up and go to the toilet; I no longer had to behave in any particular way at all. It felt so profoundly relaxing – I try to grab hold of positives wherever I can (my mother is a great advocate of this kind of thinking and I’ve tried to instil that in my own children) – that there on the plastic chair, I let those pelvic floor muscles go.