Let Me Lie(2)

She stirs in her sleep, and the ever-present lump in my throat swells. Awake, Ella is my daughter. When friends point out her similarities to me, or say how like Mark she is, I can never see it. I look at Ella, and I simply see Ella. But asleep … asleep I see my mother. There is a heart-shaped face hiding beneath those baby-plump cheeks, and the curve of their hairline is so alike I know that, in years to come, my daughter will spend hours in front of a mirror, attempting to tame the one tiny section that grows differently to the rest.

Do babies dream? What can they dream of, with so little experience of the world? I envy Ella her sleep, not only because I am tired in a way I never experienced before having a baby, but because when sleep comes, it brings with it nightmares. My dreams show me what I can’t possibly know. Supposition from police reports and coroner’s court. I see my parents, their faces bloated and disfigured from the water. I see fear on their faces as they fall from the cliff. I hear their screams.

Sometimes my subconscious is kind to me. I don’t always see my parents fall; sometimes I see them fly. I see them stepping into nothing and spreading their arms and swooping low above a blue sea that sends spray into their laughing faces. I wake gently then, a smile lingering on my face until I open my eyes and realise that everything is just the way it was when I closed them.

Nineteen months ago, my father took a car – the newest and most expensive – from the forecourt of his own business. He drove the ten minutes from Eastbourne to Beachy Head, where he parked in the car park, left the door unlocked, and walked towards the cliff top. Along the way he collected rocks to weigh himself down. Then, when the tide was at its highest, he threw himself off the cliff.

Seven months later, consumed with grief, my mother followed him, with such devastating accuracy the local paper reported it as a ‘copycat suicide’.

I know all these facts because on two separate occasions I heard the coroner take us through them, step by step. I sat with Uncle Billy as we listened to the gentle but painfully thorough account of two failed coastal rescue missions. I stared at my lap while experts proffered views on tides, survival rates, death statistics. And I closed my eyes while the coroner recorded the verdict of suicide.

My parents died seven months apart, but their linked deaths meant the inquests were held the same week. I learned lots of things, on those two days, but not the only thing that mattered.

Why they did it.

If indeed they did do it.

The facts are unarguable. Except that my parents were not suicidal. They were not depressed, anxious, fearful. They were the last people you would expect to give up on life.

‘Mental illness isn’t always obvious,’ Mark says, when I raise it, his voice giving no hint of impatience that the conversation is, once again, circling back to this. ‘The most capable, the most upbeat people can have depression.’

Over the last year I’ve learned to keep my theories to myself; not to give voice to the cynicism that lies beneath the surface of my grief. No one else has doubts. No one else feels unease.

But then, maybe no one else knew my parents the way I did.

The phone rings. I let the answerphone pick up but the caller doesn’t leave a message. Immediately I feel my mobile vibrate in my pocket, and I know even before I look that it’s Mark calling.

‘Under a sleeping baby, by any chance?’

‘How did you guess?’

‘How is she?’

‘Feeding every half an hour. I keep trying to start dinner and not getting anywhere.’

‘Leave it – I can do it when I get home. How are you feeling?’ There’s a subtle change of tone that no one else would notice. A subtext. How are you feeling today, of all days?

‘I’m okay.’

‘I can come home—’

‘I’m fine. Really.’

Mark would hate to leave his course halfway through. He collects qualifications the way other people collect beer mats, or foreign coins; so many letters they no longer fit after his name. Every few months he prints new business cards, and the least important letters fall off the end into oblivion. Today’s course is The Value of Empathy in the Client–Counsellor Relationship. He doesn’t need it; his empathy was evident the second I walked through his door.

He let me cry. Pushed a box of tissues towards me and told me to take my time. To begin when I was ready, and not before. And when I stopped crying, but still couldn’t find the words, he told me about the stages of grief – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance – and I realised I hadn’t moved past first base.

We were four sessions in when Mark took a deep breath and told me he couldn’t treat me any more, and I asked if it was me, and he said there was a conflict of interest and this was terribly unprofessional but would I like to have dinner some time?

He was older than me – closer to my mum’s age than my own – with a confidence at odds with the nerves I now saw hovering beneath the surface.

I didn’t hesitate. ‘I’d love to.’

Afterwards he said he felt guiltier about interrupting my counselling than about the ethics of dating a patient. Former patient, I pointed out.

He still feels uncomfortable about it. People meet in all sorts of places, I remind him. My parents met in a London nightclub; his met in the frozen food section at Marks & Spencer. And he and I met in a seventh-floor apartment in Putney, in a consultation room with leather chairs and soft woollen throws, and a sign on the door that said MARK HEMMINGS, COUNSELLOR. BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.