He looked worried. “But shouldn’t you wait for Dad? Shouldn’t he be here? You shouldn’t be doing this by yourself.”
Louise smiled at him. “I’m just going to make a start,” she said as brightly as she could. “I actually thought you’d gone round to Hugo’s this morning, so . . .” Hugo was Josh’s friend, possibly his only true friend. (Every day Louise thanked the Lord for the existence of Hugo and Hugo’s family, who took Josh in whenever he needed an escape.)
“I did, but I forgot my phone, so I came back for it.” He held it up for her to see.
“OK,” she said. “Good boy. Are you staying there for lunch?”
He nodded, and he tried to smile, and then he was gone. She waited until she heard the front door slam before she sat down on the bed and allowed herself to cry properly.
On the bedside table there was an old hair tie, stretched and worn down almost to a thread, long strands of Katie’s glorious dark hair still entwined in it. Louise picked it up and turned it over in her hands, lacing it between her fingers. She held it against her face. She got to her feet and walked over to the dressing table, opened the heart-shaped pewter jewellery box and placed the hair tie inside. It would remain there along with her bracelets and earrings—nothing would be thrown away, everything would remain. Not here, but somewhere; it would travel with them. No part of Katie, nothing she had touched, would languish on a dusty charity-shop shelf.
Around Louise’s neck hung the necklace that Katie had been wearing when she died, a silver chain with a little blue bird. It bothered Louise that she’d chosen that particular piece of jewellery. Louise hadn’t thought it a favourite. Not like the white-gold earrings that Louise and Alec had given her on her thirteenth birthday, which she’d adored; not like the woven friendship bracelet (“brotherhood bracelet”) that Josh bought for her (with his own money!) on their last holiday to Greece. Louise couldn’t fathom why Katie had chosen that—a present from Lena, to whom she’d no longer seemed particularly close, the bird engraved (most un-Lena-like) with love.
She’d worn no other jewellery. Jeans, a jacket, far too warm for the summer evening, its pockets filled with stones. Her backpack similarly laden. When they found her, she was surrounded by flowers, some of them still clutched in her fist. Like Ophelia. Like the picture on Nel Abbott’s wall.
People said it was tenuous at best, ridiculous and cruel at worst, to lay the blame at Nel Abbott’s door for what happened to Katie. Just because Nel wrote about the pool, talked about the pool, took pictures there, conducted interviews, published articles in the local press, spoke once to a BBC radio programme about it, just because she said the words suicide spot, just because she talked about her beloved “swimmers” as glorious, romantic heroines, as women of courage meeting easeful death in their chosen place of beauty, she could not be held responsible.
But Katie d
idn’t hang herself from the back of her bedroom door; she didn’t cut her wrists or take a handful of pills. She chose the pool. What was truly ridiculous was to ignore that, to ignore the context, to ignore how suggestible some people can be—sensitive people, young people. Teenagers—good, intelligent, kind children—become intoxicated with ideas. Louise didn’t understand why Katie did what she did, she never would, but she knew that her act hadn’t happened in isolation.
The grief counsellor she had seen for just two sessions told her that she shouldn’t seek to know why. That she wouldn’t ever be able to answer that question, that no one could; that in many cases where someone takes her own life, there isn’t one reason why, life just isn’t that simple. Louise, despairing, had pointed out that Katie had no history of depression, she wasn’t being bullied (they talked to the school, they went through her email, her Facebook, they found nothing but love). She was pretty, she was doing well in school, she had ambition, drive. She wasn’t unhappy. Wild-eyed sometimes, excitable often. Moody. Fifteen. Most of all, she wasn’t secretive. If she had been in trouble, she would have told her mother. She told her mother everything, she always had. “She didn’t keep things from me,” Louise said to the counsellor, and she watched his eyes slide from her face.
“That’s what all parents think,” he said quietly, “and I’m afraid all parents are wrong.”
Louise didn’t see the counsellor again after that, but the damage had been done. A fissure had opened and guilt seeped through, a trickle at first and then a flood. She didn’t know her daughter. That was why the necklace bothered her so much, not just because it came from Lena, but because it became a symbol for everything she didn’t know about her daughter’s life. The more she thought about that, the more she blamed herself: for being too busy, for focusing too much on Josh, for failing so completely to protect her child.
The tide of guilt rose and rose, and there was only one way to keep her head above it, to keep from drowning, and that was to find a reason, to point to it, to say, There. That was it. Her daughter made a senseless choice, but pockets filled with stones and hands grasping flowers: the choice had context. The context was provided by Nel Abbott.
Louise placed the black suitcase on the bed, opened the wardrobe and began to slip Katie’s clothes off their hangers: her bright T-shirts, her summer dresses, the shocking-pink hoodie she wore all last winter. Her vision blurred and she tried to think of something to stop the tears coming, she tried to find some image on which to fix her mind’s eye, and so she thought of Nel’s body, broken in the water, and she took what comfort she could from that.
SEAN
I was roused by the sound of a woman calling out, a desperate, faraway sound. I thought I must have dreamed it, but then I was jolted awake by banging, loud and close and intrusive and real. There was someone at the front door.
I dressed quickly and ran downstairs, glancing at the clock in the kitchen as I passed. It was only just after midnight—I couldn’t have been sleeping for more than half an hour. The hammering at the door persisted and I could hear a woman calling my name, a voice I knew but for a moment couldn’t place. I opened the door.
“Do you see this?” Louise Whittaker was shouting at me, red-faced and furious. “I told you, Sean! I told you there was something going on!” The this to which she referred was an orange plastic vial, the sort you get prescription drugs in, and on the side there was a label, with a name. Danielle Abbott. “I told you!” she said again, and then she burst into tears. I ushered her inside—too late. Before I closed the kitchen door I saw a light go on in the upstairs bedroom of my father’s house.
It took quite a while to understand what Louise was telling me. She was hysterical, her sentences running into one another and making no sense. I had to tease the information out of her gradually, one gulping, breathless, furious phrase at a time. They had decided at last to put the house on the market. Before viewings could start, she needed to clear out Katie’s bedroom. She wasn’t having strangers tramping through there, touching her things. She had made a start on it that afternoon. While she was packing away Katie’s clothes she had found the orange vial. She’d been removing a coat from a hanger, the green one, one of Katie’s favourites. She’d heard a rattling noise. She’d slipped her hand into the pocket and discovered the bottle of pills. She was shocked, even more so when she saw that the name on the bottle was Nel’s. She had never heard of the drug—Rimato—before, but she looked it up on the Internet and discovered that it was a kind of diet pill. The pills are not legally available in the UK. Studies in the United States have linked their use to depression and suicidal thoughts.
“You missed it!” she cried. “You told me she had nothing in her blood. You said Nel Abbott had nothing to do with it. But here”—she banged her fist on the table, making the vial jump into the air—“see! She was supplying my daughter with drugs, with dangerous drugs. And you let her get away with it.”
It was strange, but all the time she was saying this, attacking me, I felt relieved. Because now there was a reason. If Nel had supplied Katie with drugs, then we could point to that, and say, Look, there, that’s why it happened. That’s why a brilliant, happy young girl lost her life. That’s why two women lost their lives.
It was comforting, but it was also a lie. I knew it was a lie. “Her blood tests were negative, Louise,” I said. “I don’t know how long this . . . this Rimato? I’ve no idea how long it stays in the system. We’ve no idea if this even is Rimato, but . . .” I got to my feet, fetched a plastic sandwich bag from the kitchen drawer and held it out to Louise. She picked the vial up from the table and dropped it into the bag. I sealed it up. “We can find out.”
“And then we’ll know,” she said, gulping for air again.
The truth was, we wouldn’t know. Even if there were traces of a drug in her system, even if there was something that had been missed, it wouldn’t tell us anything definitive.
“I know it’s too late,” Louise was saying, “but I want this to be known. I want everyone to know what Nel Abbott did—Christ, she might have given pills to other girls . . . You need to speak to your wife about this—as head teacher, she should know someone’s selling this shit in her school. You need to search the lockers, you need—”
“Louise”—I sat down at her side—“slow down. Of course we’ll take this seriously—we will—but we have no way of knowing how this bottle came into Katie’s possession. It’s possible that Nel Abbott purchased the pills for her own use . . .”
“And what? What are you saying? That Katie stole them? How dare you even suggest that, Sean! You knew her—”
The kitchen door rattled—it sticks, especially after rain—and flew open. It was Helen, looking dishevelled in tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt, her hair uncombed. “What’s going on? Louise, what’s happened?”