And now look!
She knew it was going to be fine. She knew Duncan Clyde loved her, maybe even more than he’d loved Kathleen.
She kicked off her shoes and pulled up the duvet and sighed as she sank onto the comfy mattress, lying on her side as she had to now. There was a window right opposite with a view across the lawn and the fields to the hill that she had to stop thinking of as Billy McLetchie. It was pure dead gorgeous. Everything here was gorgeous. Even the window was a posh old wooden one with four panes in it, framing this view of the bonnie Scottish Borders countryside.
Maggie shut her eyes, sinking into sleep, breathing in the cool, clean, fresh country air.
For the first time in her life, she had a real home and a real family.
For the first time in her life, she felt safe.
3
Lulu - May 2019
The blood was like threads, threads that thickened into string, into rope, coiling through the bath water, coiling over the doughy, pale grey skin of the person who lay there, on his side, his back turned towards her so she couldn’t see his face.
Lulu was clutching the door handle.
She couldn’t let go the door handle.
It was a strange room, gloomy and dingy with peeling paint and a grubby floor, but the bath in the centre was the bath from Braemar Station, the big cream enamel bath with the chip in the side where her brothers had hit it once with a cricket ball.
She needed to get to him, but she was caught in a thick, heavy inertia, as if the air around her wasn’t gas but solid, and there was nothing she could do, she couldn’t get to him and she couldn’t stop what was happening.
He flopped over, and she saw his face.
It was Dad.
And then light was searing through her eyelids and she was awake, all of a sudden, awake and weeping, staring at the bright wall of glass opposite the bed.
The blinds were rolling up and music was blaring from the integrated sound system.
‘Close to You’ by the Carpenters.
Thank God, thank God, thank God, it was a dream!
She closed her eyes.
That had been hellish. Even worse than usual.
Every night, as soon as she closed her eyes, her brain seemed to take this as a cue to go back over her clients’ traumas, but not with Lulu as an objective observer. Oh, no. Lulu was her clients, as she imagined the events they’d experienced happening to herself. And when she eventually managed to drop off, this often bled into her dreams.
She felt like she’d only just fallen asleep, but it must be 7:30 already. Instead of an alarm, Nick set a different track to come on for her each morning. But she didn’t feel ready to face the day. As Nick had slept like a baby through the night, she had lain awake for hours, battling against the urge to take a zolpidem. On the advice of the private doctor Nick had insisted she see, she was trying to wean herself off her prescription sleeping pills. She was currently allowed one tablet every three nights, and this hadn’t been one of those blissful occasions. She’d grabbed her phone at intervals to chart the progress of her wakefulness – ten to one, quarter past two, half past three, four o’clock.
That meant she’d had a maximum of three and a half hours’ sleep.
Not enough. She knew that wasn’t enough to get her through the day in anything like decent shape. Her head ached already. But at least tonight was a pill night – not that she generally felt any better when she woke after taking one, her head muzzy and stupid, her mouth dry and sticky, her bowels rebelling. There was no easy answer, it seemed, to what the doctor had referred to as the ‘chronic anxiety-related insomnia’ caused by the stressful nature of her work. Nick had pounced on that, of course, as yet another reason why she should give it up and do something else.
But she couldn’t help but smile as she listened to the song.
Nick was a big fan of cheesy retro romantic stuff.
She forced herself upright and padded across the soft white carpet to the wall of glass which gave an uninterrupted view across the wide brown expanse of the Thames to the new high-rises that loomed above the old brick buildings of Battersea. Standing here was like you were floating right over the river. The master bedroom floor formed the roof of the big balcony underneath, so between this window and the riverbank there was only the width of the walkway.
Showered and dressed, she stumbled downstairs and into the maze, as Nick called it, the series of right-angle turns in the white-walled and mirrored corridor that took her past all the other bedrooms and the study and out into the big open-plan living space, which Lulu always secretly thought was a bit like walking into an upmarket department store – all clean white lines and marble and glass and tasteful soft furnishings in shades of beige and grey. Light was streaming in through the slanted glass roof above the double-height area in the middle of the room, from which you looked up to the gallery that led to the master bedroom. She had worried, when she’d seen that on the house tour, that it would be triggering for Nick, but when she’d tentatively broached the subject, he’d assured her that the apartment was so different from Sunnyside in every way that it wouldn’t pull any ‘triggers’ on him. ‘You don’t have to worry that you’ll come home one day to find me chewing the back of the sofa like a neurotic spaniel you’ve left home alone.’