She takes a travel casefrom the basement and brings it up to Marisa’s room, unzipping and placing it on the bed. Then she folds up Marisa’s clothes – baggy T-shirts, artist’s overalls, ripped jeans, the odd patterned sundress, bobbly and bleached pale by too many washes – and puts them into the cases. She is surprised by how few possessions Marisa has: they have filled a little over half of the case. She finds a stuffed toy bunny with a stitched ‘x’ for a nose on the shelves, along with two books of poetry, and she puts these in too. She packs sketchpads and pens and a box of blunted graphite pencils, but the paints and the desk will have to stay behind. She goes to the bathroom to gather up Marisa’s toiletries, which include a toothbrush and toothpaste, some Vaseline, a small pot of skin cream, hotel sample-size shampoo bottles and, at the back of the cabinet, a half-empty box of Risperidone tablets. She shoves these in too. Chris indicated earlier that he wanted to get her back onto the drugs as soon as possible.
‘The risks to the baby are minimal and far outweighed by the advantages,’ he said. ‘If she carries on not taking them, then there could be more serious consequences.’
‘Such as?’ Jake asked.
‘Maternal suicide.’
She shuts the case and wheels it out of the room. Jake comes from downstairs to help her carry it outside. She keeps hold of the diary and of an address book she has found in the top drawer of Marisa’s bedside table.
Jake’s parents have driven down in the battered old Volvo estate rather than the niftier Vauxhall Corsa (‘the runabout’, Annabelle callsit) and Kate is grateful for their foresight as she and Jake pack the cases into the boot. They have decided that Jake will travel in the back with Marisa, who will be able to stretch out and rest her head on his knees. Kate puts a tartan blanket and a flask of water in the footwell on the passenger side.
She kisses Jake briefly on the lips in the street and he holds her tightly. It is now almost 1 a.m. and the rest of the road is in darkness, apart from a single light in an open window in the block of flats opposite. There is a smell of weed in the air, and the low bass thrum of some indistinguishable music.
The two of them return to the house, where Annabelle and Chris and Marisa are waiting. Kate passes them in the hallway, making grateful eye contact with Chris who nods, and then she goes upstairs to look on from the first-floor landing.
Chris has given Marisa the second dose of lorazepam and she is pliant and willing and child-like.
‘We’re going to take you to my parents’,’ Jake tells her, ‘to give you a bit of a rest while I sort things out with Kate.’
Marisa looks up at him and smiles.
‘All right,’ she says.
Jake leads her gently outside by the arm, with his parents following. Kate keeps thinking of something, at the edge of her consciousness; a memory that she doesn’t yet want to give in to. She keeps it at bay until the front door closes and she hears the Volvo engine start up and then fade into the distance and when she knows they have gone, the memory comes to her. It is a scene from a black and white film she watched at university, the Elia Kazan adaptation ofA Streetcar Named Desirewhere Vivien Leigh, playing the doomed Southern belle, Blanche DuBois, looks up with shining eyes at the dark-suited doctor as he removes his hat and says, ‘Whoever you are, I have always depended on the kindness of strangers.’
The house feels big and silent without any people in it. Kate’s head is aching and she realises she is very tired. She didn’t think it would be possible to feel like this with so much adrenalin coursing through her body, and yet she is seized by an exhaustion so complete that the onlything she can do is stumble to their bedroom, roll onto the duvet cover and close her eyes. She lies there fully clothed, her shoes still on from when she walked through the door when she got back from work. Funny to think how that was just a few hours ago, she thinks as she drops into sleep, and that this was all it took for life to warp and snap into chaos.
When she wakes, it is early morning and she can hear the clattering sound of the rubbish collection vans outside. She slams upright, heart skipping and beating against her ribcage. Her mouth is throbbing. She takes two paracetamol from the bedside table and gulps them down. She can live without a tooth for now, she tells herself. It wasn’t one from the front. You couldn’t really notice it when she talked.
She grabs her phone and sees several missed calls from Jake, followed by a series of text messages telling her they had arrived in Gloucestershire and all was calm but where was she, he was worried about her, please ring when she can.
She calls him and he answers immediately.
‘Are you OK?’ he says.
‘Yes, yes, I’m so sorry. I fell asleep.’
She can hear him exhale on the other end of the line.
‘Thank God. I was so worried about you. I was going to drive back down there but Mum told me not to. She said you would have gone to bed.’
‘I’m glad you listened. I’m so sorry,’ she says again. ‘How are you? How is everything?’
She hears Jake moving around, pacing the floor and she imagines him in the Sturridge family sitting room where she first met his parents, with the overstuffed sofas and the silver-framed photographs of christenings and graduations.
‘It’s under control,’ he says. ‘I feel weird about it.’
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know, it feels like we’re exploiting her. We’re kind of … lying to her, aren’t we?’
Kate pinches the bridge of her nose.
‘Not as much as she’s lied to us,’ she says, trying to keep her voice calm. ‘It’s only until she’s more stable, anyway.’
‘Yes, you’re right. Sorry. I know you’re right. She’s in the cottage, safely installed. The drive up was fine. She slept most of the way.’
‘How’s she been with your parents?’
