The Last Resort, page 4
Now – August
Zoe Sawyer pulls up into the hospital car park, peering out of the window for a parking space, swearing at the person who has parked their BMW on the line, leaving no room for her to squeeze into the only empty space she can find.
‘Bastard!’ she says as she carries on driving round, until eventually she pulls into a tight spot as far away from the entrance as it seems possible to be. She must be in the wrong car park. It’s so bloody small. The last time she came to this hospital must have been five years ago, when her youngest was born and she’d been in no state to be appreciating the layout of the parking spaces. But for 2.30 a.m. on a Sunday morning, she can’t believe it’s this busy.
Grabbing her bag from the passenger seat, Zoe swings herself out of the car, locks it and begins running to the front doors of the hospital.
This is the first chance she has had to get here. Since she got the call from Will to say that Erin had been in an accident she has been waiting at home for Dave to come back from his night shift.
An hour has passed since Will phoned her to tell her that her best friend has been seriously hurt. An hour of waiting, because she doesn’t know any of her neighbours well enough to ask them to look after the children in the middle of the night, and her mum would have taken longer to get home than Dave was supposedly going to. By the time he got back and she heard his key in the front door, she wondered if she should have called her mum after all.
But she is at the hospital now, and Will had impressed on her that there was nothing she could do anyway. Erin has been in a hit-and-run. The arsehole driver couldn’t even stop to make sure she was OK. Zoe told Will she was coming; he couldn’t be there on his own. And besides, she needs to be there when Erin wakes up.
Zoe feels the sting of tears stabbing at her eyes as she pushes through the revolving doors and strides over to the Emergency reception desk, where she gives them Erin’s details and is directed down a corridor to her right towards ITU, where Will’s latest text told her to come. Zoe thanks the woman as she runs off again, sliding to one side to narrowly miss a trolley coming in the other direction.
She hates the idea of what lies ahead of her, the not knowing what state her friend is going to be in or what she looks like. She needs to tell Erin that she still loves her and still cares about her. Especially as she hasn’t shown it over the last few months. She needs to say she is sorry.
Recently Zoe hasn’t been a good friend at all to Erin. She hasn’t been there for her and she has been living with this crushing guilt for the last hour, praying that she has the chance to make amends.
She rounds a corner and sees Will talking to a nurse. He looks over his shoulder at her when he clocks her approaching. His body is deflated. In the past few months she has watched Will suffering, not knowing what to do with Erin. She has taken his side, despite feeling her own betrayal of her best friend, but she has done it because she has believed Will.
Often Zoe has asked her husband what this says about her, but always Dave has told her that Will’s done nothing wrong. They couldn’t side with Erin over this.
Zoe always imagined she would kill for Erin, if her best friend turned up on her doorstep one night and asked her to. Only, when it came to it, she couldn’t even stand by her when her marriage collapsed.
Now Will holds out one arm towards her as she walks over and takes his hand. ‘What’s happening?’ she asks.
‘They had to remove her spleen.’
‘Oh my God, is that serious?’
‘She can survive without it, but …’ Will pauses. ‘Well, they don’t know what other effects there are at the moment. They’re keeping her in a coma. Until she’s stable.’ He rubs his hands over his eyes.
‘A coma?’
‘They don’t know how long she was on the side of the road for. She lost a lot of blood. They told me they won’t know until they wake her up what effects it has had on her brain.’
‘Oh my God, Will.’ Zoe’s eyes glisten with tears. She can feel the pressure of her own blood pumping around her body.
‘What was she doing, out in the middle of the night? Do you know anything?’ he asks her.
Zoe shakes her head. He’s asking her the question because he has to, but Will knows she hasn’t spoken to Erin in weeks, because they had this conversation only two nights ago. Will had called her on Friday night to tell her Erin had turned up on his mother’s doorstep, screaming at him, and Zoe had promised him she would call her friend. Only she put it off for fear of Erin hanging up on her.
The weight of her guilt continues to press into her now, crushing her furiously. If anything happens to Erin, she will never forgive herself. Erin must not die without knowing that she is still the best friend Zoe could ever have.
‘Will,’ she starts, ‘do you think she did this—’ She breaks off, unable to finish. Does Will think Erin has done it on purpose?
He is shaking his head emphatically. ‘No. No,’ he says, but his eyes are screwed up as if he must have been wondering the same himself. ‘It was an accident. She was hit. She couldn’t have done. No,’ he says, and then, ‘could she,’ he adds, though it isn’t a question, more a consideration.
‘She could have walked out in front of the car,’ Zoe says in a murmur, looking at him, desperate for him to tell her it isn’t possible. She holds a hand up to her throat, which is filled with a knot of tension, coiled up into a hard ball, making it hard to breathe.
‘No. No. She wouldn’t,’ he says. He is trying to convince both of them.
Zoe hopes she knows, deep down, that Erin wouldn’t. She wouldn’t leave her daughter. Ever. But then with what has happened recently – Will leaving her, taking Sadie – who knows what is possible?
The last time Zoe had spoken to her, she had told Erin she was mad. ‘You’re acting crazy, Erin,’ she’d said.
And Erin, with glassy eyes, had replied, ‘That’s exactly what Will says.’
After his call to her two nights ago, Zoe also put off phoning Erin because she knew she could no longer reason with her. Erin had made it clear she didn’t want to talk to her any more. But she should have persisted. She shouldn’t have given up.
‘She was by Harberry Woods,’ Will tells Zoe.
‘What the hell was she doing back there?’
‘I don’t know.’ He shakes his head.
Zoe considers the meaning of it and eventually says, ‘We’ve abandoned her. Both of us have.’ Erin can’t have had anyone to turn to over the last few months. Anyone apart from that counsellor, Maggie Day, of course. A woman Zoe has never met, but whom Erin decided to share everything with. Had she become a friend to Erin? Zoe doesn’t know because Erin stopped talking to her about their therapy a long time ago.
Will doesn’t take his eyes off her, as if he is contemplating what she said and making up his mind whether he believes he had no choice but to abandon Erin. Surely now, with Erin here in hospital, he must believe he should have done things differently.
‘Did she have Sadie – was she looking after her?’ Zoe asks him, and the idea that her god-daughter has been left with anyone else is another punch she can’t bear.
‘No. Sadie’s with me. She was … Mum and Dad have her.’
Zoe nods.
‘All this is killing her, Will,’ she tells him. ‘Literally killing her. You know that, right? Whatever is going on, it’s—’ She stops and waves a hand in the air, gesturing for a word that never comes.
And what if they have left it too late?
Five months earlier
MAGGIE
The Cliff House is falling apart. I can see cracks in the bricks that I am certain weren’t there a couple of months ago. I run my fingers across the rough surface, rubble crumbling beneath them, then over the shiny brass plate next to the door that bears my name along with those of others who work out of the house. Maggie Day, Couples’ Therapist. Still I have to pinch myself that I have got to where I am, working from this imposing building that takes prime position on the edge of Dorset’s Keyport cliffs.
Three years ago I saw that the room at the front had come up for rent and I knew I had to have it. All my stars were aligning, though I don’t really believe in all that stuff. I showed Richard, a little apprehensively because I already knew what he would say, and he didn’t let me down.
‘Mags, the cost – we’d really be stretching ourselves,’ he’d frowned. My husband was worried at this, but at the same time he knew how much it meant to me, the chance to be working here. He pointed out its location and questioned the insurance, when the building was so close to the cliff edge, and threw in words like ‘subsidence’ that I didn’t want to consider.
By then I’d been running my practice for six years, having started training two years earlier, and had built it up successfully. I had published my first article, which has since led on to more, and I declared to Richard that for someone that Life In Dorset magazine was calling a ‘leading expert in psychotherapy and psychodynamics’, I needed a room more suitable than the tiny one I’d been renting in the centre of Keyport. I needed somewhere that reflected my professionalism, and he couldn’t argue that the Cliff House wasn’t perfect.
The double doors could do with a good lick of paint, I think now, as I push them open. I didn’t have any say in the deep grey that had been chosen three years ago. My first day here coincided with that of the decorator who was painting the outside, who arrived in his white van behind me. It was a job that was supposed to take him three weeks, but had ended up being double that because the weather had been particularly bad that March.
He was afraid he would fall off his ladder. He told me this every morning as he stood with his flask looking out to sea. ‘Don’t know how much I’m going to be able to do today, Maggie.’ I always told him to be careful. I had visions of him falling because I knew, as well as he did, that the wind could whip up wildly on the clifftop. I didn’t want him breaking a limb, or worse.
I decide to have a chat with Craig later, who runs his chiropractic business from the back, about getting it painted again. Craig pays less rent than I do, but then he doesn’t have the view of the sea from his windows – the view that every time I see it still takes my breath away.
Over the last three years, as my business has continued to grow, Richard has worried less. He has never questioned my decision; if anything, he is the opposite and supports me wholeheartedly, but he’ll always check my books every so often. Just to be sure, to alleviate any worries that we’re going to be all right.
Richard and I are so different in many ways. I often say that if we’d met a year earlier we’d have never made it. I was thirty when I stood in front of him in a coffee-shop queue near Keyport Harbour. He, it turned out, was forty and he was also my saviour when I realised I didn’t have my purse and he paid for my flat white, adding a muffin to my order for me.
Only six months before that, I had started my therapist training, and only six months before that I had been seeing a counsellor myself to help me through a bad break-up. A relationship with a man called Paul, who’d been a nice guy on the surface, but we couldn’t seem to stop ourselves from hurting each other.
My counsellor helped me realise that the break-up wasn’t all my responsibility and helped me to throw off the blame I’d been layering onto myself. She only scratched the surface of the rest of the guilt I’d been buried under for the whole of my twenties, but what I did realise was what I wanted to be doing with my life – helping other people before their relationships got to the point of no return, as mine and Paul’s had.
Richard and I had walked out of that coffee shop together, chatting and eventually swapping numbers. I was relieved he hadn’t met the twenties version of Maggie, who used to drink too much and party too often, and had instead met the Maggie who was turning her life around. I cannot imagine what life would look like without him in it.
Two weeks after we had met, I told my mentor, Elise, about him and she looked at me and beamed, and said she knew as soon as I walked through her door that day there was something different about me.
Elise was appointed to me at the start of my training and she acted as a counsellor too, someone to dig into my own past and demons as a way of unearthing them before I counselled other people. ‘God help our clients if we take our own issues into their problems,’ she’d joked early on. Then, ‘Take it carefully, Maggie,’ she said when I left her that day. Maybe she could see how important Richard was already becoming to me, or maybe she worried there was still too much I was dealing with, stuff that made my break-up with Paul seem trivial in comparison. Either way, I wasn’t sure.
Elise is still in my life, but now every month I share with her any obstacles that I have with my clients. It isn’t about me any longer.
I twist the blinds on the windows, so the shutters open and light pours into the room. I have a new couple this morning: Erin and Will Harding. I know nothing about them yet and, as always, this fills me with a little buzz of anticipation that’s either excitement or apprehension, or a mixture of the two.
I have fifteen minutes before the Hardings arrive. They are taking the first slot of the week – 9 a.m. on a Monday morning, which I had been reluctant to give over because I am not a good morning person. My sessions don’t normally start until 10 a.m., but there was something quietly desperate about Erin when she called that made me find a slot to fit them into.
As is always the case, I laid down my rules on the phone:
They must pay for the slot every week, regardless of whether they can make it or not. This is their time and I won’t give it to anyone else, which means they have to commit to coming.
I see the two of them together, and never one of them on their own. This is couples’ therapy and if they can’t both make it, then we don’t go ahead with the session. They are my clients together, and I don’t ever want to find myself swayed towards one of the parties. I need to remain impartial.
My rules are my code of ethics. I have never crossed them and there is nothing that would ever make me. It is important for me to have boundaries, not least because Elise taught me this from the start, but also because I realise I need them for myself too. When I went through my own counselling and my life was all over the place, it became a way of me keeping it together.
While I wait for the Hardings I make myself a coffee, popping a pod into the machine that sits on a chest tucked into an alcove of my room. I have one espresso shot that I knock back quickly, enjoying the sharp kick.
I’d spent a long time setting up my room just the way I wanted it. I have a reclaimed chair that I fell in love with when Richard and I were on holiday in Cornwall. He hired a van so that we could go back the following weekend to pick it up. It is covered in soft blue birds and green vines and it is where I always sit. It’s one of those possessions that makes me remember happy things. I often have a flash of the long, lazy lunch we’d had after I’d seen it, sitting in the window of a bar as the rain pattered relentlessly down the pane.
Opposite me and across from a coffee table I have a two-seater sofa in pale blue, and the back wall is hidden by a white bookcase that catches the attention of inquisitive clients: the ones who want to run their fingers along the spines of my books, assure themselves that someone this well read in their field of psychology must know what they are talking about. I advertise myself as specialising in psychodynamics – the idea that we are all shaped by our pasts. They mostly come to me knowing that this is what we’ll dig into, but still they look for reassurance that surely I must be able to fix their broken relationships.
My couples don’t all come with hope. Or maybe their hopes are differently aligned because they all want a resolution after all, an outcome, a solution to their problems. But not all of them hope for me to fix them; some are looking for a way to escape. They need me to tell them they are right and the only way for them to be happy is to leave the person sitting beside them.
I wonder what it is that the Hardings are here for. What they need me for. I don’t know much about them yet, apart from the basics they completed on their forms.
Will is thirty-six and a history teacher at a local secondary, which surprises me as I cannot imagine that 9 a.m. on a Monday morning can be convenient for him or how he manages to escape the first hour of the week. It isn’t my place to ask, yet it leaves me wondering what it says about them. That he would move heaven and earth to please her, or that there’s something he is desperate to get resolved too?
Erin is thirty-four and had a good job as a medical rep that she gave up when her daughter was born. A job that would have demanded long hours and structure and is likely a far cry from the life she probably has now.
I don’t ask for back-story over the phone because I learnt when I was starting out that you can give over too much of your time to a client who hasn’t paid you yet.
It sounds so harsh, but I discovered it the hard way, occasionally giving clients a bit of extra time on their session if they were mid-flow on a topic when the big hand hit the ten. Fifty minutes in and I need to wrap up swiftly, and not being punctual led clients to expect more, and to me being disorganised once my diary began filling up.
Now I can close down the session promptly, but I can never be accused of not throwing myself wholly into my clients’ story. I give them my all – sometimes too much – but I always remember that I am their therapist, not their friend. It’s important to realise how much influence I can have and, if I’m not careful, how much harm it could cause.
A black Audi pulls up outside the window, its tyres slowly rolling across the gravel.
I peer between the slats of my blinds to get a first impression. He is driving, she sits beside him. I don’t see her properly as she is on the other side of him – not until she steps out of the car and stops to look up at the house.
Erin Harding is wearing a long camel-coloured woollen coat that reaches to her mid-calves and, beneath that, dark jeans and small black pixie boots that will dig into the gravel with each step she takes. Around her neck is a brightly coloured scarf, and on top of her head a woollen hat in salmon pink with a pompom on top. Her face looks pained as her eyes trail the old house, and she stares at the windows above me as if she has seen a ghost. I wonder what’s going on in her head, whether she’s relieved to be here, if a little nervous, or if she’s thinking she’s made a big mistake.
