‘It’s quite bad, yes.’
‘It’s so bad that you’re unable to attend outpatient appointments or go to the hairdresser or the shops. You’re virtually unable to leave your house. That must be making it very difficult to be here.’
‘That’s not true. I can leave my house.’ Tears were prickling at the back of her throat. ‘I – there’s a walk along the coastal path, to a ruined castle. I’ve done that walk a lot.’ Although not for weeks. Not for months. Not, in fact, since Oliver was born.
‘When was the last time you left your house?’
‘Yesterday!’ she sobbed. ‘I left my house yesterday, when Oliver disappeared and I had to… I had to…’
‘All right, Sarah. I’m sorry.’ He held out the box of tissues, and she grabbed a handful. ‘So you’ve been dealing with quite a range of mental health issues.’
She wiped her face. Took a long breath.
Calm.
She had to be calm, but she also had to take control of this conversation.
‘That’s not my fault either. I know you’re going to say mental health issues are never the person’s fault – What I mean is that there’s not something inherently wrong with me. I never used to be like this. It all started after a trauma I experienced nine years ago.’ On the rare occasions on which they referred to it, she and Evie called it What Happened to Mum and Dad, as if it had been outside anyone’s control, as if their parents had been struck by lightning or crushed by falling masonry. She gulped a breath. ‘Yes, I have some problems, and yes, I’ve had a delusional episode before, as a side effect of medication – but Oliver isn’t a delusion. There’s plenty of proof that my son exists. I’ve got all his paperwork, and he’ll be in any number of databases. The NHS database, for a start.’
‘Okay. So tell me about “Oliver”.’
Finally!
Oliver leapt into her head, his mouth open wide in a tantrum. He didn’t often have one – he was such a good little boy, usually – but when he did, he gave it his all. And the funniest things would precipitate it. On the last occasion, he’d been devastated and enraged by a new bottle of shampoo, and Sarah had had to search through the recycling until she found the old bottle, and decant the new shampoo into it.
‘Sarah?’ he prompted.
He didn’t believe Oliver existed, but he was humouring her, he was ‘exploring the content of her delusion’ and hoping to get her to see sense. She remembered the process from last time. But this was her chance to convince him.
‘He was born eighteen months ago. In my house near Achnaclach. I have his birth certificate, at home. And all his other paperwork, his immunisation records and… and there are lots of photos of him, and all his stuff is there. But the documents are the important thing. They’re in the top drawer of the desk in my study – it’s locked – the key’s hidden under a little wooden car with… with pigs in it, on top of the filing cabinet. I think I left the front door unlocked. Someone could go now and check all this. Although maybe it would be quicker if you just checked the NHS database – you presumably have access to that – Oliver will be on there. Oliver Booth. Date of birth 10th of July 2017.’
He looked down at his notes and wrote something. Did that mean he was at least considering that what she was saying was worth checking?
But then he looked up and said, ‘And can you tell me what happened last time you had to be admitted to hospital? After the reaction to the antidepressants? That was just over two years ago, wasn’t it?’
She shut her eyes. ‘Yes.’
‘Can you tell me about it?’
‘I can try.’
Her memories of that night were fragmented and strange, as if they belonged to someone else entirely. That hadn’t been her, that hadn’t been Sarah Booth who had had drunken, frantic sex with a man in a pub toilet in Inverness. But she remembered the cheap melamine counter into which the sinks were set, splattered with gobs of bright pink liquid soap; the corroded faux-chrome hand dryer she’d grabbed at one point; his body odour, musky and animal.
And she remembered the sense of panic afterwards, sitting on the sticky moquette in the gloom of the lounge bar, in a shirt she couldn’t do up properly because two of the buttons had popped off when he tore at it; sitting and waiting for him, her partner, as she had thought him, to come back from the bar with their drinks; the sense of mounting panic when she’d realised he had gone.
She didn’t remember accosting the other customers, demanding to know where he was; she didn’t remember screaming at them, cursing them, calling them liars; she didn’t remember hurling glasses about, or picking up a chair and smashing the optics behind the bar; smashing the windows…
But all that had been detailed in the police report.
She remembered being groped by one of the men in the bar as he sat on her back, ostensibly to restrain her as they waited for the police to arrive. But she wasn’t sure if that had actually happened. She wasn’t sure, now, what had been real and what had been part of the delusion.
But the sex must have happened, because she knew she wasn’t imagining the child who had resulted from it. Oliver.
It was a never-ceasing source of wonder to her that the dearest, most innocent, most precious little being could have come from such complete degradation and squalor and shame.
But he had.
And he had changed her life.
When he was born, it was like someone had reached inside her and ripped out her soul, like some awful science-fiction scenario in which, when you became a mother, your soul wasn’t contained inside you any more – it was this tiny helpless thing that had to exist independently out there in the big bad world.
Out there, somewhere.
‘So,’ said Dr Laghari, when she’d finished her halting recitation. ‘You now accept that this man in the Crown and Thistle pub was not your long-term partner?’
‘Yes. Of course I accept it. But we really did have sex. I became pregnant as a result. With Oliver.’
‘At the time, you thought your “partner” had abandoned you in the pub?’
She nodded.
He blinked at her, his mouth quirking sympathetically. ‘A recurrent feature of your concerns seems to be people going missing?’
3
Sarah’s room looked out onto a wall and concrete slabs interspersed with ground-cover planting – heathers and cotoneaster and that low, spreading thing like a conifer gone wrong that always made her think of sheltered housing complexes. Last time she’d been sectioned here, after smashing up the Crown and Thistle, she’d been at the other side of the building with a view across the lawn to the street.
This was better, in terms of keeping the white mist at bay. In that other room, it had been a constant battle with the nurses to have the curtains tightly closed. The last thing she needed was to see traffic and people whizzing past.
It was so much better when there were no people.
She sat in the wing chair by the window, a Parker Knoll-type chair covered in the same maroon leather-look stuff as the tub chairs in the consulting room. She was so tired. She felt as if her whole body was shutting down, like someone had pressed the power-off button and it was useless trying to fight it. She just wanted to lie down on the bed and close her eyes, but if she did that, she knew she would sink back down into the fug, and she needed to think.