By day I stuck to the timetable, kept my head down and struggled to cope with the tears that would spring to my eyes at the slightest thing. One afternoon Patsy, a woman I was teaching to read who also lived in my house, came in with a letter from her daughter. Would I read it to her and help her write back? It was mundane stuff, family news and local gossip, nothing overtly sentimental, but as I read on, I broke down. She rushed to comfort me, which made it even worse.
‘Aw, darlin’, what’s wrong? What’s to do?’
‘I lost my husband,’ I spluttered, ‘I miss him so much. And I lost my dad and now I feel as if I’m losing my mind.’
‘We all feel like that sometimes,’ she said. ‘That’s why there’s so many girls cutting up.’
Self-harm is commonplace. Some people cut or burn themselves; others swallow dangerous objects or even find ways of breaking their bones. The prison librarian told me that forty per cent of the women inside have a mental illness, and eighty per cent have a serious drug or drink addiction. Most have been convicted of crimes linked to their addiction. Counselling is practically non-existent – lack of resources. Women speak of waiting nine months, a year or more to see a therapist.
‘You want to see the doctor,’ she told me, ‘get some meds.’
I nodded, wiping my face. ‘I’ve put in for an appointment.’
And then I helped her write the letter.
If I had known that my father had killed himself, if I had experienced the bewilderment, the anger and hurt of that abandonment, would I have even entertained Neil’s request, knowing what it might feel like for his children?
Chapter Twenty-one
‘Deborah, will you please tell the jury what happened on the fifteenth of June 2009?’
‘The children went out, Sophie first to school, and then Adam.’
I had made a point of asking each of them if they had seen Neil before they left. One of the clues, perhaps, that had made Sophie doubt my story later that day.
‘I sat with Neil in our room until about one o’clock.’
Adam had gone by then. I felt sick. Sick and shaky and terribly frightened. It was the fear of nightmares, visceral and inescapable. Neil seemed calm, resigned to his decision. I wanted to savour our last hours and minutes together. It was a beautiful day, a good day to die. But my mind was fractured, panicky, skittering away from the deed that lay ahead. Would he want to eat? The notion of all these ‘lasts’ – a last meal, last kiss, last breath – was intolerable to me. I said very little. I lay beside him. Should I have made more of it? Brought in flowers and put music on? Songs to end a life to? I did none of these things because until the end I was hoping it would never happen.
‘And then what did you do?’
‘I got us a drink.’
Are you hungry? I had said. Perhaps if he ate a good lunch he would be sick and the whole thing would fall apart, a débâcle that would set him straight. Neil had shaken his head: I’d like a drink. Some wine.
I thought of his Greeks and his bloody Romans, drinking their flagons before falling on their swords. I smiled at him and went downstairs to cry. I’m sure he knew how distressed I was but he didn’t say anything when I returned except ‘Thank you.’ What was he thanking me for? The wine or the rest of it?
‘A drink?’ Mr Latimer wants the details.
‘Some wine.’
Red wine. The colour of blood. Ruby staining his lips, his tongue.
‘And then?’
‘It all happened so quickly,’ I say. Tears start in my eyes, but now I will say my piece. I’m damned if I’ll collapse again. ‘We hadn’t even finished the bottle and Neil said my name, he touched my face. And I knew what he meant.’
‘What was that?’
‘That it was time.’
‘Thank you. Please tell the jury what happened next.’
‘I got the morphine bottles and opened them.’
My hands were shaking and my heart hurt in my chest, a profound pain, as if a fist was squeezing it. I thought how fucking ironic it would be if I had a heart-attack before I could give him the drugs. End up dead and Neil forced to live on.
‘Neil drank one. I kissed him and told him I loved him. He told me the same.’ My voice is uneven, fluting with emotion. In the jury box Alice is crying silently, her hand over her mouth, her eyes closed and her wide face flushed.
‘Then I gave him the other bottle. Then I think he had some more wine. Then the last one from the breathing space kit, or it might have been then that he had the wine. I can’t be sure.’
‘How long did it take Neil to drink all the medicine?’
‘About five minutes.’ It was so quick.
‘And then?’
‘He fell asleep.’ His eyes closed, his hands relaxed, his breathing altered.
‘What time was this?’
‘It was almost two o’clock.’ I remember looking at the alarm clock and thinking that when it next rang Neil would be gone. That I’d be getting up on my own. It seemed unreal. Preposterous.
‘And what did you do then?’
‘I lay down with him. And waited.’
‘How long did you stay like that?’
‘Half an hour. Neil was still breathing. I didn’t know what to do. I knew Sophie would be home soon. I tried to wake him. To see if it was too late.’ As I talk, I can’t catch the rhythm of my own breath. There is no oxygen in it, I am choking. Pushing at Neil, shaking his shoulder, slapping his cheek. Neil, Neil, wake up. Please, oh, God, please.
Mr Latimer waits, hoping to settle me.
‘I couldn’t wake him up. I had the plastic bag.’ Sweat breaks out across my body. I am trembling. ‘I put the bag over his head. He jerked and made this sound, this awful sound. I held it tight. Then he stopped breathing.’
‘Would you describe what happened as a good death?’
‘No,’ I whisper.
It had been horrible. It hadn’t been dignified – not from my point of view. How could he have pressured me into it? The worst moments, the drumming of his heels on the bed, the strangled murmur that might have been ‘Stop’ or ‘Help’, the bubbling breath, the way his body bucked, the smell as he emptied his bowels. They pulse through me time and again in waves of shame and revulsion.
‘What did you do then?’
I cursed him. ‘I took the bag and the morphine bottles, along with the breathing space kit, put them in an old carrier bag in the wheelie-bin, then emptied the kitchen bin on top.’ My knees threatened to buckle as I went outside. I felt eyes on my back, expected someone to come up the drive any moment. Pauline to trot round with a complaint.
‘I went back upstairs. I needed to make sure he was still there. Still… dead.’
Flo, in the back row of the jury, blanches and looks down.
When I cupped his face in my hands I thought perhaps he was slightly cooler. I traced the lines on his brow with my thumbs, rubbed the heel of my hand against the stubble along his jaw. Speckles of silver in there with the black. He had never grown a beard, not even a moustache. He looked worried in death. His mouth turning down. His lovely eyes marbles now.
‘Wake up.’ I tested him. ‘Neil, come back.’ All I heard were the birds outside and the hammering from down the road where they were converting the loft. I wrapped one palm around his throat, over his Adam’s apple, absorbing the absence of motion, the lack of rhythm in his blood. I wanted to clean him up, bathe him with libations, oils and tears. Like the godly women who laid out the dead. We no longer had that skilclass="underline" death, like birth, had been hived off to professionals, to antiseptic corporate enclaves far removed from the glory and filth of the real thing.