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The fog in my head cleared suddenly and the gentle Scots of Matt’s voice was in my ear saying you’ve reached Matt Corsham. I’m probably in my dungeon – the photo lab, in the hospital basement – leave a message. I hung up before the beep and dialled it again. Looked at the clock: 07:43. He was on earlies, started at eight, he should have been on his way to the hospital, on the 267. He should have his phone in his hand. I slumped onto the sofa. He should be texting me.
Mum sat beside me and took my face in her hands.
‘What do we do?’ she asked me gently. ‘Things get tough, what do we do?’
‘We deal with it,’ I told her in a whisper.
‘That’s exactly what we do. You and me.’ She sighed, took my good hand and peeled each finger from the phone, until I released it. It went on the table, out of reach, then she moved up next to me, pulling me close. I relented, sank my head against her chest.
‘Please don’t let this happen again, Mum.’
‘Shh. He’ll be OK, though. Probably just have worked late or started early or something.’ She gave me a gentle nudge. ‘Don’t worry. Just a bit of mud. Just some scrapes.’
Even then, neither one of us believed it.
2. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Mae (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
Detective Sergeant Ben Kwon Mae stopped at the lights. He raised his eyebrows in the rear-view mirror and the kicking to the back of his seat immediately ceased. Bear, his 8-year-old daughter who was suspiciously engrossed in the palm of her hand, slowly lifted her chin to meet his gaze.
‘What?’ Eyes all wide, butter-wouldn’t-melt incredulous. ‘It wasn’t me!’
He laughed. Thirty quid a pop, the drama lessons his ex-wife made him shell out for and look what it bought.
‘You’re a terrible actress, Bear. Really bad,’ he said, returning his attention to the school-run gridlock. Should have walked.
The kicking resumed, and he swung around. ‘Oi! Stop it!’
She laughed, but then he clocked the crisps all over her almost-freshly-laundered school sweater. Busted, she started to brush at them, scattering them into the footwell.
He blew out his cheeks. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.
‘I’m hungry.’
‘But crisps, mate?’
He wanted to leave it, because the clock on the dash gave him eight minutes to get Bear to school and wasting one of those minutes complaining about her diet meant wasting them all. When the bell rang at 8.45 he’d be looking at a clear week and a half until he got her back. But Nadia had complained enough times about having to deal with what she called ‘the BMI situation’ on her own. It wasn’t fair on her for him to just ignore it.
He shook his head. ‘I did offer you a proper breakfast. I thought you loved scrambled eggs.’
‘Not since I was like three. I hate it.’ He could only see the top of her head now, but he was pretty sure she was holding back tears. ‘You never have any decent food in your stupid flat. I’m always hungry at school after I have to stay at yours.’
‘OK, well. I’ll stock up next time.’ The lights changed and he turned back to the road. ‘Just have to make healthy choices, that’s all I’m saying.’
‘All you’re saying is I’m fat and no one likes me.’ She stared angrily out of the window, nicking at the raw skin around her thumbnail with her teeth.
‘That’s absolutely not true.’ Nice one, Superdad. One guess what she’d remember about the visit with him now. In the mirror he saw her lean her head on the glass, and they finished the journey in silence. Could they bunk off for an hour? Take her to the park, make things okay between them so they’d part on good terms? No. Obviously not. Nadia would find out, for a start, and his approval rating was already on the floor. Things had eroded badly enough between them lately without him adding truancy to the list.
Only three minutes late, he swung into a space miraculously close to the school entrance. He got out and went round to open Bear’s child-locked door.
‘My tummy hurts,’ she whined.
‘OK. Well, let’s get some fresh air and see how you feel in a minute.’
‘But I’ve got a headache.’ Her voice was quieter. He followed her gaze out across the playground to where two boys, older, were in direct line of sight. They turned away as soon as he made eye contact. Bear sighed and looked at her feet.
He leaned across her to undo her seatbelt. ‘Friends of yours?’
‘No! Get off, Ben,’ she snapped, twisting away.
He made sure the sudden sag in his chest didn’t make it to his face.
‘It’s Dad,’ he told her, pulling her bag and reading folder out from the back seat. This Ben thing was new this visit. No way did she call Nadia by her first name. He hadn’t even heard her shorten it from Mummy yet. He wasn’t having it. ‘You call me Dad.’
‘Whatever.’ She squeezed past him and stumped off towards the gate. Catching her up, he reached for her shoulder but let his hand drop before it touched her. Best not push it.
‘Tell you what. If you don’t give me a cuddle, I’ll cave your head in with a fire extinguisher.’ A bit too hopeful, the way it came out, but she let him draw level. He coughed, dropped his voice a bit. ‘Gouge your eyes out with a soup spoon. I will. I’ve done it before. In Helmand.’
Which won him a very small smile. ‘You haven’t been to Helmand.’
‘Flipping have.’
‘And you’ve used that one before, too.’
‘Right, right. Sloppy.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking. ‘In that case I’ll just have to grate your nose off.’
‘Yeah? How?’
‘Cheese grater. Like I did in Operation Desert Knickers.’
A single sniff of a laugh, and she glanced at him. The shape of her eyes so almost-Caucasian, hardly a sniff of Korean about her. Like even his genes were being diluted, rinsed out of her life.
But her sideways smile was all his. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ll boil you alive and peel your skin off and sell it to the shoe shop so they can make shoes out of you.’
The realization that she’d planned that, rehearsed it, glowed like a coal in his belly.
‘Nice.’ He gave her a serious look and slow-nodded. ‘What’s the score? Seventeen-twelve?’
‘You wish,’ she said, appeased now. ‘Nineteen-twelve.’ She cheerfully swung her bag at him, obliviously but narrowly missing his bollocks.
Bear started to skip but stopped when she got to the gate. She was scanning the yard for those boys.
Mae crouched. ‘If there’s anything you need me to deal with—’
She shot him a serious look. ‘No. There’s nothing. There isn’t.’
‘Because if—’
‘Please, Dad.’
Mae shrugged, straightened up, committing those two lads to memory: bags, hair, sneery little faces. The last of the latecomers ran past them, ushered in by her classroom assistant (Mr Walls, 29, newly qualified last year, single, previously a gardener, caution for shoplifting aged 13). Mae bent to fix the mismatch of toggles on her coat, and she let him.
‘Thanks for hanging out with me, Bear.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘See you next week.’
She ducked him and was gone, off down the path, trying to press into a group of girls he half-recognized. Flicking a hand up briefly as a backwards goodbye. He flexed his fingers a few times in his pockets and headed back to the car.
It didn’t get to him. Saying goodbye and not even getting a hug: it was no big deal. He dealt with assaults and suicides and RTAs, no problem, all the time. Cat C murders, child abuse, DV, the lot. All the fucking time. So, his little girl forgot to give him a hug before a whole nine days away from him, even though five minutes ago she was three years old, falling asleep in his arms as he read The Gruffalo for the eighteenth time? Christ! Take more than that to make him cry.
From the driver’s seat he watched Bear disappear into the building.
Music. He reached round to dig a CD out from the pocket behind his seat, and his fingers closed on a disk in a square plastic wallet. She must have left it there by mistake. He brought it out: Lady Gaga for Bear! on the disk in sharpie, and then under the hole,
(not really, it’s Daddy’s very best CLEAN hip-hop mixtape).
And it was clean, too: he’d checked and double-checked each track, and there wasn’t a single swear. It had taken some doing.
He tucked it into the glovebox, then tried again and found Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle under a fine layer of fried potato crumbs. It was scratched to shit but last time had played fine up to ‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)?’, which would be long enough to get him to the nick. His speakers were almost as creaky as his brakes, but they were loud, and loud meant a clear head.
Ignition, arm round the headrest to reverse. And off.
All business.
3. (#u079d501d-f43d-5e2f-9341-37d3e850f369)
CC: OK, I think that’s recording … Good. Right, before we begin can we just confirm this because we’ve got a slightly unusual situation here. You have asked for your friend Jodie – our mutual friend, should I say – to be here during this first session?
EP: Yes. Please. If that’s all right.
CC: Certainly, whatever makes you feel comfortable. OK. So, what I’d like to do to begin with is to have a chat about the dissociation, and the range of what you’re experiencing on a daily basis.
EP: OK.
CC: And from there we can move on to having a think about where you’d like me to get you to. Does that sound OK?
EP: Yeah. Yes. That’s fine.
CC: So. A normal day then. How does that start?
EP: OK well, it depends on whether I’ve had a fugue or not.
CC: Tell me about that.
EP: So, um, Siggy sometimes—
CC: Siggy is your alter.
EP: Yeah, sorry yeah my alter, she sometimes kind of takes over. I wake up at night sometimes but I’m not like, actually awake, it’s not me, it’s her. She talks to my mum sometimes, otherwise she’ll just try to go outside, that kind of thing. Sometimes we’ll only know Siggy was up because things will be moved, or lights will be on. Stuff like that. But I always know anyway because I feel her there.
CC: Physically?
EP: Not exactly. I mean, I always feel sick afterwards, sort of achy.
CC: OK, so let’s say you’ve woken up, got up. What happens next?
EP: Well, she’s always there. Just … like I can sort of sense her, whatever’s going on. It’s like she thinks things that I can hear—
CC: Does she speak? Does she have a voice?
EP: Well … no. Not really. But it’s like she’ll get scared or angry or whatever and I know it’s not me feeling those things. Does that make any sense?
CC: Yes, it does. It sounds like what you experience is what I call co-conscious dissociation, which is when a person can feel that they have more than one identity at the same time.
EP: Right. Yes, that’s what it’s like. But the times she gets me up and does stuff with me at night, and … I just have completely no memory of that at all.
CC: OK. I’m getting from the way you’re speaking now that it’s quite distressing.
EP: I just … I don’t know.
[pause: 32 sec]
CC: Would you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?
[pause: 12 sec]
EP: Look, I-I don’t know.
CC: OK: Eleanor—
EP: Ellie.
CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.
[pause: 27 sec]
EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.
CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.
EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.
CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?
EP: My mum.
CC: She’s always believed you.
EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.
