Burnt Paper Sky (2 page)

Here’s the list of everything I used to have under control: work, relationship, family.

Here’s the problem I have now: the thoughts in my head.

They remind me hourly, sometimes minute by minute, of loss, and of actions that can’t be undone, however much you wish it.

During the week I throw myself into work to try to erase these thoughts.

Weekends are more of a challenge but I’ve found ways to fill them too: I exercise, I work some more, and then I repeat.

It’s the nights that torment me, because then the thoughts revolve ceaselessly in my head and deny me sleep.

When I was a student I gained a little knowledge of insomnia. I studied Surrealist poetry and I read that sleep deprivation could have a psychedelic, hallucinogenic effect on the mind; that it had the potential to unleash reserves of creativity that were profound and could enhance your life and your soul.

My insomnia isn’t like that.

My insomnia makes a desperate, restless soul of me. There is no creativity, only hopelessness and frustration.

Each night when I go to bed I dread the inevitability of this because when my head hits the pillow, however tired I am, however much I crave respite from my own mind, every single part of me seems to conspire to keep me awake.

I become hyperaware of all the potential stimuli around me, and each one feels like an affliction.

My shifting movements make the smooth sheet beneath me buckle and form ridges and channels like baked earth that’s been torn into by the claws of an animal. If I try to lie still, my hands linked together on my chest, then the pounding of my heart shortens my breath. If I lie without covers, the air in the room makes my skin prickle and crawl, whatever the temperature. Bundled up, I feel only an intense and overheated claustrophobia, which robs the air from my lungs and makes me sweat so that the bed feels like a stagnant pool that I’m condemned to bathe in.

As I stew in my bed, I listen to the city outside: the shouting of strangers, cars, a moped, a siren, the rustle of treetops agitated by the wind, sometimes nothing at all. A sound void.

There are nights when this quiet torments me and I rise, usually well beyond midnight, and I dress again, and then I walk the streets under the sodium-orange glow of the streetlights where the only life is a shadowy turbulence at the periphery of my vision, a fox perhaps, or a broken man in a doorway.

But even walking can’t clear my mind completely because as I put one foot in front of the next I dread even more the return to the flat, to the bed, to its emptiness, to my wakefulness.

And, worst of all, I dread the thoughts that will circle once again in my mind.

They take me straight to those dark, vivid places that I’ve worked so hard to lock away during the day. They find those hidden places and they pick the locks, force the doors, pull away the planks of wood that have been nailed across the windows and they let light into the dark corners inside. I think of it as harshly lit, like a crime scene. Centre-stage: Benedict Finch. His pellucid blue eyes meeting mine, and in them an expression so innocent that it feels like an accusation.

Late into the small hours I sometimes get the sleep I crave, but the problem is that it’s not a refreshing blackness, a chance for my mind to shut down. Even my sleep allows me no respite, because it’s populated by nightmares.

But whether I’ve been awake or asleep, when I rise in the morning, I’m often fetid and dehydrated, wrung out before the day has even begun. Tears might have dampened my pillow, and more often than not sweat has soaked my sheets, and I face the morning with a sense of dread that my insomnia hasn’t just blurred the boundaries between day and night, but has unbalanced me too.

I think, before it happened to me, that I might have underestimated both the restorative power of sleep and the destructive power of a shattered psyche. I didn’t realise that exhaustion could bleed you dry so completely. I didn’t realise that your mind could fall sick without you even noticing: incrementally, darkly, irrevocably.

I’m too embarrassed to tell anybody else about these things, and the fact that the effects of my insomnia stay with me as day breaks, woven into the fabric of it. The exhaustion it breeds makes my coffee taste metallic and the thought of food intolerable. It makes me crave a cigarette when I wake. It fuels my cycle ride to work with adrenalin, so that I’m nervy, riding dangerously close to the kerb, misjudging a junction so that the thud of a car forced into an emergency stop just behind me makes my legs pump painfully fast on the pedals.

In the office, an early meeting: ‘Are you OK?’ my DCI asks. I nod, but I can feel sweat breaking out along my hairline. ‘I’m fine,’ I say. I last for ten minutes more, until somebody asks, ‘What do you think, Jim?’

I should relish the question. It’s an opportunity to put myself forward, to prove myself. A year ago, I would have. Now, I focus on the chipped plastic shard on the end of my biro. Through the pall of my exhaustion I have to force myself to raise my head and look at the three expectant faces around me. All I can think about is how the insomnia has smeared the clarity of my mind. I feel panic spreading through my body as if it’s being infused like a drug, pushing through arteries, veins and capillaries until it incapacitates me. I leave the room silently and once I’m outside I pound my fist into the wall until my knuckles bleed.

It’s not the first time it’s happened, but it’s the first time they make good on their threat to refer me to a psychologist.

Her name is Dr Francesca Manelli. They make it clear that if I don’t attend all sessions, and contribute positively to the discussions with Dr Manelli, then I’m out of CID.

We have a preliminary meeting. She wants me to write a report on the Benedict Finch case. I start it by writing down my objections.

My ex-husband’s name is John. His new wife is called Katrina. She’s petite. She has a figure that can make most men drink her in with their eyes. Her deep brown hair always looks shiny and freshly coloured, like hair in magazines. She wears it in a bob, and it’s always carefully styled around her pixie face, framing a pert mouth and dark eyes.

When I first met her, at a hospital function that John was hosting, months before he left us, I admired those eyes. I thought they were lively and sparky. They flashed around the room, assessing and flirting, teasing and charming. After John had gone, I thought of them as magpie’s eyes, darting and furtive, foraging for other people’s treasure to line her nest.

John walked out of our family home on Boxing Day. For Christmas he’d given me an iPad and Ben a puppy. I thought the gifts were thoughtful and generous until I watched him back his car out of the driveway on Boxing Day, neatly packed bags stowed on the back seat, while the ham went cold on the dining table and Ben cried because he didn’t understand what was happening. When I finally turned and went back into the house to start my new life as a single mother, I realised that they were guilt-gifts: things to fill the void he would leave in our lives.

They certainly occupied us in the short term, but perhaps not as John intended. The day after Boxing Day, Ben appropriated the iPad and I spent hours standing under an umbrella in the garden, shivering, shocked, while the new Cath Kidston Christmas slippers my sister had sent me got rain-soaked and muddy, and the puppy worked relentlessly to pull up a clematis when I should have been encouraging it to pee.

Katrina lured John away from us just ten months before Ben disappeared. I thought of it as a master plan that she executed: The Seduction and Theft of My Husband. I didn’t know the detail of how they kindled their affair but to me it felt like a plot from a bad medical drama. He had the real-life role of consultant paediatric surgeon; she was a newly qualified nutritionist.

I imagined them meeting at a patient’s bedside, eyes locking, hands grazing, a flirtation that turned into something more serious, until she offered herself to him unconditionally, the way you can before you have a child to consider. At that time, John was obsessed with his work. It consumed him, which makes me think that she must have done most of the running, and that the package she offered him must have amounted to a seductive proposition indeed.

I was bitter about it. My relationship with John had such solid and careful beginnings that I’d assumed it would last for ever. It simply never occurred to me that there could be a different kind of ending for us, which was, I now realise, extremely naive.

What I hadn’t realised was that John didn’t think like me, that he didn’t view any problems we might have had as normal, surmountable. For him things boiled under the surface, until he couldn’t cope with being with me any more, and his solution was just to up and leave.

When I rang my sister right after he’d gone she said, ‘Didn’t you have any idea at all?’ and her voice was strained with disbelief. ‘Are you sure you paid him enough attention?’ was her next question, as if the fault was mine and that was to be expected. I hung up the phone. My friend Laura said, ‘I thought he was a bit detached lately. I just assumed you guys were working through it.’

Laura had been my closest friend since we were at nursing college together. Like me, she hadn’t stuck with bedpans and body fluids. She’d quit and switched to journalism instead. We’d been friends for long enough that she’d witnessed the birth and growth of my relationship with John as well as its demise. She was observant and forthright. That word ‘detached’ stayed with me, because if I’m being really honest, I hadn’t noticed it. When you have a child to look after, and when you’re busy developing a new career as well, you sometimes don’t.

The separation and divorce tore me apart, I’ll admit to that. When Ben disappeared I was still in mourning for my husband. In ten months you can get used to some of the mechanics of being alone, but it takes longer for the hurt to heal.

I went round to Katrina’s flat once, after he’d moved in with her. It wasn’t difficult to find. I pressed on her door buzzer, and when she answered the door I snapped. I accused her of being a home-wrecker, and I might have said worse things. John wasn’t there, but she had friends round and, as our voices rose, the three of them appeared behind her, mouths open, aghast. They were a perfectly groomed Greek chorus of disapproval. Glasses of white wine in hand, they watched me rage. It wasn’t my finest hour, but I never quite got round to apologising.

You might wonder what I look like, if my husband could be lured away by such a pert little magpie. If you saw the press conference footage, you’ll already have an idea, though I wasn’t at my best. Obviously.

You’ll have seen that my hair looked straggly and unkempt, in spite of my sister’s efforts to tame it. It looked like witch’s hair. Would you believe me if I said that under normal circumstances it’s one of my best features? I have long, wavy dark blond hair that falls beneath my shoulders. It can be nice.

You’ll certainly have noticed my eyes. That’s the close-up shot they replay most: bloodshot, desperate, pleading eyes, red-rimmed and puffy from the tears I’d shed. You’re going to have to take my word for it that normally my eyes look pretty: they’re wide and very green and I used to think they flattered my pale, clear skin.

But what I really hope you noticed was the smattering of freckles across my nose. Did you see those? Ben inherited them from me, and it always pleased me beyond measure to see that physical trace of myself in him.

It would be wrong of me to give you the impression that the only thing I was thinking about was Katrina, when Ben disappeared. On the afternoon when it happened, Ben and I were walking the dog in the woods. It was a Sunday, and we’d driven out of Bristol and across the Clifton Suspension Bridge to reach the countryside beyond.

The bridge traversed the Avon Gorge, a great crevasse in the landscape, carved out by the muddy-banked River Avon, which Ben and I could see flooding its basin far below, brown and swollen at high-tide. The gorge was the boundary between city and countryside. The city hugged one side of it, teetering on its edges, and the woods hugged the other, trees running densely hundreds of feet down steep cliffs until they petered out beside the riverbank.

Once we’d crossed the bridge, it only took us five minutes to be parked and loose in the woodland. It was a beautiful late autumn afternoon and, as we walked, I was relishing the sounds and smells and sights it offered.

I’m a photographer. It’s a career change I made when I had Ben. I walked away from my previous incarnation as a nurse without a single regret. Photography was a joy, an absolute passion of mine, and it meant that I was always looking at the light, thinking about how I could use it in a photograph, and I can remember exactly what it was like as we walked that afternoon.

It was fairly late, so what light remained had a transient quality to it, but there was just enough brightness in the air that the colours of the leaves above and around me appeared complex and beautiful. Some of them fell as we walked. Without a whisper of protest they let go of the branches that had sustained them for months, and drifted down in front of us to settle on the woodland floor. When we began our walk, it was still a gentle afternoon, allowing the change of seasons to unfold quietly and gradually around us.

Of course Ben and the dog were oblivious to it. While I composed photographs in my mind, both of them, with misty breath and bright, wild eyes, ran and played and hid. Ben wore a red anorak and I saw it flash down the path in front of me, then weave in and out of the trees. Skittle ran by his side.

Ben threw sticks at tree trunks and he knelt close to the leaf-strewn ground to examine mushrooms that he knew not to touch. He tried to walk with his eyes closed and kept up a running commentary on how that felt. ‘I think I’m in a muddy part, Mum,’ he said, as he felt his boot get stuck, and I had to rescue it while he stood with a socked foot held precariously in the air. He picked up pine cones and showed me one that was closed up tight. ‘It’s going to rain,’ he told me. ‘Look.’

My son looked beautiful that afternoon. He was only eight years old. His sandy hair was tousled and his cheeks were pink from exertion and cold. He had blue eyes that were clear and bright as sapphires. He had pale winter skin, perfectly unblemished except for those freckles, and a smile that was my favourite sight in the world. He was about two-thirds my height, just right for me to rest an arm around his shoulders as we walked, or to hold his hand, which he was still happy for me to do from time to time, though not at school.

That afternoon Ben exuded happiness in that uncomplicated way children can. It made me feel happy too. It had been a hard ten months since John left us and although I still thought about him and Katrina more than I probably should have, I was also experiencing moments of all-right-ness, times when it felt OK that it was just Ben and I. They were rare, if I’m honest, but they were there all the same, and that afternoon in the woods was one of those moments.

By half past four, the cold was beginning to bite and I knew we should start to make our way home. Ben didn’t agree.

‘Can I have a go on the rope swing? Please?’

‘Yes,’ I said. I reckoned we could still be back at the car before it got dark.

‘Can I run ahead?’

I often think back to that moment, and before you judge me for the reply I gave him, I want to ask you a question. What do you do when you have to be both a mother and a father to your child? I was a single parent. My maternal instincts were clear: protect your child, from everything. My maternal voice was saying,
No you can’t, you’re too young, I want to take you to the swing, and I want to watch you every step of the way.
But in the absence of Ben’s dad I thought it was also my responsibility to make room in my head for another voice, a paternal one. I imagined that this voice would encourage Ben to be independent, to take risks, to discover life himself. I imagined it saying,
Of course you can! Do it!

So here’s how the conversation actually went:

‘Can I run ahead?’

‘Oh, Ben, I’m not sure.’

‘Please, Mum,’ the vowels were strung out, wheedling.

‘Do you know the way?’

‘Yes!’

‘Are you sure?’

‘We do it every time.’

He was right, we did.

‘OK, but if you don’t know where to find the track, just stop and wait for me on the main path.’

‘OK,’ and he was off, careering down the path ahead of me, Skittle racing with him.

‘Ben!’ I shouted. ‘Are you
sure
you know the way?’

‘Yes!’ he shouted with the assurance of a kid who almost certainly hasn’t bothered to listen to what you said, because they have something more exciting to be getting on with. He didn’t stop, or look back at me.

And that was the last I saw of him.

As I walked the path behind Ben I listened to a voicemail on my phone. It was from my sister. She’d left it at lunchtime.

‘Hi, it’s me. Can you give me a ring about the Christmas photo shoot for the blog? I’m at the Cotswold Food Festival and I’ve got loads and loads of ideas that I want to chat to you about, so I just want to confirm that you’re still coming up next weekend. I know we said you should come and stay at home, but I thought we could do something better at the cottage, dress it up with holly and stuff, so why don’t you come there instead. The girls will stay with Simon as they’ve all got things to do, so it’ll be just us. And by the way I’m staying there tonight so try me there if you can’t get through on my mobile. Love to Ben. Bye.’

My sister had a very successful food blog. It was called ‘Ketchup and Custard’, named after her daughters’ favourite foods. She had four girls, each one the image of their father with deep brown eyes and hair that was so dark it was nearly black and stubborn, wilful temperaments. My sister often joked that if she hadn’t given birth to them herself she’d have questioned whether they belonged to her at all. And I admit I sometimes wondered if my sister ever truly got the measure of her girls: they seemed such an impenetrable bunch, even to their mother.

Close in age – all of them older than Ben – they formed a little tribe that Ben never quite managed to penetrate, and in fact he regarded them with some wariness, mostly because they treated him a bit like a toy.

Nicky proved a match for them more often than not, though, scheduling and organising them down to the last minute, dominating them by keeping them busy. Their lives ran to such a strict routine that I sometimes wondered if these raven-haired girls wouldn’t implode once they entered the real world, beyond their mother’s control.

On her blog Nicky posted recipes that she claimed would make even the fussiest families eat healthily and eat together. When she started the blog I thought it was naff and silly but to my surprise it had taken off and she was often mentioned when newspapers published ‘Top Ten’ lists of good food or family blogs.

My sister was a brilliant cook and she combined recipes with good-humoured writing about the trials of raising a big family. It wasn’t my cup of tea – too contrived and twee by far – but it was impressive and it seemed to strike a chord with lots of women who bought into the domestic heroine ideal.

I called her back, left a message in return. ‘Yes, we’re planning to come up on Saturday morning and leave after lunch on Sunday. Do you want me to bring anything?’

I was making a point by asking that. I knew she wouldn’t want anything from me. She prided herself on being a perfect hostess.

Limiting our stay was also deliberate. When I’d thought we were going to visit Nicky at their family home I’d been determined to stay only one night, because although Nicky was the only family I had, and I felt a duty to see her and to give Ben the chance to get to know his cousins, it was never something I looked forward to especially.