Oh Dear Silvia (21 page)

Silvia found herself confessing to Cat back then, when she was just a patient.

‘Ed and the kids, they’re great and everything, but they’re just so … cripplingly … normal. I can’t help it Cat, I find the day-to-day stuff of family life completely suffocating. I live in a coffin of it, I die a bit each day in it. I know it sounds awful, I should be grateful really, but it’s all so supremely predictable.
Where’s the excitement? I just can’t fake being interested in Pokémon or Postman Pat any more … Oh God.’

So, when Cat came along and started to pay lots of attention to the flattery-starved Silvia, she caved in easily.

She also liked the fact that in her situation with Cat, she held the power because she was the loved one. Or so she thought. That power would bounce wildly around inside the relationship like a cricket ball that’s been tampered with. It depended entirely on Cat’s needs, and Cat’s moods. And. Over and above all of the extreme outer edges of Cat’s behaviour was the other key, deadly element. Cat was, and still is, in the grip of a demanding menace. Unfortunately, Cat O’Brien is the humble servant of a greedy mistress. Cocaine. And there couldn’t be a less suitable person for the post.

Cat has spent the morning turning Silvia’s flat upside down, looking for the box she keeps under the bed with her supply in. She is fuming that it is missing, and because it is missing, Cat is unravelling, experiencing a shaky sniffy flu. She is presently in the throes of a paranoia so pronounced, she could believe that the comatose Silvia has somehow purposely hidden her stash, as indeed she has promised to many times before. Cat’s tenuous link to any inner calm is under severe pressure.

She doesn’t like to admit to the scale of this dependency. She can’t; she is a successful GP, a respected upright member of society, it would be unthinkable for her to allow herself to
know just how much she wants that drug. As far as she is concerned, it’s a bit of fun at the weekends, a buzz, a lark. It doesn’t interfere with her work in any way whatsoever. She is in charge of it, she is the boss, and it’s all harmless. In fact, it’s a bit exotic if anything. A little bit cool. Like she believes other people’s lives might be, that aren’t hers.

Her life is muddled and complicated. She has to spend a lot of time suppressing thoughts of what happened with Philip. How she sedated him with diazepam crushed up in his porridge, so easy to mask the taste with maple syrup and hot milk. How she watched him gradually get drowsy and limp. How she injected him with an alarming amount of diamorphine hydrochloride. Heroin. One whole gram. A drug she was easily able to obtain, since she is the one at the surgery in charge of returning unused drugs, and this was the pain relief quota for a patient with terminal bowel cancer who had died a month ago. His family handed her the surplus drugs, for her to dispose of safely. Cat would order in, and Cat would do the returns, so in effect she could control how much diamorphine she could cream off.

She’d never done such a thing before, and she didn’t intend to ever again, but at the particular moment she took it, she had no conscience whatsoever. In fact, quite the opposite. She was choosing a method of death for Philip which was relatively painless. Ever the conscientious medic, she didn’t elect to torture him with a slow, sentient death. That would be morally
corrupt. She gave him, instead, a woozy slide into unconsciousness and a quick tip off the edge of life. Merciful, clean and neat. Somewhere in Cat’s perverse field of logic, that was the noble and correct thing to do. Despite his unkind treatment of her and all his horrific threats.

The only, tiny moment of hesitation she experienced was when she was drawing up the syringe. Her natural medical instinct to get doses correct kicked in for a nanosecond until she remembered with a jolt that, on this occasion, she wasn’t looking to save life or relieve pain. She was killing. It was a matter of switching into her cold, robotic other self to do it.

Once done, she sat back and watched him. He jerked and spasmed a couple of times as his body acknowledged the murderer coursing through his veins. He looked at her occasionally with his trancey eyes, although she felt sure he wasn’t seeing her clearly. She was amazed at how calm she was. It wasn’t hard to watch him die. She felt detached from it all. Quite numb. If Cat had to analyse her own pathology at this crucial moment, she would certainly tag it as psychotic. But Cat didn’t allow herself to investigate it. She is supremely skilled at sidestepping anything that will force her to confront her terrifying, malevolent self. She doesn’t visit that voluntarily.

When, eventually, Philip was dead, Cat sat for another whole hour looking at him. She wanted to be absolutely sure he was gone, and there was something about sitting quietly like this, together, that felt oddly respectful, as if she was acknowledging
his passing with a reverent grace. The way you should when someone dies. Cat saw no reason to disrespect him in this very personal moment.

Perhaps it also helped to make her feel polite. After all, it would be difficult to equate ‘polite’ with ‘cold-blooded killer’, wouldn’t it? Murderers are evil bad people who belong in prison so that the rest of us can feel safe. Cat isn’t that. She is an upstanding contributing member of society, valued and respected by her community. And polite. Very polite. She’s not a murderer. Like murderers are. Most certainly not. She detaches herself from that label. Gives it no power whatsoever.

So, on that dreadful difficult day, the non-murderer rolled her warm dead husband into a big old tent bag, zipped it up, fastened the clips on the sides and lugged it into the back of her estate car parked in their garage, and drove over to Silvia’s house where she sat at the family kitchen table and drank Chablis with Silvia and Ed.

Eventually, when Ed went off to bed and left the two women alone, Cat took a deep breath and told Silvia what she had done. Silvia was already a little bit drunk, and to begin with, she just couldn’t believe it. She even laughed.

‘You’re joking Cat. Stop it. I know you’re joking. Please say it’s a big fat joke. Darling. Come on. Seriously. Please. Cat. Please.’

Cat watched Silvia sober up very quickly until they were both speaking in rushed hushed tones the way you do when
something is horribly true, and shockingly urgent. The way you do when a murder has just happened …

Silvia was confronted with a fait accompli.

It was done. Cat had killed Philip. Philip’s body was in the boot of Cat’s car.

Silvia felt sick. Sick that it had happened, that Cat had made it happen, that Cat had made it happen in such a premeditated way, and that Cat’s eyes were so ablaze with it all as she was recounting it to Silvia. Whilst Silvia listened to the telling, which was chillingly calm, except for that small giveaway fire in Cat’s eyes, Silvia’s stomach lurched. Then her head became uncomfortably tight on her skull, then she started to taste acid in her throat. It was the clunking realization that she was about to make a colossal life-changing decision.

If she kept Cat’s awful secret at this point, she would be leaping into the dangerous darkness where Cat lives, along with her. There would be no return from there. She would be inextricably part of it. Actually, she already was. Five minutes before, Silvia had been utterly innocent, she had no knowledge of this horror, and now, five minutes later, she is in it with Cat. She is colluding by even hearing it all. It’s all so very weird and menacing and dreadful and yet she is drawn. She wants to be, longs to be complicit.

Silvia can feel the sinister change in light on her soul as she moves further into the shadow of death. In an unbelievable
moment from which she would never recover, she has a life-altering lapse of judgement.

She doesn’t waver.

She doesn’t hesitate.

Silvia says, ‘Shh now. Listen. This is what we do …’

We. They are ‘we’.

And that’s it.

In a careless trice, Silvia betrays everyone else but Cat. She makes the most foolish decision of her lifetime, and consequently, she loses her family. In that tipping second, the splitting starts, because that’s when Silvia jumps into a deep murky pool where she knows her children can NEVER be permitted to swim. She makes the decision, without fully knowing it then, that she must separate from them. To save them. Never ever must her family be embroiled in this filthy fucked-up mess.

On top of Cat’s unhinged, volatile state of mind which has resulted in this deadly mire, there is also the glaring nightmare of her addiction. Glaring because that’s what Silvia also saw in her eyes that night. The whole sorry mess had happened whilst Cat was buzzing, high as a kite and as confident as a queen.

Silvia doesn’t like anything about the drug. She was shocked when she first saw Cat sniff a couple of lines. She felt as if she was watching a cheap Hollywood film. This didn’t happen in
her life. She had eaten some cannabis cake in Amsterdam with Ed once, managed to get run over by a cyclist, followed by a huge dose of explosive diarrhoea the next morning, so pretty much decided not to repeat the experience. That’s how racy Silvia’s life had been, drug-wise. Of course, Cat didn’t display her relationship with cocaine for some time. She kept it furtive, where it belonged. In toilets, in cars, in carefully locked rooms, and she managed to keep the full knowledge of her ever-increasing love affair with it from even herself.

In the same way that Cat could disconnect from any difficult or awkward experiences in her life, she was and is alarmingly able to unplug from reality when she chooses. This trait leaves Cat unfixed very often. Adrift. Available to danger. And Silvia didn’t want THAT available to her kids.

She and Cat have argued many times about it. Silvia has pleaded with Cat to give it up. Cat has even promised to, in more emotional moments. She claims, when she is high, that she can kick it. When she is the inevitable depressed opposite a day later, she is gripped by her need and can’t envisage her life without it to bolster her. The toxic mix of shame, guilt and desire is Cat’s familiar luggage. Nothing Silvia feels or says will change it. Cat even loves how slim she gets to stay as long as coke is her chum, forever suppressing her appetite and quickening her heartbeat. Always boosting her confidence and giving her a lovely, reliable, immediate burst of euphoria.

Cat is ultimately only ever going to be interested in Cat, first
and foremost, and so her faithful Colombian compadre is the perfect complement to her bruised ego. Her arse-licking chum. Sniff. Charlie. Blow. White. Coke. She chooses to call it ‘Mr Charlie’, it enables her to minimize her habit, and regard it as harmless and colloquial. Not at all dirty or bad. Cat wouldn’t want to be regarded as a hypocrite. Cocaine isn’t a bad habit in the same way that smoking is. Smoking is what Silvia does, and it’s awful. Cocaine is what Cat does, and it’s fun.

So, on the night of Philip’s death, when Silvia said, ‘This is what we do,’ Cat listened. She listened for two reasons. Firstly, Silvia would indeed know what to do, and secondly, Silvia said ‘we’ and Cat knew then that they would be inextricably linked from then on, and that is what she has always wanted.

Silvia knew where they could drive to, very close by, they took spades and they dug and dug. It was back-breaking. It took ages. Not a shallow grave, but a fairly deep one. The hole wasn’t quite long enough when the sun started to come up, so they doubled Philip’s body over and pushed it in. He was buried as he was born, in the foetal position. The two women worked like navvies and filled it in, covered it over and stood panting and sweating on top of him, treading in the soil among this dense thicket of trees as the dawn chorus started up.

Cat drove Silvia home. They sat in silence in Silvia’s street, side by side, thinking about the strange night. They clasped each other and hurriedly kissed before Silvia scuttled into her
home, stripped off her clothes which she stuffed into a black bin liner, showered and slipped into bed alongside the deeply deeply asleep trusty old Ed. Silvia lay still, hearing his snuffles and knowing that this marriage was now over. Ed and the kids must not be anywhere near the ugly chaos. Lying there in the dark, frantically thinking, thinking, she was struck by the lightning realization that she would, at this moment, give anything to turn back time and re-establish herself in the bosom of her boring, predictable family. Her wonderfully normal husband and kids.

What on earth had she done? She could physically feel the dread spreading in her body like poison.

When they all woke up, it would be new and different. She would have to protect them.

By rejecting them.

It was going to be appalling.

In Suite 5, Cat is fraught and fidgeting. Her comedown is dismal. She is extra irritated by the fact that, because she is a GP, she travels some distance to buy her drug, to be sure she isn’t recognized. She had already spent a great deal of money, and travelled a long way, all for nothing because she can’t find the bloody box. Which she clearly remembers leaving under the bloody bed. Bloody hell.

‘For God’s sake, Sil. I mean, it’s not that I can’t cope without Mr Charlie, a’course I can, just not at the moment with every
one asking me all this useless bloody stuff. Endless questions. About Philip. About you. It helps me to think straight. Feck’s sake – do they really think I wanted you like this? I didn’t. I so definitely didn’t. You … just … pissed me off, Sil. You know you did. Sometimes you do that. Especially when you’re drunk. Why do you do that? I’ve told you not to. I’ve told you not to smoke, and you still do. I’ve told you not to constantly rehash old unimportant stuff. You know it’s not good … for me … to do that. And you persisted. You knew what you were doin’. You know I hate it if you are upset. I hate cryin’. It’s so … bloody hideous. You knew you were pushin’ me, so you did …’

Cat is sweating now, and thumping her left fist into the palm of her right hand as her irritability moves up a notch. The beginnings of the red mist are starting to descend.

‘If they all knew what you’re like, honestly, they would see … you know how to wind me up, sure you do. You’re so … bloody … disappointin’, Silvia.’