Dead Scared (15 page)

‘Are you OK?’ he asked.

‘Fine, just tired. I should let you go too. Thanks for checking in. Goodnight, Sir.’

‘Lacey, be careful.’ Idiot. Shouldn’t have said that.

‘Why? What’s up?’ Alert again.

‘Just do what you’re told for once,’ he said. ‘Keep your wits about you. I’ll see you soon.’

IT’S SURPRISING HOW
a spot of medieval-style humiliation can give you an appetite. I woke early and went straight up to the Buttery, where I helped myself to scrambled eggs and bacon that were surprisingly good. As the hall filled I became increasingly aware of the sideways glances directed my way, and the muttered conversations that were just out of earshot.

Instinct told me to hold my head high and thump anyone who stepped out of line. Common sense made me keep my body language submissive, to avoid eye contact. I was Laura, nervous and needy. Laura would not fight back.

By the time I left, the room was largely full and a small queue had formed outside. I was about to leave the building when something made me stop. The crowd outside the entrance weren’t queuing, they were looking at something on the notice board. Something I was pretty certain hadn’t been there when I arrived. I walked over.

Two large pieces of white card covered most of the board. The card, in turn, was filled with photographs. Of me.

The pictures told the story. They started with the arrival of the three boys at the door of my block, then showed me being carried out and across the lawn. As I’d become increasingly drenched, the photographer had moved in closer. One shot was of little more than my breasts, all too visible beneath a soaking wet vest. Two shots from the end, I disappeared from view, ushered by Talaith and the
girls
back into my block. The last two were of the three boys, posing triumphantly for the camera. One was a pretty good close-up of their masked faces.

‘Oh, I think we can do without this crap,’ muttered a voice beside me.

I turned. The boy wasn’t much bigger than me, pale and flabby from too much time indoors. He reached up, slid his fingernails behind the drawing pins and began pulling them out. In seconds, the card and photographs fell to the floor.

‘Want me to get rid of them?’ he offered.

‘Thank you,’ I said.

He was leaving the building when I called him back. I found the picture of the three masked men and ripped it from the card. Thanking him again, I slipped the photograph in my pocket and went back to my block.

‘Thanks for seeing me so early.’

The two women made their way along the towpath. Most of the narrowboats moored along this stretch had been closed up for the winter months. Only the occasional one they passed showed signs of recent occupancy. The taller, thinner woman pushing the wheelchair looked down at the dark-haired one sitting in it. ‘You’ve never let me push you before,’ she said.

‘Not sure I have the energy,’ replied Evi in a dull voice.

‘I thought you looked tired,’ said Megan. ‘Didn’t you sleep? After they’d gone?’

‘Would you have done?’ asked Evi, without turning her head.

They slowed as they approached the lock, to allow three female students to wind their way round them on the path. When they’d moved out of earshot, Megan said, ‘
I can see you
? It’s creepy, but does it have any special significance?’

Evi nodded. ‘I think so,’ she said. ‘When I was working with that little boy last year, the thing that struck me most was his belief that the family were being watched all the time. Even before I knew he was telling the truth, it used to creep me out. Just the idea of someone always watching.’

‘Not pleasant,’ Megan agreed. ‘And the blood in the bath?’

Evi nodded again. ‘The woman I was treating, do you remember me telling you, the case I seriously screwed up? She was found in a bath full of blood.’

The women moved on, drawing level with a navy-blue narrowboat with a row of potted plants on its flat roof. An elderly man, huddled in oilskins against the cold, pulled weeds from a pot directly above the main cabin. As Evi watched, a duck landed on the bow of the boat.

‘Did John say who they think is doing it?’ asked Megan after a moment.

Me, thought Evi. They think I’m doing it. Out loud she said, ‘They have no idea. No sign of a break-in. The locks were changed recently. No fingerprints that they can find. Nothing.’

The chair’s wheels crunched over the rough path; from the river came the sound of waterfowl fighting over scraps and the soft plash, plash of a sculling boat passing by.

‘Evi,’ said Megan, ‘did you talk to Nick about increasing your medication?’

Evi nodded. ‘A couple of weeks ago,’ she admitted. ‘He put me on gabapentin and OxyContin. Amitriptyline to help me sleep. It helped for a few days but it’s just got steadily worse since.’

‘What does he say?’

A pile of blown leaves lay across the path. Some of them became caught on the chair’s wheels, altering the sound it made as it was pushed along.

‘He’s sympathetic,’ said Evi, ‘but we both know pain management is all he can do for me.’

‘Are you in much pain?’

Evi took a deep breath, her special way, since being a child, of fighting back tears. ‘It never goes,’ she said. ‘All day long, it hurts. When I wake in the night, the pain is the first thing I think about. But if I take anything stronger I’ll be like a zombie. I’m only thirty-four, Meg. How can I get through the next forty years?’

Megan stopped pushing and came round to crouch in front of Evi. She took her hands, forcing Evi to look directly at her. A couple approaching didn’t bother to hide their stares.

‘Evi, you need to take some time off,’ Megan said. ‘You’re not fit to be working.’

Megan’s face had become blurred. ‘I’m doing practically no clinical care at the moment,’ Evi said. ‘You don’t need to worry about my patients.’

She felt her hands being squeezed. ‘It’s you I’m worried about,’ Megan told her.

‘I know. But if I stop work now, I might never start again.’

Megan stood up and walked to the back of the chair.

‘I hear voices too, did I mention that?’ Evi went on, as Megan turned the chair on the spot and headed back towards St John’s. ‘Voices in the night when I’m half asleep, half awake.’

‘What do they say?’

‘They say,
Evi fall
.’

The chair slowed for a second then picked up pace again. ‘Evi fall?’ Megan repeated.

‘It’s what scares me the most. Falling. Falling is how I became like this in the first place. Then last year I had another fall that nearly killed me. It’s how I imagine my death, falling from a great height. Meg, what’s happening to me?’

The chair stopped in its tracks again and a deep sigh came from behind her. ‘Evi, I want your permission to talk to Nick about you. I can’t …’

‘Do you know what it feels like?’ said Evi, turning round in the chair to face Megan. ‘It feels as if someone’s been in my head, rummaging around there, finding all the things that I’m most scared of and using that knowledge to drive me nuts.’

No response. Just a sad, worried look on her psychiatrist’s face.

‘Except,’ said Evi, ‘the only person inside my head is me.’

THAT DAY I
became a psychology student in earnest. I went to a lecture. I sat at the very back of a large theatre, listening to a man in red corduroy trousers talking about something called the Hawthorne Effect and pretending to type up notes on my laptop. In reality, I was surfing. Dr Oliver had talked about the destructive subculture that was manifest largely on the internet; a virtual world that legitimized and even glamorized the act of suicide. That’s what I was looking for.

It didn’t take me long. Type phrases like
Suicide Websites, Online Suicide
or
Suicide Pacts
into any search engine and you’ll be awash with results. I started reading through news coverage. I wanted to know a little more about the particular incidence of suicide among people new to the university environment, especially those considered to be the world’s top academic institutions. Most of the online sites of the national papers had something to say on the subject and I read accounts of students for whom years of planning, effort and achievement had brought them only to a place where the future was more than they could face. These bright young things talked of continual over-achievement as the pressure inside slowly and relentlessly built up. They talked about blind panic over-whelming them as they got ready to go away to Oxford or Cambridge for the first time.

I’d experienced something of that myself, I realized, even though
my
presence here was largely a sham. I’d felt something of the pressure of finding myself amongst an elite.

When I moved on to cyber suicide, though, the net widened way beyond academia. Anyone computer literate, it seemed, could find themselves drawn in.

A particularly disturbing case was that of the 42-year-old from Shropshire who’d hanged himself in front of a webcam, watched by dozens of cyber pals, after being goaded in a so-called ‘insult’ chat room. ‘
Fucking do it. Get with it
,’ one viewer was reported to have yelled down his microphone as the father of two slipped a noose over his neck and slowly choked to death.

Families of those who died had been scathing about the sites. ‘They tell them how to do it,’ said one grieving mother. ‘They tell them how many pills to take, how putting a plastic bag over your head will make the pills work faster. And they give them advice on trying to hide it from their families. They tell them to keep their room tidy, to keep washing their hair, to keep up the front. They help them maintain the façade.’

When I’d gone through the news coverage, I started on the websites themselves, moving from one to the next. There was something relentless about the pain I found that morning. ‘I feel so alone,’ said a woman on one site. ‘Is there nobody out there?’ ‘I don’t think I can go on much longer,’ said another. ‘I dream constantly about the failures of my life, I wake up drenched and stinking of sweat. Is there nowhere I can find peace?’

I learned of the existence of cults who believe the world is overpopulated, that suicide is a responsible and selfless act, and offer advice on the most effective ways of taking one’s own life. They cite the cruelty and distress of botched methods as their justification.

When I didn’t think it could get much worse, I discovered the trolls.

Wherever there is human misery, it seems to me, there are those who will feed on it. These so-called trolls are gatecrashers who access suicide sites to join and manipulate the online discussions for their own entertainment. Put bluntly, they’re getting off on other people’s despair. There were more cases than I wanted to think
about
of trolls actively goading people into acts of self-destruction, all the while keeping up a caring and helpful façade.

I sat back in my chair too suddenly and caught the lecturer’s eye. Not good. I looked down quickly. A boy in the same row as me glanced my way with what looked like a smirk on his face. He’d probably been in the crowd last night at my initiation ceremony. That made me remember the photograph of the three boys in my pocket. I wanted to know who those bozos were. Student prank or not, it went totally against every bone in my copper’s body that someone could do that to me and get away with it. Somehow, though, I didn’t think Joesbury was going to be too helpful with a personal vendetta. On this one I was on my own.