Nearest Thing to Crazy (34 page)

‘And you blame me, make me take the blame for falling over the edge . . .’ My voice rose, until I was screaming at him: ‘YOU FUCKING PUSHED ME, DANIEL BURTON . . . YOU FUCKING PUSHED ME . . .!’

‘I’ve stayed with you. I stayed with you through all of that. Don’t you think other men might have left you . . . might have had enough?’

‘Well maybe you should ask yourself why you haven’t left me. Maybe my inadequacies make you feel better, I don’t know. Maybe you use my insecurities to cover up your own. It’s all too fucking complicated for me. All I know, Dan, is that I’ve always had to feel grateful to you, grateful to you for staying with me, grateful to you for bearing to be with me – me . . . this fruitcake . . . this utter nutcase. This person – God am I really a person? – this person that you can manipulate and control with the smallest click of your fingers. Well now you’ve got an accomplice, and it’s all so perfect, isn’t it? You can both manipulate me as much as you like, it seems, and there isn’t a damned thing I can do about it.’

‘You’re crazy!’ he said. He picked up the car keys and grabbed his coat.

‘What about her book, then? What about her fucking book?’

‘There is no book, Cass. It doesn’t exist.’ He slammed the front door behind him. I was left standing alone in the kitchen. I was panting. I heard the car engine start and then drive away.

I picked up his laptop and took it into his study and set it on his desk. I wasn’t really very good at computers, but I knew the basics. I knew how to do the internet, use Google; and I also knew how to activate ‘in private browsing’. As I watched the screen come alive, and waited for all the files and gizmos to open up, I wondered why I hadn’t thought of doing this before.

The first thing I did was to type Eleanor Black into the search window. I waited while the list of entries came up,
something in the region of seven million, five hundred thousand entries. But I was only interested in page one and
any that linked up with Amazon. There were Eleanor Blacks on Facebook, LinkedIn, and all sorts of other Eleanor Blacks,
but I couldn’t see any that appeared to have a chain of books attached to them. I flicked onto page two of the
search result. None there either. Strange. I tried again, this time with ‘Ellie Black’, but same thing – lots
of connections to black clothes but none to books. I didn’t remember her mentioning that this was her first novel.
But then did I remember her mentioning that it wasn’t? I remembered, all too clearly, her saying how she liked to
get into the middle of the action, sort of live her books. She was certainly doing that. But had she really not had anything published? Or was it the first time she was writing under her own name? Maybe there was some small shred of truth in all the lies she had spun to me. I remembered on her manuscript it had definitely said Eleanor Black below the title . . . what was it?
Gaslight.
Why gaslight? I know we lived in a country backwater, but we’d had electricity for quite a few years now. Idly, I tapped the word ‘gaslight’ into the search window. The first result was a movie title from 1944. And underneath that, good old Wikipedia’s ‘Gaslighting’. Just one click and it all became clear. At last, I began to understand the game she was playing.

‘
Gaslighting
is a form of
psychological abuse
in which false information is presented with the intent of making a victim doubt his or her own
memory
and
perception
. It may simply be the
denial
by an abuser that previous abusive incidents ever occurred, or it could be the staging of bizarre events by the abuser with the intention of
disorienting
the victim.’
¹

There was no doubt. No reason to doubt myself anymore. I had been right all the time and there was the evidence. She was deliberately setting me up to make it look like I’d trashed her house. She wanted everyone to think I was insane and she was succeeding.

I had no idea where Dan spent the night. I only knew that I was awake long before the alarm went off at 7.30 a.m. and that his side of the bed was untouched. I went for a shower and dressed quickly. Then I phoned her.

‘Hello . . .’

‘It’s me, Cassandra.’

‘Yes.’

‘I know what you’re trying to do. I know about gaslighting. You asked me to go round to your house, to get that telephone number for you to set me up, didn’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about. But what I do know is that you rang me from my house and called me a fucking bitch, said something about a book I’ve supposedly been writing. Cassandra . . . I feel really sorry for you, honestly. But you’re sick and it’s time you stopped doing things to upset me. You can’t get away with it, you know, you’re going to be in real trouble. And now this latest . . . it’s all too much and I want you to stop it.’

‘What latest?’

‘As if you need to ask. My tyres, of course. Each one, slashed. I’m sorry Cass, I don’t want to involve the police because I know you’re ill, but they’re going to find out it’s you. I mean, you must realize, your fingerprints will be all over my house.’

‘You fucking bitch!’ I shrieked down the phone. Dan was standing in the doorway. I hadn’t heard him come in. He looked rough; his face white, his jaw iron-grey.

I put the phone down. ‘That’s what was written on her mirror,’ he said.
‘You fucking bitch.’

An image came unbidden, a cornered fox, a pack of baying hounds, lips snarling and jowls slavering, baring razor-sharp teeth, circling and watching in an ecstasy of anticipation, sensing with a primeval certainly that the moment was upon us. I could almost feel the remnants of my resistance seeping like lifeblood into the floor beneath me.

‘How could you, Cass? Whatever possessed you? This has got to stop. I don’t think you realize just how much trouble you’re going to be in if you carry on this campaign of . . . of . . . God, I don’t even know what to call it.’ He ran his fingers through his hair in a gesture of exasperation that I knew all too well. ‘What the hell did you think you were doing?’

‘I didn’t do it. Listen, I haven’t been anywhere near her house. I’ve been here all night. If only you’d been here with me you’d have known that. Where were you?’

‘I slept in the car for most of the night and then I went round to see Ellie, to see if she was okay. And that’s when I saw what you’d done to her car.’

‘Dan! I didn’t do it.’

‘Then why did I find a knife by her car? A knife just like one of ours.’

‘It can’t be ours. I’ll prove it. I’ll get it.’ And then I remembered . . . the missing knife. I started to tremble and I could feel my lungs constricting, struggling for air. I had to think. I spoke quickly, desperately. ‘One went missing. I couldn’t find it when I was making the chutney. It had gone, Dan. She must have taken it.’

‘Oh Cass. You’re sick. This isn’t normal behaviour, this is madness. All of it. I just don’t know what to do, how to handle you.’

‘No, Dan. It’s not true. I’m not sick. You have to believe me. I know what she’s doing.’

‘No more, Cass. He just stared at me, shaking his head slowly. ‘I’ve got to get ready for the village hall. I’ve got stuff I need to do. I don’t want to leave you alone. I’m worried about what you might do next. Will you be okay? Can I trust you not to do anything silly?’

‘I haven’t done anything,’ I said. ‘I just wish you would believe me.’ Silent tears were dripping onto my cheeks, sliding down to my mouth. I could taste the salt.

‘If only I could, Cass.’ And then I was alone once more.

Because I simply didn’t know what else to do, I put on my boots and my jacket and went outside into the garden. I almost felt calm, or was it just numb? Perhaps it was a belief that things couldn’t possibly get any worse and so my emotions had just shut down. I didn’t seem able to feel anything at all, apart from a sense of grim defeat. Even the thoughts of confronting Laura seemed to have dulled from sheer blind panic to a sense of unavoidable destiny. I had lost her. I hadn’t realized it, but I’d lost her nearly three years ago. Everything since then had been a lie between us. She had kept her secret from me since the time my mother had told her; and I had kept a secret from her since the day she was born. I suppose you could say there was a kind of natural justice at play. Not only would she know I was a liar, but she would now believe that I was some kind of insane stalker. Funny, as my mother would have said, you never know what the day will bring.

It was a beautiful day. The sort of perfect day that makes it hard to believe that bad things can happen. Like 9/11. I remember people remarking that all of that murderous devastation unfolded on a perfect day, against that cloudless, infinite blue backdrop pierced by two identical towers polished silver by the sun’s brilliance.

It was the kind of day that would normally have promised the scent of wood smoke from crackling logs. There, in the old lean-to, was our store neatly stacked and graded by Dan, with big fat logs at the bottom and little ones at the top. Their many shades of gold and amber harmonized with the dead and dying leaves that crunched and squelched beneath my boots. It was perfect early October weather, clear and sunny. The air had that slightly musty bonfire-ish taint, that damp, mildewy, hibernating essence of autumn, the season of poetic melancholy, of essential death and decomposition before a new cycle of life. A skein of Canada geese flew high overhead, honking their bossy commentary to one another. Oh, to be that free. And what was I to them? A tiny little speck of insignificance, whose imprint, whose legacy upon the earth would be no more than that of the withering oak leaf in my hand.

It had been a very long time since I’d had any suicidal thoughts. But now, engulfed by this torture – no nightmare, but reality – I felt the first, treacherous little demon come raking around the edge of my mind. Is it worth it? it said. Wouldn’t it be so much better . . . ? I shook my head firmly and put my hands over my ears and said aloud, ‘No . . . no . . . please . . . not again . . .’ I couldn’t let it happen again. I was better now, over it. I was
me
. Cassandra. I knew me. I had to hold on to that belief – that I really did know me. Normal. And sane. Most of all, sane. If I took the so-called easy way out – though there was nothing easy, to my mind, about taking your own life – I’d just confirm that I really was some crazy woman, crazy enough to leave her family without answers, without understanding. How could I do to my family what my own father had done to me? No, I still had love and compassion inside of me, even if I’d forfeited Laura’s. I was not that old Cassandra. Without a shadow of a doubt, I truly believed that.

I was done with all that. I had blocked it out, as though it had all happened to another person, somebody I barely knew; like an anecdote I’d once heard related about an acquaintance. They say that suicide’s a heritable trait, apparently. If that was supposed to mean like father, like daughter, it wasn’t going to be me. Not this me. I was sane. Ellie was trying to drive me mad – maybe she even wanted to drive me to suicide – but I was sane. I was never going back to the mental hospital. Never. I had such fond memories of the place. I remember that from the outside it looked like a smart country hotel, a cruel kind of facade, perhaps, to assuage the consciences of those abandoning their loved ones. You left me behind, Dan. You abandoned me. You made me say goodbye to Laura. My arms ached from the moment I left her until the moment I was allowed home again. I so wanted you to bring her to see me. I thought maybe just once, for an hour, maybe one Sunday afternoon I’d look up and see you both there. But you’d decided on the tough love regime. But I wasn’t there against my will, you said. I was told that by you, by the nurses, and by the professionals.

The pills were the highlight of the day because they provided some degree of numbness, dulling the edge of the pain in the same way that a hard rock can scrape the edge off a sharp blade.

People think that there is such a thing as a nervous breakdown. But I know there isn’t, not as such. It’s not so much a breakdown as a gradual erosion of all the little bits and pieces of yourself; little bits and pieces of your soul that shrivel through want of nourishment. You, Dan, didn’t need me. Laura . . . none of you needed me anymore. And part of the problem was that I’d never really been convinced that you had ever needed me.