Free Book Excerpts

A contemporary story of love stretched to its limits by divorce, drug abuse, and bereavement.  As divorced parents Claire and Mark are forced together to solve the mystery of their daughter’s death, they find forgiveness and peace of mind.

Excerpt

Chapter One

A COPY OF the Pathology Report – promised, and ambivalently awaited – has arrived in my absence. For some reason that upsets me, though I can’t think why. What possible difference can it make? By its very nature a Post Mortem is posthumous. And death brings an end to influence and change. Doesn’t it?
I’ve dragged myself round the usual early morning circuit – beside the vapid, dust-strewn waters of the canal basin, through St Kit’s to the Thames footpath and the muted early summer sounds of the river, under Tower Bridge and back home again – driven by a half remembered sense of the comfort to be derived from routine, familiarity, activity. That’s how it’s been for the past ten days: the routine of being; of breathing – in and out; of forcing a response from reflex swallowing muscles that appear to have lost spontaneity; of sipping, without revulsion, the scalding sweetened liquids with which I’ve been plied; of seeing, without registering, familiar faces etched with unfamiliar expressions – pity? sorrow? concern?
Activity has come easier: planning a funeral – an event that can have no date until the body is released; helping in preliminary enquiries with the police; learning that an Inquest has been opened and adjourned. Keeping on. Keeping going. Feeling in control of a spiralling situation. Or at least kidding myself that I am. The role of grieving mother might not be an everyday occurrence, but it’s one I’ve rehearsed many times in my mind.
The package, protruding from the cubby hole for Flat 7, is visible the moment I let myself in through the front security door. My stomach heaves. A large brown envelope – on top of the customary wad of junk mail, flyers, and business letters addressed to Mr Richard Lombard – the handwritten scrawl is instantly recognisable as Mark’s. Claire Lombard, it reads. No title, then! No Mrs, or even a despised Ms. As if, even after all these years and the precedent of his own remarriage, Mark is indicating his disdain of mine to Richard.
A prickle of frustration seeds itself in my mind: the faint flowering of remembrance of myriad, similar, small humiliations planted, bindweed-like and pervasive, in the soil of my marriage to Mark, which, over a fourteen, fifteen year period, all-but choked me of meaningful life. I give myself a mental shake to loosen its hold.
The small cramped hallway in which I’m standing is communal to the four flats in this section of the low-rise building. Unwilling to be engaged in small talk by any of my neighbours, I pick up the package and the remainder of the post and make my way upstairs to my own front door. The apartment, purchased by the pooling of resources when Richard and I married, is on two levels: hall, dining room, kitchen, bathroom and master bedroom on the first floor; and under the eaves a large lounge, small study-cum-second bedroom and adjoining toilet and shower.
With no high rise building in the immediate vicinity, the entire living area is filled with a wonderful sense of airiness and light which, when we were property-hunting, immediately appealed to my need of space and tranquillity. Both are rare commodities in the city, and I’ve enhanced the illusion of outdoors-come-in, through a combination of window boxes, indoor plants, and a décor of winter white with highlights of sharp limey greens and citrus yellow. Since privacy is not an issue, calico curtains suffice at the windows, softening the contours with their billowing folds.
The furnishings are now faded and worn, but in all the nine years that we’ve lived here, the different nuances of sunlight by day and lamp light by night have never failed to surprise and delight me. Today, everything jars!
Once inside, I drop the mail on the dining table and, as if it has no significance, turn my back on it and walk through to the galley kitchen. My chest feels tight, but I tell myself that this is due to my run. When the churning in my belly has receded and I can breathe more easily, I take the water-filter jug from the fridge and fill a tumbler from the draining board. Turning to face the dining room door and table beyond, I lift the glass to my eye, study the distorted view, then lean back against the counter top and drink deeply.
When I’ve finished, have washed and dried the glass and replaced it in the cupboard, I immerse myself in the small daily activities of domesticity: sweeping little piles of crumbs into my hands from around the toaster and breakfast table, to-ing and fro-ing between kitchen and dining room, giving a wide berth to the mail in general and the brown envelope in particular.
Oh hell! This is absurd. I am dismayed by my lack of courage, but can’t help myself. I wish the package had not been delivered; wish I’d never agreed to Mark’s suggestion that he send me a copy; wish that the circumstances were different, that Katya’s death had not occurred, that I’d not been thrust into this nightmare.
The telephone rings. It’s Richard: his customary call home to catch up on the morning’s news.
‘It’s arrived.’ My voice is strident. ‘The Pathology Report from Mark.’
‘What does it say?’
Pulling out a chair at the dining room table, I seat myself, lacing the telephone flex through my fingers.
‘I haven’t opened it.’
‘Are you going to?’
‘I don’t know if I want to.’
There’s a pause. I picture Richard standing in a telephone booth – perhaps in some restaurant or hotel – his brow furrowed as he thinks through the implications.
‘I suppose it’ll be full of medical details,’ he says, at last. ‘Could be upsetting. Perhaps you’d better leave it until I’m home? We could look at it together, if you like. I’ll try and get back early.’
I’m grateful – pathetically grateful – for his insight, and grasp at his suggestion. For some moments after I’ve put the phone back on its cradle, I continue to sit at the table. My breathing is fast and shallow. Emotion knots my throat. Then my fury explodes into the silence of the empty flat.
‘Why did you have to die?’ I shout.
Instantly, I’m enveloped with hot guilt and confusion. I know from a friend who offers bereavement counselling that anger is a normal reaction to loss. Anger against the deceased for letting go of life; for causing pain to those they’ve left behind. Anger against God, all-powerful and all-seeing, for permitting – or failing to stop – the events that have led to this end. Anger against yourself for your lack of foresight; your stupid, helpless, useless futility. I understand the concept! I’ve simply never considered that I might succumb.
Action is called for: a shower. I cross the hall to the bedroom, find clean knickers and bra, and pause in front of the mirror to peel off my joggers and drop them into the dirty laundry basket. The woman who looks back at me with fading hair and red-rimmed brown eyes seems to be perceptibly nearer the half century that will soon be upon her, than the mid-forties that I actually inhabit. With a grimace I make my way back across the hall to the cloakroom shower.
The scented lather with which I begin to soap myself eases the ache of well-exercised muscles, the gush of water rinsing away the furrows of a sleepless and over-active mind. For a moment, I’m deluded into thinking everything is normal. But suddenly, the protective elements of numbness and the passage of time are sluiced away. Ten-day old memories cascade through my brain.

IT’S JUNE. EARLY Saturday morning. Richard’s and my ninth wedding anniversary – and there he is applying the last coat of paint to the kitchen ceiling!
‘Half an hour,’ he calls. ‘Promise! Quick shower and we’ll be off. Get your glad rags on. We’re going to be tourists for the day, then up to the West End for a show.’
‘Yeah, yeah!’ I retort, plumping up pillows and smoothing the duvet on the bed. ‘Half an hour, my foot. When have I ever known you to manage a shower in half an hour?’
Had the day really begun so benignly filled with affection and expectation? The recollection brings with it a renewed stab of pain that hits me just below the ribs.
The phone begins to ring as I am about to leave the bedroom. What if it hadn’t rung until after we’d left home for the pleasures of our day? What if we’d been on the river with my bridesmaids of nine years earlier, Richard’s best man, and their families? Or in Piccadilly, alone at the theatre? But it didn’t happen like that. I pick up the receiver, stand at the bedroom window, look down at the once functional – now purely decorative – docks below, and listen to a voice which, though clearly that of one of the girls, is not immediately identifiable as to which.
‘Mum?’
‘Katya? What’s wrong?’
The assumption that it’s my younger daughter is a natural response to the tension that crackles down the line. A less frequent caller than her sister, Rosie, Katya rings only in extremis, the tremor in her voice indicating that she’s in need of money, refuge or sympathy – sometimes all three in equal measure – which need she will later, obstinately and independently, refute. Aged twenty-five, Katya has recently split with her partner, the father of her baby daughter, Zara. She has already phoned home several times that week.
‘Katya?’ I repeat.
The voice at the other end of the phone is high-pitched and rasped with the resonance of shock.
‘It’s Rosie. Mum, is Richard with you?’
I turn from the window.
‘What’s the matter, darling? It’s not Steve again?’
A year older than Katya, Rosie lives in the West Country, Molvelly Abbey, an inland hamlet half an hour from Katya’s coastal home in Compass Quay. Steve, Rosie’s husband for the past seven years, and father to three of my four grandchildren, has recently had surgery for an inflamed bursa.
‘It’s not Steve,’ Rosie responds breathlessly. ‘It’s Kat. Is Richard there?’
I sink onto the bed, oblivious of the crumpled duvet I’ve smoothed only moments earlier. The persistent enquiry for Richard’s whereabouts begins to seep into my thinking. My heart pounds.
Did I know then? Is it true, as I’ve heard said, that some sixth sense applies; some inner antennae between a mother and child that, from conception through birth and life, goes on transmitting and receiving without thought or action on the part of either, without being perceptible? Until it’s broken. When the imperceptible clamours for attention; transmission ceases; a persistent crackle and hiss intone inside: an incessant, cacophonous white noise. And you know. You just know!
But I didn’t know. That’s the point. After all these years, this scene, this death scene, so long imagined, so fervently rehearsing itself in my mind, has been put to death. R.I.P. I’ve allowed myself hope, and hope has become surety, surety, peace. How could I know? What inner sense could have detected that the peace was about to be shattered?
‘Katya?’ I echo, stupidly, down the phone line. ‘What’s happened Rosie? Have the two of you had a row?’

ROSIE BACKED THE Range Rover out of the yard. Behind her stood the stone cottage that had been her home for the last seven years. To one side, beyond the thick Leylandii hedge, lay the adjoining Garden Centre and Nursery – heavily mortgaged to the bank – from which she and Steve scraped a living. She tooted her horn to let him know she was off.
‘You haven’t forgotten that I have another doctor’s appointment this morning, have you?’ she’d asked him, earlier, before breakfast.
Tall, lean, and tanned, he’d paused in the act of lathering his face prior to shaving, and eyed her, quizzically, in the mirror.
‘You alright with that?’ he asked.
Her eyes flicked up and over him, as a sudden recognition filled her – warm and wholly unexpected – that here, in Steve, was the security she’d craved as a child.
Severe stomach cramps in the months following Erin’s birth – her longed-for and cherished daughter – had prompted the original appointment ten days earlier. But with Steve worried about an outbreak of black spot among the hybrid roses, and the twins acting up as only four year old boys could, she’d almost convinced herself that the pain didn’t warrant the doctor’s attention; that it would right itself, soon enough; that she should cancel the consultation.
‘Go!’ Steve had urged her. ‘Marjorie can take the twins on a tour of the new aquatics, while I organise a spraying programme of the roses.’
Marjorie was one of the staff in the tiny café area, which abutted the conservatory that housed the potted house-plant section. A grandmotherly woman, whose rich dialect delighted the boys, she was more friend than employee. It was she who, as the day evolved, had taken them home with her and kept them over the weekend so that Rosie could concentrate on other things.
Other things had begun with Rosie’s arrival that Saturday morning at the surgery in Compass Quay.
‘Rosie Timbline for Dr Wharton,’ she’d announced, presenting herself at the counter.
The Receptionist, Pauline, looked up from her desk. But instead of checking off the appointment in the diary before her, to Rosie’s acute embarrassment, she came round the counter to her side.
‘You won’t be seeing Dr Wharton this morning,’ she said, her voice hushed and slightly nasal. ‘Dr Morris wants a word with you. He’s running rather late so he’s asked me to take you into the Clinic to wait.’
Conscious of the curious stares of other patients, Rosie’s cheeks flushed and her mouth felt dry. She seemed to have been back and forth to the surgery no end of times in the last few years. If it wasn’t a pregnancy or a miscarriage, it was some minor ailment or other; either her own or those of the children. Was this to be a reprimand for wasting surgery time? An old childhood guilt that could never quite be assuaged, an irrational fear of having failed the expectations of others, gnawed at her insides.
She allowed herself to be steered away from the doctors’ surgeries towards the newly-built annexe, which housed the Clinic.
‘Will the doctor be long?’ she asked, indicating the sleeping baby. ‘It’s such a palaver getting out and back home in time for feeds these days.’
Pauline showed her empathy in a half-smile half-grimace, pushed open the double doors of the annexe and switched on the lights.
‘Sorry. Shouldn’t be too long now. He particularly wants to see you.’
Rosie’s heart missed a beat. Something must be afoot. She set the baby chair on the floor and perched on the edge of her seat as if for flight. Pauline hurried back to the Reception Desk.
The Clinic – usually packed with the subdued chatter of ante- or post-natal women awaiting scans and other minor miracles of obstetric care; mothers, with pre-school infants mercifully unaware of the terrors of the needle ahead; or the elderly and disabled juggling exercises of body and mind – was, that morning, silent and foreboding. The emptiness, the shadowless ceiling lights, the grey walls, and red plastic seats rigid in their attempt at informality, felt cold and cheerless.
Rosie shivered.
When, at last, Dr Morris appeared at the door of the Clinic, she had no sense of how long she had waited. The doctor shook her hand, leaned over the baby in her chair and made the right noises, then seated himself at right angles to Rosie.
He was not Rosie’s GP and was known to her only by hearsay. Somehow, his appearance didn’t match the image Rosie had formed. She thought him unkempt, his eyes bleary, his jowls dark and unshaven. He leaned forward, his forearms on his thighs, the flesh on his face falling into crumpled folds.
‘I’m sorry to have kept you,’ he began. ‘I’m afraid I have some bad news.’
Rosie’s heart began to thump. It thumped so loud she thought it would leap from her chest. All she could hear as the doctor started to speak was an endless drumming in her ears.

THE MEMORY OF that morning, ten days earlier, brought a sharp reflux in Rosie’s chest and throat. She came to a halt at the junction at the top of the lane, scrutinised the traffic conditions to right and left, then turned onto the main road that would take her into town. Even now, after more than a week of assimilating accumulated information, she found it difficult to recall the details of that Saturday. She cast her mind back.
Dr Morris had been called out by the police at four o’clock that morning, he told her.
‘I’m so sorry Mrs Timbline – Rosie, if I may? There’s no easy way of saying this. Your sister, Katya, was found dead in her home.’
The blood surged and pounded in Rosie’s ears. Strangely, Katya had been the last person on her mind when the doctor had warned her of bad news. Such was her state of confusion, that she’d thought, initially – was convinced, in fact – that Dr Morris was about to tell her of some disaster that had befallen her mother. A road traffic accident on the way down to the river for their celebratory pleasure cruise? A drowning? From a boat they had not yet boarded! How stupid was that?
‘Katya?’ she repeated. But her brain refused to give up its image of Mum.
Little by little, his voice resonant with kindness and fatigue, the doctor relayed what he knew of the situation. Little by little, like arrows fired at ramparts and falling short, the blunt facts barely penetrated the thick layer of insulation that Rosie’s mind had erected around her intellect.
With some effort, she recalled the facts. Kat had been to a party – a barbecue – on the Friday evening. Her estranged partner, father of fifteen-month old Zara, had stayed over to baby-sit. It was he who had found Kat in the early hours of the next morning, slumped on the sofa downstairs. In a state of extreme shock he had telephoned the emergency services, who had then contacted both the police and the Duty Doctor, Dr Morris.
‘I’m afraid there was nothing I – or anyone else – could do,’ said Dr Morris. ‘She’d been dead for some hours before anyone got there.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ Rosie said repeatedly. Illogically. ‘I’m so sorry.’
Even to her own mind she was unsure to whom and for what she was apologising.
The doctor was kind and understanding. Kat’s death was due to asphyxiation, he said. But a Post Mortem would have to be conducted before the full facts could be known. Shaking off the shock that engulfed her, Rosie roused herself.
‘I need to let my mother know. And can I see her? Kat? Mum will want to know how she looked.’
Dr Morris arranged for a cup of tea to be brought to Rosie, for her to see the body at The Chapel of Rest, and then for her to make whatever phone calls she deemed necessary.

TEN DAYS LATER and here she was again!
At the outskirts of Compass Quay, Rosie slowed to the obligatory thirty-mile limit. She would have to pass the end of Locket’s Lane, where Kat had lived – and died – in order to reach the doctor’s surgery. Her heart lurched at the thought.
She drew a sharp breath and, to calm herself, turned her head to smile at the baby in her rear-facing car seat strapped to the passenger seat beside her. Rewarded with a windy grin on the tiny, puckered features, she lingered too long before returning her attention to the road. Heart racing, she slammed on the brakes to avoid a collision with the car in front.
Claire’s response to her phone call from the surgery to convey the news of Kat’s death had been equally unnerving. Should she – could she, Rosie wondered – have broken it any better?
‘Mummy – I’m so sorry. Kat’s been found dead at home.’
There was no easy formula; no pat phrase; no acceptable tone of voice. Besides, she had been in shock, herself. It had been all she could do to force the words out past her teeth and lips. The cavity of her chest felt empty, as if her lungs had deflated; as if there was insufficient breath on which to convey the sound and meaning of her message. How did you tell any mother of the loss of her child? How could you cause such pain to your own? Her teeth chattered.
‘I’m so sorry, Mummy. I’m so sorry.’
Over and over, her guilt spilled out, inane, irrational, unstoppable: for being the harbinger of bad news; the cause of pain and anguish; for every hard thought she had ever harboured – against Kat, their mother, their father; for being hundreds of miles away from dispensing and receiving a hug; for feeling utterly, devastatingly, helpless.
And then – silence.
She’d imagined her mother sitting on the sofa in the lounge. Or perhaps on the edge of her bed. She tried to get her mind round what it would be like if someone were to tell her, Rosie – one day, in the far off future – that her precious Erin was no more.
Are you okay, Mummy? I understand how you must feel, Mummy.
The crumbs of comfort she had been about to offer were never uttered. Instead, an inhuman moan, which emanated from Claire, began to echo down the phone line. It grew to a crescendo, and became a wail that filled Rosie’s head.
Immutable, it had filled her head for the past ten days.

STEPPING OUT OF the shower and beginning to dry myself, I realise that I have little coherent memory of the day of Katya’s death. Is this the nature of grief? A savage slash across a known territory. A ripping, searing pain. And then – nothing? Nothing but the blurred edges of reality, like those left by softly falling snow; the blotting out of familiar landmarks until – yes – almost nothing known remains.
Patchworks of disconnected impressions burn bright and clear in my mind, but it’s as if they are the borrowed memories of some other entity – a character of whom I’ve read, perhaps; a photograph of some past event that has been vividly brought to life by the descriptive powers of its participants, or observers.
That’s how I feel: a spectator of something outside myself; something that touches me empathetically, but fails fully to involve me. It’s as if the events unfurling before me, however dramatic, are not grounded in my understanding of reality, but have a dreamlike quality about them. There are two minds at work: the one that has left its lived-out abundant life at home but continues to operate at the level of banality: sustenance, sleep, self-preservation; the other that brings into play the detached watchfulness of an interested bystander.
Like a photographer accompanying a journalist to the scene of a disaster, the camera of my mind merely records the victims and helpers; their actions and reactions; the mood and emotions of the occasion. But it’s not my disaster. And its importance seems ephemeral.
I apply deodorant and talc and pull on my underclothes, sweater and jeans.
The news that Rosie broke that Saturday morning hit me like a body-blow. But the shock I felt was not simply that of Katya’s death. This shock took the form of astonishment: disbelief that a death so long anticipated should elicit so predictable a response, when I’d thought myself inured. Or cured!
At some point, a howl broke the sleepy Saturday morning feel of residential Dockland. But though reason told me it must have originated in my throat, I felt no sense of ownership.
It did, however, bring Richard running. Poor Richard, I thought, regarding him from the edge of the bed as he appeared at the door, paint-laden roller still in hand, red-faced from the contortion of looking ceiling-ward for so long. Had he truly understood what he was taking on when he married me, a thirty-six year old divorcee, with two teenage girls? And I realised, with that other mind – the spectator-mind – that there was no incongruity in my concern for him; that anxiety for others was a buffer, a kinder reality than the realism that had thrust itself, cruel and barbed, into the soft underbelly of sorrow, pain and disappointment which, together, amounted to self-concern.
Richard’s face was etched with fear.
‘What’s happened?’ he asked. ‘I thought you’d fallen. Thought you must’ve killed yourself.’
Wordlessly, I passed the phone to him.
A drop of white paint fell from the roller onto the polished oak of the bedroom floor. Viscous, like blanched blood, it remained perfectly round. I stared at it, unseeing. Did Mark know of Katya’s death, I wondered? He was her father, after all. I hadn’t thought to ask Rosie. It hadn’t seemed to figure in my thinking at the time.
I bring to mind other occasions when I’ve had to break news to him of some disaster or other concerning Katya. There was purpose, then. A reason for the two of us to leave our respective spouses and go haring off together in an attempt to avert greater catastrophe. The morning of Katya’s death, there was none. Just an empty, gaping void.
He would hear soon enough, I told myself. Just as I tell myself, now, ten days later, that there’s no need for me to ring in respect of the Pathology Report. My reluctance, I fear, is palpable.

Read more about A Painful Post Mortem and Mel Menzies HERE.

Copyright 2008 Mel Menzies. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.