Overlapping Lives Read online

  Overlapping Lives

  A Collection of Short Stories

  Andrew Dicker

  Copyright © 2016 Andrew Dicker

  The moral right of the author has been asserted.

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  Act 1988, this publication may only be reproduced, stored or transmitted, in

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  Matador

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  ISBN 978 1785895 845

  Cover image provided by Louisa Stobbs

  louisastobbsphotography.co.uk

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data.

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  Matador is an imprint of Troubador Publishing Ltd

  Contents

  About the Author

  Julie’s Story

  Julie and Morag

  Morag

  Sally’s Story

  Melanie

  Paula

  Ben and Catherine

  The Village

  Roger and Claire

  Roger, Claire and Paula

  About the Author

  Andrew Dicker grew up in North London and went to medical school during the 1970s. From 1982, he worked as a general practitioner in Suffolk, Hong Kong, Hertfordshire and Westminster. In 2013 Andrew retired and embarked on a creative writing project. His previous publications include book chapters on mental health, postgraduate education, medical ethics and a collection of short stories entitled The Seduction of Celia.

  Julie’s Story

  The sonorous clangour of the cell door slamming shut was like a final toll. Julie had been deprived of her liberty but in the process had freed herself from the mental daemons which threatened her life. The man who had been the source of her turmoil was dead. She had killed him.

  Being processed from courtroom to cell had been dehumanising. She had been questioned endlessly, had most of her possessions confiscated, had been stripped, searched and left to wait for hours, not knowing what was supposed to happen next or where she was going. The only things she had been allowed to keep were the underwear which she had brought with her, a pen and a pad of lined paper. Standard prison clothes were drab, the holding cells small, smelly, overcrowded and threatening. Now that the risk of relapsing into suicidal thought processes was gone she was confident that her mental resilience would enable her to survive. But the survival would need to last many years.

  Julie believed that regret was a pointless emotion, if indeed it was an emotion; it was more like a kind of rumination. Because nothing could be changed by it, regret seemed like a waste of mental effort, but sometimes she wondered about what might have been had things turned out differently. At her trial she had not been able to bring herself to express either regret or remorse, so the judge had announced that he had no option but to impose a maximum sentence.

  Before the turmoil began she had been happy in her work as a clinical psychologist. She spent all day talking to people about how to think differently about the way they felt and behaved. It was mentally and emotionally exhausting work, but also rewarding. Most of the people who came to see her were depressed. Julie knew a lot about depression, partly because it was her job to know about mental illness, but also because a few years previously she had been depressed herself and had not forgotten how incapacitating the experience had been.

  It had happened in her second year at university, when everything seemed to be going well. She suddenly lost her energy; all the things she enjoyed lost their appeal. Sleep at night had become elusive and she could barely stay awake in the daytime, let alone concentrate. Sadness engulfed her and she could not stop weeping. Anxiety made going out alone an ordeal. She thought about ways she might kill herself but did not think she had the courage to do it. Gradually she recovered with pills and the help of a psychologist. The thing that most upset her about the illness was that during her gradual recovery one of the students in her year, whose name was Trevor, came to visit frequently in the evenings. Trevor was a nice-looking man, medium height with brown, wavy hair and a square jaw. He had a relaxed manner and a quiet sense of humour. Initially, his visits seemed like a kind, pastoral gesture. On many days she saw no one else. Feeling vulnerable, she had gradually been persuaded by Trevor to sleep with him. She had allowed herself to have sex with him repeatedly, knowing that had she been well she would not have considered it. As soon as the illness allowed her to regain her usual assertiveness she banished him from her life, intending never to see him again. She was discerning about men and had had only one serious boyfriend. The recollection of the illness was always troubling, but the sex, which on reflection had not been entirely consensual, gave her a sense of self-disgust, as if she had been raped, which disturbed her. Whenever this thought recurred it evoked a series of recollections of other things that she wished had not happened. While she was well, Julie was a dedicated party girl: enthusiastically socialising, relishing the gossip and humour and frequently drinking too much, which was what everyone did. But from time to time it led to unintended consequences that always embarrassed her when she thought about them. Usually, it was because of some disinhibited behaviour which got out of control and upset other people. There had been many good times and she had done many worthy things during her undergraduate years, but it was always the excessive, embarrassing events that surfaced in her memory and gave her the same troubled feeling. She sensed that the depression had left a scar in her mind which had not fully healed. If it was irritated or injured it might easily draw her back to the evil of the interior from which she had successfully emerged.

  After the long vacation before her final year, her hedonistic self fully restored, Julie launched herself back into the frenetic undergraduate social life, despite the imminence of the final assessments and exams. Her tutor had intimated that she was on track to gain a first class degree, but it would be necessary to moderate the socialising. She knew that sacrificing the fun for study was not in her nature. Undergraduate hedonism got the better of her. She partied on and left university with an upper second. And that became another of the nagging things which made her ruminate on what might have been.

  Julie knew that she had an urgent need to feel needed. Everyone had the same sense to some degree, but Julie’s fragile self-esteem depended on her need being met. She felt valued at work helping people with minor – and not so minor – mental health problems to recover and return to a normal life and sometimes back to work.

  Her skills were much in demand. The need to work, and take life seriously, obliged her to spend less energy on her social life, but she still liked to be the centre of attention, which was not difficult. Her appearance attracted attention. She was medium height, with long, dark hair. Her eyes were forget-me-not blue. She had a straight nose and her mouth was wide, particularly when she laughed, which she did a lot because she had a well-developed sense of humour. While she had been ill
she had been unable to eat. Having shed weight excessively, she had stayed lean ever since. Male attention was never in short supply.

  As her graduate friends pursued their parallel careers many of them decided to marry. During the years after university, life was punctuated by extravagant wedding celebrations all over the country, which usually lasted all weekend. Julie was conspicuously single at these occasions. Being attractive, clever and funny, she had been beguiled by numerous men over the years, but all her relationships had foundered when the men detected an obstacle to their lascivious ambitions and gave up, leaving Julie with a sense of guilt. Whenever she reached the tipping point where taking off her clothes in the company of someone else seemed the right thing to do, she froze and felt her unhealed mental scar inflame. She realised she had been abused during the time she had been depressed and the associated sense of evil had deprived her of her capacity for intimacy. A longing to find a gallant man who knew how to unfreeze her sexual self had become a preoccupation. Knowing that she was capable of functioning sexually she badly needed someone to help her to do it.

  For her thirtieth birthday Julie decided to have a party. Her birthday was in May when the weather was often fine. She had managed to buy a basement flat in a north London Edwardian terrace with a small paved garden and raised flowerbeds against the perimeter walls. The party would be on a Sunday lunchtime which would allow her married friends to bring their new offspring as well. She made huge salads and a trifle and ordered lots of pizzas. The local bakery supplied metres of baguette and she found a delicatessen which sold large wedges of English cheese. Cases of ordinary red and white wine were delivered by the off-licence. These, she thought, were the necessary ingredients for the sort of hilarious, gregarious occasion she craved. It worked well. Her flat filled up with friends, most of whom had been at university together. The paved garden was crowded with people getting drunk in the sunshine. Julie looked glossy; she wore a pink, cashmere jumper and tight, pale blue jeans. She had tied her straight, dark hair back in a shiny ponytail.

  As she negotiated the living room, dispensing wine and loving the sense of being desirable and desired, she recognised the face of a man who she knew she had not invited but seemed to be with one of her university girlfriends, whose name was Sally. The last time she had seen the man was in her narrow bed in her student bedroom, unclothed, during her second year at university. She politely offered wine, excused herself, deposited her bottles and locked herself in the bathroom where she threw up in the lavatory. For a while she was consumed by the sense of evil which the sight of her abuser had evoked. She sat on the loo to compose herself, feeling as if she had been violated. After a while she rejoined the oblivious throng. Sally and Trevor were nowhere to be seen.

  The last of the guests left in the early evening. Julie had taken the precaution of absenting herself from work on the following Monday as she knew she would be under the weather and the task of clearing up would be Herculean. Eventually, she became bored with washing glasses, went to her bedroom, pulled off her clothes, dropped them on the carpet and lay naked on the bed. She tried to read, but the recollection of Trevor’s face persistently interposed itself between her and the page. Giving up on the book, she pulled the duvet over her and slept. In the early hours she woke suddenly, feeling afraid. Her limbs were leaden and her brain had ceased to work. She could not stop the tears and buried her face in the pillow; after a while the tears abated and she slept again, uneasily. In the middle of the morning she woke again and knew instantly that the daemons within her unhealed mental scar were stifling her once more and there was nothing she could do to prevent the relapse.

  Sometime in the afternoon Julie got out of bed, found a tee-shirt and pulled it on, which barely made her decent, but she was beyond caring. Incongruous signs of the happy party filled the flat, making it dishevelled; the rooms smelled of stale food. Her identity seemed to have been usurped. The insatiable hedonism of yesterday had become a wraith. She was consumed by despair and a debilitating tiredness. Wandering around the flat, she was unable to decide what needed doing and dumped piles of uneaten food in the bin. Eventually, she sat down on her sofa in front of the television and curled up, pulling the tee-shirt over her knees. She turned the television on, vaguely aware that she loathed daytime TV, and found she could not see the screen because her vision was obscured by tears. Silent, helpless weeping incapacitated her for a long time.

  The light began to fade. Julie dragged herself to the kitchen, found a bottle of white wine still unopened, unscrewed the top and went back to bed. She slowly drank the contents of the bottle, not bothering with a glass. Sleep would be elusive without something to make her unconscious. She had a sense of alarm as it dawned on her that the catalyst of her depression was the sight of her abuser and that something in her subconscious was still painfully wounded. Drifting into an uneasy, drunken sleep, she hoped that she would never wake.

  Days passed in alternating sleep and tearful wakefulness. Her mobile tinged at intervals but Julie ignored it. She was unable to eat, did not have the energy to wash and could not bear to confront the things that she knew she should be doing; she waited to be rescued.

  After three days of helpless misery she was woken in the night by the sound of rain in the garden. She got out of bed aimlessly. Weakened by the days of deprivation, she had to support herself to the back door, still wearing the inadequate tee-shirt which had started to smell unwashed. She stepped outside, feeling the coldness of the rain as it rapidly soaked her tee-shirt. It seemed the right thing to do to lie down in the middle of the garden, on the soaking paving stones, breathing the freshness of the wet atmosphere. The coldness of the night stopped her from thinking and she drifted in and out of dreamless sleep. She had the vague idea that by the morning she would be dead.

  Julie was woken by a shrill cacophony. She listened more carefully and realised that the noise was the suburban chorus of birds at dawn. It was surprisingly loud; it rose and fell in volume, constantly modulating its erratic tune.

  The rain had stopped, but the cold was penetrating, made worse by the soaking tee-shirt which clung to her prone body. Her head lay on her hands, which she could no longer feel, against the freezing stone. Julie opened her eyes to the pale light of dawn. The first thing she saw was a black cat with yellow eyes sitting a few feet away, staring steadily at her. It occurred to her that the cat was waiting to see if she was dead before starting to eat her, tearing at her exposed skin to access the flesh beneath. She tried to move and succeeded in raising her head enough to see the grey, melancholy sky. It was as if there had been a catastrophe in the night and nothing else was alive apart from the birds, the cat and herself. Despite the frozen numbness of her arms she turned on her side painfully and sat up. She had not died in the night; she was alive with the vibrant, musical dawn and a cynical cat. There had been a change in her head during the cold, wet night; she could feel something like joy at the intensity of audible life around her. The primitive cadence of birdsong had penetrated an atavistic compartment of her brain and sealed the porous scar.

  The back door of the flat stood ajar since her exit hours previously. Julie struggled to her feet and padded across the wet garden and into the flat where the cat decided to join her in the kitchen, looking expectant. The party cheese was slowly dehydrating on a plate on the sideboard. She tossed a lump to the cat which started carefully to dismantle it. Peeling off the dripping tee-shirt, she dropped it on the kitchen floor and walked naked to the bathroom where she was met by the sight of her unclothed self in the mirror. Her catwalk thinness startled her. She could make out her ribs etched faintly in the skin below her small breasts, her dark nipples made erect by the cold which still gripped her. Her narrow waist was accentuated by the bones of her pelvis and the neat triangle of pubic hair above the gap between her thighs. She considered her lean proportions and liked what she saw; her self-esteem was restored. Pulling the bedraggled strings of hair off h
er face, she looked at her pale blue irises; they were undeniably beautiful. The heat of the shower beckoned. She stepped inside the glass box and thawed painfully beneath a hot torrent.

  Once the paralysing cold had been banished she stepped out of the shower, wrapped herself in a towel, and went to look for the cat which had installed itself on the kitchen surface by the sink and was embarking on another lump of drying cheese. She picked it up, stroked it briefly and dumped it outside the kitchen door. The birds had quietened, the clouds were clearing and there was an intoxicating freshness in the air. Julie inhaled deeply. She knew she had been rescued by the dawn and its timeless chorus.

  Despite the discomfort of the night Julie felt her energy returning. She needed to re-join the world of the living and reconnect herself with the people on whom she depended for her livelihood and welfare. The cat stalked stubbornly back through the open kitchen door and wound itself round Julie’s ankles. Self-interest guided the cat; its endearing behaviour was the way it got looked after. Rapidly, she cleared the remains of the party, washed the glasses, stacked the dishwasher and was about to open the front door to put the rubbish bags by the steep stone steps, which led up to pavement level, when she realised she was still unclothed. The pale blue jeans lay in a crumpled heap on the bedroom floor. She pulled them on, hung the cashmere jumper in the cupboard, found another tee-shirt and covered her top half. When the rubbish was dealt with she started to search for her phone.

  By the end of the morning she had put right everything she had neglected since the weekend and was expected at work on Monday morning. Her mood had restored itself to the optimistic hedonism with which she was familiar. She was ravenous, but what food had survived the party was inedible so she would have to go to the high street to restock. Everything was achieved with seamless efficiency in the minimum of time and by the end of the afternoon Julie had installed herself on the sofa with her mentor, the cat, and knew she must reflect on what had happened to her. What, thought Julie, would a cat do, whose sole preoccupation in life was looking after itself? She needed to cauterise the scar in her memory, which might incapacitate her again with its terrifying, suicidal evil. Killing herself was a vivid possibility if it were to recur. She knew she must find a way to inure herself against her abused past and preserve her optimistic identity. Cats were territorial. Their feral instinct would not tolerate unwelcome intrusion. Trevor had transgressed; he had taken physical advantage of her when she was vulnerable. She decided that she must kill him or she would remain at risk of killing herself.