‘You know, I really thought that this time things might be differ-
ent. You’ve been so good for him. I always thought that with you . . .’
Anne said, her voice failing her. ‘And he was on such a good . . . It’s been, what, nearly ten years—’
‘Anne, sorry,’ Esme said. ‘I’m really not following you. Could
you tell—’
‘ Depression,’ Anne snapped. ‘Okay? You don’t have to make me
bloody say it, Esme.’
Then, for a moment, there was nothing. Silence. Tom could
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picture Esme’s face, taking it al in. The realisation that her boyfriend, the man she lived with, had this thing, this illness.
And that she had no idea all this time.
Tom curled up in the bed, keeping his ears trained on the door.
How much more would she reveal to Esme, and how much would
she leave for him to tell her himself the following morning? The red
digits of the chunky eighties alarm clock on the bedside table next
to him cast a little light onto his face. 00:47.
‘Tom has depression?’ Esme said, quietly.
Again, the silence. This time it felt longer.
‘Oh Esme,’ Anne said. ‘I’m . . .’
‘He’s never said, Anne.’
‘He hasn’t,’ his mum said, the realisation setting in.
‘What’s been ten years?’ Esme said firmly.
‘I don’t know if I—’
‘Anne. I have a right to know.’
‘Tom tried . . .’ she tried to speak. But the words wouldn’t come
easily. Tom had seen this before, when she had tried to ask him why,
to understand the disease so she could look for the cure. ‘He tried
to . . . harm himself.’
‘Self harm? Like cutting?’
‘No.’
‘Suicide?’
‘Esme, please,’ her voice breaking and cracking.
‘When?’
‘It was before he met you. That spring. And—’
‘Twice? When . . .’
Tom could almost hear the penny drop. A new understanding
of Tom and his past drift over Esme like a raincloud covering the
sun. It wouldn’t take her long to fit the pieces together. When he
went strange on her in Oxford, John outside the pub at her thirtieth
birthday party, the teetotal life he led.
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‘At university,’ she said. ‘That’s what happened at university.’
‘I’m sorry, Esme,’ his mum said through tears. ‘I really thought
he’d told you. He promised me.’
That was the last thing his mum said. After that, he heard sniffs
and the rustles of clothes as the two of them embraced, or so he
assumed. Followed by footsteps on the stairs and, faintly, his dad’s
voice asking, ‘What’s wrong?’ Then the turn of the door handle, as
Esme stepped inside.
‘Tom,’ she said. He pushed his head down into the pillow, long-
ing for sleep. For oblivion of some sort.
‘Sorry,’ he said quietly.
She sat down on the bed next to him. He desperately wanted her
to show some sign of affection. A hand on the shoulder, a kiss on
the head. But nothing came.
‘I’m sorry, Es.’
‘Tom,’ Esme said, as the red lights of the clock changed, signal-
ling the end of the first hour of the year. ‘I want you to tell me
everything.’
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CHAPTER FOURTEEN
1 – 2 am
WORKING ON MYSELF
February 2015 – Stansted Airport, London
The voice over the address system announced the further delay. Her
flight was now due in at ten past one. He took a seat on the hard,
metal chair and took out his phone. There were three or four others
around him. Kind souls who’d offered to pick up their loved ones
despite the late hour, and all of whom were, like Tom, probably
worrying about how tired they’d be at work tomorrow. They all cast
occasional glances up at the display screen that confirmed the bad
news.
RY074 GLASGOW 00.46 DELAYED 01:10
Tom wondered if he should even have come to the airport at
all. Esme would never have expected him to. But tonight (or rather
this morning) was intended to be a surprise. A show of how far he’d
come after what happened on New Year’s Eve, and the weeks that
followed. They had come back from his parents’ house, Esme still
shocked, angry and devastated at what his mum had told her, and
Tom had shut himself away – beginning a six-week period of acute
anxiety and depression so bad that he couldn’t leave the house.
It was a new thing to him. Never before had he felt so low that
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an unnameable, yet all-consuming dread prevented him from even so much as walking around the block. What was more, it was the
first time he’d been forced to cope with a such a serious dip in his
mental health without alcohol, the thing that conquered all his social anxieties, at least for a few hours. And since he had stepped over the threshold of their flat on the afternoon of 1st January, Tom could
not countenance the idea of going back over it again.
It wasn’t as if he hadn’t thought about it. Alone, standing at
their kitchen window, Tom had watched passers-by sheltering under
coats, scarves and woolly hats as the weather grew colder and more
fierce. When it snowed later in the month he looked on at the
nervous commuters navigating ungritted paths, except for the few
wealthy North Londoners who owned snow boots usually reserved
for annual skiing holidays. He himself had experienced none of it.
Almost missing an entire season was quite something.
He had gone over and over how it would be to leave.
One step.
Two steps.
The end of the house.
The beginning of the path, through the small front garden.
He had thought about the particular noises of their corner of
North London. Buses, slow-moving cars, the whir of a racing bike,
ridden by some squidgy forty-year-old in multi-coloured leathers.
The shouts and calls from the noisy shop owners and delivery men,
the telephone conversations overheard. All of which would grow
louder as he walked to the end of Islay Gardens and towards the
much busier West End Lane. Then the smells: musty, foetid leaf
and grass mulch from the garden at number forty-two, so vibrant
in spring and summer; the faint drifting scent of fried food from
the best-avoided kebab shop on the corner. And the feel of the end-
of-winter air on his cheeks and on fingertips that would poke from
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leather of his shoes after weeks of wearing slippers. The firmness of the pavement, instead of the comfortable cushion of carpet and rugs.
In the end, it wasn’t a bit like that. The things he thought he’d
notice he didn’t. His fears remained.
Tom
shifted on the seat and glanced at the fat, bald man next
to him.
‘Fucking typical, ain’t it?’ the man said. He had a paper sign face
down on his lap. Tom wondered if he should’ve made one. Was that
the done thing now? Or was it only for cabbies and chauffeurs?
Tom smiled back at him.
Earlier in the day he had been sitting on the tatty armchair in his
little office box room, a piece of furniture much used in recent weeks.
Especially given Tom no longer listened to the music he produced
while walking around North London. Instead he played things back
while slouched in that armchair, staring blankly up at the Bruce
Springsteen poster on the wall opposite – one of the various habits
that had become his new normal since he and Esme had returned
from the New Year’s Eve party in Lowestoft. Magnus, their cat, was
on the floor in front of him, looking up occasionally as if questioning what Tom was doing with his life, while the ukulele chorus to a
vegan dog-food jingle played out around the room.
But Tom was unable to concentrate on the irritatingly chipper
voice singing about ‘good things for good dogs’ and ‘the first ever
ethical treats made from baobab and ginseng’. Instead, he was think-
ing about that day’s session with Christine, his therapist.
She visited their flat once a week, charging extra for a home visit.
Esme had insisted that he seek help, after he had refused medication
outright.
He and Christine had talked about this recent anxiety-induced
agoraphobia, but were no closer to dampening the fear he felt at
the idea of going outside, of being so exposed and vulnerable. What
could he tell her about a nameless dread? An aching sickness? A fear
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that was so real and yet apparently rooted in absolutely nothing?
He had been trying to explain similar things to himself for almost
fifteen years without success.
‘I feel sick every time I think about it. Then the sickness makes
me panic,’ was all he could really manage. ‘And it all makes me feel
worse.’
Christine had nodded and written something down in her note-
book.
‘Explain worse,’ she had said.
Their sessions were an incomplete, basic summary of a life
continuously interrupted by bouts of depression and anxiety. One
that was getting close to becoming little more than a col ection of
near-catastrophes – of various support structures built up and later
destroyed. Recently, in her more frustrated moments, Esme had
questioned whether Christine was ‘any good’.
‘I can’t change therapist now, Es,’ Tom had said. ‘We’ve made
progress.’
It was a half-truth. He and Christine had made progress. But
not necessarily in the right direction. While they should have been
talking about the root of his problems, most of their time together
was spent on Esme. And how he could save what they had together
after all his concealing and lying.
Hours had been lost to talking about her kindness, her support-
ive nature, her forgiveness and her selflessness. Echoing something
Annabel once told him, he contrasted her nurse-like caring with his
clichéd artistic self-absorption (despite it being increasingly difficult to paint himself as an artist with each corporate video he soundtracked).
He had spoken at length about how he was undeserving of her
understanding and empathy, all the while praying to some nameless
God that he would never lose it. And of how she was often the one
thing that kept him from returning to his oldest and most destructive
crutch: alcohol.
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Going through it al again that afternoon, Christine had diligently listened and nodded. She had told Tom that he was lucky, and that
he had all the right things around him to repair himself.
‘But you have to do the repair work, Tom. She can be your sup-
port. But she can’t be your answer to everything.’
‘I know,’ he said. ‘I think I’m trying to say that it’s holding on to
what we have that makes me want to break the cycle.’
‘If that’s what it takes,’ Christine had told him. It was the end
of their session and he could see her wanting to wrap up, probably
with half a mind on the traffic. ‘Whatever works for you, Tom. But
that can’t always be the answer.’
As Tom had sat in the tatty chair, her words swirled around in
his head.
If that’s what it takes.
Whatever works for you.
Esme was the only thing that worked for him. From the day they
met until today, it was all her. After everything that had happened,
he wouldn’t blame her if she decided she’d had enough. He had
pushed and pushed and she had stayed through it all. The drive home
from Suffolk might’ve been her last straw, perhaps. But instead she
had questioned herself, had asked him why he couldn’t trust her to
know the circumstances of his suicide attempt. She begged for him
to tell her if he found her unapproachable or lacking in the requisite empathy. It was all nonsense, of course. To Tom’s mind, he was the
problem, and she was always the solution.
Esme didn’t know it, but Tom had found himself standing by
their closed bedroom door ten or fifteen times a day during the past
again. He had listened to Esme bustling around in their cluttered
hallway, searching for headphones or shoes, and thought about
following. He had wanted to stop her and tell her to wait for him
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every time he heard the screech of metal on metal as she turned their broken door handle to leave the house.
But each time he said nothing and stayed inside. The impetus to
go out was always overridden by something holding him back, the
retreat to familiarity infinitely more comforting.
His retreat had made reconciliation with Esme slower than it
might’ve been, he was sure of it. There had been nights spent in
separate beds, as she made the distance Tom had put between them
real. At times he’d hoped she might be over everything, or at least
have forgiven him enough to allow their relationship to re-find
the equilibrium it had up until the end of last year. Then, out of
nowhere, it was as if something would remind her of it: a throwaway
line from a television programme; a song on the radio. Enough to
bring back to her mind the meaninglessness of a guarantee from
Tom Murray.
He sensed her frustration and upset. Something had to give.
It was two hours after Christine left, and while he was listening
back to the terrible ukulele music, that Tom decided if things were
to repair, he would have to try to ignore certain nagging parts of
himself. He knew he could never shake anxiety. Nor depression. But
equally, he knew that his best chance of happiness was bundled up
with
his love for Esme. And that despite her caring and kindness, she
would have a limit, beyond which the difficulties of his life would
begin to create difficulties in hers.
It was not possible to ignore things, Tom knew. But he could try
to suppress them, to push them down into the deepest recesses of his
being, in the desperate hope they remained dormant. And, maybe,
that would give him the best chance of thickening the line he was
trying to draw under the things she’d learned on that night outside
his childhood bedroom.
Sitting up, Tom had looked down at Magnus and said, ‘I should
go, shouldn’t I?’
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*
Tom looked out of the window towards the brightly lit runway. A
plane was approaching the strip, its landing lights cutting a path
through the night sky. It must be her, he thought. There were only
two other arrivals on the board after hers.
His heart jumped a little at the thought of her touching down.
Behind him the last of the arrival lounge shops pulled its shutters
down, making Tom jump. The fat man beside him swigged at a
bottle of Coke.
What would he tell Esme about his first time outside? Maybe
about the cold and the thin layer of ice that lay across the scratchy, patchy grass out the front of their flat. Or how it had taken a moment for him to realise what he had done, the step he had taken. That he
had escaped from the only place he’d found safe for the past month
and a half.
Tom heard the familiar voice behind him.
Esme.
Talking to the fat man, who was now picking up the small
suitcase she always took to conferences. Tom could see the other
side of his sign now. It read ESME SIMON, below which was the
logo for North West Cars, the minicab firm whose business card was
permanently stuck to their fridge.
‘Es,’ he called. But she seemed not to hear. The two of them were
making for the doors. ‘Esme!’ he called again.
She stopped and turned.
‘Tom?’ she said, loud and surprised, running over to him. ‘Fuck-
ing hell. Tom!’
They hugged tightly, in a way that they hadn’t for months. It may
have just been his imagination, a hopeful thought interrupting the
recent darkness, but things felt different.
‘I was waiting,’ Tom said. ‘I thought I’d seen you land.’