Book Review: Insomnia

Synopsis:

In the dead of night, madness lies . . .

Emma Averell loves her life. She has a high-powered legal career, two beautiful children, and a wonderful stay-at-home husband. But it wasn’t always so perfect.

When she was just five years old, Emma and her older sister, Phoebe, went into foster care because of a deeply disturbing incident involving their mother. Phoebe remembers a time when their mother was loving and “normal,” but Emma can only remember her as one thing — a monster. And that monster emerged right around their mother’s fortieth birthday. The same milestone Emma is approaching now.

Emma desperately wants to keep her childhood trauma in the past, but with her birthday looming, she stops being able to sleep and can’t stop thinking about what happened all those years ago. Is madness in her blood? Could she end up hurting her family in her foggy, half-awake state, just like her mother?

Or is there another explanation for the strange things that keep happening around her?

Emma must unravel the dark strands of her past to protect the people she loves . . . or risk losing everything, including her sanity.

Review:

Bestselling author Sarah Pinborough has penned more than twenty-five novels across several genres, including Behind Her Eyes, Dead to Her, Cross Her Heart, The Death House, and 13 Minutes. She has also drafted screenplays for the BBC. She won the British Fantasy Award for Best Short Story in 2009, and the 2010 and 2014 British Fantasy Award for Best Novella. She resides in the historic town of Stony Stratford.

Pinborough says her inspiration for Insomnia was the idea of writing about a stay-at-home husband and working wife, exploring working women and female guilt, and the ways in which societal expectations for women differ from those for men. She believes that “women seem to have a time limit that men don’t have and fears of getting older, and turning into your mother. . . . Which is so odd because when we’re little, our mothers are the best thing in the world. And by the time we’re twenty, the last thing we want to be told is that we look like her, sound like her, dress like her. . .” During the pandemic, Pinborough observed that women were handling home schooling their children, despite maintaining full-time jobs, and they were not sleeping as a result of the stress. “Men take a little longer to catch up with the worry,” she notes. She wanted to explore sleepless nights that often prove frightening and the resultant paranoia.

Insomnia opens twelve days before Emma Averell’s fortieth birthday. Emma, a divorce attorney, awakens at 1:13 a.m., convinced that someone is in the home she shares with her stay-at-home husband, Robert, and their children, five-year-old Will and Chloe, who is seventeen. After she checks on the children and satisfies herself that nothing is amiss, she returns to bed and tries to go back to sleep. By 3:00 a.m., she is checking her emails and contemplating her schedule for the day. She is on track to become a partner at her firm and knows that without sleep she is facing a long, grueling day. Yoga breathing brings no relief and she drags herself through the workday, in the midst of which she receives a telephone call from her older sister, Phoebe, summoning her to the hospital. When she arrives, she finds that Phoebe, three years her elder, has tricked her, realizing that she would not have come if she’ds known it was in response to their seventy-five-year-old mother’s injury. It seems she smashed her head against a mirror during the night and sustained a cerebral hematoma which is life-threatening. And she did it at 1:13 a.m. Emma made clear long ago that she never wanted to see their mother, who has spent years in a secure unit housing mental patients who are too ill to be imprisoned, again. But Phoebe reveals that she has been visiting their catatonic mother over the prior few months, maintaining that the visits were recommended as a way of healing.

Just before Phoebe’s own fortieth birthday, the sisters lost contact when Phoebe essentially vanished. Now her reappearance is dredging up memories for Emma, who has told her colleagues, friends, and family that their mother is dead. When Emma met Robert, she lied to him about her family history — and Phoebe backed up the story. “I don’t want my mother’s story to be any part of my life,” Emma explains in the first-person narrative Pinborough employs to tell her compelling story. As she returns to her office, Emma is confronted by the crazed spouse of one of her clients, and at the end of the day finds her car has been keyed and a vile note left on the windshield. It’s only the first of a series of very bad days for Emma as her fortieth birthday looms. Suddenly, anything that can go wrong, does. And Emma’s life begins quickly unraveling.

Pinborough believes readers will find Emma “quite relatable.” After all, she observes that “anyone who’s ever had a bout of insomnia knows that night feels like a whole different – and not pleasant – landscape when you can’t sleep. All our worst worries and thoughts come to plague us in that exhaustion,” so, of course, as a writer, she found it fun to place her protagonist into that scarily uncomfortable space. With each passing day, Emma’s inability to sleep becomes more pronounced, and she desperately tries to maintain her sanity as her career and family begin slipping away from her. But the line between reality and fantasy grows increasingly blurred as she becomes more and more sleep-deprived, her behavior increasingly erratic and irrational. Indeed, many of her actions are outside the realm of plausibility for an educated, professional woman, especially when she fails to heed the precise advice she would render to her clients. She begins experiencing blackouts and finds herself the prime suspect in a murder investigation. She knows that she could not have committed the crime . . . doesn’t she?

As a girl, her mother called Emma the “mad child,” warning her that she inherited “bad blood” that ran in their family. So Emma has always feared that she would turn out to be like her mother. “How long before that night, her fortieth birthday, did my mother stop sleeping?” she wonders. Unlike Phoebe, Emma cannot remember a time when their mother wasn’t mad. Her mother locked her in a cupboard and left her there for hours at a time. Emma was the one who found their mother in the act of harming Phoebe, as a result of which the sisters were placed in foster care and their mother was permanently institutionalized. She consults a doctor who explains that rather than trying to forget her mother, relief might be found by trying to understand her. Emma accepts the wisdom in that approach, but in her panicked state, finds herself engaging in compulsive behaviors akin to her mother’s and suspects that Phoebe has come back into her life with a malicious motive. Are Phoebe and Robert plotting against her? Are they gaslighting her? And is someone else involved in a sinister plot against her? She is devoted to her children and knows that she could never harm them. Doesn’t she? Sleep-deprivation leads her to fear that she might actually hurt them. She questions her own judgment and her hard-earned career implodes. And in the midst of her ongoing crisis, she befriends a nurse, Caroline, who kindly returns her wallet after it is stolen by a gang of boys. Caroline’s viewpoint is provided via interspersed chapters related in her voice. But is the whole encounter a set-up related to secrets Emma has yet to discover? On top of everything else, Emma’s seventeen-year-old daughter is rebelling and acting out in a deeply concerning, self-destructive fashion. Can she save her?

For Emma, the life she dreamed about and carefully constructed unexpectedly falls apart, and she finds herself literally fighting to hang on. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Emma is careening closer and closer toward a catastrophe from which she will never be able to recover. Her young son, Will, who has taken to drawing the same picture over and over, unwittingly provides some of the most damning evidence that she is indeed losing her grip on reality and may be a danger to her family, as well as herself.

Pinborough expertly ramps up the dramatic tension with each unsettling event in Emma’s life while her birthday draws nearer, accelerating the story’s pace as Emma’s descent into complete madness seems all but assured. In fact, the story itself appears to be careening out of control, as well, but it becomes apparent that is by design. At that juncture, Pinborough begins revealing what has actually been happening to Emma and why. “I have been so worried about repeating the past, but what if I’ve been looking at it all the wrong way around?” Emma ponders. Having found a key piece of evidence, she is able to piece together what she has been experiencing. But has she figured it out in time?

Pinborough deftly keeps readers guessing until the very end. In fact, exactly as Emma’s whole life feels off-kilter, readers will experience the same sensation while trying to solve the mystery, to no avail. Insomnia is a thoroughly puzzling, indeed unsettling, but thoroughly engaging and inventive thriller. Once all is revealed, the cleverness of Pinborough’s plot and inclusion of an other-worldly aspect is displayed. The story’s conclusion is surprisingly satisfying and thought-provoking. To what extent does the past inform the future? Is it ever possible to fully overcome childhood trauma? What about the importance and impact of the picture that Will drew incessantly?

Perhaps Emma is right, after all, when she says, “There are some things you can’t try to understand. You’d go mad trying.”

Excerpt from Insomnia

Prologue

The other car comes out of nowhere.

There’s no warning screech of brakes, not even a sideways what the glance through the window, just the hard whoomph of metal hitting metal at high speed, an explosion of energy, a symphony of disaster. The impact is so great that glass shatters instantly, dispersing in a sharp angry hail. The chassis ripples like water and the car lifts high, the worst kind of fairground ride, tumbling over, hard into the roadside ditch.

After that, a terrible stillness. A slight creak as the metal settles and then nothing. The radio is no longer on. There is no more excited conversation. In a matter of seconds everything has changed.

Small movements in the passenger seat. Contained, trapped, broken desperation. A scream that is barely a wheeze.

The other car, a bull of an all-terrain car, is still on the road, front end crumpled to a snout. The engine, surprisingly, is still running, an old man’s rattling cough, but going all the same. For a moment, a longer moment than it took to destroy the universe of life in the other vehicle, the driver sits, trembling at the wheel. The sun is still shining, dappling through the trees. It’s still a beautiful early morning and the road is still empty.

The road is still empty.

No witnesses.

Only one mile or so from home.

The driver leaves it to chance. To luck. The airbag has not deployed. If the car will go, the driver will leave. They won’t look back. If it doesn’t, they’ll stay and face the consequences. Shaking hands shift the gears into first and then grip the steering wheel, suddenly aware of aches and pains coming alive from the impact. The car, a workhorse of a machine, grinds into movement, and turns, limping along the road. The driver does glance back. They can’t help it. A hand rises a little from the figure trapped in the passenger seat. A cry for help.

The driver moans. They’ll call an ambulance. From a phone box maybe. But there’s no phone box on the short route. Someone will be along soon, though. This road gets busy by nine. Someone will help. They’re sure of it.

TWELVE DAYS UNTIL MY BIRTHDAY

There’s someone in the house.

It’s not a complete thought, but something feral, more instinctive, and I sit up, suddenly awake, my heart racing. The clock clicks to 1:13 A.M. and I stay very still, listening hard, sure I’m going to hear a creak from the hallway or see a threatening shadow emerge from a dark corner of the room. But there’s nothing. Just the patter of rain on the windows and the hum of night quiet.

My skin has prickled. Something woke me. Not a dream. Something else. Something in the house. I can’t shake the feeling, like when I was small and the nightmares would grip me so hard I would be sure I was back in that night and my foster mother would run in to calm me down before I woke the whole house.

Robert is fast asleep, on his side facing away from me. I don’t wake him. It’s probably nothing, but still, I’m alert with worry. The children.

I won’t be able to get back to sleep until I’ve checked on them and so I get up, shivers trembling up my body from my bare feet on the carpet, and I creep out onto the landing.

I feel very small as I look along the central corridor, the gloom making it appear endless, a monster’s yawning mouth ahead of me. I walk forward – I am a mother and a wife. A career woman. This is my house. My safe place – and wish I’d brought my phone with me to use as a torch. I peer over the landing banisters. Nothing moves in the dark shadows below. No thump of burglars shifting possessions in the night. No menace.

A flurry of wind drives the rain hard into our cathedral feature window, startling me. I go to the end of the corridor where it cuts into the wall, a perfect arch of black. I cup my hands around my eyes and press my face against the cold glass but all I can make out is the vague shape of trees. No light. No activity. Still, I shiver again as I turn back and head down the L bend ahead to the kids’ rooms. Footsteps dancing on my grave.

I feel better once I’ve pushed open Will’s door. My little boy, five years old and at big school now, is asleep on his back, the dinosaur duvet kicked away, and his dark hair, so like mine, is mussed up from sweat. Maybe he’s been having a bad night too. I carefully cover him up, but gentle as I’m trying to be, he stirs and his eyes open.

“Mummy?” He’s blurry, confused, but when I smile, he does too, and wriggles onto his side. His drawing book is under his pillow and I slide it out.

“No wonder you woke up,” I whisper. “Sleeping on this.” It’s open on his most recent enthusiastic crayon drawing and I turn it this way and that in the gloom, trying to make out what it is. If I’m honest it looks like a dog that’s been run over. Twice.

“It’s a dinosaur,” Will says, and laughs and then yawns, as if even he knows drawing may not be his finest skill and he’s cool with that.

“Of course it is.” I put the notebook on the table by his bed and kiss him goodnight. He’s almost asleep again already and probably won’t even remember this in the morning.

I go to Chloe’s room next and she too is lost to the world, blonde hair fanned out on the pillow, a sleeping princess straight from a fairy tale, even though, at seventeen and a staunch modern feminist, she’d be quick to tell me that fairy tales are misogynistic rubbish. I go back to my own room, ridiculing myself for having been so afraid.

I get back into bed and curl up, Robert barely stirring. It’s only one thirty. If I fall asleep now, I can get another four hours in before I have to get up. Sleep should come easily – it always has done in this busy, exhausting, exhilarating life I lead, so I snuggle down and wait to drift. It doesn’t happen.

At three a.m. I check my emails – a midnight congratulations from Buckley for my result in court yesterday with the Stockwell divorce custody hearing – and then scan the news on my phone and go to the loo. Robert almost wakes then, but only enough to mutter something unintelligible and fling one heavy arm over me as I get back into bed. After that I lie there, my head whirring with my schedule for the fast-approaching day, becoming more and more frustrated that I’m going to be facing it tired. I’ve got to be at the office for seven thirty and it’s rare for me to get home before twelve hours later, and that’s only if I can get away without going for the obligatory drinks. There’s no room for slacking. Especially not now. I’m in line to be the youngest partner in the firm. But I love my work, I really do.

I practice some yoga breathing, trying to relax every muscle in my body and empty my mind, which sounds so easy but normally results in me pondering stupid things like whether there’s enough milk in the fridge or if we should change our gas supplier, and although my heart rate slows I still don’t sleep.

It’s going to be a long day.

ELEVEN DAYS UNTIL MY BIRTHDAY

Work is busy. By ten forty-five I’ve had two conferences, dealt with some billing, and returned calls to three more clients to calmly explain that I can’t make the courts work any quicker, and nor can I speed up responses from their partners’ solicitors, however infuriating the delays might be, and that each time I have to call to reassure them, it’s costing them money. People always seem to be hastier to exit a marriage than they ever were to get into one.

I check my mobile. There are three missed calls from a number I don’t know but whoever it is will have to wait. I’ve got something else to deal with first. Alison.

There’s a knock at my door and I take a deep breath. Alison is never easy.

“Come in.”

Alison Canwick is in her mid-fifties and of the mindset that age in and of itself brings authority, and the fact that she’s been a solicitor for a lot longer than me should supersede the fact that she’s my Junior Associate. If I make partner, she might actually kill me.

“Well done with the ex-Mrs McGregor.” I smile as I wave her to a seat she doesn’t take. “She must be happy with the result.”

“As happy as someone can be when their husband of thirty years has run off into his sunset with a woman the same age as their eldest daughter.”

Just take the praise, I want to say. Alison’s forte is angry wives who want vengeance. I’m not even sure they all do want vengeance but Alison fires them up to go for broke, as she did herself when her own husband left her for another woman ten years ago. Maybe if she stopped fueling rage in others, her own might fade. As it is, the McGregor result was all right, but it wasn’t entirely in her client’s favor. I only complimented her to try to smooth what I’m about to say.

“Well, yes, there is that.” I sit even though she’s still standing. “It’s about your billable hours,” I say, and her face tightens. Here we go. “You’ve been below 80 per cent for two weeks now, and I thought I’d check that you weren’t under any pressures that we don’t –”

“I’m sure that stupid computer program doesn’t always log everything right.”

“Please, Alison, let me finish.” That’s the other thing. Alison is never wrong. Nor can she ever admit weakness. “I’m not pulling you up on it,” I lie, “I just want to make sure you’re okay. You’re normally so good at hitting the targets.” To be fair to her, that last is true. She’s quite competitive and she might not always be on top of things, but she definitely knows we need to be at 80 per cent minimum of our working hours being ones we can charge for.

“I’m fine,” she says, disgruntled. “I’ll make sure it’s better from now on.”

“Any problems, I’m here to help.” The moment the words come out I can see it was the wrong thing to say. Her jaw tightens and her eyes flash with indignation.

“I’ll bear that in mind.” She squeezes the words out through gritted teeth.

A second knock at the door saves us both. Rosemary, my secretary, also in her fifties but someone who oozes warmth and joy at the world, comes in carrying a large vase of roses.

“Look at these!” She takes them straight to the decorative table by the window. They are beautiful, at least twenty blooms.

“For me?” I’m confused. It’s not a special occasion and Robert would never buy me roses. He knows I’d rather have a plant that carries on living instead of something that’s condemned to rot even when it looks so beautiful.

Alison is lingering, curious, and I can’t be bothered telling her to leave.

“This was in with the bouquet,” Rosemary hands me a card. Oh God, Parker Stockwell.

“Once again, thank you. And if you ever feel like that dinner, just call. Parker x”

I groan. While Rosemary looks at me quizzically, Alison is all knowingly snide. ‘Let me guess – Mr Stockwell?” She turns and leaves, somehow managing an air of victory, which irritates me more.

“I wouldn’t mind if he wasn’t such a creep,” I say as I look at the flowers. “Asking me out for dinner. I don’t think he was expecting a no, even though I’m married.”

“I should imagine he doesn’t get many no’s.”

“True. But he’s definitely not my type.” I take a deep breath and cross Alison off my diary schedule for the day. “Perhaps I should set him up with Alison.” I laugh a little at the thought.

“Why does she have to be such hard work?”

“She’s jealous, that’s all it is,” Rosemary says. “You’re younger, more successful, got a lovely family and – ah, that reminds me – your sister called. She said she’s tried your mobile a few times. She wants you to call her back. As soon as possible, she said.”

Phoebe.

The flowers, and Alison, and my busy day and my lack of sleep are suddenly all forgotten. Phoebe’s called. I bring up the missed calls on my phone from the unknown number. A UK number. Phoebe. My sister. She’s back. And the only thing I can think is . . . Why now? Why so close to my birthday?

I’m at the hospital. Ward fifteen. You’d better come.

That’s all she said before hanging up and now that I’m here, I know why. She’s tricked me into coming.

This is a private ward, but it’s a geriatric private ward. I go past a couple of rooms and I can’t help looking in through the half-open doors. In one a man, skin shrunken into his cheekbones, hair wispy thin, is silently descending into whatever comes next. In another, a patient is watching Homes Under the Hammer on a too-loud TV, and in the last one I reach there’s a wheelchair folded against the wall and a woman is reading a magazine to an old woman, perhaps a mother or aunt, who’s listening and carefully sipping a cup of tea. Snapshots of lives. I don’t want to reach the room that holds the snapshot of mine.

“Can I help you?” A nurse makes me jump.

“I’m Emma Averell. I mean Bournett. I’m looking for Phoebe Bournett?”

“Emma? Patricia Bournett’s other daughter?” And there it is. “Have you signed in?” She is loud and irritated and even the woman reading to her mother in the room next to where I’m standing stops and looks around. I step farther away from the doorway.

“I’m sorry, I—”

“Emma. Here.”

Phoebe’s standing farther up the corridor. My older sister.

Her hair’s grown long and hangs free around her shoulders, and in her tunic top, skinny black jeans, and ballet pumps, it’s hard to believe she’s forty-two. But it’s a disguise. There’s nothing carefree about Phoebe, and a closer look at her face tells a different story. Lines are showing in her forehead and around her mouth, no longer gossamer threads, but sinking deeper, the fishhooks of time tugging her skin downward.

“You nearly gave me a heart attack, Phebes. I thought you were sick.”

She studies me for a long moment. “It’s uncanny.”

“What?”

“You look so much like her. Like she was then.”

Why can’t she ever say anything nice? Hey, Emma, I’ve missed you. How’s work? I’m so proud of you. No, she has to go straight for the jugular. As if she resents loving me. Sometimes — now for instance — I’m sure she does.

“I’m nothing like her.”

“You don’t remember.” She shrugs. “But you do look like she did then.” She frowns a little. “I mean, exactly like her. Quite disturbing.”

I refuse to rise to the bait. “I left work because I thought you’d had an accident. If you’re fine then we can catch up later.” In another couple of years probably.

“You wouldn’t have come if I’d told you.”

“This is about her, isn’t it?” She’s right, I wouldn’t have come. And nothing is going to make me stay.

“You mean Mum? She’s not Voldemort. You can use the word.” She nods toward a closed door. “She’s in there. She smashed her head against a mirror in the night.” She pauses as I take an involuntary step backward. “Repeatedly. She’s got a life-threatening cerebral hematoma. I thought you’d want to know.”

I look around and frown. “Where are the guards?”

Phoebe laughs then, a burst of sharp surprise. “She’s a fragile seventy-five-year-old woman with a severe brain bleed who’s barely done more than shuffle and mumble in decades. She’s hardly a flight risk.”

“They should still have someone here.” I would feel safer if there were guards. Someone watching the door. Childhood fears go deep.

“No one cares anymore, Emma.” Phoebe, always so blunt. “About what she did. And it’s a secure unit she lives in, not a prison.”

Sometimes I Google the place. I’ve been doing it more often recently. I don’t even know why; maybe it reassures me to know that she’s still behind several sets of security gates and metaphorical bars. Hartwell House’s Medium Secure Unit. For patients who have been in contact with the criminal justice system and who present serious risk to others . . . In a superhero film it’s the kind of place that would be called “an institution for the criminally insane.”

“Only because she was too mad for prison,” I mutter. “And I care.” Now it’s me who’s vehement. “I can’t believe you made me come here. I’ve always been clear I never want to see her,” I say. “Actually, I can’t believe you’re here.” A thought strikes me. “How are you here?” How the hell would the unit have contacted her? I’m surely the easiest daughter to find. Phoebe doesn’t even live in the country.

She shrugs, the noncommittal mildly annoyed shrug that normally means she’s about to drop a bombshell.

“I’ve been visiting her.”

And there it is. I lean against the wall. I should be at the office. I’ve got a full day. This is something I did not need. “What do you mean visiting her? When?”

“Not often. But over the past few months.”

“Wait.” Last we heard from Phoebe she was living in Spain and working for some property firm. “You’ve been back a few months? And this is the first time you get in touch? For fuck’s sake, Phoebe.” God, she makes me so mad. I’m too busy to be here and she should have known better than to make me come. I turn away, storming back down the corridor. The nurse is by the desk gesturing at the signing-in book. “Emma bloody Averell!” I shout at her as I pass. She can sign me in and out herself.

—————–

I lean against my car, the breeze cooling the anger burning me up inside. Visiting time must be over because people from all walks of life come past me heading to their cars. Some have been here to see their mothers, no doubt. I am the worst daughter in the car park. The worst daughter of the worst mother. But I’m not the worst sister. I can’t even put my feelings into words. This is a proper kicker from Phoebe. Visiting her? And not even telling me she was back?

“Emma!” She’s coming toward me. “Wait!”

“I can’t talk to you right now, Phoebe, I just can’t.” I don’t have the energy for a public car park confrontation with my own sister.

“I knew you’d be like this.”

“Don’t turn this around on me. I’m always here for you. Always. It’s you who stays away.”

“If that makes you feel better, then keep telling yourself that.” It’s her turn to flash an angry look. “And I’ve been there for you plenty of times too. Back before you had all this.” She nods at my new car.

“What happened to the life in Spain? The job?”

“It was my boss’s idea to come. They said it would be healing to spend time with her.”

“But not with me.” I’m cold and she’s defensive.

“I really don’t have to explain my life choices to you, Emma. I also knew you’d be shitty about me seeing her. As it is she was pretty catatonic just like she’s been since then and –”

“I don’t want to know about her. I don’t care about her.” I pull open my car door. I’m nearly forty, too old to be so frightened of the monster. “But you? You hurt my feelings, Phoebe.”

“Oh, like you care about seeing me. Look at you. New car. New house. Flashy life. Always so busy. Saw that piece in the paper about you. Rising legal star. Your feelings aren’t hurt. You just like to be in control of everything.” She looks so bitter and I can’t be bothered to go through our same old arguments again. “Anyway.” She takes a step back.

“She’s in a very bad way,” she says. “Maybe seeing her would do you some good. Give you some closure. Let all that fear out.”

“I’m not afraid.” I throw my bag onto the passenger seat and get in.

“Sure you are,” Phoebe holds the door open momentarily, her dark eyes sharp, a hint of a smile on her lips. “You’re forty in a week or so. You’ve always been afraid of that.”

“Have a safe trip back to Spain, Phoebe,” I say, before pulling the car door closed hard and quickly starting the engine. I can see her in the rearview mirror, watching me drive away, and I’m sure she’s smiling.

How could she bring up my birthday like that?

She’s a bitch. What a bitch.

I keep my eyes forward as I join the queue of traffic crawling toward the exit. Phoebe always said that turning forty didn’t bother her, but she dropped out of a steady job and cut off contact—what intermittent contact we ever had—a while before hers and it transpired she went to a cooking retreat somewhere in Eastern Europe, which was the least Phoebe thing she had ever done, so she can say what she likes, it bothered her too.

She’s been basically absent ever since. To me, anyway. And now, right before my own fortieth birthday, she expects me to suddenly, after all these years, want to spend time with our mother. I can’t get my head around it.

It’s lunchtime and the traffic heading to the roundabout is in a slow stop-start, disgruntled drivers moody in the muggy heat. I turn the air-conditioning up. I need to get myself together.

She smashed her head against the mirror in her room.

As I turn left, the traffic finally picks up. I try to focus on the mountain of work waiting for me at the office and how I’m going to have to lie to everyone about why I was at the hospital, because as far as they know my mother is already dead. I’m going to have to pretend Phoebe had an accident or something, but my mind keeps coming back to her. Our mother. The age-old jokes — What are you scared of? Turning forty. Turning into my mother — all terrifyingly true for me.

Forty has always loomed like a specter in my life—more so for me than for Phoebe, because Phoebe was never called the mad child by our mother. It was me she’d whisper to sometimes, that I’d go mad like her, hissed in my face as her fingers dug too tightly into my arms. That I had the bad blood too. It ran in the family.

Most of what I recall of my childhood with our mother are vague snippets except for that last day. Phoebe remembers more, but she was eight to my five. We were much more like sisters then. Bonded. And then that night came and broke us all up.

It’s the morning I remember the clearest. The last morning. I can feel the rough carpet under my knees as we made a card with a big 40 on the front that Phoebe drew so carefully, and I colored in, and then her taking my hand, holding it firm as we went downstairs.

For a moment I’m back there, lost in the memory, and then a blaring horn pulls me into the present. Work. I need to get to work. But even as I park I can sense the ghost of my mother emerging from the darker corners of my mind, and can almost feel Phoebe’s hand gripping mine, pulling me away from her.

“You look just like her.”

I wish they’d both let bloody go.

—————–

“Funny is it? Wrecking my life?”

I’ve parked and got out of my car back at the office, and for a moment I don’t realize that the angrily spat words are meant for me until I look up and see Miranda Stockwell, all sinewy nerves, blocking my path.

“Ms. Stockwell, if you have anything further you wish to raise, I suggest you contact your own solici—”

“You helped him steal my children from me!” Her face is red, a mess of makeup, as she slams her hands down on the hood of my car. I flinch slightly. Other cars are pulling in around us, so I’m not overly concerned that she’s going to physically attack me, but having just avoided a car park fight with Phoebe, I have no intention of having one here with a client’s ex-wife.

“No, Miranda.” My voice is soft but cool. “I didn’t do that. You did. But things can change. If you get some help, then I’m sure you can reapply for—”

“Oh, now you’re giving me advice?” She sneers. “Everyone thinks I’m crazy. You think I’m crazy.”

She hiccups a laugh. “He did well, didn’t he? Turning me into a madwoman and you all went along with it. Not stable enough to look after my own children. Such utter bullshit.”

I really have had enough of crazy for this morning, and this isn’t any of my business. Not anymore. The case is done.

“I’m sorry.” I’m wary but I do feel for her. I’d always rather parents split custody, but her erratic behavior made that impossible. “Speak to your solicitor if you want to contest it.”

“Maybe I’ll take the law into my own hands.” She turns, stumbling slightly, and I realize that she’s spent her morning drinking. “And we’ll see how you like that, you fucking bitch.”

She shouts the last words back at me as she walks away, and I lean against my car for a moment until she’s rounded the corner. My head throbs. Well, at least the day probably can’t get any worse.

—————–

It’s only later, when I sneak off at the end of the day without going for the ritual Friday drinks at Harry’s Bar, claiming to having to check on Phoebe’s sprained ankle, that I find that the day has indeed got worse. I’m so relieved to be heading home in plenty of time for Will’s bedtime and to have an actual Friday evening with my family, and then I see my new car. If you want to make partner, Emma, you have to look the part.

The first thing that hits me is where the paintwork has been keyed all along one side, the jagged line clear against the blue, and then I see the note under my windshield. A piece of paper from a spiral notepad, the sort I didn’t think people carried around with them anymore, especially not women like Miranda Stockwell, who I’d have thought wrote everything down in her phone or iPad, but who obviously did.

The word is scratched angrily in pen so hard the back of the paper feels like braille.

BITCH

I stare at it and then look around. No sign of her. No sign of any cameras. I take a picture of my car in situ with the scratches on my phone, not that I can prove anything, and then get in and close the door, tossing the note into the cup well. Great. Just great.