Love Me, Love Me Not: An addictive psychological suspense with a twist you won’t see coming. Katherine Debona
more and more time alone. A haphazard picture of my grief, a reminder that, no matter how hard I tried, I would always be a little strange, a little out of place.
My time had been spent hibernating, either at work or in the rancid pit that was my new abode. A soulless studio at the end of a corridor where all the doors looked the same. Two rooms within a steel structure where only a handful of lights were ever turned on at night because no one really lived there. They were investment properties owned by people with more money than they knew what to do with. If I opened the bathroom window wide and leant right out I could just about see the Thames, boat lights winking in the distance.
The first time I cut myself was by accident. I was trying to recreate one of my father’s terrariums and dropped the glass dome, shattering it against the workbench in his shed. At first the pain didn’t register and I watched my sliced flesh as it slowly pooled with red. Then the sharp sting of recognition as air hit the inside of my arm, cold on warm making me draw in breath, then sink to the earthy floor.
The second time was deliberate. A way to control my feelings. To decide when and where the pain would occur. Not when someone pushed me over in the playground or took my bag and dropped it into an icy puddle. This was my pain to bear. My blood to spill.
It was a coping mechanism, a way to block out all the hurt and anger, to channel it into a single, sharp point that I would run over my skin, creating patterns with red. Replacing the voices in my mind that told me I wasn’t worthy, letting them out of my veins, spilling them to the ground below.
Over the years I have read all sorts of theories about self-harm. A mixture of benign and idiotic for the most part, but one study nearly came close to giving me the answer I craved.
In 2013, a doctor named Franklin carried out an experiment that showed most people felt better after experiencing pain and how, over time, self-harm could become addictive because of the association of relief with pain. The high after the low. It fascinated me, not because of any kind of revelation about my scars; it was more that any one of us could learn to enjoy pain. Anyone at all.
After Patrick told me to leave I had no way of lessening the ache inside that would not leave me be. No matter the hours I worked, the bottles of gin I emptied or the amount of times I opened my skin. Until I became nothing more than a pretence. A memory of the person I wanted to be, thought I could become. Someone with a life, a love, a purpose.
For it felt as if each and every person who found it in their hearts to love me was slowly slipping away and I could not escape the voice that told me it was all my own doing. It felt as if every time I got close to someone, my demons would snatch them back, and now they had set their sights on my beloved grandfather. The man who’d helped raise me, who’d taught me how to ignore the darkness when it cried out in my mind.
I looked back towards the bed where Gramps was sleeping. My substitute father, the only man who truly knew me and loved me just the same, was sick.
Dark splotches of bruise on one side of his restful face. There was a sling holding a broken collarbone in place and bandages wrapped around a sprained wrist. But the doctor had told me the real damage was hidden beneath his skull. That there was an illness lurking within the synapses of his brain which we hadn’t been able to see. Or was it that we didn’t want to see? Had we allowed his stubborn refusal to ask for help to blind us to his illness?
Had I been too caught up in my own distress to realise he was in need as well?
A hand on my arm made me stop the pacing I was unaware of. A hand I knew was now more accustomed to touching someone else.
‘What are you doing here, Elle?’ I couldn’t bring myself to look at her, didn’t want to see the happiness that should have been mine.
‘The care home still have Patrick’s number on file. When they couldn’t reach you…’
‘Of course.’ So many things left unfinished. So many things I ran from, had been hiding from, until fate intervened and threw us back together once more.
‘I’m so sorry. I know how much Gramps means to you.’
‘Do you?’ At this I spun round with every intention of striking out, of making her feel some semblance of the pain she had caused me. Of smashing her head against the wall, plunging my hand into her chest and ripping out her still-beating heart. Of making her understand what it was that she had done to me, and how she had taken away my belief that I too deserved to be happy.
Instead all I could do was stare at her, at the sorrow on her incredible face, and curse myself for wondering what the matter was.
‘I never meant to hurt you,’ she said, taking a step closer, then another, watching to see how I would respond. When I didn’t move she pulled me into a hug I didn’t know I wanted until it happened. Let me wet her with my tears, my remorse, my absolute bewilderment at the power she had over me. ‘You’re my best friend, the sister I never had, and I miss you.’
Some people seem to be blessed, others cursed, by an invisible hand I didn’t know how to understand or appease. For why shouldn’t I have a share of life’s elusive wonders? Why did she get to have it all?
‘I want to help,’ she said as she released me, searching my eyes for an inch of forgiveness. ‘What does Gramps need? What do you need?’
I didn’t know. I didn’t know what to do with all the new information. With Gramps being debilitated by an illness no one paid any attention to. With my mother nowhere in sight, choosing as always to bury the problem under a mountain of ignorance. With Elle standing so close I could feel the warmth of her skin. With her offer of help, of returning to my life, catapulting any resolve I’d had to stay away far beyond my reach.
She was always so impossible to resist and I hated myself because of it.
‘I’m still mad at you,’ I said, walking away as a smile formed on her lips.
Going out into the hospital courtyard I sat on a bench next to a whitewashed wall covered with ivy, the twisting tendrils reaching ever outward, seeking new places to stretch and grow. It made me think of the story about Tristan and Isolde. How King Mark buried them in separate graves so that even in death they couldn’t be together. Except ivy vines grew from their graves to meet and entwine. Proof that nothing can break true love’s bond.
‘Why didn’t you return my calls?’ Elle sat beside me and I noticed her looking at the scratches on my arms. Marks I could have easily explained away as a gardening accident, except I hadn’t been anywhere near a garden for months. No, those marks were my way of feeling something, anything, other than wretched. Wretched because he left. Wretched because I led him straight to her. Wretched because I thought they both loved me the most.
‘Why do you think?’
Elle took out a packet of cigarettes. Lit one then crossed her legs as she blew smoke into the sky. The scent of tobacco mixed with a sweet perfume that once upon a time I had inhaled every day. So many years, so much time spent with one person, all tossed aside in favour of another.
‘Nothing happened between us that night, Jane. Nothing happened until after you had broken up.’
‘I know.’ I knew because Patrick told me. In a letter no less, left by the side of the bed for me to find when I woke next morning. Telling me too much had changed, that the life we were living wasn’t the one he wanted. That he didn’t think he could forgive me for what I had done. That he would give me until the end of the week to move out.
As if he was completely innocent. Because there was no denying the inevitable. The irresistibility of something, someone, so precious.
The first year of university I had missed her with such ferocity it terrified me. I would lie awake, listening to other students revelling in their freedom, wishing I could go back to the home I had spent the past decade trying to escape. I wrote her letters that I never sent, afraid she would laugh at my neediness, my immaturity, my intrinsic desire to have her in my life.
‘Are you okay?’ She was looking again at my arms. No doubt