Chapter Two

       March

      Robyn,

      I hate to do this on Facebook, but I haven’t got your number and the email address I tried doesn’t work any more. I’ve got some really bad news: my mum died suddenly on Tuesday. She was fine, went out for a curry with Dad, then came home and had a heart attack. I can’t believe it. I know what people mean now when they say, ‘I keep expecting her to walk through the door.’

      I’ve never seen my dad like this. I know this won’t have rocked his faith in the long run, but he’s struggling. I think he realizes it’s different when it happens to you, you know?

      Personally, I am enraged: I mean, fifty-nine? WTF. Thirty years of service and that’s how he repays my dad? If one more person tells me he works in mysterious ways, I’ll punch them. I remember you saying that to me once, after your mum died. I remember exactly where we were, too – down the cricket ground. I probably gave you a cuddle, then tried to slip my hand up your top … God, I’m sorry, Robbie. Going through all that at sixteen, with only a sixteen-year-old me to talk to. I had no idea. Now I do.

      The first person I thought of calling was you, because I knew you’d understand but, like I say, I had no number, so here I am telling about the death of my mother on f**ing Facebook!

      The funeral’s a week tomorrow (1 April) at 3 p.m. at St Bart’s, Kilterdale obviously. (Dad says he’s giving it, but I’ll believe that when I see it. He’s a mess.) I’d love you to be there. I know Mum would too. She was talking about you just days before she died, about that time we all went on a barge holiday to the Norfolk Broads and she had one too many Dubonnet and lemonades and fell in. Hey, she wasn’t a typical vicar’s wife, was she?

      Anyway, my number’s below. Hopefully see you there.

      Hope you’re well, darl X love Joe X

      I smiled as the memory floodgates opened … The barge holiday and the night of Marion’s ‘Dubonnet Splash’. My God, I’d completely forgotten about all that. Joe and I had only been seeing one another a month and were still in the unhealthily obsessed stage when, against their better judgement, Marion and the Reverend Clifford Sawyer (Joe’s dad) decided to take us with them. A rev he may have been, but Cliff loved a tipple, as did Marion, and a major plus point of a barge holiday, they soon found, was the number of pub stops one could make along the way.

      We’d all been in the pub this one afternoon, but Joe and I had offered to go back to the barge to make a start on the carbonara for tea. But we hadn’t made a start on tea, we’d just made out. Marion had come back tipsy and, seeing us suckered against one another (thank God, fully clothed), surrounded by chopped raw bacon, because that’s as far as we had got, she’d dashed off in desperation for fish and chips, falling, as she did, in between the canal bank and the boat. She’d done this Carry On-style dramatic scream. Oh, how we’d laughed …

      ‘Robyn, if you could tear yourself away from Facebook and whatever is so funny just for a second, then perhaps you could fill us in on last night? By all accounts, it was an eventful one?’ (It was only then that I realised, I was still laughing sixteen years later.)

      I’d got Joe’s Facebook message on the night shift. By now – 8 a.m. at handover – I could think of nothing else. I knew it off by heart. I’d read it so many times.

      I turned away from my computer to find the whole office waiting for me to start and Jeremy – our team Manager, perched on the edge of a desk, wearing one of his ‘five for a tenner’ shirts.

      ‘Yes, it was eventful,’ I stuttered. ‘Really, really busy actually.’

      In fact, there must have been something in the planets – something in the full moon, which hung like a mint imperial over south London – because, as well as receiving Joe’s Facebook message, the first contact I’d had from him in five years, it had been one of the busiest night shifts I’d ever done. Everyone was going mad.

      John Urwin – one of Kingsbridge Mental Health Trust’s most notorious clients – had been arrested after being caught having sex in Burgess Park.

      ‘And all you need to know about that,’ I said, when I finally got myself together enough to join in handover ‘is that he was butt naked when arrested but still wearing his Dennis the Menace wig, and I think you have to love John for that.’

      Kaye, Parv and Leon, also CPNs (community psychiatric nurses), had an affectionate giggle, but Jeremy was not amused. ‘If you could just stick to what actually happened, Robyn.’

      And so I told them how John was a little ‘agitated’ when I arrived at Walworth Police Station. (This was a distinct downplay of events. I’d been able to hear him shouting as soon as I got there.)

      ‘WHY CAN’T A MAN HAVE SEX WITH HIS GIRLFRIEND IF HE WANTS TO? IT’S AN ABUSE OF MY HUMAN RIGHTS, DOCTOR! MY HUMAN RIGHTS!’

      But Dr Manoor and I had managed to calm him down. Dr Manoor has been John’s psychiatrist for years, and thankfully knows him as well as I do.

      John is perhaps one of the more extreme clients I work with (although there’s not really such a thing as ‘extreme’ in this job) and institutionalized now. I find people like him the absolute saddest. It’s as if they had their breakdown aged 18 and stayed that age – arrested development. John has been sectioned more times than most people have had hot dinners. Still, if you talked to John when he was well, he talked a lot of sense. He was a bright man – he could tell you every single species of butterfly – and he was in a relationship.

      Because the night shift had been so full on, handover ran over. As well as John Urwin baring all in Burgess Park, Levi Holden was admitted with an overdose. I really don’t mean to sound glib when I say this happens quite often.

      Of the thirty people on my caseload, Levi is probably my favourite: six feet of utter gorgeousness for a start. He’s also hilarious, when he’s not suicidal. And even when he is suicidal, he’s probably funnier than the average person. He has a little job washing cars in the Dulwich Sainsbury’s car park. The other day, he was making me laugh so much,