Let Me Lie

by Clare Mackintosh

Nineteen months ago, my father took a car – the newest and most expensive – from the forecourt of his own business. He drove the ten minutes from Eastbourne to Beachy Head, where he parked in the car park, left the door unlocked, and walked towards the cliff top. Along the way he collected rocks to weigh himself down. Then, when the tide was at its highest, he threw himself off the cliff. Seven months later, consumed with grief, my mother followed him, with such devastating accuracy the local paper reported it as a ‘copycat suicide’.

‘Mental illness isn’t always obvious,’ Mark says, when I raise it, his voice giving no hint of impatience that the conversation is, once again, circling back to this. ‘The most capable, the most upbeat people can have depression.’

stopped seeing a therapist when I realised all the talking in the world wasn’t going to bring back my parents. You reach a point where the pain you feel inside is simply sadness. And there’s no cure for that.

Mark would say I’m looking at the past through rose-tinted glasses, but I can’t be alone in wanting to only remember the good times. And, rose-tinted or not, my life changed for ever when my parents died.

It was Dad who’d had the tinted glass installed, a few weeks after Granddad retired, and Billy and Dad had moved into the office, a desk on either side of the room. ‘Keeps them on their toes.’ ‘Keeps them from catching you having forty winks, more like.’ Mum could see through the Johnson boys. Always had.

She was dry-eyed, but Murray felt uncomfortably certain crying was on the cards. He wasn’t good with tears. He never knew whether to ignore or acknowledge them, or whether nowadays it was politically correct to offer a neatly pressed handkerchief.

Murray’s relief was short-lived, as Anna Johnson deftly whipped the baby from its carriage and positioned it horizontally across her lap, before pulling up her top and starting to feed. Murray felt himself blushing, which made him redden even more. It was not that he objected to women breastfeeding, it was simply that he never knew where to look while they did it.

‘I’m ill,’ Sarah had said gently, when Alan had taken his seat again, and the kitchen was quiet. ‘It doesn’t mean we can’t talk about mental health issues, or suicide.’

People liked boxes, Murray had concluded. You were ill or you were well. Mad or sane. Sarah’s problem was that she climbed in and out of a box, and people didn’t know how to deal with that.

Sometimes there were months between attempts; on other occasions Sarah would try several times a day to end her life. It would be these times that would prompt another stay at Highfield. Gradually he had learned that what Sarah needed was for him to be calm. To be there. Not judging, not panicking. And so he would come home and hold her, and if she didn’t need to go to hospital – as, more often than not, she didn’t – Murray would bathe her arms and gently wrap gauze across the cuts, and reassure her he wasn’t going anywhere. And only when Sarah was in bed – the lines on her forehead smoothed out by sleep – would Murray put his head in his hands and weep.

She hadn’t wanted to kill herself, she’d told the chaplain; she just didn’t want to be in the world any more. There was a difference, she’d insisted.

‘How’s Sarah?’ There it was. The head, cocked to one side. The ‘thank God it’s you and not me’ look in his eyes. James’s wife was at home, looking after their two children. She wasn’t in a mental health unit for the hundredth time. James wouldn’t be rushing home from work because his wife was kneeling in the kitchen with her head in the oven. Murray checked himself. No one knew what went on behind closed doors.

Besides, uncool though it might have been to admit it, I liked living at home. Not for the clean washing or the home-cooked meals, or my dad’s infamous wine cellar, but because my parents were genuinely good company. They made me laugh. They were interested and interesting. We chatted late into the night about plans, politics, people. We discussed our problems. There were no secrets. Or so they pretended.

From the kitchen, Chris Evans laughed at his own joke. ‘Tosser. Play some music.’ Murray’s soul lifted. If Sarah was swearing at radio presenters, she was listening to what they were saying. Listening meant stepping out of her own world into someone else’s. Something she hadn’t been doing yesterday, or the day before that.

‘Nice, aren’t they?’ He nodded towards the iPhone stand. ‘Five-point-five-inch screen, wireless charging, OLED display, fully waterproof.’ Murray was momentarily distracted by the only feature that mattered to someone who had twice let his – far less expensive, but nevertheless vital – phone fall out of his back pocket into the loo.