When I woke up again, the room was empty and the hypnotist’s visit seemed like a dream.

Chapter 23

Love! Give me chocolate any day!

—Ellen’s godmother Pip

The suffragettes didn’t starve themselves for the vote

so that you girls could starve yourselves for a man.

—Ellen’s godmother Mel

Oh Lord, what superficial nonsense she’d been spouting: Close the door. Close it forever.

For heaven’s sake, the woman had broken into their house in the middle of the night and watched them sleep. She was probably schizophrenic or bipolar or who knew what. She probably needed anti-psychotic medication combined with intensive ongoing therapy. Ellen’s sappy little comments were like giving her vitamins when she needed surgery.

Also, closing the door wasn’t quite the right metaphor. You didn’t close the door on your memories. That was encouraging repression! Something to do with water might have been better. Cleanse yourself … oh, whatever.

Ellen yawned hugely without bothering to put her hand over her mouth. She was driving back from the hospital. There wasn’t as much traffic as usual on the roads; people were staying home because of the dust storm. It was still windy, although not as bad as the previous night. The sky was heavy with gloomy clouds, and the entire city was covered in a fine layer of orange dust. Everything looked grimy. She drove by an empty outdoor café and saw a woman wearing a hospital mask and mopping the floor. A mother hurried from her car carrying a toddler with a sheet draped over its head, like one of Michael Jackson’s children. Then a young man wearing shorts and a T-shirt jogged by, as if he’d jogged straight through from another day, a sunny, blue-skied clean and ordinary day.

Why were you even talking to her? That’s what everyone would say. You must be crazier than her! Did you take her chocolates and flowers? A get-well card?

She looked at her watch. It was noon. She thought back to early that morning: It seemed like days had passed since then, not hours.

When it became obvious that Jack was well enough to move around, Patrick had decided to drive him to the hospital. It was clear to Ellen that he couldn’t bear to sit and wait for an ambulance, he needed to be moving, taking action, and most important of all, he needed to be far away from Saskia. Ellen could sense the heat of his simmering fury emanating from his body like a low-grade fever. She offered to stay at home and wait for Saskia’s ambulance. “You can’t stay with her,” Patrick had said, but Ellen pointed out that as she was barely conscious (breathing shallowly and obviously in a great deal of pain), she wasn’t a danger to anyone, and besides, they could hardly just leave her there alone, with a note pinned to the door for the paramedics. Patrick hadn’t been in the mood for lighthearted remarks of that nature. Let’s call the police, he’d said, and hand her over. But Ellen had convinced him to concentrate on Jack.

When the ambulance arrived, the paramedics told Ellen they were taking Saskia to Mona Vale Hospital and not to try to follow them but to take her time driving there, and that Saskia was in good hands. They seemed to take it for granted that Ellen would also be coming. So she got dressed and drove to the hospital and then sat for hours in a crowded waiting room, reading trashy magazines without absorbing a single word, surrounded by wheezing asthmatics who had been affected by the dust storm. Finally, a nurse told her that she could see Saskia for a few minutes.

In the meantime she’d spoken to Patrick once on his mobile. He’d taken Jack to a private hospital in Manly and they were waiting for an X ray on his arm. He hadn’t even asked about Saskia, and he obviously assumed that Ellen was still at home, because he told her to try to get some sleep.

How would he react when he heard she’d actually been at the hospital, and that she’d talked to Saskia? Would he see it as a betrayal? Was it a betrayal?

The thing was, talking to Saskia hadn’t just felt like the right thing to do, it felt somehow imperative, for both of them.

Ellen thought about the despair on Saskia’s face as she lay in that narrow hospital bed. She seemed to Ellen like someone who had lost everything in a natural disaster, someone who was trying to grapple with the fact that the entire framework of her life no longer existed.

Had she really hit “rock bottom”? Perhaps that despair Ellen thought she saw was just the pain (which the nurse had said would be considerable) and that once she was back on her feet, she’d be back to her old ways.

Her phone rang on the passenger seat beside her and she saw that it was Patrick calling. He must be home with Jack by now and was wondering where she was. She was only a few minutes away, so she didn’t bother pulling over to answer.

There was no question that this would mark a turning point for him. Now that Jack had been hurt he would definitely want to get the police involved. If Ellen tried telling him that she thought Saskia may have reached her own turning point, he probably wouldn’t believe her. She remembered him crawling across the bed in that eerie dawn light, his face ugly with fear and fury.

If she was wrong, if Saskia continued to stalk them, then Patrick’s hatred for her was gradually going to destroy him. It was like acid, corroding him from the inside. She felt that it had already given his personality sharp edges. Most of the time those edges were hidden by the identity he liked to show the world: the easygoing, straightforward Aussie bloke. But over the last few months, as she’d got to know him, to truly know him, as they both moved beyond the infatuation stage, she’d seen the edges reveal themselves. The bitterness. The mistrustfulness. The anxiety. And he’d already suffered so much grief in his life before he even met Saskia.

She wondered what sort of person Patrick would have been if Colleen had lived. They probably would have had more children after Jack. Patrick would have been a typical dad, involved with the school, leaving the domestic decisions to his wife—a simpler, sweeter person. A happier person.

And the tiny baby who had waved at them yesterday would never have existed.

Well, whatever. A foolish and pointless line of thought.

She yawned again. She was not only exhausted but starving: that urgent, ravenous hunger she’d never experienced before pregnancy. When she got home, she wanted to climb into bed with a huge plate of toast and a cup of tea, and then she wanted to pull the covers up and fall straight into a deep, dreamless sleep. She would tell Patrick she was too tired to talk, too tired to talk about anything—the past, the future, the present.