The Voices Read Online Free PDF Page B

got back into bed, Laura turned over and said, ‘Is she all right?’
    ‘Yes. She’s fine.’
    ‘Why did you get up? Did you hear something else?’
    ‘No,’ Christopher yawned. ‘I just thought I’d check, that’s all.’ He shifted position so that his wife could lay her head on his chest. ‘Goodnight,’ he whispered.

Early May 1976
    ‘I won’t be long, love,’ said Christopher. ‘A couple of hours, maybe.’
    ‘Where are you going?’ Laura asked. She was perched on a high stool by the kettle.
    ‘Only the village. Le Cellier du Midi – lunch with Henry. I did say . . .’
    ‘Has he got you some work?’
    ‘I don’t know. He mentioned a new Peter Cushing film on the phone. We’ll see.’
    Christopher lifted a pale linen jacket off a coat hook and rifled through the contents of a drawer. His movements were abrupt and hurried.
    ‘Next one down,’ said Laura.
    ‘Right.’ Christopher followed his wife’s advice and there were the car keys he had been looking for. He picked them up and went over to his wife, loose change jangling in his trouser pockets. ‘Thanks.’ He gave her a perfunctory kiss on the forehead, pulled on his jacket, and said, ‘See you later.’
    Laura listened to his footsteps receding down the hallway, the loud crash of the slammed front door. The house shook and when the reverberation faded the ensuing silence filled her with cold dread. Suddenly, she felt entombed. Her heart thumped in her chest and she struggled to draw air into her lungs. She gripped the edge of the worktop and waited. ‘It’s OK,’ she said out loud. ‘Nothing’s going to happen.’ Gradually, the panic subsided and she began to feel normal again.
    Laura made herself a camomile tea. Good for the nerves. She took a tin of biscuits down from a shelf and prised the lid off with a butter knife. The chocolate digestives and bourbons were gone. She had eaten them the day before. It wasn’t that she had been hungry, but rather that she had found the sweetness of the chocolate comforting. She grabbed a handful of shortbread cookies and pushed the tin away.
    What was happening to her?
    She had consulted her doctor – a jolly, avuncular type with half-moon spectacles and a suspiciously florid complexion – earlier in the year, and he had said that it was common for women to get emotional after childbirth. Even as he was saying these words, she was thinking, but that was fourteen months ago now. He mumbled something about chemical imbalances and appeared uncomfortablewhen she tried to articulate her feelings. He interrupted her tentative disclosures with bland reassurances. His heedless manner made her feel stupid, as though she was making a fuss about nothing. She felt like a child, sitting with her knees pressed together and her feet wide apart. He surprised her at the end of the consultation by scribbling out a prescription. ‘To be taken three times a day,’ he said, without looking up. ‘You may feel a little drowsy, so be careful when you’re driving.’
    The pills made her feel less tense and agitated, but when she was alone, she still felt panicky for no good reason, and she still cried without knowing why. She was unable to talk to her husband about what she was going through. Christopher was a sympathetic man; she knew that he would be concerned and try his best to help her, but she doubted that he could. Indeed, she doubted that anyone possessed the means of restoring her former happiness and self-confidence – except perhaps herself. She was hoping for an epiphany, after which everything would click back into place.
    Sometimes, she felt as though she was no longer one person, but two. There was the Laura who looked after Faye and went about her daily routine, and then there was another Laura who critically observed the first. She was familiar with the term schizophrenia and knew thatthe condition had something to do with split personalities, but she was sure that she wasn’t going mad. At