Guilt: The Sunday Times best selling psychological thriller that you need to read in 2018

‘Can’t I see Zara?’ I asked.

‘Not right now.’

The panic that had been simmering inside me for hours became volcanic. ‘Why not?’ I asked.

‘A team of doctors are assessing her at the moment.’

A team of doctors assessing my sister who’s slit her wrists. A team of doctors assessing my sister, who was laughing and joking with me on the phone the previous evening. Just under twenty-four hours ago. The nurse and I walked past cubicles containing people in distress. A man lying on his back with a protruding stomach, his mouth covered by an oxygen mask. A young child giving a bloodcurdling scream. A woman with a black eye and a bloodied nose.

Through A&E.

Right and right again. Along a corridor with windows to a small garden with pebbles, ferns, and rubbery plants. The pink nurse stopped by a soap dispenser at the entrance to Critical Care. I washed my hands with something that looked like cuckoo spit. And then finally she led me to a small seated area where my mother was waiting.

My mother, but not my mother. A woman wearing a facial expression that my mother never wears. She stood up. She walked towards me. She held me against her. Holding me so tight as if she wanted to engulf me. She felt like my mother. She smelt like my mother. Of love. Of despair.

Deborah Cunningham of Heathfield Close, Tidebury, Lancs.

Heathfield Close, an oxbow lake of modern housing, at the right end of town. Wide pavements. Leafy streets. Divorced from my father when we were toddlers. He moved to the States. We never saw him again. Mother working her socks off as a teacher, to support us. Always responsible for us alone.

‘How is she?’ I ask.

‘No news yet.’

‘Can I get you anything? Tea, coffee, anything?’ the nurse asks.

‘My daughter back,’ Mother said.

‘We’re doing our best.’

The nurse evaporated, I don’t know where. Mother turned on the small TV mounted on the wall in the corner. But I did not watch it, figures just moved about on the screen in front of me, and I thought of you, Zara. Of holding you, touching you. Asking you why you had done this again after so much help, so much therapy. You always said you cut to feel better. But was it true? Or did you really want to kill yourself?

The previous time this happened, so many years ago, you denied that suicide was your motive. But it is hard for someone who doesn’t understand cutting to really grasp the significance of its euphoria.

This time, the second time, somehow, I don’t know how, Mother and I managed to contain ourselves, as hours and hours passed. I felt as if I was sitting in a vacuum. My life had stopped and I would only feel better if I got you back. At last a doctor was walking towards us, stethoscope around his neck. We did not stand up to greet him or walk towards him. We did not have the strength. We sat and watched him approach, transfixed, waiting for news. He stood in front of us, a half smile in his ice-blue eyes.

‘Zara is stable. She has regained consciousness. All the neurological tests are positive.’

Stable. Positive. Neurological. Words tumbled in my head and for the first time in hours I stopped having to concentrate to breathe.

My stomach tightens with worry. What are you doing now, Zara? Why have you been gone so long?

You finally return to my flat after your trip to Tesco, over an hour later, looking flustered.

‘What’s the matter?’ I ask, unable to disguise the anxiety in my tone, as you waltz through the door, placing two microwaveable boxes of chicken tikka masala on the kitchen table and sighing noisily. You are wearing your Doc Marten boots and a floral skirt with a creamy background that always looks a bit grubby. I do not like your nasal piercing. I do not like the way you have sliced into your hair, just on one side, above your ear, with a razor. I don’t think it suits a woman of your age.

‘I’ve met someone,’ you say.

The word someone hovers in the air. A word of importance. You are always meeting people, laughing with them, talking to them, dating them. But never someone. Not until now.

‘Someone?’ I ask.

‘Yes. Sebastian Templeton. I met him in Tesco. Just now!’ You are trying to look nonchalant, but not managing. ‘He’s moving to Bristol from London. He’s got an interview at your firm.’ A deep, overegged sigh. ‘He’s really handsome.’

All your boyfriends are handsome. Nothing unusual about that. Not that their looks help them keep your attention. None of them ever last more than a few months.

‘He has a lovely voice,’ you continue.

‘A posh southerner perhaps?’ I ask.

‘Give me a chance to find out where he comes from. All I know so far is that his eyes are electric.’

Instead of eating the chicken tikka ready meal you have just bought, you inform me that you are going out to a restaurant with him. One of the expensive ones on the front. A restaurant that reeks of interior design. Plated food, pretty enough to be used as wallpaper. Edible flowers. Colour coordinated. You spruce yourself up by putting on an extra layer of make-up, run your fingers through your already carefully tousled hair, and leave.

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Sebastian (#ulink_37d2a0af-bf2b-53fb-9ca6-51ec1627d2a5)

Jude, I was sitting on the bench outside Tesco when I first saw Zara. She walked past with a jaunty step like you used to have; shiny-eyed, as if she was about to do something far more interesting than visit Tesco. Feeling sociable after the E I had taken, I followed her in. With her tousled hair and creamy skin, she reminds me of you. There is an edginess about her that makes me feel invigorated, as if, after all my problems, one day I will feel alive again. One day my life will work out.

‘Have you eaten here before?’ Zara asks, as I sit opposite her at Chez Luigi’s.

‘Once or twice, on special occasions,’ I reply.

‘So being here with me is special?’ she asks, flicking her hair from her face. ‘I bet you say that to all the girls.’

‘I don’t usually pick people up in supermarkets.’

‘Neither do I,’ she replies.

‘When I met you in the supermarket, you said you were a twin,’ I remind her. ‘Are you identical?’

‘No.’ She pouts a little. ‘I can assure you that I am one hundred per cent individual.’

Zara Cunningham. Not defined by being a twin. Zany. Interesting. Button nose. Perfect cheekbones. So spontaneous, so free flowing. Someone I so want to fuck.

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Miranda (#ulink_184bd127-1e57-5310-9e3f-37fde980f556)

The chicken tikka meal you brought back from Tesco tastes weird: a mix of canned tomatoes, anchovy paste, ground coriander and additives. After I have forced myself to finish it, I download the latest series of Game of Thrones from Amazon – my latest addiction. This evening, its strange world engulfs me as usual, then spews me out, as my favourite character dies. She is decapitated, which distresses me. There is something about decapitation that seems so much more brutal than other sudden deaths.

I am contemplating why this is when you float through the front door at midnight humming to yourself, looking ethereal and strange. You seem overfriendly, elated, holding me against you and hugging me before you go to bed, as if I am long lost, and you haven’t seen me for years, not just a few hours.

And the next morning, over orange juice and Dorset Cereal, your Sebastian Templeton monologue starts.

Sebastian. Sebastian. Sebastian. A eulogy to a modern-day god.

‘He’s from Bristol,’ you say as we sit cramped together at our veneer table. ‘Attended Bristol Grammar School and then went to Cambridge to study maths. Stellar CV. Like yours. His parents are doctors. His dad’s a consultant in obs and gynae. His mother’s in community medicine. A lot of medical women do that. Go into community medicine because it’s more nine to five, easier if you have children, or so Sebastian says.’ Silence for a second as you take a spoonful of muesli and sip your orange juice. ‘He’s so empathetic because he’s so close to his mother.’