‘It’s not your fault,’ Claudette says, dabbing at the baby’s perspiring brow with a damp washcloth. ‘How could anyone dress a child in that many layers in this climate?’
‘I can’t believe I didn’t check!’ Maeve cries. ‘I changed her nappy but I must have been on autopilot because everything I took off I just put back on! This just shows, doesn’t it, that I’m not cut out for this, that—’
‘It’s OK,’ Claudette says, laying a hand on her arm. ‘She’s OK.’
And she is. The child, Zhilan, she is called, which means ‘iris orchid’ – Maeve looked it up – sits on Claudette’s knee, looking first at Claudette and then at Maeve, her gaze one of startled astonishment, her mouth parted in a tiny, round O. What am I doing, she seemed to be saying, in a bathroom with you, and why was I wearing all those clothes?
Maeve looks at her. She looks and looks. If she was a liquid, she would drink her; if she was a gas, she would breathe her in; if she were a pill, she would down her, a dress, she would wear her, a plate, she would lick her clean. Her hands gripping the hem of her vest, her toes flexed in mid-air, the place at her temples where the black hair crowds in. Her eyelids are the shape of a bird’s wing, her ribcage delicate branches. Her realness, her corporeality, the way her lungs go in and out, the way she turns her head to look around takes Maeve’s breath away. She cannot believe she is here, cannot believe she is hers.
‘She might,’ Claudette says, ‘be ready for that bottle now. What do you think?’
Maeve sits down. She makes herself ready, and when Claudette stands, Maeve opens her arms to take the child.
A Jagged, Dangerous Mass of Ice
Ari, Suffolk, 2010
‘Just a moment,’ the counsellor cried, and hurried to cram the remains of his lunchtime sandwich into his mouth, sweep his desk for tell-tale crumbs, crumple the greaseproof wrapper in his fist and drop it into the bin. ‘I won’t be a minute.’ He grabbed the file from his in-tray, swallowing an unchewed hunk of hummus-clogged bread, and flipped open the cover.
Ari Lefevre Lindstrom Wells Sullivan, he saw. He had to read it twice. Aged 16. He let his eye travel down the page as he took a swig from his water-bottle. Lives in Ireland, mother, stepfather, attended this school for a year, subjects taken, blah, blah. But the counsellor’s eye was caught by one particular detail: Previous schools attended – none. He sighed and his head gave a single shake. He took a dim view of home-schooling. He turned his swivel chair and stood up.
A child – he opined, to an audience comprising his bookshelf, a watercolour of a Scandinavian lake, a Newton’s cradle, his effigy of a Yoruba deity, picked up a long time ago on a gap-year placement – is a social being. He or she requires, needs, nay, craves the company and instruction of his or her peer group.
The counsellor crossed the room, pausing only to light a candle on the mantelpiece. He had a handle on the session to come now. He felt inspiration, confidence, assurance surge through him. He loved this job, he loved it. He could help this Ari Whatever Hatchback Peugeot Whatever he was called, he knew he could. He could picture the child who would be waiting beyond the door, in all probability nervously, fearfully, although perhaps covering these emotions with the rough façade of teenage bravura. Ireland, the file had said, so the counsellor imagined the offspring of some Celtic hippie types. Auburn dreadlocks, a whispery Irish inflection, dressed in hand-felt and hemp, that particular brand of drivelly, directionless, formless home-schooling written all over him. Couldn’t read until he was eleven, could barely count, even now. He, the counsellor, would bring him out of himself, give him that direction, inspire him to exert himself in more mainstream educational channels, show him that there are other ways to live, besides weaving one’s own clothes, straining one’s own cheese, splitting one’s own logs.
The counsellor flung open the door to welcome this waif, this refugee, this victim of over-parenting.
He beheld a figure in dark clothes seated in the armchair outside his office. One foot balanced on the opposite knee, a newspaper folded on his lap, where a crossword was being filled in with a gold fountain pen. Polished leather ankle boots, navy sweater, narrow trousers and the kind of angular-framed tortoiseshell glasses usually worn by architects or web designers, black curly hair worn neither short nor long. The counsellor thought: This cannot be him. He thought: This must be someone else. A parent? No, too young. An older sibling of one of the pupils?
‘Oh,’ the counsellor said. ‘I was waiting for Ari …’ he floundered ‘… Ari … Le-something … um …’
The person nodded. Really, it was a quite extraordinary outfit – it made him look as though he’d stepped straight out of the pages of a French novel; he ought to be wearing a beret and smoking a Gauloises and expounding the theory of existentialism in a café on the Left Bank. Extraordinary, especially because most of the pupils at the school preferred to dress like off-duty rap stars, in ridiculously capacious jeans, sleeveless vests and baseball caps worn backwards. The person stood, recapped his fountain pen, laid a jacket over his arm and extended his hand. He was tall, this boy, with the kind of rangy, muscular thinness found in greyhounds.
The counsellor took the outstretched hand, bemused, trying to remember if a teenager had ever offered to shake hands with him before. Then he recalled himself to his script. ‘Ari,’ he said. ‘Welcome.’
‘It’s Ari.’
‘Excuse me?’
‘You said Ari, with the emphasis on the second syllable. It’s Ari.’ The boy smiled. ‘Inflection on the first.’
The counsellor let go of his hand and motioned him inside. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Well, thank you for clearing that up.’
He felt better when seated behind his desk, when he had the file open before him, when he had the boy situated on the couch, which was sagging and enveloping, designed to make his subjects relax.
But Ari wasn’t in it for long. He was up again, almost immediately, his legs unfolding beneath him, to examine the Yoruba figure, the Scandinavian lake, to run his eyes over the bookshelves.
‘So, tell me,’ the counsellor began, ‘how are you finding the school? You’ve been here – how long? A year?’
‘An academic year,’ Ari replied, without breaking off from his examination of a Moroccan bowl. ‘Just under.’
The fountain pen was gripped in his left hand, the counsellor noticed, where the boy clicked the lid on and off, on and off. Compulsive tics? he wrote on his notepad.
‘And before that you were home-schooled?’
‘I was.’
‘By your parents?’
‘My mother.’
‘And your mother is …’
The boy turned an expressionless stare towards him.
‘A teacher?’ the counsellor hazarded.
Ari shook his head and seemed to be suppressing a smile.
‘So, help me paint a picture of your home life. It’s you, your mother, and …’ here, he checked the file ‘… three siblings?’
‘Two.’
‘And they are – how old?’
‘Six and one.’
‘Do they attend school?’
‘No.’
‘Whose decision was it for you to come to school here?’
Ari picked up and put down the Yoruba deity. He shrugged. ‘Mine. And Daniel’s.’
‘And Daniel would be …’ The counsellor floundered through the file.
‘My stepfather,’ Ari supplied.
The counsellor put down his pen and placed his hands on the desk. ‘Ari,’ he said, in a lower voice, ‘why don’t you come and sit? Take a seat. Now, tell me, what kind of a relationship do you have with your real father?’
Ari rolled his eyes. He sat, crossed one leg over the other, laid the newspaper on the floor beside him. ‘Are these standard questions? Do you ask everybody this? “Help me paint a picture of your home life”,‘ he repeated, and the counsellor was almost glad to hear something vaguely teenage come out of his mouth, so unnervingly mature
did he appear. ‘“What kind of a relationship do you have with your father?”’ Ari gave a scoffing exhale and looked round with an expression of barely veiled disgust. ‘Is this the kind of asinine nonsense they teach you at counsellor school?’
The counsellor laced his fingers together, realising, with a dismaying jolt, that he had no idea what ‘asinine’ meant. ‘I’m sensing a reluctance in you, Ari, a discomfort at being in this room.’
‘Well, then, your senses are finely tuned. I should be in double history now, preparing for my imminent and extremely important exams instead of in here answering simplistic questions about my family.’
The counsellor glanced down at the file, to glean some kind of insight into this boy. Far and away the most intelligent pupil I have ever taught, he sees, in a colleague’s handwriting.
‘Just to get back on track,’ the counsellor said, ‘you haven’t lived with your father—’
‘Since I was four,’ Ari said quickly, too quickly, the words running into each other. ‘I don’t see him and that’s fine. He works incredibly hard and he’s very committed to what he does. I have what you might call a father-figure in my stepfather: I’ve lived with him since I was six. I accept the way things are. It’s always been like that and it’s really no problem at all, so if you’re trying to find a route to a source of trauma or stress in my life, I suggest you direct your attention elsewhere.’
The counsellor was thinking not so much about what Ari had said but the way in which he had said it. Those sudden breaks in the middle of words, the repetition of certain syllables. ‘Ari, have you ever had any counselling before?’
Ari shook his head.
‘Any therapy? Of any description?’
Ari rubbed his forehead. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘what you’re getting at now is-is-is …’ he winced, turned his head one way and then other, seemed to grip his hands into fists ‘… th-the way I speak. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘I have a stammer,’ Ari said. ‘Had. Have. One of the two.’
‘But you’re over it now?’
‘You’re never over it. There exists a theory in speech therapy,’ he spoke in a toneless voice, as if he’d explained this countless times, ‘that a stammer is like an iceberg.’
‘An iceberg?’
‘Only a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.’
The counsellor smoothed the pages. ‘It interests me that you used the word “dangerous”.’
‘Does it?’ Ari said. ‘I suppose you want me to ask why.’
‘Not necessarily. Does it interest you?’
‘No.’ The boy sighed, placed his hands on his knees. ‘Look, why don’t we get to the point? We both know why I’m here.’
‘Do we?’
‘Yes. Because of Sophie.’
The counsellor leant back in his chair. At the meeting he’d attended yesterday, the subject of Ari Lefevre Lindstrom Wells Sullivan and Sophie Bridges had been top of the agenda. They had been going out for a month or two, he’d been told, and several members of the teaching staff were uneasy about the relationship. The counsellor had shifted in his seat, bracing himself for tales of trauma, unhappiness, victimhood, manipulation, abuse even. He was ready with numbers of helplines, with ways of handling parental input, with psychological support. But, no, the problem with Ari and Sophie was that they were too involved, too intense, too happy. They had stopped fraternising with other students, the history teacher said. They spent break and weekends together in Ari’s room, reading. They took walks, they listened to music, they sat together at meals. They had stopped sneaking out, like other sixth-formers, in the evening and instead were watching old movies on Ari’s laptop. Sophie, who came from a good Home Counties family, had mentioned post-structuralism in class the other day. She had cut her sensible blond hair into a brunette bob. She wanted to do her coursework on Simone de Beauvoir and her multimedia incarnations.
It didn’t reflect well, the headmistress said, on the school or the pupils, this kind of adolescent intensity. We like our pupils to be healthy, outgoing team-players.
‘The pupils here,’ the counsellor said to Ari in his office, ‘are encouraged to be healthy, outgoing team-players. We emphasise—’
‘The pupils here,’ Ari interrupted, ‘are brainless drones, encouraged to regurgitate pre-prepared knowledge so that they can replicate the narrow, self-regarding, white middle-class lives of their parents.’
‘Well,’ said the counsellor, ‘now, this is a viewpoint that—’
‘The pupils here,’ Ari continued, ‘indulge in astonishing levels of drinking, drug-taking and promiscuity, to such a degree that you and your cohorts couldn’t even imagine. But you don’t choose to confront that, do you? You don’t investigate that. You don’t drag in those people selling weed and pills of questionable origin and purity. No, you choose to cast aspersions on two pupils who choose to step away from that kind of activity and form a relationship that is entirely—’
‘I’m told you’ve been spending the night in her room.’
Ari shrugged.
‘Do you deny that?’
‘No, I don’t deny it. Sophie and I want to be together. You and your spies can’t put a stop to that.’
‘It’s against the rules, Ari.’
‘Well, it’s a ridiculous rule.’
‘It’s an important rule. It protects—’
‘What about the rules of no drinking or no consuming drugs or no being a total and complete tedious idiot? Because everyone here is guilty of breaking those rules. Everyone.’
‘Everyone except you and Sophie?’
Ari got to his feet. He bent to pick up his newspaper. Straightening, he shook his head. ‘My mother was right,’ he muttered.
‘Right about what?’
He looked the counsellor in the eye. ‘School,’ he said, gesturing round him. ‘All this. You. Square pegs and round holes. The whole thing.’
‘Tell me about your mother,’ the counsellor said.
Ari let out a short laugh. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t. I won’t tell you about my mother.’
‘The staff say they’ve never met her, that she’s never been here.’
‘She hasn’t. So what?’
‘Your teachers say they have spoken to her on the phone but it’s only ever your stepfather who comes to the school, your uncle and, once or twice, your grandmother.’
Ari looked up at the ceiling and crossed his arms over his newspaper.
‘Why doesn’t your mother visit the school?’
Ari smirked. ‘At a wild guess, I’d say because she doesn’t want to meet people like you.’
‘I’ve been told that you’ve been overheard having quite heated phone calls from her in the last few days.’
Ari shut his eyes and shook his head.
‘You were heard speculating on the whereabouts of your stepfather.’
The counsellor left a pause for Ari to speak, which he didn’t.
‘Has your stepfather left? Is everything OK at home? Ari, does your mother suffer from depression?’
Ari looked at him and started to laugh. He laughed so much that he had to bend over and clutch his well-tailored knees.
‘Why are you laughing, Ari? Depression is a serious thing but it can be treated. It can be—’
‘I think what amazes me most,’ Ari said, ‘is how wrong you’ve got everything. You’ve clearly read my notes, researched what you can of me but the result is a picture so skewed and erroneous it’s really quite remarkable. I commend you for consistently getting the wrong end of every single stick, I really do. And now,’ Ari said, standing, ‘I think this interview is over. I’m heading back to my history class. Adios.’
The door slammed shut behind him. The counsellor took a breath, a deep, cleansing breath that he hoped would clear this boy, his aggression and his vocabulary out of his airspace.
He picked up his pen and inscribed the date in Ari’s fi
le. Then he stopped short, realising he had absolutely no idea what to write next.
You Do What You Have to Do
Daniel, Brooklyn, 1986
Daniel pushes at the door of the thrift store, knowing that the bell will leap on its spring, giving off that atonal two-note interval. He tries to cover his ears but it’s too late. The jangling bell has set up an answering tinnitus in his left ear, just as it always does.
It’s made up of a repetitive baseline of a shurr-shurr sound, with the odd high clang or ting thrown in for good measure, as if someone is sweeping the floor near his head or going at their clothes with a brush, all the while wearing a cowbell around their neck. He shakes his head, like a dog trying to rid itself of excess water or unwanted scent, but the movement seems to unbalance him. The mat must be rucked under his feet or the door too narrow or the step too high. Either way, he is stumbling, the door jamb lurching to meet him, his shoulder coming into painful contact with its sharp edge.
He is aware, as he rights himself, leaning heavily on a conveniently placed tapestry chair, that certain codes of behaviour require him to nod at the ladies behind the counter, to bid them hello but it seems too late, now that he’s stumbled into their shop, now that he has dislodged a display of crystal animals from a small table with the tail of his coat.
The tiny glinting animals lie scattered about the carpet, like the victims of some terrible glass-based genocide. He sees an upturned squirrel, with one missing eye, a cat with ears of sharp glass, what is possibly a hippo.
It is important, he tells himself, to remain upright, to appear calm, collected and, above all, sober. He picks his way through the fallen animals and moves towards the goods and wares, the racks and displays.
The rich, sour, yeasty smell of thrift stores the world over fills his nostrils, makes his throat ache and sting.
Sober, sober, sober, he is chanting to himself, as he circles the aisles: racks of men’s jackets, shiny at the elbows, a basket of woollen scarves, coiled like serpents, rows of lace-up shoes, rubber boots. The sad residue of human lives, washed up here to be resold, rehomed.
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