by Amy Lloyd
To pass the time I try to imagine what Dr Isherwood would say to me if I did tell her about Jack but if I knew what she would say then I wouldn’t be stuck in this situation in the first place because she is always right. I can only do what I think I should do, which is nothing. Just wait for him to get bored of me and leave me alone.
Ten minutes before my appointment I walk over to the secretary’s desk. She doesn’t look up until I start talking.
‘Do you think Dr Isherwood is coming?’ I ask. ‘Because it’s my appointment soon and she still isn’t here so …’
‘It’s still ten minutes until your appointment,’ she says. She stares at me like I’m an idiot. I blush.
‘I know but … usually she’s early and …’
‘If you take a seat,’ the secretary says, ‘she will be here by your appointment.’
‘Would she call you?’ I ask. ‘If she wasn’t coming, would she call you?’
‘Dr Isherwood will be here when she arrives,’ the secretary says. I try to work out what this means.
I want to ask why she can’t call her. Then I remember that I have Dr Isherwood’s telephone number.
‘Please can I use the phone?’ I ask.
‘No,’ she says. She puts a hand on the receiver as if she needs to guard it from me. ‘The phone is for business use only.’
‘I only want to call—’
‘If you don’t take a seat I’ll have to ask you to leave,’ the secretary says.
Back in my seat I browse the magazines and anxiously watch the clock hands move closer to my appointment time. When it is just one minute until my session it becomes so unbearable that I put my face in my hands and a little groan escapes, loud in the quiet room. In response the secretary sighs. Then it is my appointment time, then it is one minute past my time, and the secretary seems completely unconcerned. My mind races. Has Dr Isherwood been hurt? Has someone she loves been hurt? Is it my fault for thinking bad things about her? Did I not care enough to stop it from happening?
At two minutes past the hour the door finally opens and in comes Dr Isherwood, her hair all blown about and car keys clutched in her hand, out of breath.
‘I am so sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m having one of those mornings!’
I wait for her to explain but she doesn’t.
‘Kay, can you make us a cup of tea?’ she says to the secretary. Dr Isherwood shakes off her coat and pats at her hair.
I don’t want a cup of tea but I don’t say anything. Kay smiles as though nothing has happened at all this morning and I think about telling Dr Isherwood how grumpy Kay is when she isn’t around. I follow Dr Isherwood upstairs; the old wallpaper has been taken off and the walls painted white. Everything looks and smells so new. In Dr Isherwood’s office there are the shelves full of her books and there are flowers on the desk. There are more picture frames than usual, their backs facing the room.
‘I’m so sorry,’ Dr Isherwood says again. She hangs her coat over the arm of the sofa and dumps her bag on the floor by the desk. She’s not acting like herself. Normally she leaves her coat downstairs, her handbag out of sight. And when she sits down on the sofa she kind of slumps and makes a sound: Ahhh. Hangs her head back for a moment.
‘So,’ she says, sitting up and crossing her legs. ‘How has your week been since we last spoke?’
‘Two weeks,’ I say.
‘Of course!’ she says. ‘You’ll have to bear with me, I’m still gathering myself.’
‘Are you OK?’ I ask.
‘Oh, bless you,’ she says, laughing. ‘Yes, I am OK, just a little rushed off my feet lately. I’m sure it’ll settle once we’ve finally got everything finished here.’
A whining noise interrupts the quiet, a sound like a mosquito hovering just by your ear.
‘Ugh,’ Dr Isherwood says. ‘There’s a dentist above us.’ She points to the ceiling. ‘Every time he gets that drill out it goes right through me.’
I don’t like the new office and I don’t know if I like the new Dr Isherwood. She laughs all the time like she’s drunk and she’s not acting like a grown-up any more.
‘I don’t like my job,’ I blurt out.
Kay the secretary knocks on the door and brings in a tray with two mugs on it.
‘You’re an angel,’ Dr Isherwood says. ‘I swear I haven’t had time to have a cup of tea in a week.’
When Kay leaves Dr Isherwood puts her tea down on the table and turns to me. ‘Sorry …’ she says. ‘You were just saying …’
‘It doesn’t matter,’ I say. I know I am being petulant but Dr Isherwood doesn’t seem to notice.
‘So how are you finding the job? Any better?’ she asks. What is wrong with her?
‘It’s fine,’ I lie, waiting for her to realise her mistake.
‘Well, good! I know it’s not the most challenging job in the world but there’s opportunity to progress once you have some experience and there are plenty of people there to potentially connect with.’
‘Hmm,’ I grunt.
‘Now, I had something I needed to … Oh!’ She jumps up from her chair. ‘I remember! I have something for you.’ She retrieves her bag and roots around in it. An empty tissue packet falls to the floor. ‘Here,’ she says, extending a box towards me.
It’s an iPhone. It feels heavier than I remember them being.
‘It’s my old one,’ she says. ‘Just until you get your own. I’ve put in for the funding. I said you need a proper phone, one for your emails and the internet. You just can’t get on with anything less.’
‘Thank you,’ I say, not knowing who – aside from Dr Isherwood – I would email.
‘I already gave this number to your parole supervisor, so they can call you if they need to speak with you regarding your appointments. I’ve also put in all your essential contacts,’ she says.
They fill only one page. There is Dr Isherwood, my work number, my parole officer and my social worker.
‘Thanks,’ I say, trying not to show her how upset I feel when I look at how barren my life is.
‘It’ll fill up,’ she says, reading my mind. ‘Over time. You will meet people and they will get to know you and they will love you. I promise.’
Hot, fat tears roll down my face. Dr Isherwood hands me a tissue.
‘Oh dear.’ She crouches down and places a hand on my knee. ‘Is this why you were so reluctant to get a phone?’ she says. ‘Does it make you feel lonely?’
I nod. But I think of the real reason, of the phone calls that came the last time, when Sean found me. Always an unavailable number; always Sean calling me. At first they were infrequent. We didn’t say much; sometimes we said nothing at all. Sometimes we just listened to the open line, breathing very softly, until we fell asleep.
There were late-night calls where he would cry and ask me if it was all his fault. No, I would say, but he would ask again. There were angry calls, where he wished he’d never met me, where he wished I was dead. The worst were the calls where he was just like he used to be. Where he made fun of me and we laughed, our laughter catching in our throats and burning our eyes. Where I wasn’t sure if I was laughing or crying any more.
‘Do you really not remember?’ Sean would ask me again and again. He called me a liar; then he told me he was sorry. ‘How can you forget?’ I told him about the underpass and how that’s as far as my memory lets me go. I asked him to tell me what he remembered, but all he said was that he wished he could forget, too.
Then he was gone. The calls stopped suddenly and I wondered what I’d done wrong. I couldn’t call him because I never knew his number. I thought he was punishing me. I felt the hole inside me yawn wide open until it felt like I might be sucked into the blackness. I could barely sleep but I could barely stay awake either. When I did leave the house it was only to see Dr Isherwood. I lied and told her I couldn’t sleep because of the noise my neighbours made all night. She worried over me, and wrote out a prescription for sleeping tablets which I stuffed in my pocket and f
orgot about.
I put the television on to feel less alone but the sound clashed with the noise in my head and it felt like everyone talked too quickly, or that the music was too chaotic and loud and layered. So I muted it and lay in front of it for hours. Until one day I was watching the screen and I saw Sean’s face. The picture of him they took at the police station when they arrested us both. His mouth a tight line, eyes hard. I knew that face: it was the one he used when he was trying not to cry. But that’s not how the world saw it.
I scrambled to find the remote control to unmute but I couldn’t. Instead I crawled to the TV and felt with my fingers until I found the volume buttons. The news reporter’s voice grew and grew: ‘… computer was seized and the suspect was arrested. Police confirmed that Sean Jenkins would be held in custody but didn’t specify the charges brought against him.’
Dr Isherwood pats my knee, which I know means she’s about to stand up, and I want to hold her hand and ask her not to but I can’t. She groans as she straightens up.
‘My back is in bits,’ she says. ‘Now that you have that phone you must promise to call me if things get too much.’
By too much she means what happened after Sean was arrested. We still have trouble talking about it. It is too painful, even for her.
‘I promise,’ I say.
‘You don’t feel like that again now, do you?’ she says.
‘No,’ I say. I’m telling the truth but really it’s impossible to know when you start feeling like that. It’s almost as if you stop feeling anything.
‘Do you think—’ Dr Isherwood starts but her phone starts to ring in her bag. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. She roots around searching for it. When she looks at the screen her face changes. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she says. ‘I need to take this. I’m so sorry. Hello?’
Dr Isherwood leaves the room and closes the door behind her. This has never happened before, either. Her phone has gone off but she’s never answered it. All the things I was thinking about saying start to sink back inside me like swallowed vomit, burning all the way down. I feel like screaming: Dr Isherwood is the only person I have and she doesn’t care any more. She was late and she wasn’t listening properly, and now she’s just gone.
I stare at the backs of the photographs on the desk and wonder which ones are new, and if they will show me what has changed the one person I had thought was permanent, consistent, mine. Outside Dr Isherwood’s voice grows quieter as she walks down the stairs.
I stand and walk towards the pictures. Is it bad? Would I be breaking her trust? I hesitate. If she didn’t want anyone to look at them she wouldn’t have put them on her desk. I reach and touch the frame of one. Dr Isherwood knows almost everything about me; why can’t I know anything about her?
20
Her: Then
After I had seen the news that Sean had been rearrested, I felt the hole inside me rip wider. Without him, I could suddenly see the rest of my life stretching out ahead of me. It would be a life without friends or laughter or crying. So I made a decision.
I packed everything I needed into a backpack and I got the prescription Dr Isherwood had written me for sleeping tablets from my coat pocket. I left my keys on the kitchen table, knowing I wouldn’t be coming back.
Outside, it was raining lightly, like the spray from a waterfall, misty and floating. I hadn’t brought an umbrella.
On my way to the train station I went into a pharmacy and gave them my prescription for the sleeping tablets.
‘Have you taken these before?’ the pharmacist asked me. I nodded and the pharmacist handed me the box of pills inside a paper bag. I was relieved as I said goodbye. I wasn’t sure if I could manage talking to anyone for any length of time.
Back in the rain I walked the ten minutes to the train station and bought a one-way ticket back home. I had to go back. I needed to remember what had happened, who I really was.
The journey took three hours. It seemed impossible that the past could have been so close this whole time. I looked out of the window and watched the world roll by, like a tape being rewound, as I was taken back to where I came from. As soon as I stepped off the train I knew I had broken the law. One of the conditions of my release was that I was never allowed back there ever again. As I left the station my phone rang. Dr Isherwood left a voicemail message, asking if everything was OK, and whether I had forgotten our appointment. I switched it to airplane mode and put it back into my pocket.
The town didn’t look familiar at all and I had to look back at the sign above the train station to make sure I had got off at the right stop. Then, slowly, everything started to fall into place and I was walking the old streets without having to think about where I was going. The shopfronts were all different but when I tilted my head and looked up I saw that all the buildings were the same, the old architecture still as dirty and splattered with bird poo as it always was.
I knew I wouldn’t find myself there. I knew I needed to get a bus to the suburbs, to the estates they kept at arm’s length from everywhere else. The bus station was new, all glass and steel, a clock tower with a clock stuck at the wrong time. I closed my eyes and brought back the memories of Christmas shopping, my hand in Mum’s, in the old bus station which was always damp and dark and smelled of stale urine and smoke. It had become the smell of going home, a bag full of Christmas presents and decorations. In the new bus station, the memory felt like someone else’s life.
Everything that passed by the window as the bus took me home looked just as distorted as in town. It looked new, but only on the surface. There were still cracks where I could see through time. There was a new school building that gleamed even on the gloomy day but part of the old school still stood nearby. It was the comprehensive school that I would have gone to, that Sean would have gone to. That Luke … Then I felt something. Pain. I grabbed on to it and made myself feel it again and again.
I got off the bus at the edge of the estates and it felt like I was ten again. Here, nothing had changed. The pre-fab houses clustered around unkempt greens. The blocks of flats that had the bad reputations looked as though they still did. Even the precinct looked the same, though the shops had all changed. The video shop where Sean’s dad worked was now a vape shop instead. The flat above it had its curtains drawn and I wondered if Sean’s dad still lived there now.
The streets were empty because of the weather. It was the afternoon and people were still at work, their children in school. It felt like I was the only person left alive or that I had frozen time and was walking around in a stopped world. Only the wind and the rain disturbed the stillness. Even the playing fields were empty. From a spike of the black railing that surrounded the park someone had hung a child’s coat by its hood. It was weighed down with rain and looked like it had been there for a long time, waiting to be collected.
I walked to the edges of the park, where everything had started. Where I met Sean; where we had hidden in the undergrowth and listened to all the other children playing above us. This was where it had started and where it had all started to come apart. I walked down the bank and along the backs of the houses, remembering how it had felt to be small and invisible in the tangles of weeds and branches, and how they would scrape my arms and my cheeks like cat scratches, itchy and evidence that I’d been alive that day. We were agile, weaving through the brambles and squeezing through the gaps in the fences like urban foxes. Feral, fearless.
I left the park and decided to look at the houses from the front until I found the one I was looking for. Again, at first glance, it looked as though everything was different, but it was only superficial things like hanging baskets and front doors which had changed. Underneath, everything was still the same and if I concentrated I could peel away the years and remember them as they were back then.
I stopped dead outside number 23. It still had the same low front wall, red bricks with smooth grey slabs running along the top. This is where all of Liam’s friends would sit, lined up, swapping football stickers
and cooling off with the bottomless supply of ice lollies his mum kept in the freezer, their bikes lying on their sides on the grass. But the grass was gone now, replaced with a patio surrounding a miniature tree with burned red leaves.
The porch had changed, too. Instead of the glassed-in area surrounding the front door – where muddy football boots and umbrellas and guests’ shoes used to cluster in the corner – now there was just an overhanging roof and a small bench. Whoever lived here now didn’t have the cluttered and chaotic life of the family who lived here before them and I wondered if they knew that this was the house, or if no one had told them that it was haunted with sadness and that it was my fault, me, staring into their windows and seeing only my reflection.
The rain had plastered my hair to my skin and my jumper was soaked through. I shivered but didn’t feel the cold. I didn’t feel anything, not like I should have. It was Liam who was always in the front garden, always surrounded by friends. Luke had always been in the back garden, alone, playing his strange games that only he understood. I took out my phone and googled our names, searching for the old pictures of the garden, the sports field and the disused lido in the sports village. Each image was like a pinch and I felt the bruises throb inside me. But I needed more.
I took a deep breath and opened the gate, which creaked so loudly I was sure that if there was someone in the house they would already have known I was there. The gate swung itself shut and I made my way down the path and stood frozen in front of the door. In one hand I clutched my phone, slick with rain, and with the other I reached to press the doorbell. It rang so clearly that I could hear it and I started to hope that no one was home because I realised it had been a terrible idea. I waited one second and then decided to leave but before I could step off the porch someone answered and called me back.