by Nicci French
She put an arm through his. ‘What’s up, Alan?’
‘I just had to get away from work. I couldn’t stay there any longer.’
‘Did something happen?’
He shrugged at her, ducked his head. He looked like a boy still, she thought, although his hair was prematurely grey. He had a child’s shyness and rawness; you could see his emotions on his face. He often seemed slightly at a loss and people wanted to protect him, especially women. She wanted to protect him, except when she wanted protecting herself and then her tenderness was replaced by a weary kind of irritation.
‘Mondays are always bad.’ She made her voice light and brisk. ‘Especially Mondays in November when it’s starting to drizzle.’
‘I had to see you.’
She pulled him along the path. They had walked this route so many times before that their feet seemed to steer them. The light was fading. They passed the playground. She averted her eyes, as she always did nowadays, but it was empty except for a few pigeons pecking around the rubberized Tarmac. On to the main path and past the bandstand. Once, years ago, they had had a picnic there. She didn’t know why she remembered it so clearly. It had been spring and one of the first warm days of the year, and they had eaten pork pies and drunk warm beer from the bottle and watched children run around on the grass in front of them, tripping over their own shadows. She remembered lying on her back with her head in his lap and he’d stroked her hair from her face and told her she meant the world to him. He wasn’t a man of many words, so perhaps that was why she held such things in her memory.
They went over the brow of the hill towards the ponds. Occasionally they took bread for the ducks, although that was really something for little kids to do. Anyway, the ducks were being chased away by Canada geese that puffed their chests and stretched their necks and ran at you.
‘A dog,’ she said. ‘Perhaps we should get a dog.’
‘You’ve never said that before.’
‘A cocker spaniel. Not too big but not too small and yappy either. Do you want to talk about what you’re feeling?’
‘If you want a dog, let’s get one. How about as a Christmas present to each other?’ He was trying to work himself up into enthusiasm for it.
‘Just like that?’
‘A cocker spaniel, you say. Fine.’
‘It was just an idea.’
‘We can give him a name. Do you think it should be a him? Billy. Freddie. Joe.’
‘That isn’t what I meant. I shouldn’t have said anything.’
‘Sorry, it’s my fault. I’m not…’ He stopped. He couldn’t quite think of what it was he wasn’t.
‘I wish you’d tell me what happened.’
‘It’s not like that. I can’t explain.’
Now they found themselves back at the children’s playground as if they were drawn to it. The swings and the seesaw were empty. Alan halted. He took his arm out of hers and gripped the railings with both hands. He stood like that for some moments, very still. He put one hand flat against his chest.
‘Aren’t you feeling well?’ Carrie said.
‘I feel odd.’
‘What kind of odd?’
‘I don’t know. Odd. Like a storm’s coming.’
‘What storm?’
‘Wait.’
‘Take my arm. Lean on me.’
‘Hold on a second, Carrie.’
‘Tell me what you’re feeling? Does it hurt?’
‘I don’t know,’ he whispered. ‘It’s in my chest.’
‘Shall I call a doctor?’
He was bowed over now. She couldn’t see his face.
‘No. Don’t leave me,’ he said.
‘I’ve got my mobile.’ She fumbled under her thick coat and brought it out from the pocket of her trousers.
‘I feel like my heart’s going to burst through my chest it’s pounding so hard.’
‘I’m calling an ambulance.’
‘No. It’ll pass. It always does.’
‘I can’t just stand here, watching you suffer.’
She tried to put an arm around him, but he was such an awkward shape, bunched up on himself, and she felt useless. She heard him whimper and for a moment she wanted to run away and leave him there, bulky and hopeless in the twilight. But of course she couldn’t do that. And gradually she could sense that whatever it was that gripped him was loosening, until at last he straightened up again. She could make out beads of sweat on his forehead although his hand, when she took it, was cold.
‘Better?’
‘A bit. Sorry.’
‘You’ve got to do something about it.’
‘It’ll be all right.’
‘It won’t. It’s getting worse. Do you think I don’t hear you in the night? And it’s affecting your work. You’ve got to go to Dr Foley.’
‘I’ve been to him. He just gives me those sleeping pills that knock me out and give me a hangover.’
‘You’ve to go again.’
‘I’ve had all the tests. I saw it in his eyes. I’m no different from half the people who go to their doctor. I’m just tired.’
‘This isn’t normal. Promise me you’ll go, Alan?’
‘If you say so.’
Chapter Three
From where she sat in her red armchair in the middle of the room, Frieda could see the wrecking ball swinging into the buildings on the site across the road. Entire walls shivered and then crumbled to the ground; inside walls suddenly became outside walls and she could see patterned wallpaper, an old poster, a bit of a shelf or a mantelpiece; hidden lives suddenly exposed. All morning she had watched it. Her first patient, a woman whose husband had died suddenly two years ago and whose grief and shock had never abated, sat bowed over and sobbing before her, her pretty face pink and sore from weeping. Without her attention slackening, Frieda saw it from the corner of her eye. When her second patient, referred to her for his escalating obsessive-compulsive disorder, fidgeted in his chair, stood up and then sat down again, raised his voice in anger, Frieda saw the ball smashing into the block of apartments. How could something that had taken so long to build up collapse so quickly? Chimneys folded, windows shattered, floors disappeared, walkways were obliterated. By the end of the week, everything would be rubble and dust, and men in hard hats would walk across the razed ground, stepping over children’s toys and sticks of furniture. In a year’s time, new buildings would stand on the ruins of the old.
She told the men and women who made their way to her room that she could offer them a bounded space where they could explore their darkest fears, their most inadmissible desires. Her room was cool, clean and orderly. There was a drawing on one wall, two chairs facing each other with a low table in between, a lamp casting a soft light in winter, a pot plant on the windowsill. Outside, an entire street of houses was being cleared away, but in here, they were safe from the world, just for a while.
Alan knew that Dr Foley was irritated by him. He probably talked about him to his partners at the practice: ‘That bloody Alan Dekker again, moaning about not sleeping, not coping. Can’t he just pull himself together?’ He had tried to pull himself together. He had taken the sleeping pills, cut down on the alcohol, done more exercise. He had lain awake at night with his heart racing, so fast that it was impossible to believe it wouldn’t burn itself up, and sweat pouring off him. He had sat rigid at his desk at work, his hands clenched, staring at the papers in front of him, waiting for the physical dread to pass, hoping his colleagues wouldn’t notice. Because it was humiliating to lose control like this. It scared him. Carrie talked about a mid-life crisis. He was forty-two, after all. This was just the age when men went off the rails, drank and bought motorbikes and had affairs, trying to be young again. But he didn’t want a motorbike and he didn’t want an affair. He didn’t want to be young again. All that awkwardness and pain, that sense of being in the wrong life. Now he was in the right life, with Carrie, in the small house they’d saved for, and would be paying for for another thirteen
years. There were things he dreamed of having, but surely everyone had dreams and hopes for themselves, and they didn’t collapse in the park or wake up crying. And sometimes he had these nightmares – he didn’t even want to think about them. It wasn’t normal. Surely it wasn’t normal. He just wanted them to go away. He didn’t want to be the kind of person who had such things in his head.
‘The pills you gave me aren’t working,’ he said to Dr Foley. He had to stop himself apologizing for being there again and for wasting the doctor’s time, when the surgery was full of patients with real illnesses, real pain.
‘Still having trouble sleeping?’ Dr Foley wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his computer screen and tapping something into it, frowning.
‘It’s not just that.’ He tried to keep his voice steady. His face felt rubbery, as though it belonged to someone else. ‘I get these horrible feelings.’
‘You mean pain?’
‘My heart feels like it’s being pumped up and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth. I don’t know.’ He struggled for words but couldn’t find them. All he could say was: ‘I don’t feel myself.’ It was a phrase he kept using, and each time he did so, it felt as though he was digging a hole inside himself. Once he had cried out to Carrie, ‘I can’t feel myself,’ and even at the time he had recognized how odd that sounded.
Dr Foley turned his chair and faced him. ‘Has anything been troubling you lately?’
Alan didn’t like him staring at his computer but he preferred that to being looked at like this: as if the doctor was looking inside him at things Alan didn’t want to know about. What could he see?
‘I had it when I was much younger, this feeling of panic. It was a feeling of loneliness, like in a nightmare, of being completely alone in the universe. Of wanting something, but I didn’t know what. After a few months, it went away. Now it’s back.’ He waited, but Dr Foley didn’t react: he didn’t seem to have heard him. ‘It was when I was at college. I thought it was the sort of problem people got at that age. Now I think I’m having a mid-life crisis. It’s stupid, I know.’
‘The drugs obviously aren’t helping. I’d like you to go and see someone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone you can talk to. About your feelings.’
‘You think it’s all in my mind?’ He had a vision of himself as mad, his face contorted and savage, the horrible feelings he was trying to keep tamped down inside himself suddenly liberated and possessing him entirely.
‘It can be very helpful.’
‘I don’t need to see a psychiatrist.’
‘Try it,’ said Dr Foley. ‘If it doesn’t work, you won’t have lost anything.’
‘I can’t afford to pay.’
Dr Foley started to tap on his keyboard. ‘This is a GP referral. You won’t have to pay. It’ll be a bit of a journey, but these people are good. They’ll contact you with a date for an assessment. And we’ll take it from there.’
It sounded so grave. Alan had just wanted Dr Foley to give him different medicine, to make it all go away, like a stain that could be wiped clean, leaving no trace. He put his hand against his heart, feeling its painful bump. He just wanted to be an ordinary man with an ordinary life.
There is a place where you can see and not be seen, an eye pressed to a small hole in the fence. It’s playtime and they spill out from their classrooms and run across the yard. Boys and girls, all shapes and sizes. Black and brown and pink, with blond hair and dark hair and the shades in between. Some are almost full-grown, spotty boys with clumsy feet and girls with breasts just budding under their thick winter clothes, and they won’t do at all. But some are tiny; they hardly look big enough to be away from their mothers, with their stringy legs and baby voices. They’re the ones to watch.
It’s drizzling in the schoolyard and there are puddles on the ground. Just a few feet away, a little boy with a buzz-cut jumps into one violently, and a grin splits his face at the splashing. A girl with straw hair in high pigtails and thick glasses that are misted over stands in the corner and watches the crowd. She puts her thumb in her mouth. Two miniature Asian girls hold hands. A squat white boy kicks a skinny black boy and runs away. A group of girls whisper nasty things to each other, snigger, look sideways out of their dangerous eyes.
But they are all just a moving crowd. No one stands out. Not yet. Keep watching.
Chapter Four
At two o’clock in the afternoon, Frieda left the room that she rented on the third floor of a mansion block and walked to her house, which was only seven minutes away along back roads that hid behind the arterial routes of the city. Just a few hundred yards away was Oxford Street, with its jostle and noise, but here it was deserted. The muted November light made everything seem grey and still, like a pencil drawing. Past the electrical shop where she bought her light bulbs and fuses, past the twenty-four-hour newsagents, the dimly lit grocers, the low-rise flats.
Frieda didn’t pause until she reached her house, where she felt the same sense of relief that she always had when coming home, closing the door against the world outside, breathing in the smell of cleanliness and safety. From the moment she had seen it, three years ago, she had known she had to have it, even though it had been neglected for years and had seemed shoddy and misplaced, squeezed between the ugly lock-ups on its left and the council flats on its right. Now, after the work had been done on it, everything was in its place. If she closed her eyes, she would still be able to find each object, even the sharpened pencils on her desk. Here in the hall, the large map of London and the hooks where her belted trench coat hung. Here in the living room, whose window gave out on to the street, the thick-pile rug over the bare boards, the squashy chair and deep sofa on either side of the open fire that she lit each evening, from October through until March. Near the window a chess table, the only item of furniture she had ever inherited. The house was narrow, the width of a single room. Its stairs went steeply up to the first floor, where there was a bedroom and a bathroom, and then even more steeply up to the top floor, which consisted only of her study, with a sloping roof and her desk near the skylight, on which she kept all her drawing things. Reuben called her home her den, or even her lair (with her as its dragon, keeping people out). It was true that it was dark in here. Lots of people knocked through walls, enlarged windows, let in air and light; Frieda preferred snug, enclosed spaces. She had painted the walls in deep colours, matt reds and bottle greens, so that even in summer the house felt dim, as if it was half underground.
She picked the letters up from the doormat and put them on the kitchen table without even glancing at them. She never opened her mail in the middle of the day. Sometimes she forgot about it for a week or more until people rang to complain. Nor did she check her answering-machine messages. In fact, it had only been in the last year that she had finally bought an answering machine and she steadfastly refused to have a mobile, to the incredulity of all those around her, who didn’t believe that people could actually function without one. But Frieda wanted to be able to escape from incessant communications and demands. She didn’t want to be at anyone’s beck and call, and she liked cutting herself off from the urgent inanities of the world. When she was on her own, she liked to be truly alone. Out of contact and adrift.
She had thirty minutes before her next patient. Often she had lunch at her friends’ café in Beech Street, Number 9, but not today. She made herself a quick lunch: toast and Marmite, a few small tomatoes, a cup of tea, an oat biscuit and an apple that she quartered and cored. She took the plate through to the living room and sat in the chair by the fire that she had already laid ready for later. She closed her eyes for a moment and let her tiredness settle inside her, then ate her toast slowly.
The phone rang. At first she didn’t answer it, but she didn’t have the answering machine turned on, and whoever was on the other end didn’t give up. Finally she picked up.
‘Frieda. It’s Paz. Is everything all right? Were you in the bath?’
Frieda sighed. Paz was the administrator at the Warehouse, which wasn’t a warehouse at all. It was a clinic that had relocated to an old warehouse and taken a name that had sounded cutting edge in the early eighties. Frieda had trained there, then worked there and now was on the board. When Paz called her at home, it wasn’t to deliver good news.
‘No, I wasn’t in the bath. It’s the middle of the day.’
‘I’d have a bath in the middle of the day if I was at home. Especially on a Monday. I hate Mondays, don’t you?’
‘Not really.’
‘Everyone hates Mondays. It’s the low point of the week. When the alarm clock goes off on Monday morning and it’s still dark outside, and you know you have to haul yourself out of bed and begin all over again.’
‘Did you really ring me to talk about how you hate Mondays?’
‘Of course not. I wish you’d get yourself a mobile.’
‘I don’t want a mobile.’
‘You’re a dinosaur. Are you coming in on Thursday?’
‘I’m meeting Jack.’ She was supervising Jack’s therapy training.
‘Could you come in a bit earlier?’ said Paz. ‘We’d like some input.’
‘I can give you input over the phone. What’s it about?’
‘Better face to face,’ said Paz.
‘It’s Reuben, isn’t it?’
‘Just a little talk. And you and Reuben…’ Her sentence trailed away, leaving a whole history unspoken.
Frieda bit her lip, imagining what was going on. ‘What time do you want me?’
‘Can you come at two?’
‘I’ve a patient until two. I can get there for two thirty. Will that do?’
‘Perfect.’
She returned to her toast, which was cold now. She didn’t want to think about the clinic, or about Reuben. Her job was to deal with the mess and pain inside other people’s heads, but not his mess and not his pain. He was out of bounds.
Joe Franklin was her final patient of the day. For the last sixteen months, he had been coming to see her on a Tuesday afternoon, at ten minutes past five – although sometimes he didn’t make it, or came just as his time was up. Frieda would wait without irritation, catching up with her notes or doodling on her pad of paper. She never left before all of his fifty minutes had gone by. She knew that she was the one reliable point of his tumbling, kaleidoscopic week. Once he had told her that it was the thought of her sitting slender and straight-backed in her large red armchair that kept him going, even if he couldn’t get to her.