Blue Monday

by Nicci French

  She stood up, dislodging the cat. ‘I’m sorry to have disturbed you.’

  ‘I don’t know if I was asleep,’ he said. He seemed bewildered. Frieda noticed how Carrie put her hand against his back to guide him into the room and took her place behind his chair like a guard. He bent down and picked Gretel up, held her against his broad chest and put his face into her fur.

  ‘I needed to see you,’ Frieda said.

  ‘Shall I go?’ asked Carrie.

  ‘This isn’t a therapy session.’

  ‘I don’t know,’ said Alan. ‘You can stay if you want to.’

  Carrie bustled around the kitchen, filling the kettle, opening and closing cupboards.

  ‘You know why I’m here,’ said Frieda at last.

  As he stroked the cat on his lap, Frieda was reminded of the way he rubbed his hands up and down his trousers when he was in her room, as if he could never keep entirely still. She took a deep breath.

  ‘During our sessions I was struck by resemblances to the case of a boy who has disappeared. He’s called Matthew Faraday. So I talked to the police about it.’

  Behind her, Carrie clattered angrily with cutlery, then banged her mug down in front of her. Tea slopped over the brim.

  ‘I was wrong. I’m very sorry to have caused you extra distress.’

  ‘Well,’ said Alan, slowly, drawing out the word. He didn’t seem to have anything to add to it.

  ‘I know that I said to you that in my room you were safe and could say anything,’ continued Frieda. Carrie’s presence made her self-conscious. Instead of talking to Alan she was reciting the words she had rehearsed in advance, and they sounded stilted and insincere. ‘There were these coincidences between your fantasies and what was going on in the outside world and so I felt I had no choice.’

  ‘So you’re not really sorry,’ said Carrie.

  Frieda turned towards her. ‘Why do you say that?’

  ‘You think you acted right in the circumstances. You feel justified. In my book, that’s not being sorry. You know when people say to you, I’m sorry if, because they can’t bring themselves to say I’m sorry that… That’s what you’re doing. You’re apologizing without really apologizing.’

  ‘I don’t want to do that,’ said Frieda, carefully. She was impressed by Carrie’s pugnacity and touched by her fierce protectiveness towards Alan. ‘I was wrong. I made a mistake. I brought the police into your life in a way that must have been shocking and very painful to you both.’

  ‘Alan needs help, not being accused of things. Taking that poor little boy! Look at him! Can you imagine him doing such a thing?’

  Frieda had no trouble in imagining anybody doing anything.

  ‘I don’t blame you,’ he said. ‘I keep thinking maybe they’re right.’

  ‘Who’s right?’ said Carrie.

  ‘Dr Klein. That detective. Maybe I did grab him.’

  ‘Don’t talk like that.’

  ‘Maybe I’m going mad. I feel a bit mad.’

  ‘Tell him he’s not,’ urged Carrie. There was a wobble in her voice.

  ‘It’s like being in a nightmare, all out of control,’ said Alan. ‘I’m handed from one crappy doctor to another. Finally I meet someone I trust. She makes me say things I didn’t even know I was thinking, and then reports me to the police for saying them. Who turn up and want to know what I was doing on the day that little boy went missing. I just wanted to sleep at night. I just wanted peace.’

  ‘Alan,’ said Frieda. ‘Listen to me now. Many people feel they’re going mad.’

  ‘That doesn’t mean I’m not.’

  ‘No, it doesn’t.’

  He smiled suddenly, his face breaking into a grin that made him look suddenly younger. ‘Why does it make me feel better not worse when you say that?’

  ‘I wanted to come and tell you what I did and to say sorry. But also I’ll quite understand if you don’t want to come back to see me. I can refer you to someone else.’

  ‘Not someone else.’

  ‘Do you mean you want to carry on?’

  ‘Will you be able to help me?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Alan sat in silence for a moment. ‘I can’t think of anything else that wouldn’t be worse,’ he said.

  ‘Alan!’ said Carrie, as if he had betrayed her. Suddenly Frieda felt for the other woman. Patients very often talked to Frieda about their partners and about their family but she wasn’t used to meeting them, to getting involved.

  She stood up, taking her trench coat from the back of the chair and putting it on. ‘You need to talk about it,’ she said.

  ‘We don’t need to talk about it,’ said Alan. ‘I’ll see you on Tuesday.’

  ‘If you’re sure.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Good. I’ll let myself out.’

  Frieda closed the kitchen door on them and stood on the other side, feeling like a spy. She could hear the rise and fall of their voices. She couldn’t make out whether they were arguing. She peered more closely at the photographs of Alan and his parents. He was chubby and solemn and had the same anxious smile, the same look of dismay. One portrait of the parents looked as if it had been taken by a high-street photographer. Probably for an anniversary. They were wearing their best clothes. The colours were almost garish. Frieda smiled and then her smile froze. She looked more closely at the picture. She muttered something to herself, a sort of reminder.

  Hansel accompanied her to the door and watched her leave with his golden, unblinking eyes.

  ‘Why the fucking fuck did you leave him?’

  ‘I didn’t say I’d left him. I said it was over.’

  ‘Oh, come on, Frieda.’ Olivia was striding around her living room, stumbling in her heels, trampling over clothes and objects, a very full glass of red wine in one hand and a cigarette in the other. The wine kept slopping over the rim of the glass and spreading small drops in her wake and the cigarette’s ash grew longer until it, too, scattered to the floor, to be ground into the grubby carpet by Olivia’s emphatic heel. She was wearing a gold, glittery cardigan, too tight for her and stretched open across her breasts, a pair of blue jogging pants with a stripe down the legs, and summer sandals with stiletto heels. Frieda wondered if she was having a slow, garrulous nervous breakdown. Sometimes it seemed that half the people around her were in states of collapse. ‘He wouldn’t have left you in a million years,’ Olivia was saying. ‘So why?’

  Frieda didn’t really want to talk about Sandy. She certainly didn’t want to talk about him to Olivia. It turned out she wouldn’t be given a chance to anyway.

  ‘Number one, he’s a hunk. God, if you saw some of the men I’ve been dating recently – I don’t know how they have the nerve to pass themselves off as “attractive male”. I see them walking through the door and my heart sinks. They want some gorgeous blonde woman but they don’t seem to think they need to make an effort themselves. How desperate do they think we are? I’d jump at someone like Sandy.’

  ‘You never actually met him…’

  ‘And why not? Where was I? Yes. Number two, he’s rich. Well, he must be quite rich – he’s a consultant something-or-other, isn’t he? Think of his pension. Don’t look at me like that. It matters. I can tell you it bloody fucking matters. It’s hard being a woman alone, let me tell you, and you’ve got no safety net, have you, with your bloody family writing you out of their wills? God, I hope you knew that – I haven’t just let the cat out of the bag, have I?’

  ‘It’s not a great surprise,’ said Frieda, wryly. ‘But I don’t want their money – and anyway I don’t think they’ve got any to leave, have they?’

  ‘Well, that’s OK, then. Where was I?’

  ‘Number two,’ said Frieda. ‘You probably don’t want to go any higher than two, do you?’

  ‘Yeah, rich. I’d marry him just for that. Anything to get out of this dump.’ She kicked viciously at a wine bottle that was on its side by the sofa and it rolled away, dribbling red from its mouth
. ‘Number three, I bet he loves you, so that should be three and four and five, because it’s a rare thing to be loved.’ She stopped abruptly and flung herself into the sofa. Some of the wine left in her glass flew out in a violent daub of crimson onto her lap. ‘Number four – or should that be six? – he’s nice. Isn’t he? Maybe he isn’t, because I seem to remember that you have a thing for scary men. OK, OK, I didn’t mean that, strike it. Number seven -’

  ‘Stop it. This is demeaning.’

  ‘Demeaning? I’ll show you demeaning.’ She gestured round the room. Ash swirled in a powdery arc round her. ‘Number five or ten or whatever, you’re not getting any younger.’

  ‘Olivia. Shut up, do you hear me? You’ve gone too far and if you go on I’m going to leave. I came round here to teach Chloë some chemistry.’

  ‘Which Chloë hasn’t turned up for so you’re stuck with me until she arrives, which may be never. You’ll soon be too old to have children, you know, though from where I’m sitting maybe that’s a lucky escape. Have you thought about that? All right, all right – you can give me that look of yours to freeze the blood, but I’ve had two, no, three glasses of wine now’ – and she took a last dramatic gulp from her glass – ‘and you can’t intimidate me. I’m insulated. I can say what I please in my own house, and I think you’re a bloody fool, Dr Frieda Klein-with-lots-of-letters-after-your-name. There, now I’ve had three glasses. Maybe it was four. I think it must have been. You should drink more, you know. You might be clever, but you’re tremendously stupid as well. Maybe it runs in the Klein blood. What did Freud say? I’ll tell you what he said. He said, “What do women want?” And do you know how he answered that?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I’ll tell you how. He said, “They want love and work.” ’

  ‘No. He more or less concluded that they want to be men. He said girls have to come to terms with being failed boys.’

  ‘Wanker. Anyway – where was I?’

  ‘What’s that noise?’

  Olivia went out of the room, shrieked, and returned glassy-eyed. ‘That noise,’ she said, ‘is Chloë throwing up on the mat in the hall.’

  Chapter Twenty-one

  As Frieda was paying the cab driver, she saw Josef standing in her doorway.

  ‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘You don’t have a standing invitation, you know. You can’t just turn up whenever you feel like company.’

  As if in explanation, he held up a bottle. ‘It is good vodka,’ he said. ‘Can I come in?’

  Frieda unlocked the door. ‘How long have you been here?’

  ‘I just waited. I thought maybe you come back.’

  ‘I’m not going to sleep with you. I’ve had a fucking awful day.’

  ‘No sleeping.’ Josef looked reproachful. ‘Just a drink.’

  ‘I could do with a drink,’ said Frieda.

  While Josef lit the fire in the grate, Frieda rummaged in the back of a cupboard and found a packet of crisps. She emptied them into a bowl. She brought it through with two small glasses. The fire was already crackling. As she came into the room, she saw Josef before he knew she was back. He was staring into the flames with a different expression from the smile he’d greeted her with.

  ‘Are you sad, Josef?’

  He looked round. ‘Far away,’ he said.

  ‘Why don’t you go home?’

  ‘Next year, maybe.’

  Frieda sat down. ‘Do we need juice with this?’

  ‘Good on its own,’ he said. ‘For the taste.’

  He unscrewed the top and delicately filled the two glasses to within a couple of millimetres of the rim. He handed one to Frieda. ‘Drink the first one all at once,’ he said.

  ‘I think I’d like that.’

  They both tossed the drink back. Josef gave a slow grin. Frieda picked up the bottle and looked at the label. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

  ‘Russian,’ he said. ‘But good.’ He refilled their glasses. ‘What was bad in your day?’

  Frieda took another sip of Josef’s vodka. It stung the back of her throat and then it spread hot through her chest. She told Josef about sitting on Olivia’s bathroom floor as Chloë knelt with her face over the lavatory, retching and heaving, even when there was nothing left to vomit out. Frieda hadn’t spoken much, just leaned across and gently touched her on the back of her neck. Afterwards she had wiped Chloë’s face with a cold flannel.

  ‘I didn’t know what to say. I just kept thinking what it would be like, when you’re sick and you’re vomiting, to have some older woman lecture you about drinking sensibly. So I didn’t say anything.’

  Josef didn’t answer. He just looked into his glass of vodka as if there was a faint light in the centre of it and he needed all his concentration to see it. Frieda found it comforting to talk to someone who wasn’t trying to be clever or funny or reassuring. So then she told him about her visit to Alan. To her own astonishment, she heard herself telling Josef how she had previously gone to the police about him.

  ‘What do you think?’ Frieda asked.

  Very slowly, with a care that had now become exaggerated, Josef filled her glass once again. ‘What I think,’ he said, ‘is that you shouldn’t think about it. It’s better not to think about things too much.’

  Frieda sipped at the drink. Was this the third glass? Or the fourth? Could it be the fifth? Or had Josef been topping up the drinks so that it didn’t really count as separate drinks but instead one sort of elasticated drink that gradually grew? She was just starting to agree with the idea of not thinking when her phone rang. She was so surprised by what she had been about to say that she let it ring several times.

  Josef looked puzzled. ‘You don’t answer?’

  ‘All right, all right.’ Frieda took a deep breath. She didn’t feel entirely clear-headed. She picked up the phone. ‘Hello.’

  ‘I love you.’

  ‘Who is this?’

  ‘How many women ring you up to say they love you?’

  ‘Chloë?’

  ‘I do love you, although you’re so stern and cold.’

  ‘Are you still drunk?’

  ‘Do I have to be drunk to tell you I love you?’

  ‘I tell you what, Chloë, you should go to bed and sleep it off.’

  ‘I’m in bed. I feel dreadful.’

  ‘Stay there. Drink lots of water through the night, even if it makes you feel sicker. I’ll call tomorrow.’ She put the phone down and pulled an exasperated face at Josef.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good. You fix things. You are like me. Two days ago a woman rings me, someone I worked for. She is screaming. I get to her house. There is water bursting from a pipe like a fountain. There is five centimetres of water in her kitchen. She is still screaming. It’s just a simple valve. I turn the valve, I drain the water. That is you. There is an emergency, they phone you, you rush in and rescue them.’

  ‘I wish I was,’ said Frieda. ‘I’d like to be the person who knew what to do when someone’s boiler had broken or their car wasn’t working. That’s the sort of expertise that really makes things better. You’re the person who fixes the leaking pipe. I’m the person who’s hired by the company who made the pipe to come along and try to persuade the screaming patient not to sue them.’

  ‘No, no,’ said Josef. ‘Don’t say that. You’re being self… self…’

  ‘Conscious.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Sabotaging.’

  ‘No,’ said Josef, waving his hands around as if he was trying to act out the meaning of the words he couldn’t find. ‘You are saying, “I am bad”, so that I say, “No, you are good, you are very good.” ’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Frieda.

  ‘Don’t just agree,’ said Josef. ‘You should argue.’

  ‘I’m too tired. I’ve had too many vodkas.’

  ‘I am working with your friend Reuben,’ said Josef.

  ‘He’s not necessarily my friend.’

  ‘Strange man. But
he talks about you. I am learning about you.’

  Frieda gave a shudder. ‘Reuben knew me best ten years ago. I was different then. How is he?’

  ‘I am making his house better.’

  ‘That’s good,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s probably what he needs.’

  ‘Do you want to tell me why it was so urgent to see me?’

  Sasha Wells was in her mid-twenties. She was dressed in dark trousers and a jacket that seemed designed to disguise the shape of her body. Even so, and even though her dirty blonde hair was dishevelled, and she kept running her fingers through it, pushing strands out of her eye even when they weren’t in her eye, and though she was just a bit too thin, and though the fingers of her left hand were stained from cigarette smoking, and though she wouldn’t meet Frieda’s gaze except to give an ingratiating half-smile, her beauty was obvious. But her large dark eyes seemed to be apologizing for it. She made Frieda think of an injured animal, but the kind of animal that reacts to being injured not by fighting back but by curling up and retreating. Neither of them spoke for some time. Sasha was fidgeting with her hands. Frieda was tempted to let her have a cigarette. She was clearly desperate for one.

  ‘My friend Barney has a friend called Mick who says you’re great. That I can trust you.’

  ‘You can say anything you like,’ said Frieda.

  ‘All right,’ said Sasha, but so quietly that Frieda had to lean forward to make her out.

  ‘I take it you’ve already been seeing a therapist.’

  ‘Yes. I was seeing someone called James Rundell. I think he’s quite famous.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve heard of him. How long have you been seeing him for?’

  ‘About six months. Maybe a bit more. I started just after I got my job.’ She pushed her hair away from her face, then let it fall forward again. ‘I’m a scientist, a geneticist. I like my work, and I have good friends, but I was stuck in a rut and I couldn’t seem to get out of it.’ She gave a little grimace that only made her more beautiful. ‘Bad relationships, you know. I was letting myself get messed around a bit.’