Perfect Little Children

by Sophie Hannah

  “I suppose it’s easy for me to say this now, but I do think I knew. Two things, really: that the behavior I saw, however unusual, wasn’t half as odd as whatever was behind it. The cause.”

  I wonder how much she’s allowing what I’ve told her to distort her memory of what she used to think. “What’s the second thing?” I ask.

  “That the explanation, whatever’s really going on with the Caters, must be something so strange that I couldn’t ever imagine it,” Lou says. “No matter how hard I tried.”

  15

  “It makes quite a difference,” says Pam Swain, as I smooth away a hard knot beneath her left shoulder. Many people would say, “Ow!” or make distressed noises, but not Pam. She can handle my pressure. She’s used to it. “It’s funny, you wouldn’t think I’d notice, with me lying facedown for the hour, but the purple’s definitely more soothing and relaxing than the white was.”

  “It’s not purple, Pam,” I say mock-sternly. “It’s aubergine. Remember?”

  “Yes, sorry.” She laughs. “Aubergine.”

  “I still love it—though I was worried I’d hate it as soon as I’d put down the paintbrush. But it works because it’s deep in a soft way. Not bright.”

  “That’s it exactly,” says Pam.

  She’s fifty-nine, a nurse at the Rawndesley General Infirmary, and she’s been coming to me for two years. Like so many of my clients, she’s become a friend. Rarely do I give a massage in silence. All my regulars like to chat—probably because my massages aren’t the kind that allow clients to zone out and nod off. The aim isn’t inner peace or pampering. My work is about increasing flexibility and removing chronic pain. If you want someone to rub pretty-smelling oil into your back while a bland Sounds of the Ocean CD plays on repeat, I’m not the massage therapist for you. I don’t apologize for any of this; I advertise it upfront, and my work diary is full of people still wanting more after years of coming to me.

  “I wouldn’t want more than one wall this color, but I’m glad I have one,” I tell Pam. “I so nearly didn’t do it.”

  “I remember. And you wouldn’t have done it if Zannah and Ben hadn’t already changed their walls from white to something else.”

  This is true. I’ve always been a strict white-walls-only person, but I persuaded myself that I was allowed to paint my treatment room aubergine by thinking, “No radical change is happening here. You are already somebody with two nonwhite rooms in your house.”

  Zannah’s bedroom has mint-green-and-gold diamond-patterned wallpaper that she insisted would look amazing and has hated from about a fortnight after it went up. She refuses to let me or Dom strip it or paint over it, though, because of something about the importance of remembering one’s mistakes and learning from them—advice she got from a YouTube star’s Pinterest quote board. Instead, across the whole of one wall, she has spray-painted the words “Big Mistake” in pale pink, graffiti-style. The other walls she’s covered in collages of photographs so that the wallpaper is barely visible: pictures of her and Murad, friends, family.

  When Ben heard Zannah lobbying to have her room redecorated, the principle of equality obliged him to join in, even though he didn’t and doesn’t care what his bedroom looks like. He chose pale gray for the walls, but couldn’t be bothered to test the various shades, so Dom—who, despite being a graphic designer, also has zero interest in the difference between one color and another when it comes to doing up our house—picked one for him at random. It looks good. Zannah immediately said, “Ben, your room looks a hundred times better than mine, you little shit.”

  Ben chose a couple of posters of Kate Moss, the supermodel, wearing clothes with the word “Supreme” on them, and asked me to get them framed. At the same time, he took down all the pictures that he thought were too childish, apart from the very first one I ever bought for him that was his before he was born—framed and waiting for him in his room. It’s a black-and-white drawing of a five-bar gate in a field, with teddy bears sitting on the gate’s bars and in a semicircle in front of it. The bears are all grinning happily. Most recently, they’ve been grinning at Kate Moss in her Supreme T-shirt across the no-man’s-land of Ben’s clothes-strewn floor.

  “Change really is the most frightening thing,” says Pam with a sigh.

  I know my next line in this dialogue, and Pam just gave me my cue. “It’s true,” I say. “But change is good for us. If we never make any changes that scare us at first, we end up missing out.” I vary the wording slightly each time Pam and I have this conversation.

  “Yes,” she says quickly. “I think one of the worst mistakes we make is investing so much significance in details of our lives that don’t matter at all. We can just choose. It doesn’t matter all that much, and maybe there’s no wrong choice.”

  “Mm-hmm.”

  “It’s like me, with moving house,” says Pam, as if she’s never said it before. “Or rather, not moving house. I know I could live somewhere nicer, quieter and for half the price. I don’t like living on a busy street in the center of a town. But Ed loved the house, and I’ve lived in it since we got married. The thought of moving’s frightening. I might not be able to be me in a different house—that’s what I say to myself. But that’s rubbish, of course.”

  “And you’ll still be you if you stay where you are,” I say cheerily. Here is where the discussion always stalls. Pam will change the subject now, and we’ll spend the rest of our hour together talking about other things. I don’t mind the repetitive element of my sessions with her. She seems to need it, and I keep hoping that one day she’ll pluck up the courage to do what she so obviously wants, on some level, to do: sell her enormous town house that’s much too big for her now that Ed’s died and her children have all left home, and move to a cottage in a country village.

  I swore to myself that I would never advise her directly, or tell her that’s what I think she ought to do, even though sometimes I’m tempted to scream, “Just do it and stop fretting!” I’m not sure whether she would prefer a new house to her current one, but I’m convinced she’d feel happier and more confident if she demonstrated to herself that she’s brave enough to take a risk once in a while and live with the consequences, whatever they might be.

  “So, what’s been keeping you so busy?” she asks. “It’s not like you to cancel on me twice in one week.”

  “I know. I’m sorry.”

  “No need to apologize! I know you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t necessary. You’re so reliable. I was a bit worried about you, that’s all. Is everything okay on the home front?”

  “Fine. There was something I had to pursue. Something I can’t really talk about, I’m afraid, but nothing for you to worry about.”

  “Well, you pursue away!” she says. “You’re the sort of person who’d make a success of whatever you decided to do.”

  “Am I?”

  “Oh, yes,” Pam says confidently.

  Apart from persuading PC Pollard to check on the Cater children. We still haven’t heard anything from him. I wanted to ring him this morning, but Dom said we ought to give it more time. “If he doesn’t get back to us by the end of Thursday, we can ring him then,” he said.

  It’s Monday today. Pollard’s already had long enough. I’ve spent the days since we saw him trying to prove to Dom that I can put the Braids and the Caters to one side and get on with normal life. He’s been impressed and so have I. I’ve done better than I thought I would. Every time a new theory occurs to me and I’m about to say, “You know, another possibility . . .” I manage to stop myself in time.

  If I ring Pollard on Thursday and find out he’s done nothing . . .

  “He will have done,” Dom assured me this morning. “If he’s doing it properly, through child protection channels, it might take a while. There’ll be processes they have to go through. It’s probably all underway. Be patient.”

  I think again of Thomas Cater’s broken shoe, with its flapping sole. I don’t want to be patient. I want to do
something. I know what I want to do, but I’ve been pushing it down whenever it surfaces in my mind because it’s too extreme.

  “Beth? There’s something worrying you, isn’t there?” says Pam. “I’m not asking you to tell me what it is, but there’s something.”

  “Sorry, Pam. I was miles away.” I try to sound lighthearted. “Something I’m trying to figure out, that’s all. How to take a particular project forward.”

  “You can’t think how to get to where you want to be—is that it?”

  “No, I know how to get there. It’s whether I should go at all—that’s the problem. If and when I arrive, I might find it’s the last place I want to be.” It’s hard to discuss it without any of the specifics.

  “I’ve been listening to an excellent podcast,” Pam says as I pour some more oil into my hands to rub into her back. “I tell you, since Ed died, podcasts have saved my life. Anyway, this one said that you can fear change and still allow change to happen if it’s necessary.”

  “Sounds good, but fear’s not my problem. It’s more a straight choice. Deciding what to do between two options that are diametric opposites.”

  1) Do whatever I have to do to find out what’s going on with Flora and her family. 2) Leave it to PC Pollard.

  “Ah, well, this podcast had something to say about choices too,” says Pam. “And indecision. Mind you, it hasn’t managed to help me resolve to move house yet. Though if it does, it’ll be thanks to one particularly useful piece of advice.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Imagine you could pursue both choices, in parallel universes.”

  “Like a Sliding Doors scenario?”

  “What’s that?” Pam asks.

  “A film. Never mind.”

  “Imagine you make choice number one, and it goes as well as it possibly could.”

  “Okay.” That’s me taking action and finding out the truth. And then doing what? What if I can’t prove it, or no one will listen? What if the truth is as bad as I’m imagining it must be, and I’m powerless to do anything about it?

  “Now imagine you make choice number two,” says Pam. “That also goes as well as it possibly could.”

  Which means PC Pollard finds out the truth, arrests whoever needs to be arrested, rescues Thomas and Emily Cater . . . who then go into the care system, because their parents are in jail.

  Those parents, I realize with a jolt of shock, are Lewis and Flora. They must be. For the children I saw with Flora outside Newnham House to look so similar to older Thomas and Emily at the same ages, they must have both parents in common, not just one. In all four faces, there’s an unmistakeable resemblance to Flora, but the eyes are different. They’ve all got the same eyes: dark and almond-shaped, not rounder and green like Flora’s.

  How the hell have I only just seen this? I’ve thought so much about the similarities between the two pairs of children, the ones living at Newnham House and the teenagers in Florida as they were twelve years ago—and then about how younger Thomas and Emily’s faces reveal that they’re Flora’s, not Yanina’s or any other woman’s—that I’ve failed to think about the eyes and what they mean.

  Flora used to say it all the time: that baby Thomas or baby Emily had looked at her with Lewis’s eyes. “Not just his eyes, but his stubborn expression,” she would say, laughing. “That ‘Give me what I want or else’ stare.”

  Last Thursday, as I watched Thomas Cater walk across the playground to Yanina after school, I told myself that he couldn’t be the Thomas I knew in 2007; he had to be a different boy because it was in every way impossible that he was the same one, frozen in time, unaging—not because he didn’t look identical to Thomas Braid. He did. Going only by the visuals, they could be the same person.

  Which means Thomas Cater has Lewis Braid’s eyes. And is his son. And Emily is Lewis’s daughter.

  Then why doesn’t Lewis insist on having them in Florida with him? The Lewis I knew wouldn’t allow any child of his to stay in a house where his wife was living with another man. He wouldn’t let his youngest son go to school wearing broken shoes that barely covered his feet.

  “Beth?” Pam’s voice breaks into my thoughts. “Was it helpful? Or are you still trying to work out what both choices going as well as they could might look like? That’s what the exercise is: you imagine that each choice goes amazingly well, and then you choose which of those ideal outcomes would be the most ideal. It’s very clever.”

  I don’t have time to answer. There’s a loud rapping on the door of my treatment room.

  “Beth, I need a word.” It’s Dom. No apology for interrupting when I’m working—something he’s never done before.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s urgent,” he says. “It’s Zannah.”

  I apologize to Pam, leave her in the treatment room on the table, and close the door behind me, my heart thudding like a maniac on the loose in my chest.

  Dom’s waiting for me in the hall. “What’s wrong with Zan?” I snap at him. “Tell me quickly. Is she hurt?” She’s supposed to be with Murad at a revision session at school. History.

  “What? No, nothing like that,” says Dom. “Physically she’s fine.”

  Thank God. “Then what?”

  “She just rang and said can I send you to school immediately. I told her you were with Pam. She said, ‘This is more important than someone’s stiff back.’”

  “Important how?”

  “She refused to say. I tried, Beth.”

  “Did she sound upset?” Please, please, don’t let Murad have dumped her, not just before her GCSEs.

  “No. More angry.”

  “Oh, God. Just angry, though, not scared?”

  “It was hard to tell. Maybe a bit scared too, yeah.”

  I’m finding it hard to breathe. Please let this not be too serious. “Why didn’t you make her tell you what’s wrong?”

  “You think I didn’t try? She wouldn’t tell me anything. She only said that it’s important and you need to go to school immediately and text her when you get there. Don’t go inside and ask for her—she stressed that quite a few times. Text Murad’s phone from the car park and she’ll come out and meet you. She wants you to hurry. Have you got his number?”

  If she’s asking me to text Murad’s phone, they can’t have broken up. Unless she had his phone for some reason, found something on it that shouldn’t have been there, and is refusing to give it back. “Yeah, I’ve got his number. But, Dom, I’ve got Pam—”

  “I know. Look, don’t blame me. I offered to go instead, and got a firm no. Oh, and Zannah wants you there by eleven. Ideally before.”

  I look at the clock on the wall above Dom’s head. “I can easily do it. It’s only ten past ten and it’s a fifteen-minute drive. What about Pam, though?”

  “She’ll understand—it’s a family emergency.”

  He’s right. Back in the treatment room, I explain the situation to Pam, who’s very reasonable about it. “Of course you must go,” she says, buttoning up her flower-print blouse. “And try not to worry. Everything seems ever so serious when you’re that age. It’s probably just boyfriend trouble.”

  That’s what I’m worried about. Zannah feels things deeply. Her love for Murad isn’t a passing fad. If he’s done something like cheat on her and she’s just found out, I’ll be lucky if I can stop her smashing his head in with the nearest heavy object. Maybe she has already. Dom said she was fine physically, but maybe Murad isn’t. No, a teacher would have rung if there had been an injury, surely . . .

  “Beth.” Pam puts her hand on my arm. “Zannah is fine. If it was really serious, she’d have told Dominic what had happened, wouldn’t she?”

  I hadn’t thought of this and it makes me feel slightly better. “Yes. If it was life or death, she’d have told Dom.”

  But if it wasn’t, she wouldn’t interrupt you when she knows you’ve got clients all day that you let down last week and are trying to make it up to.

  “Unless she�
��s pregnant,” Pam announces cheerily. “She’d prefer to tell Mum than Dad that sort of news, I imagine.”

  Yes, she would. Oh, God. “Thanks for that,” I try to smile. Zan and Murad have already thought of a name for their first baby: Truelove. Is this the news I’m about to receive—that Truelove Rasheed-Leeson is already on the way? Zannah knows how not to get pregnant; she and I have discussed it many times.

  But GCSEs are coming up. And she’d do anything to avoid them. And she hasn’t revised.

  No. I shake the idea from my mind. She wouldn’t—neither accidentally nor deliberately. Not my Zan, who’s wise beyond her years.

  “Stop imagining worst-case scenarios and go,” says Pam. “You don’t need to wait for me. It’ll take me a while to put my jewelry back on. Dominic’ll see me out, I’m sure.”

  “Thank you, Pam. I’ll make this up to you—free massages for life, at this rate.”

  I grab my car keys and head for Bankside Park.

  16

  I follow Zannah’s instructions: park in the visitor car park, text Murad’s phone to say I’ve arrived. Immediately, three dots appear on the screen beneath my message. She’s typing. Or he is.

  Nearly a minute later, the typing is still going on, or so the jumping dots indicate. Maybe it’s both of them together. What are they doing, writing an essay?

  The message that finally lands has no name at the bottom, so I can’t tell who wrote it. It contains directions for how to find the Art room on foot. The school has 2,000 pupils and is spread over four buildings if not more. Each one is a labyrinth of corridors. I’m to meet Zannah at a particular door, which she’s waiting at.

  What’s she doing in the Art room, when she gave the subject up two years ago? She’s supposed to be at a History revision day. And why can’t she come and meet me in the car park?

  I cross the wide rectangular yard and knock on the prescribed door when I find it, planning to ask all these questions. Zannah’s voice calls out, “Mum?”

  “Yeah. Open the door.”