Darling Sweetheart

by Stephen Price

  ‘This is all your fault.’

  At first, Annalise had not understood. Had she spilled something? Had she disturbed her mother’s sleep?

  ‘When he goes,’ her mother pointed at the ceiling, ‘just you remember: this is all your fault.’

  ‘S-sorry, Mummy, I don’t–’

  ‘It’s only you he gives a shit about. After you came along, he stopped caring about me. He doesn’t like me any more,’ and now her mother pointed at herself, just below her tummy, ‘he doesn’t like me down there. But just you wait; you might be his favourite, but you’re not enough for him, I can tell. No one is ever enough for your Darling fucking Sweetheart.’

  And her mother was right. Gradually, her father stopped reading plays with her in the library then he even stopped reading bedtime stories. He stopped speaking, no matter how hard she tried with Froggy. He spent a lot of time on the phone and smoked and drank loads. Annalise hid his aeroplane keys, afraid he would fly away and leave her again. He had raged for two days, but she pretended to know nothing and, in the end, he had another set ordered.

  Two men came to the house, a tall thin one and a little bald one. Both had scary eyes. They laughed very loudly and stayed up late; her mother refused to come downstairs at all. A few nights after they arrived, her father got Annalise out of bed and made her stand on a stool in the drawing room, to recite bits of The Tempest. The two men clapped, but when her father said, ‘Okay, Annalise, now do Froggy. Wait until you see this boys, it’s uncanny, she can make that soft toy in her hand come alive.’ Then, she couldn’t speak; her mouth turned dry and she wanted to pee herself.

  The following morning, there was a single white rose beside her bed. She looked around her room, expecting to see him, but he wasn’t there, and somehow she knew that meant he had left her. She scampered downstairs in her pyjamas, pulled on a pair of wellies and dashed through the meadow, crying already, knowing before she reached the bottom field that the hangar would be empty. Darling Sweetheart had gone, taking the two men with him.

  All bullies possess a sixth sense for weakness and that very same day Katie Brennan and Hannah Cowen were waiting for her after school. Where the road to Whin Abbey left Kilnarush, there was an abandoned mill – a roofless roughstone hulk full of scrap metal, weeds and broken glass. The big boys from the village drank there at night. Her two tormentors stood by the mill, flagrant, in full view. As she walked past, Hannah Cowen marched wordlessly up to her, grabbed her by the hair and dragged her through the doorway. They pushed her to the ground and set about kicking and punching her, venting all the pent-up beatings of the past three years.

  ‘Get her knickers off!’ Katie Brennan kept shouting. ‘Get her knickers off!’ Annalise kicked and wriggled but Hannah Cowen sat on her chest and Katie Brennan clawed at her underpants, which ripped but did not come away. Annalise started screaming then, screaming so hard and so loud that the bullies took fright and scrambled off back to the village, leaving her bleeding in the piss-soaked dirt.

  No one had heard her, no one had come to help, but she managed to stagger home, holding her underpants together to stop them falling off, her mouth full of blood and awful numbing pains over her back, ribs and face. Her mother was nowhere to be found, so she limped to her room, got Froggy and hid behind the sofa in the library. Mrs Crombie found her there the next morning and wept at the sight of her. She made Mr Crombie drive them to the doctor and told the doctor they needed to phone the police, but Annalise wouldn’t speak and the doctor said that Hannah Cowen was the policeman’s daughter anyway, so shag-all good it would do. For a long time afterwards, Annalise stayed off school and wouldn’t speak to anyone except Froggy, and, even then, only when there was no one else was around.

  ‘Annalise? Are you in there? Annalise!’

  Emerson’s voice echoed through her house. It was twilight; she lay on her bed wearing Roselaine’s dress, staring at the ceiling.

  ‘Annalise!’

  She sat up and peered through the venetian blinds. The press pack had diminished; the half-dozen that remained were easily kept at bay by Emerson’s minders, who equalled them in number but towered over them in size. Two black people-carriers blocked the street. She couldn’t see him from this angle, but Emerson was obviously at her front door, calling through the letterbox.

  ‘Annalise! It’s Harry! I dunno if you’re in there but everythin’s okay now! This thing with your ex-boyfriend – you shoulda told me! My guys will protect you, there’s nothin’ to worry about! If you can hear me, you gotta call, ’cos we gotta movie to make!’

  As she watched, he descended her front steps, spoke briefly to Levine and jumped into one of the people-carriers, followed by two of his men. A few flashguns went off as this car sped away. The second reversed into a parking space opposite and the remaining four bodyguards, Levine and Bernstein amongst them, arrayed themselves along the pavement before her door, like a Praetorian guard. Her downstairs phone had gone quiet but now it rang again. It rang every half-an-hour until four in the morning, before it finally stopped. All that time, she lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling or dozing in short fits and starts. Sometime after five, she rose and looked through the blinds again. The press pack had gone; a lone bodyguard stood by her steps, the others had retired to their car. What a rotten bloody job, she thought; your only purpose in life to hang around constantly, bolstering some movie star’s image. Of course, that’s why he wants me, to bolster his image. But maybe that’s also the answer; maybe I should become his grateful little princess in faraway Los Angeles. Because if I run far enough, the past might never catch up.

  She took Roselaine’s costume off and laid it on her bed. She dressed in jeans, boots, a black poloneck and a red raincoat. Without turning any lights on, she let herself out the kitchen patio door into her darkened back garden, where she crept along the hedge until she found a gap that let her squeeze through into her neighbour’s garden, then onto a parallel street. Within two minutes, she was on Maze Hill. She had a long walk ahead, so she set off at a steady pace, towards the pillars of light that were Canary Wharf.

  11

  ‘You’ve read the file?’

  ‘Yes, doctor.’

  ‘Please, call me Charles. No need for formalities when we’re alone.’

  Karla Lutze shifted in her chair and opened the folder in her lap. Consultant psychiatrist Dr Charles Seabon Passmore, BSc., MPhil., FRCPysch., ran a hand through his silver hair, then, conscious that this was a grooming gesture signalling sexual interest, shifted his gaze out the window. It fell on the plane trees and parked cars of Devonshire Place… and on a tasty, young, blonde thing crossing the street. He pulled his gaze back inside his surgery, which was furnished in expensive Edwardian pastiche.

  ‘So may I ask you,’ he tapped a fingertip on his green leather desktop, ‘for your assessment?’

  ‘I have questions,’ Lutze replied flatly. Her eyes were unnervingly steady, an effect abetted by glasses as thick as beer mugs. It was only when Passmore had seen her without these glasses, emerging two days ago from the female lavatory, that he had decided to make an effort with his East German intern. Over the years, dozens of placement students had come and gone from his immensely private practice – he took them as a favour to a former colleague in King’s College. His side of the favour was that he only accepted females; sometimes they were pretty, sometimes they were not. Sometimes they were amenable, sometimes not. Lutze was plump with short, brown hair, but she had buttermilk skin and a mole beside her mouth. Involving her in this case was his way of impressing her, of drawing her in. However, he got the impression that East German universities did not encourage informality.

  ‘You have questions…’ he echoed.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Such as…?’

  ‘The file does not state how the patient was referred. There are no prior notes, only yours.’

  ‘The patient was not referred to me. In a strange way, I was referred to her.’

  �
�Please to explain.’

  Suddenly, Passmore felt as if he were the patient. ‘It was all rather… unorthodox,’ he began. ‘She was brought to my attention by an old acquaintance.’ Lutze took a pen from the breast pocket of her blouse; Passmore tried to keep his gaze from lingering on her breasts.

  ‘They are related? Your acquaintance and the patient?’

  ‘No, they weren’t – Sylvia’s dead now, you see. She was the patient’s drama coach.’

  ‘There was a sexual relationship between your acquaintance and the patient?’

  ‘God, no!’ No need to mention, he thought, that in the distant mists of time, there had been a sexual relationship between him and his acquaintance. He cleared his throat. ‘Errm… Sylvia was in her sixties and the patient in her teens. There was never, as far as I could see, any hint of… no, definitely not. Sylvia simply came here one day and asked me to see one of her students. It was only when I agreed that she told me the student was in Ireland.’

  ‘Ireland?’

  ‘At her family home. Her father had died in an accident and she had returned there to grieve. Sylvia said she had been deeply attached to him.’

  ‘Possible Electra complex?’

  ‘If you subscribe to Jung, possibly. Bad relationship with her mother, terribly fond of the father – but there was a bit more to it than that. You see, Sylvia had become concerned when she had telephoned Ireland to offer the patient her condolences. She called from this office to demonstrate, from that very phone,’ he nodded at the device on his desk, ‘and I must say that what I heard troubled me, too.’

  ‘Please to why?’

  ‘Because a horrible rasping voice answered and when I asked to speak with the patient, it told me to… what was it now… yes, it said that I should “shove my bugle up my jacksie”.’

  ‘Please, what is jacksie?’

  ‘I have absolutely no idea. The point is, I could get no sense out of this individual and asked again for the patient, but that just provoked a stream of mindless abuse, so I hung up. Sylvia then told me that, in the evenings, sometimes a woman would answer the phone instead, in a state of advanced inebriation. She feared that the patient was at risk from these persons and wanted to fly to Ireland immediately.’

  ‘But why not to summon the police?’

  ‘She had already called the local police and found them useless. So, rather reluctantly I have to say, the following morning I accompanied her to Dublin. We took a taxi to this village, in the middle of nowhere. We were directed to a great, big, rambling wreck of a place, a Victorian pile that had seen much better days. The front door was open, so we went inside. It was practically derelict – there was almost no furniture; only one room on the ground floor even looked occupied. Quite massive and empty it was, but, eventually, we found the patient upstairs, cowering in a corner, hugging a stuffed toy as if her life depended on it. But then, when she spoke, I realised that the horrid voice on the phone had been her.’

  Lutze referred to her folder. ‘You say here that she used the soft toy to communicate…’

  ‘Yes, it was quite grotesque actually. In the same way that a little girl will role-play with dollies, the patient attributed this awful voice to a ghastly, frog-like toy.’

  ‘Prosopopoeia?’

  Passmore nodded. ‘The personification of inanimate objects or the introduction of a pretend speaker. Most of us do it without thinking – by calling a car ‘she’, by exhorting, “My God!” or by attributing malice to a device that does not function properly. When people over-identify with objects, transferral can occur – this is common to all religions, of course, but you also hear of grieving parents who will literally substitute a doll for a dead offspring.’

  ‘Did she communicate only through the toy?’

  ‘Initially, yes. It was not an attempt at ventriloquism but rather like watching a puppet show. Indeed, knowing that the patient was a trainee actress, at first I thought that I was merely seeing a performance, the main purpose of which was to seek attention.’

  ‘What made you alter that diagnosis?’

  ‘Her mother arrived and threatened us with a shotgun.’

  ‘Hmmm…’

  ‘The woman was plainly psychotic, untreated paranoid schizophrenia – I recognised the symptoms straight away. She seemed capable of real harm, but Sylvia calmed her down by producing a bottle of whiskey that she had bought at the airport duty-free, which was jolly clever thinking actually – you see, the mother was also a chronic alcoholic. When Sylvia promised to purchase more booze, the mother even became quite friendly.’

  ‘So perhaps the patient has a hereditary disposition to both alcoholism and schizophrenia?’

  ‘Perhaps. The mother had obviously been afflicted for many years but in the absence of medical attention had developed her own coping mechanisms, of which alcohol was one. Another was ritual: a mish-mash of quasi-religious ideas and so forth. She believed herself to be the high priestess of some ancient Egyptian cult.’

  ‘How did the mother behave towards the patient?’

  ‘Mostly with indifference, although the more she drank, the more angry she became about the patient’s dead father, who had been quite a well-known film star – David Palatine, you might have heard of him?’

  ‘In Germany we have this, yes.’

  ‘Err… yes. Well, the mother’s anger towards the father provided an insight that I considered key. You are aware, I take it, of R.D. Laing?’

  ‘ The Divided Self?’

  ‘Very good, very good… well, I knew Laing, you see, and although I disagreed with his methods, a lot of what he had to say about ontological insecurity seems to me basically sound: that the root cause of some mental illness, schizophrenia in particular, often lies in familial discord. So, for example, if a child’s parents fight a lot, or behave unusually, then the child grows up in what Laing called “a perpetual lose-lose situation”, always having to suppress their own personality to appease their parents’ conflicting demands.’

  ‘And the toy became an outlet?’

  ‘Precisely – as a person, she herself was quite submissive, but the stuffed frog was the conduit for her defiance. She could use it to express her feelings without having to take ownership of them.’

  ‘What happened to the toy?’

  ‘The toy? I told her to get rid of it.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘We’re leaping ahead here slightly; you must understand, I spent a lot of time with the patient after we found her. I booked into a hotel and conducted two lengthy sessions a day for over a week, at considerable inconvenience to myself and my other patients here in London, I might add. At first, she would only talk to me through the toy, using its personality to make a mockery of my questioning. But then Sylvia attended a session and the patient broke down – she was still traumatised by her father’s death. Gradually, I was then able to adopt what I call the Corinthian approach,’ and here Passmore allowed himself a smile, ‘you know, “when I was a child I spoke as a child, but then I put away childish things”. The patient needed to see herself as a woman, not as a child. I felt that setting the toy aside was essential for her recovery. My approach seemed to work; when she arrived for her final session, she told me that she had burned the toy.’

  ‘So she was cured?’

  ‘I believed her to be on a recovery path. I returned to London, and Sylvia followed a week or so later, bringing the patient with her.’

  ‘Did you prescribe an anti-psychotic? Chlorpromazine? Perphenazine, perhaps?’

  ‘I wanted to, but Sylvia wouldn’t let me.’

  ‘So… I am puzzled. Why do you ask me to study this case, doctor? Is this a test for me?’

  Passmore ran his hand through his hair, abruptly pulled it away, then slumped in his chair.

  ‘No,’ he sighed. ‘All this happened eight years ago. As far as I was concerned, the case was closed. But the patient is downstairs at this very moment, waiting to see me. She rang me yesterday afternoon in an agi
tated state.’ Lutze, he noted with some satisfaction, had turned pale. ‘She says she’s hearing voices. She’s about the same age as you, so I want you to sit in on the consultation and give me a second opinion: is the patient just suffering from stress or is something else amiss?’

  ‘But I cannot!’

  ‘Karla – ours is a life devoted to helping people. I shall request her consent, of course, but I don’t think that will be a problem.’ He lifted his telephone. ‘Ellen – send Miss Palatine up, please.’

  Lutze blinked behind her beer-mug glasses. Hurriedly, she closed the file on her lap, cleared her throat and turned her notebook to a clean page. The surgery door opened and Annalise entered.

  ‘Annalise! How are you?’ Passmore came around his desk, embraced her and, Lutze observed, pecked her on both cheeks, before showing her to a suite of sofas on the far side of the room, ‘I’d like you to meet Karla Lutze, a very brilliant student of mine. She is bound by the same rules of confidentiality as I am. Subject to your agreement, I should like her to observe our conversation; I think an extra perspective might prove useful.’

  It seemed to Lutze that Palatine nodded only reluctantly; Passmore was being unprofessional by springing such a request on her. She made a written note to that effect, in German.

  ‘Wonderful to see you again,’ Passmore purred, ‘in the flesh as it were. I’ve been to every one of your films, so I’ve actually seen quite a lot of you. How is your mother?’

  ‘She died six years ago.’

  ‘Oh dear. I’m terribly sorry, I didn’t–’

  ‘It’s all right, you weren’t to know.’

  ‘So even before Sylvia…?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But I saw you at Sylvia’s funeral, and you didn’t… I mean, you–’

  ‘It didn’t seem like the right time to mention it.’

  ‘No, no. I suppose that funerals are not good places to talk about death. Well, belated condolences. I’m sorry to hear that.’

  ‘Thank you.’