House. Tree. Person.

by Catriona McPherson

  “Don’t stamp on worms,” I shouted to her.

  “Oh God. Save the Worms! Print me a tee shirt,” she shouted back. But she had reached the canopy of one of the sycamore trees and she bent to start collecting the leaves instead.

  “And how about you, Sylvie?” I said softly when I was sure Julia was engrossed. “Would you like to try to draw a picture again?”

  Sylvie said nothing and didn’t look at me, but her fingers twitched. Maybe. I pulled the pad out of my bag and put the thick marker in her hand.

  “Awright?” The voice made me jump.

  It was Ryan. He’d come up over the bank behind us from the lower, wilder area of grounds and stood staring at me.

  “Aren’t you at substance group?” I said, throwing a glance back towards the house, hoping one of the nurses was passing a window.

  “Got expelled,” he said. Like Julia, he hawked and spat, but unlike Julia, he looked at Sylvie and then rubbed his spit into the grass.

  “What for?” I asked him.

  “I’m a disruptive influence,” he said, the pride unmistakable. “I told some lame cunt she was kidding herself.”

  “That is a really horrible way to talk about someone, Ryan,” I said. “But … kidding herself how?”

  “She was having a nervous breakdown over a few glasses of sherry. She’s got nae record, nae cautions. She’s just giving her mind a treat. Looking for attention.”

  “So she’s in and you’re out?” I said. “Well, you can join us if you like. We’re a right wee bunch of misfits. The more the merrier.”

  Ryan gave one scathing look at Julia’s bottom, really quite prominent as she bent double picking up leaves, then threw a glance Sylvie’s way. “Who’s this?” he said.

  I knew Julia was new, but if Ryan didn’t know Sylvie either, maybe it had been some time since she’d left her room. I maybe should have checked, I told myself, shifting uncomfortably. But she seemed fine. Better, I’d say.

  “Sylvie,” I told him. “Catatonic but understands everything. So no more c-words, okay?”

  “And what are youse doing? Are you no’ the lipstick one?”

  “Lipstick and art,” I said. “It’s art today. Autumn leaf collage on the grass or you can draw me a picture. Hey, actually, has anyone ever asked you to draw a house, a tree, and a person? It’s something I’m doing with everyone.”

  He lit the inevitable cigarette and settled down with a torn off sheet and a black marker pen while I tried again with Sylvie.

  “A house,” I said. She stared ahead and then once again she drew the tiny square in the corner of the paper. “I’m sorry, sweetheart,” I said. “Never mind then.”

  “Fucken impossible to draw a flat,” Ryan said. “I’ll draw the whole block and then I’ll just put an arrow, right? And a tree, eh?”

  Sylvie, as she had before, scored through the square, top to bottom.

  “A tree, yes,” I said to Ryan.

  “That’ll do,” he said viewing his sheet. “And a person.” He turned away to stop me watching. I only had eyes for Sylvie. She drew a slash through the square, making a cross. Just as before. Except this time I knew she wasn’t protesting. She was drawing. She was trying to tell me something.

  “Tah-dah!” Ryan said and held up the sheet. The block of flats and tree were sketched in well enough, but the person was a crude depiction of a woman with her legs open and her genitals huge and detailed. He threw it at me and then walked off laughing.

  “House, tree, person, darling,” I said to Sylvie, as I tucked Ryan’s effort into the back of the pad.

  She did it again. The square. And the two lines.

  I put my finger on all three one after the other. “This is a house?” She didn’t nod or smile but I was sure she was trying to say yes. There was a softening about her. So I checked. I touched the vertical line. “This is a person standing in the house?” And she didn’t frown and she didn’t shake her head, but she was saying no to me. She really was. I touched the horizontal line. “Is the tree dead?” I asked her. This time there was nothing.

  “Tah-dah!” said Julia, just as Ryan had, which should have warned me. She was standing quite close to us and on the grass was a dazzling litter of leaves. How had she done so much in such a short time? She blew on her hands and then beamed at me. “What do you think?”

  I stood up, surprised at how creaky I felt and then the thought hit me. I touched Sylvie’s hand and it was icy-cold. Her face was pale and the light had changed. The guns had started without me noticing too. As I pulled the blanket closer around Sylvie there was a long barrage and then a single louder crack. How long had I been sitting here after Ryan left? Had it happened again?

  “What is it?” I said to Julia. “I can’t tell what it is.”

  “Best viewed from up in the house,” she told me. “Jesus, it’s cold. Dr. de Vil will have a great view.”

  “Oh Julia, what is it?” I said. “Do I need to kick it over before she sees?”

  But it was too late. Dr. Ferris was on her way already. As we watched she let herself out of the French window in her office and came powering across the grass, her spike heels sinking in but not slowing her.

  “Alison, what exactly do you think you’re doing?” she said when she was close enough to speak loudly but not have to shout.

  “Art,” I said. Julia snorted.

  “What’s Sylvie doing out of her room?”

  “A-art?” I said.

  “Who gave you permission to form a group?”

  “A group?”

  “These two patients are not—” she said then bit the words off.

  “Ryan was here too for a bit,” I said

  “And she’s frozen!” Dr. Ferris exclaimed, reaching us and immediately bundling Sylvie back in to her shawl, hands and all. “She’s chilled to the bone. How long have you been out here? What were you thinking?”

  “Dr. Ferris—the other Dr. Ferris—asked me to take care of Julia this morning,” I said.

  “Oh, I see!” Julia said. “You drew the short straw, did you? You got landed with me? Well, fuck you very much.”

  “I didn’t mean it that way,” I said. “Stop stirring the shit, will you? And I thought Sylvie could do with some fresh air.”

  “Alison,” said Dr. Ferris, speaking low and cold as she grasped the handles of Sylvie’s wheelchair. “That is extremely unprofessional language to use to a client.”

  “I don’t care,” Julia said. But Dr. Ferris ignored her.

  “And Sylvie’s care is not your concern, beyond the cosmetic and aesthetic matters you were employed to cater to.”

  “I was catering to them,” I said. “Fresh air is essential to good skin. I was absolutely—”

  “I’m afraid I’m going to have to—”

  “And anyway,” I went on. “It’s working. Julia took her for a hurl and made her smile. And look!”

  I held out the notepad to show her Sylvie’s drawing, but she didn’t so much as glance at it.

  “Julia took her?” she repeated, voice even colder. “Are you suggesting that you left one vulnerable patient in the charge of another unsupervised patient? A patient still under initial assessment?”

  “Standing. Right. Here,” Julia said. “And look at what she’s showing you, at least.”

  Dr. Ferris did flick a glance at the notepad then. Then she stared at Sylvie. She had grown very still and her heels were sinking further into the wet ground the longer she stood there so that she looked as if she was deflating. “Are you trying to tell me that Sylvie … made those marks?”

  “She was trying to draw a house, a tree, and a person,” I said. “I don’t think she’s as far gone as you thought, actually.”

  “And y-you guided her hand?” said Dr. Ferris. “To-to make those marks?”

  “No,” I said.
“She did it herself.”

  Dr. Ferris held her hand out for the pad and I gave it to her. “It’s not helpful to concoct fanciful interpretations,” she said. “And this would be Ryan’s, is it?”

  Julia went to stand beside her and look over her shoulder, giving a thunderclap of a laugh—“Ha!”—at the drawing. Dr. Ferris snapped the top sheet back over.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Julia, staring at the paper and then at me. “You’re right, though. It’s not fanciful at all. The square’s a house and the line’s a tree, right? That is spooky. That is seriously creepy.”

  “My office, ten minutes,” Dr. Ferris folded the whole pad in half, cracking the cardboard backing, and then put it under her arm like a soldier’s baton. She tugged her feet free, kicked the brake off Sylvie’s chair and struggled off across the grass with her, sinking and shoving and so grimly set on getting away from me that I don’t think she even noticed one of Sylvie’s hands creeping out of the folds of the shawl and wagging gently at her side, as if she was saying goodbye.

  “So … why’s she so pissed off?” Julia said. “Isn’t it good news if whatshername’s better? And why the hell shouldn’t I be allowed to hang out with her? Everyone else gets together and plays Ping-Pong if they feel like it. What makes me so toxic?”

  “Apart from nearly bouncing a frail woman out of her wheelchair onto wet grass?” I said.

  “She’s less frail now than she was at breakfast. Like you said. So why isn’t Dr. Frosty glad of it?”

  I shrugged and it turned into a huge shudder that left my teeth chattering. Without speaking, we both started off across the grass towards the house again. When we were halfway there, Julia heaved a huge sigh.

  “Oh God,” she said. “It’s Monday, isn’t it? I tell you what, Ali. I’ll swap you. I’ll go to get bollocked by the ice queen and you can go to my one-on-one with Gummy Boy and think up something new to shock him with.”

  “Gummy Boy?”

  Julia stretched her lips over her teeth and mugged. “Lars. He creeps me out. I want to ask him what’s going on. Same with that whale Bella. What a fucking cheek they’ve got letting her talk to the skinny minnies about body image. But Gummy Lars is worse. Hey, listen! I don’t suppose you know what tats he’s got under those stretchy bandages, do you?”

  “Belle,” I said. “Not Bella. What do you mean, ‘think up something new to shock him with’?”

  “Go on. Ask him to show you and then you tell me. I’m dying to know but when I made a grab for him and tried to rip one off he was too quick for me. He had my arms pinned and the help bell going off before I could blink.”

  I nodded, remembering my own run-in with him on the range that morning. As another bout of gunfire split the air, I found myself wondering what Mona Swain was playing at. Asking myself about what sort of mother would send her daughter here. With the Ferrises, and all the staff members taken on after they’d been fired from somewhere else, I’d never let Angelo within ten miles of it even if he peed himself every night for a year and killed all the wildlife in the county … and what else was it?

  “Why don’t you tell Lars the truth instead of making up stories to shock him?” I said. “He might be able to help you.”

  “I can’t,” said Julia. “I can’t remember the truth. I can’t remember anything. But I know it’s real. It happened even if nobody will admit it.”

  “Any of what? Who won’t?”

  “I don’t know!” she bellowed. Then she shook a cigarette out of the packet and lit it with trembling fingers. “So here I am, trying to find out.”

  “By talking crap to the people trying to help you?”

  “Oh for fuck’s sake!” she said. “I’m not exploring my inner turmoil. Jesus! I’m here. Back in the ancestral pile my bloody parents offloaded to the docs, because I’m trying to find out what the fuck’s going on. Because here is where it’s happening. Whatever it is.”

  I stopped walking and stared at her. After a few paces, she realised I’d fallen behind and she turned to scowl at me. “What?” she said. “Or are you farting? Waft it away, will you?”

  “You’ve fooled them all,” I said. “You haven’t got any kind of personality disorder, have you?” She opened her eyes very wide. Marion had said it and so had Lars. Dr. F had touched on it too. The pain under the fairytales was real. “You’re as sane as I am, aren’t you?”

  She regarded me for a long slug of dead time before she spoke again. “As sane as you are? Oh, Ali, how much does that say?”

  Sixteen

  I stretched the ten minutes as far as I dared, taking the time to check in with Angel, via Marco.

  “Fine, Mum. Jeez!” was all I could get out of him, and it soothed me. He sounded back to his old self. I could almost hear his eyes rolling down the line.

  “I’ll pick you up after school, if you like,” I said. “Spare you the bus.”

  “I’m not going in,” Angel said. “Dad’s dropping me at home.”

  I wanted to argue but I was ten paces from Dr. Ferris’s office door so I just told him I loved him and he should text me what he wanted for tea. Then I put the phone away, smoothed my hair back into a tighter ponytail, and squared my shoulders.

  I had my hand up to rap on the door when I heard their voices.

  “—absolutely adequate to the requirements,” Dr. Ferris was saying.

  “We should have had a shortlist and interviewed candidates together, Tam,” her husband said in the same kind voice he had used talking to me. I put my head closer to the door and held my breath.

  “For God’s sake, she’s washing their faces and letting them paint pretty pictures! It’s not worth all this.”

  “That’s my point,” Dr. F said. “We could have had a nutritionist, another physio, a drama therapist. If we really wanted to make this level of investment in paratherapies, we—”

  “There’s another consideration,” said Dr. Ferris.

  “Isn’t there always? What are you up to this time?”

  I heard a chair move and the unmistakable sound of Dr. Ferris’s heels on the parquet. She was pacing. One, two, three, and turn. Back, two, three, and turn. She was literally pacing.

  “Oh you know me,” she said at last. “Protecting our investment, securing our future. The usual donkey work. But by all means, you carry on listening to their whining and patting their heads.”

  “That’s what makes us such a great team,” said Dr. F. “I’ll plod on doing the work we have to do and you play your games and see what you can cheat your way into this time.”

  The pacing stopped. I put my ear against the wood of the door and only then noticed Hinny, in her kitchen whites, standing at the far end of the corridor watching me. I jerked up and away, cheeks flaming. Hinny flitted towards me and breathed in my ear.

  “Share it if it’s good stuff,” she whispered, then glided off again, silent in her soft shoes. I cleared my throat, rapped on the door, and at a word from Dr. Ferris, sidled in.

  “You’re late,” she said.

  “I had to call my kid but I’m here now and I’m ready to learn where I went wrong and make sure not to do it again. I really hope Sylvie didn’t catch a chill.”

  “She is minty,” Dr. Ferris said, spitting the word out. She sniffed. “As all the kids are saying these days apparently.”

  She had got so far under my skin I suspected she was using that stupid slang word to prove that she was better at talking to teenagers than me, that she didn’t need to phone her kid, because her kid phoned her. Paranoia. I shook it away.

  “Good,” I said. “I really am—”

  “My husband is going to deal with you,” she said, cutting me off and, without another word, she swept out, leaving a ringing silence behind her.

  “So,” I said after an awkward moment, “you’ll have heard that I screwed up, I suppose. I let one patient
meet another one and I took one outside to do some art with the—oh, actually, can I have a look at it from this window?”

  “Feast your eyes,” said Dr. F. “I’ll need to get out there with a rake before this afternoon. Posy’s mum and dad are coming for a visit and family therapy session.”

  Julia’s handiwork was an enormous penis. Of course. It was made of dull yellow sycamore leaves, topped with bright red maple leaves and finished with a little heap of brown birch leaves for pubic hair.

  “It’s actually quite well done,” said Dr. F, joining me to look at it. “But even saying that to you is sexual harassment, so I’ll need to get rid of it.”

  “And do you need to get rid of me too?” I said. “I really didn’t mean to let Sylvie get cold.”

  “Sylvie?” said Dr. F. “You took Sylvie out? With Julia?”

  “I thought she needed the fresh air. I’m sorry.”

  “Well, she’s so inactive, of course, that we try to be careful. Pneumonia’s a constant concern when she moves as little as she does.”

  “Shouldn’t she move more then? Sorry.”

  “Her case is very complex,” Dr. F said.

  “But shouldn’t she be getting physiotherapy or something? In a swimming pool if she’s too wobbly to be on her own two feet. Although, you know, she walked about quite the thing when I was holding her hands. And outside today, she was smiling!”

  “We’ve been taking care of Sylvie for a long time,” Dr. F said. “You don’t need to worry.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” I said. “Maybe it is a waste of money having me instead of someone else who could—” I stopped when his eyebrows had risen high enough to be lost in his untidy hair. “I might just have caught a bit of what you were saying,” I admitted.

  “Have you heard of transference, Ali?” said Dr. F. I shrugged. “Where a patient in therapy imagines a close relationship—a love connection or a family bond—with their therapist?” I nodded, waiting. “And then of course there’s counter-transference, where a professional in a caring role can reflect that imaginary bond and start to project a relationship onto a patient. Typically a patient who offers a way back to unresolved relationships in the therapist’s own past.” I nodded, maybe with a bit less certainty now. “Sylvie is absent but she is not your mother,” he said. “She is within age range for it, but she is not your sister.” I nodded very fast. I wanted him to stop talking now. “And although she is very helpless and very appealing, she is not your child.”