A Line of Blood

by McPherson, Ben

  ‘I’m not sleeping, Alex,’ she said after some time. ‘I know I never should have gone out and left Max, but I just can’t seem to sleep, and you weren’t here, and I was feeling stupid and ashamed about what I did, because what I did was so stupid and so shameful. So I went for a walk. I kind of destroyed my dress, and my shoes. Even my underwear.’

  By the back door was a pair of black leather wedges. The heels were covered in a grey-black mud, the leather sides dulled down to a feathered salt-stained grey.

  ‘I don’t think I can save them, can I?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘I already threw my dress in the trash. And my underwear and bra. This is the second time someone I know killed themselves, Alex,’ she said. ‘In truth I’m struggling a little …’

  She wiped her eyes on her shirt sleeve, and rested her cheek on my shoulder. I held her to me, rocked her gently back and forth on her chair.

  ‘It scares me, you know, Alex. It’s like, it says other people’s pain is unbearable, and there’s nothing you can do about it because you can’t reach it. Like what if I’m wrong and they’re right, and every word I write is ultimately pointless because you can’t bridge that gap?’

  Don’t unravel, I thought. There isn’t room for either of us to unravel.

  ‘I found some stuff.’ The timbre of her voice was so even, so without inflection, so studiedly calm.

  She pushed me away. I sat down in the chair beside hers. She pulled away from me a little, watching my reaction.

  ‘What stuff did you find?’

  ‘Some letters.’

  Not Caroline’s letters. She didn’t say Caroline’s letters. She won’t find Caroline’s letters.

  ‘In my sock drawer?’ I said, as calmly as I could.

  She nodded. ‘I guess maybe you meant for me not to see them. I may have overreacted a little.’

  ‘You overreacted?’

  ‘I know you’re not that guy.’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘I’m not. Not any more.’

  ‘Then question,’ she said. ‘Why keep them?’

  Because somewhere, almost out of sight now, is a darkly remembered landscape. In that landscape there is no tiny house in Finsbury Park, and no Max, and no Millicent.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said.

  ‘Kind of funny how often the term lack of commitment comes up.’ She gave a little laugh.

  ‘I’m sorry, Millicent,’ I said.

  ‘It’s OK, Alex, you get to have a past. I guess I was scared maybe you were feeling nostalgic for something I can’t give you. Like maybe we’re unreachable to each other, or something.’

  ‘I was unhappy then,’ I said.

  ‘And you’re not now?’

  ‘Not since I met you.’

  She opened her eyes very wide. Blinked hard.

  ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Because life with me is just so great.’

  ‘You know what I mean, Millicent.’

  Don’t unravel.

  When we lost Sarah, Millicent had kept herself together for as long as it took to get Max back on his feet. Then she lost her job on the additives magazine.

  ‘But I thought you’d been working crazy hours.’

  ‘Yes. I guess I did let you think that.’

  She had barely been turning up at all. She had been sitting in parks, cafés, museums and restaurants – anywhere to avoid sitting at her desk and working. There she sat for hours on end, quietly grieving, while I knew nothing of her pain.

  She had been protecting me, and protecting Max, while she took the full force of the blow. She had shielded me from the horror of that birth that wasn’t a birth. That tiny stiff body in the delivery room. That ward with the real living babies and the want-some-more-gas-and-air fathers. I was insulting her by believing I understood it.

  I had assumed my grief matched hers, that I had the measure of her pain. I saw now that Millicent’s suffering was of a different order. Gulfs, chasms, continents, voids – those are the tropes that divided her from me. I watched her suffering as though through fog: I was desperate to help; I was unable to reach her.

  Millicent had begun to unravel then. If it was a breakdown, it was very controlled. She was functional when Max was around: she played with him and bathed with him, read to him and sang to him. I could feel the sadness in her then, but also the love.

  But with Max asleep, or at nursery, she would lie for hours on the sofa, in our bed, in the bath, saying nothing, doing nothing.

  She refused to see a doctor.

  ‘You’re depressed,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ she said. ‘But please let me do this my way. I don’t want it to be a thing.’

  ‘It is a thing, whether you want it to be or not.’

  ‘OK. But please, no doctor.’

  And I can see now what I couldn’t see then: that the seeds of her supercompetency had already been sown; that she planned the structure of her unravelment. She knew that suppressing the pain would extract a high price, that there would be a reckoning, and she planned for that reckoning.

  She waited until she was sure that Max was secure. She waited until I had a break in my contract. She made sure that we were all right. As far as we could be. She even arranged extra childcare for Max.

  She told me that her pain was hers to deal with, and hers alone; that I could not understand it; that I must not try. She asked me only to look after her, to wash her and to feed her, and to see to it that she did not do something stupid. Most of all she wanted me to make sure that Max was all right.

  ‘What do you mean, do something stupid?’ I said, but she never told me.

  ‘Just make sure that Max is all right.’

  Then and only then did she let herself fall; she trusted that I would catch her, and I did.

  8

  I woke to find Max standing in our bedroom again. He had been watching us for some time, I guessed. He seemed happy to accept that we were in bed in the late afternoon, that I wasn’t at work and that Millicent wasn’t at her desk. I wondered if that made us bad parents or good parents.

  ‘OK.’ He stayed where he was, all nervous expectancy. ‘I’m ready.’

  ‘What for, Max?’

  ‘The psychiatrist.’

  ‘The psychiatrist?’

  ‘The psychiatrist.’

  ‘What psychiatrist?’

  ‘The one you think I have to go and see. Mum said it’s today.’

  ‘Is it?’

  ‘You forgot, Dad.’

  ‘I didn’t forget. Your mum’s been very tired. I’m sure she meant to tell me, but she didn’t.’

  ‘Mum doesn’t forget things. You forgot.’

  Normally of course that would be true, but Millicent was at the end of her strength. I tried to slide her off me without waking her, but she stirred, blinked twice, and sat up.

  ‘Hey, Max.’

  ‘Hi, Mum. Want me to make you some coffee?’

  ‘I’ll make some, Max,’ I said, and got out of bed. ‘While Mum gets ready.’

  ‘For what?’ asked Millicent.

  ‘The psychiatrist,’ said Max.

  ‘I forgot. I’m sorry, Max.’

  Max looked pained, but sat down on the bed beside her.

  ‘You know it’s not a real psychiatrist, Max,’ said Millicent.

  ‘How come?’

  ‘Psychiatrists are doctors. This one’s not a doctor.’

  Max considered this.

  ‘She’s a psychotherapist. Lots of people go to therapists.’

  ‘No they don’t.’ But he leaned in towards Millicent, who put an arm around his neck, drawing him gently to her. I pulled on a pair of trousers.

  ‘Aren’t you going to put pants on, Scottish Dad?’

  ‘What’s Scottish about not wearing pants, Max?’

  Millicent and Max exchanged a look. ‘The kilt thing, right, Max?’ said Millicent.

  Max nodded.

  ‘What’s worn under the kilt?’ said Millicent.


  ‘Nothing,’ said Max with great seriousness. ‘It’s all in good working order.’

  ‘Listen, small boy,’ I said, ‘I don’t know what bothers me more: the fact that you know that joke, or the fact that you seem to understand it.’

  ‘Mum taught it to me.’

  ‘Yeah, Millicent, that’s not good.’

  Millicent made a gun with her hand, shot herself in the head. Max smirked. I put on a shirt and went downstairs to make coffee. While I waited for the coffee to boil I rang my mother.

  My mother understood, she said, though in truth I hadn’t explained what had happened. Her breathing sounded laboured, and I was fairly certain she was crying.

  ‘I’m so sorry, Mum,’ I said. ‘Millicent is sorry too.’

  ‘Aye,’ she said, ‘aye, son, I understand.’

  ‘We’ll be back up as soon as we can, Mum.’

  ‘Aye, son. Aye.’

  This wasn’t Max’s first course of therapy. After what I told you about his sister, how could it be? We have form with kiddie-shrinks.

  Our very first visit to a therapist had been for ‘observation’. We had agreed that Millicent would turn up fifteen minutes after Max and me, to give Max time to settle in.

  ‘Hello, Max, hello, Alex,’ said the therapist, elegant in silk slacks, her grey hair modishly shaped and highlighted. Expensive, I thought, very, very expensive. Proper oil paintings on the wall. A real bronze sculpture on the table.

  Max had surprised me. He walked brightly over to the toy box in the corner and began playing quietly with a wooden train. I had expected the therapist to be watching him, but once she had decided that he was content she turned her chair to face me. I talked quietly, explaining that Max’s fear of his mother was ruining our lives. We had tried everything, I said; wits’ end.

  Millicent entered. Max whimpered, and shrank from her.

  ‘Interesting,’ said the therapist. ‘Alex, could you leave us for ten minutes?’

  ‘I’m not sure that’s a great idea.’

  ‘Perhaps not. But could you step outside?’

  I stood in the waiting area, expecting to be summoned by Max’s screams. But he didn’t scream. As far as I could tell, he didn’t even cry.

  After some time, the therapist called me back in. Max and Millicent were sitting in the corner, Max on Millicent’s lap. She was reading quietly to him.

  ‘Alex, are you aware that you flinched when Millicent walked in?’

  ‘I really don’t think I did.’

  ‘It was quite distinct. And what struck me is that Max saw that you flinched. And then he flinched in his turn.’

  The therapist explained that Max was taking his cues from me, looking for guidance as to how he might react to this curious turn of events, by which she meant the death of our little daughter. He could read phatic signals in my behaviour that I didn’t know I was sending out. He was not the one who was angry with Millicent.

  ‘Are you saying I am?’

  ‘Aren’t you? After all, you weren’t there at the birth of your daughter.’

  ‘But it wasn’t a real birth.’ And she wasn’t a real daughter.

  ‘But is it possible that some unconscious part of you can’t forgive Millicent for sending you away? Or for not keeping her side of the deal, for not bringing your baby to term?’

  ‘I’m not a chauvinist.’

  ‘Interesting. I’m not saying you are. But many men would be angry.’

  Well, it wasn’t given to me to know what my unconscious mind was up to. Maybe I was sending phatic signals to Max that I was angry with Millicent. Maybe I was – unconsciously – instructing Max in how to behave. It seemed unlikely to me. Then again, I didn’t have a better theory.

  At home Max still screamed when Millicent entered the room. But at the therapist’s he would sit in his mother’s lap for an hour at a time, playing shyly with her hair.

  We saw the therapist eight times. She explained to Max that Millicent hadn’t killed the baby; that sometimes bad things in life happen over which grown-ups have no control; that we had genuinely believed he was going to have a sister; that Millicent and I were ourselves terribly upset at what had happened to her.

  Then the therapist charged us a grand. I could have told Max the same things myself and used the cash on something useful. But we had been desperate; we hadn’t known what else to do.

  ‘Give your daughter a name,’ said the therapist. ‘Have a burial service. Invite other people if you want to.’

  ‘Christ,’ I said, ‘what a quack.’

  But Millicent insisted we do it, so we did. Just the three of us. We reassembled Max’s doll, dressed it and packed it in tissue paper, and buried it in a shoe-box in the garden. Max had asked if she could be called Sarah, and we didn’t have a better alternative. Max cried. Millicent cried. I cried too, hugging my wife and son so very tight.

  This was ridiculous. A shoe-box and a doll called Sarah Mercer, for the love of God. Still we cried, our unhappy little tribe united in our grief.

  And I hated to admit it, but the doll-burial changed something. Max was wary of Millicent, but he no longer screamed when she picked him up; he stopped crying when she tried to brush his teeth; he started to sleep through the night again. He began to let her read him stories in his bedroom; then finally he allowed her to get into the bath with him. I moved out of my son’s room and back into the marriage bed.

  For a long time my reaction was one of bewildered acceptance. I didn’t understand what had happened to us, but knew that it had changed us all. We didn’t have another child; we didn’t even try.

  We had come down a path at the side of a big house near Highbury Fields, rung a bell on the back door. The stainless steel plate by the door said Nora Å, PhD. After a moment, the therapist answered. Bit young to be called Nora: about my age, tall, mid-brown hair streaked with grey.

  ‘Hello, Max,’ she said, opening the door wide. ‘Would you like to take a seat?’

  The door opened directly into a large white-walled room. There were three simple plywood chairs on the far wall, and another padded seat facing them.

  ‘Is that your chair?’ asked Max.

  ‘Yes. I get the nice chair because I’m here all day.’ Some very slight accent – not British, but hard to pin down.

  I had expected Max to sit between us, but he chose the chair on the right. I sat on the chair on the left, leaving room for Millicent to sit in the middle. The therapist sat opposite us, and smiled at Max.

  ‘So,’ said Millicent, ‘the reason we’re here is that Alex and I are a little concerned.’

  The therapist held up a finger.

  ‘And I’m just going to stop you there.’

  There was a long pause. The therapist smiled at Max. Max smiled at the therapist.

  I tried to take Millicent’s hand, let my fingers trail against hers, but she didn’t seem to notice. The room was very bare. There were no curtains, and the floorboards had been painted a light grey. Behind the therapist light streamed in through the glass door and two full-height sash windows.

  ‘Max, what would you like to talk about?’

  Max looked thoughtful. ‘Mum said you weren’t a doctor. But you are.’

  ‘Not a medical doctor.’

  ‘I know that. What’s the A for?’

  ‘It’s not really an A. It’s got a little circle over it, and it’s the last letter in the Norwegian alphabet. It’s pronounced “Oh”.’

  ‘So your name is Dr N. Oh. Like Dr No?’

  ‘If you like.’

  Max smiled. ‘You’re not very scary.’

  ‘Å is a place in Norway, and that’s where my family’s from. We’re called Å. That’s it.’

  ‘Is your dad called Mr Oh?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is your mum called Mrs Oh?’

  ‘No, she’s called Dr Å. She’s a proper doctor. She works in a hospital.’

  ‘Oh,’ said Max, and smiled again. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Why do
you think you’re here, Max?’

  The smile left Max’s face. ‘Mum and Dad are concerned about me.’

  ‘And why do you think that is?’

  He sighed, looked first at Millicent, then at me. I tried to smile at him, but he frowned and turned back to the therapist.

  ‘I don’t know. I saw the neighbour’s penis, and it was a boner.’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘And I know that if a man with a boner tries to touch you, then that’s bad. But it’s not like he was a paedo, and he was dead so he couldn’t touch me.’

  The therapist nodded. She looked a little taken aback.

  ‘It would be useful to know the events leading up to this, Max. It’ll help me to understand a little better.’

  ‘We found him together, didn’t we, Max?’ I said. ‘When I’d come out to find Max and get him into bed. You jumped down into the next-door neighbour’s garden, didn’t you?’ I turned to the therapist. ‘Max was looking for the cat.’

  ‘And I’d like to hear about it from Max, please.’ Again that raised finger.

  ‘Sorry, Max.’

  Max went very quiet. He sat looking out of the window at the trees. Millicent seemed pained. I looked at the clock on the wall behind her. Ten past six. Ten minutes we’d been here. One minute of talk, nine of pauses. At two pounds per minute that was eighteen pounds’ worth of pauses.

  ‘It’s OK,’ Max said at last. ‘Dad can tell you.’

  ‘He could, Max. But we all remember things in our own way.’

  Max got up out of his chair and went to look out of the window. Eventually he turned and said, ‘Can they go?’

  ‘Do you mean that you’d like your parents to leave?’

  Max nodded.

  ‘Normally they would be here for the first session. But I can ask them if they’re prepared to leave you here.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Millicent.

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  ‘Before you go, I should say that I normally don’t tell parents the details of my conversations with their children. Because of Max’s age, if there’s anything I think you need to know, I will tell you. Or anything I have a legal duty to disclose. Can we proceed on that basis?’

  ‘OK,’ I said. Millicent nodded.