Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  Lesley got into her car and Adam walked down the street toward the sea. He would walk home. A ridiculous idea as it was four miles to Margate, even longer if he walked it round the coastline, but the buses would be full of people and people were annoying and he needed to be outdoors, even if this was not a particularly familiar bit of outdoors and he would prefer to be nearer home. He stopped at a coffee shop and bought a large peppermint tea and wandered along the cliff top. The breeze was cool, almost cold, and he pulled the collar of his jacket up and his battered pork pie hat down on to his head. He put sunglasses on to stop the wind from making his eyes water. The tide was out and it wasn’t raining. It was 8.35; he might be at the shop by ten. He reached the sea. A wide road with an expanse of grass leading to the cliff edge stretched in front of him. He breathed deeply, lifted his head slightly and began to walk home.

  As he walked he looked at the sea, imagined being in it and trying to swim home, all along the coast. He knew he could swim the distance and if the current was following him he would enjoy it. He toyed with the idea of stripping down to his pants and doing it, but only momentarily, largely because he would have to jog back to get his clothes. He turned the idea into something less appealing by reminding himself of the many times he had swum against the current, unable to find the rhythm of the water, or at least to fall into step with it. So he settled instead for breathing in the sea air and watching the water move without a plan or pattern, promising himself a swim this evening if the sea looked as though it would let him.

  There were a couple of large ships in the distance and a small sailing boat coming from the east; otherwise it was empty. He moved closer to the cliff top. Below was a promenade, and occasionally a dog walker would stride along purposefully. Where he was, on the grass, the view was better but it was less sheltered. There was always a breeze coming off the sea and despite his glasses it made his eyes water, which made him feel old. He took off the glasses and wiped his face. He felt his hat move on his head so he pulled it tighter again and moved away from the edge of the cliff and walked on.

  After an hour he was in Margate, having walked along the sea front beneath the old Winter Gardens and Lido on a promenade that would eventually lead to the tiny harbour that lay beyond the bay. It was only ten o’clock. He had walked quickly. He wanted to be later, he didn’t know why, so he stopped and sat on a bench and looked down towards the beach. There was a group of people fussing over a small yacht they were wheeling onto the sand; there were a few people walking dogs, and an old couple walking slowly along the cliff top in front of him. And there was a blonde woman walking toward him from the other direction, the woman from yesterday.

  ‘Hello,’ she said, smiling through hair that was whipping around her face. ‘Shouldn’t you be selling books?’

  ‘Shouldn’t you be corrupting young minds?’

  ‘Day off? Shopkeepers don’t get days off, do they? Or do you have staff?’

  Adam smiled. ‘No staff, I’m just late. I’ve been arguing with myself about going for a swim.’

  Alison turned to look at the uninviting grey sea. ‘In that?’ Adam nodded and Alison grimaced. ‘So, while you decide, do you have time for that coffee now or will there be a queue forming?’

  She was different outdoors, Adam thought, although he wasn’t sure how. ‘Hell, I’m self-employed and I’m sitting here because I don’t want to be there, so coffee would be nice.’

  They walked across the lawn to some old stone steps that led to the promenade. Without consulting each other they selected the café nearest the sea and sat outside, both turning their metal chairs to face the beach.

  ‘I like it here,’ said Alison after they had ordered drinks.

  ‘There are worse places to be,’ he said.

  ‘Do you swim a lot?’

  ‘As often as I can. I have a small boat; sometimes I take it out and swim from it. Feels good.’

  ‘You own a boat? You must be a man of means.’

  Adam smiled. ‘What do you imagine an owned boat looks like?’

  She smiled back. ‘I’m thinking yacht, cabins, staff, probably not the same staff that you don’t have running your chain of bookshops, but staff nonetheless. Am I wrong?’

  Adam laughed: ‘So, Kent University? In Canterbury, right? Why are you living round here?’

  ‘I have some family, thought it would be nice to be a bit nearer. Have you always lived here?’

  ‘Good god, no.’ Adam noticed his own defensiveness. What would be wrong with always living here? ‘No, I’ve moved around, spent a lot of time in London, lived near Manchester for a while, spent some time abroad. Ended up here more by coincidence really. I suppose I couldn’t really live the way I do in many other places.’

  ‘Is that because only people in Kent read?’

  ‘No, there isn’t much money in selling books these days and that is probably only going to get worse. Here I can live pretty simply: I grow my own vegetables, I fish, I read. I am old before my time.’

  ‘Sounds good to me,’ she said, which Adam didn’t believe and so he said nothing.

  The people who had been preparing the yacht were finally ready to put to sea: they had removed the boat from the trailer, set it in shallow water, returned the trailer to the promenade, put on their life jackets, tied down ropes and were leading the boat over the small breaking waves to a point where they could all get on and let the wind take them out.

  ‘Is your boat like that?’ asked Alison, turning to face him for the first time since they sat down.

  ‘No. So, why psychology?’

  ‘What an unusual question.’ The wind caught her hair again and wrapped it round her mouth as she spoke; she had to pull it away. Adam smiled and waited.

  ‘OK, well the superficial answer is I am interested in what it is that makes us human and when I was younger the obvious way to think about that was to study psychology, but I sense you are inviting something a little more authentic by asking me, and I am not by nature superficial. I suppose the fact that my brother was finally diagnosed with schizophrenia when he was fifteen and I had grown up with his, I don’t know, weirdness is how I would have experienced it then, difference is how I would think of it now, meant that I either wanted answers or at least greater understanding or I wanted to run away. I opted for the former. Eventually.’

  ‘Eventually?’

  ‘We call that key wording, you know.’ She was uncomfortable.

  Adam nodded. ‘I call it curiosity,’ he said.

  ‘I did a degree in French. I fancied myself hanging out in cafés talking about Genet and De Beauvoir, or at least not being in Stoke worrying about why my brother slept under his bed rather than in it. I worked as an interpreter for a while, did other stuff…’

  ‘Stoke?’

  ‘You’re doing it again and let’s never talk about Stoke’

  ‘Fine by me. Has psychology helped?’

  ‘My brother? Not really, no.’

  ‘I meant you. Has it helped you?’

  ‘I like to think it has helped others a bit and I like the idea of being useful.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  ‘Are you being sarcastic?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I can’t tell.’ She was moving around on her chair now.

  ‘I admire anyone who wants to be helpful. Particularly if they can sustain it.’

  ‘But you don’t like psychologists.’

  ‘What do I know? I just sell books.’

  ‘Now you’re patronizing me.’

  The small yacht was slow but it was maybe a hundred metres out now and, even though the sea looked flatter further out, the boat was swinging up and down more than Adam had expected.

  ‘I think there are three sorts of people who try to be helpful. There are the ones who succeed, the ones who fail and the ones who profit from pretending to
succeed while failing. You are probably the first, I was the second. Being in the second group means I have to pick on the people in the third group to feel better about not being in the first group.’

  ‘And that is what you think psychologists do? Profit while pretending to be helpful?’ Adam shrugged. ‘So how do you know I’m not in the third group?’ She was not smiling but her eyes were soft.

  ‘I’m trying to learn to think the best of people when I meet them, rather than assuming the worst.’

  They sat in silence looking at the bobbing yacht and sipping hot drinks. Finally Adam said: ‘I used to be a psychiatric nurse, a long long time ago.’ He had imagined it would sound like a confession. Instead it felt like a purging.

  Alison didn’t say anything; she just glanced over at him and then turned back to the sea. Finally she said: ‘Why did you give it up?’

  ‘It made me feel like shit.’

  By the time Adam got to the shop it was 11.15. Tom was waiting outside with a young woman: she was around his age, short and thin with mousey brown hair and confident eyes.

  ‘Have I missed much?’ Adam asked.

  ‘Those two blokes who were in yesterday came by a couple of times, and a couple of people seemed confused by the fact you were closed but that aside… Do you open at 11.30?’

  ‘Not on purpose,’ said Adam. ‘But mornings are often slow, or even slower.’ He turned to the young woman. ‘Hello,’ he said.

  ‘Hello,’ she replied.

  ‘This is Laura,’ said Tom.

  ‘Laura,’ nodded Adam and he unlocked the shop door.

  Perhaps buoyed by the fact that Adam didn’t ask for any further information, Tom said:

  ‘Laura is Grace’s daughter.’

  Adam stopped in the doorway and turned to look at the young woman. She had Grace’s mouth and something around the eyes. He felt his own face tingle. He nodded at the girl again. ‘How’s your mum?’

  ‘She doesn’t know I’m here,’ she said flatly

  ‘I can’t keep secrets from your mum, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Wouldn’t expect you to, Mr Sands.’

  ‘Adam, please.’ The three of them stood still just inside the shop, Adam with the sense that there was still something to be said but he at least didn’t know what.

  ‘I know who you are,’ she said. He looked at her impassively. ‘You were the one who tried to save my dad.’

  *

  Anna had spent a whole day walking round Eastbourne. It occurred to her for the first time that if they did not contact the hotel in Southampton and were not trailing her debit card around the southern coast of England then they might not have the ability to track her movements. They might be a couple of thugs hired by a drug company that has been told their multi-million-pound profit-making medicine is about to be proved to be pointless. They may have just had her address and the address of her best friend. Or it might even have been a different Ford Focus. Would an international pharmaceutical company hire thugs? Surely they could afford something a little more upmarket. Anyway, her fantasies about the mechanics of large corporations were just that. For her they were dull labyrinths of unbridled wealth collection. She had never met anyone who worked in that world.

  She and Paul had both felt the need to run when they had heard about Meena. He must have felt threatened, just as she did, and that means it must have something to do with their work. The most significant part of their work was about to reveal that people with psychotic illnesses appeared to recover more fully and more often without being given drugs, at least if they were treated in the right sort of place in the right sort of way. When those results had emerged the three of them had been quite thrilled, but none of them really believed that it would change anything as fundamentally as the evidence itself demanded.

  Paul had said that three things would happen. Firstly, the research method would be discredited. It would, he said, only take a professor with a pharmaceutical share option to say the words ‘We’re talking about a very small sample group’ randomly on Radio 4 and doubt would begin to spread. Secondly, there would be counter-research funded by a drug company offering wildly different results or, better still, what the public relations people call a convenient death: a patient, unmedicated, that the drug companies could have saved if those evil Luddites hadn’t planted such silly ideas in her pretty if mad young head. And thirdly—and Paul said that this was the one that he both admired and feared the most—there would be a new miracle drug wheeled out, maybe not even a drug, probably not even to do with mental health, but a miracle nonetheless. Something that treated cancer or Alzheimer’s or a genetic disorder, that reminded the world just how fantastic medicine is. And that triumph will astonish and reassure. It won’t matter that the treatment won’t be available for ten years; it will remind everyone that medicine is progress, and all medicines will benefit from that.

  Anna had considered Paul to be naturally depressive and eternally cynical. But in truth she didn’t feel that she was part of something that was going to revolutionize the management of madness. She had believed that what they had found was important but that it would be subsumed in some way as to ensure everything would stay the same. Where money was concerned that was what always happened. On some level Anna realized that she had always assumed that large corporations had far too much power to ever need to hurt people. They would get their way regardless.

  What was obvious to her, however, was that if she got the story out there, if the results to the research were in the public domain, she and Paul would be safe. The thought made her feel nervous, which surprised her. Her first feeling was that they were not her results to release. That there was an issue of manners to observe: Paul was the team leader, he should be the one to release the results. And the fact that he hadn’t, and that he would surely have arrived at the same conclusion as her, scared her. And they were Meena’s results too. What if she woke up and said the fire had been an accident? What if she was over-reacting to everything?

  ‘You look worried.’ A soft voice. She turned to see a pretty young man—high cheekbones, soft if grubby skin, curly shaggy brown hair and the most piercing blue eyes—sitting at a round metal table outside a café, holding a large cup of black tea. His jeans were ripped around the leg revealing a calf and a brown rolled-down sock. He was wearing a light green windcheater that was smeared with dirt or oil. But he had the most beautiful smile.

  ‘Doesn’t everyone?’ she said.

  The young man shrugged. ‘Yeah, mostly.’

  Anna looked inside the café: there wasn’t a queue. The young man followed her gaze.

  ‘Sit a while.’ He smiled. ‘Talk to a safe if grubby stranger, why don’t you?’ He spoke rhythmically, knowingly.

  ‘Would you like a sandwich?’ Anna asked.

  ‘That’s kind of you but no thank you.’

  He sounded educated; he had good eye contact; his body posture was relaxed. If it was a mental health problem that kept him on the streets, thought Anna, it was well controlled. Drugs more likely she thought. She pressed: ‘Are you sure? I’m going to get something.’

  The young man smiled. ‘Well, that is nice of you. This may sound strange, but they do these cheese and Marmite buns in there. I wonder if I could have one of those? It isn’t my usual fare but I can’t help feeling the vitamin B would do me good.’

  Anna smiled at him. Usual fare? Vitamin B conscious? He didn’t look like a drinker. ‘Good thinking,’ she said.

  She returned with a cheese and Marmite bap for him and a soya latte and avocado wrap for her. ‘I’m Anna,’ she said.

  ‘JJ. Are you a vegan?’ he asked.

  ‘No, why?’

  ‘Soya milk.’

  ‘How can you tell?’

  ‘It smells different.’

  ‘All I can smell is the coffee,’ she said.

  ‘Wake up and sm
ell the coffee,’ he smiled. He ate more slowly than she did. If he was hungry he didn’t show it. ‘Why so worried?’

  ‘Oh, work stuff.’

  ‘What is your work?’

  She took a deep breath. ‘I work in mental health.’

  ‘Oh right, that explains why you didn’t run away when I spoke to you and why you offered to buy me food. What were you thinking? Schizophrenia? Drugs? Not drink, surely?’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking anything…’

  ‘Really? Are you an OT?’

  ‘No, why do you ask?’

  ‘Well, if you were a psychologist you wouldn’t have answered me. If you were a nurse you would have asked me questions by now. OT’s are polite, and anyway you’re wearing nice shoes.’

  Anna looked at her feet. She hadn’t changed her shoes for four days. ‘I used to be a nurse. Now I work in research.

  ‘What are you researching?’

  ‘We were looking at ways of treating people with psychosis.’

  ‘Drug company stooge?’ He said it with a smile.

  ‘I didn’t think so,’ she said impassively.

  ‘I was diagnosed with a psychotic illness when I was a kid. Pumped full of all sorts of rubbish. Made me fat, made me forever thirsty. Made me smoke dope to take away the tension in my muscles that the drugs put there, and the dope made the voices louder, uglier.’

  ‘Do you still hear the voices?’

  ‘Nope. Not for years. I treated myself.’

  ‘Did you?’ Anna felt the top of her spine tingle slightly, aware that she was preparing herself for an encounter with madness.

  The young man laughed. ‘It’s OK, I get how that sounds. You know, if I told you how I treated myself, and how I now help others treat themselves, your registration—you are still on a nursing register aren’t you? Yes, of course you are—might mean you felt the need to call someone and report a mad boy in torn trousers in the town centre.’