Stranger Than Kindness

by Mark A Radcliffe

  Anna smiled. ‘Yeah, I stayed with the nursing thing, then became a researcher, better hours.’ She paused and, with a change of tone, said more quietly. ‘Was I wrong?’

  Adam didn’t turn to look at her. ‘About what?’

  ‘About Tom.’

  ‘He seems a great kid to me.’

  ‘I meant about the father thing. When I look back on my life, and I have done it more lately, with Tom not being around, all I think of are the things that I might have got wrong. The small misjudgements or mischosen words and the larger choices that… that were perhaps selfish or wrong or downright mad.’

  ‘Maybe when we look back we can only see the decision, we can’t feel the context. It occurred to me more than once that in some odd way you might have done me a favour.’

  ‘Really? By tricking you into maybe being the father of my child and never speaking to you again?’

  Adam laughed. ‘Well, if you put it like that… No, my sense was, and I am aware that we rewrite our pasts all the time and I may have done that, so be gentle with me here, but my sense was that I was really—’

  ‘Fucked up?’ interjected Anna.

  ‘Yeah, is that the technical term now? I’m a bit out of touch. Yes, fucked up. And ridiculous as it sounds now but I had lost my sense of purpose. I honestly remember believing, don’t laugh, that I could do some good. After Graham’s suicide I lost any sense of that, and any sense that I was even capable of doing good if I had the opportunity. I suspect I didn’t have either the nerve or the clarity of thought to simply leave, so I set about sabotaging…’

  ‘Have you had therapy?’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘You sound like you have.’

  ‘I swim a lot.’

  ‘OK. Sorry.’

  ‘Where was I?’

  ‘Sabotaging,’ she said helpfully.

  ‘Yeah well, floating around the hospital corridors at night visiting psychotic old people.’

  ‘Well, just the one psychotic old person, to be fair,’ offered Anna. ‘She did OK, you know.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘Libby. In the house she moved to. I think she was happy. Lived until she was ninety-nine. The house had a cat which would sit on Libby’s lap.’

  ‘She didn’t have a lap.’

  ‘Indeed. She would say that. If anyone ever said “Libby, that cat loves sitting on your lap”, she’d grin and say “I don’t have a lap” and stroke the cat. And apparently she used to get up in the mornings and stand at the window and watch the kids going past the house on their way to school. No idea why. She seemed happy.’

  ‘Do you know why she was admitted?’ Adam asked.

  ‘No, someone said melancholia. 1920s-speak for being sad sometimes.’

  ‘She got pregnant. Out of wedlock. Kid got taken away when it was born; she probably never saw it. She got committed.’

  ‘How do you know?’ Anna asked.

  ‘I read through her old notes once.’

  They were passing the only service station on the M2. It hadn’t occurred to either of them to stop. They would, they reasoned, have time for a coffee at Anna’s place.

  ‘How do you know?’ Adam asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘What happened to her after she moved to the house.’

  ‘I kept an eye on her.’

  ‘Good,’ he said quietly. ‘Anyway,’ he said, louder again, seemingly needing to finish. ‘The irony was that, when I left, the nearest thing to meaning I could see was the vague possibility that I’d, sort of, well, helped you out.’

  ‘Is that how it felt at the time?’ Anna said awkwardly.

  Adam smiled. ‘I can no more remember how it felt at the time than you can, Anna.’ It was the first time he had said her name. She nodded. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘That’s a bit crass. I mean that if I had made you pregnant I was at least leaving something tangible behind, some mark of a positive presence. And if I hadn’t, well, that just sort of emphasized the whole ridiculousness that I felt about trying to do good somehow, a symbol of the fact that one’s actions are at best irrelevant and at worst destructive.’

  Anna stared ahead at the curling grey road and the pale green backdrop of Kent. She had never once imagined that her pursuit of Tom was about her doing anything with anyone else. She had come to acknowledge that she had done something to a couple of people but not imagined they had done anything with that experience beyond resent her.

  ‘That’s a bit nihilistic,’ she said.

  Adam smiled. ‘Well I didn’t skip down the road to the airport singing hi-bloody-ho. I felt pretty nihilistic.’

  ‘And what do you feel now?’

  Nobody had asked Adam that in a long while. His instinct was to shrug, as ever, and say ‘Dunno.’ But that would have felt petulant, impolite. ‘I’m not sure I feel very much at all. I think that I imagine I don’t have the right. I don’t know why I think that.’

  ‘You mean about Tom?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Because of me?’ Anna asked, leaning forward very slightly towards the steering wheel. Adam looked at her for the first time. She had a good profile and nice skin; she was biting her lip and he could see the crow’s feet dancing beside her left eye.

  ‘No. Because of Tom.’

  Anna’s flat smelt musty. She put her bag down in the middle of the living room as a gesture of reclamation and set about walking briskly around the small flat, looking behind curtains and in cupboards. Finally she arrived at the fridge, opened it, said ‘Empty’ very quietly and turned to look at Adam, who seemed large and out of place. ‘Are you checking for really small spies?’ he asked.

  Anna took a bath. Adam went out and bought coffees and a cream cheese bagel each. ‘I could buy a house in Margate for the price of these bagels,’ he said. And they sat together not talking, perhaps remembering that the only other time they had ever been alone together they went to bed.

  ‘Do you have a plan for this meeting?’ Adam asked.

  Anna thought for a moment. ‘I have an attitude. I’m expecting that to turn into something that might look like a plan.’ Adding: ‘Do you have much sex?’

  ‘Not as much as I used to have. You?’

  ‘Hardly ever. I never anticipated a life without sex.’

  ‘It is odd. It sort of occupies a different place now, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Hardly occupies any space at all,’ she mumbled.

  Later, Adam asked if she had ever heard from ‘the advertising guy.’

  ‘No. I heard about him a couple of times. He went into PR, worked on some anti-stigma stuff.’

  ‘Around madness?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Well, you must have left an impression.’

  ‘No, I think he got a bit paranoid after smoking too much dope and turned that into a career opportunity.’

  ‘Does Tom…?’

  ‘Well, Tom knows that either you or Black are his father. In these days of sperm donors and surrogacy it is a little easier for him to accept than it might have been at the time.’

  ‘Has he never wanted to meet us?’

  ‘He’s never spoken about it but it’s clear he has inherited his mother’s bloody annoying capacity for big secrets, so maybe he has. He was pretty quick to come and see you when something resembling a reason arose.’

  Adam thought she sounded cross. ‘You sound cross.’

  ‘Do I?’ she sighed. ‘I am cross. I have no justification for that, so please don’t reason with me.’

  ‘Take the lead.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Take the lead.’ Adam was staring at her impassively, inviting her to tell him to mind his own business.

  ‘I don’t even know what that means.’

  ‘It means that maybe he wants to know more, maybe you modelle
d a way of being with him that involved not telling, not even knowing stuff that might be important. So maybe you have to take the lead on showing him or offering him another way.’

  Anna thought for a moment. ‘You mean ask him if he wants to know who his dad is?’ Adam shook his head. ‘No, I mean ask him what he needs, what would help, what he wants. Let him identify the questions, Anna. Stop drip feeding the boy.’

  Anna felt a thin wave of resentment quelled by him saying her name. It was so rare that anyone ever said her name, she thought. ‘Maybe you would just like to know if he is your son, Adam?’ Adam shrugged. ‘Are you telling me you don’t want to know?’

  ‘I’ve seen the way he plays guitar,’ Adam said very quietly. ‘Anything beyond that feels… It makes me feel something I can’t give a name to.’

  ‘Because anything beyond that can only tell you he isn’t your son, and because he likes music you think he is?’ Anna sounded more impatient than she had meant to. Adam gave her a look of gentle disdain. ‘Sorry,’ she said immediately. ‘I’m being defensive.’ She paused. ‘He is a good guitarist, isn’t he?’

  The drive to Manchester took five and a half hours. Anna said it was because of the English motorway system. Adam felt that driving a car with the engine of a vacuum cleaner didn’t help. Their hotel room, with twin beds and a shared reading lamp, was bland and smelt of carpet freshener. They could hear the traffic from the M62. The room was too hot. They were tired, irritable and unfamiliar with spending this much time with another person. For both of them, the most good manners they could muster in such circumstances was silence, so they had driven from Oxford to Manchester with no sound except the radio.

  ‘Who are you seeing tomorrow?’ Adam asked.

  Anna thought: Kofi Annan, Richard Nixon, three of the Spice Girls, someone called Billy, Noel Edmonds… What does it matter who I say, you won’t bloody know them. And thus noticed that she had run out of people energy. ‘Why?’

  ‘I was wondering, if it was someone senior that might reflect they thought you required special time, if it wasn’t…’ He shrugged.

  It was a fair point. ‘The letter didn’t say.’

  ‘Who did you talk to at CREAK when you talked to them?’

  ‘I didn’t, Paul did.’

  ‘What do you know about them?’

  ‘A quango. Never gave them a thought, just the people who oversee stuff. The health service is full of them. I never took them seriously.’

  Adam nodded. ‘But might they not be the people responsible for hurting your friend?’

  Anna gave him a look that suggested she didn’t think he was quite keeping up. ‘I rather suspect that is the drug company.’

  Adam screwed up his nose. ‘Well firstly, that’s just because you don’t like drug companies more than you don’t like government quangos, and secondly that assumes they are not working together and surely nothing has happened to suggest that is the case?’

  ‘I’m finding you annoying,’ she said with a smile.

  ‘Of course you are,’ he replied. ‘I am annoying. If it’s any consolation I am finding you annoying too, but I think that is mainly because my back hurts, I hate driving, I’m too hot and I haven’t spent this much time with one other person since the 1990s. Although it is equally possible that you are actually just annoying.’

  ‘I think…’ She stopped. Actually she hadn’t thought. The overwhelming point of the meeting for her was that she could stop running. Yes, she would demand to know what happened to Meena, yes she would defend Paul, but mostly, deep down, she expected to be told that the research findings were on hold, she would be forbidden to disclose any of the data, that Meena’s accident, like the accusations made against Paul, was in the hands of the police. Mostly, she expected to be relieved of the burden of responsibility, of this gaze. And then, she thought, then she would decide what to do to help. ‘I think,’ she said quietly, ‘I got scared.’

  Adam let it go. He was here to watch, or watch over. He was here because he wasn’t quite ready to not be part of whatever the hell was going on. He was here because it felt like the right place to be. He had a shower. Anna flicked through the television channels, came across the news and left it on without paying much attention. When Adam came back he was wearing shorts and a t-shirt.

  ‘Where did you get the tattoos done?’

  ‘All over. The flowers were done in Thailand, the sea in Scotland, the smaller lines between the leaves by a wonderful artist in Greece…’

  ‘Do they mean anything?’

  Adam smiled. ‘Do you not have any?’

  ‘No. If it’s not a silly question, why do you?’

  Adam shrugged. ‘Stuff happens, we collect the years, we get a few scars… I thought I might as well choose some of them and even colour one or two of them in. It’s kind of like therapy, I think.’

  Anna showered and washed her hair; she put on shorts and a t-shirt too. When she went into the bedroom Adam was in bed, eyes closed. The flickering TV was making no impression. She got quietly into her bed and picked up the remote control.

  ‘You can carry on watching that if you like,’ he said quietly. ‘It doesn’t bother me.’

  ‘It’s OK,’ she said, turning it off. ‘Goodnight.’

  ‘Goodnight.’

  They lay in the dark for nearly a minute. The cars outside were louder and she could hear some lads shouting.

  ‘Adam?’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Well, for coming, I suppose.’

  They both lay still and it occurred to Anna that he would fall asleep before her and so she climbed out of bed, stepped across the small space that separated them, pulled back his sheet and said ‘Move over.’ Adam moved over and put out his arm without opening his eyes. She climbed in and let him put his arm around her, resting her head on his chest. He smelt of hotel soap. Up close she could see that the tattoo on his arm was very intricate. She wondered how they did the shading, she wondered if it hurt, she wondered if you could really get a dahlia in that colour, and then she fell asleep.

  17. Lemonworld

  The building currently housing CREAK had been designed by a man raised on 1970s sci-fi programmes: a man drawn to buildings with the sleek straight lines and pale artifice once imagined as a moon base or a secret home where a rich person kept their Thunderbirds. Its address was a lie, implying it needed distinguishing from other buildings, whereas in fact it had its own postcode. Indeed, the white, cold, glass-walled building stood alone at the end of a private drive and was surrounded by well-cut grass.

  Cassells took great comfort from the well-cut grass. The government had announced, albeit at around the same time that they announced a load of things that nobody took seriously, that it would be cutting the excessive number of quangos it funded just as soon as it found out where they all were. He knew very well that government tended to tire of looking for expenditure after it crossed London’s North Circular; to be secreted away up here, in leafy, quiet Cheshire was a fantastic career move. He also reasoned that if someone at a different quango, the one charged with working out where the money was going, decided that CREAK Towers, as he liked to think of it, was costing too much, one of the first things to go would be the gardener.

  Cassells did not feel anything special about the coming day. There had been a time, maybe twenty years ago, where he would have got some kind of thrill from putting Black Portier and Anna Newton in the same room and watching them blink like babies in the rain. He would have considered it research to watch people realise just how illusory their own sense of autonomy is. But even then it would have been an observation of strangers. He was not remotely interested in the idea of meeting people he had known a couple of decades previously. He had worked with Anna Newton for a while and considered her pretty, efficient and seemingly uninterested in hi
m. She had only become interesting when his trainee, Carla Tandy, had done a routine assessment on advertising director and unusually well dressed admission Black Portier and noted that he said he knew Ms Newton. David Cassells offered out-patient follow up to a gratefully gushing Black Portier for nearly four months. Anna Newton became one more for the files.

  Anyway, Cassells was not what the organizational psychologists called a completer finisher. He didn’t care much for the completion of a project; as far as he was concerned the research findings were already buried. This meeting was simply to ensure that nobody ever considered digging them up. He was already moving on to the next project, one involving discrediting CCT via a rumoured suicide attempt by the allegedly recovered rock star and a Panorama investigation into the sexual activities of so-called patients and so-called staff. This would be followed by the launch of a new anti-psychotic drug from Leichter and Wallace that not only had fewer side effects and treated depression but might even help with baldness. A drug that, as part of its licensing agreement, saw CREAK benefit financially from all overseas agreements. The integrity, standards and diligence of British research was, on the open market, worth around £20 million to CREAK. And, given that in America alone people spend over $200 billion a year on prescriptions, it was worth a whole lot more to Leichter and Wallace. Cassells loved the beginning of a project but the end felt like cleaning up after a party.

  For Anna Newton, however, her meeting marked the end of something significant. Two weeks ago her life crisis involved an impending menopause and the fact that her son had gone and grown up. These were significant things but they were scripted. The worries that so filled her then—was her son lonely? Had she failed as a mother? What if the aloneness she had chosen when she felt strong and single minded melted into loneliness as she became more invisible to the world and less useful to her son—were all distinctly personal yet shared by millions. Now, after the fear had filled her in a way it hadn’t for almost twenty-five years, the residue it left asked harder questions. How much of what she did was pointless? Was the bone-hard resilience she was convinced ran through her just an illusion? And more practically, what was she going to do to make a living now? Because being a researcher in a world where finding things out is banned is too ridiculous for words. She could go back to clinical nursing but she felt too old and impatient, and anyway she didn’t really understand the language they seemed to use these days or why there were so many earnest, chest-thumping, managers. And of course she was too old to dance.