Copyright
Copyright © 2005 by Margaret Leroy
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
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Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com.
First eBook Edition: June 2009
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
The author is grateful to Taylor & Francis for permission to quote the extract on page 145, which is taken from page 171 of A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures, copyright 1951 by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, revised edition, Penguin 1971.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07710-1
Contents
COPYRIGHT
CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER 2
CHAPTER 3
CHAPTER 4
CHAPTER 5
CHAPTER 6
CHAPTER 7
CHAPTER 8
CHAPTER 9
CHAPTER 10
CHAPTER 11
CHAPTER 12
CHAPTER 13
CHAPTER 14
CHAPTER 15
CHAPTER 16
CHAPTER 17
CHAPTER 18
CHAPTER 19
CHAPTER 20
CHAPTER 21
CHAPTER 22
CHAPTER 23
CHAPTER 24
CHAPTER 25
CHAPTER 26
CHAPTER 27
CHAPTER 28
CHAPTER 29
CHAPTER 30
CHAPTER 31
CHAPTER 32
CHAPTER 33
CHAPTER 34
CHAPTER 35
CHAPTER 36
CHAPTER 37
CHAPTER 38
CHAPTER 39
CHAPTER 40
CHAPTER 41
CHAPTER 42
CHAPTER 43
CHAPTER 44
CHAPTER 45
CHAPTER 46
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY MARGARET LEROY
Postcards from Berlin
CHAPTER 1
HE’S BUILDING A WALL FROM LEGO. There’s no sound but the click as he slots the bricks together and his rapid, fluttery breathing. His face is white as wax. I know he’s very afraid.
“You’re building something,” I say.
He doesn’t respond.
He’s seven, small for his age, like a little pot-bound plant. Blond hair and skin so pale you’d think the sun could hurt him, and wrists as thin as twigs. A freckled nose that would wrinkle if he smiled—but I’ve yet to see a smile.
I kneel on the floor, to one side of him so as not to be intrusive. His fear infects me; the palms of my hands are clammy.
“Kyle, I’m wondering what kind of room you’re building. I don’t think it’s a playroom, like this one.”
“It’s the bedroom,” he says. Impatient, as though this should be obvious.
“Yes. You’re building the bedroom.”
His building is complete now—four walls, no door.
It’s a warm October afternoon, syrupy sunlight falling over everything. My consulting room seems welcoming in the lavish light, vivid with the primary colors of toys and paints and Play-Doh, and the animal puppets that children will use to speak for them, that will sometimes free them to say astonishing things. The walls are covered with drawings that children have given me, though there’s nothing of my own life here—no traces of my family, of Greg or my daughters, no Christmas or holiday photos; for the children who come here, I want to be theirs alone for the time that they’re with me. The mellow light falls across Kyle’s face, but it doesn’t brighten his pallor.
He digs around in the Lego box, looking for something. I don’t reach out to help him; I don’t want to distract him from his inner world. His movements are narrow, restricted; he will never reach out or make an expansive gesture. Even when he’s drawing, he confines himself to a corner of the page. Once I said, Could you do me a picture to fill up all this space? He drew the tiniest figures in the margin, his fingers scarcely moving.
He finds the people in the box. A boy and an adult that could be a man or a woman: just the same as last time.
“The people are going into your building. I’m wondering what they’re doing there.”
He’s grasping the figures so tightly you can see his bones white through his skin.
I feel a slight chill as a shadow passes across us. Instinctively, I turn—thinking I might see someone behind me, peering in at the window. But of course there’s nothing there—just a wind that stirs the leaves of the elms that grow at the edge of the car park.
There’s a checklist in my mind: violence, or sex abuse, or something he has seen—because I have learned from years of working with these troubled children that it’s not just about what is done to you, that what is seen also hurts you. I know so little. His foster parents say he’s very withdrawn. His mother could have helped me, but she’s on a psychiatric ward, profoundly depressed, not well enough to be talked to. The school staff were certainly worried. “He seems so scared,” said the teacher who referred him to the clinic. “Of anything in particular?” I asked. “Swimming lessons, story time, male teachers?” She had riotous, nut-brown hair, and her eyes were puzzled. I liked her. She frowned and fiddled with her hair. “Not really. Just afraid.”
“Perhaps a bad thing happened in the bedroom,” I say now, very gently. “Perhaps the boy is unhappy because a bad thing happened.”
Noises from outside scratch at the stillness: the slam of a door in the car park, the harsh cries of rooks in the elms. He clicks the figures into place. The sounds are clear in the quiet.
“You can talk about anything here,” I tell him. “Even bad things, Kyle. No one will tell you off, whatever you say. Sometimes children think that what happened was their fault, but no one will think that here.”
He doesn’t respond. Nothing I say makes sense to him. Yet I know this must be significant, this room with the child and the adult, over and over. And no way out, no door.
Perhaps this is the detail that matters. I sit there, thinking of doors. Of going through into new, expectant spaces: of that image I love from Alice in Wonderland, the narrow door at the end of the hall that leads to the rose garden. Maybe he needs to experience here in the safety of my playroom the opening of that door. I feel a surge of hope. Briefly, I thrill to my imagery of liberation, of walking out of prison.
“Perhaps the boy feels trapped.” I keep my voice very casual. “Like there’s no way out for him. But there is a way. He doesn’t know it yet, but there is a way out of the room for him. He could build a door and open it. All that he has to do is to open the door. …”
He turns so his back is toward me, just a slight movement, but definite. He rips a few bricks from his building and dumps them back in the box, as if he’s throwing rubbish away. His face is blank. He stands by the sandpit and digs in the sand with his fingers and lets the grains fall through his hands. When I speak to him now, he doesn’t seem to hear.
After Kyle has gone, I stand there for a moment, looking into the empty space outside my window, needing a moment of quiet to try to make sense of the session. I watch as Peter, my boss, the consultant in charge of the clinic, struggles to back his substantial BMW into rather too small a space. The roots of the elms have pushed to the surface and spread across the car park; the tarmac is
cracked and uneven.
The things that have to be done tonight pass rapidly through my mind. Something for dinner. The graduates’ art exhibition at Molly’s old school. Soy milk for Greg and buckwheat flour for his bread. Has Amber finished her Graphics course work? Fix up a drink with Eva. … A little wind shivers the tops of the elms; a single bright leaf falls. I can still feel Kyle’s fear: He’s left something of it behind him, as people may leave the smell of their cigarettes or scent.
I sit at my desk and flick through his file, looking for anything that might help, a way of understanding him. A sense of futility moves through me. I wonder when this happened—when my certainty that I could help these children started to seep away.
I have half an hour before my next appointment. I take the file from my desk and go out into the corridor.
CHAPTER 2
LIGHT FROM THE HIGH WINDOWS slants across the floor, and I can hear Brigid typing energetically in the secretaries’ office. Clem’s door is open; she doesn’t have anyone with her. I go in, clutching the file.
“Clem, d’you have a moment? I need some help,” I tell her.
Her smile lights up her face.
Clem goes for a thrift-shop look. Today she looks delectable in a long russet skirt and a little leopard-skin gilet. She has unruly dirty-blond hair; she pushes it out of her eyes. On her desk, there’s a litter of files and psychology journals, and last week’s copy of Bliss, in which she gave some quotes for an article called “My Best Friend Has Bulimia.” We both get these calls from time to time, from journalists wanting a psychological opinion; we’re on some database somewhere. She gets the eating disorder ones, and I get the ones about female sexuality, because of a study I once did with teenage girls, to the lasting chagrin of my daughters. In a welcoming little gesture, Clem sweeps it all aside.
“It’s Kyle McConville,” I tell her.
She nods. We’re always consulting each other. Last week she came to me about an anorexic girl she’s seeing, who has an obsession with purity and will only eat white food—cauliflower, egg whites, an occasional piece of white fish.
“We’ll have a coffee,” she says. “I think you need a coffee.”
Clem refuses to drink the flavored water that comes out of the drinks machine in the corridor; she has a percolator in her room. She gets up and hunts for a clean cup.
“When does Molly go?”
“On Sunday.”
“It’s a big thing, Ginnie. It gets to people,” she says. “When Brigid’s daughter went off to college, Brigid wept for hours. Will you?”
“I don’t expect to.”
“Neither did Brigid,” she says. She pours me a coffee and rifles through some papers on a side table. “Bother,” she says. “I thought I had some choc chip cookies left. I must have eaten them when I wasn’t concentrating.”
She gives me the coffee and, just for a moment, rests her light hands on my arms. It’s always so good to see her poised and happy. Her divorce last year was savage: There were weeks when she never smiled. Gordon, her husband, was very possessive and prone to jealous outbursts. She finally found the courage to leave, and was briefly involved with an osteopath who lived on Wesley Street. Gordon sent her photos of herself with the eyes cut out. About this time last year, on just such a mellow autumn day, I took her to pick up some furniture from the home they’d shared, an antique inlaid cabinet that had belonged to her mother. Gordon was there, tense, white-lipped.
She looked at the cabinet. She was shaking. Something was going on between them, something I couldn’t work out.
“I don’t want it now,” she said.
“You asked for it, so you’ll damn well take it,” he said.
As we loaded it into the back of my car, I saw that he’d carved “Clem fucks on Wesley Street” all down the side of the cabinet.
She sits behind her desk again, resting her chin in her hands. There are pigeons on her windowsill, pressed against the glass; you can see their tiny pink eyes. The room is full of their throaty murmurings.
“Are you OK, Ginnie? You look kind of shattered,” she says.
“It’s death by shopping. I’ve got this massive list of stuff that Molly seems to need.”
“You need to treat yourself,” says Clem. “A bit of self-indulgence.”
I sip my coffee. Clem likes to eat organic food, but the coffee she makes is satisfyingly toxic. I feel a surge of energy as it slides into my veins.
“I did,” I say. “I really tried.”
I tell her about the boots I bought, in a reckless moment out buying bedding with Molly. How they caught my eye in a shop window—suede ankle boots the color of claret with spindly improbable heels. How Molly urged me on: Go for it, Mum. You look fab in them. And for a moment I believed her; I felt a shiver of possibility, a sense of something shifting. And then the moment of doubt when I handed over my credit card, wondering why I was doing this.
“You haven’t worn them yet,” says Clem sternly.
“No. Well, I probably never will.”
She shakes her head at me.
“Ginnie, you’re hopeless,” she says with affection. “So tell me. Kyle McConville.”
“There’s something I’m missing,” I tell her.
She waits, her fingers steepled in front of her face, like someone praying. She has bitten nails, and lots of silver rings engraved with runes, that she buys at Camden Market.
I take a breath.
“He makes me feel afraid. Like there’s some threat there, something that’s happened or might happen. It sounds silly now, but I found myself kind of looking over my shoulder. I don’t know when I’ve had such a powerful feeling of dread—not even with kids we know have been abused. But there’s nothing in his case notes. …”
She nods. I know she’ll take my feeling seriously. We have a mantra, Clem and I: How someone makes you feel is information. We understand this differently. I’m more prosaic perhaps—I think we’re all more sensitive than we realize and respond unconsciously to one another’s signals; while Clem’s quite mystical about it, believing we’re all connected in ways we don’t understand.
“He builds a bedroom from Lego,” I tell her. “Over and over. I feel that he went through some trauma there. But maybe that’s too simplistic.”
“So much is simple,” she says.
“I said that he wasn’t trapped, he could escape from the room. He just closed up completely when I said that. But it felt so right to me—you know, to walk out of your prison. …”
Her eyes are on me. She has brown, full eyes, always a little dilated, that give her a childlike look. Now they widen a little.
“Ginnie,” she says tentatively. “Perhaps there was some other reason that seemed to make so much sense …” Her voice fades.
There’s silence between us for a moment.
“I just can’t tell if it’s something I ought to pursue,” I say then. “Given how he reacted.”
She leans toward me across the desk.
“Ginnie, you need the story,” she says. “You’re dancing in the dark here. You need a bit more background. Who else has been involved?”
“There’s a note to say the police were called to the house.”
“Well, there you are then.”
“But no one was charged. And no one told social services, so Kyle can’t have been thought to have been in any danger.”
“So what?” she says. “Maybe someone messed up. Go and talk to them, Ginnie.” There are lights in her eyes; this amuses her. “Isn’t it what we’re all meant to be doing nowadays? I mean, it’s all about interfacing, isn’t it? Collaboration and interfacing and stuff. You need to go off and collaborate. …”
She pulls the notes toward her, flicks open the cardboard cover. Her fingers with the runic rings move deftly through the file. I wait to see what she says. You can hear the murmuring of the pigeons, as though the air is breathing.
She pauses, her hand on the page. A shadow crosses her face.
<
br /> “Oh,” she says. “That’s not what you’d choose exactly.”
“What do you mean?”
She looks up at me, a little frown stitched to her forehead. “I’ve met this guy—the detective you need to talk to. He’s at Fairfield Street, runs the Community Safety Unit. DI Hampden. I know him.”
“You don’t sound very impressed.”
“Maybe it’s nothing,” she says. “I mean, I could have got him wrong. He spoke at this conference I went to. Very energetic.”
“You mean difficult.”
“I didn’t say that, Ginnie. A bit combative, perhaps—but there were some pretty crass questions from the floor. What the hell. I’ll give you his number.”
She writes it down for me.
I feel tired suddenly. I know just how it will be, this encounter with Clem’s rather combative detective. A meeting like all the others, hurried and inconclusive, both of us distracted and rushing on to the next thing, in a room that smells of warm vinyl: trying to find a way forward for yet another troubled, damaged child.
“I guess I could try him,” I say.
The reluctance is there in my voice. She looks up sharply.
“Ginnie, you are OK, aren’t you? I mean, should I be worried?”
“I’m fine, Clem, really. Just shattered, like you said.”
She frowns at me with mock severity.
“This isn’t burnout, is it, Ginnie?”
“Nothing so glamorous.”
I can’t quite tell her how I really feel. How I’ve lost the shiny hopefulness I used to have. How as you get older it changes. You learn how deep the scars go; you worry that healing is only temporary, if it happens at all. You know there’s so much that cannot be mended.
I take the number and walk back to my office. The bars of sunlight falling from the windows seem almost opaque, like solid things—as though if you put out your hand you might touch something warm and real.
CHAPTER 3
MY HOUSE IS HALF HIDDEN behind tall hedges. It’s a house that belongs in the country—you’d never guess you were on the edge of London—a cottage, with a little sunken garden; and at night its crooked old walls and beams and banisters seem to stretch and creak as if they’re living things that are shifting and turning over and settling down to sleep. Sometimes I think how we’d all have loved this house if we’d moved here earlier, when the girls were little and we lived in a forgettable thirties semi. How it would have preoccupied me in my domestic days, when I thrilled to fabric catalogs and those little pots of paint you can try out on your walls. How the girls would have relished its secrets and hiding places; and how Amber especially would have loved that the river was down the end of the road, the Thames, which runs on through London, with its willows and islands and waterbirds. Like in the poem she made me read each night when she was three:
The River House Page 1