‘So how do you know Zoe?’ Jessica asks, and I really wish she hadn’t. I wait for the man with the mop to start smirking again before breaking into some sordid story about my sister.
Instead he barely glances up from his mopping as he replies, ‘Used to drink here, di’n’t she? Used to help behind t’bar from time to time, as well. Nothing official, like, just for free drinks and that.’
‘And she moved to Scotland, you say?’ I ask. ‘To a hippy commune?’
He pauses his mopping and stretches his back. ‘’S what she said,’ he tells me. ‘She was dead excited about it, I’ll say that much.’
‘And this commune,’ I say. ‘Do you know where it is? Do you know anything else about it?’
‘Not really,’ he says. ‘She was excited, like I say. They grow their own veg and stuff, she said. I remember her talking about that. In some country home, I think it is. Big place, like a mansion or sommat. Like Downton Abbey, she said.’
‘And you’ve absolutely no idea where?’ Jess asks. She’s simultaneously googling something on her phone.
‘On the coast, maybe,’ he says. ‘Not that far either, I don’t think. It wasn’t up in the Hebrides or nothin’. I remember that ’cause there’s another one right up north, she said. But it was too cold. She didn’t fancy that.’
‘East Scotland, or west?’ Jess asks.
‘Sorry,’ he says. ‘Why you after her, anyway?’
‘Oh, their mum’s ill,’ Jessica says, and I realise that I’ve forgotten to request that she stop using that particular excuse. ‘So Jude really needs to contact her quite urgently.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry to hear that,’ the man says, propping his mop against the wall and crossing the dark pub to join us at the bar. ‘Let me think. ’Cause she was in here quite a bit.’
Jess continues to fiddle with her phone while I watch the man’s face expectantly.
‘From Buxton,’ he says. ‘That sound right?’
‘That’s right,’ I tell him. ‘We’re from Buxton.’
‘Nice over there,’ he says. ‘The Peaks and all that. Good motorbiking roads.’
‘You’re right,’ I say. ‘All the bikers love it.’
‘So they grow their own veg, but I told you that already, yeah? They’ve got chickens and I think she said actual cows and stuff. I know this i’n’t helpful, like, I’m just . . .’ He taps on the side of his head with one finger.
‘Any idea how many people there are?’ Jess asks, glancing up from her phone. ‘In the commune, I mean?’
‘Sorry,’ he replies. ‘No idea.’
‘I’ve got a list here,’ Jess says, holding out her phone. ‘Could you maybe look at it? See if anything rings a bell?’
The man sighs. ‘Sure,’ he says. ‘But I doubt it. It was a good while ago.’
‘How long?’ I ask, realising that we haven’t asked that yet.
‘’Bout a year,’ he says. ‘Maybe more. Maybe eighteen months. They all come down in one of them hippy vans to get her. It had flowers on the side and everything. Right mess, it was.’
Returning his attention to the list, he begins to read. ‘Auchinleck, Balnakeil, Bath Street. Corbenic Camphill, Edinburgh. Jees, there’s a lot of them, i’n’t there?’
‘Yeah,’ Jess says sadly. ‘There are three pages of them.’
‘Faslane, Findhorn, Iona. Milltown, Monimail, Newbold . . . Ploughshare . . . Look, I’m sorry but . . .’ he says, shaking his head, then, ‘Oh! That’s it! That’s the one.’
I move to his side so that I can see which of the names in the list he is pointing to. ‘Portpatrick?’ I say.
‘That’s the one.’
‘Really?’ Jess says. ‘And you’re sure?’
‘Portpatrick,’ he says. ‘Definitely. D’you know why I remember, love?’
Both Jess and I shake our heads.
‘’S me name, innit,’ he says.
‘Your name’s Patrick?’
‘That’s right. Yes, Portpatrick. That’s the one. I remember now.’
We thank Patrick for his help and, promising to return for a drink, we step back outside, blinking, into the sunshine.
‘So! Scotland!’ Jess says, a mad look in her eyes.
‘Jess, we’re not going to Scotland,’ I laugh.
‘Why not?’ she asks, apparently without irony. ‘It’ll be fun. Plus, a hippy commune! Imagine! I may never want to come home again.’
‘It’s miles and miles away,’ I say. ‘And she’s probably not even there.’
‘A hippy commune on the coast?’ Jess says. ‘Well, I can imagine her there, can’t you?’
I laugh again at this and remind Jess that she has never even met Zoe.
‘I know that,’ Jess says. ‘But I’m . . .’ She raises her hands and waves them mystically around my head. ‘I’m picking up the vibe. From you, and from all these places we’ve visited.’
‘Picking up the vibe, are you?’ I ask, sounding cynical.
‘Tell me honestly that you can’t imagine Zoe in a hippy commune!’ Jess says.
‘OK, I can,’ I admit. ‘I can perfectly imagine Zoe knitting her own spaghetti with her sisters in front of a cauldron of vegan soup. But it’s still bloody miles away. And I’m worried it’ll turn out to be a wild-goose chase.’
‘The exciting bit is the chase,’ Jess says. ‘It doesn’t actually matter if you don’t bring a goose home. In fact, being vegan, I’d rather the goose escaped to freedom.’
‘Great metaphor, Jess. I’m not sure what it means, but I like it.’
‘Look. We’re on holiday, aren’t we?’ Jess says. ‘Do you have somewhere else you need to be?’
‘No,’ I admit. ‘But what if she’s gone even further north? What if she’s in that one in the Hebrides?’
‘I’ve got another nine days’ leave left,’ Jess says. ‘We’ve got the car for another four, and I’m betting we can prolong it if we need to.’
‘I wouldn’t be so sure of that,’ I tell her. ‘You know what they’re like with these cheap deals.’
‘Either way, we’ve got time. And I’m up for the Hebrides. But she won’t be in the Hebrides. I’ll bet she’s smoking a home-grown joint in Portpatrick as we speak. And according to the map app, it’s only about three hours away.’
‘Really?’ I say. ‘That is closer than I thought.’
‘So, it’s settled,’ Jess says. ‘The only thing you need to decide is if you want to leave today or tomorrow.’
‘Oh, tomorrow,’ I tell her definitively. ‘It’ll give us time to find somewhere to stay in Portpatrick. Plus, we said we’d come back for a drink tonight. And we’ve already paid for two nights in our luxury retirement home already.’
‘Yeah, I am sorry about that, you know,’ Jess says, pulling a face. ‘You’re definitely choosing the next one.’
We’re very boring again that evening. As neither of us feel drawn to explore Morecambe’s winter nightlife, or even to return to the Smugglers Arms, we eat in the same pub as the previous night and find ourselves back in our granny flat by nine.
‘Do you think it’s this retirement home that’s turning us into old people?’ Jess asks.
‘Maybe,’ I say. ‘But I don’t think old people do what we’re about to do.’
‘And what might that be?’ Jess asks, all innocence.
‘I think you know full well,’ I tell her. And then I chase her, squealing, to the bedroom.
Afterwards, we simply fail to really get up again, and by ten Jess is dozing off. ‘It’s better this way anyway,’ she tells me sleepily. ‘We can get an early start. It’s Scotland tomorrow. My first ever visit to Scotland! Plus, I’m maybe joining a hippy commune.’
‘Can I join too?’ I ask. ‘You wouldn’t join without me, would you?’
‘Maybe you can come,’ Jess says. ‘If it’s not girls only. I’ll discuss it with my comrades and let you know.’
Nine
Mandy
Dr Stevens, the school psychologist
, had retired. He’d been replaced by a part-timer called Dr Rufkin. He was a short fat man with bottle-bottom glasses, and I disliked him instantly. He sounded, I thought, a bit like Jeremy Corbyn, who I’d always considered a bit sneery. It always felt like Dr Rufkin was trying to make everyone feel stupid, including me.
Getting Zoe to appointments in the first place was an exhausting, ever-changing battleground of threats and bribes and occasionally even locked doors.
No one strategy ever worked repeatedly, because Zoe was too clever to fall for anything twice. Ultimately, what seemed to work best was making sure Zoe didn’t know when the appointments were (so she couldn’t vanish entirely) and then throwing a hefty bribe into the mix at the moment the subterfuge was revealed. She was a fifteen-year-old girl, after all. She wanted make-up and clothes and gadgets almost as desperately as she didn’t want to be shrinked.
After only a few sessions I came to believe that all the effort to get her there was pointless. Dr Rufkin rarely told me anything about what had taken place in Zoe’s session, and I suspected that was because nothing had taken place at all. I could perfectly imagine, as I sat in the waiting room next door, that Dr Rufkin was playing Candy Crush on his phone while Zoe stared at the ceiling in silence. Or vice versa.
One afternoon, after I’d handed the promised twenty-pound bribe over and released Zoe back into the wild, I met up with Celia, a friend from my previous workplace. It was one of those relationships that didn’t seem to make much sense now we no longer worked together, but one we intermittently maintained all the same.
Celia, who was aware of Zoe’s eating disorder, asked me how things were going with her; and perhaps because I was feeling so frustrated with Dr Rufkin, I told her the full story for the first time ever.
‘So she hasn’t spoken to Scott since that day?’ she asked, her eyes wide. ‘Not once?’
I sipped my cappuccino, which because of the length of my story was going cold, and shook my head.
‘Not even a yes or a no if he asks her if she wants a drink or something?’
‘Nothing. Not one word. It’s like she can’t hear him.’
‘But how do you cope with that? It must be unbearable!’
‘It is,’ I told her.
‘And this shrink at the school, is he making any progress?’
I shook my head again. ‘Not really,’ I said.
‘Has Zoe told him why she’s not speaking to Scott, though?’
‘I don’t know,’ I admitted. ‘It’s like I said; he tells me nothing. He says that their sessions are private. But it might just be that Zoe doesn’t say a word.’
‘That’s just so weird, though,’ Celia said. ‘How awful for you.’
‘I know,’ I agreed. ‘It’s a nightmare.’
‘It’s a bit like Jeremy’s sister, Patricia,’ she said thoughtfully, Jeremy being Celia’s rather sexy triathlon-champion husband. ‘Patricia had a huge falling-out with one of their uncles, way back when they were kids. Patricia would never stay in the room when he came to visit – actually, she would never stay in the house. It caused all kinds of arguments, I think. Jeremy only found out once the uncle had died that it was because he was a bit of a Jimmy Savile character. Nothing major. I mean, I don’t think he ever actually . . . you know. But he was . . . over-tactile, I suppose you’d say. He was very over-tactile, by all accounts.’
I licked my lips and struggled to swallow.
‘I’m not saying that . . . !’ Celia said, now noticing my reaction. ‘God, me and my mouth! I wasn’t suggesting anything, Mandy. Really, I wasn’t.’
‘No,’ I said. I could sense that the blood had drained from my face. My heart was racing and my stomach was churning.
‘Anyway, you trust him, yeah? This Scott you’re seeing. He’d never do anything like that, would he?’
I stood up so fast that I almost knocked the table over, and muttering, ‘Sorry, I, um, have to go,’ I pulled my coat on as I stumbled to the door of the coffee shop. I wondered if I was going to throw up.
When I got to the park, I sat on a bench by the pond and cried. I was realising, slowly, painfully, that I had been going to quite extraordinary lengths to avoid that very thought, and I had managed to blank it out quite effectively. But now it was here, bouncing around like an alert on the computer desktop, demanding to be dealt with. I feared that I would never be able to think about anything else again.
Sadly, over the coming weeks, I realised that I was right about that. Whether I was looking at Scott’s dreamy features, thinking, No! Of course he didn’t! Of course he wouldn’t! or watching Zoe arching her body away from him as they passed in the narrow corridor, avoiding any possibility of contact, whether I was having sex with him, or (increasingly) making up excuses to avoid having sex, those awful images my mind had manufactured at the instant Celia had said what she’d said were always there, always present, tainting every moment.
I asked Scott a couple more times what had happened on the mouse ride. I asked if Zoe had come on to him, partly because that, too, had crossed my mind, and partly because I wanted to see how he’d react.
Scott just laughed out loud at that. ‘She was fifteen. And she can’t stand me,’ he said. ‘Of course she didn’t come on to me!’
I tried asking Zoe the question differently, too, adopting the dulcet tones one might use to address an abuse survivor, hoping that this might perhaps produce a response. ‘If there’s a reason you hate Scott,’ I’d tell her softly, ‘then you can tell me, you know. If he’s ever done anything specific to upset you, then you have to tell me. You can trust me. And if you do, I’ll fix it. I promise that I’ll do whatever’s required to sort things out.’
During one of these conversations I thought I saw a rare flash of recognition in Zoe’s eyes. But whether it was recognition of what I was implying, or recognition of something that had actually happened, I really couldn’t tell.
I took her to see a specialist abuse therapist in Manchester, tricking her with the offer of a shopping trip and a visit to McDonald’s – my vague attempt at humour – and then bribing her with five £20 notes when we got to the practice. Zoe was growing so tall that she needed new clothes. The £100 was really just the clothing budget I’d set aside for her anyway.
There was no clue to Dr McDonald’s speciality on the door or in the waiting room – I’d checked that by phone before taking her there. But by the time she came out of the session fifty minutes later, she’d worked it out, I think. There was something different about her during the shopping trip that followed – something cold, something calculating, something watchful, perhaps. She seemed to be eyeing me up intently, gauging my reactions.
I phoned Dr McDonald on the Monday afternoon while Zoe was still at school, and she deigned to talk to me about the session. That, I suppose, is what you get for going private; that’s what you get for handing over sixty hard-earned pounds.
‘Your daughter’s in a lot of pain,’ she told me.
‘Pain?’ I repeated. I was surprised by her opening gambit.
‘Yes, psychological pain. She’s one very unhappy child.’
‘I know that,’ I told her. ‘We’ve been trying to help her for years.’
‘Do you trust your partner?’ she asked then. I could hear pages ruffling, then she continued, ‘Scott, isn’t it?’
‘Yes, Scott, that’s right. And yes, I think I trust him.’
‘You think you do,’ she said. ‘That’s not really reassuring me. Because if you have any doubts at all, you need to err on the side of protecting your daughter. I’m sure you understand that. Do you know anything about Scott’s past relationships? Do you know why they ended?’
‘Nothing,’ I admitted. And the moment I said it, that struck me as astonishing. ‘Did she tell you something?’ I asked. ‘Has she accused him of something?’
‘No,’ the doctor said. ‘No, not as such.’
‘Not as such?’ I repeated. ‘What does that mean?’
‘No,
she didn’t,’ she told me. ‘But there’s a . . . a black hole, I suppose you could call it, surrounding that day in Blackpool. You told me about it, but Zoe says she doesn’t remember it at all.’
‘She doesn’t remember it?’
‘That’s what she told me. And my interpretation of that is that either she remembers it, and perhaps not much happened other than her throwing a hissy fit, and so she doesn’t want to admit to that; or something happened that was so traumatic, or perhaps so adult, that she can’t process it. In which case she’s repressed the memory, so it’s out of reach. It can be a self-defence mechanism.’
‘We’re talking abuse, in that case?’ I asked. I’d been prepping myself all morning to be able to discuss this objectively, but I was shaking and sweating all the same.
‘If that’s the case, if she’s truly repressed the memory, then we might be talking about abuse, yes. Or at least something that, to her young mind, she interpreted as some kind of abuse.’
‘I see,’ I said. ‘But if she’s truly forgotten, surely she has no reason to avoid Scott.’
‘Well, we all forget when we first burned our hand in a flame,’ the doctor told me. ‘But the reflex to jerk the hand away remains for ever.’
‘Of course,’ I said, visualising, despite my best efforts not to do so, Zoe’s body jerking away from Scott’s touch. ‘I just can’t imagine it,’ I said. ‘Scott’s so sweet. I really can’t.’
‘Sadly, I’ve heard that many times,’ Dr McDonald said. ‘Our imaginations often fail us when it comes to imagining such horrors. Especially when it involves those we love.’
‘So how do we find out for sure?’
‘Therapy,’ she said. ‘Regular therapy. I’d like to try regression hypnosis, but she’s way too refractory at the moment. So I need to build some trust first.’
I’ll bet you do, I thought, thinking about the sixty pounds per session she’d be earning while she gained Zoe’s trust. ‘She’s not easy to build trust with,’ I said, instead. ‘It’s almost impossible to even get her to a consultation.’
The Road to Zoe Page 13