by Nicci French
She recognized Alan Dekker at once as the man she had seen outside Reuben’s office. His face – round and creased, with faint, blotchy freckles – was not exactly handsome, but it was appealing. His eyes were a sad brown, and there was something in them that reminded her of a dog expecting to be beaten but asking for affection none the less. His voice shook and he punched one fist into his open palm as he spoke. She noticed his nails were bitten down to the quick.
‘You think – you think – you think…’ he said. He was used to being interrupted. He spoke to fill in the gaps until he could get the right words out. ‘You think it was easy for me to go to that man?’
‘It’s never easy,’ said Frieda. ‘It must have taken courage.’
Alan stopped for a moment, looking confused. ‘I went because of Carrie, my wife. She drove me there. I think I wouldn’t have done it otherwise. He made a fool out of me.’
‘He let you down.’
‘He wasn’t paying attention. He didn’t even remember my name.’
He looked at Frieda but she just nodded and waited, leaning forward slightly in her chair.
‘What’s more he’s being paid, out of taxpayers’ money. I’m going to deal with him.’
‘That’s up to you,’ said Frieda. ‘I just want to say clearly that there was no excuse for the way he treated you.’ She paused, thought for a moment and silently cursed. There really didn’t seem to be any other way. ‘Whatever you plan to do, I was hoping that you and I could talk things over.’
‘Are you trying to talk me out of it?’
‘I wanted to talk about your feelings, about your suffering. Because you are suffering, aren’t you?’
‘That’s not the point,’ said Alan. His eyes had filled with tears and he blinked them away. ‘That’s not why I’m here.’
‘How would you describe it?’
Alan looked up at her. Frieda saw something yield in his expression as if he was surrendering himself.
‘I’m not good with words,’ he said. ‘Everything feels wrong. I’ve taken sick leave. My heart feels too big for my chest. There’s a taste in my mouth, like metal. Or blood. And I have thoughts, pictures going through my mind. I wake at night with them. I can’t – It’s like I’m not in my own life. I just don’t feel myself and I’m scared. I can’t…’ He paused and gulped. ‘I can’t make love to my wife. I love her but I can’t manage it.’
‘It happens,’ said Frieda. ‘You probably don’t realize how common it is.’
‘I feel terrible about it,’ said Alan. ‘About everything.’
The two of them looked at each other.
‘When you went to see Dr McGill you were taking the first step. It went wrong. I’m sorry about that. Do you think you can try again? With me?’
‘That’s not why I came here. I…’ He stopped and gave up as if the effort was too great. ‘Do you think you can help me?’
Frieda looked at him – his bitten nails, his anxious face splashed with pale freckles and badly shaved, his supplicating eyes. She gave him a nod. ‘I’d like to see you three times a week,’ she said. ‘I want you to treat it as a priority. Each session will last fifty minutes, and if you arrive late, I will still end at the same time. Do you think you can manage that?’
‘I think so. Yes.’
She took her diary out of the drawer.
Chapter Nine
They stood together on Waterloo Bridge. Frieda wasn’t looking at the Houses of Parliament or the London Eye or St Paul’s, the glittering mass of the city reflected in the brown water. She was staring down at the currents of the river, where they swirled around the foot of the bridge. She almost forgot Sandy was with her until he spoke.
‘Don’t you prefer Sydney?’
‘Sydney?’
‘Or Berlin?’
‘No. I think I have to get to work now, Sandy.’
‘Maybe Manhattan.’
‘You can only really love one city. This one’s mine.’
‘Is that Essex?’ said Alan, looking at the picture on the wall.
‘No,’ said Frieda.
‘Where is it?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Why did you get it, then?’
‘I wanted a picture that wasn’t too interesting. That wouldn’t distract people.’
‘I like pictures that have things in them, like old-fashioned sailing ships where you can see all the details, the ropes and the sails. That’s not my kind of picture. It’s too fuzzy, too moody.’
Frieda was about to say that that was a good thing because they weren’t here to talk about pictures when she stopped herself. ‘Is moody necessarily a bad thing?’
Alan nodded. ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You think everything means something. What you do is read things into what I say.’
‘So what would you like to talk about?’
Alan sat back and folded his arms, as if he was fending Frieda off. On Monday, he had been anxious and needy. Today he was assertive, defensive. At least he had turned up. ‘You’re the doctor. Or, at least, a sort of doctor. You tell me. Don’t you get me to go on about my dreams? Or should I talk about when I was a child?’
‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m a doctor. So tell me what’s wrong with you. Explain why you’re here.’
‘As far as I know, I’m here so that I don’t make a complaint against that other doctor. That guy is a complete disgrace. I know you all want to stick together. I still might make a complaint.’
Alan kept shifting his position. Uncrossing his arms, pushing his hands through his hair, looking at Frieda, then looking away.
‘There are places for you to complain,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you decide to do. But not here. This is a place where you come and talk about yourself, with honesty. You can do it in a way that you probably can’t with anyone else, not with close friends or your wife or people you work with. You might want to see that as an opportunity.’
‘The problem I have with all of this’ – Alan gestured around the room – ‘is that you think you can solve problems just by talking about them. I’ve always seen myself as a practical person. If there’s a problem, I believe in going out and fixing it. Talking about it doesn’t get it done.’
Frieda’s expression was unchanged but she felt a familiar kind of weariness. This again. So often the first proper session was like a particularly awkward first date. At a first session, people had to claim that they didn’t really need help, that they didn’t know what they were doing there, that there was no point in just talking about things. Sometimes it took weeks to get beyond that stage. Sometimes you never really got beyond it at all.
‘As you said, I’m a doctor,’ said Frieda. ‘Describe your symptoms to me.’
‘They’re the same as they were before.’
‘Before when?’ Frieda leaned forward slightly in her chair.
‘When? I don’t know exactly. I was young. In my early twenties – it would have been about twenty-one, twenty-two years ago. Why?’
‘How did you deal with it then?’
‘They went away.’ Alan paused, made a strange, anxious grimace. ‘Eventually.’
‘So for twenty-odd years, you’ve not felt anything like them, and now they’re recurring.’
‘Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean I need to be here, necessarily. I think my GP just referred me as a way of getting rid of me. My own theory is that doctors basically just want their patients to go away as quickly as possible and stay away. The main way they do it is to give you a pill, but if that doesn’t work they send you to another doctor. Of course, what they really want…’
Suddenly he stopped. There was a pause.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Frieda.
Alan slowly twisted his head. ‘Can you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘There’s a sort of creaking sound,’ he said. ‘It’s from over there.’ He pointed to the far side of the room, the opposite side from the window.
‘It’s
probably just building work,’ said Frieda. ‘There’s a construction project…’
She frowned. There really was a creaking noise and it wasn’t coming from across the street. It was inside the house. And yet not exactly inside. The noise got louder. The creaking turned into a groaning, and then they could feel it as well as hear it. Then there was what sounded like an explosion in the ceiling and something fell through: plaster and pieces of wood, but mainly it was a man. He landed heavily on the carpet. Chunks of plaster fell on to him. The room was suddenly full of white dust. Frieda just sat there. It was so unexpected that she felt unable to process what was happening. She just stared at it as if a theatrical spectacle was taking place in front of her. And she was waiting to see what would happen next.
Meanwhile Alan had leaped up and run towards the figure slumped on the floor. Could he be dead? Frieda wondered. How could a dead man have fallen through her ceiling? Alan knelt down and touched it, and the figure stirred. Slowly it shifted, pulled itself on to its knees and then stood. He was a man. He was bulky, shaggy-haired, in overalls, but it was difficult to make out anything else about him because he was covered with a film of grey dust. Except that on his face, to the side of one eyebrow, there was a trickle of blood, which ran down over his cheekbone. He looked at Alan and then at Frieda, as if confused.
‘What floor is this?’ he asked. His accent sounded foreign, Eastern European.
‘What floor?’ said Frieda. ‘The third. Are you all right?’
The man looked up through the hole, then back at Frieda. He patted at his arms and his body, releasing a snowstorm of dust. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said, and walked out of the room.
Frieda and Alan looked at each other. Alan gestured at the chair he’d been sitting in. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Mind what?’
He dragged the chair under the hole in the ceiling and then stood on it. Frieda looked up at him, then at his feet and his shoes on her chair, and didn’t know what to say. Alan’s head had disappeared into the hole. She heard a muffled ‘Hello’ and other words that she couldn’t make out. Then she heard another voice that was even more distant. Finally Alan stepped down off the chair.
‘Does it look serious?’ said Frieda.
Alan pulled a face. ‘Lucky I’m not at work.’
‘Are you a builder?’
‘I work for the housing department,’ he said. ‘I’d have something to say about that if I was at work.’
‘I’ll have to get it fixed. Does it look difficult?’
Alan glanced up at the hole, shook his head and sucked air through his teeth in a hiss. ‘Rather you than me,’ he said. ‘Bloody cowboys. If he’d broken his neck, who would have paid for that? These bloody Poles.’
‘From the Ukraine,’ said a voice from the hole.
‘Are you listening?’ said Frieda.
‘What?’ said the voice.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘It’s your ceiling that got hurt,’ said Alan.
‘I come soon,’ said the voice.
Frieda stepped away from the rubble. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said. ‘I suppose we’ll have to stop here.’
‘Did you arrange it?’ said Alan. ‘Is it a way of breaking the ice?’
‘We should make another arrangement. If you’re comfortable with that.’
Alan looked up at the hole. ‘What’s disturbing about that,’ he said, ‘apart from the shock, is that it shows how close we live to each other. We’re like animals in cages on top of each other.’
Frieda raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You’re talking too much like an analyst. Sometimes someone falling through a hole in the ceiling is just someone falling through a hole in the ceiling. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an accident.’ She looked at the rubble and the dust that was now settling on every surface. ‘A particularly irritating accident.’
Alan’s face turned serious. ‘I’m the one who should say sorry,’ he said. ‘I was being rude to you. That other guy wasn’t your fault. My GP wasn’t your fault. There are things I’d like to talk to you about. Thoughts. In my head. Maybe you could make them go away.’
‘You weren’t rude, not really. So I’ll see you again on Friday. Assuming I’ve got this lot cleared up.’
She showed Alan out and then, as she always did, she went to her desk and started to write notes on the session, though it had lasted barely ten minutes. She was interrupted by a knock at the door. A knock, not a ring from the street bell, so she imagined it would be Alan, but it was the man from upstairs, still covered with dust.
‘Five minutes,’ he said.
‘Five minutes what?’ asked Frieda.
‘You stay here,’ he said. ‘I come back in five minutes.’
Frieda made two phone calls cancelling sessions for later that day. Then, as she sat down to finish her notes, there was another knock on the door. It took her a moment to recognize the man standing there now that he was clean, smelling of soap and dressed in jeans, a T-shirt and a pair of trainers with no socks. His dark brown hair was swept back off his face. He held his hand out. ‘My name is Josef Morozov.’
Almost as if she were in a dream, Frieda gave his hand a shake and introduced herself, although for a moment she thought he was going to lift her knuckles to his lips and kiss them.
In his other hand he was holding a packet of chocolate biscuits. ‘You like biscuits?’
‘No, I don’t.’
‘We have to talk. Do you have tea?’
‘We definitely need to talk.’
‘We need tea. I make tea for you.’
Frieda kept almost nothing in the little flat where she saw patients but she did occasionally make herself tea and coffee. So she took him through and watched him while he pottered around her kitchen. With her having to tell him where everything was, it took longer than if she had done it herself. They each took a mug and walked through to the consulting room.
‘You could have died,’ Frieda said. ‘Are you OK?’
He held up his left arm and looked at it as if it belonged to someone else. There was a livid red scar running down the inside. ‘I fell from a ladder,’ he said, ‘and through a window. And once I broke my leg when a…’ He gestured vaguely. ‘It ran on me. With a wall behind me. This was nothing.’
He sipped his tea and looked out of the window at the demolition. ‘That is a big job,’ he said.
‘Shall we talk about the big job in here?’
Josef turned and looked at the rubble on the floor, then up at the hole. ‘It is bad,’ he said.
‘This is where I work,’ said Frieda.
‘You cannot work here,’ said Josef.
‘So what am I going to do?’ said Frieda. ‘By which I mean, what are you going to do?’
Josef looked up at the hole again, then gave a melancholy smile. ‘I am to blame,’ he said. ‘But the person who built that floor, he is the one who is really to blame.’
‘I’m not so bothered about your floor,’ said Frieda. ‘What matters to me is my ceiling.’
‘It’s not my floor. I am doing the work while the people are at their house in the country. This is their town flat. You work every day?’
‘Every day. Except weekends.’
He turned to her and put the hand that wasn’t holding the mug on his heart, in a gesture that had a certain theatrical flourish. He even gave a slight bow. ‘I will fix everything for you.’
‘When?’
‘It will be better than it was before I fell through the hole.’
‘You didn’t fall through the hole. You made the hole.’
He frowned thoughtfully. ‘When do you need to work here?’
‘I’d like to work here tomorrow, but I guess that’s out of the question.’
Josef looked around. Then he smiled. ‘I put a partition here,’ he said. ‘I work behind it. You have your office. When you’re not here, I put new paper up. Paint it. I’ll paint it a proper colour.’
‘Thi
s is a proper colour.’
‘You give me a key and the partition will be up tomorrow and you will have your office again. Just a smaller office.’
He held his hand out. Frieda pondered just a moment. She was giving her key to a man she had never met before. But what else was she going to do? Find another builder? What was the worst that could happen? Never ask that question. She opened a drawer, found a spare key and gave it to Josef. ‘You’re Ukrainian?’ she said.
‘Not Polish.’
The best ones are the shy ones, with their anxious smiles and their wobbling bottom lips. The ones who miss their mother and who sit on the steps in the cold, damp weather until their teacher comes and makes them stand up, run around. You need them eager to please, obedient. You can mould.
There’s a little boy who is sitting on the small wooden seesaw, waiting for someone to climb on to the high other end. But no one comes and he goes on sitting there. At first, he is smiling and hopeful, then bit by bit his smile freezes on his face. He glances around. He sees the other children looking at him and deciding not to join him. He tries to call another boy over but the other boy ignores him.
He’s a possibility. You have to know what you’re looking for but you have to be careful as well. It doesn’t matter how long it takes. Time isn’t a problem.
Chapter Ten
‘That was interesting,’ said Sandy.
They were walking hand in hand through the City towards his flat, just a few hundred yards away. On either side of them, imposing buildings rose up and towered over them, their height almost obscuring the sky. Banks and financial institutions and august law firms with their names above the doors. The smell of money. The streets were clean and deserted. Traffic lights changed from red to green and back, but only the occasional cab passed through them.
They had been to a leaving party for a doctor who worked with Sandy, and whom Frieda had also known for several years. They had arrived separately, but halfway through the evening, Sandy had come up to where Frieda was standing in a group and placed his hand on her back. She had turned towards him and he had bent his head and kissed her on the cheek, too near her mouth and too lingering for it to be a greeting between acquaintances. It was a clear statement, and of course he had meant everyone to notice it. When she had turned back to the people she had been talking to, she saw how interest brightened their glances, though nobody said anything. Now they had left together, aware of all the eyes following them, the speculation they were leaving behind. Frieda and Sandy, Sandy and Frieda – did you know, did you guess?
