by Nicci French
Whales are not fish. Spiders have eight legs. Butterflies come from caterpillars and frogs come from tadpoles and tadpoles come from the thick dotted jelly Mrs Hyde sometimes has in a jam jar at school. Two and two makes four. Two and two makes four. Two and two makes four. He didn’t know what happened next. He couldn’t remember. Mummy will come soon. If he squeezed his eyes tight shut and counted to ten, very slowly – one hippopotamus, two hippopotamus – when he opened them again, she would be there.
He closed his eyes very tightly and counted, then opened them. It was still dark. She was cross with him, that was it. It was a lesson. He’d gone outside without her tight warm hand. She said never do that, do you promise, Matthew, and he’d promised. Cross my heart hope to die. He’d eaten the sweets. Never take food from a stranger, Matthew. It was a spell. Magic potions, they can change you into what you’re not. Small, like an insect in the corner of the room, and then Mummy wouldn’t see him; perhaps she would step on him. Or he had a different face, a different body, the body of a scary animal or a monster, but him trapped inside it. She would look at him and not understand that it was him, Matthew, her little muffin, her honey-bunch. But his eyes would be the same, wouldn’t they? He would still be looking out of himself with his eyes. Or he would have to call and shout to tell her who he really was, but his mouth was stuck shut and all he could hear when he cried was an echoey humming in his head that was like one of those horns you hear when you’re on a ferry-boat at sea, going on holidays with Mummy and Daddy. Lonely in the distance and a shiver of dread goes through you, though you don’t know why, and you want to be hugged and safe because the world is wide and deep and full of surprises that make your heart too big inside your body.
He needed a wee. He concentrated on not needing a wee. He was too big to wet himself. People laughed and pointed and held their noses. Warm wet, then cool, then cold and stinging against his thigh and the thin, high smell at the back of his nose. His eyes were wet too, stinging wet. He couldn’t wipe them. Mummy. Daddy. I am very sorry I did wrong. If you take me home now, I will be good. I promise.
Or he had been turned into a snake, because his arms weren’t arms any more but part of his body, though he could wiggle his fingers, and his feet weren’t feet any more but stuck together. Once upon a time, there was a little boy called Matthew who broke a promise and who ate a magic potion and was turned into a snake to punish him. Slithering on the floor. Wood under his cheek. He could feel it and he could smell it. If he wriggled, could he move like a snake? He bunched up his body and straightened it again and his body jerked across the floor. Suddenly his face met something cool and firm, with a curved point at the end. He lifted his head and nudged it but it didn’t move. Then he stretched himself and laid his cheek on top of it, to see what it was. Once, in Hide and Seek, he had hidden in his parents’ wardrobe. He had curled up in the darkness, giggling and a bit scared, just a tiny stripe of light between the double doors, and waited to be found. He could hear them in the house, looking in stupid places like behind curtains. He had put his head on something like this then. Now his wet cheek felt a coil of string and a knot.
The shoe pulled away and his head fell back on the floor with a thump. The shoe poked him in his side. Too hard. A small bright light went on and he rolled over so he was staring up at it and he couldn’t see anything now except the piercing light. It exploded in his eyes and flowered inside his head, and around its throbbing centre the darkness was even darker.
The light went off. The shoe pushed him to one side. There was a sudden rectangle of grey in the blackness, then a click and the grey disappeared.
Chapter Fourteen
Frieda rang the bell on the familiar door. It made no sound and she couldn’t tell whether it was broken or whether it was ringing deep within the house. She pushed the button again. Still no sound. She rapped the heavy knocker several times. She stepped back from the door and looked at the windows. There were no lights visible, no movement, no sign of any presence. Could he have gone away? She knocked again, more heavily this time, so that the door shook. She bent down and pushed the letterbox open. She peered through. There were letters on the mat. She was about to leave when she heard something from inside. She knocked again. Now there was definite movement. She heard footsteps approaching, a rattling, the sound of a bolt being pulled and then the door opened.
Reuben narrowed his eyes, as if even the grey of a cloudy November morning was too much for him. He was dressed in a pair of grubby jeans and a partially unbuttoned shirt. It wasn’t immediately clear that he recognized Frieda. He seemed puzzled and confused. Frieda could smell alcohol and tobacco and sweat. He had clearly spent at least one night in his clothes.
‘What’s the time?’ he said.
‘Quarter past nine,’ said Frieda.
‘Morning or night?’
‘It looks like daytime to me.’
‘Ingrid’s gone,’ said Reuben.
‘Where?’
‘She’s left me. She left and she said she’s not coming back. She wouldn’t tell me where she was going.’
‘I didn’t know. Can I come in?’
‘Better not.’
Frieda pushed her way past him. She hadn’t been to the house for more than a year and it had an abandoned look to it. A window was cracked, a light fitting had come off the ceiling and bare wires were exposed. She looked around and found a phone under a newspaper in the hall. She took a scrap of paper from her pocket and dialled the number on it. After a brief conversation, she rang off.
‘Where does the phone live?’
‘Anywhere,’ said Reuben. ‘I can never find it.’
‘I’ll make you some coffee.’
As Frieda entered Reuben’s kitchen, she had to hold her hand over her mouth to stop herself retching at the smell. She looked at the wreckage of dirty plates, pans, glasses, boxes and wrappings of half-finished takeaway meals.
‘I wasn’t expecting company,’ said Reuben. His tone was almost defiant, like that of a child who had smashed up his toys. ‘Needs a woman’s touch. This is better than upstairs.’
Frieda felt an impulse just to flee the horrible scene and leave him to it. Hadn’t Reuben said something like that to her years ago? ‘You’ve got to let them make their own mistakes. All you can do is to follow and make sure they don’t scare the horses or get arrested or damage anyone apart from themselves.’ She couldn’t do it. There was no question of clearing up, but she decided she could make at least some sort of pathway through the squalor. She pushed Reuben into a chair where he sat, rubbing his face and muttering. She put the kettle on. Scattered around the kitchen were various half-full and quarter-full bottles: whisky, Cinzano Bianco, wine, Drambuie. She tipped them all down the sink. She found a bin-bag and filled it with old scraps of food. At least that showed he hadn’t only been drinking. She piled crockery in the sink and then, when it was full, around the sink. She opened cupboards and found a jar of instant coffee somewhere high up and forgotten. It hadn’t been opened. She used the end of a spoon to tear open the paper covering the top of the jar. She washed up two mugs and made them each a hot black coffee. Reuben looked at it, gave a groan and shook his head. Frieda lifted the mug towards his mouth. He took a couple of sips and gave another groan. ‘Burned my tongue.’
Still she held the mug, tipping it into his mouth, encouraging him, until half of it was gone.
‘Come to gloat, have you?’ Reuben said. ‘This is where I’ve come to. This is where Reuben McGill has ended up. Or are you going to offer condolences? Are you going to say how very, very sorry you are? Or are you going to give me a lecture?’
Frieda lifted her coffee mug, looked at it and put it back on the table. ‘I came to ask you for advice,’ she said.
‘That’s a laugh,’ said Reuben. ‘Look around you. You think I’m in any kind of position to be dispensing advice?’
‘Alan Dekker,’ said Frieda. ‘The patient I took over from you. Remember him?’
‘Took over from? You mean the one you had me removed from. The one that involved me getting suspended from my own clinic. That one. The problem is, I don’t remember very much about him because my own old student, my protégée, had me booted off the case. So what’s the problem? Has he complained about you as well?’
‘The problem is, he’s got under my skin.’
‘Has he now?’
‘The last couple of days I’ve not been sleeping properly.’
‘You never did sleep properly.’
‘But it was the dreams I’ve been having. I feel like I’ve been infected by him. I wondered if you’d felt anything about him. I thought that might have been why it went wrong between you and him.’
Reuben took a gulp of coffee. ‘Christ, I hate this stuff,’ he said. ‘You remember Dr Schoenbaum?’
‘He was one of your trainers, wasn’t he?’
‘That’s right. He was analysed by Richard Steiner. And Richard Steiner was analysed by Thomas Bayer and Thomas Bayer was analysed by Sigmund Freud. Schoenbaum was like my hotline to God and he taught me that when you were an analyst you weren’t a human being. You were more like a totem pole.’
‘A totem pole?’
‘You were just there. And if your patient comes in and tells you his wife just died, you don’t even offer your condolences. You analyse why he feels the need to tell you that. Schoenbaum was brilliant and he was charismatic and I thought: Fuck that. With my patients I was going to be everything that he wasn’t. I was going to hold the patient’s hand, and in our little room I would do everything they did and go everywhere they went and feel everything they felt.’ Reuben leaned across the table towards Frieda and she could see his eyes close up, yellowy, red-veined in the corners. His breath was sour, reeking of coffee and alcohol and rubbishy food. ‘You wouldn’t believe where I’ve gone. You wouldn’t believe the shit that flows through the human brain, and I’ve walked through it up to my neck. Men have told me things about children and women have told me things about their fathers and their uncles, and I don’t know why they didn’t just go out of the room and blow their fucking brains out, and I thought if I went on the journey with them, if I showed them that they weren’t alone, that someone could share it, then maybe they could come back and make something of their lives. And you know what? After thirty years of it, I’ve had it. You know what Ingrid said to me? She said I was pathetic and that I was drinking too much and that I had become boring.’
‘You did help people,’ said Frieda.
‘You reckon?’ said Reuben. ‘They’d probably have done just as well if they’d taken a few pills or done a bit of exercise or just done nothing. Anyway, I don’t know what it did for them, but it didn’t do me any fucking good. Just look around. This is what it looks like when you let these people inside your head. So if you came here wanting some advice, I’ll give you some: if a patient starts getting to you, give them to someone else. You won’t help them and you won’t help yourself. There. You can go now.’
‘It’s not that I’ve let him get to me, not in the way you mean. It’s just – well, curious. He’s curious.’
‘What do you mean?’
Frieda told him about her sessions with Alan, and about the startled feeling she had had when she opened the paper and read about Matthew. Reuben didn’t interrupt. For a moment, Frieda almost forgot where she was. The years rolled away and she was a student again, articulating her fears to her mentor Reuben. He knew how to listen, when he tried; he leaned slightly forward and his eyes didn’t leave her face.
‘There,’ she said at the end. ‘Do you see what I mean?’
‘Do you remember that patient you had years ago – what was her name? Melody or something.’
‘Melanie, you mean?’
‘That’s it. She was a classic somatizing patient. Irritable bowel syndrome, spells of dizziness and fainting, you name it.’
‘And?’
‘Her anxieties and repressions were embodied in her physical symptoms. She couldn’t admit them, but her body found a way of expressing them.’
‘So you think…’
‘People are very strange and their minds are stranger. Look at that woman who had an allergy to the twentieth century. What was that about? I’m suggesting that Alan is doing something of the same thing. Panic can be free-floating, you know, attaching itself to whatever comes along.’
‘Yes,’ said Frieda, slowly. ‘But he thought about a red-haired child before Matthew disappeared.’
‘Hmm. Well, it was a good theory. In fact, it’s still a good theory – it just applies to you instead of your patient.’
‘Ingenious.’
‘I’m half serious – you’re anxious about Alan, you can’t get to the bottom of him. So you’re attaching his fantasy son to a convenient symbol.’
‘A snatched child is hardly a symbol.’
‘Why not? Everything is a symbol.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Frieda, but she laughed. Her mood had lifted. ‘What about you?’
‘Oh, OK,’ said Reuben. ‘It’s your turn to give advice. Here I am. No woman. No job. I’ve been drinking gin out of coffee cups. What do you recommend, Doctor? Is it all to do with my mother?’
Frieda looked around. ‘I think you should tidy up,’ she said.
‘You’re a behaviourist, are you?’ asked Reuben, sarcastically.
‘I just don’t like mess. You’d feel better.’
Reuben slapped his head so hard that Frieda flinched. ‘There’s no point in clearing up out here if you’re fucked up in here,’ he said.
‘At least you’ll be fucked up in a tidy house.’
‘You sound like my mother.’
‘I liked your mother.’
There was a loud knock at the door.
‘Who the fuck can that be?’ said Reuben, irritably. He shuffled out of the room. Frieda took her mug of coffee and poured it over the dishes in the sink. Reuben came back into the kitchen. ‘There’s some guy asking for you,’ he said.
He was followed by Josef.
‘That was quick,’ said Frieda.
‘Is he a cleaner?’ said Reuben.
‘I am a builder,’ said Josef. ‘You have had a party?’
‘What’s he doing here?’
‘I asked him to come,’ said Frieda. ‘As a favour. For which you will pay. So be polite. Josef, I wondered if you’d fix about five things here. Like the doorbell and a broken window and there’s a light that’s come off the wall.’
‘The boiler doesn’t work properly,’ said Reuben.
Josef looked around. ‘Your wife is gone?’ he said.
‘She’s not my wife,’ said Reuben. ‘And yes. As you can see. I did this all by myself.’
‘I am so sorry,’ said Josef.
‘I don’t need your sympathy,’ said Reuben.
‘Yes, you do,’ said Frieda. She touched Josef’s shoulder lightly with her hand. ‘Thank you. And you’re right. Talking isn’t always enough.’
Josef inclined his head in his characteristic courtly gesture of acknowledgement.
Chapter Fifteen
‘Frieda?’
‘Sorry.’
‘You’re miles away. What were you thinking about?’
Frieda hated it when people asked her that. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘The day ahead. Work stuff.’ She had slept so badly that her eyes stung. Now she felt brittle and on edge and she didn’t want to make conversation with Sandy, who had slept beside her, murmuring things in his dreams she couldn’t make out.
‘There are things we should talk about.’
‘Things?’
‘Yes.’
‘Is this the how-many-men-have-I-slept-with conversation?’
‘No. We can save that for later, when we’ve got enough time. I want to talk about our plans.’
‘What am I doing this summer, you mean? I should warn you that I hate flying. And sunbathing on beaches.’
‘Stop it.’
‘Sorry. Ignore
me. It’s seven thirty in the morning and I’ve been awake most of the night with my brain fizzing. The only plans I can make right now are ones for the next eight hours.’
‘Come to mine tonight. I’ll cook us something simple and we can talk.’
‘That sounds ominous.’
‘It’s not.’
‘I have a patient at seven.’
‘Come after that.’
Frieda never took notes during a session; she did that afterwards, then wrote them up on the computer in the evenings or at weekends. But she occasionally made drawings or simple doodles on the pad of paper she kept at hand. It helped her to concentrate her thoughts. She did that now, sitting in the repaired room, newly painted a colour called ‘Bone’, to Josef’s obvious disapproval. She loosely sketched Alan’s left hand, which rested, for the moment, on the arm of his chair. Hands were difficult. His had a thick gold band on his wedding finger, chewed skin round his thumbnail, prominent veins. His index finger was longer than his wedding-ring finger; that was supposed to mean something but she couldn’t remember what. Today he was more than usually restless, twisting in his seat, sitting forward, then shifting backwards, rubbing the side of his nose. She noticed a rash had broken out on his neck and there was a toothpaste stain on his shirt. He was talking, very fast, about the son he wanted. Words that had been forbidden and jammed inside him for so many years now spilled out. She drew in the knuckle of his little finger and listened very carefully, trying to quell the unease prickling through her, raising goose pimples on her skin.
‘Being called Dad,’ he was saying now. ‘Having him trust me. Never letting him down. He plays football and likes board games. He likes being read to at night, books about dinosaurs and trains.’
