Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  I introduced myself and went through a few preliminaries. Emma waited for me to finish. In an immaculately clipped voice, she said, ‘My husband refuses to believe there’s anything wrong with Joshua that one of the major public schools can’t fix. He thinks if we get Joshua into Eton, our son will stop flushing kittens down the lavatory.’

  I’d run into the ‘my child’s too well bred to be a psycho’ argument before and knew it for what it was: embarrassment combined with a wafer-thin sense of superiority brought in as a defence against the situation in which a woman like Emma Barrons found herself. The Barrons were used to being able to buy themselves out of almost any situation. I didn’t judge them for that; what parent doesn’t do whatever it takes for their kids? But money wasn’t the point here and that was what left Emma and Christopher Barrons at a loss.

  I leaned forward and steepled my hands to give myself more professional authority.

  ‘And what do you think?’

  I felt her pull back. A pulse thumped in her throat at the suprasternal notch. She wasn’t here to have her opinion canvased. What she wanted was exactly what we couldn’t offer her: a cure. A tiny frown appeared on her otherwise waxy face. ‘I should have thought that was rather obvious. I’m here, aren’t I?’

  ‘You are, and I’m very glad about that, because we’re going to help your son.’

  The tiny frown returned. ‘Forgive my scepticism, Dr Lupo, but Joshua has been diagnosed any number of times by a series of private psychiatrists and prescribed dozens of pills with names I can’t pronounce, but he’s still trying to flush kittens down toilets. I’m here because I’m afraid for my child and I don’t know what else to do and because the emergency psychiatrist who looked at Joshua hinted that he would section him if I didn’t agree to come.’

  I sat back and settled in for the long haul. Emma Barrons had a point. Diagnosis of paediatric mental disorders was both complex and highly controversial. Cases of child psychopathy were missed or misdiagnosed all the time, in part because it was relatively rare and in part because psychiatrists were resistant to giving kids such a devastating label. Even the most experienced psychiatrists and neurologists often got it wrong, either because they couldn’t see it or because they didn’t want to.

  As I began what I hoped was a reassuring speech about how different our approach was at the clinic, I found my mind once more wandering back to the situation at home. A bubble of anxiety burst at the back of my throat. By now Freya would have met her half-sister. What if they didn’t get on? What if Freya blamed her father and turned against him? Against both of us? So many what ifs. Hurriedly, I put those thoughts back into the box labelled ‘home life’ and returned my attention to my patient’s mother. My upbringing had made me good at compartmentalising. It was something Tom liked about me. The hallmark of survivors. He thought of himself as one too. ‘You and me both have a ruthless streak,’ he’d said to me once in the early days. At the time, I let it go. I let a lot of things go back then.

  Emma Barrons waited for me to finish and said, ‘I sometimes wonder if Joshua behaves this way because he hates me. On the rare occasions Christopher comes home, Joshua runs into his arms. Runs. And then it’s all “Daddy this” and “Daddy that”. That’s why my husband can’t see it. He thinks I haven’t put in enough effort to find the right school for our son. He won’t accept that Joshua is too disruptive to go to a normal school.’

  I mentioned we could arrange to have Joshua home-schooled by a specialist tutor, at least while he was still in treatment. As I was speaking, Emma Barrons began twirling the index finger of her right hand around the left. She wasn’t listening. I couldn’t blame her. By the time the kids in our clinic had been referred to us, their parents had usually gone through years of anguish. Most often they were on the brink. Taking an e-cigarette from her ostrich bag and holding it briefly in mid-air, she said, ‘Do you mind?’ and, without waiting for an answer, drew the metal tube to her lips and sucked like an orphaned lamb at the teat.

  ‘I suppose there’s no point in asking how Joshua got this way?’ she said.

  ‘We don’t know exactly. The only thing we’re sure of is that there are certain genetic and neurological markers often associated with children with the disorder. Joshua has the low MAO-A variant gene. It’s an epigenetic problem, an issue with the way a particular gene expresses itself, which can affect the production of serotonin in the brain and lead to flattened emotional responses and a tendency towards problems with impulse control. You might have noticed that Joshua doesn’t have the same fear response as most other children. He may need to go to extremes in order to feel pleasurable emotions. In fact, to feel anything at all. But I can explain it in more detail to you as we go along.’

  Emma paused just long enough for her nicotine fix then launched into a diatribe about her son’s reckless behaviour. I checked the clock. I loved my work and I was motivated by a strong sense that we could help kids like Joshua, kids who we in the brain business call ‘unsuccessful psychopaths’ because they are unable to disguise their dangerousness, but knew from experience that it would be a slow and painful process, one which could derail at any time. I steered the conversation towards more productive territory and spent a few minutes outlining what the institute proposed for the boy’s therapy programme. Most of our kids were in residential care but, since the Barrons lived nearby, I thought it might be better for Joshua if we tried him out as a day patient. We would spend the first few weeks attempting to unlock Joshua’s deep motivators, the things that really drove him, and then use them to try to modify his behaviour. Eventually we hoped to alter the neural pathways in his still malleable brain.

  ‘I do really want to emphasise that there is hope,’ I said.

  Emma Barrons shot me a baleful look. We finished up and Emma Barrons stood to go. At the door, she turned and, with an odd, damaged smile on her face, she said, ‘I didn’t really want a child, you know, but Christopher had an heir thing going on. I suppose Joshua is the price I paid for marrying money. Quite a high price, as it turned out.’

  For a moment she just stood there in the doorway working the rings on her hands. ‘I suppose that shocks you, Dr Lupo?’

  ‘Call me Caitlin. We’re going to get to know one another quite well.’

  ‘Caitlin, then.’ One side of her mouth rose up in a half-smile. ‘Do I shock you?’

  ‘Right now, Emma, absolutely nothing would shock me.’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  After Emma Barrons had gone I called Tom’s mobile and left a message. He and Ruby were spending the morning with social services then with police liaison, so I knew he would be unlikely to pick up, but I wanted him to know that I was thinking about the family and to remind him that we needed to talk tonight after the girls had gone to bed. I knew he’d try to sidestep it if he could.

  What a bastard Tom was. What a complete shit. To go behind my back would have been one thing, but to do it when I was on my back. After everything I’d been through to bring our daughter into the world. After all the moral and financial support I’d given him. After all the badly cooked meals I’d laboured over so he could spend more time on Labyrinth. After all the bloody perfunctory sex.

  Oh, the moral high ground. It was a dangerous place to linger, I knew that; barren and lonely and with air so thin it’s difficult to breathe. If I allowed myself to follow the angry road and turn righteous at the top, I might feel I’d won, for an instant, only to sense a moment later that all I had really done was run away.

  For now the only way forward was to think myself into accepting what had happened. Tom had cheated on me, it was over and the woman was dead. All that remained was the girl, Ruby Winter. Once she went to live with her grandmother, our day-to-day lives would remain essentially unchanged. I figured that we’d see her some weekends, support her financially and perhaps include her in our holiday plans, but that was more or less it.

  By the time I finished my notes from the meeting with Emma Barrons it was ne
arly one o’clock. I was meeting Anja for lunch to discuss the grant application we were putting together to expand the clinic. On my way out, I asked Claire to take messages, then, swiping myself out of the building, I walked through the car park and out into the street.

  As I made my way along the slip road towards Holland Hill and the Wise Owl Cafe, which was where Anja and I usually had lunch when we had something to discuss other than our patients, I was struck by a sudden and wholly unexpected sense of loss. The feeling was so intense I felt nearly floored by it. For most of the girls I grew up with on the Pemberton Estate, weed, booze, coke, even crack, were no bar to pregnancy. A few were on their third child – or abortion – before my eggs had so much as asked a sperm for its phone number. I came late to the sex party but I assumed that, once I’d arrived, I’d be pretty much like anyone else. I’d find a time when starting a family seemed to make sense and I’d do it. It never occurred to me that my body would prevent me getting what I most wanted. That my flesh and blood would become the enemy.

  Tom once told me that my reproductive system was like one of those multi-layered computer games where you need to know the cheats to be able to complete the game. By ‘cheats’ he meant two rounds of IVF, the last of which, by some scientific miracle, brought us Freya. And that, for Tom, was that. The arrival of Freya was game over. We’d won. Move on.

  But you know what? Completing the game only made me want to start from the beginning and play it again. Despite the cost, despite the expense, despite all the medical advice and evidence suggesting that, had I got pregnant again, there would have been a significant chance of my ending up in the psych ward for a second time, I would have gone on. Because the heart wants what it wants. And the womb wants what it wants. And my womb and my heart both wanted more.

  And this was what floored me now. The knowledge that, while Tom was putting his foot down and refusing to give space to the idea that we might have another child, he’d gone out and made one. Just like that. From that most simple, tried and tested formula: a few drinks plus one willing woman plus nine months equals one child. And then – who could have predicted it? – one day, more than a decade later, the child he denied me would show up on our doorstep. I could forgive the cheating; I could forgive the lie. But tell me, how the hell was I supposed to forgive the child?

  By now I’d reached the Wise Owl. Anja had already arrived and was sitting at a table at the back near the air con, one hand leaving snail trails with an ice cube across the soft mound of her left arm, while the other pecked at her phone. I rearranged my features, sent the demons back under the bed and waved. Her eyes flicked up and registered me, smiled briefly, then went back to finishing up whatever she was doing on her phone.

  Anja and I had one of those close professional relationships that rarely spilled over into our personal lives. We’d trained together and run parallel careers for a time, and we could perhaps have been proper friends if the Spelling case hadn’t forced me to give up forensic work to focus on research. Anja had backed away from me a little after that. We never socialised outside the institute and I’d only ever met her husband, Marc, at institute parties. I knew he worked for a hedge fund and put in crazy hours, and that they usually went away to the Caribbean at Christmas, and that they didn’t have kids, which Anja regretted, but that was about it. From time to time, I wished we were closer. But I completely got it that we weren’t. For a while, close association with me would have been career suicide. Now, ironically I supposed, given the dive my career had taken back then, I was effectively Anja’s boss.

  I took the seat beside her, noticing that a bottle of sparkling water and two large iced glasses already sat on the table. Anja dropped her phone into a leather bag at her side and clasped her hands to signal her switch in focus.

  ‘Now, I can’t wait to hear how you got on,’ she said with a smile, which faded as she met my eye. ‘God, you look tired. Hardly surprising, I suppose.’

  For a single shocking moment, I imagined that she’d found out about Ruby Winter, but no, she’d be thinking I’d been up late finishing off the grant application.

  ‘All those bloody forms,’ I said and gave a hollow laugh.

  The waitress appeared to take our food order. Anja waited until the waitress had gone, then, leaning towards me in a half-whisper, she said, ‘You’re not pregnant, are you?’

  This was so unexpected, the timing so ironic, it floored me. ‘Why ever would you ask that?’

  She eyed the menu.

  ‘Oh, yes.’ I’d asked for a cheese toastie and double brownies with double ice cream. ‘No, not pregnant, just fatigue munchies.’

  ‘Sounds like a band,’ Anja said, a little disappointed, then, changing the subject, ‘So, this morning, the mother? Have you told her we need her son to be one of our guinea pigs?’

  ‘Funnily enough, no.’ I hadn’t broached this with Emma yet. After the Spelling case I was terrified of putting my foot in it. There was nothing the news outlets loved better than a ‘devil children’ story and I wanted to be sure Emma could be trusted before I put our funding application at risk. ‘I’m still thinking about how best to phrase it,’ I said.

  ‘How’s about: “Your kid is a bloody nightmare but what’s great is that he’s also a funding opportunity”?’

  ‘That should do it.’

  The waitress was heading our way with the food. I unfolded a paper napkin and laid it on my lap, and by the time I looked up Anja was enthusiastically scooping tuna into her mouth. She was a woman of considerable appetites, which made her sexy in an obvious kind of way. I’d seen men follow her with their eyes without realising they were doing it. At last year’s Christmas party, Tom gawped at her cleavage.

  ‘Not my type,’ he’d said in the cab home, pulling me into an exaggerated clinch. ‘I’m-alike de dusky ladies.’ Always the joker. Ha ha, Tom.

  We dutifully addressed ourselves to the grant application while we ate, then, over coffee, chatted briefly about our other charges. There were currently five children in the unit, none as extreme as Joshua, but all deserving of our time and attention. Ayesha, the girl who’d come to us from the care system, having manoeuvred a boy into sexually assaulting one of the girls in the group home Ayesha didn’t like, was getting ready to go back to mainstream school and had found a long-term specialist foster parent. Adam, our borderline CU patient, a seven-year-old with a habit of violent tantrums, had begun to come off the drugs prescribed by another psychiatrist and was making some early progress. We went on through the list and, as we were coming to an end, I reached into my bag for my credit card, meaning to pay the bill, when my hand slipped and knocked my glass of water, which swayed then tumbled, pouring its contents across the table. I sprang up, grabbed a handful of paper napkins and began wiping and dabbing. Anja’s hand landed on my arm.

  ‘Are you all right, Cat? You seem a bit distracted.’

  Before I’d even registered the words I heard myself say, ‘It seems Tom has a daughter I didn’t know about.’

  Anja froze, then, looking at me, wide-eyed, she said, ‘Oh fuck.’

  I almost went on to talk about the strange circumstances in which Ruby had arrived. The death-boiler. The window that should have been open. But something stopped me. An obscure feeling of disloyalty crept in. Anja wasn’t the right person to be telling this to. Confused, I said nothing.

  ‘Sorry, I didn’t mean…’ Anja said, registering my discomfort.

  ‘No, I know. It’s fine. We’ll be fine. I’m just trying to process it all.’

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. It must have come as a shock.’ She caught the waitress’s eye and air-scribbled for the bill, which she then insisted on paying. (‘Oh, for heaven’s sakes,’ batting away my twenty-pound note, ‘it’s the least I can do.’) We wandered back to the institute along sticky asphalt, meticulously avoiding any further mention of my personal life.

  Claire had gone to lunch. A bunch of cream roses sat on my desk. No note – none necessary. A first attemp
t at some kind of reconciliation. An intimate little in-joke. The phrase ‘not quite white’ had been a running gag between us for years. It began as our way of dealing with Tom’s awful mother, who, when introduced to me for the first time, had taken her son to one side and said, ‘She seems very nice, but she’s not quite white, is she?’ You had to laugh. And we did. From then on, ‘not quite white’ became our little joke. A wholemeal loaf morphed into ‘not quite white bread’, brownies were ‘not quite whiteys’, a fashionably drab paint job was a ‘not quite white number’. Tom in particular relished the game, especially when it came to taking revenge on his mother, whom he loathed. When Freya came along he introduced her to his parents as ‘your not quite white granddaughter’. Predictably, Geraldine was clueless. Michael flushed purple and didn’t say anything. Afterwards, Tom and I laughed like drains.

  Neither of us was laughing now.

  The roses went in the bin.

  A little while later my office phone rang.

  ‘Dr Lupo?’ a vaguely familiar voice said. ‘James White, the Herald.’

  It was White who had first made the link between my expert evidence in the ‘boy in the woods’ case and the terrible events that followed.

  ‘You’ve got a bloody nerve.’

  ‘Please don’t hang up. It was all such a long time ago. I wonder if anyone even remembers?’

  ‘I remember. Every day.’

  White gave a little cough. ‘Well, I’m giving you an opportunity to put your views out there in a less personally charged situation, to be part of the conversation again, so to speak.’

  ‘I don’t want to be part of the conversation.’

  I sensed White was after a comment on the spate of stabbings across the city and was trying to provoke me into a reaction. My rational self told me to put the phone down but I felt a sudden urge to knock White off his perch.