Give Me the Child

by Mel McGrath

  Addressing himself to me, White said, ‘I thought you should know there’s been another stabbing. Victim twelve years old, fifteen-year-old kid being questioned by police.’

  My eyes bladed over to Tom who was standing with his hand on the door, blocking the entryway. Behind him in the hallway the two girls had stopped talking and were staring at the visitor. No one moved for a second or two then Tom eye-rolled and went inside, slamming the door.

  Turning back to White, I said, ‘Please leave.’ I wasn’t going to give White the satisfaction of knowing that his article had got me into trouble.

  White held out a staying hand. ‘Look, I know you’re treating Christopher Barrons’ son.’

  I felt my breath go walkabout. First the clinic, now this. How had he found out about Joshua Barrons? It was a sackable offence to leak details of patients. I was sure no one at the clinic would have been so indiscreet. Which left Emma Barrons herself. But what possible benefit could she have seen in exposing her boy to the attentions of the press and public? All I could think of was that she and her husband were engaged in the worst kind of destructive power play. I didn’t want any part in it.

  ‘I have nothing to say to you,’ I said and, turning on my heels, strode up the path. I keyed the door open and slammed it behind me, leaning back against it, my hands in tight fists at my hips, trying to compose myself. Tom’s voice was coming from the kitchen, telling the children to go upstairs. A moment later, he appeared in the hallway with a face like a hailstorm.

  ‘I sent him packing.’

  ‘Good.’ Tom took a breath and collected himself. He seemed almost unnaturally calm now. ‘You know, you keep going on about Ruby getting help but maybe it’s you who needs the help. You really don’t seem very stable right now, Caitlin, and we both know where that can lead.’

  He looked at me and in his eyes I thought I saw something of the old Tom, the old us, then in a flat voice he mumbled, ‘I’ve got work to do.’ He turned his back to me and headed towards his study. I called his name before he got to the door and he twisted his head.

  ‘Happy anniversary,’ I said.

  He gave me a weary look and disappeared.

  ‘Are you OK? You sound weird,’ Sally said, when I related the events of the day on the phone later, leaving out the incident with White.

  ‘Yes, no. I’m fine. I’m just finding all this quite difficult to deal with.’

  A sigh. ‘Look, I know you’re really protective of Freya.’ Her voice softened. ‘I get that. But maybe you’re projecting, just a bit?’

  ‘Projecting?’

  ‘I’m just wondering maybe if you’re somehow playing out some old shit here. You told me Ruby’s mother was a drinker so I’m just thinking, maybe this is stirring up old feelings. I really did need saving back then, Cat, and you saved me and that was amazing. But Ruby’s not Heather. And Freya’s not me. I’m just saying, maybe you should cut Freya a little slack and trust her to make up her own mind about her sister. And be a bit easier on yourself while you’re at it. You’re under a lot of pressure right now and no one wants you to…’ She tailed off.

  I laughed. A mean, contemptuous laugh. ‘Thank you so much for your fucking amazing psychological insights, Dr Sally. I might even take them seriously if you were actually qualified to give them.’

  ‘Ouch.’

  I apologised. Anger can turn anyone into a bitch.

  ‘That’s OK,’ said my sister.

  There was a pause during which an idea dropped into my head.

  ‘Shit, Tom called you, didn’t he? That’s why you’re calling me.’

  My sister let the air out between her lips. ‘He’s just concerned about you, Cat. We both are.’

  I could hear Sal’s voice carrying on as I cut the call. Then I sat back, winded by the realisation that, for the first time in my life, I could no longer confide in the only person whose loyalty I had, up to that point, never questioned.

  Later, in our bed, watching Tom’s chest rise and fall in the dimness of our room, I wondered what was left of us. I remembered turning to Tom one time, not long after we’d got together. It was a Sunday morning and Tom had just brought up coffee – in those days we always had it in bed – and we were having one of those generalised metaphysical discussions lovers have which are really just analogues for questions they dare not ask directly. I remember saying, ‘Do you think every relationship has a predetermined amount of love? Or, like, a fixed amount of trust? And once you’ve used up all the love or the trust then that’s it? But there’s no way to know in advance how much there was to start with until it’s gone?’

  Tom laughed – he found my worrywart self charming back then – and, taking my face in his hands, he said, ‘Cat, I think we should have a baby, don’t you?’

  And, of course, I said yes.

  The reality of trying to get pregnant took us both by surprise. The tests and investigations, the endless prodding around, the hollowing news that we would be unlikely to conceive naturally. Then, at the clinic appointments which followed, the porn-filled cubicles, the countless injections, and the awful cycle of raised and dashed hopes. Infertility isn’t cool. It doesn’t feature on the pages of London Style. No one will take pictures of your eggs being harvested or invite you to parties to talk about the mood swings and the lack of sex and the fact that your body is being factory farmed. The diary pages don’t want to know about the relentless bloody monitoring of hormones and the crippling, gut twist of waiting, the agonising want and longing which leaves you feeling flattened.

  Tom reacted to it all with anger, which was initially directed at the world, then at me. Though he only ever expressed it once, in the middle of a fight, I knew that at some level he thought all the soul searching, all the anguish and expense, all the embarrassment of the procedures and all the humiliation of our failure to succeed in this most elemental, animal thing could be laid at my door. I was a disappointment to him. I had taken the broad horizon of our future and obscured the view. I had failed ‘us’. Over the years I’ve thought a lot about why he stayed with me and I’ve come to the conclusion that he knew he loved me as much as he would ever love anyone and he wanted a child, and because his loyalty made him the hero in his own story, the knight errant who had stood by his infertile, basket-case queen. And as bruised as I was from the fight to have Freya, and as grateful as I was to him for not simply shrugging off his armour and striding from the battleground, I wasn’t in any position then to draw a distinction between heroics and common or garden decency.

  I got up and cracked open Freya’s door and there she was, still as a summer pool, and in the quiet rustle of her breath I sensed goodness and hope and everything that was right in the world. Then I slid back to bed and tried to quiet my mind.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The following morning, I left for work without seeing Ruby Winter. It was too early to be busy and most of the shops had yet to open up. Outside Jamal’s store, a new shrine to a new ‘warrior’ had appeared overnight, perhaps the stabbing White had been talking about. A handful of teenagers, black, mixed race and pallid-faced, clustered around the shrine, smoking, and as they watched me running by, their expressions moony with whatever they’d taken to get them through the night, I was struck by the weight of their weariness. No wonder the kids were off their faces. How terrible to be young and poor in a city that kept telling you, in a hundred different ways, that you weren’t wanted, that you were dispensable and the city would not protect you.

  A few years ago, just before Freya was due to start school, Tom and I had talked about moving out to the suburbs to be near his parents, but in the end I’d resisted the idea. Freya expressed no enthusiasm for leaving and I told myself that a mixed-heritage kid stood a better chance of being treated the same as a white kid in a school where she was hardly a minority. I saw little enough of my daughter as it was without adding a long commute to my day. Besides, I had a passion for the capital which I hoped Freya would one day share. Back then I th
ought you could be anything here.

  London was a fantastic web of brimming life, a daily carnival, a riot of opportunity. And for kids like Freya it probably still was, which was why, in spite of all the hassles, the expense, and the knowledge that we were living in a place where children were killing other children and adults were doing little or nothing to stop it happening, I still wanted my daughter to grow up a Londoner.

  I continued my run, arrived at the institute, showered and went to my office. The first hour of my working day was spent checking the patient files from the previous week, then looking at Joshua Barrons’ scans and preparing my notes. Our patient wasn’t making the progress we’d hoped. A tough case, made worse by what was going on at home. You expose a kid to violence often enough it becomes the kid’s first response. It gets hardwired into the brain. Particularly in a genetically vulnerable child like Joshua.

  I finished my notes, packed up my stuff and made my way along the quiet, cucumber-green corridors of the institute’s research unit, through the access door and out into the more frenzied atmosphere of the clinical areas. Anja and I had decided to call Emma and Joshua back in together. The purpose of the meeting was ostensibly to give them the opportunity to meet a few of the clinicians so they could give Emma a more comprehensive sense of why Joshua would be valuable to our research. But I had another unspoken agenda too. Joshua’s disorder was an incredibly rare collision between genes, their expression and the particularity of experience. In seminars I sometimes likened the condition to a dark asteroid speeding through time and space towards earth on an unstoppable trajectory. You couldn’t halt the asteroid but by blasting the rock with an opposing force greater than itself you might just alter its trajectory. For a CU child that force was love, or, perhaps more accurately, the root of love: empathy. Its opposite was violence. I didn’t think anyone was being violent to Joshua but my hunch told me that he was a witness to his mother’s beatings. I’d seen the bruises on Emma’s body and listened to her unlikely explanations. I did believe her that no one was hurting Joshua but in the last few days I’d noticed that the boy had started acting out certain things he’d witnessed. If this went on, not only would it make Joshua’s condition much harder to treat but I would eventually be obligated to inform social services, who would most likely put the boy into care and beyond the reach of my help. Within weeks, he’d be in some secure behavioural unit in another part of the country. Not that these places didn’t do good work. But for a kid with a psychopathic profile like Joshua they could be a deadly training ground.

  The door to Anja’s office was open and she was staring at her computer screen. I knocked and walked in.

  ‘Oh, Caitlin,’ she said, ‘you always look so fresh. Come in, come in.’ She waved a hand in front of her face. ‘I never thought I’d complain about the heat, but really, this is too much. Someone needs to tell the big controller in the sky to turn it down a notch.’ There was a jug of iced water on her desk. She gestured for me to sit and poured some into a glass.

  ‘A little bird told me you managed to wangle an air con unit for that lovely office of yours.’

  ‘That was Claire. She’s wonderful.’

  Anja raised herself up in her chair, stuck out her bottom lip and blew away her fringe. ‘I wish I had a Claire, I wish I had your office! Instead, I’m stuck here in this madhouse. Which reminds me: Ayesha; what are we going to do?’

  Last week the girl had turned up with a series of small cuts on her leg that her therapist thought were probably self-inflicted. Most kids on the CU spectrum were more likely to be a danger to themselves than to others. We discussed what to do about Ayesha then turned our attentions to Adam. The boy was a harder case to crack. A vengeful kid, he played crude and alarming power games with the therapists. His care assistant had reported that he’d offered her a piece of brownie into which he’d pressed several dead spiders. We discussed his therapy and were about to move on to Joshua when Anja’s phone rang. It was Claire calling to say that Emma Barrons had got caught in traffic and would be ten minutes late. Anja suggested we have coffee and wait it out.

  ‘Do you have any biscuits?’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘What kind?’

  Anja grabbed a tin she kept on a shelf behind her desk and peered in.

  ‘Hobnobs, some very melty choc digestives and a couple of curranty things.’

  We drank our coffee and ate the biscuits and talked inconsequentially for a bit, until Anja said, cautiously, ‘I’ve been meaning to ask you how yesterday went. I imagine it must have been tricky.’

  I’d taken a personal day to go to the crematorium but so far as I could recall I hadn’t told anyone the reason. Reading my expression, Anja said,

  ‘It didn’t take a brain scientist to work out why you were off.’

  I gave a mechanical laugh. ‘No, well, I’m glad it’s over.’

  Anja smiled and, observing some hesitancy in me, decided not to pursue the topic.

  It occurred to me then that I should warn Anja about my encounter with James White. I was still pretty sure Emma Barrons was the source of the leak. The woman seemed to possess a giant internal self-destruct button and I thought we should be cautious around her. I was about to open my mouth to speak when there came a knock on the door and one of the clinic administrators popped her head around to say the visitors had arrived. She’d taken Joshua off to play with one of the clinicians but if we were ready, she would show Emma Barrons in.

  The change in Emma was alarming. Purple crescents bloomed under her eyes and, as she sat and untied her silk scarf, thin bloodied fingernail tracks were clearly visible around her neck. Anja clocked them too.

  ‘Are you OK?’ I said. Through the window in the office I could see Joshua digging through the soft mounds in the sandpit with a toy earthmover.

  Emma sighed. ‘Joshua went for his nanny again. I had to separate them. These are what I got for my trouble.’

  Anja and I exchanged glances. I didn’t know if Emma was telling the truth but even if she was, the latest injuries didn’t explain the bruise she’d been sporting at the last meeting. One way or another something was very wrong in the Barrons household.

  ‘I think it’s time for a family meeting. You, Joshua and your husband,’ I said.

  Anja added, ‘We really need both of you on board.’

  Emma Barrons turned her head to the ceiling and gave a little snort. ‘Christopher never gets “on board”,’ she air-quoted. ‘Not at the same time as anyone else anyway. He’s strictly the private jet type.’

  ‘We’re concerned about you. About all of you,’ I said.

  Emma Barrons’ jaw trembled and for a moment her eyes seemed to expand and she blinked away whatever she was feeling. As she opened her mouth to speak, she looked very alone. ‘The last time I allowed my son to reduce me to tears he must have been about four or five. We were out and about and Joshua was being Joshua. I was very distracted and I stepped out onto Holland Hill just as a bus was coming along. Joshua was behind me. He saw me step into the path of that bus but he didn’t shout or try to get my attention or do anything to stop me. I would probably have been killed if a bystander hadn’t rushed forward and pushed me out of the way. Joshua told me later that he was curious to see if the bus was going to roll me flat, like in a cartoon.’

  I decided to steer the conversation into safer terrain.

  ‘We spoke about the amygdala, remember? It’s this tear-shaped bit, the part of the brain where the emotions are processed.’ I had pulled up Joshua’s scans and was pointing to the spot on the screen.

  Emma Barrons touched the corner of her eye.

  ‘In children with Joshua’s disorder there tends to be slightly less grey matter – that’s the processing stuff – and the neural connections within the amygdala are less pronounced. We don’t know what came first, the behaviour or the neural pattern. What we do know is that if you show Joshua a picture of a scary situation, his heart rate doesn’t rise in the way it mig
ht in a neurotypical child. The popular press likes to say that’ – my tongue moved onto the back of my teeth to articulate the ‘s’ in ‘psychopath’ but I managed to stop myself in time – ‘people with Joshua’s condition have a problem with empathy, but it’s more complicated than that. Kids like Joshua understand other people’s emotions but they pay much less attention to them. We call it impaired affective empathy. It really means that their own feelings trump everyone else’s.’

  Emma Barrons inspected her rings minutely, as if they were the spoils of war, while I went on. ‘Now we know a bit more about how Joshua’s brain works, we’re hopeful that we can modify some of his more challenging behaviour.’ I went on to outline some of the latest research suggesting that the condition was in all probability the result of a complex interplay between the epigenetic effects of the MAO-A gene variant and environmental triggers, among which, in Joshua’s case, as in all the cases of violent CU kids we’d studied, there was likely to have been some exposure to violence, but the correlates were so complex and individuated and the research was in such early stages that coming to any conclusion was like trying to pick out a single star in the Milky Way without the benefit of a telescope. We were in unknown territory with only the sketchiest of maps. It was always so difficult to find a balance between how little we really knew and the confidence we had in being able to make a difference. Somewhere in the middle of that sat faith of a scientific kind, but this kind of faith was the hardest sell. People looked to science for answers and we had so few. ‘What we do know is that once violence starts it can often escalate.’

  Anja had begun to rub her hands across her temples, then, conscious of transmitting her anxiety, stopped herself. But it was too late. Emma Barrons’ face contorted into a frightened wince. ‘What you’re really saying is that one day my son is going to kill someone.’