by Abigail Dean
‘Hello,’ she said, without looking up. ‘I’m Dr K.’
Many months later, I understood that it was spelt as a word – Kay – but by that time we knew each other well, and she liked my interpretation: ‘It’s far more concise,’ she said.
She set down her folder and held out her hand to me, and I took it. ‘I’m Alexandra,’ I said. ‘You probably already know that.’
‘I do,’ she said, ‘yes. But it’s better to hear it from you. Alexandra, I’m one of the psychologists who works with the hospital and with the police. Do you know what that entails?’
‘The mind,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘That’s right. So while all of the doctors and the nurses will be looking after your body, we can talk about your mind. How you’re feeling and what you’re thinking. Both what has happened, and what you would like to happen now. Sometimes the police might join us, and sometimes it will just be me and you. And when it’s like that – when it’s just the two of us – whatever you say to me is confidential. It’s a secret.’
She stood up from the chair and knelt at the side of my bed. ‘Here’s the thing,’ she said. ‘A promise. I can understand minds, and I can work with them. I like to believe that I can make them better. But I can’t read them. So we’ll need to be honest. Even about the difficult things. Does that sound OK?’
Her voice was starting to distort. ‘OK,’ I said.
She said something more, but she was in motion, tipping away from me, and when I next woke it was night-time, and she was gone.
After that, she visited each day. She was sometimes accompanied by two detectives; they were there when she explained that Father had killed himself shortly after I left the house. The first team of respondents found him in the kitchen. Despite multiple attempts, it was not possible to resuscitate him.
Did they try? I wondered. Then: And how hard?
Instead, I asked how he had done it. The detectives looked at Dr K, who looked at me. ‘He consumed a toxic substance,’ said Dr K. ‘A poison. There were many, many indications that this had been planned, and planned for some time.’
‘There was a large supply in the household,’ one of the detectives said. ‘We speculate that this might have been the endgame.’
They looked at one another again. There was a relief to them, as if they had got something out of the way which had gone better than they expected.
‘How do you feel about that?’ Dr K said.
‘I don’t know,’ I said. An hour later, when I was alone, I came up with my answer, which was: unsurprised.
Mother, they said, was in custody. She, too, had been in possession of a toxic substance, but had declined to take it; they had found her sitting on the kitchen floor with Father’s head in her lap. She guarded the body like those dogs you read about, which refuse to leave their master’s corpse.
‘And the others?’ I said.
‘Rest, now,’ Dr K said. ‘Let’s talk more tomorrow.’
I understand, now, that there were things that they were working to resolve. We had a whole team, a vast new family: the police; our psychologists; the doctors. They’d stand looking at old photographs of our faces on a whiteboard, headed with the names by which the world now knew us: Boys A to D; Girls A to C. There were lines drawn between us, and words written along those lines: ‘Close proximity’, and ‘Potential violence’, and ‘Relationship to be determined’. New details would be noted, offered or ascertained from hospital beds. The map of our lives began to appear, like constellations at dusk.
Often, Dr K and I would sit in silence. ‘Would you like to talk today?’ she would ask, and I would be too tired, or in pain from one of the operations, or hating everything: hating her beautiful clothes and composure, and mortified, in contrast, by the way my body looked in the bed, the angles of it avian and strange, none of it working as it was meant to. At other times, when the detectives were with her, she would ask me about everything that I could remember: not just the Binding Days or the Chaining, but before that, when we were children. My audience recorded everything that I said, even the things that seemed irrelevant, and so I talked more: about the books that Evie and I liked, for example, or the holiday in Blackpool.
‘How long has it been since you went to school?’ Dr K asked. I was embarrassed: I couldn’t remember.
‘Did you start at senior school?’ she asked.
‘Yes. That was my last year. I don’t remember the exact time I stopped, but I know where we were up to in all of the subjects – in almost everything.’
‘How would you feel about going back?’ she said, smiling.
After that, a hospital tutor came to visit me each afternoon. Dr K never mentioned it, but I recognized her quiet magic. She had procured a Bible for me to read, because I liked the familiar passages before bedtime. She sensed when I was becoming tired of the detectives’ questions, and shut her notebook, closing the conversation. To say thank you, I tried to talk to her more, even when I did hate her.
Sometimes, too, we talked about the future. ‘Have you ever thought,’ she said, ‘about what you would like to do?’
‘Like a job?’
‘Maybe a job, but other things, too. Where you would like to live, or places you’d like to visit, or activities you’d like to try.’
‘I liked history,’ I said, ‘at school. And maths. I liked most of the subjects.’
‘Well,’ she looked up at me, over her glasses, ‘that’s helpful.’
‘I had a book of Greek myths,’ I said. ‘So I’d like to go to Greece, maybe. Evie and I agreed that we would go together. We told each other the stories.’
‘Which was your favourite?’
‘The minotaur, obviously. But Evie got scared. She liked Orpheus and Eurydice better.’
Dr K set down her notebook and put her hand next to mine on the bed, as close as it could be without touching. ‘You will go to Greece, Lex,’ she said. ‘You will study history and maths, and lots of other subjects. I’m quite sure of it.’
The team concluded that our best chance of living normal lives would be through adoption. Following careful consideration, each of us would be adopted by a different family. We had diverse, specific needs and problematic sibling dynamics; besides, there were so many of us. I have no basis for it, but I see Dr K lobbying for this approach, standing in front of the whiteboard and fighting for it. Above all things, she believed – with work, and with time – that it was possible to discard parts of the past, like an old season’s coat that you never should have bought.
The frantic activity of that time was delivered to us in the months and years that followed, packaged in neat conclusions. The younger children went first: they would be malleable, and easier to save. Noah was given to a couple who wanted to remain anonymous, even to the rest of us; it was an approach approved by Dr K, and supported by secondary and tertiary psychologists. Noah would remember nothing of his time at Moor Woods Road. The first ten months of his life could be erased, neatly, as if they had never taken place. Gabriel went to a local family, who had followed the case closely, and who gave a series of emotional statements requesting that people respect their privacy. Delilah, who was the most photogenic of all of us, was adopted by a couple in London who hadn’t been able to have children of their own. And Evie got luckiest: she went to a family on the south coast. Nobody told me much about it at the time, other than that she would have two new siblings, a boy and a girl, and that the family lived close to the beach.
I remember that Dr K was appointed to tell me this, and I remember asking her, absolutely sure that it couldn’t be too much more effort, if they may have room for one more child.
‘I don’t think so, Lex,’ she said.
‘But did you ask them?’
‘It’s something I know,’ she said, and then, unexpectedly: ‘I’m sorry.’
That left Ethan and me. After many weeks of indecision, Mother’s sister, Peggy Granger, agreed that she would see Ethan through senior s
chool. She had two older sons, and she could handle another boy. The expectation was that he would leave her home after three years, when he had completed the school examinations that he had missed, although Ethan – being Ethan – was out in two. Peggy had visited us just before things became bad, and I had answered the door, so I was sure that she still thought of me. When she was asked, she denied ever having been to Moor Woods Road. Besides, she said, and God forgive her, she wasn’t used to teenage girls.
In the London office, people wanted to know two things: first, how was Devlin? And, once I had told them that: why was I back?
Let me tell you about Devlin.
Devlin always had an exciting project – a new project – which would ruin your life. She had endured sleepless weeks, and clients like Lucifer (‘just as difficult,’ she said, ‘and just as charismatic’), and various uprisings from old, besuited men, all of which she had quashed. There would be moments, in the middle of a deal, when she would turn to me, and ask, quite nonchalantly, how I was. There was only ever one answer that Devlin wanted to hear: I’m fine. I am adapting to my third time zone in forty-eight hours; a typhoon has cut the Internet; I am tired enough to vomit with it. I’m fine. Devlin knew men who may (or may not) supply chemicals to Venezuelan drug barons; she knew the sultans of small Middle Eastern countries; she always knew precisely what to say. Her eyes and the hollows around them were the same shade of gun-metal grey. At forty-two, her heart – tired of two countries a week and five hours of sleep a night – rebelled against her, 35,000 feet above the Pacific and two hours out of Changi airport. ‘I knew that something was wrong,’ she said, ‘when I didn’t want the champagne before take-off.’ A doctor rushed in from economy, and Devlin’s heart settled. She woke back in Singapore, and asked for drinks for the whole plane – to make up for the inconvenience.
Afterwards, they performed some kind of operation on her heart, some deeply invasive surgery, and in meetings I noticed that she had developed a tic: she would touch her chest when she was angry or frustrated, as though she was reassuring a child. I often imagined the scar beneath her shirt, the strange contrast of the rumpled flesh and the clean, pressed cotton.
Devlin had suggested that we fabricate a deal which required me to be in London, but as it turned out, a real one came along. One of Devlin’s friends sat on the board of a technology company, which wanted to buy an exclusive genomics start-up, based out of Cambridge. ‘My understanding,’ Devlin said, ‘is that you send them some DNA, and they predict your future.’
A slew of information had arrived on Tuesday evening. It was midnight in London; I opened the files as she spoke.
‘Like a fortune teller?’ I asked.
‘A particularly sophisticated one, I hope. They call themselves ChromoClick.’
For the rest of the week, I slept under a thick cover of exhaustion, thrashing out of it every morning to the hotel alarm. I was in work in time for the start of London’s day, and at night I joined Devlin on her New York calls. When I left the office, in the empty time before morning, the City was warm and dark, and I wound down the taxi windows to keep myself awake.
I ignored calls from Mum and Dad. I ignored the two hundred messages from Olivia and Christopher in our group chat. Throughout the day, Dr K rang at intervals designed to surprise me, and I ignored her, too. The only person I contacted was Evie. Our plan for Moor Woods Road was coming into place: a community centre, populated by things of which Mother and Father would have disapproved. We plotted a children’s library; reading groups for the elderly; talks on contraception. Our suggestions became more ambitious.
‘A roller disco,’ Evie said.
‘An all-you-can-eat buffet.’
‘The country’s premier gay wedding venue.’
Bill called me on Wednesday. Had I made a decision regarding my role as executor? There was a client on the other line, and a junior waiting outside my door. Bill was an anomaly: it was impossible to believe that the prison occupied the same world as the office. ‘Give me until the weekend,’ I said.
Friday evening, and still thirty degrees. I stood on the 18.31 from Paddington, emailing Devlin my thoughts on the genomics company’s various misdemeanours, which had just been disclosed. A director had once left unencrypted hardware on a train, jammed with details of employees’ sexual orientations, health conditions, and ethnicities. ‘In short,’ I concluded, ‘there are issues.’ Olivia had screenshotted photographs of the wedding and sent them to Christopher and me with eviscerating captions. ‘Extremely strong canapés,’ she wrote. ‘Dress subpar. Gendered menu. What the fuck?’ I reviewed my message to Devlin. ‘For what it is worth,’ I added, ‘I am on a train. Will keep a lookout.’
I had asked for Ethan’s address, and requested that he and Ana didn’t meet me at the station. Their house was in Summertown, and I liked the walk: JP had studied here, and sometimes we had visited for a weekend. I wheeled my suitcase through Jericho and along Woodstock Road: there we were, at twenty-five, darting from the Ashmolean Museum, impersonating the death masks. Twenty-seven, and cutting away to Port Meadow with swimming costumes and champagne. Did she, I wondered – the small girlfriend – undress when he asked her to, and fill her mouth with it, carefully, before tasting him, barely concealed in the undergrowth? But she wasn’t at fault; she had come long afterwards.
The colleges languished behind their gates, sleeping all summer.
Ana saw me coming along the street and waved from an upstairs window. I could see the flurry of her through the misted glass at the front door, just before she opened it.
If Ethan could have ordered a wife, it might have been Ana Islip. Her father had taught History of Art at the university for many years, and her mother was a minor member of a Greek shipping dynasty; distant enough to stay away from the business side of things, but sufficiently related to receive a monthly allowance. Ethan connected with Ana’s father at Art Attack, which was an Oxford City Council initiative to rehabilitate victims of violent crime through art, and – having invited himself to a dinner at the Islip residence, which was out along the river, and made entirely of wood and glass – met Ana ten days later.
‘Art Attack?’ I said, when they narrated the story to me together. They each had assigned parts, and knew them well. ‘Is that really what it’s called?’
‘Yes,’ Ana said. Ethan, smiling, looked elsewhere.
On the day of the lunch, Ana had been swimming in the Isis. She was still drying off in her costume, on the bank, when Ethan arrived. It was a terrible day for him to be early.
‘A fortuitous day,’ Ethan said, and raised his glass.
Ana was an artist. She smelt, softly, of paint, and different colours scuffed her limbs. In each room of the house in Summertown, her canvases hung on the walls, or rested against them. She painted water, and the way that light fell on it: she painted the green-grey surface of the Isis, barely disturbed, and the ocean in the very last sunray before a storm. She painted the tremor of somebody setting down a mug of tea. There was an Ana Islip painting in my loft in New York, of the ocean twinkling under the afternoon sun. ‘Greece,’ she had written, on the accompanying card. ‘My second home. Ethan said that you would like it.’
She flung open the door and embraced me. ‘Your mother,’ she said. ‘God, I’m sorry.’
‘Really. There’s no need to be.’
‘It must be complicated,’ she said, and brightened, glad to have that part over with. ‘Ethan’s in the garden. Go, go. He opened the wine, even after I told him to wait. Oh, Lex. You look like you haven’t slept in a week.’
I walked through the wood-panelled hallway, past Ana’s studio and the living room, and out to the kitchen. Here, the house opened to the garden. The summer evening slanted down the skylights and drifted in through the great double doors. The conversion had been an engagement present from Ana’s parents. Ethan’s dog, Horace, lolloped inside to greet me. Ethan was sitting outside, with his back to the house. ‘Hello, Lex,’ he said. Th
e sun was near-parallel with the earth, and for a moment all I could see was the white shock of his hair. He could have been any one of us.
I had last seen him in London, six months before, when he invited me to a panel discussion at the Royal Academy. The discussion was titled ‘Education and Inspiration: Teaching the Young Artist’, and Ethan was the chair. I arrived late, after drinks with Devlin – too late, conceivably, to enter the auditorium – and waited for him in the bar. Each table had a stack of cardboard flyers advertising the event, with a painting of two small children entering the ocean on the front, and descriptions of the speakers on the back.
Ethan Charles Gracie is Headmaster at Wesley School in Oxford. The school has a distinguished history and track record in the arts, and a number of acclaimed art initiatives at different age groups. At the time of his appointment, Ethan was one of the youngest headteachers in the country. Ethan is a trustee of several charities in Oxfordshire, has advised the government on education reforms, and gives lectures and seminars internationally, which address how education has helped him to overcome personal trauma.
I ordered another drink. The doors opened, and the crowd chattered in from the auditorium. Ethan was one of the last people to emerge, talking to two men in suits, and a woman wearing a lanyard. He caught my eye and a smile crossed his face, just so; none of the others even looked in my direction. He was holding a heavy jacket over one arm, and coming to a punchline. His palms turned up, to catch the laughter. He told a story just as Father did, with the same conviction, the telling of it travelling through his sinews and his muscles, through his whole body, but leaving his mouth and his eyes impassive, as if there was a faulty connection just beneath the face. People were waiting to speak to him, hovering at the periphery of his presence. I sat back. I would have to wait, too.
