by Kate Medina
‘Hi, Robbie. I’m Sarah Workman’s …’ she was about to say colleague, but she stopped herself. Too impersonal. ‘Friend.’
‘The psychologist,’ he murmured, barely audible.
‘Yes. The psychologist.’ She smiled. Not, she figured, that any facial expression she might make would penetrate that fringe. ‘Let’s sit down, shall we.’
She waited while he selected the chair with its back to the sliding glass doors that opened onto the back garden and folded himself into it. When he was hunched octogenarian-like in the seat, Jessie realized what had driven that choice. The straight, high back of the chair blocked the light the setting sun cast through the patio doors, throwing shadow over his face, blending what little of his features his fringe failed to hide.
There was an identical traditional, straight-backed reading chair on the opposite side of the fireplace, facing Robbie’s, and a low, squishy sofa, shoved up against the facing wall. Settling herself in the chair, she shuffled it subtly sideways so that it was at an elliptical angle to Robbie’s, facing him, but not directly, combatively so. Folding her hands in her lap, crossing her legs, right over left, she mirrored his introverted sitting position. Tapping into a patient’s subconscious to create rapport by aping their body language was an age-old trick and she always used it. This session would be hard enough without turning her nose up at the easy wins, however pop-psychology people thought they were.
She had no notes on Robbie, nothing to refer to … only the few brief lines that Workman had sketched in her mind.
He was hospitalized with stab wounds in his legs from a craft knife at the age of nine. A furious, angry shake of her head. Who knew that art lessons could be so dangerous?
… the outline, stick figure of a boy …
One boy, Niall, the pack leader, broke Robbie’s ankle when he was ten, playing football. It was dismissed as an accidentally awkward tackle.
… drawn in charcoal on grey paper …
They broke his arm when he was walking home from school when he was twelve. The kids from his year who ‘witnessed it’ said he tripped over the kerb and fell. Eight voices against one, so they were believed. An incredulous look on her face. Girls, there were girls in the group too.
… no light, no colour in the sketch …
He has tried to commit suicide twice. The first time when he was twelve. The last time, nine months ago.
Jessie hadn’t asked – How? Hadn’t wanted to know. Suicide, a boy attempting suicide, was far too close to home for her, too raw.
Jamie.
Her eight-year-old brother, hanging from a curtain rail by his school tie, his beautiful face bloated and purple.
Robbie.
Jamie.
Robbie.
Jamie.
‘Would you like a drink before we start, Robbie?’ Her voice croaked around the lump wedged firmly in her throat.
Looking out from underneath his fringe, for the first time since he had entered the sitting room, Robbie met Jessie’s gaze. His eyes were a pale green, soft, beautiful and so so unusual. She held his gaze and smiled, didn’t let her eyes rove down to his mouth. He would have spent his whole life coping with people staring at him as if he was an exhibit from a Victorian freak show: pointing, whispering, cringing, sniggering, the whole gamut of heartless human emotions.
And pitying him too.
He would doubtless have experienced pity. Endless pity. And it would have hurt far more than the rest. Pity always hurt the most. The last thing he needed was to be faced with an adult, his only hope, Workman had said – Please, for me, please see him. You’re his only hope – feeling sorry for him, pitying him.
Robbie shook his head. ‘No, I don’t want a drink, thank you.’ His robotic voice still barely there.
Despite enunciating each word independently, an island to itself, his severe lisp made him hard to understand. Jessie would need to listen closely, couldn’t afford to have to ask him to repeat; he would have had more than enough of that too in his short life.
Two deep scars ran upwards from his top lip, one to the base of his nose, half of which was missing, the other half misshapen with stitched scar tissue. The second deep scar ran to the base of his right eye, the lower lid bumpy and raw. His face wasn’t easy, comfortable, to look at.
‘I’m aware that you didn’t request to see me, Robbie. That your father spoke with Sarah Workman and asked if she could help.’
‘It is fine. Sarah told me about you. Thank you for agreeing to help me.’
She smiled, suppressing a shiver, not sure if it was the chill air in the room, several degrees cooler than the small, hot hallway, or the intense presence of the boy sitting opposite. She had been unnerved when she was standing at the front of the incident room this morning, selling her ideas to twenty people, but usually she was comfortable alone, with just one patient. Why wasn’t she now? The fact that talking to him felt like being transported back fifteen years, looking at her own teenage self hunched in a chair, excluded, isolated, teased, tormented, her self-esteem shattered? Robbie had experienced the full smorgasbord of cruelty that children could inflict on each other. If only she could slip into his shoes now, with the benefit of hindsight and maturity, of having clawed her way, bruised and bloodied, to a good place in life, go back and deal with the bullies for him.
She pictured herself trailing her former best friends before her year’s incarceration at Hartmoor Psychiatric Hospital down the school corridor to lunch, the four linked arm in arm, the corridor too narrow for five abreast. Laughing and joking, too loud, contrived, she realized now, phoney clubby jollity to intensify her feelings of exclusion and isolation. Choosing a table for four despite there being countless free that seated six. Sorry, Jessie, there’s no room for you.
It had escalated, of course. Bullying without consequences always did. Exclusion had morphed to insults, to physical attacks.
Your hair is disgusting. Don’t you ever wash it?
You’re embarrassing to be seen with. Ask your mum to buy you some decent clothes.
Your lips are so thin, no boys will ever want to kiss you.
You’re so stupid.
So endlessly, endlessly stupid, so she had stopped putting her hand up in class.
She was told about parties, but not invited to them; it was no fun not inviting her if she didn’t know about them. She was followed into the toilets and attacked, her hair torn from her head in clumps, head banged against the tiles. But there were no bruises, so it never happened.
Her mother reported them numerous times, was told that it was four girls’ words against Jessie’s and, given her psychiatric problems, it was understandable that she overreacted.
We’ll ask the girls to be extra nice.
Unless you’re offering lobotomies with your history lessons, these girls don’t know how to be nice.
That’s what Jessie would have said now.
And back then?
She just took it. Her mum was drowning in pain from Jamie’s suicide and Jessie had already caused enough trouble, so she didn’t mention the bullying again.
The electric suit hissing across her skin snapped her back to the present, to Allan and Robbie Parker’s lifeless sitting room, hotly oppressive suddenly, the beige walls shrink-wrapped as tight around her as the walls of the box-prison she’d lived in at Hartmoor, a quizzical expression on Robbie’s ruined face. How long had she been caught in her own thoughts?
‘I’m sorry. My mind just …’ Wandered. She couldn’t say it, not to this boy who had spent his whole life being tormented or ignored. I’m a professional, here to help you, and I can’t even focus on you.
‘It’s fine,’ he murmured, watching her intently.
‘Do you mind if I open the patio doors?’ Jessie asked. ‘I’m working on a murder case and I haven’t had much sleep. I could do with a blast of fresh air to wake me up.’
‘I saw a mention of the murders on the Internet,’ he said, standing. As Robbie slid open
the door, cool autumn air swelled into the room, curling around Jessie.
A movement in the garden caught Jessie’s eye, a tabby cat dropping lithely down onto the lawn from the neighbours’ fence and disappearing into the twilight at the bottom of the garden. When she looked back to Robbie she saw that he had removed his iron-grey sweatshirt and slung it over his shoulders. But instead of the empty sleeves hanging down his chest, as would have been normal, he had draped them carefully over his bare arms from shoulder to wrist. His fingers, curled into claws, clutched the ragged end of each sleeve. Her gaze moved from his arms – the sweatshirt’s flat, iron-grey arms – to his face. He was watching her from the concealing darkness of his fringe. He gave a tentative, shy smile before his gaze flitted away.
‘I’m hot too,’ he murmured. ‘Even with the door open.’
‘You can open it more,’ Jessie said.
He shook his head. ‘I am fine now.’
Fine.
That ubiquitous word that said nothing, meant nothing, hid a multitude of sins. What was he thinking? She had no idea, not yet. And though he had spoken little, she recognized the awkward intensity of someone for whom social interaction was a huge and unnatural effort.
‘You know Sarah Workman from the Age UK charity,’ she began. Sarah Workman, with her sensible navy shift dresses, matching courts, low-maintenance bob and low-maintenance attitude, had to be a safe-as-houses opening conversational gambit.
He nodded. ‘I volunteer at their Chichester Sunday lunch club, serving food, washing up.’ Each word clearly enunciated in that lisping, robotic voice. Such an easy target, and nasty kids did so love an easy target. ‘I didn’t realize Sarah was police for ages. She seemed too—’ He broke off with a slightly embarrassed shrug.
‘Normal?’
He smiled as best he could. ‘Square.’ A pause. ‘You won’t tell her.’
Jessie smiled back. ‘No, of course not. Everything we discuss is confidential. You have my absolute word on that.’
‘What about my father?’
‘You can tell him what we’ve discussed, but I won’t.’
‘But I am only fifteen. Isn’t that below the age of—’ he broke off, fumbling for an appropriate word.
Consent? He probably wouldn’t need to worry about that in the context of its normal meaning.
‘Psychological consent?’
He nodded.
‘It is, but your dad has given permission for me to see you alone and to keep our discussions confidential.’
Robbie seemed to be thinking, ruminating over her words. ‘I don’t mind if he knows.’
Jessie shrugged. ‘It’s up to you, but I won’t tell him anything. It’s important you know that everything you tell me will remain within these four walls. And I’m not easily shocked. I’ve seen a lot, heard a lot.’ Too much, probably for one person, in my own life and in others.
Robbie gave a thoughtful nod. ‘Do you work with the police? Is that how you know Sarah?’
‘Yes, I’ve worked on a couple of murder cases with Sarah and her boss, DI Bobby Simmons.’
‘Marilyn?’
Jessie smiled. ‘You’ve heard about Marilyn?’
‘Sarah talks about him. We do a lot of washing-up together. She seems to live for her job.’
‘They both do and they’re very good at them.’ Jessie kept the comment short, neutral. She had no right to talk about Sarah Workman or Marilyn, beyond light banalities.
‘She told me that she works so hard and does charity work to keep herself busy as she was unable to have children,’ Robbie said. ‘She seemed very sad about it.’
‘Infertility can be devastating. It can, understandably, take over people’s lives, and it’s tough to admit that there are no more options.’
‘Do you have children?’
A sharp twinge in Jessie’s chest; she shook her head. ‘No.’
‘Will you?’
‘I’d like to, but not yet.’ A brief, half-hearted smile. ‘I need to convince someone to have them with me first.’
‘You won’t have a problem. Not like me. No one will want to have children with me.’
‘That’s not—’
‘Don’t say, “That’s not true.” Saying stuff that is untrue only makes things worse.’
Biting her lip, Jessie nodded. What the hell had she been thinking? What the hell was wrong with her today?
‘You’re right and I’m sorry. I should know better than to come out with meaningless platitudes.’
She did know better, but her brain was all over the place, none of those places good or helpful. A portion was trapped in that hot swimming pool complex with Hugo and Claudine Fuller; another portion in the incident room, surrounded by photographs of Fuller’s face, the black pits of his eye sockets, her mind floundering for clarity; another portion stuck fifteen years ago, with her own psychologically bleeding teenage self.
‘My mother wished she’d never had children.’ His voice pulled her back. ‘Never had me, at least.’
Jessie met his gaze. I’m sure that’s not true. She wasn’t going to risk another meaningless platitude.
‘Sarah told me you live with your father,’ she said, instead.
He nodded. ‘My mother left when I was a baby. She was horrified that she had given birth to a … a monster.’ No emotion in that lisping, mechanical voice. It was as if he’d announced he was popping to the shops or nipping around to a friend’s house. Friends. Something most children took for granted.
‘Is that what your father told you?’ she asked gently.
‘Once.’
‘Once?’
‘He told me that my mother was a whore who had run off with another man.’ Still no expression in his voice, just the flicker of a muscle underneath his good eye.
‘People say stupid things that they don’t mean, that they regret, when they’re angry.’
‘He did regret saying it, but he meant it when he said it.’
‘Had she run off with another man?’
He nodded. ‘A man with no children.’
‘Relationships are hard. Marriage is hard.’ She knew that herself and she’d only been in a relationship for five minutes, had never been married, didn’t know if a lifelong commitment, even to Callan, would suit her. Suit her or suit him. ‘You shouldn’t blame your mother. And your father certainly shouldn’t, not in front of you. He was angry – and anger is an intense emotion that drives people to speak and act irrationally.’
Robbie nodded, though not in a way that indicated agreement; more a cynical tilt of his head. ‘Dad told me that she had another child, a normal child. He didn’t get to run away. He was stuck with me.’
‘It’s nothing to do with you,’ Jessie snapped, with more force than she had meant, but what he had told her made her furious. Anger is an intense emotion. The poor kid had enough to deal with without being told that his mother was a whore in one breath, being blamed for her absence in the next. ‘What happened to your parents’ marriage was nothing to do with you. Relationships are difficult.’
‘Their relationship wasn’t difficult until I came along.’
‘Did your father say that too?’
Robbie shook his head. ‘I worked that one out for myself. They were together and happy for ten years before I arrived.’
His gaze broke from hers, moved off around the room, jerkily, as if looking for something to fix on.
‘How old were you when your father said that? About the monster?’
‘Eight or nine. Old enough not to care.’
Jessie knew that wasn’t true. Being told that your mother left because she’d given birth to a monster. Christ, that would cut any child to the bone. Any adult, too.
‘It didn’t affect me. I never knew her.’ Expression in his voice this time – insistence – a well-practised denial. But Jessie sensed the waver underneath, almost, but not quite, imperceptible.
Abandonment always affected children and Robbie’s had been one of the wo
rst; blamed by his father for driving his mother away because of the physical defect he was born with, could do nothing to change.
‘Were you being bullied by then?’
He nodded and shrugged, affirmation and studied ambivalence. The shrug, the ambivalence, well practised. ‘I have been bullied for as long as I can remember.’
With the shrug the sweatshirt’s sleeves bagged, even though his fingers were clenched tight around its cuffs, and Jessie’s gaze snapped to the crazy criss-cross of gashes on his forearms. So much, so many, that she couldn’t for a second compute, comprehend. She had seen self-harm before, knew its stamp, had been expecting the lines, the knife marks, the razor-blade slashes, though not this madness of intense violence. And so recent. She had never seen such extreme self-harm, and the rawness and ferocity shocked her.
Some bullied children turned their trauma inwards, into self-hatred, self-harm; others outward into aggression. Girls tended towards self-harm, cutting, bulimia, anorexia; boys aggression, violence. She wasn’t surprised that Robbie’s trauma had morphed into self-hatred. He seemed too gentle for violence – or perhaps just too far gone, too repressed, totally and utterly ground down.
I have been bullied for as long as I can remember.
Workman had known, clearly known, how desperately Robbie needed help.
‘I saw my mother once.’ His quiet voice pulled her back.
‘When?’
‘A few years ago, when I was ten or eleven.’
‘And you recognized her?’
‘My dad keeps a lot of photos. He doesn’t know that I know about them, but I look at them sometimes.’
‘Where did you see her?’
‘In Portsmouth, one Saturday. I was waiting for Dad outside a shop and I saw her.’
‘Did she see you?’
A barely there shake of his head.
‘Why not?’ Though Jessie was pretty sure that she already knew the answer to the question.
‘I hid.’ His voice, like the shake, also barely there.
‘Do you think she would have recognized you? She hasn’t seen you for many many years.’
He gestured listlessly to his face, and again the sleeve of the jumper bagged, revealing the carnage of his forearm. He lowered his arm and his fingers moved, as if playing piano keys, as he worked the sleeve back into place. Watching him fiddle with the cuff of the iron-grey woollen camouflage-cum-comfort-blanket, Jessie realized how little Sarah Workman had told her about him, his history, how little she had asked. They were both so focused on the murder cases that until half an hour ago, when Robbie had walked into the room and Jessie had relaxed into the role that was her forte, this, he, had felt like an unwelcome intrusion. But now she was glad to have the opportunity to do some good. She felt as if she was having no impact on the murder investigation, that her inexperience with criminal cases was being cast in unremittingly sharp relief.
