Authors: Peter Robinson
‘Can I have one?’ Kirsten asked.
‘Of course.’ The doctor pushed the packet towards her. ‘I didn’t know you smoked.’
Kirsten almost said, ‘I don’t,’ but she managed to stop herself. ‘Sometimes,’ she said, then lit up. Though the first few drags hurt a bit, she didn’t make a
fool of herself and start coughing and spluttering and crying. She had smoked once or twice before, just to see what it was like. The smoke made her feel a little dizzy and sick at first, but her
system seemed to adapt quickly.
‘And my first name’s Laura,’ the doctor said. ‘I want us to be friends.’ She poured two cups of coffee from a Thermos on the desk and pushed one towards Kirsten.
‘Milk? Sugar?’
Kirsten shook her head.
‘Black, then. So, I take it you haven’t really been able to talk to anyone about what happened to you?’
‘No. I can’t remember, you see, I really can’t. It’s like there’s a heavy black cloud inside my head where it’s all stored, and I can’t see inside
it.’
‘I don’t mean the event itself so much as your feelings about it now,’ Laura said.
‘I don’t think I feel anything.’
‘Why did you take all those pills? Was it because of this cloud?’
‘Partly, I suppose. But it’s mostly because I don’t feel I’m really living. I mean, I don’t enjoy things like before. Reading . . . company . . . and I don’t
sleep well. I have bad dreams, over and over again. I thought it might just be better if I . . .’
‘I see.’ Dr Henderson made a note in the file. ‘How important are sex and children in your life, Kirsten?’
Kirsten swallowed, shocked by the sudden change of direction. Her mouth turned dry again and the bitter coffee made it worse. She turned away. ‘Never thought about them. I don’t
suppose one does till . . . till . . .’
‘Till they’re gone?’
‘Yes.’
‘Had you ever considered having children?’
Kirsten shook her head. ‘One day. I imagined I’d have some one day. But not for a long time.’
‘What about sex? Were you sleeping with your boyfriend regularly?’
In spite of herself, Kirsten blushed as she told Dr Henderson about Galen and about how she was now trying to cut him out of her life. The doctor listened, then made more notes in her file.
‘As far as I understand it,’ she said, ‘Dr Masterson told you that sexual intercourse would be painful, if not impossible. Am I right?’
Kirsten nodded.
‘But that’s not all there is to sex, is it?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘What I mean,’ said the doctor, ‘is that perhaps you should start thinking about the pleasurable things you
can
do, rather than the ones you can’t. I’m not
going to embarrass you by explaining them, but there are manuals available. What I’m saying is that you have to accept the loss of your full sexuality, yes, but that you mustn’t think
that means the end of your entire sensual and erotic life. It’s important to know that you can still have those feelings and can still satisfy them in some ways – you can still touch
and you can still feel.’
Kirsten stared down at the floor. She hadn’t thought about this, had tried not to think about sex at all since leaving the hospital, and she didn’t know what to say. It was probably
best to let it go by for the time being.
‘Just think about what I’ve said, anyway,’ the doctor said. ‘It might be a long haul, Kirsten, but if you stick with it we’ll get you there. And if at any time you
feel the need to talk to someone, please call me. Any time. Do you understand?’
Kirsten nodded.
‘What about dreams? You said you’ve been having bad dreams about what happened?’
Kirsten told her about the black and white figures slashing and slicing at her in the recurring dream.
‘Are you talking about nightmares?’ Laura asked. ‘Do you wake up screaming?’
‘No, nothing like that.’
‘How do you react, then?’
‘I don’t really. It’s all very ordinary. A bit frightening, I suppose, but there’s no pain. It’s like I’m detached from it all, just watching.’
‘Why do you think you keep having that dream?’
‘I don’t know. I suppose it’s some version of what happened. But I didn’t see anything, so it can’t be real.’
‘Why are there two figures, a black one and a white one?’
‘They’re both doing the same thing.’
‘Yes, but why two?’
‘I don’t know. Like I said, it can’t be anything to do with what happened. I didn’t see anything.’
The doctor stubbed out her cigarette and drank some more coffee. ‘The mind’s a curious thing,’ she said. ‘It remembers things that happen even when you’re asleep or
unconscious. Obviously, if your eyes are closed you can’t see, but you can hear and smell, for example. Some of those things that happen come up in dreams. What the imagination does is
translate them into pictures, based on what the sensations were and what you feel about them. I’m not a Freudian, but I do think dreams can tell us a lot. These two figures cutting you, who
do you think they are?’
‘I suppose one of them – the black one – must be the man, the one who . . . you know. Or maybe they both are.’
‘White and black?’
‘Yes. But if what you say is true, and I remember things even when I’m unconscious, then maybe the white one’s the doctor. They operated on me for a long time, cutting in the
same way I suppose. White and black. One for good, one for evil.’ She felt pleased with herself, as if she had finally cracked a particularly obscure code, but Laura didn’t seem
impressed. ‘Perhaps,’ she said. ‘Now what’s in this cloud, do you think?’
‘I don’t know. Everything.’
‘Everything?’
‘What happened that night.’
‘Do you believe that you were conscious for part of the time? That you saw the man and struggled, and that you’ve repressed the memory?’
‘I don’t know for certain, but I must have, mustn’t I? Otherwise why would I feel there’s something in me I can’t get at?’
‘Do you want to get at it?’
Kirsten crossed her arms and drew in on herself. ‘I don’t know.’
‘It might be necessary. If you’re to make any progress.’
‘I don’t know.’
The doctor made some more notes in the file, then closed it and put it in an overflowing tray – whether it was ‘In’, ‘Out’ or ‘Pending’, Kirsten
couldn’t tell. She suspected that Laura Henderson had no such efficient system for dealing with paperwork.
‘Well,’ said Laura, ‘I don’t suppose it matters for the moment. You’ll come again?’
‘I have a choice?’
‘Yes. You must come of your own free will.’
‘All right.’
‘Good.’ Laura stood up and Kirsten noticed how slim and healthy her figure looked, even under the loose white coat. It made her feel unattractive herself. In hospital, her skin had
acquired that yellowish-grey pallor that sick people get, and the stodgy food had done her figure no good at all. Later, when she had lost her appetite, she had lost weight again, and now her skin
felt wrinkly and loose. Her face was spotty too, as it hadn’t been since she was fourteen, and even her hair seemed to hang lifeless and dry.
They walked over to the door, which Laura opened for her. ‘And Kirsten,’ she said finally, ‘remember this: it’s all right to feel things, even bad things. It’s all
right to feel hatred and anger towards whoever did this to you. In fact, if you want to get better, you must. The feelings are there, in you, and you have to admit them to yourself.’
Kirsten nodded and left. She felt, even as she walked out and crossed Pulteney Bridge to Grand Parade, that the doctor’s words had planted the seeds of a recovery in her. As she watched
the daring canoeists go through their paces in the wild water down by the city weir, she reminded herself of the doctor’s last words: ‘It’s all right to hate him, it’s all
right to hate him.’ And she did. Something inside her began hardening into a cold enduring hatred for the man who had shattered her future and crippled her sex. Below, the canoeists
manoeuvred deftly, tracing crazy patterns on the water. Kirsten joined the crowd and watched them for a while longer. For some reason, they reminded her of Yeats’s lines: ‘Like a
long-legged fly upon the stream / His mind moves upon silence.’ It was an image she found strangely comforting.
SUSAN
Monday morning found Sue riding up the coast towards Staithes on the 10.53 bus. Her plan was to have lunch there, look around, then walk the three miles or so along the
Cleveland Way to Runswick Bay for tea. From there she could get a bus back to Whitby at 6.25 in the evening.
Robin Hood’s Bay, though quaint enough with its hotchpotch of pastel cottages almost sitting on top of one another, had proved disappointing. Not only had Sue seen no evidence of fishing
there, she had felt very strongly that this was not the place she should be wasting her time in.
That evening, she had ventured into the lounge alone to watch TV and make a cup of instant coffee, and Mr Cummings had joined her for a while. He was a pleasant, ruddy-faced young man, more than
willing to talk about fishing in the Whitby area. It turned out that there were more jobs connected with the industry than Sue had imagined – canning, freezing, processing, shipping –
and some of them might be worth looking into. But Staithes was a strong fishing community, so she couldn’t afford to overlook it.
The coast road to Staithes cut across a landscape of rolling farmland that ended abruptly in sheer cliffs at the North Sea. To the west lay a patchwork quilt of hedged fields. Some were brown
after harvest, some still pale gold with uncut wheat and barley, while others were plain green pastures where black and white cows grazed. The bus passed a far-off village, a cluster of light stone
houses with red pantile roofs, almost hidden by a clump of trees in a hollow. The weather had turned sunny again, and the colours of the landscape were saturated with light, like a colour
transparency. On the seaward side, in a field next to a local rubbish dump, hundreds of white gulls squatted fat and replete after feeding. The sight disgusted Sue and made the bile rise in her
throat. She looked beyond them to the clear blue sea, where the sun glinted silver on distant ships.
The bus stopped in the modern part of the village up on the main road, and Sue had to walk about a mile down to the village itself. The street, by Roxby Beck, was so steep that cars
weren’t allowed down it. Below her, the houses, a mixture of different stones, colours and styles, seemed to tumble over one another down to the sea. On the way, she stopped at a
newsagent’s and bought a local paper and a
Daily Mirror.
The village at the foot of the hill was penned in on both sides by high headlands, huge skulls of grass-topped rock, where the horizontal strata of light sandstones and reddish-brown clays had
been bared by the wind and rain over the centuries. The only view from the promenade was of the cliffs looming on each side, or out to the sea itself. There was nobody about; the place was deathly
quiet. Even the gulls seemed to be swooping in silence, and the air was thick with the smell of rotten fish.
First, Sue wandered into the Cod and Lobster, a whitewashed pub right on the seafront above the thick stone wall. She ordered a lager and lime and, surprised to find they didn’t do meals,
sat down for a cigarette and a read. There weren’t many people in: a man in a Yorkshire Dales T-shirt scratched the neck of his red setter, two lads in navy jerseys, baggy jeans and
wellingtons chatted up the young barmaid, and that was it. In fact, she hadn’t seen many tourists at all, even on her way down the hill. Staithes seemed to be much more of an isolated,
working village than Robin Hood’s Bay. It seemed to be the kind of place where she might have more luck in finding the man she wanted.
As she smoked, Sue examined the photographs on the walls. Some of them showed a terrible storm that had hit Staithes in 1953 and damaged the pub badly. Others showed groups of local fishermen,
and Sue studied them keenly. She knew she could rely on her visual memory least of all in her quest, but she
had
glimpsed him briefly in the moonlight and remembered the thick black eyebrows
meeting in the middle, the Ancient Mariner eyes and the thatch of dark hair. No one in the photographs resembled him, so she turned to her newspapers.
There was nothing more on the Sandsend body in the local paper. Obviously, the police were stuck and the reporters couldn’t justify repeating the same story day after day. It didn’t
mean that the investigation had come to a dead end, though, she realized. The police would still be working on it, questioning people, digging around for evidence. The very idea that they might be
drawing closer gave her butterflies in her stomach.
She had bought the
Mirror
because she thought it might have more news about the Student Slasher. She found a whole page recapping his exploits, with the familiar blurred photos of the
victims’ faces taken from old students’ union cards or passports (not Sue’s, of course, for she had never been officially identified as his first victim). There they were:
Kathleen Shannon with her long, wavy hair; Jane Pitcombe with her large, far-apart eyes; Margaret Snell with her lopsided smile . . . and the three others. Apart from veiled hints about what he did
to the nubile young bodies (suggesting, between the lines, that some of them asked for it), and a number of editorial calls for the police to get a move on and catch him (‘This could happen
to
your
daughter, too!’), there was no real information at all. Sue stared at the six faces. She had never met any of the women, but she felt closer to them than she did to anyone
else. Sometimes late at night, she had even fancied she heard them whispering in her ear. They helped her, guided her when she felt weak and lost, and for them, if not for herself, she had to carry
on to the end.
Feeling hungry, she stubbed out her cigarette and finished her drink. Outside, a little further around the harbour from the Cod and Lobster, was a cafe attached to a private hotel. She walked in
and found the small room crowded with full tables and only one waitress trying to deal with all the orders. Though she was obviously rushed off her feet by a recent influx of six or seven
customers, the woman managed everything as quickly as she could, and with a smile. From the glimpses Sue got when the kitchen door swung open, there was only one cook, too. The menu offered little
choice. The special of the day was cod and chips. Sue ordered it.