Authors: Liz Jensen
'Internet paranoiacs. Eco-fanatics. Psychics. People on the distant margins. The kind of people you give a wide berth to. The kind of people Sheldon-Gray Googled for you. Freaks in Prague and mystics in Yucatan. Apocalypse dot fucking com. Forget it.'
I secretly agree with him but cannot allow pessimism to prevail. We part on bad terms. He has lost what looks like five kilos in two weeks, and doesn't look well on it. I am supposed to have an understanding of the human psyche. But today I do not.
The next morning when I arrive at work I'm informed at Reception that Dr Sheldon-Gray wants to see me immediately to discuss an 'incident' involving Bethany Krall. When I get there I discover that today his pomposity is formal, statesmanlike, as though the next step in his career involves a UN candidature. He is afraid there is bad news. Bethany is in casualty at St Swithin's hospital. She is 'not doing too well'.
'What happened?'
'Electrocution. She got hold of a metal fork and stuck it in a socket. Passed out, of course. Burns all over her hands and up her arms. Miracle she's not dead. Rubber soles. Oh, and before all that she shaved her head.'
'Totally?'
'It seemed ritualistic. They're keeping her in hospital.' Something's up. I can feel it in the air. He has a plan.
'So what now?' I'm wondering how best to play this.
He places his hands on the desk, spreads out his fingers, and eyes me defiantly. 'I'm having her transferred to Kiddup Manor.' Kiddup Manor: modern psychiatry's Death Row.
In the silence that follows he lifts his hands from the desk and places them in an attitude of prayer, the middle fingers touching his lower lip. The blue eyes scroll across my face assessingly. If I speak now, my voice will tremble and I'll betray myself. So I don't. Instead I nod, as though Bethany's transferral to one of the most brutal institutions in the country is worth mature consideration, and will make no difference to me.
'Any particular reason?' I manage finally.
'I'm merely following the guidelines. They're very clear when it comes to repeated self-harm. Another approach is called for.'
'You realise what will happen to her there?' I say as calmly as I can. 'That all the progress she's made here in Oxsmith will be undone? That they'll pump her with drugs until she's practically a vegetable?'
He shrugs. 'A safe vegetable. No longer a danger to herself or others. Look, the ECT experiment was a mistake.'
'It worked.'
'For a while. But she just stuck a fork in an electric socket, knowing it could kill her. Look, I'm prepared to take responsibility for the ECT decision, I'm the one who signed the forms, and it seemed like the right treatment at the time. It produced an improvement. But now it's backfired and I admit defeat. Anyway. Since you've been her most recent therapist, I just thought you should know. As soon as she's free to leave hospital, she's no longer our patient.'
'Or our problem.'
He smiles tightly. 'Semantics. There's no dishonour in admitting that Bethany Krall's treatment here has been one of our most spectacular failures.'
'How long will they keep her in St Swithin's?'
'Until the burns heal. Take tomorrow off. You look dreadful.'
It's late. I hesitate, then call the physicist. His phone is busy, so I decide to drive over and tell him what's happened, hoping that I'll end up staying the night, and that the tension engendered by our disastrous trip to London will dissolve with a session in bed. What I need is sex. With Frazer Melville. To be in his arms.
A jogger thunders up the pavement outside Frazer Melville's house, accompanied by three high-stepping dogs on long leashes. There's no space free directly in front, so I park opposite. The lights are on in his living-room. I'm just about to dial his number so that he can help me negotiate the steps when I glance at the house again. I don't know why. But that's when I see her. She's tall, and wearing jeans, and standing at his window, looking out. Blonde. Trim. Young. She wasn't there when I pulled up. But now, like a horrible jack-in-the-box, she has materialised in the physicist's home. Then I see him emerging from the kitchen. Is that where she has come from, too? Has he cooked for her? Like a car driven by a reckless drunk, my heart attempts a sickening U-turn. Fails. And stalls.
The woman looks at home.
She moves away from the window and over to the sofa, where the physicist settles next to her, close enough for their bodies to touch. They're looking at something together, heads lowered over the table. He wants to impress her. And she's considering the matter. She has the power.
By now I'm not just trembling. I am shuddering all over. And I can't seem to stop.
His ex,
I realise. Melina. Since the e-mail, she's been worried about him. So she's flown over. To take care of him. She doesn't look Greek. Has she stopped being a lesbian? Does she want him back? Does he want her?
Or not Melina. Someone else. A young colleague. One of his students.
Have they fucked yet?
She crosses her legs and I feel a flash of venomous, untamed envy. She can stand on them, she can run with them, she can use them to get up and down, she can spread them when he's entering her. A dry retch hatches in my throat.
It makes sense, the kind of obvious sense a 3-D puzzle makes when you slot the last piece into the right configuration, having wrestled with it for hours.
I am not a real woman any more, and I was wrong to think I was. My mistake was to assume there were no other women in his life. Women with elegance and slim, fully functioning legs, Melina or someone else, someone who has every right to take a sexual interest, and is worth losing weight for. Women who can stand up, and turn on their heel, as she is now doing, and wander across the room to look at the books on the shelves, as though she is contemplating moving in, and wondering where hers will fit. Can you die from jealousy? It feels like you can, and that I will.
I am about to start the car and make my getaway. But suddenly, appallingly, I can't - because the physicist has jumped to his feet and is heading directly for the window.
Terrified that he'll spot me, I duck. Not easy. My heart's thumping. Bent double like an ignoble paperclip, I'm having trouble breathing. I am absurd. I am raging. My chest is tight, my upper spine hurts, I am still shuddering. I force myself to stay with my head tucked down by the steering wheel, not daring to look up in case I reveal myself. The blood rushes to my head. My hands and my mouth and breasts are not enough for him, however alive they are, however greedy for his touch, however responsive. Because when the physicist and I make love, below the waist I am as lifeless as a blow-up doll. And nothing can change that. Ever.
When I finally dare to look up again, there's an almost sick relief in seeing my worst fears confirmed.
I am free to drive home now, because the physicist has done what couples do when they require privacy.
He has closed the blinds and blocked out the world.
What I have learned about psychological survival is that the plan you have for yourself might not be shared by others. That your personal notion of justice is an artificial construct, a luxury and an irrelevance in a world built of cells, minerals, wind, sea, flame, synapses. That the size of a defeat is always in proportion to the size of the ego knocked down. And that all knowledge comes at a price.
Today I am paying it.
Hangovers are a vivid form of vengeance. Last night my apartment became the venue for a small, introverted chardonnay festival. A melancholy choir of Bulgarians provided the entertainment, via a set of headphones which ended up irredeemably tangled beneath the bed. Part of me just watched. The other part was in charge.
Today, pig-sick and fallen from life's untrustworthy grace, I will be indulgent towards myself. I will arrange for a mushroom pizza with extra cheese to be delivered to my door by a wordless bike-helmeted Kosovan. I will watch home makeover pro-grammes on daytime television. I will drown in unabashed moi. I will be my own worst enemy pretending to be my own best friend, tending to my self-inflicted wounds with all the patience and compassion of a committed narcissist. I will recognise passion, sexual fulfilment and romantic love as mirages that may have fooled me once, but never will again. And I will forget that Bethany Krall is being transferred to a maximum security hospital which will feed her heavy doses of narcotics until the end of what will probably be a short life.
Tomorrow, another story: the sequel. In which I hand in my notice at work, inform my landlady, Mrs Zarnac, that I'm moving out of her vinegary domain, ask Lily if I can stay with her in London despite the tricky logistics of a second-floor apartment with no lift, stop caring about the fate of Child By banish Armageddon, and brainwash myself into erasing the fickle, freckled physicist from my psyche. That, at least, is the agenda I have mapped out for myself before I settle down with a towel to dry my hair and check my phone messages.
Upon which the plan changes.
Not as a result of the first message, an emotional outpouring from Lily - whose predicament bears uncanny parallels to my own. She and Joshua have officially split up, and she's moved out. She thinks she's glad about it. Probably. Lily's a vodka aficionado, and the slurring tells me she's had a festival of her own. She sounds seven shots gone. I feel a wave of affection for her as she apologises and self-deprecates, but it's followed swiftly by a selfish honk of alarm: does this mean I can't sleep on her red velvet sofa? My head aches sullenly. More paracetamol, it urges, as though it's someone else's head, and I'm its slave. Swallow some. You know you want to.
'Wheels. Wheels.
Pick up the fucking phone
!
' As soon as I hear the hoarse baby-croak, I stop towelling my hair to concentrate. She is calling from an anonymous number which I assume to be St Swithin's hospital. 'I need you here. You've got to come and get me out. It's happening. It stinks of rotten eggs. We're all going to drown. You, me, everyone!' How did she get my number? There is a noise in the background. Bethany says 'oh Jesus' and hangs up abruptly. Two psychiatric nurses will be supervising her round the clock. The rules allow her one phone call. I suppose I should feel flattered she has designated me her buddy.
The next message kicks in before I have time to absorb Bethany's call. But in the split second before the physicist speaks, I know it's him. I flinch. Then flare. Flight-fight. I'll opt for fight, every time - but only after a lurch.
'We have to talk. Something's come up. We'll need to rethink things. Just call me right away, can you.'
His voice is low, apologetic, but with a delicate catch, an undercurrent of excitement. So the physicist has had some proper sex, with a woman who can wrap her legs round his back. Whose sudden presence in his life has led to a need to 'rethink' things. Good for him. Water deltas down my neck and pools in the hollows of my collarbones. For a moment I am convinced I can't move, that the paraplegia has spread, that my body has calcified, that I am now a tetraplegic, a floating brain and no more. In the silence that follows his voice, the physicist's absence throbs in the air, as florid as pain. I press delete.
There's another message, but I can't cope with the possibility of further torture just now, so I call the hospital. The process of getting through to the right department is labyrinthine. When I finally speak to the nurse on duty, she tells me Bethany's condition is stable. She will be kept in for a few more days and then transferred to Kiddup Manor. The paperwork is underway. No, they have no knowledge of her having made any phone calls last night. Yes, she has two Oxsmith nurses with her. She's heavily sedated and on painkillers. She has second-degree burns on her hands and arms from the electrocution. She has got hold of my phone number, and tried to electrocute herself - but the situation is at least stable, I decide. And she isn't going anywhere for now. I finish drying my hair and laboriously dress. Twice I speed-dial the physicist's number, but flip my mobile shut before it starts to ring.
'Wake up and smell the coffee, Gabrielle Fox,' I tell the mirror. I'm applying waterproof mascara and a 24-hour lipstick called Cinnamon Kiss, which like a ship's hull requires a phased application of paint and varnish. 'Breathe in deep and inhale the bitter aroma of reality.' I stop and consider my reflection, and the daily waste of time that is the application of cosmetics, especially those which demand a minute's drying-time between layers, and Bethany's astute comment when we first met: why bother with make-up when no one's going to look at you, unless they're some kind of perv? 'Then go for a swim. And if you drown, don't say Bethany didn't warn you.'
Ten minutes later, preparing to leave, I notice that the answer-phone light is still winking. I hesitate. A vivid imagination can be as much a curse as it is a blessing. Today it is all curse. My brain has spent the night conjuring a thousand graphic images and I know that if I hear the physicist's voice again now, twenty lengths of the pool will not be enough for me to process the way his tone has changed to a mixture of apprehension, guilt and excitement brought on by the thrill of another woman's internal muscles flexing around his penis.
I press play.
'I didn't finish what I needed to tell you the other night,' Joy McConey blurts. I could kiss her. 'My husband thinks I'm mad. But I'm not. I need to see you. I have to warn you what'll happen.' She leaves her mobile number. 'Ring me when you get this. There's something you have to know about Bethany. It'll change your mind about her.' I recall Joy McConey's paleness as she turned to face us in the doorway of the restaurant. Like those round white paper plates you use for picnics. Blank and honest.
She's not just predicting things. She's making them happen.
If humans disappeared from the face of Hadport tomorrow, the botanical species which would most quickly assert itself would be the Australian eucalyptus, a tree which has already made an impressive bid for dominance in the local park where I have suggested to Joy that we meet. Breezes shuffle through their waving silver-green canopies, littering the paths beneath with narrow tongues of leaves. If I push hard, I can get there in nine minutes. But today it's seven.
I cross the footbridge of a sluggish stream flanked with burst-open bulrushes, their cottony innards tugged at by the wind. Incongruously, an adult figure is perched on the top of a pyramid-shaped climbing frame in the enclosed children's play area. She sits like a lonely beacon, her pale red hair shining. As I approach and fumble with the gate, she signals hello, then begins to negotiate her way down the wire ropes with a laboriousness that makes me wonder why she climbed up there in the first place. The play area's surface is rubberised: noting its pleasantly soft squish under my wheels I add the sensation to my secret list of life's tiny compensations for all the shit.
'I take the kids here a lot,' Joy says, descending the last three metres. She squats opposite me on one of the lower metal rungs but makes no attempt to shake hands, which is fine by me because for psychological reasons, I want to keep my gloves on. Before I ask she says, 'I have three. Two girls and a boy.' She is dressed in jeans and a khaki T-shirt. On her feet, hiking boots. As though she's planning a trip into the jungle, like a modern-day Tintin. 'I need to keep fit,' she says, brushing something invisible off her knees. 'Take care of myself. For the kids' sake. Ronan's only seven. Lots of vitamins, good food, low stress.' Her hair swings about her shoulders, glinting with an ethereal, otherworldly shine that belies the combat gear. Her round face is pretty in an understated way, but ghost-pale. Apart from a couple of mothers with toddlers over by the sandpit, and the odd dog-walker in the distance, we are the only people here. 'I can't stay long. I had to sneak out. It's not Nick's fault. He thinks he's doing the right thing. Protecting me from myself, etcetera. He doesn't realise.' The words are tumbling out. She could be a teenager exchanging confidences. 'My husband's one of those people who have to see things with their own eyes before they'll believe it. And then when they do, they go straight into denial.'
The curse of the therapist: reflexively analysing the behaviour of others.
'So tell me what's on your mind, Joy.' How I hate the conventions of shrink-speak. But how unavoidable they are. I can imagine Bethany snorting in contempt.
'When I worked at Oxsmith she wanted something from me that I wasn't prepared to give. I've paid the price and I'll keep paying it for the rest of my life. I've accepted that.' I suggested the park, but the playground was her choice. An interesting one: regression as safety. Joy is clearly in another place - a place so far away from her sane starting point that one must marvel at and respect the journey made. 'But I don't want you to be in that situation. That's why I've been following you, and why I rang you. I don't want anyone to go through what I have. Especially not you. You look like you've been through enough.' With a sharp twist of irritation I think: it's not for her to make those judgments. 'Bethany's dangerous. Her father knew all about it. I should have realised, it was all there in the notes. Staring at me in black and white. But I had to learn it the hard way, didn't I.'
I ask, 'So when Leonard Krall suggests that Bethany's possessed by the Devil, you agree?'
'Some kind of force. I don't know what to call it. I was like you once. Not so long ago, I didn't believe in evil. But I do now.' Her eyes grow rounder. She seems out of breath, as though her words are exacting a heavy physical price.
'What did Bethany want so badly?'
'She wanted me to help her to escape. I wouldn't, of course. Even though I believed in her. She lost faith in me. And I got scared, and I left.'
'You left with nine stars. She liked you. You got along. So what made you scared?'
'When I refused to get her out, she said something terrible would happen to me. It wasn't a prediction. It was a threat.'
'What did she say would happen?'
With a single swift movement she raises her hand to her head and, as though removing a hat, lifts off her hair. I stare at the stark white dome of her baldness. Flesh as architecture. I am too shocked to speak. Nor can I think of a single word to say.
She clasps the pale red wig in her hand, its locks trailing like the delicate tendrils of a jellyfish. Her crowning glory. 'Cancer.'
She tosses the hair to the ground, as if it is of no relevance to her. It lies between us. A piece of evidence, a statement of fact. With extreme reluctance, I pick it up. It's heavier than it looks, and hot inside. I offer it back but she rejects it distractedly. 'The doctors have done what they can. But it's terminal.'
From the sandpit, a child has materialised. He is about three. He stares at the egg-bald woman on the climbing frame, at my wheelchair, and then at the mass of red hair curled in my lap, and angles his mouth to form a terrible wail.
For which I do not, for one microsecond, blame him.
I make it back to the corner of my street in six minutes, shaken to the bone.
I might be forgiven for believing that right now things can't get worse. But then they do. Because in the driveway, chatting to my landlady, dressed in the same crumpled linen suit he wore last night for his blonde visitor, stands the very last person I want to see. I approach warily, greet my landlady and salute the physicist with a curt nod.
He asks, 'Where've you been?'
'I was at the park. Not that it's your business.'
Mrs Zarnac's smile falters but her eyes blaze with avid life. Registering tension, and perhaps an upcoming clash whose details she can later recount to a gentleman friend, it's with extreme reluctance that, prompted by my pointed goodbye, she withdraws into the pickle-scented recesses of her home. The physicist and I stay where we are, in psychic checkmate. I have no intention of inviting him in. The next move is his.
When it comes, it surprises me. He says, 'I need to see Bethany.'
'You can't. She's in hospital with burns.' Telling him this gives me a perverse satisfaction, as though it is an element of some elaborate punishment that will be meted out to him across the course of his entire life. 'She electrocuted herself yesterday. As soon as she's well enough to be transferred, she'll go to another hospital. With a different ethos. Where they'll blast her with every drug known to man. Not the kind of place anyone tends to emerge from.'
'Christ,' he murmurs. 'That's bad news.'
'I tried to get hold of you last night to tell you. But I couldn't reach you on the phone. How come?'
He pretends to look puzzled, but when it comes to faking, he is an amateur. His freckles show up like grains of brown sugar, and a little pulse sets up on his left temple.
'I worked late at the office. The switchboard doesn't operate after five. And I must have turned my mobile off.' His left temple is a place that I have often kissed. 'I was there till midnight.'
I swallow. 'And what were you working on, so late, at the office?' I sound like a nagging wife.