‘Thank you, Harriet.’

  It is difficult for me to describe the effect those three words had. Like a spider’s web brushing your face in the dark. It was nothing. It was something. Already my bravado was evaporating. Cold fingers brushed me.

  Pritchard smiled, sat down, crossed his legs and the pantomime began with the removal of the jacket, the waft of body odour, the laboured breathing, pleased expectation lighting his face. ‘I believe you’ve had a holiday.’

  I said nothing.

  He pursued the subject. ‘Anywhere nice?’

  ‘Just Spain with my brother.’

  ‘Nice,’ he said. ‘I wish I had a brother.’ Again I said nothing but took in every detail

  of him. Today’s outfit was a suit, a dark green suit. Tight under the armpits, slight flares on the trousers. Tramline creases. There was a grease spot on his lapel and lots of tiny holes where pinholes might have been stuck. Pinholes? Had this once been a much-used wedding suit?

  He slid out of the jacket. He was being careful with this suit, his best, using the chair as a coat hanger. Even draped over the chair it kept Pritchard’s shape. Plump arms, a slightly hunched back. He sat and faced me.

  I made a feeble attempt to regain my equilibrium. ‘And how is your mother?’

  He didn’t answer until his sleeve had been methodically pleated up the white grub of an arm. ‘I don’t see what your interest is in my mother,’ he said.

  ‘She’s one of my patients too,’ I replied. ‘As are you.’ I could have added, but older, more feeble, more vulnerable.

  ‘She’s well,’ he said sourly. ‘She’s not fallen out of bed again if that’s what you’re worried about.’

  Maybe because you have not moved the commode, Mr Pritchard. ‘Good,’ I said.

  He briefly fingered the frayed tie. Orange today and thin enough to have belonged in the nineteen sixties. ‘I don’t neglect her,’ he said, ‘if that’s what you think.’

  ‘No?’ I wound the cuff around his arm, pumped up the bladder and listened to the slow thump of his brachial pulse. ‘The drugs seem to be controlling your blood pressure remarkably well,’ I said. ‘Even on this low a dose.’

  ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘I’m relieved. But it’ll still need regular checks. Once a month.’

  ‘The nurse can—’

  ‘But I feel, Harriet...’ He uncrossed his legs and crossed them again. ‘I feel that it’s good for me to see you on a regular basis. I find you such pleasant company. I’m sure that you are as good for my blood pressure as the drugs.’

  It was on the tip of my tongue to ask him then what he really wanted from me but the eyes, magnified from behind the glasses, were unblinking. I didn’t want to ask him anything because his answer would prolong the consultation. I wanted him to go.

  ‘I’m getting accustomed to seeing you on a regular basis.’ At last he stood up. ‘I shouldn’t like these appointments to stop.’ He paused and wiped beads of sweat away from his forehead before replacing his sleeve. Then his jacket. ‘I look forward to them, you see. And I’m silly enough to believe that if I missed a month of your healing my blood pressure would become dangerously high.’

  To any other patient I would have pointed out the facts, that his blood pressure was not ‘dangerously high’, that his visits to me had no effect—therapeutic or anything else. I was doing nothing for him. The very appointments were a waste of my time, manipulated by him. I did not want them. I did not want to see him. To him I said nothing.

  He held out his hand and gave me a bland smile. ‘I shall see you in one month, Harriet.’

  I knew that to argue would be futile. But the powerlessness was paralysing me.

  *

  Thankfully the last few weeks of the summer rolled on without further incident but in September the nights began to lengthen. There were more hours cloaked in darkness and Rosie returned to school. But now she was ten. She had moved up a class, had a new teacher. She was growing up.

  She had only been back a week when she asked her first question. ‘Mum,’ she said, ‘do some people really find girls’ conversation interesting? Or are they just pretending?’

  I was spooning gravy over her meal. Perhaps this is my excuse for not picking up on things. ‘I find you interesting,’ I said.

  She was toying with her knife and fork. ‘Not mums. I mean other people.’

  ‘What sort of conversations?’

  ‘Just about things,’ she said idly. ‘You know, the telly, clothes, pop music. Things.’

  ‘Some people do seem to have the ability to relate to children better than others.’

  ‘Oh,’ she said, picked up her plate and sat down with it in front of her.

  I was vaguely aware that I had given her the wrong kind of answer. But there was a reason. I had imagined she was referring to her new teacher because during the first two weeks of the new term she must have mentioned his name more than thirty times already, Jay Gordon. Mr Jay Gordon. Mr Gordon and lately, just Jay.

  Two nights later she was doing her homework in her customary untidy fashion with all the books sprawled across the kitchen table when it struck me how very hard she was trying.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  ‘An essay,’ she said, hardly looking up, ‘for Mr Gordon.’

  Perhaps it was the reverent way she spoke his name that alerted me. Or the pink tinge on both her cheeks. It might even have been a certain protectiveness in the way she coiled her arms around her homework book. It made me more curious than normal because she didn’t want me to see it.

  ‘What’s it about?’

  She looked up now. ‘My family.’

  ‘Oh.’ I bristled. I was angry. How crass to set children an essay on this subject, this emotional minefield.

  She chewed the top of her biro. ‘It’s hard to know what to write,’ she said. ‘I mean we’ve only got Tigger. And Daddy...’ The words hung in the air, a sad epitaph.

  ‘So what have you put?’

  ‘Just things,’ she said. ‘And by the way,’ she added casually, ‘there’s a parents’ night next Wednesday so you can meet Mr Gordon then.’

  ‘Fine,’ I said.

  *

  I always feel like Alice in the tiny house when I visit a junior school. Everything’s so small. It starts with the building, a toy house. The doorways look abnormally tiny, hardly big enough for a full-grown human to squeeze through. The toilets are dwarf sized. And the classrooms are filled with miniature chairs that wedge your bottom in them, small desks, small books.

  I wasn’t too badly off. I’m not much bigger than the average ten-year-old anyway. But as I entered I noticed that some of the other parents looked uncomfortably giant like. I was late, a little after nine. Mine had been the last appointment of the evening, purposely.

  I had pulled the car into the playground and wandered towards the entrance before I saw it. But how common a car is a blue Lada? Not unique. I should not see him everywhere, behind the wheel of a common make and colour of car. And this one was not muck-splattered but clean. This reassured me. It was not his.

  I carried on walking into the school and turned into Rosie’s classroom. I glanced around, uncertain which was Rosie’s desk until I spotted her name, clumsily drawn on a piece of card standing up on the front desk. I might have known. Keen, under the teacher’s eye, close to the board. I headed in the general direction. Pairs of parents were poring over their offspring’s books. All looked up as I entered. I knew none of them.

  I could see Mr Gordon sitting at his desk, behind a plastic sign which bore his name, Jay Gordon. I thought him very nondescript, with brown hair that needed trimming, and a serious face. On closer inspection I picked up that he was casually dressed in jogging pants and an open-necked shirt. I sat down in Rosie’s desk and started reading through her exercise books.

  It seemed to me that while she had a flair for English with lots of ticks and ‘very goods’ her maths was sadly lacking. I could see depressing huge red crosses right the way through. And there were comments too. ‘Don’t forget your columns, Rosie’ and ‘I think you forgot about the decimal point’. I closed the book and glanced back at the desk.

  He was still talking to the woman in the red suit and the man in jeans. I bent my head again, found an awful poem she had written and then the story she had most recently done. The opening sentence was enough to grab me.

  I used to have a Dad.

  He was nice but he left me and now I don’t love him anymore. I love someone else. It is a secret who. We don’t tell anyone but he loves me like Daddy used to do. He told me that he loved me and if I was old enough he would marry me in a long white dress and lots of flowers and he told me my Mummy would cry because Mummys should cry at weddings. I think that’s true.

  I closed the book. Was this fantasy? Or…

  I glanced back at Mr Gordon, at Mr Jay Gordon. He was sitting with a different couple this time. Man in dark suit, woman in smart black trousers and a jacket. How cringingly embarrassing. They were holding hands. But Jay Gordon didn’t seem in the least bit put out. In fact he was laughing with them, head thrown back.

  I glanced at my watch. My appointment had been for nine thirty. It was now nine thirty-five. I was tired. I wished I was home. I read another page from Rosie’s exercise book. No more about love this time. Instead it was meanings of words. She seemed very good on this. I glanced back at Mr Gordon again. He was still being pally with the parents. I stood up and all three turned their heads. I crossed the room towards the desk. I would have asked how long he would be but they got the message, stood up and shook hands, the three of them still laughing.

  I felt such an outsider. Was this how Rosie felt at school? An outsider? Was that why she had to fantasise?

  Brown eyes looked humorously into mine. ‘I’m Dr Lamont,’ I said abruptly,’ Rosie’s mum.’

  He smiled. ‘I thought you probably were. You’re the last parent on my list.’ He scanned the room. ‘I’ve seen all the others.’ He paused before saying softly, ‘Well, are you going to sit down?’

  I flopped into the tiny chair and wondered irritably, Was this entire evening organised not to discuss your child’s education at all but to humiliate the parent? To make them feel intruders into their children’s and teachers’ private world? If so it was succeeding. He was succeeding. He was calling the shots.

  ‘Rosie’s a bright child.’

  ‘I thought her essays were good.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They are. As I say. She is a bright child. Not brilliant but bright.’

  He’d got me on the defensive. Because I knew how much this faint praise would mean to her I wanted to wound him.

  ‘She’s improved just over the few weeks I’ve had her.’

  ‘I don’t see much evidence of that in her exercise books.’

  He took no offence but again threw back his head and laughed. ‘You’ve been studying her maths more than her English.’

  It cut me down to size so I was even more prickly. ‘Why did you set her that essay, Mr Gordon?’ I burst out. ‘She’s ten years old, just a very young girl. She’s lost her father in abrupt circumstances. Why get such children to expose themselves and write about their half-family? You must realise that it’s both difficult and embarrassing for them, sometimes upsetting.’

  His brown eyes were fringed with thick, long lashes. He smiled through them. ‘Are you describing your family as only half a family, Dr Lamont?’

  ‘I…I…’

  ‘You should read all the way through Rosie’s essay, not just the first page. She’s a sweet, bright kid with far more insight into her life than you give her credit for. She doesn’t want to hurt you but she’s bottling up a good deal of her feelings. Give her the chance. That’s all I say. Give her the chance to talk. I set that essay deliberately, you know. Rosie isn’t the only one in the class to come from a broken home. And for every one of those who have divorced parents there’s another two who suffer misery at home, abuse from over-critical parents, sometimes drunkenness and violence. And at other times the children have all their parents’ financial burdens on their shoulders. Life can be very cruel, Doctor, when you’re a child. Sometimes to write about it or talk about it is a release.’

  ‘And the bit about love?’

  ‘Rosie’s an imaginative and affectionate child,’ he said.

  I felt so chastened I was beginning to hate him. It seemed that this cow-eyed teacher knew more about Rosie than I did.

  He stood up dismissively. ‘I’d better go,’ he said. ‘It’s late and I promised the boys that I’d get home in time to read them a story. If you don’t mind.’ He glanced around the room. The other parents had melted away. Ignoring me he started switching lights off. ‘You aren’t the only one, Doctor.’

  *

  When Rosie arrived home a week later bearing an envelope with my name on it. I was not feeling terribly benevolent towards the school. I tore the envelope open, realised it was an invitation to a sixties disco for parents and was inclined to bin it.

  But Rosie was watching me with a trusting expression on her face.

  ‘It’s a sixties night,’ she said. ‘They’re having a real live band with a singer. And everyone’s got to come in old fashioned gear. You know,’ she said, putting her pen down. ‘Miniskirts and flares and things.’

  I was reminded of Pritchard’s sixties flares and smiled. It was a mistake. Rosie took it as a rejection of her enthusiasm. ‘You have to come, mum,’ she said. ‘It’s raising money for the new computers.’

  ‘On my own?’

  ‘You could bring Neil.’

  But I hesitated. Neil and I were colleagues. All right, we were also friends but I didn’t want to push things too far or our easy relationship would be threatened, and then it could spill over into our work. I didn’t want to invite him to a night out. At least not a sixties night at Rosie’s school. It seemed too intimate, too familiar.

  Rosie was eyeing me with frank hostility. ‘You aren’t going to come, are you, Mum? All the other mums and dads will be there, supporting the school. And my bloody mother...’

  ‘Rosie,’ I said sharply. ‘Language.’

  But she folded her books together and stood up. ‘You have to come, Mum,’ she said. She was close to tears. ‘You have to. I promised you would.’

  ‘Who did you promise?’

  ‘We all promised,’ she said evasively. ‘Everyone in the class.’

  ‘All right,’ I said reluctantly. ‘I’ll tell you what. I’ll ask Ruth and Arthur. If they’ll go with me I’ll come.’

  ‘And if not?’

  ‘Rosie,’ I said. ‘Don’t ever ask the impossible.’

  It was a wasted warning. Already her face had lit up. ‘Three tickets,’ she said, ‘I’ll get them tomorrow.’ She threw her arms around me and for a moment I could feel her thin body, her cheek next to mine. ‘All I want,’ she said softly, ‘is for us to be a normal family.’

  It was the perfect moment to ask her who her ‘secret love’ was. I hugged her closely and drew breath to ask. But she jerked out of my arms, her exuberance spilling over into a funny, hopping little dance across the kitchen. ‘Brilliant.’

  The opportunity had passed.

  And so the dance was quickening in tempo, Others were joining it. The music was loud, fast, dangerous.

  11

  It was a warm autumn with lots of lazy, golden sunshine. With the bright colours of the trees should have come optimism, confidence, anticipation for the future. But already I was filled with foreboding. Like a drum-beat, louder, quicker, events seemed to be banging out a grim future.

  I had seen nothing of Danny Small for months. Later I would learn that he had been admitted to a rehabilitation unit in yet another futile effort to cure him of his ‘habit’. As usual the treatment was pointless and they discharged him with ‘therapeutic’ and ‘maintenance’ doses of methadone, theoretically monitored by urine samples. But as clean urine samples fetched fifty pence outside the clinic Danny was able to acquire all he wanted—at least nearly all he wanted.

  It was never quite enough. Danny always wanted more. Just a bit more. Not very much. Just a few grams. More.

  Late one Monday morning in the middle of October he returned with his usual demands for drugs. He sauntered in, the last patient of the morning, fitted in because he had claimed a medical emergency and the receptionists, good hearted women as they were, gave him the benefit of the doubt. Because underneath we did pity these human wrecks.

  And we could never afford to ignore their demands. Just in case on this one occasion they really were ill. We could never take the risk.

  He still had that shifty look in his eyes, the dishevelled, evasive expression that told me nothing had changed. He still did not care whether he lived or died. As long as he got more drugs. There was no fixed amount. Just more. He didn’t respond to my good morning but dropped straight into the chair.

  ‘Dr McKinley,’ he complained, ‘won’t give me my full dose.’

  Like I said. It’s never enough. They always want more. And we have to play their game. ‘Why is that, Danny?’

  He laughed and chewed vigorously on his gum. ‘I dunno. He just says he’s givin’ me plenty.’ He lifted his eyes with a huge effort. ‘But it ain’t.’ His voice was flat and expressionless. It was as though he knew he was on a downward slope.

  I did feel pity for him. Then.

  ‘Would it be true to say, Doctor... ?’

  ‘I did not dislike Danny Small. He was a nuisance. That’s all.’

  I shrugged my shoulders. ‘Would you like me to ring Dr McKinley?’

  ‘You can if you want,’ he said. ‘I don’t mind if you do.’

  ‘But you know our policy here is that we don’t give out methadone. All I can do is to ask Dr McKinley if he’ll see you today.’

  Something in Danny’s demeanour was disturbing me. He was pale, dishevelled, thin. That was nothing new. It was something else. He was accepting my offer of nothing too easily. I should have realised that he had something up his sleeve. Maybe on another day I might have cottoned on to the fact that his mind was tracking in a different direction from mine. Danny was planning something while he sat there, playing meek.

 

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