Читать книгу The River House - Margaret Leroy - Страница 7

Light from the high windows slants across the floor, and I can hear Brigid typing energetically in the secretaries’ office. Clem’s door is open: she doesn’t have anyone with her. I go in, clutching the file.

‘Clem, d’you have a moment? I need some help,’ I tell her.

Her smile lights up her face.

Clem goes for a thrift-shop look. Today she looks delectable in a long russet skirt and a little leopardskin gilet. She has unruly, dirty-blonde hair: she pushes it out of her eyes. On her desk, there’s a litter of files and psychology journals and last week’s copy of Bliss, in which she gave some quotes for an article called My Best Friend Has Bulimia. We both get these calls from time to time, from journalists wanting a psychological opinion: we’re on some database somewhere. She gets the anorexia ones, and I get the ones about female sexuality, because of a study I once did with teenage girls, to the lasting chagrin of my daughters. In a welcoming little gesture, Clem sweeps it all aside.

‘It’s Kyle McConville,’ I tell her.

She nods. We’re always consulting one another. Last week she came to me about an anorexic girl she’s seeing, who has an obsession with purity and will only eat white food—cauliflower, egg white, an occasional piece of white fish.

‘We’ll have a coffee,’ she says. ‘I think you need a coffee.’

Clem refuses to drink the flavoured water that comes out of the drinks machine in the corridor: she has a percolator in her room. She gets up and hunts for a clean cup.

‘When does Molly go?’

‘On Sunday.’

‘It’s a big thing, Ginnie. It gets to people,’ she says. ‘When Brigid’s daughter went off to college, Brigid wept for hours. Will you?’

‘I don’t expect to.’

‘Neither did Brigid,’ she says. She pours me a coffee and rifles through some papers on a side table. ‘Bother,’ she said. ‘I thought I had some choc chip cookies left. I must have eaten them when I wasn’t concentrating.’

She gives me the coffee and, just for a moment, rests her light hands on my arms. It’s always so good to see her poised and happy. Her divorce last year was savage: there were weeks when she never smiled.Gordon, her husband, was very possessive and prone to jealous outbursts. She finally found the courage to leave, and was briefly involved with an osteopath who lived in Wesley Street. Gordon sent her photos of herself with the eyes cut out. About this time last year, on just such a mellow autumn day, I took her to pick up some furniture from the home they’d shared, an antique inlaid cabinet that had belonged to her mother. Gordon was there, tense, white-lipped.

She looked at the cabinet. She was shaking. Something was going on between them, something I couldn’t work out.

‘I don’t want it now,’ she said.

‘You asked for it, so you’ll damn well take it,’ he said.

As we loaded it into the back of my car I saw that he’d carved ‘Clem fucks in Wesley Street’ all down the side of the cabinet.

She sits behind her desk again, resting her chin on her hands. There are pigeons on her window sill, pressed against the glass: you can see their tiny pink eyes. The room is full of their throaty murmurings.

‘Are you OK, Ginnie? You look kind of shattered,’ she says.

‘It’s death by shopping. I’ve got this massive list of stuff that Molly seems to need.’

‘You need to treat yourself,’ says Clem. ‘A bit of self-indulgence.’

I sip my coffee. Clem likes to eat organic food,but the coffee she makes is satisfyingly toxic. I feel a surge of energy as it slides into my veins.

‘I did,’ I say. ‘I really tried.’

I tell her about the boots I bought, in a reckless moment out buying bedding with Molly. How they caught my eye in a shop window—ankle boots the colour of claret with spindly improbable heels. How Molly urged me on: Go for it, Mum. You look fab in them: and for a moment I believed her: I felt a shiver of possibility, a sense of something shifting. And then the moment of doubt when I handed over my credit card, wondering why I was doing this.

‘You haven’t worn them yet,’ says Clem sternly.

‘No. Well, I probably never will.’

She shakes her head at me.

‘Ginnie, you’re hopeless,’ she says, with affection. ‘So tell me. Kyle McConville.’

‘There’s something I’m missing,’ I tell her.

She waits, her fingers steepled in front of her face, like someone praying. She has bitten nails, and lots of silver rings engraved with runes, which she buys at Camden Market.

I take a breath.

‘He makes me feel afraid. Like there’s some threat there, something that’s happened or might happen. It sounds silly now, but I found myself kind of looking over my shoulder. I don’t know when I’ve had such a powerful feeling of dread—not even with kids we know have been abused. But there’s nothing in his case-notes.’

She nods. I know she’ll take my feeling seriously. We have a mantra, Clem and I: How someone makes you feel is information. We understand this differently. I’m more prosaic perhaps: I think we’re all more sensitive than we realise and respond unconsciously to one another’s signals; while Clem’s quite mystical about it, believing we’re all connected in ways we don’t understand.

‘He builds a bedroom from Lego,’ I tell her. ‘Over and over. I feel that he went through some trauma there. But maybe that’s too simplistic.’

‘So much is simple,’ she says.

‘I said that he wasn’t trapped, he could escape from the room. He just closed up completely when I said that. But it felt so right to me—you know, to walk out of your prison.’

Her eyes are on me. She has brown, full eyes, always a little dilated, that give her a childlike look. Now they widen a little.

‘Ginnie,’ she says tentatively. ‘Perhaps there was some other reason that it seemed to make so much sense.’ Her voice fades.

I sip my coffee.

‘I just can’t tell if it’s something to pursue. Given how he reacted.’

She leans towards me across the desk.

‘Ginnie, you need the story,’ she says. ‘You’re dancing in the dark here. You need a bit more background. Who else has been involved?’

‘There’s a note to say the police were called to the house.’

‘Well, there you are, then.’

‘But no one was charged. And no one told Social Services, so Kyle can’t have been thought to have been in any danger.’

‘So what?’ she says. ‘Maybe someone messed up. Go and talk to them, Ginnie.’ There are lights in her eyes: this amuses her. ‘Isn’t it what we’re all meant to be doing nowadays? I mean, it’s all about interfacing, isn’t it? Collaboration and interfacing and stuff. You need to go off and collaborate.’

She pulls the notes towards her, flicks open the cardboard cover. Her fingers with the runic rings move deftly through the file. I wait to see what she says. You can hear the murmuring of the pigeons, as though the air is breathing.

She pauses, her hand on the page. A shadow crosses her face.

‘Oh,’ she says. ‘That’s not what you’d choose exactly.’

‘What do you mean?’

She looks up at me, a little frown stitched to her forehead. ‘I’ve met this guy—the detective you need to talk to. He’s at Fairfield Street, he runs the Community Safety Unit. DI Hampden. I know him.’

‘You don’t sound convinced.’

‘Maybe it’s nothing,’ she says. ‘I mean, I could have got the wrong impression. He spoke at this conference I went to. Very energetic.’

‘You mean difficult.’

‘I didn’t say that, Ginnie. A bit combative, perhaps—but there were some pretty crass questions from the floor. What the hell. I’ll give you his number.’

She writes it down for me.

I feel tired suddenly. I know just how it will be, this encounter with Clem’s rather combative detective. A meeting like all the others, hurried and inconclusive, both of us distracted and rushing on to the next thing, in a room that smells of warm vinyl: trying to find a way forward for yet another troubled, damaged child.

‘I guess I could try him,’ I say.

The reluctance is there in my voice. She looks up sharply.

‘Ginnie, you are OK, aren’t you? I mean, should I be worried?’

‘I’m fine, Clem, really. Just shattered, like you said.’

She frowns at me with mock-severity.

‘This isn’t burnout, is it, Ginnie?’

‘Nothing so glamorous.’

I can’t quite tell her how I really feel. How I’ve lost the shiny hopefulness I used to have. How as you get older it changes. You learn how deep the scars go: you worry that healing is only temporary, if it happens at all. You know there’s so much that cannot be mended.

I take the number and walk back to my office. The bars of sunlight falling from the windows seem almost opaque, like solid things: as though if you put out your hand you might touch something warm and real.