Millennium People

‘I’ve thought about that.’ I sat on the edge of the bath, inhaling the heady scents of Sally’s body. ‘I’d been pushed around by the police, and they knew I was an amateur. Hard-core demonstrators never get knocked to the ground – far too dangerous. They do their thing and skip off before the rough stuff begins. Like Angela, the Kingston housewife at Olympia. Really quick on her feet, and happy to leave me to face the music.’

‘This film lecturer helped you. She sounds sweet.’

‘Kay Churchill. She was great. Completely scatty, but she saved me outside the court. I was in a bad way.’

I waited for Sally to sympathize, but she lay passively in the bath, playing with the bubbles on her breasts. The X-rays at the Royal Free Hospital had shown no rib fractures, but the cat fanciers’ boots had bruised my spleen, as Joan Chang predicted. Collecting me from the hospital, Sally glanced at the plates with a perfunctory nod. She was immersed in her own perpetual recovery, and had no wish to share her monopoly of doubt and discomfort with anyone, even her husband. In her mind, my bruises were self-inflicted, far removed from the meaningless injuries that presided over her life like an insoluble mystery.

‘David, towel…When are you going back to Chelsea Marina?’

‘I’ll give them a miss. They’re not the kind of people who set off bombs.’

‘But they mentioned Heathrow. You overheard them when they thought you were asleep. That was the first thing you said when the cab driver helped you up the steps.’

‘They were trying to impress me. Or impress themselves. They feed on conspiracy. This biker priest – he’s frightened of violence. Something happened in the Philippines, long before Heathrow.’

‘What about Dr Gould? When he was fourteen he was hauled before a juvenile court, charged with an arson attack on a Kilburn department store.’

‘Sally, I’m impressed.’ I watched her fasten the bath towel under her arms. ‘You should be working for the Antiterrorist Squad.’

‘It’s all on the net. Dr Gould has his own website. He’s uploaded his testimony to the juvenile court – he’s obviously proud of it.’

‘Being arrested by the police is part of the thrill. The teacher catches you out, and you feel loved.’

‘The department store in Kilburn was built by Gould’s father.’ Sally examined her teeth in the mirror. ‘He was a commercial architect and builder. When he died the firm was bought up by McAlpine’s.’

‘Sally…take it easy.’

She stood with her back to the mirror, body and hair swathed in white towels, staring at me through the drifting steam like a priestess at an archaic marine shrine. Looking into her eyes, I sensed that I could see my whole future.

‘David, listen to me.’

‘For God’s sake…’ I opened the window, letting the steam float away. ‘Sally, you’re obsessed by this.’

‘Yes, I am.’ She held my shoulders and made me sit on the edge of the bidet. ‘We have to find the truth about the Heathrow bomb. Or Laura’s death is going to hang over you for ever. You might as well have her mummy sitting in your chair at the office.’

‘I agree. I’m trying to pick up the scent.’

‘Good. Don’t give up. I want to lock the past away and turn the key.’

Sally broke off when her mobile rang. She greeted a friend and strolled into the bedroom, listening intently. She cupped the phone and said to me: ‘David, there’s a picture of you in the Kensington News.’ She sat on the bed and huddled happily over a pillow. ‘He was fined. A hundred pounds. Yes, I’m married to a criminal…’

I was glad to see Sally enjoying my new-found fame. I had taken a week’s sick leave from the Institute, but Henry Kendall rang to confide that Professor Arnold was unhappy with my conviction. Corporate clients might prefer not to be advised by a psychologist with a criminal record. Clearly my status had slipped, along with my claims on the director’s chair.

Luckily there was a long tradition of maverick psychologists with a taste for oddball behaviour. My mother had been a psychoanalyst in the 1960s, a friend of R.D. Laing and a familiar figure on CND marches, joining Bertrand Russell at anti-nuclear sit-ins and being glamorously dragged away by the police. Late-night discussion programmes on television were as much her natural home as the consulting room.

As a child I watched her on my grandmother’s TV set, deeply impressed by the caftans, waist-length black hair and fiercely articulate passion. Free love and legalized drugs meant little to me, though I guessed they were in some way connected to the friendly but unfamiliar men who appeared on her weekend visits, and to the home-made cigarettes she taught me to roll for her and which she smoked despite the protests of my wearily tolerant grandmother.

For all her acclaim, her magazine profiles and pronouncements on Piaget and Melanie Klein, her knowledge of motherhood was almost entirely theoretical. Until the age of three, I was brought up by a series of au pairs, recruited from the waiting room of her once-a-week free clinic – moody escapees from provincial French universities, neurotic American graduates unwilling to grasp the concept of childhood, Japanese deep-therapy freaks who locked me into my bedroom and insisted that I slept for twenty-four hours a day. Eventually I was rescued by my grandmother and her second husband, a retired judge. It was some years before I noticed that the other boys at school enjoyed a social phenomenon known as fathers.