The River House

There’s a checklist in my mind. Violence, or sex abuse, or something he has seen—because I have learnt from years of working with these troubled children that it’s not just about what is done to you, that what is seen also hurts you. I know so little. His foster parents say he’s very withdrawn. His mother could have helped me—but she’s on a psychiatric ward, profoundly depressed, not well enough to be talked to. The school were certainly worried. ‘He seems so scared,’ said the teacher who referred him to the clinic.

‘Of anything in particular?’ I said. ‘Swimming lessons, storytime, male teachers?’

She had riotous, nut-brown hair and her eyes were puzzled. I liked her. She frowned and fiddled with her hair. ‘Not really. Just afraid.’

‘Perhaps a bad thing happened in the bedroom,’ I say now, very gently. ‘Perhaps the boy is unhappy because a bad thing happened.’

Noises from outside scratch at the stillness: the slam of a door in the car park, the harsh cries of rooks in the elms. He clicks the figures into place. The sounds are clear in the quiet, like the breaking of tiny bones.

‘You can talk about anything here,’ I tell him. ‘Even bad things, Kyle. No one will tell you off, whatever you say. Sometimes children think that what happened was their fault, but no one will think that here…’

He doesn’t respond. Nothing I say makes sense to him. Yet I know this must be significant, this room with the child and the adult, over and over. And no way out, no door.

Perhaps this is the detail that matters. I sit there, thinking of doors. Of going through into new, expectant spaces: of that image I love from Alice in Wonderland, the narrow door at the end of the hall that leads to the rose garden. Maybe he needs to experience here in the safety of my playroom the opening of that door. I feel a surge of hope. Briefly, I thrill to my imagery of liberation, of walking out of prison.

‘Perhaps the boy feels trapped.’ I keep my voice very casual. ‘Like there’s no way out for him. But there is a way. He doesn’t know it yet, but there is a way out of the room for him. He could build a door and open it. All that he has to do is to open the door.’

He turns so his back is towards me, just a slight movement, but definite. He rips a few bricks from his building and dumps them back in the box, like he’s throwing rubbish away. His face is blank. He stands by the sandpit and digs in the sand with his fingers and lets the grains fall through his hands. When I speak to him now, he doesn’t seem to hear.

After Kyle has gone, I stand there for a moment, looking into the empty space outside my window, needing a moment of quiet to try and make sense of the session. I watch as Peter, my boss, the consultant in charge of the clinic, struggles to back his substantial BMW into rather too small a space. The roots of the elms have pushed to the surface and spread across the car park: the tarmac is cracked and uneven.

The things that have to be done tonight pass briefly through my mind. Something for dinner. The graduates’ art exhibition at Molly’s old school. Soy milk for Greg, and buckwheat flour for his bread. Has Amber finished her Graphics coursework? Fix up a drink with Eva… A little wind shivers the tops of the elms: a single bright leaf falls. I can still feel Kyle’s fear: he’s left something of it behind him, as people may leave the smell of their cigarettes or scent.

I sit at my desk and flick through his file, looking for anything that might help, a way of understanding him. A sense of futility moves through me. I wonder when this happened—when my certainty that I could help these children started to seep away.

I have half an hour before my next appointment. I take the file from my desk and go out into the corridor.

CHAPTER 2

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.’