Say You're Sorry

1




It’s freezing outside—minus twenty-six degrees in places—extraordinary for this time of year. I felt like Scott of Antarctica when I walked to work this morning across Hyde Park—O’Loughlin of the Serpentine, battling the extremes—although I looked more like a bloated contestant on Dancing on Ice.

The snow began falling four days ago, big wet flakes that melted, refroze and were covered again, stupefying traffic and silencing roads. There aren’t enough snowplows to clear motorways or council trucks to grit the streets. More grit has been needed, literally and figuratively.

Airports have been shut. Flights grounded. Vehicles abandoned. Tens of thousands of people are stranded at terminals and motorway service stations, which look like refugee camps full of the displaced and dispossessed, huddling beneath thermal blankets in a sea of silver foil.

According to the TV weather reports, a dense block of cold air is sitting over Greenland and Iceland, blocking the jet stream from the Atlantic. At the same time winds from the Arctic and Siberia have “turbo-charged” the cold because of something called an Arctic Oscillation.

Normally, I don’t mind the snow. It can hide a lot of sins. London looks beautiful under laundered sheets, like a city from a fairy tale or a sound studio. But today I need the trains to be running on time. Charlie is coming up to London and we’re going to spend four days together in Oxford. This is a father–daughter bonding weekend although she would probably call it something else.

A boy is involved. His name is Jacob.

“Couldn’t you find an Edward?” I asked Charlie. She gave me a look—the one she learned from her mother.

I don’t know much about Jacob other than his brand of underwear, which he advertises below his arse crack. He could be very nice. He may have a vocabulary. I do know that he’s five years older than Charlie, and that they were caught together in her bedroom with the door closed. Kissing, they said, although Charlie’s blouse was unbuttoned.

“You have to talk to her,” Julianne told me, “but do it gently. We don’t want to give her a complex.”

“What sort of complex could we give her?” I asked.

“We could turn her off sex.”

“That sounds like a bonus.”

Julianne didn’t find this funny. She has visions of Charlie succumbing to low self-esteem, which apparently is the first step on the slippery slope to eating disorders, rotten teeth, a bad complexion, tumbling grades, drug addiction and prostitution. I’m exaggerating of course, but at least Julianne turns to me for advice.

We’re estranged, not divorced. The subject is raised occasionally (never by me) but we haven’t got round to signing the papers. In the meantime, we share the raising of two daughters, one of them a bright, enchanting seven-year-old, the other a teenager with a smart mouth and a dozen different moods.

I moved back to London eight months ago. Sadly, I don’t see as much of the girls, which is a shame. I have almost come full circle—establishing a new clinical practice and living in north London. This is how it used to be five years ago when Julianne and I had a house on the border of Camden Town and Primrose Hill. In the summer, when the windows were open, we could hear the sound of lions and hyenas at London Zoo. It was like being on safari without the minivans.

Now I live in a one-bedroom flat that reminds me of something I had when I was at college—cheap, transitory, full of mismatched furniture and a fridge stocked with Indian pickles and chutneys.

I try not to dwell on the past. I touch it only gingerly with the barest tips of my thoughts, as though it were a worrying lump in my testis, probably benign, but lethal until proven otherwise.

I am practicing again. There is a bronze plaque on the door saying JOSEPH O’LOUGHLIN, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, with various letters after my name. Most of my referrals are from the Crown Prosecution Service, although I work two days a week for the NHS.

So far today I have seen a cross-dressing car salesman, an obsessive-compulsive florist and a nightclub bouncer with anger management issues. None of them are particularly dangerous, simply struggling to cope.

My secretary, Bronwyn, knocks on the door. She’s an agency temp who chews gum faster than she types.

“Your two-o’clock is here,” she says. “I was wondering if I could leave early today?”

“You left early yesterday.”

“Yes.”

She departs without further discussion.

Mandy enters, aged twenty-nine, blonde and overweight, with terrible skin and eyes that should belong to an older woman. She has been sent to see me because her two children were found alone in a locked flat in Hackney. Mandy had gone clubbing with her boyfriend and slept over at his place. She told police that she felt her daughter, aged six, was old enough to look after her younger brother, four. Both children are fine, by the way. A neighbor found them fluttering like chickens over the biscuit crumbs and feces that dotted the carpet.