When She Was Bad(100)

And then she’d asked him to go down to the cellar. He’d stayed in his chair, unable to move. So she’d asked again, and everyone was staring, and the silence was so big and solid you could have cut it with the knife Charlie wouldn’t stop playing with. He’d found himself getting to his feet, the pain still tight across his chest, the red in front of his eyes even when they were closed, as if his lids themselves were painted that way.





42

Charlie



The sound of the door closing behind Rachel and Ewan was like something breaking inside Charlie’s head. He still felt split into two people, but now the old Charlie was fading, dissolving, leaving only this new twisted thing, full of rage and something else, sharp, like needles in his skull, that he finally identified as fear.

He was scared of them, these people he’d worked with, day in, day out for years. He was scared of what they were all capable of, scared of what he was capable of.

He struggled to bring himself back into focus. The others were discussing Ewan and Rachel.

‘He must think his luck’s in – an invitation to get down and dirty with the boss,’ Amira said.

‘I don’t think so.’

That was Paula. Even through the confusion in his head Charlie registered surprise that she’d volunteered an opinion. She’d been so quiet for the last two days, ever since she’d overheard him and Amira scrabbling for her job like a couple of dogs.

‘We arrived practically at the same time earlier on,’ Paula continued. ‘He was admiring the house until she said something really bitchy about him stealing the family silver. Then he clammed right up. I don’t think he’ll forgive that very easily.’

Paula’s voice was flat and deadened, as if she was speaking through a layer of thick foam.

Charlie tried to summon the old sense of shame that had been with him ever since he’d decided to apply for Paula’s job, but he couldn’t. It was as if the anger and hatred and fear had pushed all other emotions out. Everything was foggy, untethered. The voices around him arrived through a mist as if disembodied.

Only the knife was real. Solid. Hidden by the table, he ran the tip of the blade across his thigh, over the thick material of his suit trousers. Then he rested his injured arm on his lap and gently traced the contours of his cut with the knife’s metal edge. As if in a trance, he pressed down on the top of it, observing as spots of fresh blood emerged like rubies on the surface of the old.

Chloe’s voice drifted past his ears. ‘He’s a big boy. Old enough to sort out his own shit.’

She sounded sad and so much older than her years, and Charlie wondered briefly if maybe she was experiencing the same thing as him – that feeling of being replaced by an alien Chloe.

But the thought was driven out almost as soon as it arrived, and Charlie was lost once again in the crimson brilliance of his own arm.

He pressed harder, enjoying the savage spurt of pain. He deserved it. They all deserved it. Rachel might have been pulling the strings but they’d all been complicit, all instrumental in making themselves victims or bullies at her whim. They made him sick. All of them. Himself most of all.

His head was throbbing, the blood pounding in his temple. He put his hand up to his forehead and a spray of blood arced across the table.

Someone screamed.





43

Anne



My daughter has always known she was adopted. We’ve never had secrets on that score. Her almond-shaped eyes are the colour of sea-glass, while mine are blue. I’ve always had a boyish figure, straight up and down with a slight stoop as if to apologize for the space I take up, while Shannon is unashamedly curvy, with the kind of figure that fits with the retro-style fashion she favours – tight sweaters and pencil skirts that hug her hips and swish when she walks, and long, honey-toned hair that falls in waves around her shoulders. She is beautiful. Of course she isn’t biologically mine.

And yet she is mine in every other sense. The light of my life. The reward for every good thing I ever did in my life, or even thought about doing. The only reason I haven’t drunk myself to death, or ended up like my own mother, alienated from friends and family, playing online poker with strangers just for the interaction.

Shannon Laurie Cater. Child L.

It was not easy.

When it became obvious that Ed Kowalsky and I had very different views on whether or not Laurie was capable of being assimilated into a new family, a new life, a new country even, capable of putting everything that had gone before out of her mind, he brought in Dan Oppenheimer to support him. At that time, Early Years psychiatry was still an under-researched area. I believe that in some more progressive academic institutions, there had already started to be a recognition of just how crucial experiences during the first two years of life, even before a child is capable of speech, are to their development in later life. But in our little backwater, that wasn’t the case. So Professor Kowalsky and Dan definitely held the prevailing view. This was before the definitive studies showing that in cases of severe abuse, memory recollection was delayed, starting at the age of six or even seven, but there was enough anecdotal evidence to convince them time was on their side.