Now, after what Paula had just said, or implied, about there being too many middle managers, he wondered if perhaps she could have found out that he’d been sounded out about her job and this was payback. But she wasn’t like that, surely? Paula had never been the vindictive sort.
Charlie looked over at Amira who was in turn exchanging wide-eyed glances with Sarah. The tension at the table was like an uninvited guest who’d arrived without warning and was refusing to leave.
At the far end Rachel Masters speared a whole cherry tomato. Reddish juice trickled from her mouth, and she licked it with the pink tip of her tongue.
12
Anne
Some days I look around at my life, my nice office, my secure job that gives me respect and status, my smart daughter, my lovely house, my interesting eclectic group of friends, and think I wouldn’t be here without my mother. Other days I look at it all and know I’d be somewhere better. My mother got me here. And she keeps me here.
‘Work hard,’ she told me, and then, ‘Work even harder. You’re attractive now, but looks fade. No one will give you anything for free.’
So I inherited from her the drive and determination to make it this far. And I also inherited from her the self-doubt that ensured I went no further, and the conviction that the cure for it lay in the bottom of a glass. The only difference between us is that she gave in to that conviction whereas I battle it, day after day, year after year.
But during those days when Child L’s story continued to dominate the headlines, I was still in denial. Addiction was a failure of will, not of genetics, I’d think as I carefully sipped on the single glass of wine I allowed myself each day. Working on the Child L case was my chance to move irrevocably beyond my mother’s reach, or rather the reach of her legacy to me. It would be a gate into the rose garden she’d never been able to access, an escape route away from her perpetual and paralysing disappointment. Whenever Dan Oppenheimer and his cronies would whisper about me in the canteen when I passed – those old rumours about exactly why Ed Kowalsky had picked me for the case, reasons that had more to do with my long blonde hair than my professional qualifications – I’d remind myself of where I was headed and the small-town narrowness I was going to leave behind.
Ed Kowalsky and I had a very specific remit. We were to assess Laurie over a period of weeks or months to ascertain the degree of psychological damage she had suffered; based on that, we would then make recommendations for her long-term future. Putting it bluntly, Laurie was four and a half years old. If we judged her to be deeply, even irrevocably, damaged by what she’d seen and experienced in the House of Horror (as the papers had predictably dubbed her family home), we would recommend her to a specialist children’s psychiatric facility and she would be made a permanent ward of the state. However, if we felt the effects of such emotional trauma as she’d sustained would fade in due course, we would recommend her to be adopted. In this respect our assessment differed markedly from that of Laurie’s younger brother, which Kowalsky was also overseeing with the assistance of Dan Oppenheimer. In Child D’s case, it was assumed the psychological and physical scars would render adoption an impossibility, so the assessment was to determine his long-term treatment. Laurie, however, had a chance.
Things were very different back then. We didn’t know all the things we do now about the long-term effects of early childhood trauma and the different ways it can come out in adolescence or adulthood. This was before all the controversy over False Memory Syndrome where adults, often undergoing psychological treatment, claimed to have recovered memories of infant abuse. We genuinely believed that as long as the damage was not too extreme, if a child was young enough, and placed in a stable, loving environment, he or she would form a new set of memories, and leave the past behind. In those days we thought the best chance of a new life was to sever all links with what had gone before and start afresh. If Laurie was approved for adoption, we’d already talked about placing her somewhere overseas where no one would know her story, and where the chances of her coming across the details in later life would be minimal. These were pre-internet days when it was still possible to lose oneself and stay lost. Or to lose someone else.
So there was a lot riding on us, and we wore our responsibilities particularly heavily on our third meeting with Laurie. This time Jana brought her into the medical school together with her own young son, Barney, a year Laurie’s junior. Her older daughter, Lisa, was in class. For the first quarter of an hour we exchanged chit-chat while watching the children play. I was particularly keen to observe the interaction between the two. After all, Laurie had been brought up essentially as an only child. She wasn’t used to sharing. To that end I brought out a simple but brightly coloured building-block game.