When She Was Bad(4)

‘I’m not here to make friends.’





3

Anne



I was shocked, the first time I saw her. That’s how naïve I was. I thought that somehow, what had happened to her would be written on her skin. Despite all my training, all those lectures and clinic hours and nights spent poring over textbooks, I didn’t think you could be unmarked by something like that.

When I think about the young woman I was then, the one who slipped in through the run-down back entrance of the teaching hospital that first morning to avoid the scrum of reporters outside the front, feeling shyly self-important as she flashed her credentials to the police guarding the lift access, she doesn’t seem like me at all but someone else entirely. A woman of principle, ambitious enough to worry that her blonde hair would stop her being taken seriously and vain enough to keep it long anyway. A woman who didn’t smile often but when she did, you knew she meant it.

Nowadays my smile is like a facial tic. I hardly even know I’m doing it.

Going up in the lift, I was apprehensive but excited. I had that fluttering thing going on where you’re both proud – I must be good at my job – but at the same time terrified – what if they find out I’m no good at my job? Like most women who reach a certain level of success, I worried about being unmasked as a fraud.

I didn’t know why I’d been picked. My PhD on the long-term effects of acute trauma in minors had won me some small amount of localized acclaim, and the university press had turned it into a book that sold well for an academic tome. I was up and coming, but I was by no means an authority. All these years later, I feel even less so, despite all the letters after my name and the corner office with the nameplate on the door, and the shelves with the foreign editions of my books lined up like trophies. If you stripped them away one by one, these trappings and badges of knowledge, I wonder if there’d be anything left underneath.

The rumours going around the department at the time said that Professor Kowalsky and I were lovers and that’s why he’d picked me as his assistant in one of the two assessments he’d been charged with carrying out. No such rumours attached themselves to his choice of Dan Oppenheimer to assist him in the other one. Though the same level as me, Dan was far more ambitious and contributed well-regarded papers to several international journals. That the rumours about me and Kowalsky probably originated from Dan himself did little to lessen their sting.

Professor Kowalsky was waiting in the lobby. I say ‘lobby’ as if it was some kind of grand affair, but nothing was grand back then. A few squares of carpet tile of some dingy hue, a central ceiling light. And Ed Kowalsky standing there with a clipboard in his hands and all his teeth on show. He was trying to look like it was all in a day’s work, but his hands gave him away, fluttering up to run his fingers through his hair again and again. He was proud of that hair.

‘Dr Cater,’ he said. And then: ‘Anne.’ He held my hand between both of his like he was pressing a flower.

‘Professor Kowalsky . . .’

‘Ed. Please.’

‘Ed. I just want to tell you how incredibly grateful I am for this opportunity. A case this high profile, you must have had so many people asking for a chance to work with you.’

‘Oh my gosh, yes.’

That’s how he spoke.

‘But you know, Anne, you have the right research background and, more to the point, you have sound practical experience of dealing with post-traumatized young children. Of course there were people more highly qualified than you who would have bitten my hand off to get near this case, but I have to be sure this is about the child and what’s best for the child, not about professional ego. I don’t want to walk into a bookstore next year and see an exposé of this case written by someone whose agenda was based on something other than helping the patient.’

In other words, he’d chosen me because I wouldn’t try to capitalize on his case. I was too junior to be a threat. In view of this it seemed to me that Kowalsky might have underestimated the scale of Dan Oppenheimer’s ambition, but in truth I didn’t mind. I was flattered by the recognition. And yes, excited at the chance of working with a child that damaged and of helping repair some of that damage.

The corridor of the Psychiatry Department of La Luz City University Medical Facility was a sterile affair. Since then it’s been painted in a mellow magnolia and there’s some framed artwork on the walls. We had a memo before the prints went up, checking whether we considered them suitably ‘non-stimulating’. We all joked about that for a long time afterwards. ‘Nice jacket,’ we’d say, ‘but are you sure it’s non-stimulating enough?’