Already there was the hot, gut-churning burn of injustice, the sharp needle of clever words she didn’t say, winning arguments she didn’t use. Who did Rachel Masters think she was anyway? Sarah was thirty-seven years old, yet Rachel had talked to her like a naughty child. After half an hour or so of account checking on-screen, she finally got up the nerve to take her phone out of her bag. Holding it on her lap, she texted her husband.
Was late and got telling off from new bitch boss. Feel like crying.
As soon as she pressed send she felt substantially better. She imagined laughing with Oliver about it this evening over a large glass of wine. Rachel Masters might have a more high-powered job than her but she didn’t have what Sarah had – a family, a husband, people who depended on her and upon whom she depended in turn.
Even so, when she made her way to the toilet an hour later – fear of being judged a time-waster finally losing out to post-natal bladder – she couldn’t help but cast a suspicious gaze around at her colleagues. They’d always got on so well in the past. There had been the occasional niggle – someone’s M&S smoothie going missing from the fridge, that time Amira hadn’t handed on a message and Sarah had lost a key client – but on the whole it had been an easy-going team. But now as she threaded her way through her workmates’ desks, still studiedly avoiding their eyes, a question ran through Sarah’s mind on a continuous loop.
Was it you?
6
Anne
There’s a steady stream of students who make the trip to the fourth floor, along the corridor past the framed photographs of the faculty, to knock on my door. When this happens, I try to look nurturing, and call, ‘Come in,’ in as welcoming a voice as I can muster. I have a reputation, you see, as someone who is as much concerned with the emotional well-being of the students who pass through here as with their intellectual stimulation. They come to me with questions about assignment deadlines or reading lists or resource materials, but what they really want to talk about is whether psychiatry is the right thing for them, or how to combat the homesickness that has taken over their minds until they can’t think about anything except how their mother looked when she said goodbye, or the bar where their old friends will be gathering without them on Friday night, or how they’ve fallen behind because a careless boyfriend or girlfriend has shattered their heart into little pieces that they cannot for the life of them put back together again.
And I listen, and commiserate, and tell them they’re not alone – and bring up examples of past students who’ve stood in the same spot and wept similar tears and gone on to achieve great things – and they leave here feeling a little bit more robust. Some of them even email me later, to tell me I made a difference, that seeing me was a personal turning point in their university experience. I reply that I was just in the right place at the right time – that it was nothing. But I know that not everyone could do what I do. And no one seems to notice that it doesn’t come naturally. No one seems to see that I wear my concern like a lab coat that I have shrugged on over my real clothes.
I like my students, and I feel for them, just realizing for the first time that they’re not at the centre of the world, their solipsism dissolving in the face of their own anonymity here. It’s just that empathy wasn’t one of the life skills my mother passed on to me. A bottle of vodka a day tends to make a person self-absorbed.
I’m popular here, but I know many of the younger faculty must wish I’d retire. They’re hungry for my job because they see it as a stepping stone to something else, a necessary middle stage in their career development. And here I sit like a boulder blocking the stream of their lives. But I give them no reason to push me out. I’m old, but we live in an era where age is legally protected even while secretly derided and resented. I still publish the odd paper, still give lectures, even if sometimes the back row complain they can’t hear me. I won’t go because I have nothing to go to. Now that Shannon has left home and Johnny and I are long since divorced, this is all I have.
But the young woman who was introduced by Professor Ed Kowalsky to Child L in that airless room all those years ago was a different person altogether. Not so cynical, and quietly trying my best.
‘I’m so glad to meet you, Laurie.’ Bending down so I was on her eye level. Trying not to think about what those eyes had seen.
So what was it like, that first session? What you really want to know is, how damaged was she?
The truth is, she presented as a normal four-year-old girl. By turns talkative, then clamming up, shy, then suddenly bursting with life.