All in the Mind (30 page)

28

‘Lirim,’ Arta whispered. ‘Lirim. Are you awake?’ It was just after 4 a.m., and she knew he was asleep, but she was desperate to talk to him. She couldn’t bear the fact that they hadn’t really resolved their argument which had hung over them all weekend. Waking him was the only answer to her own inability to sleep.

‘Lirim, are you listening to me?’

Without opening his eyes, her husband moved closer to her in the bed. She placed her hand firmly on his arm, and squeezed it hard.

‘Lirim, I want to say I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have got angry. I shouldn’t have slept in the children’s room last night. Can you hear me? I’m sorry.’

Lirim turned over and nuzzled into her neck. She put her arms round him.

‘I hear you,’ he said. Then he kissed her gently on her cheek.

It had been such a strange day, she didn’t know what to feel about anything. Lirim had left for the car wash early without speaking to her. She’d been lying awake on the floor by Besa’s bed, and heard him getting ready for work. She was longing for him to come in and pretend there was nothing wrong, but all she heard was his morning cough and the sound of the front door closing behind him. Breakfast was just as lonely, as she avoided Alban’s reproachful gaze. Then the doorbell had rung.

She hated the ring, partly because it was a harsh, tinny sound, but more for the memories it brought back every time she heard it. Yet Lirim had offered to change it many times, and she always refused.

She shouted to Alban not to answer, and walked slowly down the hallway. As she looked through the security spyhole, she noticed the
pink
tracksuit first, and alongside it, the little boy Alban had fouled and punched yesterday. He looked smaller out of his football gear. He had a bruise at the side of his nose, a plaster across the top.

Suddenly, Arta felt scared. She turned back to Alban.

‘It’s them, the boy from the football and his mum.’

She took another look through the spyhole. The boy looked as she felt. Anxious, scared. The mother looked much softer than she had yesterday. She had her hand on the back of her son’s head, and was patting him gently. He was staring at the floor.

Arta freed the security catch, and opened the door.

‘Hello, I’m Maggie Phelps,’ said her visitor. ‘This is Dean.’

The tone was friendly, almost embarrassed. Dean was still looking at the floor.

‘I hope you don’t mind us just turning up.’

‘How did you know where we lived?’

‘We live over there,’ said Maggie, pointing to the next block. ‘It’s how Dean knew who your boy was.’

‘Oh.’

‘Anyway, Dean’s got something to say, haven’t you, Dean?’

The boy nodded.

‘Go on then, son.’

‘Sorry,’ he said.

Arta was taken aback. She stood in silence, not knowing how to respond.

‘Sorry for what I said,’ added Dean.

‘Is your lad in?’ asked Maggie.

‘Yes,’ said Arta guardedly, about to make some excuse about how they needed to go out. But then she stopped herself. This woman and her son had clearly made a big effort to come here. She should be polite to them.

‘Come in, please,’ she said.

Alban was standing at the kitchen door.

‘Let’s go through to the kitchen,’ said Arta. ‘I’ll make some tea.’

Alban and Dean avoided looking at each other. But as Arta made the tea, Maggie said to Alban, ‘Dean has something to say to you.’

Alban looked at the boy for the first time.

‘Sorry,’ said Dean. ‘Sorry for calling you an asylum seeker and telling you to go home.’

Alban nodded. ‘OK.’

‘Is that all you have to say?’ said Arta.

‘I’m sorry too,’ he said. ‘Sorry I fouled you. Sorry I punched you.’

Arta and Maggie were both smiling. Dean nodded.

‘And I’m sorry we lost the match,’ said Alban. Maggie laughed, then Arta joined in.

The woman and her son had ended up staying for lunch. Arta had served up the dumplings and stuffed courgettes she was planning to make for dinner, which was a Kosovan speciality, and Lirim’s favourite meal, then Dean and Alban had gone off to play Pro Evolution Soccer on the Xbox. When Lirim got back in the evening, tired and wet through, but beaming with pride about the success of his Sunday opening, she’d run to embrace him.

He told her how well the day had gone, how they had taken more cash than on any day since they opened. He told her about the two young students who had answered his ad and how pleased he was to get some part-time workers who were Brits and could mix in.

‘These are the kind of English people we should have in our hearts and minds,’ he said. ‘Not the two who have been there too long already.’ Then Arta and Alban told him about the extraordinary visit from Maggie and Dean, which he said was more proof that the English were basically good people, and they had so much going for them in their life in south London.

They hadn’t discussed the events of the night before, or Professor Sturrock. Instead, they’d toasted the success of the car wash and gone to bed early. But Arta couldn’t sleep. For once, it was less the fear of the rapist troubling her dreams, than her worries about how to face Professor Sturrock at her next appointment, and how to get close to her husband again.

‘Lirim,’ she said, stroking his hair, ‘please help me. Tell me how I can escape from my nightmares.’

He was properly awake now, and he propped himself up on
his
elbow to look at her, her face lit by the glow of the bedside clock.

‘I can think when I’m washing the cars,’ he said. ‘The work requires little concentration, so I have been thinking about this all day.’

He said he thought the Professor was right. He may have made the call on her to forgive too early, but he was right in his general stance. ‘What happened happened, and can never be undone,’ he said. ‘How we all feel about it will change with time.’

‘But even if I forgive them for myself, I can never forgive what they forced Besa to endure!’

‘But Besa is fine,’ Lirim interrupted. ‘She is a happy child. She is loved. She will forget, if she hasn’t already.’ He looked at her closely, clearly waiting to see if she pushed back once more. She was still.

‘What your Professor Sturrock is suggesting is like a mental equivalent of a major operation. If you had a tumour, the doctors of the body would remove it, cut it out. With you, it is as though the rapist has left a tumour in your mind, but there is no form to it, no cells, nothing that would show up on an X-ray. It is a psychological residue of a physical attack and though the attack has stopped, you can’t make the residue go away. The harder you try, the more you remember what happened, the more it grows. And every night, as I know too well from hearing your groans and your screaming, the rapist adds to the residue, and the invisible tumour grows.’

She listened, motionless and silent. Then she nodded a little.

‘You thought all that as you washed a car?’

‘Yes, I did. And I thought about your Professor Sturrock too. You said he was old, yes?’

She nodded again. ‘Sixty, I think.’

‘How many rape victims has he counselled? Maybe hundreds. So why did he do what he did, suddenly urge you to forgive, when he must have known there was a chance it would upset you?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Maybe because he wanted to upset you, because he wants you to see things in a new light, and start to shake the residue out of
yourself
. It is like the surgeon’s knife going in, only it’s not a knife, it is a thought.’

‘So you can forgive a man who did these things to your wife?’

‘There is not one hour in any day that I do not think of them. So I cannot forget. To forgive sounds much harder. But maybe it is easier.’

‘Easier to forgive than to forget?’

‘Maybe.’ He pulled her closer and kissed her on her forehead.

‘I would like to meet your Professor Sturrock,’ he said.

‘Why?’

‘Because I am worried that you don’t want to meet him again.’

‘Mmm.’

‘Is that a “you’re right to worry” mmm, or a “I would like you to come with me” mmm?’

‘Not sure.’

‘We mustn’t give up on him. You are his patient, but this affects all of us.’

She stared intently at his mouth as the words came out. She could tell he had really thought this through, as methodically as he thought through his business plan for the car wash, or their journey from Kosovo. He was speaking more slowly than usual. He was concentrating on every word. He relaxed a little as he sensed she was not reacting against what he was saying.

‘It is odd for me,’ he said. ‘The two most important men in my life, and I have never met them. The rapist who hurt the only woman I have ever really loved. And the doctor who is trying to give her peace of mind. I see one as my enemy and one as my friend. But I do not want to meet my enemy, I only want to see my friend. If I could will the enemy away, kill him even, then fine, we would know he was not here. But I would be in jail, and he would be the one who put me there, just as he is the one who has put you where you are, in a prison inside your own mind. Our enemy wants you to stay there. Our friend wants you to be free. And he has freed women from rape before, I can sense that. I feel from everything you have told me he is a good man, and he is trying to help you as he has helped others.
But
he knows if he asks you to forget, it is impossible. So he asks you to do something far harder, yet simpler too. Forgive. Don’t try to understand. Don’t torture your mind by wondering what kind of people they are, what kind of people their parents must have been, what kind of lives they lead. We will never understand them. But we can try to forgive them.’

She could feel the beginnings of a film covering her eyes, and a tear forming in the corner of her left eye. As it became whole it trickled across the top of her nose, down her right cheek, and disappeared into her neck. Lirim wiped it away with a corner of the sheet, and then kissed her on the neck, just where the tear had ended its flow.

‘Think about it,’ he said.

‘I will.’

MONDAY

29

Matthew reckoned it would take him a maximum of one hour to cycle to chambers, which wasn’t much longer than it took to drive. He had gone into the office last night with a clutch of suit carriers and bags containing shirts, ties, socks, shoes and underwear, as well as a change of cycling gear. He intended to ride to work every morning, lock the bike up, shower and change in the office bathroom, do a day’s work, then change back into his cycling gear and ride home. His only concern was how to transport his files and papers back and forth. Celia, who had gone in with him to help think through the logistics, had the answer.

‘You can take the small packages in a little backpack. Mitchell’s will know which ones work for bikers.’

‘Cyclists, love. Bikers drive motorbikes. Cyclists ride bikes.’

‘Oh yes, of course. Anyway, backpack for small stuff. Big packages we put it in a cab, on the firm’s account. Sensitive stuff, I drive it in for you. How’s that?’

‘Sounds fine,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

As Matthew wheeled the bike to the roadside, Celia told him she intended to go online to look for a proper new cupboard for the office, and she was also going to work out a laundry system.

There was far more traffic than at the weekend and he found himself slowing more often than he liked. But he felt fairly comfortable with the mechanics of the bike now, and was starting to gauge distances better. He relished cycling past cars stuck in jams or traffic-light queues. ‘You and me, babe,’ he said, hitting the handlebars as he picked up speed coming off a roundabout into Muswell Hill Broadway. ‘We’re an item.’

He was surprised just how often he found he was talking to himself or talking to people in their cars or passers-by who couldn’t hear him. When he reached Archway Road, he noticed a woman cyclist about seventy-five yards ahead. She was on a pretty ramshackle old bike but, nevertheless, it would be a marvellous moment if he could overtake her. She would become his first conquest. He looked at his speedometer. 23kph. ‘Not very good on the flat, Matt,’ he said to himself. ‘Come on now, lower gear, higher cadence, then get the legs pumping and move back up to higher gear.’ He was up to 25, then 28 and then, as he went downhill, he was on and then over 30. ‘Twenty miles an hour, Mattie. If you were by the school in Sutherland Road you’d be breaking the speed limit. There she is now, not far, closer every stroke, she has no idea what is steaming up behind her. Go on, hit it harder, pedal harder, up down up down up down, faster, faster, nearly there, go on. You’ve got her, she’s there, you can take her, you’ve got her, you’ve done it,’ and he let out a huge cheer, turning back to see a sturdy, serious woman in her late forties or early fifties looking at him as if he were deranged. The advanced age of his competitor did nothing to diminish his elation. ‘I have lost my virginity,’ he shouted to the sky, ‘and, darling, it was wonderful.’ He laughed all the way to the next lights and then thought he’d better keep going in case she caught up with him and recognised him as Mr Noble the serious lawyer not Mattie the cycling legend. He felt that going through red lights was going to be one of the best parts of his new life.