Case Histories (31 page)

H
er last night in the bar and he came in and sat in the corner and made his one half-pint of lager shandy last an hour. When he got up to leave he said to her, “I don’t know why you’re ignoring me,” and she said, “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” and he said, “You know there’s an incredible bond between us, you shouldn’t deny it,” and she was suddenly furious (the guy was a fucking nutter, for God’s sake) because she’d been feeling sorry for the guy but really he was just
intruding
into her life uninvited—just like Mr. Jessop—and she said, “Look, just leave me alone, will you? My dad’s a solicitor and he could make real trouble for you if you keep turning up like this,” and he said, “Your father can’t stop our love,” and then he slunk away, and the bar manager said, “Everything okay?” and she said, “Yeah, just some guy who can’t hold his drink.” Of course, she would never have told her father. He would have worried himself to death. And anyway Stuart Lappin was harmless. He was a total freak, but he was harmless.

T
he good thing about working in the bar was that she only worked the evening shift and had the day to herself. It was going to be a real drag being stuck in an office all day for the rest of the summer. Dad was so happy and he was upset that he had to go to Peterborough instead of being there for her first day.

She made him promise to walk to the station because he was (supposedly) on a new, healthy regime after he’d been to the doctor.

“Don’t forget your inhaler, Dad,” she’d said to him as he was leaving the house, and he patted his jacket pocket to prove it was in there and said, “Cheryl will show you the ropes. I’ll be back in the office before lunch, maybe we can go out?” and she said, “That would be nice, Dad. And then she saw him off at the front door, kissing him on the cheek, saying, “I love you, Dad,” and he said, “Love you too, sweetheart,” and she’d watched him walk down the street because she suddenly had a horrible feeling that she wasn’t going to see him again, but when he got to the corner and turned back to look at her she gave him a cheerful wave because she didn’t want him to know that she worried about him because he worried enough for the two of them.

She watched him disappear round the corner and felt her heart fill up and she wondered if she’d ever meet anyone she loved as much as her father. And then she cleared the breakfast table and loaded the dishwasher and made sure the house was clean and tidy for them both to come home to later.

26

Amelia

N
o more slaters, no more Garys and Craigs and Darryls. No more Philip and his yapping Pekingese. No more Oxford. No more old Amelia. A fresh start, a new person.

She had thought it might be an orgy, but it really was just the barbecue they had promised (“Oh,
do
come.”) and the conversation was about the difficulty of finding a good plumber and how to keep snails off delphiniums (“Copper tape,” Amelia offered and they all said, “Really? How fascinating!”). The only difference was that they were all naked.

When she arrived on the riverbank (feeling overdressed and terrified), Cooper (“Cooper Lock, erstwhile history professor at St. Cat’s, now a ne’er-do-well,”) strode toward her, his balls swinging, and said, “Amelia, you came, how wonderful,” and Jean (“Jean Stanton, lawyer, amateur rock climber, local Conservative Party secretary”) rushed up, all smiles and small bouncing breasts and said, “Good show. Everyone, this is Amelia Land. She’s
so
interesting.”

And then she had swum naked in the river with them and it had been just as she remembered it except that there was no swimming costume between her body and the water and she could feel the plants and weeds streaming over her body like thick wet ribbons. And then they ate grilled sausages and steaks and drank South African Chardonnay as the twilight deepened and then later she had lain next to Jean, in Jean’s pine sleigh bed in an attic room painted white and scented by Diptyque candles, the cost of one of which would probably have kept a family in Bangladesh for a year. But Amelia managed to ignore this fact, as she managed to ignore the fact that Jean was the secretary of the local Conservative Party (although obviously Jean’s politics couldn’t remain off the conversational agenda forever), and Amelia could ignore these things and many other things because even though Jean was in her fifties she had a hard, lithe, brown body that she slid along Amelia’s own pale, soft body (she felt like a sea creature that had been shelled), and Jean said, “You’re luscious, Amelia, like a big ripe melon,” and the old Amelia would have snorted with derision at this point but the new Amelia cried out like a startled bird because Jean was lapping at her labia like a cat (“Oh, call it a cunt, Amelia, don’t be shy,”) and giving her her first-ever orgasm.

A
nd it was funny because she really had wanted to die, and now she really wanted to live. Just like that. Really and truly there wasn’t much more she could ask for. She had a huge garden to look after, as many cats as she could handle, and she had experienced an orgasm. Was she really a lesbian? She still wanted Jackson. “Everyone’s bi these days,” Jean said nonchalantly. Amelia thought she might introduce Jean to Julia. She would have liked just once to see Julia look shocked (“Jean, this is Julia, my sister. Julia, this is Jean, my lover. Henry? Oh, everyone’s bi, Julia, these days, didn’t you
know
that?” Ha!) She must try to be nicer to Julia—she was her sister, after all.

T
hey had been unsure what to do with Olivia. Neither of them wanted to cremate her, to lose what little they had, so hard-won after all this time. On the other hand, she had been buried in the dark alone for so long that it seemed wrong to put her back in the ground. If it hadn’t been against all social practice (and probably illegal) Amelia would have kept her bones on display, made a kind of reliquary, a shrine. In the end they buried her, in a tiny white coffin, that was laid alongside Annabelle, the afterthought baby, on top of Rosemary’s coffin in the family plot. Amelia and Julia both sobbed throughout the funeral. The local press had tried to take photographs (“Lost local tot finally laid to rest”) and Jackson’s big black friend had got very demonstrative with them. Amelia found Howell both terrifying and ravishing at the same time (thereby testifying to her bisexual nature, she supposed) and much more politically correct than Jean, of course. Jackson—utterly bizarre—was accompanied by the yellow-haired homeless girl, who was now pink haired and no longer homeless. “Why?” Amelia said to Jackson and Jackson said, “Why not?” and Amelia said, “Because —” but Julia came along and dragged her away.

Did it feel better to have found Olivia? To know that she had wandered off, wandered off while she was in
her
care? Amelia had been fast asleep and her sister had wandered off and died. Didn’t that make it her fault? Then Jackson had taken her aside at the funeral and said, “I’m going to break the sanctity of the confessional,” as if he were a priest. He would have made a very good priest. The thought of Jackson as a priest was very alluring, in a perverted kind of way. “I’m going to tell you what happened,” he said, “and then you have to decide what you want to do about it.” He didn’t tell Julia, he told
her.
She finally became the keeper of a secret.

S
o Olivia would have a shrine, she would have a garden. And Amelia would fill Binky Rain’s garden with roses, with
Duchesse d’Angoulême
and
Félicité Parmentier,
Eglantines and Gertrude Jekylls, the pale rosettes of the
Boule de Neige
and the fragrant peachy Perdita, for their own lost girl.

27

CASE HISTORY NO. 1 1970

Family Plot

I
t was so hot. Too hot to sleep. The streetlight shone through the thin summer curtains like a secondary, sickly sun. She still had a headache, like a rope tied tightly round her skull. Perhaps this was what a crown of thorns felt like. God must be making her suffer for a reason. Was it a punishment? Had she done something bad? Something worse than usual? She’d slapped Julia earlier today, but she was always slapping Julia, and she’d put nettles in Amelia’s bed yesterday but Amelia was being a prig and deserved it. And she’d been horrible to Mummy, but Mummy had been horrible to her.

Sylvia took three junior aspirins from a bottle in the bathroom cabinet. There were always a lot of bottles of medicine in the cabinet—some had been there forever. Their mother liked medicine. She liked medicine more than she liked them.

It said two o’clock on the illuminated dial of the big alarm clock beside her mother’s bed. Sylvia swept her little Eveready torch over the bed. Their father was snoring like a pig. He
was
a pig, a big mathematical pig. He was wearing striped pajamas and her mother was wearing a cotton nightdress with a tired frill around the neck. Their parents had flung the covers off and were lying with their limbs askew, as if they had been dropped from a height onto the bed. If she was a murderer she could have killed them right there in their beds without them ever knowing what had happened to them—she could stab them or shoot them or chop them with an ax and there would be nothing they could do about it.

Sylvia liked wandering the house at night—it was her own secret life that no one else knew about. It made her powerful, as if she could see their secrets too. She wandered into Julia’s room, no chance of disturbing
her
sleep. You could have pushed her out of bed onto the floor and jumped on Julia and she wouldn’t have woken up. You could have put a pillow over her face and suffocated her and she would have known nothing about it. She was drenched in sweat, you couldn’t even put your hand near her she was so hot, and you could hear her breath being squeezed in and out of her lungs.

Sylvia suddenly realized that Amelia’s bed was empty. Where was she? Did she have a secret, wandering nightlife too? Not Amelia—she didn’t have the initiative (Sylvia’s new word) for a secret life. Was she sleeping with Olivia? Sylvia hurried to Olivia’s room and found Olivia was gone from her bed too. Half of them missing—not taken by aliens, surely? If aliens existed—and Sylvia suspected they did—God must have created them, because God created everything, didn’t he? Or had he not actually created everything, only the matter in our own galaxy? And if there were other worlds then they must have been created by other gods, alien gods. Was that a blasphemous thought?

There wasn’t really anyone she could consult with over these knotty theological problems. She wasn’t allowed to go to church, Daddy didn’t believe in God (or aliens) and the religious education teacher at school had told her that she had to stop “bothering” her so much. Imagine Jesus saying, “Go away, don’t bother me so much.” God would probably send the religious education teacher straight to hell. It was very difficult when you had been brought up by an atheist who was a mathematical pig and a mother who couldn’t care less and then you heard the voice of God. There was so much she didn’t know—but then look at Joan of Arc: she was an ignorant French peasant and she’d managed, and Sylvia was neither ignorant nor a peasant. After God spoke to her Sylvia began to read the Bible, at night under the bedcovers by the light of her trusty Eveready torch. The Bible bore no relation to Sylvia’s life in any way. That alone made it very attractive.

Sylvia tried to recollect bedtime the previous evening but she could only form a hazy memory. She had felt sick with the heat and the sun and had gone to bed before anyone else. The minute her back was turned had Mummy allowed Amelia and Olivia to sleep in the tent? Would she? Mummy had been so adamant all summer (for no good reason whatsoever) that they couldn’t sleep outside.

Sylvia crept downstairs, avoiding the two steps that creaked. The back door was unlocked so that anyone could have walked right in and done the aforementioned murdering in the beds. It was unlocked, of course, because Amelia and Olivia were sleeping in the tent. It would be dawn soon, she could already hear a solitary bird greeting the morning. The grass on the lawn was wet. Where did all the dew come from when it was so hot and dry during the day? She must look it up in a book. She trod carefully across the lawn in case she stood on the soft, sluggy body of some other nocturnal creature leading its own secret life.

She lifted the flap of the tent. Yes, they were both there! What a cheek. Why should Amelia get the prize of sleeping all night in the tent, and not just sleeping in the tent but sleeping with Olivia and Rascal? It wasn’t fair. Sylvia was the eldest, she should be in the tent. Rascal climbed out from beside Olivia and wagged his tail and licked Sylvia’s nose.

They were both sleeping on their backs, dead to the world, like corpses. Sylvia shook Amelia’s feet but she wouldn’t wake up. She squeezed herself into the tent, between the two of them. It was incredibly hot in the tent—it was probably hot enough to kill them. The hottest place on earth—was it the Atacama Desert? Death Valley in America? Somewhere in Mongolia? They weren’t dead, were they? She pinched Amelia’s nose and Amelia muttered something and rolled over. She should wake Olivia up and take her out of this hothouse. The Black Hole of Calcutta, the people who died in there died from the heat, not the lack of air—a common
misconception.
“Misconception” was an excellent word. The
afterthought
—there was a misconception if ever there was one. Ha. Their mother really should stop breeding, it was very
base.
Perhaps she was a secret Catholic. That would be wonderful, then they could have long, clandestine conversations about mystery and ritual and the Virgin Mary. Neither the Virgin Mary nor Jesus had spoken to Sylvia. She didn’t think that Jesus actually spoke to people. Joan of Arc was another matter—Joan of Arc was downright chatty.

Sylvia rubbed Olivia’s earlobe because Rosemary had once said that was how they roused sleeping patients when she was a nurse. Olivia stirred and then fell helplessly back into sleep. Sylvia whispered her name and she struggled to open her eyes. She was bewildered with sleep, but when Sylvia whispered, “Get up, come on,” she followed Sylvia out of the tent, carrying her little pink rabbit slippers in her hand. Sylvia said, “Don’t bother about your slippers, feel how wet the grass is between your toes,” but Olivia shook her head and put her slippers on. Sylvia said, “You have to learn to be
rebellious.
You mustn’t do everything Mummy and Daddy tell you. Especially Daddy.” And then she added, “Except me, you should obey me.” She wanted to say, “Because I have heard the word of God,” but Olivia wouldn’t understand. Nobody understood, except for God, of course, and Joan of Arc.

The first time God spoke to her she was sitting on the sidelines during a hockey match. Sylvia, an inventive right wing, had been sent off for hitting her opponent around the ankles with her stick (the whole point to win, surely?) and she was sulking furiously when a voice close by said, “Sylvia,” but when she looked round there was no one there, only a girl called Sandra Lees who spoke with a squeaky Cambridge accent, so unless Sandra Lees was practicing ventriloquism or had changed into a man, it couldn’t have been her. Sylvia decided she had imagined it, but then the voice said her name again—a deep, mellifluous voice, a voice that bathed her in warmth, and this time Sylvia whispered, very quietly on account of the proximity of Sandra Lees, “Yes?” and the voice said, “Sylvia, you have been chosen,” and Sylvia said, “Are you God?” and the voice said, “Yes.” You couldn’t get a much clearer message than that, could you? And sometimes she felt so transformed by the holy light that she simply
swooned
away. She loved it when that happened, loved the feeling of losing control, of not being responsible for her body or her mind. Once (perhaps more than once), she had swooned in Daddy’s study—blacking out and crumpling to the floor like a tortured saint. Daddy threw a glass of water in her face and told her to pull herself together.

Sylvia whispered to an almost sleepwalking Olivia, “Come on, let’s go and play a game,” and Olivia said, “No,” and sounded whiny and not at all like her usual pliant self. “S’night,” she objected, and Sylvia said, “So what?” and took her hand and they were halfway across the lawn when Olivia exclaimed, “Blue Mouse!” and Sylvia said, “Hurry up and fetch him then,” and Olivia crawled back into the tent and reemerged, clutching Blue Mouse by one arm, Rascal bouncing happily at her heels.

J
oan of Arc had spoken to her when she was sitting high up in the branches of Mrs. Rain’s beech tree. Joan of Arc talked into her ear, for all the world as if she were sitting companionably on the branch next to her. The funny thing was that after these conversations Sylvia could never really remember anything that Joan of Arc had actually
said
and she had the impression that she hadn’t spoken at all, she had
sung,
like a great bird perched in the tree.

God had chosen her, he had
noticed
her, but for what purpose? To lead a great army into battle and then burn in the fires of purification like Joan of Arc herself? To be sacrificed? From the Latin
sacer,
which meant “sacred,” and
facere,
“to make.” To make sacred. She was holy, like a saint. She was special. She knew no one would believe her, of course. She told Amelia and Amelia said, “Don’t be silly.” Amelia had no imagination, she was so
dull.
She had tried to tell Mummy but she was baking a cake, watching the paddle of her Kenwood mixer going round and round as if she were hypnotized by it, and when Sylvia said, “I think God has spoken to me,” she said, “That’s nice,” and Sylvia said, “A tiger’s just eaten Julia,” and her mother said, “Really?” in that same dreamy, abstracted way and Sylvia had stalked out of the room.

God continued to speak to her. He spoke to her from the clouds, from the bushes, he spoke to her as she was dropping off to sleep at night and he woke her in the morning. He spoke to her when she was on the bus and in the bath (her nakedness was nothing to be ashamed of in front of God), he spoke to her when she was sitting in the classroom or sitting at the dinner table. And he always spoke to her when she was in Victor’s study. That was when he said to her, “Suffer the little children,” because she was still, after all, a child.

“N
o,” Olivia said loudly and started tugging on Sylvia’s hand. “Shh, it’s alright,” Sylvia said, pushing open the wooden gate in the wall of Mrs. Rain’s garden. “No,” Olivia said, dragging her feet, but she had the strength of a kitten compared to Sylvia. “The witch,” Olivia whispered. “Don’t be silly,” Sylvia said. “Mrs. Rain isn’t really a witch, that’s just a game we play.” Sylvia wasn’t actually sure if she believed that. But did God create a world that contained witches? And what about ghosts? Were there ghosts in the Bible? She was having to drag Olivia along now. She wanted to take her into the beech tree, she wanted to show her to Joan of Arc, show her how pure Olivia was, what a holy child she was, just like the baby Jesus. She wasn’t sure how she was going to get Olivia up in the tree. There didn’t seem much chance that she would actually climb it. Olivia started to cry. Sylvia began to get annoyed with her. The old witch would hear. “Be quiet, Olivia,” she said sternly, and she yanked on her arm to pull her along. She hadn’t meant to hurt her, she really hadn’t, but Olivia started to cry and make a fuss (which wasn’t like her, really it wasn’t) and Sylvia hissed, “Don’t,” but Olivia just
wouldn’t
stop it so Sylvia had to put her hand over her mouth. And then she had to keep it there for the longest time until Olivia was finally quiet.

S
uffer the little children to come unto me. A sacrifice. Sylvia had thought that she was going to be the sacrifice, martyred because God had chosen her. But it turned out that it was Olivia who was meant to be given up to God. Like Isaac, only, of course, he hadn’t actually died, had he? Olivia was sacred now. Pure and holy. She was pure and holy and safe. She couldn’t be touched. She would never have to go into Daddy’s study, she would never have to choke on Daddy’s stinky thing in her mouth, never feel his huge hands on her body making her impure and unholy. Sylvia looked at the small body lying in the long grass and didn’t know what to do. She would have to get someone to help her. The only person she could think of was Daddy. She would have to fetch Daddy. He would know what to do.