All in the Mind (20 page)

She laughed. ‘I didn’t do that. I was just like, I don’t know, you said what you said and I just … Don’t worry about it. It meant nothing.’

‘What meant nothing? What you did …’

‘Yes.’

‘Or you and me, what we were?’

Amanda frowned. ‘David, there was no you and me,’ she said.

‘Oh, I see. What’s that supposed to mean?’

He could tell she was beginning to lose her patience, but he couldn’t let it go. He knew that, if they didn’t resolve things now, there was a danger he would walk out of the warehouse and never
come
back. That would be that. No job. And, more importantly, no more Amanda. Even after being rejected, he wasn’t sure he could face that.

Amanda spoke very slowly, as if she were talking to an idiot. ‘David, it is not meant to mean anything beyond what it says. You say “you and me” like we were an item, a couple, boyfriend and girlfriend. It was never like that, and I’m really sorry if you think I did anything to make you think it was. OK?’

‘So not even a friendship?’

‘Look, David, I’ve got lots of friends, right. You’re different. You’re a workmate. I felt sorry for you.’

He looked intently at her lips as she spoke. He had so hoped to kiss them. But now he saw them not as objects of beauty and desire but purveyors of the bad feelings she had for him. Words were leaping from them, each one hurting, every syllable hurting, reminding him of how foolish he had been to think she might have liked him.

She realised she was making things worse not better.

‘Come on, David. We’ve both got work to do. You take those packages. I’ve got another order to get ready.’

As he packed the boxes into the canvas bag, he made a mental note to record this as his worst moment of the day, the moment he realised she had complete contempt for him, the same as all the rest. And he would tell Professor Sturrock it was fucking obvious what he would write on his headstone: ‘
Here lies David Temple, a loser – in life, in love, in everything
.’

18

Emily sat down in her favourite chair and studied the box of raisins in her hand. Her anger at Professor Sturrock had been intense through yesterday afternoon, and lingered all evening, but she had woken up regretting that she’d been so confrontational. She felt bad about herself, bad that she had possibly made him feel he was to blame for her sense of utter hopelessness that anything was ever going to get better.

She thought it might somehow help to make amends if she finally did the exercise he’d set as her homework a couple of weeks before.

‘When you next go to Sami’s corner shop,’ he’d told her, ‘I want you to buy a little box of Sun-Maid raisins. Take the box home, and really spend some time looking at it, feeling it, thinking about it. Then I want you to look even more closely at the raisins inside. I don’t want you to eat them until you’ve really, really looked at them. And I want you to record what you think.’

It seemed an odd exercise, and she felt nervous as she turned the little box over in her hand. Her worry was that if she got nothing out of it, then she would lose even more faith in Professor Sturrock’s ability to help. And yet she so wanted to trust him, as she had done in the beginning. She remembered how reassuring she’d found his manner, when he first visited her at her parents’ house in Hendon. She was so impressed, moved even, that he’d understood how scared she was about venturing into town, and agreed to travel all the way out from central London to see her. She’d liked his crinkly forehead and his kind hazel eyes, and the long thick lines on his face that gave him a look of wisdom. He didn’t make false promises, or try to minimise what had happened to her. He didn’t make any effort to say it was
going
to be easy. On the contrary, he emphasised how awful it was to have suffered as she did, and how that suffering would only ease, never fully go away, but he wanted her to try to help him ease it for her. She’d appreciated the way he looked her full in the face, rather than focusing his eyes on her undamaged side. After a few home visits, she finally felt able to travel to the hospital in her mother’s car. The Friday sessions went well at first, and she felt safe and confident in his care. But over the following months, she’d begun to doubt him. Every week she would make the excruciating journey into town and most weeks she came home feeling just as bad.

Moving into her new flat hadn’t helped. Professor Sturrock had seen it as a big step forward towards a new life, but, for Emily, it was just a reminder of everything she had lost. The flat was on the first floor of a modern apartment block just off the Caledonian Road. She’d chosen it partly because the building had a fire escape, but it felt impersonal and cold, unlike the characterful place she’d lived in before, on the top floor of a tall Victorian terraced house in Hackney with a great view over London. But the Hackney house had turned out to be a fire trap. The investigation into the cause of the fire had proved inconclusive, but Emily was convinced that it had been started by the man in the flat below, who was a heavy smoker. He’d fallen asleep in front of the TV. His wife had been woken by the smell of smoke and they’d both got out before the fire spread. Emily was asleep in her bedroom at the back of the house, oblivious to the shouts of people down in the street below, or the stones they were throwing at the window. As she was a relatively new tenant, none of the other occupants had her telephone number. By the time she was finally woken by the sound of fire-engine sirens, the staircase was ablaze.

She threw on a dressing gown and shoes, then went out to the top of the stairs. The stairwell was filled with smoke and below her she could hear the crackling of flames. She felt paralysed. There was no way she could climb or jump down from the window of her flat. The only way out was through the fire. She took a chunk of dressing gown, held it in front of her mouth, closed her eyes and raced as fast
as
she could down the stairs and out of the open front door. Halfway down she was conscious of her hair and her clothes being on fire. She kept running. The worst damage was done when a huge lump of burning plastic, part of the low-budget new roof recently put in by the landlord, landed on the side of her face and shoulder. As she reached the street, the small crowd gathered outside began to scream and it was clear they were screaming at the sight of her, flames running down her side. She fell to the ground, rolled around on the floor as people rushed to try to help her. She was coughing and choking and could vaguely hear someone shouting, ‘Lungs, lungs.’

An ambulance was there in minutes. She knew from the panic in the paramedic’s eyes that her life had changed forever. Though she was sedated, the pain was worse than anything she had ever known or imagined. She touched the side of her head where her hair had been burnt to a crinkly stubble. She looked at her lower arm. It resembled the remains of a half-eaten pizza. Although she tried to concentrate on the fact that she was alive, she was safe, her mind kept flashing towards the future, a future in which she would never look the same.

In the following months she lost her teaching job, her boyfriend and with him, she feared, her hopes of raising a family; she lost her home, her sight in one eye, and, at times, her will to live. She had first-, second- and third-degree burns. At least she had heard of those. The specialist had to explain to her what fourth- and fifth-degree burns were, when he told her she had suffered them, and it meant that some of the muscle in her arm was irretrievably lost.

When finally she was released from hospital, she felt none of the joy that people going home are supposed to feel. Unable to face going back to Hackney, she went to live with her parents until she worked out what to do with her future. They tried their best to give her the love and emotional support she needed. But it wasn’t easy. Whatever she felt about herself – whether it be anger, fear, or self-pity – they felt part or all of those emotions for themselves and on her behalf. She lived with the physical pain and disfigurement. They shared the mental load, but they also added to it. That was why eventually she decided she wanted to live on her own again. She knew the pressure
she
was adding to their lives by staying, even if she was adding to her own pressures by leaving. Her moods were like a dead weight around the house.

She knew her parents were good people, but they were not up to the task of helping her through this. She had decided to put her faith in Professor Sturrock as the man to do that. Which is why recent weeks had been so frustrating, but also why she was so cross with herself for being rude to him yesterday, and determined to complete all the homework tasks today.

Emily placed the box of raisins face up on her knee. It was one of six she’d bought at Sami’s shop a few days ago. The exercise required just one box, but they were so small she worried Sami would think it odd to buy one, so she put half a dozen into her basket, along with the other groceries.

The box was about one and a half inches long, an inch wide and half an inch deep. It was predominantly red. In the top half was a picture of a red-hatted, brown-haired, red-lipped young woman carrying a huge bowl of grapes. Behind her and encircling her was a picture of the sun. Sun-Maid. It was the kind of picture celebrated as Art in totalitarian states where the virtues of working people were extolled as a matter of cultural policy. The woman looked a little like Emily before the fire. Perhaps that was why Professor Sturrock had asked her to do this. Then she looked more closely. The woman wasn’t so like her after all. Beneath the picture were three lines of writing. First, in big yellow letters, SUN-MAID. Then, on the second line, smaller, in white, NATURAL CALIFORNIA. Then, bigger than the California writing but smaller than SUN-MAID, the single word, also in white, RAISINS. The back of the box was identical. On the top and bottom of the box, NATURAL CALIFORNIA was dropped. There, it said simply SUN-MAID and, on the line below, RAISINS. The sides of the box had the same message, though the shape of the box meant the two words could run together on the same line. On one side, beneath SUN-MAID RAISINS, was the message ‘For nutrition information, write to Sun-Maid growers of California, Department R, 13525 S. Bethel Avenue, Kingsburg, CA 93631, USA’. So this tiny box came
from
America. She wondered where the raisins themselves came from, when they were picked, how many different processes they had been through, how far they had travelled.

The box was well made. Though small, it felt solid. The flaps into top and bottom were firmly inserted. She rolled it around in her hand for a while. If there was such a thing as a cardboard box nice to the touch, this was it. She was hoping this was the kind of reaction Professor Sturrock would be looking for. His whole thrust with her seemed to be encouragement to see good in things she had previously never noticed.

She flicked open the top with her thumb. There was no internal packaging, no plastic or cellophane, which pleased her. Just the raisins, tightly packed. The raisins at the top were all dark brown, though two looked closer to black. They all had a very wrinkled look, but on some there were gaps between the folds, while on others one wrinkle ran into another, so the wrinkles took up more space than the gaps between them. One in particular reminded her of her skin where the burning had been particularly intense and the scarring severe. She took one of the raisins out and rolled it between her thumb and forefinger. Not only did the raisin as a whole change shape, but the wrinkles took on a different form too. She placed the reshaped raisin in the palm of her hand. It looked like an angry old man with a mop of hair and a big bushy beard. She shook her hand so that it rolled to a different position. Now it looked like a dead fly. She shook her hand again. It looked like a log lying in the hearth of a fireplace.

She poured the contents of the box onto her lap, and then counted the raisins one by one, laying them in a line on her right leg as she counted. There were thirty-four. She looked at them for a long time, as Professor Sturrock had asked her to. They weren’t exactly pretty but they were interesting. Each one looked slightly different to the next. Every time she moved one, even by a couple of millimetres, it took on a different look.

She picked up the smallest one and put it into her mouth. There was no real taste until she bit into it and then a juice started to form which softened the texture and meant eating it became more pleasing
as
she continued to bite it into ever tinier pieces. There was a short aftertaste which made her want to eat another. Just as they had looked different, so they felt different on the tongue and tasted different. She saved the biggest for last. She let it rest on her tongue for a few seconds, and reshaped it with her teeth without biting into it. Depending on where in her mouth she put it, it had a very different feel. When she bit through it with her top middle teeth, the juice was sweet and if she moved her tongue she could take the sweetness to different parts of her mouth. She ate the residue in a kind of shredding motion and forced the juice to the back of her throat before swallowing.

She flicked the box closed again and started to jot down what she had thought, as Professor Sturrock had instructed. Her main point was that every single raisin was different. She concluded by writing, ‘If every raisin can be different, so can every living thing.’ Was she simply saying that because she thought it was what Professor Sturrock wanted to hear? Perhaps, but somehow, looking at the raisins had made the idea feel more real.

She stood up and went into the kitchen to make herself a cup of tea. She could sense a shift in her mood, a lightness that came from having done something she thought would gain Professor Sturrock’s approval. At the same session, he had suggested she go for a walk in daylight. She’d dismissed the suggestion when he made it, but the raisins exercise had left her feeling more settled and more emboldened. She looked out of the window. It was one of those rare autumn days of bright sun. Perhaps she should go out now. If she went out in the light, there would be no hiding place, she knew that, but maybe she could deal with whoever and whatever was out there. She recalled how scared she used to be when, as a child, she jumped into the water at the Finchley Lido, where her father taught her to swim, and then how much she loved it when the initial shock had subsided and her body grew used to the cold water. She felt that fear now, but perhaps, like the cold water, it wouldn’t be so bad after she made that initial leap.