Thursday's Children (4 page)

‘She doesn’t believe me.’

‘She doesn’t know whether to believe you.’

‘Do you really think that makes it any better? That she doesn’t
know
whether to believe me?’ Becky leaned forward in the chair, grasping its arms with both hands. Her face was screwed up in a grimace of anger and distress. She had a cold sore at the corner of her mouth and her hair was lank and unwashed. ‘Because it doesn’t. It fucking doesn’t. She’s my mother. She’s supposed to be on my side. Now she looks at me as if I smell rank or something. I embarrass her. She speaks to me in this high, careful voice and can’t look me in the eye. I wish I’d never met you. I wish I’d never told you anything.’

‘Do you?’

‘I was doing OK and you made me drag everything out in the open and now it’s there
and I can’t hide it away again.’

‘Your mother –’

‘My mother thinks I made it up.’ Becky gave a sharp sob. ‘That it’s a fantasy. What kind of person would have a fantasy like that?’

‘People make things up all the time. All sorts of people for all sorts of reasons.’

‘Don’t you believe me either? Now that you’ve made me ruin my life?’

‘I do believe you,’ Frieda said steadily.

‘Why? You don’t know me. Maybe my mother’s right and you’re wrong. Maybe you’re just too trusting and gullible.’

‘I don’t think many people would agree with that.’

‘So why?’

Frieda paused, considering. ‘You rang true,’ she said.

‘So you don’t think I’m just trying to draw attention to myself.’

‘I know you’re telling me the truth. It must have felt terrible, Becky.’

Becky wrapped her thin arms around her thin body and stood in the centre of the room as if she was trying to protect herself or hide herself.

‘Yes,’ was all she managed. ‘Yes, it did. It does.’

‘Do you want to sit down?’

Becky sat, but on the edge of her chair, as if she was about to jump up again.

‘She said I shouldn’t talk about it to other people, that it would all die down.’

‘What did you actually say?’

‘Not much. I couldn’t. It took all my courage to get the words out. I was sick – literally sick – before I went downstairs and told her. I just blurted it out.’

‘So, no details of any kind?’

‘No details.’

‘You didn’t tell her the circumstances?’

‘I said it was at home, in my bedroom.’

‘Do you remember it?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t want to.’

‘So you’re trying to push it away into the darkness and bury it.’

‘Yes. I have been since it happened. Until you came along.’

‘You were raped.’ Frieda paused, watched Becky intently. ‘A terrible thing was done to you, and now you feel polluted and ashamed, as if it was your fault.’

‘Maybe it was.’ Becky’s voice was a whisper.

‘Why?’

‘Like, I’d been asking for it.’

‘Asking for it in what way?’

Becky was staring down at her knotted hands. Her face looked grey; old and babyish at the same time.

‘I was in with a crowd of guys and I slept with one of them. Just a couple of times. But it was a bit out of control, really.’

‘Was it one of them who raped you?’

‘No. I mean I don’t know, but I’d know if it was.’ She had perspiration on her forehead. ‘It was a man, not a boy. Wouldn’t I know?’

‘So you feel ashamed because you think it was some kind of punishment for what you’d done before?’

‘I guess.’

‘Listen.’ Frieda’s voice was strong and clear in the little room. ‘This is very important. Many people who are raped feel that in some way or other it was their fault. Most of them, I would say. They feel that they led their rapists on, didn’t struggle enough, didn’t say no clearly enough or, like you, they have a feeling that they were getting what they deserve. It’s not true.’

Becky gave a small murmur.

‘Do you understand, Becky? It is not true. It was done
to
you but it doesn’t define you.’

‘I knew as soon as I woke up that something horrible was about to happen,’ said Becky. ‘I could have called out.’

‘Go on.’

‘I woke up and it was all quiet. Quiet inside the house and quiet outside as well. Dead quiet, but I could tell something was different. I thought maybe I’d had a bad dream, but I knew it wasn’t a dream. I don’t know how. I just lay there in the dark and I could hear my heart beating. My mouth tasted funny, as if I hadn’t cleaned my teeth. I remember thinking that. Now I clean my teeth ten times a day.’

Frieda didn’t speak.

‘I thought of turning on the light, but I didn’t. I just lay there. Then I heard someone move. It was like a creak and then a rustle.’ She bent even lower in her chair so her dark hair hung over her face, like a curtain. ‘I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even breathe.’ She stopped, rocked forward and back, just once. ‘There was a hand.’

‘Where?’

‘On my mouth. To stop me making a noise. It was warm and smelt of soap. I remember that. I remember thinking it was quite a nice smell. Maybe an apple smell. I can’t.’

‘You can’t what?’

‘I can’t say it all.’

‘You don’t have to.’

‘I opened my eyes but I couldn’t see anything except a dark shape just above me. He pulled off the duvet. I was wearing pyjama trousers and a T-shirt and he put his other hand down my trousers and I could see his shape above me, but not his face. He was wearing something over his face.’

‘It’s all right, Becky.’

‘Why doesn’t she believe me?’

‘It’s complicated.’

‘I didn’t struggle properly. I didn’t try to stop it happening.
I was so scared. I thought I was going to die. I wish I had. I wish I’d died.’

Frieda handed Becky a tissue.

‘I can’t remember it all. I don’t want to. It was just dark and nasty and silent and ugly and fumbly. I wanted to shout but his hand was still over my mouth. I could hear him panting but it sounded weird and muffled through the cloth over his face. He was just, like, this thing, and I was like a thing as well. It hurt.’

‘I’m so sorry that this was done to you.’

‘He kept trying to arrange me, like I was a doll.’ Becky suddenly looked worn out by it all. ‘It’ll never go away, will it?’

‘It won’t stay the same. With work –’

‘I don’t want
to work at it. I want it never to have happened.’ Becky pulled a face that made her look like a toddler. ‘I know, I know. It did.’

‘It did, yes.’

‘Mum’s very angry, isn’t she?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘With you. She’s ashamed of me but she’s angry with you. She says you’ve let fame go to your head.’

‘Does she?’

‘She says this is my last time here.’

‘I’m going to recommend someone for you to see. I think your mother will agree.’

‘Why not you?’

‘Because I know your mother. I’ve got someone in mind. I think you’ll like her, and if you don’t, I’ll recommend someone else.’

‘But I want
you
!’

Frieda couldn’t help smiling. ‘I’m not the right person.
But you do need to keep seeing someone, Becky. This is just the beginning of a journey for you, but you won’t have to make it alone. You’re strong and you’re intelligent and you can come through this.’ She leaned forward slightly, fixing Becky with her dark eyes. ‘You will feel better one day.’

‘Will I?’

‘Yes.’

Just as Becky was leaving, Frieda asked her, ‘Tell me, have you thought any more about going to the police?’

‘No. They wouldn’t believe me. Why should they if my own mother doesn’t?’ Her voice became flat and dreary. ‘He was right.’

‘Who was right?’

Becky made a visible effort. ‘He said no one would think I was telling the truth.’

Frieda gazed at her. ‘Is that what he told you?’

‘He said it in my ear, in this muffled kind of voice, thick and lisping through the mask but I could make out the words. I think it was the only time he spoke, the whole time. I can hear him saying it, like he was saying something loving.’ She shivered again. ‘He said, “Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.” And he was right.’

After Becky was gone, Frieda stood for a moment, waiting. She walked to the window, looked down and saw the girl emerge on to the pavement. She put her hands into her pockets and started to walk away, looking small and lost. Was this right? What if something happened to her on the way home? Frieda caught her own faint reflection in the window pane. That was what she did. She dealt with people’s problems in that room, then sent them back out into the world to fend for themselves.

Her thoughts shifted and the reflection in the glass seemed to shift as well. Just for a moment Frieda saw another face. It was her own, but from long ago, and she had the unnerving sense that the face was looking at her and calling to her across the decades. For years this room had been a sanctuary, a quiet place where damaged people could come and say anything, be heard and understood. Suddenly Frieda felt trapped there, as if she couldn’t breathe. She pulled her jacket on and left the office, as if she was escaping something. She descended the stairs two at a time. She started walking east with no sense of any destination. She crossed Tavistock Square. This was where one of the bombs had gone off back in 2005. It was a London sort of terrorist atrocity. The bomber had got on the bus because there were delays on the Underground. Frieda had been half a mile away and hadn’t heard a thing.
Dozens of people had been killed but London just absorbed it and went on. London always went on. The driver of the bombed bus had stepped out of the wreckage, covered with blood, and walked home, all the way west across London to Acton. Frieda hadn’t understood what this meant until the same thing had happened to her. When you face real horror, you need to walk home, like an animal crawling back to its lair.

She walked to the north of Coram’s Fields, past King’s Cross, along York Way until she reached the canal. From the bridge she looked along it to the east and mouth of the Islington tunnel. She was almost tempted by the idea of continuing east along the canal, through Hackney and the Lea Valley and out – somewhere, miles ahead – into the countryside. She could walk out of London and never come back. No. That wasn’t right. She needed to go in the other direction, back into the centre. She walked down the steps on to the towpath on which she had walked many times. The landmarks were familiar to her: the strange garden in the barge; the neat little lock-keeper’s cottage; the bright new plate-glass offices; Camden Lock. But Frieda remembered something else, with a shiver.

She looked at the rippling grey water. How long ago had it been? Frieda had been a medical student when it had happened. A tourist had been walking here late at night, the way Frieda did. She had been attacked by a gang of young men. Raped. There’d been a detail she’d never been able to get out of her mind. They’d asked her if she could swim. She’d said she couldn’t and – so – they had thrown her into the water and she’d swum across the canal and got
away. She had lived to testify against them. Frieda had been struck by those two details: that last clinching bit of sadism, as if they hadn’t done enough already. And the woman’s ability to think clearly, to plan to fight for her life, even at such a time.

As she walked along the towpath, she thought about bombs on buses, a young woman thrown into the canal. Wherever Frieda walked in London she was haunted by these ghosts. She heard a sound and looked at the water that was starting to speckle with raindrops. As the canal snaked through Kentish Town and past the edge of Camden Lock market, the rain grew heavier and heavier, a grey curtain that turned the afternoon dark. Frieda was wearing a light suede jacket and within a few minutes her clothes were wet and cold against her skin. She almost welcomed it as a relief. It stopped her thinking. When the huge London Zoo aviary came into view ahead of her, she went up the steps, crossed the road and walked into Primrose Hill.

Reuben was making himself a sandwich. He assembled the avocado, rocket, sun-dried tomatoes, hummus, then took the focaccia bread from the oven and sliced it open. He arranged his ingredients in careful layers and ground some black pepper over the top. During the morning he’d been at the Warehouse, the clinic he had opened decades ago, and for the last hour, as he sat listening to the woman whose father had never loved her and whose husband was cheating on her, he had been imagining the lunch he was going to have. The question was, should he have a glass of red wine with it? He used to drink too heavily, during those terrible
days of disenchantment and chaos. Nowadays his rule was that he never drank before six o’ clock, but he frequently broke it, especially if Josef was with him. Josef was not there now, but there was an opened bottle of red wine on the side. Maybe half a glass.

Then there was a knock at his front door. He cursed under his breath and considered not answering. The knock was repeated and he sighed and went to the door.

Standing in the streaming rain, her hair plastered to her head and her clothes drenched, was his old friend, colleague and – long before that – his patient, Frieda.

‘Bloody hell,’ he said.

‘Hello, Reuben.’

‘You’re fucking soaking.’

‘I know.’

‘Where’s your umbrella?’

‘I don’t have one. Are you going to let me in?’

Five minutes later, Frieda was sitting in an armchair with both hands around a mug of tea and half of the bulging focaccia sandwich on a plate at her side. She was wearing a pair of Reuben’s jeans and a bulky woollen sweater but she was still shivering. Reuben slouched on the sofa opposite, munching his lunch. He had decided against the wine.

‘So, you walk through driving rain to get here. You don’t ring ahead to check whether I’m in. You might have to walk all the way back in the rain. What’s it about?’

‘There’s something I need to tell you. I’m telling you this because you’re my friend. But also because you were my analyst.’

‘Which is it? Analyst or friend?’

‘Both. But if you hadn’t been my analyst I couldn’t tell you at all. You know, rules and all that.’

Reuben examined her as she sat before him, in her familiar upright posture. She looked fine, more than fine, better than she had done in months: calm, clear, alert.

‘Go on,’ he said. ‘I’m listening.’

‘I’ve just seen a fifteen-year-old girl. She comes from Braxton in Suffolk.’

Reuben’s eyes narrowed. ‘That sounds familiar.’

‘I might have mentioned it in our sessions. It’s where I grew up. Where I went to school.’

‘Why are you seeing a patient from there?’

‘She’s not exactly a patient. Her mother was in my class at school. She suddenly got in touch and asked me to talk to her daughter. She was being difficult. The daughter, I mean. Acting up.’

‘What happened?’

‘She told me she had been raped.’

‘How?’ said Reuben, and then he corrected himself. ‘I mean, in what circumstances?’

‘A stranger broke into her bedroom at night. She didn’t see his face. It was dark and he was wearing something over it. So she didn’t recognize him.’

‘Has she gone to the police?’

‘She doesn’t want to, her mother doesn’t want to.’

Reuben lay back on the large sofa and ran his fingers through his long, greying hair. He was wearing a shirt with an intricate pattern in black and white. It almost shimmered. ‘It sounds terrible,’ he said. ‘But why are you telling me this?’

‘She told me that after it had all happened, the man had leaned close to her and told her that nobody would believe her.’

‘Do people believe her?’

‘I do. Her mother isn’t sure. Or is scared to be sure.’

There was a long silence. When Reuben spoke he sounded tentative, as if he knew he was entering dangerous territory. ‘That’s a terrible thing to happen,’ he said. He sat up and put the last of his lunch into his mouth, chewed vigorously. ‘But, again, why are you telling me?’

‘Because twenty-three years ago I went through exactly the same thing.’

Reuben’s features froze. ‘What do you mean?’

‘The same thing, the same words.’

‘You mean you were raped?’

‘Yes.’

‘When you were a girl?’

‘I was just sixteen.’

Reuben felt as if he had received a blow. It took an effort for him to speak calmly. ‘I’m going to say two things. The first is that I am so, so sorry about this. And the second, I was your therapist for three years. Why didn’t you tell me?’

Frieda thought for a moment. ‘One of those things explains the other. I survived it. I got out. I didn’t want your sympathy or anybody’s sympathy. If I had told you, that would have given him power over me. It would have shown he was still in my head.’

‘If that’s what you feel, then I must have failed you deeply as a therapist.’

‘I probably wasn’t a good patient.’

‘I don’t know what a good patient is,’ said Reuben, with a
rueful expression. ‘I probably learned more from you than you learned from me. But I wasn’t able to help you. Or you weren’t able to turn to me for help.’

‘You did help me in so many ways, but I didn’t need that sort of help,’ said Frieda. ‘If by that you mean coming to terms with it. That’s the old cliché for it, isn’t it? I don’t believe in coming to terms with things.’

‘You felt a need to come here, walking through the rain. You didn’t have a proper coat or an umbrella. I could say that you were punishing yourself, or scouring yourself.’

‘I could say that it wasn’t raining when I set off,’ said Frieda. ‘But that would be evasive. This girl was like a visitor from my past. Calling me back. I felt I had to tell someone.’

‘I’m glad it was me.’ Reuben turned his palm upwards in a summoning gesture that was familiar to Frieda, taking her back to the time when he had been her therapist. ‘Can you tell me now?’

‘I can try,’ said Frieda.

Two hours later, Frieda was walking alone down Primrose Hill, with what felt like the whole of London laid out in front of her. She had told the story to Reuben, such as it was; she had said it out loud for the first time in twenty-three years. He had listened in a way that had taken her back to the old Reuben, shrewd, perceptive, entirely focused on the words she was finally uttering. Yet as she thought over it now, it wasn’t something that could meaningfully be told as a story, narrated in words. It existed for her as a series of images, flashes lit by a strobe light.

The feel of her bed in the pitch darkness, the weight of her body, the smell of bath soap.

A movement. A creak of a floorboard. The heaving of the bed.

Light in her eyes. A shape behind the light. A blade against her neck. Something whispered. A mask. Woollen.

Duvet thrown back. The feeling of air on bare skin. Legs pushed apart. The weight on her. Gloved hands. Terror invading every part of her body.

Voices from downstairs. The television. Canned laughter. Life going on as it always did, careless of atrocity.

Trying to hold on to her thoughts, to her rational self. Saying, ‘Please don’t do this. I’m a virgin. Please please please.’ And a snorting little chuckle coming from him.

A sensation of pain and the feeling – which Frieda had never forgotten – that it was happening to her yet she was separate from her body. The sudden warm wetness.

The flashing certainty that this might be the last moment of her life, the final thing she would ever experience. Waiting for the hands around the neck.

Warm, panting breath. Horrible intimacy. The last murmured, muffled words lisped into her ear: ‘Don’t think of telling anyone, sweetheart. Nobody will believe you.’

Lying in the dark, trying to believe he was gone and not coming back. The thought that it would never be safe to sleep ever, ever again.