The Drowning Girl
‘So how’s your little one doing, Ms Reynolds?’
She knows Sylvie well: I may put off my own visits, but I never miss Sylvie’s check-ups.
‘Sylvie’s fine,’ I tell her.
‘She’s how old now?’
‘She’s three.’
‘They’re so lovely at three.’ Briefly, her face softens. She has a hazy, nostalgic look. ‘They grow up so quickly,’ she says.
‘Yes, I guess so.’
‘My two are at university now. It seems to happen so suddenly. But I’ll tell you one thing—you never ever stop worrying. Whatever you do, you always feel you might have got it wrong.’
‘Yes. I can imagine that.’
Her husband calls her in to help with the patient before me: she doubles as his dental nurse.
I glance across at the woman with the bruising. I wonder about her life, and the little steps, each seeming perhaps so innocuous, that have brought her to what looks like a very bad place. How easily this can happen—sleepwalking into trouble. Maybe she senses my gaze on her; she glances up, catches my eye. I feel myself flush and turn back to the magazines, pulling out a local paper, the Twickenham Times.
I keep my eyes down, looking at the paper, pretending to be interested. There are pictures of school prize-givings. I read my horoscope. There’s a recipe for grapefruit and poppyseed cake, which sounds delicious and which I attempt to memorise. I wonder if poppyseeds are expensive, and whether they stock them at Somerfield.
Something catches my eye then, a double-page spread in the centre of the paper. ‘The Real Ghost-Busters: Cynthia Johnson Reports.’ Intrigued, I start to read. It’s all written in that bland, gossipy style you find in small local newspapers.
Things that go bump in the night are all in a day’s work for Dr Adam Winters, of the Psychic Institute at Hampton University. Adam talked to me in the disappointingly prosaic setting of his office in the Department of Psychology. A soft-spoken man, whose gentle voice belies his evident energy and fascination with his subject, he has investigated ghosts, poltergeists and cases of telepathy. Sounds like an exciting job? ‘Mostly it’s quite routine,’ says Adam. ‘For instance, if someone claims to have telepathic powers, we might set up an experiment where they have to make predictions, and we analyse the results to see if their guesses are better than chance. Basically we’re applying scientific methods of inquiry to the things that happen to people that they can’t explain…’
There’s a photo of Adam Winters with the article. It’s a grainy photo; you can’t really see him clearly. He’s lean and dark, and his chin is shadowed with stubble, and he has a startled air, as if someone has just called his name. I contemplate the photo for a moment. I decide he’s the kind of man who’d corner you at a party and stand too close and talk at length about some obsession of his: someone who’d undoubtedly think that I was rather frivolous. Then I smile at myself, for conjuring up this entire persona for him.
I can hear the edgy, mosquito whine of a drill from one of the surgeries. I don’t want to think about it. I focus on the article, which has lots of stories of local ghosts. There’s a gallery at Hampton Court that’s haunted by the ghost of Kathryn Howard, whom Henry VIII beheaded: dogs won’t go over the threshold. Adam Winters and his colleagues visit the sites of the hauntings, and measure fluctuations in electromagnetic fields.
I ask him if he believes in ghosts, but he’s guarded and non-committal. He tells me, ‘A scientist should never say that anything is impossible…’
I look up as the woman in the black business suit is called in. I notice how stiffly she moves, her body fragile as eggshell. Then the door bangs shut behind her, and I’m alone in the room.
I turn back to the paper. I skim through the rest of the article, and am about to turn the page when the last few lines spring out at me as though they are illuminated.
But Adam doesn’t confine his researches to ghostly apparitions. One of the cases he’s currently investigating is that of four-year-old Kevin Smith (not his real name). Kevin wakes sobbing every night and says he wants to go home, and sometimes he talks about a place where he says he used to live. His mother wonders if Kevin is remembering a previous life…
The room tilts. I can feel my heart, its rapid, jittery beat.
I put it to Adam that many children live in a fantasy world. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘And that’s why we have to look at these cases very carefully. In fact, accounts of children apparently remembering past lives are actually quite common, though most of them come from cultures which have a belief in reincarnation, like the Druse of Lebanon.’ And he tells me there are psychiatrists who claim to use past life regression to heal physical symptoms and phobias…
I ask him what he thinks of all this. ‘I’ve never investigated a past life case that I found completely convincing,’ he tells me. ‘But there’s a US psychiatrist, Dr Ian Stevenson, who devoted his life to exploring this phenomenon—and some of his cases are really very persuasive.’
I jump as my dentist’s door swings back. An elderly man in a drab grey coat comes out; he’s touching his face with his fingers, as though to check that it’s still there. The dentist’s wife takes his credit card. I read hungrily on, my heart juddering.
So what does Adam make of Kevin? He’s diplomatic: he gives me a guarded smile. ‘As a scientist, I never say never,’ he tells me.
Have you had an experience that you can’t explain? Adam Winters would love to hear from you. You can contact him at this e-mail address…
I grab my bag and scrabble around for a pen.
‘Ms Reynolds, could you come in now?’
The dentist is standing at the door of his surgery. I fold up the paper and tuck it under the magazines.
I get in the chair, and the dentist pokes around in my mouth. He’s a bony, lugubrious, kindly man. He allows himself a melodramatic sigh.
‘And when did you last come to see me?’ he says.
‘I can’t remember exactly. I’m afraid it’s quite a while.’
He shakes his head, as though wearily resigned to human weakness.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says mournfully. ‘But in the end we’ll probably have to extract it.’
He drills my tooth, puts in a filling, prescribes some antibiotics.
‘To be honest, I really don’t know if this is going to work,’ he says. ‘You should make an appointment for eight weeks’ time. But any trouble, you come back sooner, OK? Any twinges.’
I promise that I will.
I go back into the waiting room. The dentist’s wife follows. If she weren’t here, I might steal the Twickenham Times. The work will cost a lot: I arrange to pay in instalments. She fixes my next appointment.
Outside, I’m amazed that everything is just the same as it always was: the lumbering buses, the crowd of pedestrians jostling at the traffic lights—all solid, vivid, predictable, just as they were before.
CHAPTER 10
It’s a cold, dreary December: dark days, with a raw, searching wind that often has flakes of snow in it, and sometimes a rain that looks like water but feels like ice on your skin. In our garden, the mulberry branches are bare, and the lawn is muddy and sodden, and leaves from the trees in the Somerfield car park drift up against the wall, their extravagant russets and yellows darkened and dulled by the wet. It’s a struggle to keep the flat warm, with the ceilings so high and the heating so elderly and erratic; the wind sneaks in through every little crack. At night I pile my coats on top of Sylvie’s duvet.
At the flower shop, we’re stocking up for Christmas, with poinsettias, and amaryllis bulbs, and mistletoe that I love for the remote, pearly glow of its berries, like something seen through clear water. And Lavinia buys in willow wands and patchwork scraps of fabric, and when the shop is quiet we sit in the room at the back and make up Christmas garlands—some of them very simple, woven from twisted twigs, and more formal, traditional ones with ribbon and berries and greenery; and sometimes I like to use colours and fabrics that nobody else would think of—bows of brown paper, or shimmery Indian ribbon. When I get home, my hands still smell of juniper.
A letter comes, with the Arbours Clinic slogan on the envelope: Helping Families Help Themselves, and a rainbow drawn by a child. I feel a rush of hopefulness. Now someone will come to our rescue, someone will understand. I rip the envelope open. We have an appointment with Dr Strickland at the start of January. I’m pleased—it doesn’t seem too long to wait. I worry that Sylvie’s trainers are scruffy—I don’t want them to think that I am a neglectful parent—and I take her to buy some new shoes for the appointment—pink suede boots with laces that I can’t really afford.
I yearn for Dominic. I ring the house in Newgate Road, hoping to hear him on the voicemail, so hungry for something of him, just for a moment to have his voice vibrating inside me. I choose a time when Claudia should be meeting their children from school, but to my horror it’s Claudia who answers. I put the phone down rapidly, ashamed.
And all the time I wonder about the article I read. Sometimes—most of the time—I tell myself it was nonsense, a deluded, New-Agey fantasy. I remind myself that people need something to cling to—anything to protect ourselves from knowing, really knowing, that we are mortal beings. Sometimes the mind won’t let that knowledge in.
I remember the night my mother died. I’d spent several hours that afternoon at her bedside in the hospital; she’d been doing so well with all her rehabilitation, she was starting to walk again, two months after her stroke. She’d been sitting up in bed, alert and vivid, wearing the bright new bedjacket I’d brought her, and with some lipstick on; and talking about what she’d do when they discharged her—the pelargoniums she was longing to plant. She was worried she’d missed the start of the growing season. The ward sister rang at eleven that night to say she’d died. I just said, ‘No, she hasn’t.’ My voice quite calm and unconcerned. ‘Really. Don’t worry, she’s fine, I was with her this afternoon…’ I simply didn’t believe it. When the nurse persisted, I thought it was a practical joke. I actually said that. ‘This is a joke, isn’t it? You’re having me on…’ She wasn’t thrown. It can’t have been the first time this had happened to her. She kept on talking, her manner gently insistent. ‘Miss Reynolds, I’m really sorry, but you need to listen to me. I’m ringing from Stanton Ward. Your mother had another stroke. This time it was a massive one. It was very sudden. She wouldn’t have felt any pain…’ But I couldn’t take it in. Just couldn’t. As if there were a door in my mind, shut fast—that couldn’t be prised open, wouldn’t let this knowledge through. And mostly I think that’s what all these beliefs are, really: doors in the mind, keeping the dark out.
Yet sometimes I find myself thinking: Perhaps it’s true—perhaps the soul goes on. Perhaps some of us have a memory trace—some imprint of a previous life—or a psychic link with the past… And always, just wondering that—just touching on it so lightly, even for a second or two—there’s a sense of something shifting—the present, certain, obvious world dissolving all around me, as everything I thought I knew begins to fall away.
Sometimes I wonder about Adam Winters, and kick myself that I didn’t manage to note down his e-mail address. At least I’d have a choice then. But I can’t imagine how it would be if I met him, or what on earth he’d make of Sylvie and me. I simply can’t envisage it. I think of him in his university department—his glamorous career, his adulatory students—and me in my flat in Highfields, cooking chicken nuggets, reading old copies of Heat. And what might it do to Sylvie—to give so much weight and attention to all the strange things that she says? Everything might get worse then. There are lots of good reasons to forget all about him. I tell myself it’s as well that I don’t know how to reach him: at least it stops me from doing anything rash.
‘Lavinia,’ I say one morning. We’re working at the back of the shop. It’s a bitter day, with a light sleet thrown on the wind. ‘Lavinia—there was this thing I read. About the paranormal—ghosts and so on. This guy who researches into it. D’you believe in all that?’
She’s wearing a fisherman’s sweater: long cuffs of heavy oiled wool hang over her hands. She pushes her sleeves up, folding them over and over; her gestures are so graceful. She has many silver rings, and a cinnamon staining of nicotine on the insides of her fingers.
Her thoughtful grey eyes rest on me. There’s a question in them.
‘It depends which bit you mean,’ she says then. ‘I do believe in the spirit world—that there’s a spiritual dimension.’ She gives a little self-deprecating shrug. ‘For God’s sake, Gracie, you know me.’
I smile, and think of the house where she lives—the Tarot cards, the crystals in her windows, and in her hall a low black table with beeswax candles on; and when she throws one of her parties, she sticks a notice to it: ‘Buddhist altar: please do not put your glasses here.’
‘Sometimes…’ she says slowly. ‘Sometimes I think—What if we just don’t get it? What if our dying isn’t at all as we’ve always believed it to be?’
She comes across to me, rests her hand for a moment on my shoulder. I’m making tree decorations—diminutive pipe-cleaner angels, with frocks of blackberry silk.
‘Hey—those are yummy. You clever girl…’ She turns from me, spoons coffee into our cups, pours water from the kettle. ‘Why are you asking anyway?’
‘It’s just this thing I read.’
She waits for a while, but I don’t say anything more.
‘Mind you,’ she says then, ‘you have to be a bit careful. People are gullible. It’s easy to start believing all kinds of crazy stuff…’
Out of the window, the sleet is starting to thicken; big feathery flakes of snow sift gently down. I can tell she’s musing on something. I wait for her.
She stirs sugar into her coffee. As her hand moves around her intricate rings give off glints and sparkles of light.
‘When I was a physio student,’ she says, ‘I had a skeleton to study. I kept it under my bed. And I had no end of bad luck—my boyfriend had dumped me and everything seemed to go wrong.’
The warmth of the coffee spreads through me. I drink gratefully. Outside, snow stitches its pattern.
‘And Teresa, my friend—she’s Irish and superstitious as hell, and she said it was the skeleton that was making all this happen. And she marched me off to Brompton Oratory to get the skeleton blessed. We took it in a Top Shop bag.’ She shakes her head slowly. ‘I mean, can you imagine? And we met this priest, he was absolutely ancient, he had this kind of pleased air. I guess he couldn’t believe his luck. Two girls in very short skirts with a carrier bag full of bones…’
She’s staring out of the window, where the snowflakes turn and turn as they fall, and fur the sills with white. Her expression is gentle with nostalgia.
But I’m impatient.
‘And what did he say? Did he give it a blessing? Did better things start happening?’
There are cut-off fronds of juniper on the table; she trails her finger through them, so they release their aromatic resins. Her bracelets make a faint metallic sound.
‘He stood there looking at us,’ she says. ‘He had these very blue eyes—startlingly blue, like a child’s eyes. And he said—I’ve never forgotten—“It’s not the dead we should be afraid of, but the living…”’ Her appalling Irish accent makes me smile. ‘“My daughters, always remember: it’s the living we should fear.”’
CHAPTER 11
The Arbours was once a private house. It’s a solid, whitewashed building, imposing amid its cedar trees and lawns.
The receptionist has nail extensions—navy blue, with stick-on gems. We sit in the waiting room, which smells of damp and beeswax. Thank-you cards from children have been pinned up on the walls, and there’s a heap of ancient children’s books. I read Frog and Toad to Sylvie, self-conscious about my mothering, wondering if we’re already being analysed, if the receptionist with the long jewelled nails is marking my parenting out of ten.
Dr Strickland comes to greet us. He’s a scented, immaculate man, white-haired, with a neat goatee beard. He shakes my hand; his skin is cool and smooth, like fabric.
‘I ask everyone who comes here to spend some time in the playroom,’ he tells us. ‘It helps me to understand you. I’ll be watching you through a one-way screen, but you’ll soon forget I’m there. So just enjoy yourselves.’
The playroom is all in primary colours, with lots of inviting toys—a cooker, bricks and Lego, a heap of dressing-up. Sylvie goes straight to the cooker and makes me a Play-Doh meal, which she cooks in the red plastic saucepans. I watch her as she plays—her decorous gestures, her silky colourless hair. She’s so poised, so self-possessed today. It’s the only time I’ve ever wished that she would be really difficult.
We’re joined by a woman with parrot earrings and a wide white smile. She says she is Katy the play therapist, and she will play with Sylvie, while I talk to Dr Strickland. She directs me to his office, which looks out over the lawns. It’s a blowy day, wind wrenches at the branches of the cedars, but his room is hushed and silent. He gestures me to a chair. To the side of us there’s one-way glass looking into the playroom.
‘Right, Ms Reynolds.’ He picks up a fat silver pen, pulls a notepad towards him. His cologne is too sweet for a man. ‘So when did you first begin to believe that Sylvie has problems?’ he says.
I don’t like the way he says ‘believe’. But I talk about her tantrums and her waking in the night, and he writes it all down with the fat silver pen.
‘And she has a phobia of water,’ I tell him. ‘Especially water touching her face.’
‘Yes, Mrs Pace-Barden told me. Was there any traumatic event that might have triggered her fear?’
‘No, there was nothing,’ I say. ‘I’ve thought about that a lot.’
‘So when did you first begin to notice the problem?’ he says.
‘She always hated bath time right from a tiny baby,’ I tell him. ‘We manage. I put in two inches of water, and she just does a quick in and out with absolutely no splashing. When I wash her hair I use one of those face shield things from Mothercare…’
‘You need to help her play with water in a relaxed situation,’ he says. ‘Help her learn to feel safe with water.’
‘Yes. I’ve tried that,’ I tell him.
I think of all the things I’ve tried to make her less afraid—playing at hair salons with her Barbies, buying a special watering can for watering the flowers. I think of her shuttered face when I’ve suggested these things. No, Grace. I don’t want to.
He frowns at the notes in front of him.
‘Now, the other things—the screaming and the waking in the night. Do they go back a long way too?’
‘Yes. But they seem to be getting worse. It’s almost every night now.’
‘Is there anything else that concerns you?’
‘Mrs Pace-Barden was worried because she always draws the same picture,’ I tell him.
‘What’s in this picture?’ he asks me.
‘It’s just a house,’ I tell him.
I think he will ask, like Mrs Pace-Barden—Did something happen to her there? But instead he smiles a brief ironic smile.
‘I have the greatest respect for Mrs Pace-Barden,’ he tells me, ‘but if we took on every child who repeatedly draws a house, the NHS would be in an even more perilous state than it is… Now, let’s go back a bit,’ he says.
He asks about Sylvie’s birth, how well she fed, her developmental milestones. This all seems quite straightforward.
Then he leans a little towards me.
‘Now, I think you’re in the unfortunate position of being a single parent?’ he says.
I nod. It’s the part of the consultation I’ve been dreading.
‘So what about her father? Does she see him?’ he says.
‘No,’ I say. Afraid he will think that this is an explanation for everything.
‘When relationships break down, it’s natural to feel a certain amount of anger.’ He has a sibilant, unctuous voice. ‘Absolutely natural. And I’m wondering if you felt that?’
I tell him yes: I’ve planned what I will say.
‘I’d have liked him to be there for her—to be a father to her.’
‘Of course,’ he says. ‘That’s absolutely normal. And Sylvie herself, of course, will yearn for a father figure, and for those things you can’t provide, that only a father can give…’
I hate him putting it like that. I don’t say anything.
‘Now, when you look at Sylvie,’ he says, ‘do you perhaps sometimes see her father in her?’
I shake my head.
‘I can see they’re alike, of course, but Sylvie’s very much herself,’ I say.
‘All right. Thank you, Ms Reynolds.’
He moves his notepad between his palms, aligning it precisely with the edge of his desk.
‘Now, I’ll take you through the possible diagnoses,’ he says.
I feel a quick warm surge of hope. I tell myself that he is the expert, this scented, immaculate man, and that now he is going to help us—to diagnose Sylvie and heal her.
‘As you know, I’ve been watching Sylvie play, and it’s really been very instructive. Given the history, one possible diagnosis would be Autistic Spectrum Disorder. And Sylvie does have some rigidity of behaviour and thought. But, against that, she has good eye contact and good communicative intent, which autistic children never have, and her fantasy play is excellent. Autistic children don’t play like Sylvie, they can’t create these rich symbolic worlds. Post-traumatic stress disorder would also be a possibility—but there’s no evidence in what you told me of any traumatic event. Though obviously something may have happened that you’re not aware of. Sometimes we don’t know our children quite as well as we think we do.’
‘I’m sure nothing happened,’ I say.
He ignores this.
‘Now, I’ve also been looking for signs of ADHD—but Sylvie’s attentional skills are really very good. She has absolutely no difficulty concentrating. Rather the reverse, in fact. I’d say her ability to focus is perhaps a little exceptional.’
Perhaps I should be pleased he sees these good qualities in her. But I feel my heart sink. I glance into the playroom, where she’s showing Katy her new pink boots and smiling. She’s being a perfect little girl—in that way she sometimes has, that seems too perfect, as though she’s acting the part. I’m willing her to get upset, so that he will see.
‘So my diagnosis would be a phobic disorder, possibly caused by a constitutional vulnerability in Sylvie, and triggered by some unknown environmental event. And though she quite clearly doesn’t fulfil the diagnostic criteria for Autistic Spectrum Disorder, she does have a mild impairment of social and interpersonal functioning. Perhaps made worse by the fact that there are certain issues around your parenting of her.’
I wonder what he is going to say about me. I feel a dull, heavy ache in my chest.
He leans towards me, his fingertips pressed together in mock prayer.
‘There was something that concerned me, when I saw the two of you play.’ His voice is intimate, confiding. ‘I noticed that she doesn’t call you Mum or Mummy. And I wondered why you’d objected to that?’
‘It was Sylvie’s decision,’ I tell him.
A picture slides into my mind. Sylvie is two, and we’re in the garden by the mulberry tree. I kneel in front of her, cradling her face in my hands. Sweetheart, I want you to call me Mum. That’s what children do, that’s what Lennie calls her mother… She turns away from me, her silk hair shading her face. No, Grace.
‘She’s never called me Mum,’ I say.
Doubt flickers over his face. I know he doesn’t believe this.
‘You see, what concerns me here is your rather weak boundary-setting. That there isn’t a clear enough boundary between yourself and your child. That’s so important for successful parenting. Sylvie needs to know you’re the adult, that you’re the one in charge. It’s not so healthy for children to feel their parent is their best friend.’