The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  So, yes, I found her a disturbing creature, whatever her willowy, dark-eyed allure. And having seen her and had my cordial drink, I was ready to leave. It was then she drew me aside and said it to me, whispered, into my ear, something I remember as utterly, sickeningly foul – insane, even.

  So why have I told no one else this? Because it sounds deranged. Because I still don’t quite believe it happened. Because those same offensive words of hers – even their sense and import – have just evaporated from my memory, like breath off a mirror’s surface.

  I left Robert’s thereafter, I know I did. That was the sum of our interaction that night. And yet, madly, I retain some image in my head – fractured, no relation to anything else – of Vukovara’s body, naked – her having exposed herself in some manner. White thighs, dark mound, belly, breast, the sight of them somehow malign.

  All of these feelings are weighing on me, oppressing me. What do they amount to, really, but superstition? And still, inside, everything hammers and resonates and tells me – she, Vukovara, is behind all of this. She has to be. Of course she is.

  Part II

  CAUSES OF DEATH

  12

  Dr Hartford’s Journal

  The mask

  September 5th

  Graveyard shift again – silence nested in the grounds and premises, shadows scampering over the walls – I pace the office floor, Goran knocks to find me burning the lamp. Tonight I sent him off more curtly than normal: it’s just I so badly need these hours to pick over the bones of my near-grotesque session with Eloise. For the first time, I have to wonder – what she has truly felt previously, what she feels now, whether it’s beyond my reach – or just contrary to my wishes.

  I played by the rule-book, conscious that last time I had carried on like a blundering amateur. Yet we began the session by revisiting the end of the last: we had to try to process this business of her imagined response to Flint’s attention, this shame she harbours over what she sees as the treacherous nature of her body. I wanted her to see the degree to which she’d been robbed of control, urged her toward the positive thought: ‘I wasn’t passive, I did my best.’ But Eloise was not happy with that. It was if she was being animated by some rebellious spirit.

  EK: Why should I stop feeling how I feel because you try to wave a wand? After all these years … what if I’m right to have ‘negative feelings’?

  SH: Eloise, I only ask you to think about it. That not everything happened just as you believe you see it now. Don’t endow the child you were with adult consciousness, adult freedom of choice. You went with Flint because you had no reason but to trust him. Not because you anticipated what would happen. You didn’t want to be there, you didn’t want to do those things, Flint knew that, it’s why he took you there, isolated you from your bearings. How else could he have possibly pretended it was normal or right?

  EK: Maybe it was the wrongness of it that I— embraced …

  […]

  SH: Eloise?

  EK: Sorry, I’m thinking of something else.

  SH: From the woods?

  EK: No. Yes. Different woods. This was a few years ago. A traveller guy, in his caravan. In Epping Forest. There was a free party and I was— procuring some ‘entertainment’ for some friends of mine. His place, it was just squalor, and he talked to me like I was this posh tart he’d lured back to his den of iniquity. He was loving it. And I had— an odd moment. It was like the clocks stopped. And I thought, if I had to, if I was forced to— I could move in here, yeah, we’d manage, him and me. We’d be travellers together. I could let loose of who I am. There was something in my stomach. Like butterflies in a hollow.

  SH: Butterflies like excitement? Or nausea? Fear?

  EK: What it was … The way he spoke to me, it was like he wanted to lead me down, into another world. And I do think part of me did want to go there. It was like standing over a deep, dark hole – made my head spin, but still – part of me did want to step off and just fall.

  SH: But you didn’t.

  EK: Shack up with the crusty? No. I bought his drugs, got the hell out of there. I couldn’t see a future for us …

  SH: Why do you think you thought of that now?

  EK: Because of the base wrongness of something. It has an allure. Pulling me in. Do you understand? Like your friend Doctor Forrest.

  […]

  SH: I’m sorry, do you want to talk to me about Robert?

  EK: Can I? Is that okay? Because there’s a dark man for you. A man with a black hole inside. Kept it well masked, I should say. Not ‘the doctor’, no, he was sweet reason personified. Sort of man you’d let take a knife to your face … I remember my stay-over night at his clinic, the recovery suite – I woke up the next morning in all that whiteness and I thought it was the pearly gates. He was sitting by my bed. Those eyes of his, his little half-smile. And he quoted some Baudelaire. ‘Comme les anges à l’oeil fauve, je reviendrai dans ton alcôve …’ How could I fall for that? But he did just strike me as romantic, somehow, in a brooding sort of a way. And brilliant, obviously. I just had this feeling he might be a new kind of man for me. Older and wiser. Improving, maybe. That was a joke as it turned out. You’d have to say I can pick them … Should I go on? Tell you when I met the real Forrest?

  […]

  EK: Okay. He called me a week after I checked out. ‘Aftercare’, right? I said, sure, come over. I was nervous, so I rolled a grass joint. And when he turned up, I offered him a toke. Thought it might give me the upper hand. Well, he burnt through that without a flinch, and I got wasted … Then he just lifted me and carried me upstairs … Sent me flowers the next day. Never called, though. Days went by, he didn’t call, so I gave in and called him. He told me to drive over to Artemis Park. I didn’t really think twice. That was a … nasty little transaction.

  SH: Nasty how?

  EK: I got there, his door was open, lights off. So I tiptoed in, called hello, no answer. I reached his dining room and he was just sitting there, silent, in the dark, wearing this black mask – he uses them at his clinic, they’re leather—

  SH: I know what you mean.

  EK: Right. So you can imagine. Then he stands up, walks toward me with his hand out like he’s going to seize my throat, and I— freaked, I ran, but he came after me, cornered me, forced me up the stairs backwards— and I still couldn’t say if it was a game or if I— really had to get away from him, you know? When we did it he had his hands round my throat. Intense. But it didn’t hurt.

  […]

  EK: After that it went by steps, really. Steps leading down. I’d call him. He’d tell me to drive over to his. Dracula’s castle …

  SH: Did you never feel like saying no?

  EK: Sometimes – if I could tell he’d been drinking his whiskey. But I’d go. I knew I’d rather see him than not. He made me feel like leaving the house, not just sitting there crying. Sometimes I’d stand at the foot of his stairs and think, ‘Should I go up?’ But I did. Kept going, until he told me not to come back.

  […]

  SH: I’m sorry, Eloise, I hadn’t thought you were quite so besotted by Robert.

  EK: Was I? I don’t know. You have to understand, he was such a mix – kindness and cruelty, any given day I never knew who I’d meet. It’s true, I bought him a bracelet – a token. He bought me scads of things, beautiful clothes, an amazing Jil Sander dress – which he then tore. But he would instruct me, what to wear, how I should do my hair. This bob, it was his idea. He liked to watch me dress in this closet room he’s got. Sometimes he’d bathe me, just sit there lathering my hair while I wittered on about my boring day or whatever. In bed he would – tie me up, wrists and ankles. I was usually too aroused to care. He was very talented. And I did as I was told.

  […]

  EK: So, do you understand? I have to ask myself, Steven, if this is not my nature.

  SH: Eloise, please listen, I have to ask you how long you’re going to punish yourself for something you didn’t do.

&
nbsp; EK: How am I doing that?

  SH: By this … painful submissive behaviour. I wish I could make you see just how desperately, desperately sorry it makes me feel. How long are you going to keep on warding off the people in life who actually want to care for you?

  EK: And who are they?

  […]

  EK: Steven, I can’t just ‘accentuate the positive’. It’s not enough for me to just think it, I’d have to be someone other than who I am.

  SH: You think ‘who you are’ is so set in stone?

  EK: Well, what have I ever done with my life? How have I carried on? Same old, always.

  SH: Is how you’ve ‘carried on’ made you happy?

  EK: No. So I’m here, in this room. But who’s happy anyway? The few times I’ve thought I felt it were just moments. And they flew away so fast I felt sick.

  SH: Can you consider— that you’re choosing to be cursed? Fulfilling your own prophecy? Isn’t it that you actually might just need to learn something new in your life? Be responsible for your situation, take responsibility for yourself …?

  I realise I had grown somewhat irate, but her story had been a hard thing to sit through, for all that elements of it were clearly ‘performance’. The insight she offered into Robert was, of course, dismal – but then one could have suspected as much without knowing. And the greater her insistence on her own depravity, the more plaintive her insecurity.

  With the session derailed and clearly unsalvageable, I had to get us back to some place of good order. A solution came to me hurriedly. I told her to forget writing up her workbook that night; asked her to write something else – a letter, addressed to her 13-year-old self, authoress of the ‘violet diary’. She groaned, bashed the chair, asked what on earth would be the point of that? Quietly, trying to make each word resonate, I told her I would have thought a girl of that age, so lonely and confused, would be in need of a friend, someone to comfort her and reassure her, show her that somebody understood.

  ‘You could say how sorry you are for what she was subjected to. That it’s all right to feel scared, hurt. But she’s not alone, doesn’t have to bear it alone. Because she’ll get through it. Because she has a friend …’

  Eloise was looking fixedly downward now, tugging at the hem of her skirt with gathering agitation.

  ‘You can tell her who you are now, the woman you’ve become, all that you’re trying to do. To help her.’

  ‘Oh Christ. What would she think of me …?’

  She looked up, her face wet. This time I stayed seated, let her cry until she was cried out. A vital emotion, this pity – vital for her to feel it fully, what the girl she was deserves. What the woman she is now must be reminded of. I am her friend, yes. She must also be a friend to herself.

  September 6th

  I will head home tonight: I expect Tessa to be back, and thus I can say I have thwarted Tregaskis’s prophecy.

  However poorly I may be functioning at present, whatever anyone may say, I know I controlled my temper with David today. And I was sorely pushed. But I resisted. Of course he now believes he has something on me, and so wasted the start of our session goading me about Eloise.

  DT: Come on, Steven. Wouldn’t you say she’s as shallow as a puddle? Spoiled? Annoying? Bit of a dumb blonde object?

  SH: No. And I don’t know why you would. People come here with serious problems, people like yourself, who need help.

  DT: She needs something, yes. A bit of self-improvement …

  I managed to shift onto the front foot, get him on the defensive, by turning the topic to his own recidivism in respect of Blakedene – how many more stays here he believed would be right and proper for him. Did he not feel the pull to have a normal life? He was rattled.

  DT: Steven, whatever you think, I’ve no desire or intention to be turned into some salary-man, some cunt with a mortgage and a new car and a meaningless job.

  SH: David … all I want is that you at least think about doing something with your life – that would make you feel usefully engaged with other people.

  DT: Maybe I don’t fit in that way. Some ‘useful’ idiot. Maybe it’s my job to preach, pave the way for something greater, whatever this world says. Be a vassal that way, for truth and revelation. Not a walking poster for this tenth-rate world and its values. You don’t get it, do you? What you think you see out there – is not real. Little children can see that. I told you, I knew when I was 4. You see it in people, their eyes, doesn’t matter how old they are. They know. They just know. Your secretary, Niamh?

  SH: Ms Dwyer. What about her?

  DT: She has a daughter.

  SH: How do you know?

  DT: I saw her this morning. I was on the terrace, I saw Niamh’s husband dropping her off, her little girl climbed out of the car to kiss her goodbye. Then she saw me, the girl, she looked up and right at me. For a long time, Steven. She knows, I can tell.

  SH: I’m sorry? Knows what?

  DT: Come on … How many more times? That ‘this’ isn’t this, ‘that’ isn’t that, ‘you’ aren’t you, or me or they.

  SH: I see. The issue you’re raising is, of course, one of the core questions of philosophy.

  DT: Yep. From when we were all in caves.

  SH: And little Kate Dwyer, you feel she shares your view on this matter?

  DT: We don’t ‘share’ anything. Not yet. That’s the problem. How do you suppose me and little Kate could truly commune?

  The wilful flicker of menace in his eyes at that point, I found objectionable. But it wasn’t his hostility so much as the creeping clock that had me on my feet, proposing we adjourn. David didn’t want to leave.

  DT: Steven, you know I value your company. My room, I’ve told you, I’m— wary, of being alone there. The presence, it can be very strong.

  SH: The presence being – Roisin Slaney? Master Ravenscourt?

  DT: No, no, that’s not it, you know. You must feel some of it, the aura that’s settled on this place, even more in just these last weeks? Don’t tell me you can’t feel it when you’re sleeping alone in this office damn near every night.

  SH: David – I sleep in my bed, at home.

  DT: Don’t lie. Not tonight. Tonight you’re sleeping right here where I’m sitting. ‘Your bed at home’ will be cold as the grave. That’s not a home, Steven. What do your children think? Your wife?

  At this point the transcribing software could not adequately render the noise that burst forth from Tregaskis: a loud, harsh, feigned laughter, whereupon he broke into song – lustily, a prodigious sound from out of his chest, and as he sang his eyes twinkled, eyebrows vaulted in mischief. I, at least, understood every word.

  O! Che caro galantuomo!

  Vuol star dentro colla bella!

  Ed io far la sentinella …

  Had we time, were I not so put out of patience, I could have asked Tregaskis if he’d ever seen – even performed in – Don Giovanni. As it was, he now strolled from the room as if in peace.

  September 7th

  The house is quiet again. Tessa, having swept in last night, relieving/debriefing her ragged parents, has now whipped the boys away for the afternoon. Nothing to do with my wishes, but presumably a consequence of our having argued vituperatively last night. The inciting incident seems trivial now, if only because of the bizarre way it all came to an end.

  Large glasses of wine didn’t dissolve the tension between us. She wasn’t happy with the reports she’d had of my absence from the house, for all she must have expected as much. She had no interest in or sympathy for my work stories – considers me blind to my professional obsessions. I told her I might say the same of her. The same old rewind of the tape.

  Under questioning she told me nothing of the conference proceedings, only, with a prideful look, of how much she’d enjoyed a student production of Don Giovanni some of the delegates had attended. The coincidence was freakish, I admit, but what really flabbergasted me was this sudden interest of hers in a passion of mine she’s pre
viously viewed with indifference.

  ‘Would you have gone to that with me?’, I demanded.

  ‘Oh you’d never have asked, Steven. Opera for you is what you play in your car. Alone, in your own universe.’

  My eyes were drawn to her hand as it twitched on the kitchen worktop, fingers tracing the edge of the heavy glass ashtray, as if she might suddenly lift and swing it at me. The silence was intolerably fraught. But then the telephone rang, four rings, we glancing from each other’s hard eyes to the black handset, until the cut-off and Tessa’s familiar discouraging message. Then the crackle of the other end, heavy breath and clunking fumbles, the clear semaphore of someone all at sea on a tide of booze.

  ‘Ah Tessa – sweet Tessa, Tessa babes. It’s so late and I’m so lonely.’ An Irish voice, young, clotted by whiskey. ‘But I just had a powerful need to hear a friendly voice – from the old country. So please, would you ever get on the end of this fucken line?’

  ‘Pick it up,’ I gestured to Tessa.

  ‘Are you mad? You pick it up. It’s scaring me.’