The Possessions of Doctor Forrest Read online

  ‘So you’re immune.’

  ‘Naw, naw,’ he said, pounding a fist on his evidently stiff right shoulder. ‘Never said such. In fact, all things considered, I’d not rule out the odds of a total blockage in the left anterior descending. The “widow-maker”.’ He chuckled. ‘But, sure, you cannae stop what’s coming down the pipe.’

  ‘I think Livy and Cal would like you to muddle along to at least retirement age, Grey. Maybe a while longer.’

  ‘Retirement, Stevie? I am needed. Not long now, but. Five, six years tops. Anyhow I’m not as bad as the cardiacs, or the micro guys working their fingers arthritic from dawn to midnight.’

  ‘Nonetheless. You work, what, fifty hours a week? Not counting the on-calls? Taking all your factors into account – you might want to look to your lifestyle.’

  ‘Aye, well, come that cold day in hell then I’ll do as you ask. For Christ’s sake, Steve, you’re not even a real Scot, however did you get so bloody Calvinist?’

  It does irk me, Grey’s occasional wrapping of himself in the saltire, a flag of convenience beneath which I, born of Romney Marsh, may not stand. He does it as and when it suits him – he and Robert both, their accents are usually mere lilts, the posh Scots of London. But this morning he laid it on thick. I was taking it lightly until I saw his genuinely sour face. Since he had plonked himself down on the grass with his fag, I joined him.

  ‘You know, I used to enjoy these wee runs of ours, Steven, but they’re getting to be a bloody bore, and I think it’s something to do with your womanish bloody fixation on my health. I know you “care” and that, big man, but let a fellow go to hell his own sweet way, eh?’

  There was a familiar edge on that word ‘care’ that I didn’t care for. Grey knows full well that I associate his poisonous, clogging tobacco and booze intake with Robert, and the undergraduate manner in which they’ve so long carried on.

  ‘Sorry. You want to talk about Robert, then?’

  And Grey looked to his toecaps then back at me, nodding as to say that, yes, we were as well to get down to the real business. ‘I’ve been asked to go see this Hagen fellow,’ he said finally. ‘At Robert’s place. Find out what they’re doing about finding him, I suppose. Or not, as it may be.’

  ‘Right. Yes. Hagen called me the other day.’

  Grey’s brow furrowed, and he gave me a grilling of his own, clearly assuming I had pumped the detective for information. Since I had not, he seemed peeved at both of us. I will get to the bottom of this – so said the set of his chin. He brooded a little, then turned back to me.

  ‘Listen, I’ve begun to have – oh I don’t know – a few doubts, I would say, about Killian MacCabe …’

  He told me how Malena had summoned him to the aftermath of some marital dispute, where he found Killian heavily drunken and threatening, ‘singing shanties to himself’. It did indeed sound like a grim domestic scene, as would make mine look tame, and yet not the worst account I’d heard of a ‘creative’ temperament.

  ‘Grey,’ I said, ‘he can’t be the first Irishman you’ve met who’s come on all heavy after ten big belts of whiskey.’

  ‘Aye, but this … it seemed way out of character.’

  ‘How well do you know MacCabe? From one or two house calls? What are you saying, anyway? You think he knows something about Robert? Did something to Robert? You can’t think that, surely? Robert maybe had cause to do him an injury. But not vice versa?’

  ‘I don’t know. He made … innuendoes. Said things I thought were queer. He was drunk, aye, but … he just made it sound like he knew for a fact that Robert’s six feet under. And that he wasn’t too displeased.’

  ‘It’s not easy,’ I said, soothing. ‘The change from partner to partner? We all carry baggage into these things. Male pride’s a naturally occurring phenomenon, he wouldn’t be a man if he didn’t wonder. It’s the intimacy of rivals. And he could just be disconcerted, given how Malena must be feeling over Robert.’

  ‘She could do without him giving her all else to worry about. I called by again the next day, to check the lay of the land. His nibs wasn’t about. But Malena was giving me the brave face, I could tell.’

  His diligence surprised me. ‘How does Olivia feel about all these gallantries of yours for Malena? All these house calls.’

  ‘Livy’s not mad-pleased. But I’m not in the dog-house. Not as you are, Doctor Hartford …’ I didn’t care to discuss my domestic difficulties, but in any case Grey only shook my shoulder. ‘Thank god, Stevie, you and me are the marrying kind. Not of the divorcing classes …’

  We were wandering back along a well-worn track through the West Heath, silently admiring the plains of agreeably unkempt grass and the good rosy morning glow in the treetops, when we saw, at the same time and plain as day, two lithe young men flitting through the trees, near identical in their shaved heads and denims, close together and conspiratorial – thieves of love.

  Grey raised one bushy eyebrow. ‘The last of the boys of summer, eh? By God, they’ve had an early start. Or been at it all night.’

  ‘I’ve a story in that line, actually.’ Grey only grunted, still a little distracted. ‘Yes, I was out walking here around dusk a few weeks back.’

  ‘Spying on our homosexual brethren, were you? Or escaping from your family?’

  I let that slide. ‘I could be wrong, but I was almost sure I saw Robert. With a woman.’

  ‘What bloody woman?’ Grey’s humour had flown.

  ‘Well, it was back there, I say I can’t be sure because it was late, the moon was pretty thin, and I wasn’t dallying. But I made out a fellow sat on the bench, and a woman stood behind him, in a black coat – but bent down, with her head to his neck – like she was whispering sweet nothings in his ear. An intimate look to it, anyway. And when she straightened up I thought the chap could have been Robert. But I wasn’t going to hang about to find out.’

  Grey stared at me. ‘You’ve kept that bloody quiet, Steven.’

  ‘I meant to say, but it slipped my mind …’ This was the God’s honest. ‘I don’t know why I forgot until just now. Will you believe me?’

  He nodded, rather darkly. ‘Oh I do. Describe her, the woman.’

  I had to risk a chuckle. ‘That’s the thing of it. I saw her face clearer than the man’s, but nothing of it stuck with me. Just that she was a beauty, probably. Dark, I’d say, the hair? Pale skin.’ Grey still nodding, still grimly mute. I had to ask. ‘You’ve a notion who she might be?’

  He grimaced. ‘Ach, who the hell’s to say? But you told Hagen, right? About her?’

  ‘Dad’ had me bang to rights at last. ‘I didn’t, no. Really, just because I’d forgotten about it altogether ’til this minute. I know it sounds mad. It was probably to do with being back in this same spot …’

  I wasn’t lying, odd as I know it sounded, but Grey and I scarcely spoke again before we parted ways on Wildwood Road. Still, he embraced me there, we wished each other well as ever.

  Back home Tessa was readying the boys for nursery drop, not inclined to caresses. Rather, she picked her moment to tell me that as of tomorrow she’ll be away for three nights at some scholarly conference in Cambridge. I was torn between stupefaction and relief, since now it can hardly be argued that I am the sole partner remiss in their duty. She has arranged for her parents to move in and manage the boys. ‘You’ll be crashing at Blakedene, I expect,’ she told me while addressing her compact. As if I would shirk my chores. I know for a fact she will enjoy the nights away from me – the book-chat, shared drinks and meals, all the things we used to enjoy together and now prefer to do separately.

  She even frogmarched the boys over to give me compulsory hugs, as if I were the one pissing off in the week before they start Big School. Their matching sweaters and doleful faces tugged at my heart. We’re both to blame, we fell into that ‘identical’ trap – not wanting to favour one, even unconsciously, so tending to buy them similar. (We should have named them better too, why the hell did we f
all for that alliterative thing?) They certainly know the difference, otherwise they wouldn’t bore and rile one another so. They’re still so young, of course, but they seem younger – a sort of toddler clumsiness, forever stepping across or barging into one another. Or maybe it’s some muted, inchoate competitiveness, each trying to occupy the exact same space? There are certain traits they share: they’re not wholly incapable of playing together. But Julian is so much his brother’s shadow. He wouldn’t want for friends quite so badly if he only liked me a little better.

  I can’t just sit and play the wronged party. I must, must make proper time for us all, block out the diary in black marker. We’ll go to Dungeness. It’s mad we let the cottage lie unused. Possibly Tessa and I both know, it reminds us of a moment before children, when we were sufficiently wrapped in each other, capable of being silly, certainly of seeing more things in life as possible, desirable. But in buying a family holiday place where we’d first weekended à deux we were guilty of glancing backward. Nature trails for the kids! we thought. But the boys haven’t warmed to the strange terrain. We might have done better with a caravan in Camber Sands. But then did I make the effort to involve and stimulate them? Did Tessa? These are the things we must reckon. It will all start come their half-term. I’ll make the plans tomorrow.

  September 3rd

  When I walked back into the mayhem tonight Tessa’s mother must have seen in my eye I was in no shape to chat. I did manage to read the twins a story, one about a self-pitying goblin who felt himself unjustly maligned for his incumbent need to gobble up little children. I’d begun to feel a tad sorry for the creature myself, when I realised that both boys had turned their heads, sought their pillows instead.

  Today’s session with Eloise proved distressing for her, but also for me. I will persevere with the optical therapy but it was an inauspicious start. Maybe I should have read the entrails better. When I collected her from the library I found her tense, dressed as for a job interview: pin-stripe shirt with a white collar, a suede skirt, hair brushed, face made up. Worse, David Tregaskis was browbeating her from the leather armchair opposite. They had been ‘discussing’ world politics, David confiding his ambition to enlist with Al-Qaeda, an organisation he considers insufficiently intrepid on the simple level of physical bravery. (Typical David, not for him a place among the common herd, rather a leadership post ahead of others just as sociopathic as himself.) Eloise, to her credit, was unbothered (‘I’d have to take him seriously, he’d need to have half a brain …’) But our troubles began up in the office.

  She was visibly wary of the rig set up in the middle of the room: the light-bar behind my armchair, the special reclining seat opposite, flat black sensor pads on its hand-rests. Deprived of a cigarette her hands were soon all about her, coiling her hair, picking at the arm-rest. But I had the graceful rise and fall of Beethoven’s piano concerto #5 just audible as we prepared for what we would discuss.

  Her workbook has testified all too clearly, we had to return to the scene of the crime, her abuse by Marcus Flint. The single most distressing image she retains of the ordeal is a moment when Flint, after his own climax, rammed his fingers into her mouth. This brutally encapsulates her sense of having been dirtied, sullied. And yet still she believes she ‘let it happen’, can’t accept how inescapable were Flint’s predatory wiles, the adult’s advantage he had on her. When I propose alternative, more positive ways she might conceive of how brave and dreadfully unfortunate she was, she thinks this ‘silly, fake, wishful’.

  But once it was time to begin we agreed the emergency stop-signal: she would raise her right hand, make a fist. The room was cool, dark, still. I asked her to place her hands on the sensor pads, activated the alternating pulses, turned on the sound: a pulse, a sonic throb, gradually resolving to a note bouncing back and forth between the speakers on the walls. I shifted my chair, gave her full view of the light-bar, asked her to follow the blinking red-green dots as they passed rhythmically from right to left, a set of thirty pulses, two per second. I asked her to be thinking all the while about the distressing image and the positive thought: ‘It’s not my fault.’ Watching, I was struck as ever by the strangely meditative, hypnotic aura of this treatment: the subject following the lights and yet, gradually, discernibly, starting to drift a little through their own psyche.

  After the sets, though, Eloise reported no real change in her feelings. Rather, she returned repeatedly to how hard it was for her ‘not to feel dreadful about something I knew was wrong and did anyway’. I had to refute her assertion I was trying to ‘sell’ her something. But I was reminded again of the fatalism in her, a black and pessimistic strain.

  We resumed the bilateral stimulation. Suddenly Eloise had a sneezing fit. When I told her to relax, asked her to describe her feelings anew, she told me she had got confused: a new memory/feeling had arisen in her. I assured her (albeit warily) that this was natural, that we should follow all byways and try to resolve those too. She began to talk of efforts Flint had made to stimulate her – touches, caresses, whispers in her ear. None of it sounded so different from the story as I knew it. And yet she insisted, she believed he had wanted her ‘to feel something too’.

  I may have been irritated, felt her being overly opaque – wrongly. What, I demanded, had he wanted her to feel? How had she felt?

  But she had stopped, hung her blonde head, and now she raised her right hand, shakily, curled the fingers into a fist. I saw one perfect tear drop on the parquet floor. Her hands went to her face. ‘It’s rolling over me and I just can’t bear it,’ she said between gulps.

  I considered letting her distress play out, but it had gone beyond the pale, we couldn’t continue. I darted over, knelt beside her, put my arms round her – a hug of encouragement, of reassurance. She seemed to recover calm as I looked in her eyes for some moments. I reminded her of her relaxation techniques, comforted her back to an equilibrium.

  It is, of course, a painful but unavoidable element in certain experiences of abuse: yes, the victim may have felt extreme discomfort, helplessness, humiliation, fear. But the body, irrespective, can respond to stimulation. These sensations come unbidden, create complexity.

  Therapeutically speaking, I confess, I did everything wrong. I reacted too quickly. I am only dabbling in this technique, without qualification, trying tricks I’ve read in journals, improvising round an established process. But I was concerned for her; and having opened a patient up, one must be able to close the incision successfully rather than inflict some fresh trauma. My behaviour was not quite appropriate. All I can say in mitigation is that it had the right effect.

  No, the difficulty arises because of what happened next. I heard the door open, I did flinch, move back from Eloise, but then I only expected Niamh, who knows me better than most. Instead, framed in the door, a look on his face of black relish, was David Tregaskis. Niamh pushed by him then pushed him back out, apologised frantically, said he had simply refused to sit outside waiting his turn a moment longer. I know that’s what happened. But I saw – evidently by our faces we all felt – a sort of damage was done.

  11

  Dr Lochran’s Journal

  The looking-glass

  September 3rd

  Tonight I’m bone-weary and feeling bothersomely, non-specifically ‘unwell’. But sleep feels far off. Too much unease.

  This afternoon I drove to Robert’s apartment to meet Bill Hagen. I’d cried off my supervisions to give him the time he asked for, and by God he took it. Rashly I hoped for some reassurance out of him in return. Instead the effect of our ‘chat’ has been to stir up snakes in my head.

  Of course my mood was affected from the outset by the location. Gunning up the driveway of Artemis Park, past the sycamores and the signage for tennis courts, it struck me anew that some twerp of a banker might just about fool himself he’d bought into desirable luxury. The main building is splendid, yes, those cast stone details and the old Venetian Gothic campanile rising imperious. As I pa
rked I caught myself imagining as ever that the bloody bell was about to start tolling, however long it’s hung dormant – the shade of some Quasimodo, summoning the lunatics to vespers. Then I looked up to Robert’s windows and had the brief, disconcerting experience of seeing a man standing there behind the sun-spotted glass.

  I trudged up the stone stairs to the second floor, down the hall to Robert’s door, which stood open. Memory took my hand as I crossed the entrance hall, under the Venetian lanterns, over that fine rosewood floor in Bernese panels. His walking cane – my ill-advised gift – was jammed in the umbrella stand. The big reception was enjoying the light from that floor-to-ceiling bay (whereas Robert tended to keep his crimson drapes closed, bathing the space in uterine gloom). I never had any quarrel with the Victorian handsomeness of the space, the tall proportions, the exquisite mouldings. It was the hi-tech extrusions that made me shake my head – the manufactured mezzanine of bedroom suites overhead, Robert’s boudoir; and that Kraut kitchen with its custom cabinetry, temperature-controlled wine storage and other such shiny appliances of Kraut science.

  Through the doors to the dining room I found Hagen sitting pensive by the fireplace: 50-ish, lean-faced but solidly made, clearly no tubby desk-man. Unshaven, I couldn’t but notice, and the act of shoving his somewhat lank and silvery fringe aside from his eyes was clearly a tic with him, one he might cure by a call on a barber. On the long dinner table before him lay one of Robert’s blasted black masks; in his hand he toyed with a scalpel. Seeing me, his greeting was a nod. ‘Doctor Lochran. This is a hell of a thing to leave lying about, wouldn’t you say?’

  I took the blade off him, turned it under the light. ‘A number fifteen. Robert’s favoured tool. For when the incision wants a very controlled, artful sort of a curve.’

  ‘Artful?’