Blue Monday

Chapter Seven

On Friday afternoon Frieda was at the clinic again, collecting books from its little library for a talk she was going to give in a few weeks’ time. Most people had already gone home, but Paz was still there and beckoned her over.

Paz had only been at the Warehouse for six months. She had been brought up in London and spoke with an estuary accent, but her mother was from Andalucía and Paz herself was dark-haired, dark-eyed. She was intense and added a certain melodrama to the clinic, even on calm days. Now there was a sense of extra urgency about her.

‘I’ve been trying to call you,’ she said. ‘Did you talk to Reuben?’

‘You know I did. Why? What’s he done?’

‘First off, he simply didn’t turn up for his patients this afternoon. And I can’t get hold of him.’

‘That’s bad.’

‘There’s more. This patient.’ Paz looked at the paper in front of her. ‘He was in distress, having panic attacks, and he was sent to Reuben by his GP. It went badly. Really badly. He’s going to make an official complaint.’

‘What about?’

‘He says Reuben didn’t listen to a word he said.’

‘What does Reuben have to say about it?’

‘He’s said bloody nothing. He probably thinks he can get away with it. Maybe he can. But he’s messed this patient around. And he was angry. Very angry.’

‘It’ll probably sort itself out.’

‘That’s the thing, Frieda. Sorry to land this on you. But I sort of already persuaded him – Alan Dekker, I mean – not to do anything until he’d talked to you. I thought you could maybe take him on yourself.’

‘As a patient?’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh, God,’ said Frieda. ‘Can’t Reuben sort out his own disasters?’ Paz didn’t reply, just gave her a pleading look. ‘Have you talked to Reuben about this? I can’t just take his patient away.’

‘Kind of.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘It means that he isn’t really talking. But I gathered he wanted you to take him on. If you would.’

‘All right. All right. I can do an assessment, I guess.’

‘Tomorrow?’

‘Tomorrow’s Saturday. I can see him on Monday. Half past two at my place.’

‘Thanks, Frieda.’

‘In the meantime, check out Reuben’s schedule and think about transferring other patients as well.’

‘You think he’s that bad?’

‘Maybe Alan Dekker was just the first to notice.’

‘Reuben won’t like it.’

Every Friday, Frieda walked to Islington to visit her niece, Chloë. It wasn’t a social call: Chloë had just turned sixteen and would take her GCSEs in June, and Frieda was giving her extra tuition in chemistry, a subject that Chloë (who thought she might want to be a doctor herself) regarded with a mixture of loathing and rage, almost as if it were a person who was out to get her. It had been her mother Olivia’s idea, but Frieda had only agreed to it once Chloë herself had grudgingly committed herself to one hour each Friday afternoon, from four thirty to five thirty. She hadn’t always stuck to it. Once she hadn’t turned up at all (but only once, after Frieda’s reaction); quite often she slouched in late, banging her folders down on the kitchen table, among all the unwashed dishes and the piles of unopened bills, glaring at her aunt, who would ignore her moods.

Today they would be working through covalent bonding. Chloë hated covalent bonding. She hated ionic bonding. She hated the Periodic Table. She hated balancing equations. She abhorred converting mass into moles and vice versa. She sat opposite Frieda, her dark blonde hair hanging down over her face and the sleeves of her over-sized hoodie pulled over her hands so that only her fingers, with their black-painted nails, showed. Frieda wondered if she was hiding something. Nearly a year ago now, Olivia had rung Frieda up, hysterical, to say that Chloë was cutting herself. She did it with the blade from her pencil sharpener or the needle on her compasses. Olivia had only discovered because she’d opened the door of the bathroom and seen score marks over her daughter’s arms and thighs. Chloë had told her that it was nothing, she was making a stupid fuss, everyone did it, it didn’t do any harm. Anyway, it was all Olivia’s fault, because she didn’t understand what it was like to be her, the only child with a mother who treated her like a baby and a father who had run off with a woman not much older than his daughter. Disgusting. If that’s what it meant to be an adult, she never wanted to grow up. Then she’d locked herself into the bathroom and refused to come out – at which point Olivia called Frieda. Frieda had arrived and sat on the stairs outside the bathroom. She told Chloë that she was there if she wanted to talk, and would wait for an hour. Ten minutes before her time was up, Chloë emerged from the bathroom, her face swollen with weeping, new marks on her arms, which she’d shown to Frieda with an angry defiance: There, look what she made me go and do … They had talked – or, rather, Chloë had blurted out half-articulated sentences about the relief of running a blade over her skin and watching the bubbles of red form, her rage about her pathetic father and, oh, God, her drama queen of a mother, the revulsion she felt at her own adolescent, changing body. ‘Why do I have to go through this?’ she had wailed.

Frieda didn’t think Chloë cut herself any more, but she never asked. Now, she turned her gaze away from the pulled-down sleeves, the sullen set of her face, and concentrated on the chemistry.

‘When metals react with non-metals, what happens, Chloë?’

Chloë yawned loudly, her mouth opening wide.

‘Chloë?’

‘Dunno. Why do we have to do this on a Friday? I wanted to go into town with my friends.’

‘We’ve had this discussion before. They share electrons. We’ll start with single covalent bonding. Take hydrogen. Chloë?’

Chloë muttered something.

‘Have you heard a word I said?’

‘You said hydrogen.’

‘Right. Do you want to get out a notebook?’

‘Why?’

‘It helps to write things down.’

‘D’you know what Mum’s gone and done?’

‘No, I don’t. Paper, Chloë.’

‘Only joined a dating agency.’

Frieda closed the textbook and pushed it away from her. ‘You object?’

‘What do you think? Of course I object.’

‘Why?’

‘It’s pathetic, like she’s desperate for sex.’

‘Or she’s lonely.’

‘Huh. It’s not as if she lives all by herself.’

‘You mean, she’s got you?’

Chloë shrugged. ‘I don’t want to talk about it. You’re not my therapist, you know.’

‘OK,’ said Frieda, mildly. ‘Back to hydrogen. How many electrons does hydrogen have?’

‘You don’t care, do you? You don’t care one bit. My dad was right about you!’ Her voice wavered at the expression on Frieda’s face. She had learned by now that any mention of Frieda’s relationship to her family was forbidden, and for all her defiance she was in awe of her aunt and dreaded her disapproval. ‘One,’ she said sulkily. ‘It has one bloody electron.’