Blue Monday

Chapter Twenty-one

As Frieda was paying the cab driver, she saw Josef standing in her doorway.

‘What are you doing here?’ she said. ‘You don’t have a standing invitation, you know. You can’t just turn up whenever you feel like company.’

As if in explanation, he held up a bottle. ‘It is good vodka,’ he said. ‘Can I come in?’

Frieda unlocked the door. ‘How long have you been here?’

‘I just waited. I thought maybe you come back.’

‘I’m not going to sleep with you. I’ve had a fucking awful day.’

‘No sleeping.’ Josef looked reproachful. ‘Just a drink.’

‘I could do with a drink,’ said Frieda.

While Josef lit the fire in the grate, Frieda rummaged in the back of a cupboard and found a packet of crisps. She emptied them into a bowl. She brought it through with two small glasses. The fire was already crackling. As she came into the room, she saw Josef before he knew she was back. He was staring into the flames with a different expression from the smile he’d greeted her with.

‘Are you sad, Josef?’

He looked round. ‘Far away,’ he said.

‘Why don’t you go home?’

‘Next year, maybe.’

Frieda sat down. ‘Do we need juice with this?’

‘Good on its own,’ he said. ‘For the taste.’

He unscrewed the top and delicately filled the two glasses to within a couple of millimetres of the rim. He handed one to Frieda. ‘Drink the first one all at once,’ he said.

‘I think I’d like that.’

They both tossed the drink back. Josef gave a slow grin. Frieda picked up the bottle and looked at the label. ‘Christ,’ she said. ‘What is it?’

‘Russian,’ he said. ‘But good.’ He refilled their glasses. ‘What was bad in your day?’

Frieda took another sip of Josef’s vodka. It stung the back of her throat and then it spread hot through her chest. She told Josef about sitting on Olivia’s bathroom floor as Chloë knelt with her face over the lavatory, retching and heaving, even when there was nothing left to vomit out. Frieda hadn’t spoken much, just leaned across and gently touched her on the back of her neck. Afterwards she had wiped Chloë’s face with a cold flannel.

‘I didn’t know what to say. I just kept thinking what it would be like, when you’re sick and you’re vomiting, to have some older woman lecture you about drinking sensibly. So I didn’t say anything.’

Josef didn’t answer. He just looked into his glass of vodka as if there was a faint light in the centre of it and he needed all his concentration to see it. Frieda found it comforting to talk to someone who wasn’t trying to be clever or funny or reassuring. So then she told him about her visit to Alan. To her own astonishment, she heard herself telling Josef how she had previously gone to the police about him.

‘What do you think?’ Frieda asked.

Very slowly, with a care that had now become exaggerated, Josef filled her glass once again. ‘What I think,’ he said, ‘is that you shouldn’t think about it. It’s better not to think about things too much.’

Frieda sipped at the drink. Was this the third glass? Or the fourth? Could it be the fifth? Or had Josef been topping up the drinks so that it didn’t really count as separate drinks but instead one sort of elasticated drink that gradually grew? She was just starting to agree with the idea of not thinking when her phone rang. She was so surprised by what she had been about to say that she let it ring several times.

Josef looked puzzled. ‘You don’t answer?’

‘All right, all right.’ Frieda took a deep breath. She didn’t feel entirely clear-headed. She picked up the phone. ‘Hello.’

‘I love you.’

‘Who is this?’

‘How many women ring you up to say they love you?’

‘Chloë?’

‘I do love you, although you’re so stern and cold.’

‘Are you still drunk?’

‘Do I have to be drunk to tell you I love you?’

‘I tell you what, Chloë, you should go to bed and sleep it off.’

‘I’m in bed. I feel dreadful.’

‘Stay there. Drink lots of water through the night, even if it makes you feel sicker. I’ll call tomorrow.’ She put the phone down and pulled an exasperated face at Josef.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It’s good. You fix things. You are like me. Two days ago a woman rings me, someone I worked for. She is screaming. I get to her house. There is water bursting from a pipe like a fountain. There is five centimetres of water in her kitchen. She is still screaming. It’s just a simple valve. I turn the valve, I drain the water. That is you. There is an emergency, they phone you, you rush in and rescue them.’

‘I wish I was,’ said Frieda. ‘I’d like to be the person who knew what to do when someone’s boiler had broken or their car wasn’t working. That’s the sort of expertise that really makes things better. You’re the person who fixes the leaking pipe. I’m the person who’s hired by the company who made the pipe to come along and try to persuade the screaming patient not to sue them.’

‘No, no,’ said Josef. ‘Don’t say that. You’re being self … self …’

‘Conscious.’

‘No.’

‘Sabotaging.’

‘No,’ said Josef, waving his hands around as if he was trying to act out the meaning of the words he couldn’t find. ‘You are saying, “I am bad”, so that I say, “No, you are good, you are very good.” ’

‘Maybe,’ said Frieda.

‘Don’t just agree,’ said Josef. ‘You should argue.’

‘I’m too tired. I’ve had too many vodkas.’

‘I am working with your friend Reuben,’ said Josef.

‘He’s not necessarily my friend.’

‘Strange man. But he talks about you. I am learning about you.’

Frieda gave a shudder. ‘Reuben knew me best ten years ago. I was different then. How is he?’

‘I am making his house better.’

‘That’s good,’ said Frieda. ‘That’s probably what he needs.’

‘Do you want to tell me why it was so urgent to see me?’

Sasha Wells was in her mid-twenties. She was dressed in dark trousers and a jacket that seemed designed to disguise the shape of her body. Even so, and even though her dirty blonde hair was dishevelled, and she kept running her fingers through it, pushing strands out of her eye even when they weren’t in her eye, and though she was just a bit too thin, and though the fingers of her left hand were stained from cigarette smoking, and though she wouldn’t meet Frieda’s gaze except to give an ingratiating half-smile, her beauty was obvious. But her large dark eyes seemed to be apologizing for it. She made Frieda think of an injured animal, but the kind of animal that reacts to being injured not by fighting back but by curling up and retreating. Neither of them spoke for some time. Sasha was fidgeting with her hands. Frieda was tempted to let her have a cigarette. She was clearly desperate for one.

‘My friend Barney has a friend called Mick who says you’re great. That I can trust you.’

‘You can say anything you like,’ said Frieda.

‘All right,’ said Sasha, but so quietly that Frieda had to lean forward to make her out.

‘I take it you’ve already been seeing a therapist.’

‘Yes. I was seeing someone called James Rundell. I think he’s quite famous.’

‘Yes,’ said Frieda. ‘I’ve heard of him. How long have you been seeing him for?’

‘About six months. Maybe a bit more. I started just after I got my job.’ She pushed her hair away from her face, then let it fall forward again. ‘I’m a scientist, a geneticist. I like my work, and I have good friends, but I was stuck in a rut and I couldn’t seem to get out of it.’ She gave a little grimace that only made her more beautiful. ‘Bad relationships, you know. I was letting myself get messed around a bit.’

‘So why are you here?’

There was a long pause.

‘It’s difficult,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how to say it.’

Suddenly Frieda felt that she knew what was coming. She thought of that feeling when you stand on the platform of an underground station when a train is coming. Before you hear anything, before you see the light at the front of the train, you feel a breath of warm air on your face, you see a piece of scrap paper flap around. Frieda knew what Sasha was going to say. She did something she couldn’t ever remember having done before in a therapy session. She stood up, stepped closer to Sasha and put her hand on the young woman’s shoulder.

‘It’s OK,’ she said. Then she sat back down. ‘You can say anything here. Anything.’

At the end of the fifty minutes, Frieda arranged a further session with Sasha. She took down a couple of phone numbers and an email address. She sat in silence for a few minutes. Then she made a phone call. Then another, longer, one; then a third. When she had finished, she put on a short leather jacket and walked briskly out and across to Tottenham Court Road. She hailed a taxi and gave an address that she had jotted down on the back of an envelope. The taxi made its way through the streets north of Oxford Street, then along Bayswater Road and south through Hyde Park. Frieda was looking out of the window but she wasn’t really paying attention. When the taxi drew to a halt, she realized she hadn’t been concentrating and that she had no real idea where she was. It was a part of the city she barely knew. She paid the driver and got out. She was standing outside a small bistro-style restaurant in what was otherwise a largely residential street of white stucco houses. The restaurant had small baskets of flowers hanging from the eaves. In summer people would be eating outside, but it was too cold for that today, even for Londoners.

Frieda stepped inside and was hit by the warmth, the low hum of talk. It was a small place with no more than a dozen tables. A man came over, wearing a striped apron.

‘Madame?’ he said.

‘I’m here to see someone,’ she said, looking around the room. What if he wasn’t there? What if she didn’t recognize him? There he was. She’d seen him at a couple of conferences, and in photographs accompanying an interview in a magazine. He was sitting in the far corner with a woman. They were apparently on their main course and deep in conversation. She walked across the room and stood by the table. He looked round. He was dressed in dark trousers and a beautiful shirt, a black and white pattern that shimmered. He had very short dark hair and was just slightly unshaven.

‘Dr Rundell?’ Frieda said.

He got up from his chair. ‘Yes?’ he said.

‘My name’s Frieda Klein.’

He looked puzzled. ‘Frieda Klein. Yes, I’ve heard of you but …’

‘I’ve just been talking to a patient of yours. Sasha Wells.’

He still looked puzzled, but also wary. ‘What do you mean?’

Frieda had never hit anyone before. Not really. Not with her fist, not using the full weight of a punch. It caught him right on the jaw and he fell backwards, across his own table, bringing it down on top of him with the food and the wine and the water and the bottles of oil and vinegar. Even Frieda, standing over him, panting, her blood humming in her ears, was startled by the havoc she had caused.

As he stepped through the door of the interview room, Detective Chief Inspector Karlsson tried to force his features into a frown.

‘When you get your phone call, it’s traditional to use it for your lawyer,’ he said. ‘Or your mother.’

Frieda glowered up at him. ‘You were the only person I could think of,’ she said. ‘On the spur of the moment.’

‘You mean, in the heat of battle,’ said Karlsson. ‘How’s your hand?’

Frieda held up her right hand. It was wrapped in a bandage but some spots of blood had started to show through.

‘It’s not like in the movies, is it? When you punch someone, they don’t just get up. It damages them and it damages you.’

‘How is he?’ asked Frieda.

‘Nothing’s broken,’ said Karlsson. ‘No thanks to you. But he’s got one hell of a set of bruises and they’re going to look even worse tomorrow and probably even worse the day after.’ He leaned over and took hold of Frieda’s right hand. She flinched slightly. ‘Can you move your fingers?’ She nodded. ‘I’ve seen people shatter their knuckles with a punch like that.’ He gave her hand a little pat, which made her flinch again, and let it go. ‘And have you ever heard the expression about not kicking a man when he’s down? I understand that Dr Rundell is a fellow psychoanalyst. Is this how you settle your professional disagreements?’

‘If you’re here to charge me,’ said Frieda, ‘just get it over with.’

‘This isn’t my area,’ said Karlsson. ‘But I suppose that in normal circumstances you’d be facing a charge of actual bodily harm and criminal damage. I’m assuming – God knows why – that you’ve got a clean record. So you might get away with a month or so in Holloway.’

‘I’m happy to go to trial,’ said Frieda.

‘Well, sadly, I think you may be denied your day in court. I’ve just been talking to the arresting officer and apparently Dr Rundell is very insistent on not pressing charges. My colleague is not a happy man. He’s not happy at all.’

‘What about the restaurant?’

‘Indeed,’ said Karlsson. ‘I’ve even seen the photographs. You know, in the past when I’ve encountered crime scenes of this kind, when the victim has refused to press charges, it’s usually involved gang intimidation of some kind. Is there something you’re not telling us?’ His attempt to suppress a smile now failed. ‘Drug deal gone wrong?’

‘It’s a private matter.’

‘And even then,’ said Karlsson, ‘I’ve never heard of the victim insisting on paying for all the damage himself.’ He paused. ‘You’re not the kind of person I’d expect to be arrested for brawling in public. And now you don’t seem to be particularly happy that you’ve escaped the sort of thing that most people would be afraid of, you know, like being put on trial and convicted and sent to prison, that sort of thing.’

‘I’m not bothered,’ said Frieda.

‘You’re a hard one,’ he said. Then his expression changed. ‘Is there something I should know about this? Something criminal?’

Frieda shook her head.

‘What’s he been up to, then?’ said Karlsson. ‘Sleeping with his patients?’

Frieda’s expression didn’t change.

‘I can’t condone this,’ said Karlsson. ‘This isn’t Sicily.’

‘I don’t care whether you condone it or not.’

‘You were the one who rang me.’

Frieda’s expression softened. ‘You’re right,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry. And thank you.’

‘I’ve come to say that you can go and, in fact, to give you a lift back – but look,’ he said, a little desperately. ‘What would the world be like if everyone settled things like this?’

Frieda stood up. ‘What is the world like?’ she said.