Blue Monday

Chapter Twenty-eight

Frieda had cancelled all her patients that morning but she was back in time for her afternoon sessions, including the one with Alan. As she walked to her office, she felt the smell of Dean Reeve’s house was still clinging to her: cigarette ash and cat shit. The day was closing in already. It was only three days from the shortest day of the year. The snow of the morning had turned to a sleety rain that melted in muddy rivulets on the road. Her feet were damp inside her boots and her skin felt raw. She longed for her house, her chair by the fire.

Alan was the last of her patients. She had been dreading seeing him, with a feeling that almost amounted to a physical repugnance, and had to steel herself when he eventually walked through the door, his face red from the cold and water speckling his duffel coat. She clenched her hands into fists under the long sleeves of her jersey, and made herself greet him calmly and take her seat opposite him. His face looked no different from the last time she had seen him, and no different from the man she had met a few hours earlier. It was hard for her not to gape at him. Should she tell him what she knew? But how could she? What would she say? I’ve been investigating your life, without your knowledge or consent, checking up on the truth of what you tell me in confidence within these four walls, and I have found you have an identical twin. Or did he already know? Was that what he was hiding from her and from his wife? Was there some strange conspiracy going on?

‘What will I do if I can’t cope over Christmas?’

He spoke to her. She strained to hear the words and to reply to them intelligibly. Through his frail voice she heard the tone of Dean Reeve, stronger, almost mocking. When she had met Dean she had seen Alan and now with Alan she saw Dean. At last he was going, standing up and struggling his bulky body into the duffel coat, buttoning up the toggles with painstaking care. He was thanking her. Saying he didn’t know how he would have got through this without her. She shook his hand formally. Now he was gone and she sank back into her chair and pressed her fingers against her temples.

Dean stood on the opposite side of the road, smoking another cigarette. He had been there for nearly one hour and still she hadn’t appeared. When she came, he would follow her, see where that led, but the light in her room was still on and every so often he could see shapes in the window. He looked at each person who went into the building and came out. Some of them were hooded against the rain and he couldn’t make them out. It was cold, nasty weather, but he didn’t much mind that. He wasn’t one of those whingers who couldn’t get their feet wet, who opened an umbrella at the first hint of rain or stood in the doorways of shops and offices to wait for it to pass.

Across the road, the door opened once more and a figure came out. He himself came out. As he looked around, his face was quite clear. Unmistakable. Dean became very still. He stood like that until the figure was almost out of sight. A smile crossed his face and he lifted a hand towards the man who was him, as if he could draw him back.

Well, well, well. Ma, you sly old fox.

Frieda sat motionless for ten minutes, her eyes closed, trying to clear the sludge of her thoughts. Then, abruptly, she rose to her feet, pulled on her coat, turned off the lights, double locked the door and left.

She headed straight for Reuben’s house. She had no doubt that he would be there. He and Josef seemed to have settled into a routine of drinking beer and vodka and watching quiz shows on TV. Reuben would shout out the answers and, if he was right, Josef would marvel at him and toast him with a shot.

As it happened, Reuben was alone, cooking himself an omelette, and there was no sign of Josef, although his ancient white van was parked outside, the front wheel up on the pavement.

‘He’s upstairs,’ said Reuben.

‘Is he alone?’

Reuben gave a challenging smile, as if he was daring Frieda to say something disapproving. She looked at the photograph of Josef’s wife and sons, still stuck with a magnet on the fridge door. With their formal pose, old-fashioned clothes and dark eyes, they belonged to another world. ‘It was you I wanted to talk to. I need your advice.’

‘Strange how you need it now when I’m not exactly in the best state to give it.’

‘Something’s happened.’

Reuben ate his omelette out of the frying-pan while Frieda talked. Every so often he shook Tabasco sauce over it, or lifted his glass to take a sip of water. Halfway through the story, he stopped eating, however, laying down his fork and quietly pushing the pan away from him. He heard her out in absolute silence, though in the brief pauses Frieda thought she could hear a bed creaking upstairs.

‘So,’ she said, when she had finished. ‘What do you think?’

Reuben stood up. He went to the newly installed french windows and gazed out at the sodden, neglected garden. It was dark; only the bent shapes of bushes and bare trees could be clearly seen and, beyond that, the lit windows of someone else’s kitchen. The creaking seemed to have stopped. He turned round.

‘You’ve crossed a line,’ he said, grinning. He seemed unreasonably cheerful.

‘I’ve crossed several.’

‘I think you should, one, go to the police and don’t take no for an answer.’ He was counting them off on his fingers. ‘Two, tell Alan everything you know about him. Three, see this Cambridge expert. In no particular order, but as quickly as you can.’

‘Yes.’

‘Oh – and four, see your own supervisor. Have you still got one?’

‘She’s lying dormant.’

‘Maybe it’s time to wake her up. And don’t be so tortured about it. It doesn’t suit you.’

Frieda stood up. ‘I was going to see if Josef would drive me to Cambridge. This probably isn’t a good time to ask him.’

‘I think they’ve finished.’ Reuben went to the bottom of the stairs and yelled, ‘Josef! Have you got a minute?’

A muffled shout came from upstairs and shortly afterwards Josef came down the stairs, his feet bare. When he caught sight of Frieda he looked uneasy.

Frieda walked back through Regent’s Park, her hands deep in her coat pockets. The cold northerly wind felt good, as if it was drowning her thoughts. After she had crossed Euston Road, she stopped at a shop and bought a bag of pasta, a jar of sauce, a bag of salad and a bottle of red wine. Back at her front door, she was fumbling for her key when she felt a touch on her shoulder that made her jump.

‘Alan,’ she said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I’m sorry. I needed to talk to you. I couldn’t wait.’

Frieda looked helplessly around. She felt like a wild animal that had been tracked back to its lair. ‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘We have to stick to them.’

‘I know, I know, but …’

The tone was pleading. His duffel coat was wrongly buttoned and his hair was dishevelled; his face looked blotchy from the cold. Frieda had her key in her hand and it was hovering near the lock. She had many rules, but the absolute one, the inviolable one, was that she never let a patient into her house. It was always the patient’s fantasy, to get into her life, to discover what she was really like, to get a hold on her, to do to her what she was doing to them, to find out her secrets. But so many rules had been broken. She put the key in the lock and turned it.

‘Five minutes,’ she said.

He held his hand in front of him. Fingers turned to twigs. No one would want to eat him now. Dirty bare feet; they weren’t feet any more. They were roots creeping into the earth and soon he wouldn’t be able to move at all.

But they tore him up and they wrapped him round and he could feel his twigs snapping and his roots were stuffed into a sack and his mouth was stoppered up with soil and he was crammed into new darkness. They were taking him to market. This little pig went to market. Who would give a gold coin for him? He was gripped and picked up and he sank down further to the bottom of the sack and the voices grunted and said rude words and the witch shouted that Simon Said, Simon Said but Simon didn’t say anything because his mouth was shut and his voice was all gone now.

Bump, bump, bump. Then he was lying on something hard and there was a bang above him. The darkness was even darker and there was a new smell, oily and deep. He heard a loud cough, a splutter, a hum, which felt like the noise the witch-cat made when it dug its paws in and out of his sore skin, but louder. His body was bouncing up and down. His head was banging up and down on the hard surface.

Then he was still again. There was a click and he felt hard fingers pincer him through the sack, locking on to his shoulder, his soft thigh. He knew his body was falling apart because he could feel pain running through him like a river, into every crack of him. He didn’t know the word for ‘why?’ and he couldn’t remember the word for ‘please’. Nothing left. No Matthew left. Bumped along the ground. Cold. So cold. Cold like fire. There was something rattling and heaving and the voice grunted again and then suddenly he was being pulled from the sack.

Two faces in the gloom. Mouths opening and shutting. Simon Said no but he couldn’t speak. They were pushing him into a hole. Was it an oven, even though his fingers were twigs, were icicles, too sharp to eat? But it couldn’t be an oven because there was no heat, only a throbbing cold darkness. Mouth unravelled and he opened it but nothing came out. Only breath.

‘Make a sound and you’ll be cut into little pieces and fed to the birds,’ said the voice of the master. ‘Do you hear?’

Did he hear? He heard nothing now, except the sound of stone being dragged over earth and then it was black night and cold night and silent night and lost night and only his heart still spoke, like a drum under his stretched skin. I-am, I-am, I-am.