Tuesday's Gone

Eleven

Jack Dargan looked around. ‘This is different,’ he said. ‘Not necessarily in a good way. I preferred it when we had our meetings at Number 9. I could do with a cappuccino and one of Marcus’s brownies.’

They were walking down Howard Street in the sleety drizzle. Jack’s face looked raw, where it was visible. He was wearing a green bobble hat with side flaps and a checked brown and orange scarf wrapped several times round his neck. Whenever he wasn’t speaking he pulled it up over his mouth. He’d also put on an ancient bright blue anorak with a broken zip. He’d forgotten to wear gloves, though, and kept blowing on his hands. Frieda was Jack’s mentor and Jack her trainee, but today he looked more like her truculent nephew.

‘In ten years’ time, five, this area will be all done up. Houses like this will have been pulled down to make way for offices,’ said Frieda, stopping in front of number three.

‘Good.’

‘They’ll still have to find a place to dump all the misfits and the rejects, all the hopeless, forgotten people.’

‘Is it where your man was found?’

‘He’s not exactly my man, but yes.’

‘So why are we here? You told me the case was closed.’

‘It is closed. They’ve decided Michelle Doyce did it and she’s unfit to plead. I just wanted to see where she lived. I thought you and I could talk better while we walk.’

She turned and led Jack back up Howard Street towards Deptford Church Street.

‘I don’t know that I’ve got anything worth telling you,’ muttered Jack.

‘I’ve been your supervisor for nearly two years.’

‘That’s the bright spot in my week. Other than that …’ He looked away so she couldn’t see his face.

‘Other than that?’

‘I like talking about people’s problems – just not to them. I’m interested in it all in theory, but sitting in that little room hearing someone tell me about what their step-father said to them when they were six – it feels pointless. Or maybe I’m no good at it. I try to listen and then I catch myself thinking about what I want to eat for lunch or what film to go and see. People’s lives are mostly so dreary.’

Frieda looked at him attentively. ‘What’s your life like?’

‘I tell you what was good – last year, that time with Alan and Dean, being involved with all that, even on the edge of it. When it seemed relevant and there was some kind of answer – like a key fitting into a lock and the door swinging open. Most of the time it’s just me and them in a room saying stuff.’

‘Stuff,’ said Frieda. ‘Is that all it is?’

‘You know what I think, Frieda? I think I’m only still doing it because of you. Because I want to be like you. Because when I’m with you it all seems to make sense. Most of the time I think what we do might be a great con, a joke played on people who feel heroic because they suffer and that’s all they want to talk about.’

‘You sound resentful. You almost sound as though you’re saying, “And what about me?”’

‘They give me a nasty mess and I pat it into some kind of shape. It could be any kind of shape, it doesn’t really matter. I want to tell them to look outside themselves at the real world. There’s proper suffering out there. Rape and violence and sheer, grinding poverty.’

Frieda touched him on the shoulder. They had turned off Deptford Church Street and come to a small church, set back from the road, with an old tower. A skull-and-crossbones was set on one of its gate posts and a charnel house to the right.

‘St Nicholas was the patron saint of sailors,’ said Frieda, as they went through the gates and into a small graveyard. ‘It’s what you’d expect in a church by the docks.’

‘I haven’t been into a church since my grandma’s funeral,’ said Jack.

‘This one used to be in the countryside. It was all orchards and market gardens and small boats tied up at the wharves. Pilgrims to Canterbury would pass through it. Christopher Marlowe was killed in a brawl in a house nearby. They carried the body here.’

‘Which is his grave, then?’

‘It’s unmarked. He could be anywhere.’

Jack shivered and stamped his feet and looked around at the flats that surrounded the church. ‘It’s gone down a bit in the world since then.’

‘It’ll come up again.’

They made their way back to the road that ran along the river. On the other side they could see the towers of Canary Wharf, lights glittering in the February gloom, but here it felt deserted. A tiny primary school seemed to be closed, even though it was a Tuesday in February. They walked past a breaker’s yard, piles of twisted rusting metal visible through the iron gates, nettles and brambles erupting over the wall, which was topped with coils of barbed wire. There were several boarded-up houses with smashed windows, and then an ancient industrial unit with cracking walls, whose fence bore the faded legend ‘Guard Dogs on Patrol’. Jack walked further up the tiny street and pressed his face against some railings. He could see a deep, muddy pit where a building had stood, and on the far side of it the façade of a warehouse, through whose ruined arches he could see, over the muddy waters, the gleaming skyscrapers of Docklands.

‘All ready for the developers,’ said Frieda, pointing at the notice to keep out.

‘I prefer it as it is.’

They continued along the river, past a rotting wooden pier. The low tide had exposed plastic crates and old bottles on the shore. Frieda thought about Jack’s heavy, oppressive discontent, and waited for him to speak again. At the same time, she pictured Michelle Doyce here, picking up all those things Karlsson had told her about – tin cans, round stones, dead birds, forked sticks – and carrying them back to her room to arrange. Making a shape out of mess, as Jack put it: the instinct in us all, something deeply human and fearful.

Glancing across at Frieda’s smooth profile, her chin held up in spite of the icy wind, Jack felt the familiar grip of his adoration for her. He wanted her to look him in the eye and tell him that everything would be all right, that he would be all right, there was no need to worry and that she was going to help him. She would never do that. If there was one thing he had learned from her, over all the time they had spent together, it was that you had to take responsibility for your own life.

He took a deep breath and cleared his throat. ‘There’s something I should tell you,’ he said. Now he’d come to it, it was hard to say it out loud: his chest felt tight. ‘I’ve been slipping a bit.’

‘Slipping?’

‘I’ve missed a few sessions.’

‘With your patients?’

‘Yes. Not many,’ he hastened to add. ‘Just occasionally – and a few I’ve arrived late for. And I’ve kind of stopped seeing my own therapist so regularly. I’m not sure she’s right for me.’

‘How long has this been going on?’

‘A couple of months. Maybe more.’

‘What do you do when you don’t go or when you arrive late?’

‘Sleep.’

‘You pull the covers over your head.’

‘Yes,’ Jack said. ‘And it’s not a metaphor. An actual cover over my actual head.’

‘You know, don’t you, that for the people who come to you this may be the most important fifty minutes of their week – and that they might have screwed up all their courage to come?’

‘It’s really, really bad. I’m not making excuses.’

‘This doesn’t sound like just a problem with therapy. You sound a bit depressed to me.’

They kept walking. Jack seemed to be looking at something in the river. Frieda waited.

‘I don’t know what that word means,’ he said eventually. ‘Does it mean down in the dumps or does it mean something more?’

‘It means you’re lying in bed with the covers over your head, letting your patients down and yourself, worrying that you’ve made the wrong career choice and you don’t seem to want to change.’

‘What should I change?’ They were walking past sparkling new gabled houses with front gardens and balconies. It felt a long way from Deptford.

‘I think that the first thing you need to do is stop lying in bed, letting down people who badly need you. You get up however you feel, and you go to work.’

Jack looked at her, his cheeks flushed in the cold. ‘I thought you dealt with feelings.’

‘You can think about that. We can talk about it. In the meantime, you do your job.’

‘Why?’ asked Jack.

‘Because that’s what we do.’ Frieda stopped and nudged him. ‘On a normal day I’d show you the Cutty Sark but it’s still being mended so you can’t see a thing.’ It was true: the ship was completely hidden from view by boards.

‘It’s better this way,’ said Jack. ‘It’s all a fake anyway.’

‘How do you mean?’

‘There was a fire, remember? What I heard is that there was nothing left. When it’s rebuilt, it’ll be like a Madame Tussaud’s replica of the real Cutty Sark. It’ll be another fake bit of London for the tourists to look at.’

‘Does it matter?’

‘Don’t you care if people mistake a crappy heritage museum for real life?’

Frieda glanced at Jack’s wretched face. Maybe breakfast at her local coffee shop would have been a better idea. ‘Real life is an overrated idea,’ she said.

‘Is that supposed to comfort me?’

‘Comfort? No, Jack. We’re going down here.’

They entered a doorway in a small domed building by the river, and entered a battered, creaky lift operated by a man wearing headphones, singing along to a song that only he could hear. Jack didn’t speak as it descended. The doors opened and he saw the tunnel stretching ahead of them in a long gentle curve.

‘What is this?’ Jack said.

‘The tunnel under the river.’

‘Who uses it?’

‘It used to be for the dockers to walk to work on the Isle of Dogs. It’s mostly empty now.’

‘Where are we headed?’

‘I thought I’d buy you lunch.’

Jack was surprised. They’d never eaten lunch together before. ‘Aren’t you working?’

‘A patient cancelled. Anyway, I need to think things through. Walking helps me think.’

‘Even when I’m here moaning about my problems.’

‘Even then.’

Jack listened to the echoes of their steps in the tunnel and tried not to think of the weight of the water above. ‘You mean, think about this dead man?’

‘I’m thinking about the woman they found him with. The one who was looking after him.’

They entered the lift at the other end. The operator was reading a magazine. Jack looked at Frieda. ‘I guess that some jobs are worse than mine.’

They came out into the wind and rain on the north side of the river.

‘Don’t do that again,’ Frieda said.

‘What?’

‘Talk about someone like him as if he’s deaf, as if he’s too stupid to understand.’ She walked swiftly, in long, smooth strides, looking suddenly stern.

‘Sorry,’ he said humbly. ‘You’re right. But what can you do about the woman?’

‘She clearly didn’t kill him,’ said Frieda.

‘She’s in an institution now, right? And that’s where she’ll stay, whatever happens. So …’

‘You sound like a policeman,’ said Frieda. ‘Like the commissioner.’

Frieda led them on a path along the bank of the Isle of Dogs. On the left side there were flats, converted warehouses, compact modern houses. On the right was the widening river and beyond, on the other side, scrubby wasteland. They walked briefly along a busier road, then Frieda turned off into a smaller street and suddenly they were in an old inn: a warm, oak-beamed room, the chink of wine glasses, the rise and fall of conversation and the crackle of an open fire; young women in white aprons sailing past with dishes held high on one hand.

They sat at a table with a view across the water. Frieda looked out. ‘You can understand why all those old sea captains came back here when they retired. It was the nearest they could get to being at sea.’

‘I noticed all those names in Deptford.’ Jack took his seat opposite her. He picked up a menu and looked at it intently, concealing his nervousness. What was he going to eat? It depended on Frieda. Did she expect them to have a full meal, like beef pie or salmon en croûte, or should he have a bar snack?

‘What names?’

‘The street names. They reminded me of studying the Spanish Armada at school. Fisher Road, Drake Road or whatever. There’s probably a Nelson Road somewhere, or is that too late?’

‘Say that again.’

‘Sorry?’

‘The names.’

Jack repeated them. A young woman put a basket of bread rolls on the table and he tore a large piece off one and stuffed it into his mouth, realizing how hungry he was.

‘Are you ready to order?’ asked a waitress.

Frieda paused. Jack waited for her to go first.

‘No,’ said Frieda, slowly. ‘We’ve got to go.’

‘What do you mean?’

Frieda stood up and pulled a crisp five-pound note from her wallet, which she laid on the table under the basket of bread rolls.

‘Come on.’

‘That was quick,’ he said, but she was already on her way out. He had to run to keep up with her.