“But this is ridiculous — Daisy doesn’t have psychiatric problems.”
“Maybe not as such,” says Jane Watson. “But if there are, as we think, issues in the family that need to be addressed, this
will help us to get a handle on that.”
She waits for my response.
“And if we refuse?” I say.
Richard leans toward me.
“Cat, we need to talk all this through properly,” he says. The turn of phrase is hers. I feel a brief wild rage with him,
that’s he’s taking on her language.
“I want Jane to answer my question. What if we say no?”
“Well,” she says, “I’m very much hoping that that won’t happen. I’m very much hoping that you’ll recognize the necessity for
this.” She smiles briefly at Richard. “You’ve been so very cooperative so far, in coming to sessions and working with me here.…”
“But if we don’t want this, if we don’t let her go?” I say again.
Richard lets out a small exasperated sigh.
Jane Watson clears her throat.
“We do feel this is very important.” Her voice is hard, clear. Now there’s none of that tentativeness that invites you to
confide. “It’s Daisy’s future and health we’re talking about here. And — just in the hypothetical situation that you did have
objections — to be frank, we would need at that point to take some legal powers, because we do feel that it’s crucially important
to have Daisy thoroughly assessed.”
I realize I am shaking. I clasp my hands tight together so she won’t be able to see. I feel the walls press in.
“You mean a Care Order?”
“It’s something we could do.” She turns to me — she’s talking just to me now. “And I have to say — I mean, I don’t want to
dwell on this — but if it came to that, we would have good grounds for a Care Order in Daisy’s case, if that’s the only way
for the assessment to be done. Though to have to go through the courts would greatly increase the stress on Daisy, as I’m
sure you recognize.”
Richard glances at me and away again. “Jane, I really don’t think you need worry. Like I said, we’ll talk it through at home.”
Her face softens. She nods. “Well, obviously it’s far, far better for all concerned if we’re agreed on how to move forward.…
Now, you will I’m sure want to look round the unit before Daisy is admitted — just to put your minds at rest. You’ll find
it’s a very friendly place and the dormitories are quite small and really very cheerful. In the meantime, I’ll reserve her
a bed.”
“When would you want her to start?” asks Richard.
“I’ll have to check out the bed situation,” she says. “But I think I do have a place coming up, probably at the end of the
week — normally we’d have to wait for very much longer.” She’s brisk now, leaving no space for disagreement. “As I’m sure
you’ll appreciate, there’s tremendous demand for beds in the Jennifer Norton, Right, then.” She snaps the folder shut. “I’ll
try and get the letter confirming everything in the post as soon as possible. I’m confident we can all agree on this.…”
She stands. We get up too.
“Look, I’ll find you our leaflet. And you can look at the map and reassure yourselves that it’s very easy to get to.…”
She rifles around in an in-tray on her desk. Her hair falls over her face.
“Here we are,” she says.
It’s like the publicity for a holiday play scheme, with lots of paint-box colors and photos of smiling children.
She brings it over, stands close to us, next to Richard. I smell her sandalwood scent. She turns to the map on the back, points
to the place with one discreetly manicured fingernail. I just catch sight of the road name for a moment, then she tips the
leaflet slightly away from me. I tell myself I must have read it wrong.
“There’s been a unit on the site for quite some years,” she says. “It’s named after a psychiatrist who was superintendent
there for a while. She lectured on our course when I was a student — a rather wonderful woman. She died suddenly in her forties.”
Her face is briefly poignant. “A stroke, so terribly sad — and they renamed the unit in her memory.” She hands the leaflet
to Richard. “Before the name was changed, they called it Avalon Close,” she says.
She’s showing Richard the easiest places to park, but her voice is thin, remote from me, as though she’s speaking from very
far away.
In the car on the way to the station I can scarcely speak. But Richard seems perfectly at ease. He takes out his diary, starts
flicking through.
“What are you doing?”
“I guess we should fix up a time to go and look at this place,” he says.
“Richard, I’m not going to let her go there.”
A motorbike pulls out sharply in front of me. I only just see it in time. I swerve violently.
“For Chrissake,” He says. “Calm down or you’ll get us both killed.”
“Daisy is not going there.”
He sighs, “I wish you’d stop acting like this is some major tragedy,” he says.
“Richard, she’s only eight.”
“Oh, come on,” he says. “Loads of kids go to boarding school at eight. I did.”
“You hated it.”
He shrugs. “It was fine. It didn’t do me any harm.”
“That’s not the line you usually take. Anyway, you weren’t ill.”
“For God’s sake,” he says. “This whole bloody place is geared up for children who are ill.”
“No. Not ill like Daisy.” The car is full of the thick cough-sweet smell of his aftershave: It makes it hard to breathe. “Richard,
there are girls with anorexia there — very disturbed girls — and they’ve probably got kids who cut themselves — a lot of those
girls do; I used to know girls who did.… Daisy can’t even manage
school
.”
“I just don’t get it,” he says. “You worry yourself sick about Daisy, and then when they offer you help, you won’t take it.
I mean, this has been dragging on for months, and you take her to see all these weird mates of Nicky’s and we don’t seem to
be getting anywhere. Somebody’s got to find out what’s going on.”
“Richard, she is not going there. I’m not going to let this happen.”
I pull up outside the station. He puts his diary away, clicks his briefcase shut with a sharp little sound like the breaking
of a bone. But he doesn’t get out of the car.
He turns to me, “Well, what do you propose to do, exactly?” There’s a kind of controlled rage in his voice.
“There is another way. We could get a lawyer. We could fight.”
He shakes his head slowly — as though I exhaust him, as though I am someone he is very weary of.
“
Please
,” he says. “Not all that again. What on earth is the point of wrecking our relationship with the very people who are trying
to help us?”
He gets out of the car; he isn’t looking at me.
“There’s a dinner after work tonight.” He’s speaking to the dashboard. “A leaving do. I shouldn’t wait up; I could be really
late.”
I
SIT BESIDE DAISY
and stroke her back. She’s white, retching. These evenings make me so desperate, because I cannot help her. The nausea exhausts
her, but she can’t get to sleep. I read to her from the book of Celtic tales. I don’t hear a word I read.
At last her eyelids flicker extravagantly and close. I stay beside her for a while, waiting till she’s deeply asleep to put
her pillows flat. Ail I can hear is her breathing, and the faintest sound from Sinead’s television, some frenetic soap she’s
watching, and in the distance a siren, blaring then abruptly cut off. I sit there in the middle of the silence, trying to
trace out a path, to find a way through. I could ask for Daisy to see another doctor, but she’d need to be referred by Dr.
Carey. I could go to a solicitor on my own, but I have no money that is mine. If Richard is happy for Daisy to go to this
place, and the doctors will use the law if I try to prevent it, do I have any power to stop it happening? I wish I knew about
these things. I’m like a child, so ignorant of the world. And I spell out what they have on me — the lost letter, the lies
I have told, my secret history, my wish to be alone in the house with my child: everything on my charge sheet. Despair washes
through me. Every turn I take, it seems the way is closed to me.
Daisy is sleeping deeply now. I ease her onto her pillows; she scarcely stirs. I stand, and my shadow looms across her and
halfway to the ceiling, huge, stretched out, the shadow of my hair like a fall of black water against the blue of the wall.
And I think, for a moment, my darkness falling across her: But what if they are right — these people who suspect me? What
if, as Jane Watson seemed to be saying, I am the environment from which Daisy needs to be removed? I’ve striven to create
a perfect childhood for my child, a safe, encircled place of tenderness and picnics, a childhood so different from mine. Yet
something has gone wrong. Maybe I am not like other people. Maybe, as Richard says, I try too hard, am too protective; or
perhaps there is some knowledge other people have that is denied me — some mothering art that I don’t understand. And all
these experts look at me and see this — the profound, unnamed thing that is missing in me. Or there is perhaps, something
subtly, secretly wrong with me — bad thoughts, bad blood, the passing on of some psychological taint. A blight, a contagion,
handed down in the genes. And so I must surrender to them and let her go to this place, which to me is the worst thing. For
I was shut away, and now it is going to happen to my child.
I have the dream again — the one where I am back at The Poplars, waiting on the broken sofa, smelling the disinfectant and
the stale vegetable smell. I wake, or surface a little, at least, into some state between sleep and waking, still with the
feeling that I had in the dream: a feeling of being trapped by some great, soft, heavy weight that presses into me, so I can’t
move, can’t even call or cry. Instinctively, I reach out to Richard, but the bed beside me is empty. I hear St. Agatha’s striking
one o’clock. I turn on the bedside lamp to try and dispel the feeling, and the light falls on the red of the walls, the stiff,
heavy folds of the curtains, the solitary dancer — but all these things are less real to me than the dream.
I close my eyes and sink back into sleep, and I am again in the room I shared with Aimee. Now it’s night in the dream. The
edge of the washed-out candlewick bedspread has ridden up over the sheet; it’s crisp against my face, smelling of detergent,
and the light from the street lamp filters through the curtains with their patterning of leaves and falls across my bed and
Aimee’s bed and the restless heap of her body under the bedclothes. She’s wide awake: Light glints in her open eyes. As I
watch, she throws her covers back. She stands, rips off her nightshirt; the orange glow falls across her rangy, urgent body
and her pale arms with their intricate tattoos. There’s so little flesh on her — I can see the bones through the skin. There’s
darkness under her shoulder blades and in the hollows in the small of her back; leaf shadows dapple the white planes of her
body. She pulls on her knickers, her sweatshirt, the jeans that have a razor sewn into the hem. She pushes her feet in her
trainers, runs her hands through her flame-red hair in a vain attempt to sort it. From under the bed she pulls out the schoolbag
she never uses because she doesn’t go to school. She flings a few things in: a couple of T-shirts, the Tommy Hilflger rip-off
that she nicked from the Northcote Road market — I was with her; I had to keep the stall holder talking while she did it —
and some graying underwear, Kit Kats she’s nicked from Woolworths and stashed behind her chest of drawers, a bit of change,
cigarettes, a lighter some man gave her, a crumpled, dog-eared photo of her mother. She knows I am awake. She turns to me,
I see her milk skin, her acute features, the way her flaming hair falls over her face. It’s as if she wants to tell me something,
but the dream is soundless; I don’t know what she says. She’s happy, I think, full of hope: Her eyes are laughing, eager.
She sits down on the bed and ties the laces of her trainers. She’s sharp, alert, relentless: ready to run.
I
T’S A CLEAR, BRIGHT MORNING
, light splashing around as I push back the bedroom curtains, and the sky is blue and vast and full of promise. I go downstairs:
I am all purpose.
Richard is standing in front of the mirror, smoothing his tie.
“You must have been very late last night,” I say to his reflection, keeping my voice quite level, behaving absolutely normally:
as though this is a perfectly ordinary day. “I didn’t even hear you get into bed.”
His face, the wrong way round, looks subtly different.
“It was a leaving do,” he says. “I told you.”
He’s defensive, as though I have accused him of something, but really I’m not thinking about him; I just don’t want him here.
“I went to bed early,” I tell him. “It wasn’t a problem.”
He seems relieved, as though he expected a scene.
“We went to a restaurant,” he says. “Lebanese.”
“Was it good?”
“Very good,” he says. “It’s one of Francine’s discoveries. She’s really into ethnic food.”
“Right,” I say. I wonder briefly if she wore her backless dress. “I’m glad it was a good evening,” I tell him.
It’s how we are together now — formal, polite, restrained.
He picks up his bag, opens the door. Noise from the road surges in: There’s a dustbin lorry outside, holding up the traffic.
“OK, then,” he says. He doesn’t kiss me.
I take Daisy some toast. She scarcely looks at me. She’s lying on her pillows, watching a weather forecast. I kiss the top
of her head, breathe in her smell of mangoes and warm skin.
“I thought we’d give school a miss today,” I tell her.
“I couldn’t manage it anyway, Mum,” she says. “I can’t do my work when I feel sick.”
I go back to the kitchen to make coffee. Sinead is in front of the mirror, doing something complex with her hair involving
several scrunchies. She has her weekend case with her: It’s half-term tomorrow, and Sara will pick her up from school.
“Cat,” she says, her head on one side, wheedling.