All in the Mind (17 page)

Lorraine had managed to get through more than twenty years of motherhood without ever receiving the call that every parent dreads. She and her husband were having dinner. They were irritated when the phone rang, but they answered, as they always did, in case it was one of their parents who were getting on and had a few health problems.

It was the hospital, with a few words of introduction, and then:

‘I’m afraid your daughter has been involved in an accident.’

Lorraine couldn’t get the moment out of her head. She played it, over and over.

‘I’m afraid your daughter has been involved in an accident.’

And everything stops, and you fear the next sentence, that she’s dead, but there’s a little pause and so you fill it, by asking the question, ‘Is she …’ But you can’t bring yourself to utter the word, and the voice fills the gap, says, ‘No.’ But now your husband has picked up on the worry, sees the colour draining from your lips and your face and the life flowing from your eyes, and he is saying, ‘What’s wrong, what’s wrong, what is it, is it your mum?’ because your mother is elderly and has been having tests on her heart, and you’re trying to hear the voice on the phone which is saying there has been an accident, Emily is alive, but she is badly burnt and this is the address you need to go to. And you tell your husband, and then there’s a couple looking in each other’s eyes, and they may think they know everything about each other but they have never seen this look of fear and panic, the fear of loss. How have they let this happen? they think. Why weren’t they there to protect her? And they’re asking each other questions they can’t possibly know the answers to, like ‘What happened?’ and ‘Was she on her own?’ and ‘How long will they keep her in for?’ and then rushing to put on shoes and coats and find car keys, leaving pets unfed and TVs unturned off and dinners uneaten on the table because they’ve had the call that every parent dreads and they know this is a moment
where
their life departs its comfort zone and takes them to pain and a challenge they’re not sure they can meet.

Lorraine could sense that her husband, Ken, was determined to be strong when they were taken in to see Emily. He knew that Lorraine would be crumbling inside, and he felt he mustn’t crumble himself. They had half an hour – twenty minutes driving there, five infuriating minutes trying to find somewhere to park, then five minutes getting from the car to the hospital – to become accustomed to the idea that Emily had been burnt. They both had very different pictures in mind. Lorraine couldn’t recall if the woman who phoned said fire or not. She just heard ‘accident’ and ‘burnt’ and, in her mind, she saw blisters and scaldings on Emily’s hands. Perhaps a pan of boiling water had fallen from the gas rings and caught her on the way to the floor. She hoped she was wearing shoes. She was always warning her not to cook barefoot. Ken had visions of her being dragged from a fire, choking and spluttering, and imagined his daughter suffering from the effects of smoke inhalation.

Neither was remotely prepared for what they saw. Both were crushed, instantly. Lorraine didn’t know whether she could touch her own daughter. Ken burst into tears, and was close to gagging. If the call had said she was dead, and this was a visit to the morgue to identify the body, they would have been no less devastated.

Yet little by little, in the following months, they coped far better than they ever imagined they would, and they had come to accept Emily’s disfigurement in a way that she couldn’t. Their real distress was caused by her evident suffering in trying to come to terms with what had happened to her. Yesterday, as she came out of her appointment with Professor Sturrock, the good side of her face was flushed and her hands were shaking visibly.

Lorraine had been sitting in the hospital’s basement car park listening to Debussy’s ‘Berceuse héroïque’. She turned down the volume.

‘What’s wrong, love?’ she asked. Emily shook her head. Lorraine started the car, drove out of the car park, turned left onto the main road and began the journey home.

‘How was it?’ she asked once they were well away from the hospital. She was never sure if she would get an answer after these sessions with the psychiatrist, but she always asked.

‘Not great,’ said Emily.

‘Why?’

‘I think he was a bit cross that I didn’t read the book he gave me.’

‘Why didn’t you read it, Em? He is trying to help.’

‘I know. I’ll read it at the weekend.’

‘Was that it?’

‘No. Don’t be angry, Mum, but I was a bit harsh with him. He was trying to tell me I was the same person as before, but I said there was no way he could know how I felt, and he looked a bit hurt by that.’

‘You shouldn’t talk to him like that, love. Who knows what he’s been through in his life? He could have had all sorts of tragedies for all we know. And, even if he’s had a trouble-free life himself, he’s bound to have had a lot of experience dealing with people who haven’t.’

‘I know,’ said Emily. ‘I know he has a point. I know he is trying to help. And at least he always gives me something to think about.’

Her mother looked over to her. She could only see the right side of her daughter’s face. She looked lovely. She always did when they were driving, and the burnt side of her face was hidden to Lorraine. The music ended and they broke for an ad break, which always irritated her. There was such a horrible clash between the beauty of the music and the awful jingles they played for the adverts.

One such jingle came on now, as she lay in bed thinking about Emily. ‘Rediscover the real you, with Olay Definity Self-Repair Serum – ignites skin’s natural ability to self-repair for diminished discolorations, dullness, brown spots and wrinkles.’

Lorraine tutted loudly and turned off the radio in disgust. If only life were so simple.

14

Celia was already up and about when Matthew opened his eyes on Saturday morning. She had half opened the curtains and through the window he could see it was a bright, crisp autumnal day. The wind had chased away yesterday’s rain and a sliver of sunlight fell on the bed – a bed which last night, for the first time since the visit of his clerk Julian, had seen Matthew and Celia doing what husbands and wives are meant to do from time to time. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t been getting on prior to the visit to see Professor Sturrock. After the initial fury Celia’s mood had improved steadily as, first, he’d agreed with her analysis of his problem and, second, promised to get help. Yet he had still not felt confident enough to indicate any sexual desire or intent. She had been almost impossibly nice, but he assumed that anger at his betrayal was never far below the surface and he should pander to her enjoyment of being in control, and let things evolve on her terms, at her pace, and not push his luck. Also, despite his official diagnosis as a sex addict now being recorded somewhere in Professor Sturrock’s files, he had rather liked the enforced deep freeze and its accompanying celibacy. It had reminded him of the time, pre-marriage, when his body was his own, with no calls upon it to perform when he was feeling weary or out of sorts with his partner. But when, last night, he had sensed Celia inching across the mattress, then felt her thigh against his and her arm circling his shoulders, he knew it would be churlish to be anything other than surprised and pleased. She rolled him onto his back, which was where he stayed as, here too, she was clearly enjoying being in control. Perhaps it was this surprise, and the pleasure of knowing his marriage was resuming
something
approaching normal service, that led him to climax way too soon. As she continued to bounce up and down on him, hoping to reach orgasm herself, his mind began to wander. It travelled via next week’s case, his golf swing and Angela’s neck, finally arriving, as Celia collapsed on top of him, moderately satisfied, at thoughts of what kind of house Professor Sturrock lived in, and whether he played golf. He didn’t look like a golfer, but then, Matthew didn’t look like a cyclist.

After breakfast, he walked to Mitchell’s Bikes, not the nearest bike shop to his house, but according to Celia the best in the neighbourhood. It was run by a former PE teacher who had decided teaching wasn’t for him and, with financial backing from his father, had decided to become a sports businessman. Frederick, known to his regulars as Freddie, was hoping eventually to run a London-wide chain of gyms but for now he had to content himself with selling bikes to the cyclists of Totteridge and its surrounds.

Matthew didn’t have a clue what kind of bike to get, so even before meeting Freddie or knowing he existed, he’d decided he would happily be led in his decision-making. The sun was so strong it was almost hot as he set off, dressed in the tracksuit Celia had bought him for Christmas last year, prior to another failed Get Fit kick. As he walked, he decided what he would say to the people at Mitchell’s – that he had not ridden a bike since his teens, that he wanted to get into it in a serious way and didn’t really mind the cost.

He went inside, where a young assistant was helping an elderly woman choose a helmet. Scores of bikes were racked up against two of the walls. The rest of the store offered a bewildering array of shoes, cycling tops, gloves, hats, glasses, computerised speedometers. There was a cupboard with about eighty different watches locked away. Even water bottles had their own little section. There were two huge fridges filled with energy drinks and a shelf next to them offering a choice of energy bars and food gels. He had no idea that there was so much paraphernalia attached to bikes. And this was just downstairs. He noticed a clear divide between customers in the main bike section, and those amid the paraphernalia. The bike buyers tended to be mums
with
kids or people like himself, older sorts who had bought into the fitness craze. Then in the paraphernalia sections were men in their twenties and thirties, many already kitted out for cycling, fit and lean, and chatting away about the new products that were on the market. He wondered if he was the first customer to be here because a psychiatrist had suggested he get fit, and to show his wife he was serious about it.

It was pretty clear who the boss was: the tall stocky man wearing a white T-shirt with ‘Mitchell’s’ emblazoned front and back, and who had a quiet authority as he walked around making sure his staff were taking care of the various queries customers had.

‘Excuse me,’ Matthew said, ‘I’ve not cycled since I was a student. I really want to try to get into it. Do you think you could advise me?’

Seventy minutes later, Freddie Mitchell had a new favourite customer, and Matthew Noble had a new carbon-frame racing bike and assorted paraphernalia that in total cost him well into four figures.

Walking home, pushing the bike, he could not recall the last time he felt so excited. Back at the house, he went straight upstairs to change. The padded shorts, and leotard-style braces, were tight. When he’d complained to Freddie that they showed off his gut far too graphically, he’d told him it was a good incentive to do the kind of distances that saw the gut come down. The great thing about bikes, Freddie said, was a lack of snobbery among those who rode them. From slim men on the best racing bikes burning up the road, to fat old ladies grinding their way home, the cycling community was a broad church, and nobody would think any the worse of you because of a gut, even one as large as Matthew’s. Matthew wasn’t so sure. Even breathing in hard, he looked like an overweight wrestler. But he had a strong frame and his legs were not in bad shape. He slipped on the multicoloured mild-weather zip-up top, which Freddie had told him was totally windproof, and studied himself in the mirror. He looked faintly ridiculous. But then he recalled feeling exactly the same the first time he looked at himself in the mirror wearing a QC’s wig. Come on, he said to himself, it’s not how you look, it’s how you feel, and what you do to look and feel better. And then he thought about Angela
and
how, when he was seeing her on something close to a daily basis, he had been so carried away by it all that he became in his mind’s eye a very different figure to the one he saw when he looked in the mirror. Angela had a classic young English woman’s body, firm shoulders and breasts, a slim waist, long legs. He had a classic middle-aged lawyer’s body, and yet somehow it had worked between them.

He realised he was allowing Angela to occupy too much of his mind. He needed to think bike again. What a wonderful outcome it would be if he genuinely got into cycling, became fit and lost weight, and managed to make Celia happy as she witnessed an unhealthy addiction being replaced by one she could live with.

He put on his trainers, and wondered whether he should have bought proper cycling shoes with cleats to click into the pedals. On Freddie’s advice, he had decided against getting them at this stage. Freddie had said it was best to get used to the bike first, get to know the roads. Cleats became one of Matthew’s ambitions for the future, like fidelity.

He ran downstairs, relieved that Celia smiled rather than laughed when she saw him. He showed her the bike, and explained how the computer on the handlebars worked, demonstrated the gears. She walked with him to the front door, where he put on his shiny silver helmet and his wraparound cycling glasses, which Freddie had explained were as much to keep dirt, flying objects and insects out of his eyes as to block out the sun. He was excited at the prospect of cycling so fast that he could catch insects in his eyes.

‘Here goes then,’ he said, manoeuvering himself on to the bike. ‘I’ll just go up and down the road for a bit to get used to the gears.’ Celia waved him off. He must have looked impossibly large as he perched on the tiny saddle and he could sense Celia shared his worry that he would fall off. But the moment he turned into the road, he felt he was beginning a great new adventure. He didn’t have a clue where he was going, or how far, and it took him a while to figure out the gears. But within minutes, he was loving it. The sun was on his back, cold air was blowing into his face. He felt free. He felt young. Hills were hard, but he soon learned to go into the lowest possible
gear
and just ‘twiddle’ – it had been Freddie’s phrase – his way back to the flat. Cars were scary, but if he stayed a couple of feet out from the kerb, the cars might not like it but they pulled out to give him room. He found himself being overtaken several times by other cyclists, but he consoled himself with the thought that they were half his age with ten times his experience, and vowed that one day he would overtake more than overtook him.