Kind of Cruel (13 page)

‘Ginny made an interesting point about nostalgia,’ Sergeant Zailer tells me. We’re nearly in Rawndesley; more car horn beeps here than in Spilling, more impatient people. The smell is different too, especially here on the purely functional side of town: exhaust fumes, takeaways. ‘She said nostalgic people yearn for the past for a good reason – because they missed it, they weren’t fully there when they should have been, when it was the present. They deprive themselves of the “now” experiences that are rightfully theirs. Then they feel cheated and try to recapture what they missed, and miss more of the present in the process. It’s a vicious circle.’

‘Too neat, too formulaic,’ I say dismissively. ‘Has to be made up, like the conscious/unconscious mind stuff. Did she share any other impressive theories?’

Sergeant Zailer smiles. ‘A few.’ She pulls another Marlboro Light out of the packet, lights it.

‘You didn’t spend the whole session talking about me, then – the strange woman you found in your car.’

‘No offence, but at seventy quid an hour . . .’

‘What did you go and see her about?’

‘Giving up smoking.’ Sergeant Zailer pretends to be shocked by the sight of a cigarette between her fingers. ‘Shit!’ she says. ‘I guess it didn’t work, and that’s why I have to go back next week. No, to be fair, she covered herself, gave us both a get-out. She told me I wasn’t ready to stop yet. For the time being, I’ve got her official permission to light up whenever I feel like it.’ She sounds pleased. ‘Before she can give me the hypno-suggestion that’ll send the craving packing, I need at least twelve sessions of hypno-analysis.’

‘That’s eight hundred and forty quid,’ I say. ‘The “at least” sounds expensive too.’ Ginny’s the criminal Sergeant Zailer should have been keeping her eye on this afternoon, not me.

‘Apparently I don’t smoke because I enjoy it, as I’ve always thought.’

‘Death wish?’ I suggest.

‘Compensation. Ginny says there’s something weighing heavily on the negative side. That’s why I need to treat myself all the time. The fags are my treats, and for as long as they do the job of making up for whatever’s wrong, I’m going to continue to smoke them. Why wouldn’t I? I’m not going to give up something I like in exchange for nothing. That’d be irrational.’

‘How about the treat of not dying young?’ I say.

She shakes her head. ‘Avoiding illness in the future’s too abstract, Ginny says. It’s not a concrete perk to put in place of the fags, so it has no effect. Want to know why I’m telling you all this?’

It hadn’t occurred to me to wonder. Why must openness always be justified, when withholding everything that matters is taken as standard – polite, almost? I’m the odd one out, surrounded on all sides by people who spend their days trying to say as little as possible.
People like Jo
.

I want to be told the truth and I want to be able to tell it.

‘Ginny said I shouldn’t talk about our sessions or even think about them in between,’ says Sergeant Zailer. ‘I’m rebelling. I hate doing what I’m told. Viewed alongside my compensatory smoking, it all adds up to a picture of someone whose needs weren’t met in early childhood.’ She laughs. ‘I kind of agree with you – it’s probably all bollocks. We’ll both get fleeced and be no healthier or happier. Why did you go for hypnosis, if it’s not too personal a question?’

‘I don’t sleep.’

She nods. ‘Because you’re repressing a painful memory,’ she says in an overly earnest voice. Her grin makes it clear she’s impersonating Ginny.

‘No, I’m not. Trust me, my painful memories are real extroverts. It’s the next road on the right.’

‘Ah, but what about your
guilty
memories, the ones that make you squirm with shame whenever you think about them?’ She sounds jarringly upbeat, given the subject matter. Did Ginny persuade her that suffering is fun?

‘Still no repression,’ I say. ‘All my guilty memories clock in and out, every day. There’s no subterfuge involved. I wish there were. Anywhere here’s fine. That’s my house – the one lit up like a pumpkin at Halloween.’ Nonie’s scared of the dark, and claims the house is too. She sleeps with her desk lamp on and can’t walk past an unlit room without ‘turning its light on to cheer it up’.

I wonder if Dinah will still be up. Neither of the girls has a set bedtime. Nonie always asks to go up to bed between seven thirty and eight; with Dinah, some nights it’s eight, some nights she’s still holding court at ten.

‘So,’ Sergeant Zailer says as she pulls over. ‘What have you got to feel guilty about?’

Of course. Silly of me to think we’ve been talking for talking’s sake. To Sergeant Zailer, I’m an object she’s been charged with interrogating, nothing more.

I get to tell everything and ask nothing.

‘I don’t feel guilty about anything,’ I say as I get out of the car. ‘Everything bad that’s ever happened to me is someone else’s fault.’

Luke’s standing in the hall when I walk in; he must have heard the car pull up. He chuckles at the sight of me as I take off my coat and hang it on a peg. I’ve been questioned in connection with a murder, and he’s laughing. Can anything make this man anxious? ‘You look like someone in need of a glass of wine,’ he tells me.

‘A glass?’ He might as well have said ‘thimble’. ‘Fill the biggest saucepan we’ve got with Sauvignon Blanc and give me a straw.’ I remove a second layer of clothing: my jumper. One of the things I love about our house is that it’s always warm, despite looking as if it wouldn’t be. I like the cosiness almost as much as the defiance of expectation.

‘That bad?’ Luke asks.

‘Worse. I’m going to faint if I don’t eat something.’

‘There’s loads of chilli left. I’ll heat some up for you.’ He heads for the kitchen and starts moving around energetically. I follow him, hoping to be able to make it as far as the nearest chair, so that I can slump at the kitchen table. ‘Girls in bed?’

‘Yup. Dinah fell asleep on the sofa at half six. I had to carry her upstairs.’

I raise my eyebrows in disbelief, which takes more effort than it should. The heat from the hot-plate, which Luke tends to leave on in winter to create an Aga-like effect, is making me feel drowsy, too heavy to move even the lightest parts of my body.

‘She had a stressful day. I’m under orders to tell you all about it.’ He hands me an extra-large pottery mug full of cold white wine: a compromise.

‘What happened?’ I ask, not because I’m keen to immerse myself in the details of Dinah’s latest spat with Mrs Truscott, but because there are only two other things Luke and I are likely to talk about tonight, and I can’t face either of them: my abduction by the police, and the letter from Social Services that’s lying on the table in front of me, poking out of what’s left of its envelope. It isn’t there by accident. This is Luke’s way of saying we need to talk about our least favourite subject. I wasn’t here when he opened the letter, but I can see him in my mind, ripping into the envelope, fearless.

If I were the brave one and he the coward, would I force him to confront it? Read the letter aloud to him if he wouldn’t read it himself?

‘Did you know Dinah’s been writing a play?’ he asks, stirring the chilli.

‘No.’
Knowing things is too tiring
. The thought is so out of character for me, it shocks me. I need food. ‘That’ll be hot enough if it’s been on the hot-plate since teatime,’ I tell Luke. ‘And even if it isn’t, I want it now.’

‘
Hector and His Ten Sisters
. It’s about an eight-year-old boy whose mother forces him to wear pink. She’s so exhausted from looking after her eleven children that she can’t face buying different clothes for each one, or different outfits for schooldays and weekends – too much effort. So she decides they all have to wear the same clothes every day, like a uniform, and since ten of her eleven kids are pink-obsessed girls, the mother figures it’d make sense for that to be the colour of the uniform.’ Luke’s standing with his back to me, but I can hear the smile in his voice. ‘Hector has no choice but to go along with it, and pretty soon none of his mates’ll talk to him or play football with him—’

‘What’s this got to do with Mrs Truscott?’ I cut him off. Another time, I’d love to hear all about Hector and his sisters. Just not now.

Luke bangs down a bowl of chilli in front of me and hands me a fork. I lean away from the rising steam and manage not to ask if there’s enough for me to have seconds, and thirds. He would tell me to eat my firsts first and see how I feel after that. Sometimes he reminds me that I live in a developed country, about fifty footsteps away from a Chinese takeaway, an Indian restaurant, a Co-op and a Farmers’ Outlet shop; I’m unlikely to fall victim to a food shortage.

‘Dinah showed the play to Miss Emerson, who said it was the best thing any child of any age at the school had written, ever.’

I can’t help smiling at this. Dinah has a tendency to magnify any compliment she receives. Luke’s ex-squaddie workmate Zac once told her her hair looked nice, and she thought nothing of amending that to, ‘He’s travelled all over the world and never seen anyone with hair as beautiful as mine, not in any country.’

‘Miss Emerson suggested putting on the play at school. She asked Dinah’s permission to show it to Mrs Truscott . . .’

‘Oh, God,’ I mutter, my mouth full. This is my favourite kind of meal: full of eye-wateringly strong red chillis that Luke will have added only once he and the girls were sure they’d had enough. I’m a masochist. I love food that makes me cry and sweat.

‘Mrs Truscott said she didn’t think it was suitable. Why?’ He refills my wine mug. ‘Because there’s no reason why boys shouldn’t wear pink, and we mustn’t reinforce gender stereotypes or give the impression that having sisters is a terrible thing.’

I groan. Is it selfish to wish that nothing problematic, nothing requiring any thought or action on my part, would ever happen at school? When I meet Dinah and Nonie off the bus and ask them how their day was, the answer I’m desperate to hear is, ‘Great fun and highly educative, though at the same time absolutely unremarkable and therefore in no need of further discussion.’

‘When did all this happen? Why didn’t Dinah say anything?’

‘She wanted to deal with it on her own, and she did. Admirably or deviously or both, depending on your point of view. She agreed with Mrs Truscott that there was nothing wrong with boys wearing pink, and said that was exactly the point her play was trying to make: that if Hector’s friends hadn’t teased him, he wouldn’t have had to take drastic action and there’d have been no tragic end for the ten sisters. They mock Hector mercilessly for wearing pink clothes and get horribly punished. Mrs Truscott fell for it, said Dinah’s play could be part of the Christmas show, as long as she didn’t allow it to interfere with her schoolwork or anyone else’s. Dinah set up auditions, even formed a casting committee so that all decisions could be shown to be fair. I think that might have been Nonie’s idea. Nonie was on the committee, anyway. Miss Emerson helped out with the admin, scripts went home with individual lines highlighted . . .’

‘I can’t believe Dinah didn’t tell us.’

‘She didn’t want to invite us to her drama premiere until she knew it wasn’t going to fall through.’ Luke pours himself a glass of wine and brings it over to the table. I see from his face that he’s angry. ‘Which it did, pretty much straight away. One kid’s mum rang up and said her daughter had come home sobbing because she hadn’t got one of the “sister” parts and her two best friends had; another kid’s dad stormed into Mrs Truscott’s office complaining about the disgusting script his son had brought home, full of cruelty and torture and likely to provoke a pandemic of sister-hatred.’

‘Torture? Teasing someone for wearing pink? It’s hardly
The Killer Inside Me
.’

‘You didn’t let me get to the end of story,’ Luke says. ‘People get rolled in mud, pushed into fishponds against their will . . .’

‘That ought to happen more often in real life.’

‘One girl was so upset not to be given even a minor part that her mother threatened to take her out of the school and home-educate her. You can guess the upshot: Mrs Truscott told Dinah the play was causing too much trouble, and suddenly it was all off. Dinah was upset and she overreacted. She accused Mrs Truscott of being a coward with no principles.’

I have to tread a fine line here. Luke is worried, understandably. This means I must under no circumstances blurt out, ‘Ha! Spot on!’ I have a horrible feeling my face is giving the game away.