Kind of Cruel (4 page)

‘Kind. Cruel. Kind of Cruel,’ I say, not sure I’ve got it right. ‘What does it mean?’ Is it a magic spell, designed to drag recalcitrant memories to the surface?

‘You tell me,’ says Ginny.

‘How can I? You were the one who said it.’

‘No, I didn’t. You said it.’

There’s a long pause. Why am I still horizontal, with my eyes closed? I ought to sit up and insist that this stranger stops lying about me.

‘You said it,’ I snap, annoyed that I should have to convince her when she must know the truth as well as I do. ‘And then you asked me to repeat it.’

‘All right, Amber, I’m going to count to five to bring you out of hypnosis. When I reach five, I want you to open your eyes. One. Two. Three. Four. Five.’

It’s strange to see the room again. I pull the lever under the arm of my chair and it tilts me upright. Ginny is staring at me, not smiling. She looks worried.

‘I didn’t say anything,’ I tell her. ‘You said it.’

In my haste to escape, I nearly run into the woman with the red lipstick. ‘All better?’ she says. The sight of her shocks me; at first I can’t work out why. How could I have erased her from my mind so completely? I ought to have known I might open the door and find her here, waiting. My brain is not operating at its usual speed; I’m not sure if it’s tiredness or the after-effects of hypnosis.

Her notebook. You forgot that you saw her writing in her notebook. What was she writing?

I struggle to pretend nothing has changed: my customary reaction when I’m ambushed by the unexpected.

It doesn’t work.

Why would Ginny Saxon pretend I’d said something I hadn’t? Before today she didn’t know me; she has nothing to gain from lying about me. Why is this only occurring to me now?

I should say something. Red Lipstick Woman asked me a question.
All better?
In the hour since I last saw her, her bitterness has transmuted into good-humoured resignation: she doesn’t believe that Ginny is capable of curing either of us, but we must participate in the charade all the same. I stare at the clouds of breath in the air between us and imagine they are a barrier through which words and understanding cannot pass. I can’t speak. Day is already turning into night; the fields look like flat dark cloths spread out beside the empty road. They make me think of the magician we hired for Nonie’s seventh birthday party, the black satin throw he draped over his small table.

What’s wrong with me? How long have I let this silence last? My thoughts are either moving too fast or unbearably slowly; I can’t tell the difference.

Her hands mottled from the cold, black woolly gloves on the passenger seat beside her, a notebook open on her lap, words on the page . . .

I resist the urge to run back to the warmth of Ginny’s wooden den and beg for her mercy. I went to her for help – help I still need. How did I end up calling her a liar, refusing to pay and storming out in a rage?

Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel.

‘An hour ago you could talk and now you can’t,’ says Red Lipstick Woman. ‘What did she do to you in there? Blink your answers – two for yes, one for no. Did she programme you to assassinate her political enemies?’

I can’t ask. I have to. I might only have a few seconds before Ginny summons her inside. ‘Your notebook,’ I say. ‘The one you had in the car. This is going to sound strange, but . . . were you writing some kind of poem?’

She laughs. ‘No. Nothing so ambitious. Why?’

If it wasn’t a poem, why the short lines?

Kind

Cruel

Kind of Cruel

‘What was the name of that guy who dictated a whole book by blinking his left eyelid?’ she asks, looking over her shoulder towards the road as if there’s someone there who might know the answer. She doesn’t want to talk about what I want to talk about. Her private notebook; why would she?

‘“Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel” – is that what you were writing? I’m not asking you to tell me what it means . . .’

‘I don’t know what it means,’ she says. Reaching into her handbag, she pulls out a packet of Marlboro Lights and a silver lighter. ‘Apart from the obvious: kind means kind, cruel means cruel, etc.’

‘Could I have seen those words in your notebook?’
And you have the right to ask this because?

I wait while she lights a cigarette. She takes two deep drags, savouring each one: an advertisement for the bad habit of which she hopes to be cured. Though I suppose I shouldn’t assume that’s why she’s here.

Assume nothing. Especially not that you must be right, and the person trying to help you must be a liar.

Why do I have the sense that she’s stalling? ‘No, you couldn’t have seen those words,’ she says when she’s ready. ‘Maybe you saw them somewhere else. Since we’re asking intrusive questions, what’s your name?’

‘Amber. Amber Hewerdine.’

‘Bauby,’ she announces, startling me. ‘That was his name – the blink-writer.’

I’m going to have to press the point; I can’t help myself. ‘Are you sure? Maybe you wrote it a while ago, or . . .’ I stop short of suggesting that the words might be there without her knowing, that someone else might have written them. That’s crazy – crazier than the idea of Ginny brainwashing would-be assassins in her back-garden treatment room in the Culver Valley. I don’t trust my judgement at the moment; everything that comes into my mind must be forced through the filter of normality and plausibility.
Don’t ask her if she shares the notebook with anyone; no one shares their notebooks
.

I decide my best bet is to be as straightforward as I can. ‘I remember seeing it.’
Like you remember Ginny saying it and asking you to repeat it?
‘Like a list: “Kind” on one line, then a couple of line spaces, then “Cruel” underneath, and “Kind of Cruel” a few lines beneath that.’

She shakes her head, and I want to scream. Can I call two people liars in one day, or is that excessive? It occurs to me, way too late, that I ought to tell her why I’m asking. Maybe that would make a difference to her willingness to talk. ‘I’m not prying,’ I start to say.

‘Yes, you are.’

‘I’ve never been hypnotised before.’ I didn’t realise how pathetic that would sound until I said it. She flinches.
Great
. Now I’ve embarrassed us both. ‘I’m trying to check my memory’s working properly, that’s all.’

‘And we’ve established that it isn’t,’ she says. Why isn’t she more freaked out by this, by me? I know how oddly I’m behaving, or at least I think I know; her matter-of-fact responses are making me doubt it.

Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel
. I can see the words on the page, and more than that: an equally strong image of myself looking, seeing. I’m part of the same memory as the words; I’m in the scene. So is she, so is her notebook, her cigarette . . .

‘You’re describing lined paper,’ she says.

I nod.
Pale blue horizontal lines, with a pink vertical line running down the left hand side to denote the margin
.

‘The pages in my notebook aren’t lined.’

Which ought to be the end of the matter. She’s looking at me as if she knows it isn’t.

If Ginny didn’t say those words and ask me to repeat them, if I didn’t see them written down in this woman’s notebook . . .

But I
did
. I know I did. Just because I was wrong about Ginny doesn’t mean I must be wrong about this.

‘Could I have a look?’ I ask. ‘Please? I won’t read anything. I’m just . . .’
Just what? Too stupid and stubborn to take her word for it without checking?
Why don’t I care that I’m behaving outrageously? I can’t take this any further; I have no right to. ‘Show me any page, and if it hasn’t got lines on it—’

‘It hasn’t.’ She glances at her watch, nods towards the garden. ‘I’d better go in. I’m more than two hours late for my appointment, and sixty-five minutes late for yours. And even if most of that lateness isn’t my fault . . .’ She shrugs. ‘Believe it or not, I’d rather carry on talking to you. And I might show you my notebook one day, maybe even one day soon – but not now.’ She gives me a loaded look as she delivers this peculiar speech. Is she coming on to me? There must be a reason why she isn’t as angry with me as she would have every right to be.

Maybe even one day soon
. Why does she think she’s going to see me again? It makes no sense.

Before I can ask, she’s walking past me and into Ginny’s back garden. Watching her move convinces me that I couldn’t do anything so ambitious; I stay rooted to the spot. Maybe I’ll wait for her to come out in an hour. Except I can’t. I have to get back for the girls. I need to leave now, or I’ll be late. Still, I don’t move – not until the sound of knocking galvanises me and I realise that in a matter of seconds, Ginny will open the door of her wooden office. I can’t let her see me here, not after the way I yelled at her. If there’s one thing I am absolutely sure of, it’s that Ginny Saxon must never see me again, and vice versa. I’ll post her an apologetic note with a cheque for seventy quid pinned to it, and then find a different hypnotherapist – one closer to home, in Rawndesley, who has never seen me behave like an obnoxious brat. Luke will laugh and call me a coward and he’ll be right. In my defence, I could point out that, as cowards go, surely the paying, apologising kind are the best.

Who am I kidding? I’m not going to tell Luke how badly I behaved.

You never do
. I push the thought away.

Inside my now freezing car, I rest my head on the steering wheel and groan. Ginny could have argued with me, but she didn’t. She agreed to waive her fee for the session, since I clearly felt badly let down by her. Maybe I’ll send her a cheque for double the amount I owe. No, that looks desperate; might as well change my will, leave her everything on one condition – that she promises not to spend the rest of her life thinking I’m the biggest arsehole she’s ever met.

It’s nine minutes past four. If I set off now, I’ll make it. If I stay here another ten minutes, then drive dangerously fast all the way back to Rawndesley, I’ll make it. I won’t even need ten minutes, because Red Lipstick Woman will have locked her car, and I’ll be back in mine and heading home thirty seconds from now.

I don’t know what it means
. She said it as if she was more frustrated than I was by her inability to understand the words in her notebook; she didn’t seem to care if I knew it.
Then why deny having written them?

Without allowing myself to think about what I’m doing, I get out of my car, cross the road and walk up Ginny’s drive, exactly as I did an hour ago. I’m glad it’s dark, glad Culver Valley County Council is more scared of the anti-light-pollution lobby than of their opponents, who petition endlessly for a solid flank of lamp-posts along every rural A-road, so that pensioners and teenage girls can see the muggers and rapists lying in wait for them.

There are no criminals anywhere in sight, I’m happy to report. Only a crazy woman in search of a notebook.

Everything will be fine as long as Red Lipstick Woman has remembered to lock her car; I will be prevented from doing something insane and illegal. What law would I be breaking, I wonder. Something to do with trespass, probably. It can’t be breaking and entering if I don’t break anything. Unlawful entry?

I try the driver door. It opens. Immediately, I feel more unlawful than I have ever felt. My gasps of breath hang like foggy graffiti on the air: visible evidence that I am here, where I shouldn’t be.

All I’ve done is open a car door. Is that so bad? I could still close it and walk away.

And never find out if you saw the words you think you saw.

What if they’re not there? Will I go back to believing they must have come from Ginny – that she asked me to repeat them and then, for some impossible-to-imagine reason, denied it?

The notebook lies open on the passenger seat, next to the black gloves. My hands shake as I reach over and pick it up. I start to flick through the pages. There’s lots of writing in here, but I can only make out the odd word; the sky is too dark, nearly as black as the surrounding fields. There’s a light on in the car – it came on when I opened the door – but in order to benefit from it I’d have to . . .