Kind of Cruel (5 page)

Don’t think about it. Just do it.

My heart pounding, I sit in the driver’s seat, leaving the door open and my legs outside in the cold, so that only part of my body is doing something wrong. I open the notebook again. At first I can’t concentrate; my focus is on my out-of-control heartbeat, which feels as if it’s about to spring out of my mouth. Will I be found at five o’clock, dead from a heart attack in a stranger’s car? At least I’ve shaken off my post-hypnosis stupor, finally – nothing like a bit of law-breaking to detrancify the mind.

There’s no such thing as a hypnotised feeling
. That’s what Ginny said. I’m no expert, but I think she might be wrong.

When I’m calm enough to concentrate, I see that the notebook is full of letters, if you can call something that isn’t addressed to anyone or signed from anyone a letter. Which you can’t, I don’t think. My guess is that these diatribes were not written for sending but to make the writer feel better. Each one is several pages long, angry, full of accusations. I start to read the first one, then stop after a couple of lines as a tremor of panic rolls through me.

What the hell am I doing? I’m not here to immerse myself in a stranger’s bitterness – I need to find what I’m looking for and get out of here. Now that I’ve glimpsed the verbal wrath Red Lipstick woman unleashes on anyone who crosses her, I’m even less keen than I was to be caught rifling through her possessions.

I flick through the pages quickly: diatribe, diatribe, diatribe, shopping list, diatribe . . . After a while I stop looking at the content. There is too much writing on these pages for any of them to be the page I’m looking for: one with only five words on it, surrounded by lots of space; a mostly blank page.

I’m an idiot. These pages aren’t lined. Why wasn’t that the first thing I spotted when I opened the notebook? Why am I still sitting here? Can hypnotherapy cause permanent brain damage?

I carry on flicking through, although I’m guessing the notebook is unlikely to develop lines at its halfway point.

Give up.

Just one more.

I turn the page, barely see the words before I hear the click of a door opening.
Oh, no, oh, God, this is not happening
. Harbouring an overpowering desire for something not to happen feels the same as forbidding it to happen. The drawback is that it doesn’t work.

I’m trapped in an elongated rectangle of light. The woman whose car I have invaded is marching towards me. Trying to work out if I’d have time to get out and run away before she reaches me, I end up staying where I am. Why did I take such an insane risk? How could I be so stupid? Dinah and Nonie will be getting off the school bus at half past four, and I won’t be there to collect them. Where will I be? In a police cell? My stomach churns in sudden, urgent pain; adrenaline forces beads of sweat through my skin. Is this a panic attack?

‘Put down my notebook and get out of my car.’ Her efficient calm chills me. There’s something wrong about this situation, wronger than me being here without permission. She ought to be angrier.
She ought to be inside
. Why did she come out? Was it a trap? Maybe she knew what I was likely to do – knew it before I did, even – and deliberately left her car unlocked, giving me the opportunity to incriminate myself, and her the chance to catch me.

Ginny Saxon stands in the doorway of her wooden room, watching us. ‘Everything okay?’ she calls out. I can’t look at her. I stare at the open notebook in my hands.

Then I close it, pass it to its owner.

‘Go home, Amber,’ she says wearily, as if I’m a naughty child whose detention has come to an end. ‘Stay at home. We’ll do the explanations part later, shall we?’

I’ve no idea what she means, but I’m more than happy to make both our lives easier by getting the hell away from her, away from Ginny, away from 77 Great Holling Road, the scene of too many catastrophically humiliating events for me ever to be willing to come back here.

Back in my car, I force my mind to go blank. If I’m thinking anything, it’s ‘Drive, drive, drive’. I can just make it in time for the girls, if I’m ruthless. As I approach the Crozier Bridge roundabout, I get into the lane on the far left, the only one that isn’t clogged with queueing cars. Once I’m on the roundabout, I swerve over, attracting irate beeps from other drivers, and get into the lane I need to be in. I perform the same stunt at three more roundabouts and save nearly ten minutes of queueing time.

You are ruthless, and not only today. Don’t try to pretend this behaviour is new.

Hypnotherapy seems to have amplified the voice in my head that’s always trying to make me feel guilty. Or maybe it hasn’t. It’s certainly magnified my paranoia.

Drive, drive, drive. Drive, drive, drive.

My heart rate finally slows to a manageable level when I realise that I will, after all, be there in time to meet the bus. I’ve never missed it yet, not once, and I’m determined that I never will. The downside of seeing off my bus-related worries is that there is now space in my mind for other thoughts.

She lied to me.

The words were there in her notebook, exactly as I said: ‘Kind, Cruel, Kind of Cruel’. Written as a list on an otherwise blank page. No printed lines, true, but apart from that detail my description was spot on. So why did she tell me I couldn’t have seen it?

I need another perspective on this to orientate my own – not that I know what mine is yet, other than confusion. If I tell Luke what happened, he’ll tell me it’s obvious why Red Lipstick Woman lied. Since Little Orchard, his default mode has been to listen to whatever’s puzzling me, then deny the existence of the puzzling element in case I become obsessed. ‘You’re looking at it from the wrong angle,’ he’ll say. ‘It would have been odd if she
hadn’t
lied. She doesn’t care if your memory’s misfiring – why should she? All she’s going to care about is preserving what’s left of her privacy. She’s written something weird in her notebook, you’ve seen it, and she doesn’t want to explain what it is. No mystery there.’

Song lyrics? A poem? A description of her emotional state, or her personality? It was kind of her to let me have her appointment, cruel of her to sneer at Ginny for basing her hypnotherapy practice in a shed in her back garden.

Kind of cruel to lie to me about what she’d written in her notebook?

I shake my head, disgusted by the absurdity of my line of reasoning. How many people write lists of their own character traits in notebooks that they carry around with them?

Jo’s the person I’m itching to discuss it with, but I’m not going to allow myself to ring her as soon as I get in, however much I’d like to. On a day when I’ve already done too many bad things, I’m going to exercise some self-restraint for once in my life and stop myself from adding another to the list. Since Little Orchard, I have often drawn other people’s inexplicable behaviour to Jo’s attention and asked her if she can think of any reason why someone might behave so bizarrely. I do it to make her feel awkward; I am trying to tell her without actually telling her that I have not forgotten her and Neil’s mystifying disappearing act that Christmas – never referred to by any of us and never accounted for.

If Jo is conscious of my hidden agenda, she’s expert at concealing it; my frequent observations about the irrationality of this person or that person never seem to throw her off track. I’d like to think she’s as aware as I am of all the important things we don’t say to one another when we get the chance – aware, crucially, that these gaps between us are her fault – but I’m starting to wonder if she has deleted Little Orchard from her mind, and is genuinely oblivious to its continued occupation of mine. From the way she says, ‘That
is
odd’ and ‘What a weirdo!’ when I describe the strange behaviour of my various colleagues, it’s pretty clear she’s offering that response as someone who wouldn’t dream of behaving so oddly herself.

I arrive at the corner of Spilling Road and Clavering Road at my usual time of twenty-eight minutes past four. Dinah and Nonie’s school bus has two drop-off points in the centre of Rawndesley – here and the station car park. The station is the more popular one, but for me this one has two advantages: hardly anybody uses it, and it’s no more than five or six strides from my front door. Luke and I bought number 9 Clavering Road just over a year ago in order to have somewhere big enough for the girls to move into. I was determined to buy the biggest house I could afford; nothing else mattered. It still doesn’t. I don’t care that the carpeting throughout is hideous, synthetic and bright red, or that all the curtains are faded floral and so heavily swagged that you can barely see any window between the loops and folds of fabric; I don’t care that we can’t afford to replace any of it. What I love about my house is that even though it’s on a main road, even though I live with three other people, two of whom are children, I can always find a silent, empty room when I need one. Luke’s and my old house had a ground floor that was entirely open plan apart from a downstairs loo; this one has floor after floor of square rooms with closable doors. When I mentioned this to Jo as a major attraction, it was obvious she disapproved. ‘Who do you want to shut out?’ she asked. She didn’t say so, but I knew she doubted my ability to look after Dinah and Nonie properly – Saint Jo, who believes no one can nurture quite as well as she can, who loves nothing more than to surround herself with as many dependent relatives as possible.

I told her the truth: that the only person I want to shut out – need to, sometimes – is myself. I remember what I said. I chose my words carefully to tempt her interest: ‘My mind can be a harsh environment. Sometimes I need to take it far away from the people I care about, to make sure I don’t contaminate anybody.’ Jo’s reply shocked me. ‘Ignore me,’ she said. ‘I’m just jealous. Dinah and Nonie are amazing kids. You’re so lucky.’ At the time, I laughed and said, ‘As if you haven’t got enough people on your plate.’ It was only later, lying awake that night in bed, that I replayed the scene and decided I was angry with her – or rather, I decided I ought to be, I would have every right to be. I spend a lot of time wondering how I ought to feel about Jo, while having no idea how I actually feel.

She called me lucky, knowing my best friend was dead, knowing that Luke and I probably wouldn’t now have children of our own. She avoided responding to what I’d said about feeling the need to shut myself out because she didn’t want our conversation to go beyond the superficial. She never does any more; I’m convinced that her apparent determination to spend every waking hour catering for at least ten people is an escape strategy – how can anyone expect you to engage in meaningful conversation with them when you’re dashing around your too-small kitchen putting together a cream tea that would make the Ritz Hotel’s equivalent look paltry?

I look at my watch. The bus is late. It always is. We’ve been told  in an official letter from the school that while we must be prompt and prepared to wait for up to twenty minutes, the bus will never wait for us. If we are not there to pick up on the dot of half past four, the children will be returned to school and put in something called ‘Fun Club’. I was instantly suspicious when I read this: if things are fun, one doesn’t generally need to be ‘put in’ them. I wanted to write to the school and point out that its bus needs a lesson in give-and-take, but Dinah forbade me. ‘You’re going to need to fight the school over more important things,’ she told me, as if toppling the board of governors was something she’d been mulling over recently, even if she hadn’t yet wholeheartedly committed to the plan. ‘Save your energy for a fight that matters.’ This made me smile; it’s something Luke and I are always telling her. ‘Just make sure you’re on time for the bus. It’s easier for us to be on time than it is for any other family at the school,’ she added, sounding like a headmistress. I submitted because I was so relieved to hear her describe us as a family.

Luke and I didn’t know when we bought our house that the girls’ school bus dropped off and picked up right outside; when we found out, Luke said, ‘It’s a sign. It’s got to be. Someone’s on our side.’ On yours, maybe, I thought. The kind of Someone he had in mind would have had access to information about me that I was fairly sure would result in an instant withdrawal of all supernatural support. Knowing I couldn’t say that to Luke, angry to be trapped with a secret I hated and wished would go away, I snapped at him unfairly. ‘Would that be the same Someone who let Sharon die?’ He apologised. I didn’t and still haven’t.

Another cheery memory. Ginny Saxon would be proud.