Never Ending (19 page)

Shiv catches herself nodding. Dr Pollard holds her gaze so that what follows appears to be addressed solely to Shiv.

“Comfort or torment, either way it is delusional. If it takes root, it can go from being a perfectly normal
stage
in the grieving process to something that stalls, or even
replaces
, that process.” She unlocks her gaze from Shiv’s – releasing her, it feels like – and turns to the group. “Each of you, to some extent, came to us in this condition.”

“So why—” Caron begins. Dr Pollard cuts across her.

“As you’ll know by now, Phase 1 of your treatment has been designed, as far as possible, to indulge you – to encourage you, to
immerse
you – in the delusion that the person you lost is not lost at all. That you can still maintain some semblance of a genuine relationship with them.” Another pause. “Why do we do this?” She looks at Caron. “Is that what you were going to ask?”

Caron nods.

“Perhaps you can answer that for me. All of you.” Finally unclasping her fingers and lowering her hands to her sides, Dr Pollard asks, “After thirty days of this – hour after hour, day after day, night after night – how many of you still hold to the delusion? How many of you believe your loved one is present, is with you?”

No hands go up.

“And how many of you wish to continue indulging yourself in the delusion of a relationship?”

Again, no hands are raised. Not a single one.

“You have your answer.”

It’s like the
ta-da
moment at the end of a conjuring trick and Shiv almost lets out a gasp of startled, appreciative laughter. From the murmuring along the line, the others are similarly impressed. Can it really be so simple though? So clever? So
easy
? She isn’t sure what to think but what she does know is that it’s been at least a week since she regarded “Declan” (in any of his various forms) as remotely
real
, rather than someone she created for herself.

Dr Pollard resumes. “Phase 1, the
object
of your bereavement. In Phase 2, we shift the focus to the
nature of your
trauma
. That is, from the person who died to the circumstances of their death. Trauma-centred Therapy, or TCT.”

The Director lets that sink in.

“I won’t say too much more at this stage because it’s best that you enter TCT without knowing exactly what to expect. Some therapies train you to rationalize your trauma, to detach yourself from it – as though it happened to someone else or to an earlier, obsolete ‘you’. In TCT, you are plunged right into the trauma.” She makes a fist, a plunging motion. “Face to face with what happened, with where it happened. With
how
it happened.”

For the first time today she smiles her gap-toothed smile. “It’s the difference between lighting a prayer-candle for someone possessed by a demon and conducting a full-blown exorcism.”

No one says a word as Webb and Hensher escort them along the corridor.
Too shocked
, is all Shiv can think.
Too scared
. From now on, they’ve been told, there will be no Walk or Make; each of them will spend their mornings in a specially designed Personalized Therapy Unit, or PTU. Four hours, every day. Alone. Locked in.

Shiv’s palms are clammy, her breath hot in her throat.

They’re taken upstairs to a first-floor corridor Shiv hasn’t seen before. It must be directly below the patients’ bedrooms and, with its green decor and sequence of doors along the right-hand wall, looks the same.

At each door, Assistant Webb stops to swipe it open with a key-card and usher the resident inside. Helen, Caron, Docherty – one by one, they disappear.

It’s Shiv’s turn.

Webb lets her in and closes the door without a word. She hears the electronic click of the lock. As though the shutting of the door triggered it, the darkened room blooms into light.

Whitewashed walls, tiled floor, plain blue curtains, a set of asymmetrical shelves lined with books, a blue-and-white chequered rug, a cream leather sofa and chairs, a low coffee table – the room, her Personalized Therapy Unit, is more or less an exact replica of the lounge in the villa at Kyritos.

Kyritos

The morning after the roadside encounter, Declan didn’t surface until the rest of them had eaten breakfast and were preparing to go out.

Dad was in the lounge, a map spread out on the coffee table, plotting their route to a fort on the other side of the island. Shiv was in the kitchen area, helping Mum to make up a picnic, the floor tiles deliciously cold beneath her bare feet. Every now and then she glanced at the stairs, where Dec might appear at any moment.

Actually, he could sulk in bed the whole day for all Shiv cared, but mixed in with the anger was dread. Of what he might say to their parents.

“Fifty minutes, I reckon,” Dad called out, tapping the map. “An hour max.”

“Good-oh,” Mum said, buttering bread.

She had picked up on the atmosphere, even if their father hadn’t. “What was all that about last night?” she’d asked earlier, while Dad was in the shower.

“All what?”

“Dec stomping off to bed early; you moping around like a ten-year-old.”

“I wasn’t
moping
,” Shiv had said.

She opened three cabinets before she found the sandwich bags. Greek music played on a radio outside, where the maintenance guy was servicing the pool. For no other reason than he was old and Greek, he put Shiv in mind of Nikos’s grandad and the tale Nikos told of fried fish and boyhood picnics down at the rocks.

Nikos. The look he had given her last night as he climbed onto his moped.

So what if you’re only fifteen?
That was what she sought in his expression in the wake of Declan’s revelation.
It’s OK, Shiv, we’re still good
. In the countless replays of that scene in her mind over the past twelve hours, she almost convinced herself she’d seen exactly that look in his eyes in the moment before he rode off.

But she no longer trusted herself to distinguish between what she saw and what she’d hoped to see.

In another version, she saw him dismiss her as a kid, a stupid, lying, jailbait bitch. Saw his relief that he’d learnt the truth before things had gone any further. Saw that he couldn’t mount his bike and get away fast enough.

If only Nikos had
said
something. If only he hadn’t just flicked her a look – the briefest, unreadable glance – before veering off with a spurt of grit and dust that left Shiv alone with her brother in the twilight. Then alone altogether as Dec, without a word, returned to the villa. Shiv had stared for ages at the point where the gloom swallowed the moped’s tail light, before she turned to follow her brother.

Shiv had texted Nikos that evening. Three, four times. She’d left a whispered message on his voicemail. She’d texted again, twice, in the morning.

Nothing.

If his look as he’d left was open to interpretation, his silence was clear enough. Nikos was gone and Shiv would never see or hear from him again.

Afterwards, she’d found Dec at the pool, cross-legged at the end of the diving board and gazing blankly at the water. He’d removed the basketball vest Nikos had given him and was shivering in the night air.

“Why did you tell him?” Shiv said, furious, but keeping her voice low in case Mum and Dad overheard through the open patio doors. From inside, came the sounds of food being served, a wine bottle being opened. “
Why
, Declan?”

Her brother just sat there, the board bowing beneath his weight. The pool lights on the rippling water illuminated him from below like the reflection of so many silver coins. He ignored her so totally you’d think he hadn’t even registered her at the side of the pool. Her arms hung straight down at her sides, as Dec’s had done earlier, in the lay-by; her hands, as his had been, were bunched into fists.

He was crying but Shiv said it anyway. “I’ll never forgive you for this.”

“Does His Lordship intend to grace us with his presence today?” Dad said. He had folded away the map and come to stand the other side of the kitchen counter, picking an olive out of the tub of salad and popping it into his mouth.

“Who knows?” Mum said, shooting a sidelong glance at Shiv.

Dad looked at his watch. “Only, we could do with—”

The slap of bare feet on the stairs and there was Declan, with slept-in hair, crumpled boxers and a very creased and grubby Salinger T-shirt. So, he was wearing that again.

“What?”
he said, crossly, as three pairs of eyes tracked his arrival.

“We’re meant to be going to the fort,” Dad said.

“And your point is?”

“We’ve wasted half the morning already.”

Declan crossed the room, barging past Shiv, and raided the fridge for orange juice. He drank straight from the carton. “This fort is, like, a thousand years old,” he said, wiping his mouth. “I don’t reckon it’ll fall down before we get there, do you?”

Before the bickering escalated, Mum intervened. “Eat something,” she said, handing Declan a bowl, “then get showered and changed, please.”

Dad muttered something and left them to it. Shiv watched her brother tip cereal and milk into the bowl and eat standing up at the counter. She thought he might continue to blank her, as he’d done last night, but he looked directly at her, his expression indecipherable.

Mum busied herself loading the cool box. “Do something with that, can you, Shiv?” she said, nodding at the chopping board, strewn with salad trimmings.

Shiv went to scrape it into the bin, but her brother was in the way.

“’Scuse me,” she said.

“I’m
eating
,” he said, mouth full of half-chewed cornflakes.

“Go and eat somewhere else then.”

“For crying out loud!” That was Mum, banging the cool-box lid down so hard the bottle of washing-up liquid toppled into the sink. “I don’t know what’s going on between you two, but we only have two days left of this holiday and you’re not going to ruin them.” She glared at them in turn. “Understood?”

Neither of them responded.

“I mean it,” Mum said. “The pair of you, just grow up.”

“Oh,
Shiv’s
all grown up. Aren’t you?”

“Shut up, Declan.”

“What’s the problem?” Dad said, reappearing in the lounge.

“Nothing,” Shiv said, widening her eyes at Declan, daring him to contradict her. He set the bowl down on the counter, slopping milk, and headed out of the kitchen.

“And don’t take all day in the shower,” Dad called after him.

“No, I
won’t.”

“And what’s with the T-shirt – I thought the basketball top was glued on?”

Declan paused, hung his head a moment – as Nikos had done last night – then carried on out of the room without a word.

In the car, she expected Dec to slide back into a silent sulk. But he was something like his usual self, making up silly “facts” about the fort as he pretended to read aloud from the guidebook, or singing along (intentionally badly) to the CD.
Too
normal. Like this was a reality TV show and he was playing an exaggerated version of himself for the cameras.

Shiv wasn’t sure if she preferred this Declan to the one who had frozen her out or the one who’d sniped at breakfast. She wasn’t sure what to expect.

She sat, half turned away from him, staring out the window as they snaked through the interior of the island. The sunlit hillsides, littered with huge boulders and twisted old olive trees, were almost stunning enough to lift Shiv out of her black cloud. Almost, but not quite.

They couldn’t have been too far from the place where Nikos had taken them to see the vulture.

She checked her phone for messages. No signal.

Whether it was this that caught Declan’s eye, or whether he’d planned to say something all along, she would never know. Maybe he’d just noticed where they were and remembered the vulture trip too. Whatever, he quietened again. She slipped the phone back in her bag.

Five minutes, ten – the silence in the rear seat was so profound Shiv couldn’t believe their parents were chatting away about the passing scenery. Then, as they rounded a bend and the island’s eastern coastline swung spectacularly into view far below, her brother said, “Don’t worry, Shivoloppoulos,” plenty loud enough for Mum and Dad to hear, “I won’t tell them.”

“Tell us what?” Dad frowned into the rear-view mirror.

Mum sat dead still, eyes fixed on the road as though she was the driver rather than the passenger. Like she dreaded where this was leading as much as Shiv did.

Shiv turned to her brother. “Dec, please—”

Dad repeated his question. “Won’t tell us
what
?”

“I won’t
tell
you,” Declan said, “that your lovely daughter is shagging Nikos.”

12

Shiv realizes immediately that the re-creation of the villa’s interior is virtual rather than actual. That what she is seeing isn’t a room furnished and decorated to resemble the lounge in Kyritos but photos of the original, enlarged to life-size and projected onto the floor and walls of an otherwise bare room. The clinic must have downloaded the images from the holiday company’s website.

What doesn’t happen so fast, or for several minutes, is the steadying of her breathing, or the return to a regular beat of her
thump-thump-thump
ing heart.

Or the lessening of the urge to hammer on the door and scream to be let out.

They won’t let her out though. For four hours, Shiv is stuck here with … whatever this is. A psychological experiment. Her very own Room 101. Trapped inside –
enveloped
by, taken back to – the place where her brother lived his last days.

Well, they can lock her in but they can’t make her look.

With nowhere to sit but the floor, she settles down in a corner, cross-legged, tips her head back against the wall and closes her eyes. She’ll keep them closed the whole four hours, if necessary.

But her eyes have been shut for just seconds when an unbearably loud buzz breaks the silence, insistent, drilling into her ears – right into her brain, or that’s how it feels. The moment she opens her eyes again the noise stops. She closes her eyes once more. The noise kicks back in. Opens them. The noise stops.