Scissors, Paper, Stone (29 page)

‘There was some stuff with my parents,’ Charlotte said, clearing her throat. ‘They weren’t getting on all that well and I felt . . . I felt like an intruder. I never felt at home for some reason. We never spoke about things, but . . .’ She collected herself, aware of her own embarrassment at talking so melodramatically about something so seemingly trivial. ‘It wasn’t that bad.’

‘Finish what you were going to say,’ said Roberta Mill gently. ‘Finish that thought.’

‘We never talked. I was so worried all the time, worried that I was doing something wrong or that they were unhappy or that they would divorce – although that might have been a good thing, I guess. I just remember this overwhelming feeling of . . .’ Charlotte searched for the right word. ‘Well, tension I think is the best way of describing it.’

Roberta Mill shifted in her seat, uncrossing her legs and leaning forward slightly. She clasped her hands on her lap. ‘It sounds to me as if you were a child desperate to express yourself, to say how you felt, and yet without the opportunity to do so.’

Charlotte nodded. The therapist sat back in her chair, letting the thought drift, and smiled warmly, waiting calmly for any response. Charlotte felt tears start to trickle down her cheeks and wiped them away with the back of her hand until Roberta Mill offered her a box of tissues, leaning across to put it on the arm of the sofa. ‘What would you say now to your parents that you couldn’t say then?’

It surprised Charlotte to realise she already knew the answer. ‘I’d ask my mother why she didn’t care enough to protect me.’

Charlotte twisted a piece of tissue until it became a thin, white string that she could wind through the fingers of one hand. She thought about the admission she had just made and knew that it was the single most truthful thing she had ever voiced to Roberta Mill. Yet the honesty of those few words did not leave her feeling the relief she half-expected would come with confession. Instead, she felt terror.

Later, Charlotte would wonder whether she was so used to keeping secrets that the secrets themselves had become part of her character. Was she frightened that by revealing them, she would no longer be herself? Or perhaps, more truthfully, was she worried that she would no longer have an excuse? That actually, she was rather a boring person when separated from the darkness within her. Was there part of her that enjoyed the tortured pose, the hints of hidden mysteries, the oh-so-artistic tendency towards depression? Had she made things worse than they actually were because she needed something to blame for all that she disliked about herself?

What if, once the secret was exposed, Roberta Mill thought it was mundane or pedestrian, not enough of a reason for someone to need therapy at all? What if she laughed at her? It was somehow more important that Roberta Mill liked her, rather than being allowed to know Charlotte as she really was. Because Charlotte as she really was might not have been enough.

‘Charlotte?’ Roberta Mill said, inflecting her voice with gentle persistence. ‘Why do you think you would ask your mother that?’

Charlotte looked up at her blankly. ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, and although this was a lie, it made her feel safe because even if she was not in control of what had been done to her, she was, at least, in control of what she revealed about herself. And that, more than anything else, gave her some sort of power.

Charlotte

Anne had not come to the hospital. When the nurse walked back into the room where they had taken her to calm down, Charlotte could see immediately from her baffled, semi-embarrassed expression that Anne would not be collecting her. The nurse stammered out a brief summary of the phone call, clearly ill at ease and not sure what to make of the inexplicable situation she found herself in. Charlotte almost felt sorry for her. She nodded her head once and then took a final sip of tea from the mug they had given her. It was chipped on the handle and emblazoned with the words ‘World’s Best Boss’ in jaunty, brightly coloured letters.

The nurse was saying something else now, her lips moving, her eyebrows raised in concern but Charlotte couldn’t hear what it was. She smiled, with what she hoped was a fair approximation of sanity, gathered her bag and coat and stood up.

‘Thank you for being so kind,’ she said to the nurse, who looked momentarily dumbfounded to have been halted in mid-flow.

‘That’s all right.’ She hesitated. ‘There was no real harm done but if . . . if you ever want to speak to someone . . .’ The nurse let the thought trail. Charlotte nodded once more, as kindly as she could, and then walked outside into the linty grey evening light.

She forgot that she had her car here and instead started to make her way down the road towards the Tube station. She noticed her hand was aching, a dull, sore sense of half-removed pain, and she couldn’t work out why until she remembered what had happened: she had hit her father. She had waited all these years for her revenge and this was all it had come to: slapping and screaming at him as he lay half-dead in a hospital bed. She felt like laughing, a bundled-up sense of mirth pushed against the back of her throat. How ridiculous she was.

She walked into a newsagent’s, an old-fashioned bell ringing out as she opened the door.

‘A packet of Lucky Strike Light, please. And a lighter.’

The wrinkle-skinned proprietor looked at her lugubriously, his brown eyes peeking out from behind a blue plastic dispenser of lottery scratch-cards. Wordlessly, he turned around, took the cigarette packet from the well-stocked shelves behind him and slid the blue-and-silver packet across the counter.

‘What colour?’ he asked.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘What colour lighter?’

‘Oh, I don’t mind. You choose.’

He selected one in a bright pink transparent plastic and gave it to her. He smiled briefly, pushing up the folds of flesh under his eyes like a Bassett hound.

‘Pretty colour for a pretty lady,’ he said. ‘£7.20.’

‘Thank you,’ said Charlotte, handing him the money.

She went outside and lit up, taking long, languid drags that made her slightly light-headed. Charlotte had never officially smoked but, occasionally, she craved the burnt caramel tang of a Lucky Strike. It was a brand that appealed to her for its romanticised connections with American GIs and 1940s forces sweethearts. She liked the taste of the tobacco, acrid against her tongue, and the fug of reliable numbness that now pulsated pleasurably through her body.

She took out her mobile and called Gabriel. He answered on the third ring.

‘Hi, sweetie, how was it?’

‘Gabriel, I need to talk to you.’

She could hear him breathe out heavily on the other end of the line.

‘Sounds ominous.’

‘It’s not, it’s not. I just . . . there are things I need to explain to you. Things I should have told you from the beginning.’

She took a drag of her cigarette.

‘Charlotte, are you smoking?’ he said, in a tone of bemusement. She knew that Gabriel quite liked her secret smoking habit; that he couldn’t help but find it illicit and sexy in spite of himself. The knowledge that he should disapprove somehow heightened its appeal.

‘Yes.’

He chuckled. ‘Well it must be bad. I hope you’re not going to tell me you feel like a man trapped in a woman’s body or something.’

She laughed lightly. ‘No, I promise it’s nothing like that.’

‘OK, well, come back to mine, then. I’ll cook you dinner.’

‘OK.’

‘Charlotte?’

‘Yes?’

‘I love you. Don’t forget that.’

‘I won’t.’

So she had told him everything: about her father, her mother, the cocoon of unspoken tension and gauzy half-truths that had wrapped themselves around their family. She had never spoken to another person so honestly before and it left her feeling both relieved and vulnerable, exposed like the tender, pinkish flesh of a newborn kitten.

Gabriel said almost nothing throughout, simply clasping her hand in his across the kitchen table as she let it all stream from her. Even when she got to the hardest bits – the episodes where her father had touched her; that day in the car; her mother’s refusal to acknowledge what had happened; the evening in Piccadilly when it all came rushing back – he did not respond other than to squeeze her hand more tightly.

Charlotte was oddly grateful for this affectionate reticence. She did not want him to be angry because it would have made her feel like a failure for not having been angry enough herself, as if there were something wrong with her for accepting such ugliness without confrontation. Nor did she want him to condemn Charles outright, because, in spite of it all, there existed in her a residual grain of loyalty towards her father. She was the one who had been hurt by him, who had chosen, in the years that followed, to push it to one side as best she could, and she did not want her feelings appropriated, moulded into someone else’s notion of what was right, of what they would have done in the same situation. All she wanted was someone she loved to listen. She wanted him to believe her and then to carry on loving her with the full knowledge of who she was. She wanted him to look deep into the darkest parts of her, to squeeze into the twisted corners of all she had become, and not to flinch, but to understand and be tender.

It took her two hours to tell her story, sometimes crying, sometimes clenched-up and furious inside, sometimes simply emotionless from the exhaustion of carrying it all, an over-full pool of murky water that for years had threatened to spill over and break its banks, the mulchiness flooding into her without warning.

Gabriel asked only one question. At the very end, when he was sure Charlotte had stopped speaking and when he had walked over to the other side of the table to crouch down and take her in his arms, he said, with such cautious gentleness that he was almost inaudible: ‘Do you think you should talk to your mother?’

‘Perhaps,’ said Charlotte, and she thought back to Roberta Mill, but she knew she would feel too scared of what might be revealed to try.

‘It’s none of my business, of course,’ he continued carefully, stroking her hair as he spoke, ‘but maybe there is a little bit of you that can’t forgive your mother because she’s easier to blame. You’re scared of your father but what scares you most is that he might not love you. You take what you can get from him. But with Anne, you don’t have those qualms.’ He paused. Charlotte said nothing. ‘You know she loves you,’ Gabriel said, ‘and perhaps that means you can hate her more easily because there won’t be the same sort of repercussion. She’ll always love you.’ He cleared his throat. ‘Even if she failed you horribly.’

She did not reply but the silence had its own peculiar weight. She knew that this silence would be the closest she could get to an admission of truth. Gabriel knew it too and he did not press her. Instead, he stood up and drew Charlotte’s head to him so that her cheek lay flat against the tautness of his stomach. He stroked her hair softly. She could smell the fabric softener scent of disinfected lavender on his shirt and, beneath it, the nutty mustiness of his sweat. She was overcome by a desire to touch him, to feel his solidity against her. She slid a hand underneath his shirt and let it rest on the familiar jut of his hip bone.

‘You’re safe now,’ he said after a few minutes. ‘I’m going to look after you for the rest of your life.’

The comfort of this was so intense, so all-encompassing, that Charlotte’s breath caught in her throat. She tried to say something back, to thank him, to tell this man that – improbably, despite all the anxieties and the obstacles and the tangled mess he had made of his past – she loved him. But she couldn’t. Perhaps she didn’t need to; perhaps he already knew.

They went to bed after that and he held her all night. Even when she woke, restless and shifting, in the half-light of early morning, he found a way of wrapping his arms around her again without ever quite waking up. She slept a long time, a dreamless, black velvet sleep, and when she finally opened her eyes, she checked her watch and saw it was almost midday and that Gabriel was no longer beside her.

For a moment, she thought it was still the weekend, and then rapidly the realisation dawned that it was Monday and she should be in work.

‘Shit.’ She scrambled out of bed and was on her way to the en-suite shower when the bedroom door opened.

‘So you’re awake.’

‘Gabriel?’

He laughed. ‘Don’t worry. I called your work and said you were sick. They were very understanding. Here –’

He handed her a large mug of coffee. Steam rose from the hot blackness and dampened her face.

‘Thanks,’ said Charlotte, still bewildered by the sudden transition from sleep to wakefulness.

‘You’ve got sheet creases on your face,’ said Gabriel, smiling. ‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine,’ she said, automatically, taking the mug back to bed with her and piling up the pillows against the cast-iron frame so that she could sit upright.

Gabriel followed her back into bed and lay beside her, leaning his head against his arm and looking directly at her. He touched her waist lightly.

‘You don’t have to be fine, you know.’

Charlotte didn’t respond. Gabriel sighed.

‘I want you to know how touched I am that you confided in me last night,’ he said after a long stretch of silence. ‘I know how much effort that took. And I want you to know that I will never disappoint the faith you showed in me. What you’ve been through – well, it makes me so upset to think of you going through all of that as a child. It’s more than anyone should have to cope with.’