When She Was Bad (29 page)

Wandering outside to the playground, we spotted Laurie straight away. She was playing with another little girl in the sandbox at the far end. We watched them for a few moments. They were deeply involved in their game which involved digging tunnels with their hands through a mountain of sand.

‘She looks very settled,’ said Dan. ‘Can you point out the child she had the altercation with?’

‘Well, I wouldn’t call it that,’ said the Head, her lips pulled together like a drawstring purse. ‘But that’s her – the one she’s playing with now.’

I glanced over at Ed just in time to catch on his face a fleeting flash of satisfaction. The Wendy house incident must have momentarily rocked his confidence, but here she was, calm and sociable and conciliatory.

Later, after Jana arrived to collect Laurie, we took them both to a nearby diner. If the little girl thought it was odd to be seated in a booth surrounded by strange adults, she didn’t show it. As I watched her, I felt a chill creeping up through me. There was something so preternaturally contained about her. Shouldn’t a four-and-a-half-year-old be asking questions, like who Dan was? There was no squirming, no fidgeting, no ‘can we go now’? Just this blank conformity. Where was she hiding it – all the anger, the grief, the confusion about what was happening to her and where her old life had gone?

‘Do you like school?’ Dan asked Laurie. He was sitting opposite her and his height made his head curl down across the table towards hers. He looked uncomfortable, as if he wasn’t used to talking to small children.

Once, in our first year of studying together, Dan made a clumsy pass at me. I’d been so surprised I hadn’t properly recognized it as a pass until I’d got home. We’d bumped into each other in the library and gone for a coffee and he’d pressed his leg up against mine under the table while staring at me purposefully. For a few moments I’d let it stay there while the heat travelled through my body until I felt I would ignite. Then I moved my leg away and suggested we get the bill. That was two years before, when I had very definite ideas about romance. Back then, I was looking for the big love story, the charismatic stranger. I didn’t learn until it was way too late, until long after my failed marriage to Johnny, that love doesn’t ride into town and sweep you off your feet, but sometimes looks at you in a certain way and you realize it was there all the time, right under your nose. Anyway, I digress. The point was, whatever my definition of love, Dan Oppenheimer wasn’t it.

At the time of the Kowalsky assessments, he was dating an attractive undergraduate from Stanford who came to stay every other weekend. The rumour was that Dan himself had his sights set on a teaching post at Stanford. This case might get him there.

‘School’s OK, thanks,’ said Laurie, without looking up from her ice cream, which came in one of those tall glasses which meant she had to dig around with a long spoon to dislodge the chocolate from the bottom.

‘And how about the other children?’ Ed was sitting at the end of the booth. ‘Have you made friends there?’

‘Yeah.’ She scraped her spoon down the side of the glass.

Ed tried again.

‘I heard you had a little falling-out with Sandy.’

Laurie shrugged.

‘Want to tell us about that, Laurie?’

In contrast to Ed’s practised manner, Dan’s question sounded clumsy. Laurie looked up. Blinked. Then went back to her ice cream.

‘It’s all OK now. I said sorry and she said that’s OK so that means we are friends again. We don’t have to talk about it any more.’

‘That’s what they’re told at school,’ explained Jana, reaching a slender arm around Laurie’s shoulder and giving it a squeeze. ‘They’re told that once a situation has been dealt with and everyone has said sorry and apologies have been accepted, they need to move on and put it behind them.’

‘’S not important anyway,’ said Laurie. ‘’S all finished with.’ She carried on fishing around with her spoon in the bottom of her glass, even though there was no ice cream left.

‘Laurie?’ I asked her diagonally across the table. ‘When you and Sandy were having your . . . falling-out in the Wendy house, can you describe how you were feeling? Were you very cross with Sandy?’

Laurie shook her head emphatically. Next to her, Jana bit down on her lip as if stifling a protest. My lips were suddenly dry and I took a quick sip of my Coke before pressing on.

‘But you must have been a little bit cross with her or you wouldn’t have tied her up.’

Again the shake of the head.

‘I wasn’t cross with Sandy. I like Sandy. She’s my friend.’

‘Then why did you tie her up?’

I could feel Ed’s eyes boring into me through the lenses of his glasses, but I kept my own gaze fixed on Laurie.

She shrugged once more.

‘I dunno. I think the other Laurie must have done it.’

Well. That made us all sit up. Dan leaned back in the booth as if to better assess the situation, while Ed’s response was to start combing his fingers through his hair in that nervous fluttering way he had.

‘Honey.’ Jana was looking down right into Laurie’s eyes. ‘What do you mean by the “other Laurie”?’

‘I dunno.’

‘Can you see her, this other Laurie?’ Ed’s voice was now slow and controlled.

Dan broke in, his voice too quick, too loud. Too eager. ‘Or can you hear her? Is she talking to you inside your head?’

Laurie stared at him blankly.

‘No. I can’t hear her in my head. That would be funny.’ She giggled. ‘Just sometimes she does things when I’m not looking.’

Ed caught my eye and I gave the faintest shake of my head. Laurie’s bombshell had caught us all by surprise.

‘Can you explain, sweetie,’ asked Jana, ‘what you mean when you say “when I’m not looking”?’

Laurie was already appearing bored with the conversation. Her ice cream finished, she was bouncing up and down impatiently in her seat.

‘Just sometimes it’s like I go like this.’ Laurie closed her eyes. ‘And then like this.’ She snapped them open again. ‘And something happened and it wasn’t me.’

‘You mean something bad has happened?’

‘Not really bad.’ Laurie frowned. ‘Just a little bit bad. But it wasn’t me.’

After Jana had taken Laurie home, the three of us stayed behind in the diner. Dan was the first to speak.

‘Wow,’ he said, a smile stretching out his long, thin face. ‘That was interesting. What do you think? Dissociation? Fugue? Psychosis?’

He sounded thrilled with the choices on offer, as if they were dishes on a menu, not acute psychiatric disorders he was wishing upon a four-year-old girl.

‘I’m not convinced we can read that much into this,’ said Ed eventually, stirring sugar into his second coffee. ‘Many young kids invent alter egos who act in ways they know they’re not really supposed to. My own kids have done it. Jon – he’s eight now, but when he was younger, he used to talk about himself in the third person a lot like he was a completely separate entity, especially when he was in a morally ambiguous situation. So if he was watching a movie with a bad guy, he’d say “Jon is going to beat that bad guy up.” It was dissociating, but not necessarily in an unhealthy way.’

‘But surely,’ I said, ‘given the context, given her background . . .’

‘I know we did a lot of work at the beginning of this process to contextualise Laurie,’ Ed responded. ‘But we have to be very careful, Anne, that we don’t allow the context to dictate our responses to her. We need to react first and foremost to what she presents to us, rather than our interpretation of how what she presents fits in with what we know about her context. That could be dangerously loaded.’

‘I couldn’t agree more,’ said Dan. ‘I mean, the incident in the Wendy house and this talk about “the other Laurie” – they’re actually only one part of the picture.’

Ed nodded.

‘As someone who’s coming fresh to this case, Dan,’ he said, ‘what’s your impression of Laurie? Putting those two factors aside for a minute.’

‘To be honest with you, sir . . .’

‘Enough of the formalities, Dan.’

‘Sure. Sorry. To be honest with you, Ed, I’m kinda amazed how
even
she is. You know, balanced. She seems very close with her foster mom and she has friends at school so she’s obviously capable of forming emotional bonds with other people, which is really fundamental. And she seemed genuinely sorry about the Wendy house thing, which means she’s capable of remorse. So I’d say those were pretty major tick points for me. In fact, I’d say I was pretty encouraged by what I’ve seen today.’

‘With all respect, Ed,’ I said. ‘I don’t know how we can set those two factors aside. I mean, they’re directly relevant to what we’ve been asked to assess, wouldn’t you say?’

Ed Kowalsky stared down into his coffee dregs as if trying to read his future there.

‘Of course they’re relevant, Anne,’ he said eventually. ‘But I worry you might be seizing on them to back up a narrative for Laurie you’ve already created in your head from things you’ve seen on the news. We have to be totally objective. That’s our job.’

On the way back that night to my little room in the student house I shared with three other girls, I stopped by the liquor store and stood looking in the window for a very long time.

34
Chloe

‘Chloe, where are those reports? I asked you to have them on my desk at ten thirty.’

‘Sorry, Rachel. They’re taking a bit longer than I’d thought.’

‘Try to keep to deadlines, please. I shouldn’t have to remind you.’

Chloe’s cheeks stung as if she’d been slapped. She focused her eyes on the plaster on Rachel’s forehead, half hidden by her hair, and tried not to cry.

‘Sorry,’ she mumbled to Rachel’s retreating back as the latter swivelled on her heel and returned to her office.

Chloe had never felt so wretched. She longed to talk to someone about what was going on, but her dad had had to fly off to the USA on business, and her mum had gone with him. They were so inseparable still. Chloe usually loved how close they were, but this thing with Ewan had her doubting everything she’d ever thought about relationships. She’d always just assumed things would happen for her the same way they had for her parents, but now she questioned if that was true. Maybe the men she loved would all turn on her, as Ewan had done. She’d tried to imagine her own mother being treated like that – rejected and then physically intimidated – thinking perhaps if she convinced herself it was a rite of passage it wouldn’t hurt so much, but she couldn’t. It must be something uniquely to do with her.

She glanced towards Paula, hoping for a reassuring look. She’d realized that Paula wouldn’t stick her neck out to defend her from Rachel’s barbs, but she could usually be counted on for a sympathetic eyebrow-raise. However, Paula was hunched over her desk, head down, as she had been ever since arriving that morning. Chloe had tried asking her where she’d got to yesterday afternoon, when she just disappeared without telling anyone, but Paula had given her a really strange look, as if she had no idea who she even was, and it had freaked Chloe out so much, she’d just said, ‘Oh well, never mind, you’re here now,’ or something equally silly, and retreated to her desk. Across the office, Sarah got up and scuttled off towards the double exit doors. Acting on a rash impulse, Chloe followed her. Rachel couldn’t stop her going to the loo, could she?

In the toilets, she glanced in the mirror, remembering her shock when she’d caught sight of her reflection in the hotel bathroom after Ewan had left, the ghostly pallor of her face. Her stomach spasmed as it always did when she thought back to Saturday night, the way his eyes had glazed over. She’d wondered if she should have reported him to someone. But then what exactly would she have said? That he’d been a little too rough? She’d been scared of him – she could remember that. And yet there was a small part of her, a part she was deeply ashamed of, that felt a kind of thrill that he’d felt strongly enough about her, passionately enough, to get carried away like that. And besides, as time passed, she started to wonder whether it had really been as bad as she remembered, or whether she had over-felt it, the way she did sometimes. Her mum was always telling her not to let her feelings carry her away, to be more self-censoring. Could she have exaggerated what happened? Ewan had tried to talk to her several times yesterday and this morning, but she’d ignored him. Still, it made her feel better in a way, that it was
him
pestering
her
for a change.

She heard retching sounds coming from behind the closed door of one of the cubicles.

‘Sarah? You OK?’

A noise. Something between a moan and a sigh.

‘Sarah?’

The door opened, and Sarah emerged, wiping her mouth on a length of toilet paper. Sarah had always been on the curvy side, and her body was still round but her face looked gaunt, as if someone had ironed the plumpness out of it so that her skin clung, grey and uncushioned, to her cheekbones.

‘You all right?’

Sarah shook her head. ‘Not really,’ she said in a small voice.

‘What happened in there this morning?’

When Chloe had arrived at 9 a.m., the blinds were down in Rachel’s office and Amira told her that Sarah and Mark Hamilton were esconced in there with Rachel and James Ellis, the head of HR.

‘She wasn’t still going on about you pushing her down that river bank, was she?’ Chloe asked Sarah now, who flinched as if she’d been hit.

‘No. God, no. She couldn’t. I’d have grounds to sue her, wouldn’t I, for defamation of character or something. No, that meeting this morning was her saying I’m a slacker, always late, always behind, and trying to make out I’d deliberately got pregnant because she’d threatened me with disciplinary action.’

‘She didn’t say that!’

‘Not in so many words, but the implication was clear. Luckily James from HR has some basic conception of how biology works and pointed out that it wasn’t likely I’d be able to conjure up a pregnancy just like that. And he also made it very clear that it would be extremely hard for her to get rid of me because the rules protecting pregnant women are so strict.’