When She Was Bad (34 page)

All through the time they’d spent downstairs in that big show-off kitchen, while Rachel had talked and talked until the words formed one big blur of noise in his head, he’d felt as if there was something pressing down on his chest. When he’d first started going to the gym, and bench-pressing weights, Ewan had had an irrational fear that the bar was going to fall on him, crushing him. He’d lie there on his back imagining the pain of all that pressure on his ribs, how they’d crack, how the lungs underneath would deflate like balloons with all the air squeezed out of them. Sitting on a lime-green-cushioned chair at Rachel’s circular white table, he felt just as he’d imagined he would, all that time ago in the gym.

And then she’d asked him to go down to the cellar. He’d stayed in his chair, unable to move. So she’d asked again, and everyone was staring, and the silence was so big and solid you could have cut it with the knife Charlie wouldn’t stop playing with. He’d found himself getting to his feet, the pain still tight across his chest, the red in front of his eyes even when they were closed, as if his lids themselves were painted that way.

42
Charlie

The sound of the door closing behind Rachel and Ewan was like something breaking inside Charlie’s head. He still felt split into two people, but now the old Charlie was fading, dissolving, leaving only this new twisted thing, full of rage and something else, sharp, like needles in his skull, that he finally identified as fear.

He was scared of them, these people he’d worked with, day in, day out for years. He was scared of what they were all capable of, scared of what
he
was capable of.

He struggled to bring himself back into focus. The others were discussing Ewan and Rachel.

‘He must think his luck’s in – an invitation to get down and dirty with the boss,’ Amira said.

‘I don’t think so.’

That was Paula. Even through the confusion in his head Charlie registered surprise that she’d volunteered an opinion. She’d been so quiet for the last two days, ever since she’d overheard him and Amira scrabbling for her job like a couple of dogs.

‘We arrived practically at the same time earlier on,’ Paula continued. ‘He was admiring the house until she said something really bitchy about him stealing the family silver. Then he clammed right up. I don’t think he’ll forgive that very easily.’

Paula’s voice was flat and deadened, as if she was speaking through a layer of thick foam.

Charlie tried to summon the old sense of shame that had been with him ever since he’d decided to apply for Paula’s job, but he couldn’t. It was as if the anger and hatred and fear had pushed all other emotions out. Everything was foggy, untethered. The voices around him arrived through a mist as if disembodied.

Only the knife was real. Solid. Hidden by the table, he ran the tip of the blade across his thigh, over the thick material of his suit trousers. Then he rested his injured arm on his lap and gently traced the contours of his cut with the knife’s metal edge. As if in a trance, he pressed down on the top of it, observing as spots of fresh blood emerged like rubies on the surface of the old.

Chloe’s voice drifted past his ears. ‘He’s a big boy. Old enough to sort out his own shit.’

She sounded sad and so much older than her years, and Charlie wondered briefly if maybe she was experiencing the same thing as him – that feeling of being replaced by an alien Chloe.

But the thought was driven out almost as soon as it arrived, and Charlie was lost once again in the crimson brilliance of his own arm.

He pressed harder, enjoying the savage spurt of pain. He deserved it. They all deserved it. Rachel might have been pulling the strings but they’d all been complicit, all instrumental in making themselves victims or bullies at her whim. They made him sick. All of them. Himself most of all.

His head was throbbing, the blood pounding in his temple. He put his hand up to his forehead and a spray of blood arced across the table.

Someone screamed.

43
Anne

My daughter has always known she was adopted. We’ve never had secrets on that score. Her almond-shaped eyes are the colour of sea-glass, while mine are blue. I’ve always had a boyish figure, straight up and down with a slight stoop as if to apologize for the space I take up, while Shannon is unashamedly curvy, with the kind of figure that fits with the retro-style fashion she favours – tight sweaters and pencil skirts that hug her hips and swish when she walks, and long, honey-toned hair that falls in waves around her shoulders. She is beautiful. Of course she isn’t biologically mine.

And yet she is mine in every other sense. The light of my life. The reward for every good thing I ever did in my life, or even thought about doing. The only reason I haven’t drunk myself to death, or ended up like my own mother, alienated from friends and family, playing online poker with strangers just for the interaction.

Shannon Laurie Cater. Child L.

It was not easy.

When it became obvious that Ed Kowalsky and I had very different views on whether or not Laurie was capable of being assimilated into a new family, a new life, a new country even, capable of putting everything that had gone before out of her mind, he brought in Dan Oppenheimer to support him. At that time, Early Years psychiatry was still an under-researched area. I believe that in some more progressive academic institutions, there had already started to be a recognition of just how crucial experiences during the first two years of life, even before a child is capable of speech, are to their development in later life. But in our little backwater, that wasn’t the case. So Professor Kowalsky and Dan definitely held the prevailing view. This was before the definitive studies showing that in cases of severe abuse, memory recollection was delayed, starting at the age of six or even seven, but there was enough anecdotal evidence to convince them time was on their side.

But something about Laurie, about the way she looked at me with those clear green eyes, her stubborn determination to try to make good of the shitty hand she’d been dealt, made me stick to my guns. Like Ed and Dan, I could see she had the potential to be happy, well-adjusted even, but unlike them I believed – no, I
knew
– that in order to achieve that bright future she would have to work through the darkness of her past. The lapses in her behaviour were too striking to ignore. Rather than going to a new environment and suppressing her past, folding it up into a tiny pocket inside her where it wouldn’t show but would always be there, she needed intensive ongoing therapy. She needed to talk about what had happened to her, to take it out of whatever box she’d put it in and shake it like a dusty tablecloth and expose it to the air so it lost its power.

I knew this in my gut. So I stood my ground against Kowalsky and Oppenheimer, and when they threatened to overrule me, I brought in my own experts, mostly from the very same elite universities Oppenheimer would later go on to work for. I called these experts in the evenings, leaving long messages on their answer-machines. There were a couple of ‘no’s’ but mostly they were keen to get involved, to bring their new theories to bear on this high-profile case. There was growing evidence to show that intensive early therapy in the first three years of life when the brain was still developing was much more effective in cases of serious trauma than waiting to treat problems that emerged in adulthood. I worked through the night in the university library so I could provide study after study to support my conviction that Laurie needed to stay where her past was acknowledged and dealt with, so that eventually she could be done with it and move on.

I was not popular. But I did my homework, and impressed the right people, and in the end an extraordinary meeting of all the relevant authorities ruled that Laurie should remain under our supervision and the adoption order was rescinded.

Her brother was a different matter. David. Child D. Aka The Thing.

A year and a half younger, he had been treated by a range of medical experts. In addition to Oppenheimer and Kowalsky, he’d received intensive therapy to deal with the physical effects of being kept incarcerated and intermittently restrained at such an early and vital stage in his development. He had to learn to walk properly, using muscles that had atrophied through lack of use. Vocally his development was also severely retarded. He’d been denied even the most basic social interaction. He’d never had the chance to absorb language or to develop his own speech. A small but dedicated team from the university’s Department of Cognitive and Linguistic Sciences had worked tirelessly with him over a period of months to overcome the delays to his communication skills.

But while physically he responded to treatment better than anyone dared hope, it was his emotional development that was deemed most critical, and in this respect, too, his progress far exceeded all expectations. Dan Oppenheimer and Ed Kowalsky were the ones who had ultimately rubber-stamped the adoption order, some months after the battle for Laurie’s future had been concluded. Their earlier pessimism had been misplaced, they decided. He would recover. He would forget.

‘Did you meet him? My brother?’

Since I asked her to come sit with me on the couch, so we could talk properly, Shannon has listened to me in virtual silence. That’s always been her way. Though naturally voluble and inclined to speak without thinking first, when the stakes are highest, she waits and considers before deciding on a reaction or an emotion, as if she is selecting clothes from an open closet. She has always known her early years were traumatic. She knows she was made a ward of state after her parents failed to take care of her. She knows she had a brother who was adopted overseas. She knows she had years of therapy when she was very young, and that’s how we met. She knows both her parents were incarcerated for what they did to their children.

The facts I haven’t shared with her are these: her parents were sentenced to life imprisonment for their maltreatment of their son. Her father has been on the psych ward of a medical centre for federal prisoners in Missouri for over two decades since he started believing he was God. Her mother – dead-eyed Noelle Egan – was released from prison five years ago. Her willingness to testify against her husband and her insistence that she’d been in thrall to him, incapable of independent action, worked in her favour. She was also, by all accounts, an exemplary prisoner. When I learned she was free and had been sniffing around after her daughter, I went back through the files making sure there was no trail leading to Shannon. Noelle has always believed both her children were adopted overseas. That way, I was able to keep my daughter safe.

Shannon’s brother was indeed adopted abroad, but rather than being lost in the system as I’ve always allowed her to believe, I’ve been keeping tabs on him through Barbara Campbell, the original social worker who handled the adoption.

I’ve been amazed at Shannon’s capacity for self-invention over the years. Or is it merely self-preservation? Whatever it is, I’ve always told myself I was following her cue, keeping from her only what she didn’t choose to know. For two years before I formerly adopted her, we worked hard on exploring her feelings about her parents and about what had happened in that house. But after the age of six or seven, after the final papers had been signed and she was finally mine, she was ready to move on. By that time I was married to Johnny whom she still calls Dad, even though she doesn’t see him so much since he remarried and moved away. I would have told her the truth then, or at least I like to think I would, but she never asked me. And gradually the details of what happened before seemed to fade from her mind. And now here she is, fixing me with her inquisitive eyes and asking me, finally, about her brother. And I owe her the truth.

‘I met him once,’ I tell her. ‘Well, not really “met”. I saw him through a pane of glass.’

‘What did he look like?’

‘Like you, baby. A lot like you.’

I’ve already explained the basics of his early life, trying to keep to the facts and avoid commentary or emotion.

And now she asks me the question I’ve been dreading since I formally signed the adoption papers all those years ago. All the while she is speaking, I am urging her, silently, to stop, change direction. But still she continues.

‘What was I doing while he was down there in that cage?’

I know what she wants to hear. I know she wants me to tell her she didn’t know he was there. It’s not impossible. I’ve heard of an Austrian man who kept his daughter imprisoned in the basement of his family home for twenty-four years, even having seven children with her – and all without his wife and other children suspecting a thing. It’s so tempting to lie to her. Or if not lie, to omit the truth. But I don’t. I tell her what happened and what she did. I tell her it was not her fault, and I know she understands that, but she still cries – not heaving sobs but fat tears that build in her eyes until they spill over like a slow-leaking faucet.

‘He must have felt so alone.’

I reach out and take her hand and squeeze it so I don’t give in to the temptation to tell her platitudes like ‘He was too young to fully comprehend what was happening’, or, ‘He didn’t know anything else’.

I am waiting for her to turn on me, demanding to know why I never told her this before, how I could have kept it from her. But she doesn’t. Instead she asks me about David. She wants to know why he was adopted and not her, and I try to explain about Kowalsky and Oppenheimer and about how it was back then, that they thought the younger you were, the greater your capacity to forget.

‘Was he happy?’ she wants to know then. ‘Did his new family love him enough to make him forget what went before?’

In this at least I can tell her what she wants to hear. Child D’s parents were good people. Barbara made sure of that. Though they never knew the particulars, they were told the little boy had had a traumatic start in life, the subject of abuse and neglect, and they’d done their very best to make up to him for it.