When She Was Bad (5 page)

9
Anne

Child L had been placed with foster parents out in the suburbs. Professor Kowalsky arranged for our second assessment to take place at the foster-family home where we’d have a chance to observe Laurie interacting with other people as well as to talk privately to her foster mother about any concerns she might have.

Ed had offered to drive us both there. He was supposed to pick me up from home, but he called and said he was running late and asked me to meet him at the hospital where Child D was being cared for, and where he and Dan Oppenheimer and other assorted professionals had been carrying out a range of assessments, though in view of the high level of trauma the boy had experienced their remit was necessarily different from our own.

Ed had told me to wait for him in the lobby, but curiosity got the better of me. I’d accepted I’d probably never get to meet Laurie’s young brother David. Ed Kowalsky was unwavering in his determination to keep the two assessments separate so that neither Dan nor I risked being swayed by each other’s opinions. But what harm could there be in just seeing him? I told myself it was a chance to gain a richer understanding of Laurie, by seeing what she had seen. But really, I was curious, just like everyone else. I wanted to see what the things he’d gone through could do to a child, the subtle imprint they would leave on his skin.

By this stage, weeks after the Egans had been arrested, interest in the case had died down. The TV crews that had been camped outside the hospital had packed up and gone home. So, armed with my university medical school pass, I was able to slip past the reception and get up to the third floor without any trouble. There my luck ran out. The door to the corridor where I knew David was staying required a code to open. But as I was about to turn around, I saw through the panel of safety glass a door opening further down the corridor.

As I watched, a young woman came out, holding the hand of a small child who was walking with an unsteady, lurching gait. The two of them stood waiting in the corridor facing away from me. I stepped back smartly just as the tall, stooping figure of Dan Oppenheimer emerged from the room, followed by Professor Kowalsky. As the three adults conferred, with Oppenheimer noting something down on a clipboard, the little boy turned and, for a split second, we looked at each other. I felt suddenly short of breath as I stared into those eyes that had seen so much horror. I know it sounds fanciful, but it seemed as if a look of recognition passed between us. Then, just as quickly, he was gone – whisked off down the corridor by the young woman. I myself darted back down the stairs, my nerves still jangling from the encounter.

In the passenger seat of Ed’s station wagon, I tried to put the unsettling glimpse of Child D out of my head. The car had two booster seats in the back and the cloth upholstery was covered in white dog hairs.

‘Excuse the mess. Families – you know what it’s like,’ Ed said.

No, I didn’t know what it was like.

The journey took about twenty-five minutes and I remember feeling ill at ease. It felt too intimate to be sitting up front alongside this man I barely knew with his toothy smile, surrounded by the evidence of a normal, healthy, happy family life. As we passed other cars, I imagined how we’d look – an ordinary couple out for a drive in their family motor. Perhaps off to a parents’ meeting at the kids’ school, or grabbing a quick lunch, enjoying rare time off together. Ed was only fifteen or so years older than me – a perfectly respectable age gap. The thought of being mistaken for his wife made me feel sticky with discomfort, and I angled my face away from him, nervously twirling a tendril of hair that had turned damp and frizzy with the heat.

The house where the foster family lived was situated in a cul-de-sac of detached homes maybe thirty or forty years old. The neighbourhood was pleasant, but not ostentatious. Some of the lawns were overgrown, others had brown patches where garden furniture had been recently moved. The cars in the driveways were solid without being flash. As we approached the front door, we could hear a dog barking insistently in one of the neighbouring backyards.

‘Hello, hello, hello!’

Jana Green was not what I had been expecting. I’d imagined a buxom, matronly figure with warm folds a troubled child could tuck herself inside of, and an apron tied around a soft, yielding middle. But Jana was all angles and straight lines. Her long toffee-coloured hair was tied in a loose braid that hung down her back, revealing cheekbones that jutted from her face, sharp as flint. She was wearing a white tank-top and denim cut-off shorts that showed slim legs with surprisingly long shinbones. She exuded that kind of calm which is an energy in itself, like a force field around her.

‘Lisa, that’s my eldest, has taken the little ones off for an ice, to give us a bit of time to chat. They won’t be long. I hope that’s good with you guys?’

‘Oh gosh. Excellent plan, Mrs Green.’

‘Please. Call me Jana.’

‘Jana.’

Ed Kowalsky rolled the word around in his mouth like a tasty snack and I could see he too was having to recalibrate his mental image of Laurie’s home life in the light of this new, unexpected reality. In the light of Jana and her cut-offs.

We sat around a table in the dining part of the kitchen.

‘You don’t mind, do you?’ Jana asked us. ‘I hate to be formal.’

Ed produced a tape recorder from the briefcase he’d brought in, saying, ‘Just pretend it’s not there, Jana. It’s simply for our own reference, that’s all. So how would you say it’s going so far with Laurie? I know it’s early days.’

Jana picked up her coffee mug and started tapping one of her long thin fingers against the handle. Tap, tap, tap.

‘She’s great. Amazing, when you consider . . . I mean, obviously there have been moments. Well, she’s only four and a half years old. How could there not be?’

‘Moments?’ I asked the question more to hear my own voice than because it needed to be asked. Jana was clearly going to tell us anyway.

‘She gets angry sometimes. The odd tantrum that maybe you’d expect her to have grown out of by now. But then given the circumstances . . .’

‘Quite,’ said Ed. ‘And has she talked about home at all? About her parents? About her brother?’

‘She’s asked where they are. But she doesn’t really seem that interested in finding out. It’s almost like it’s something that flits across her mind every now and then. Do you know what I mean? Oh, let me show you something.’

Jana put the mug down and dashed out of the room in a blur of tanned limbs. Without her, the atmosphere seemed flat. Ed and I exchanged strained smiles and immediately looked away again.

‘Here it is.’ She was carrying a sheet of A3 paper which she laid carefully down on the table between us. It was a child’s painting, all primary colours. There was a red square house with a triangle roof and three lollipop people, two big, one small. There was a black fence to the side and a long sausage dog next to it.

‘She said that was her with her mom and dad,’ said Jana, pointing at the trio of people with their stick bodies and round, smiling heads.

‘Interesting. So she didn’t draw her brother at all,’ said Ed.

‘Oh, but she did.’ Jana moved her finger across the paper to the shape I’d assumed was a dog.

‘He’s lying down,’ she explained.

‘Ah,’ said Ed in a small voice.

‘So that,’ I pointed to the black railings, ‘isn’t a fence.’

‘No,’ Jana agreed. ‘That’s a cage.’

10
Amira

‘Working lunch? What does that even mean?’

Amira couldn’t stop thinking about it. And every time she thought about it, her nerve-endings started tingling uncomfortably like the beginnings of pins and needles all over her chest and arms.

‘It’ll be fine.’ Tom didn’t even look up from his laptop. ‘She just wants to get you all into a more informal setting. It always happens that way. New boss. Feels she has to lay down the law in the office. Now she wants to show you all a more relaxed side. Bit of team bonding. It’s straight out of
The New Boss Handbook
.’

Without moving from where she was lying prone on the sofa, Amira reached out her hand and picked up her empty glass from the coffee table.

‘See this?’ Still Tom didn’t look up. ‘Oi! See this?’

He glanced over and then immediately looked back down again.

‘I’d rather bond with this glass than Rachel Masters,’ Amira told him. ‘She gives me the heebie-jeebies. I’m dreading our cosy one-to-one first thing tomorrow.’

‘Yeah, well, you’ve just got to suck it up. Look on the bright side. With the size of our mortgage we’re only going to have to be working for the next hundred years or so.’

Tom sounded bitter, and the tingling turned into an insistent jabbing. She knew he hated his auditing job. But he’d made the decision on his own to give up on the music stuff. She hadn’t pushed him. It wasn’t fair to make her feel guilty. Anyway, the band had always been a pipe dream. This was London, where it cost you fifty quid just to breathe the air. You couldn’t live on creative juices alone. And her mother would literally have driven her bonkers if they’d stayed there any longer, always making a big deal about being so easy-going, so different from her own strict Indian parents, yet the master of the pained expression, or the big sigh accompanied by the dreaded phrase ‘your father always dreamed you’d . . .’ followed by whatever was the exact opposite of what Amira had just announced she would do.

Every day Amira still missed her gentle-giant dad, even though it would be eight years next month since he’d died. But she remembered him as a kind man with a big laugh that shot out of him like a volley of cannon-fire when he watched a silly TV programme or joked with one of his many relations back in Ireland, not the reproachful figure hunched over with disappointment that her mother tried to project. Families were so weird, weren’t they? If they hadn’t been related, Amira couldn’t think of two people with less in common than her mother and her.

Amira’s unease was still with her when she got up to go to work the next morning, along with the heavy throb of a hangover. She blamed those huge wine glasses they’d received as a moving-in present. Three of those and you’d drunk a bottle without even realizing it.

She hesitated over what to wear, spending so long in front of the mirror trying on and discarding clothes that she was late leaving and had to do run-walking all the way to the station, cursing the heels she’d foolishly decided on at the last minute.

This wasn’t at all the way she’d seen her working life. She’d always presumed she’d do something worthwhile. Something that made a difference – charity work or advocacy or something – but instead she’d fallen into recruitment, thinking it was just a stopgap while she made up her mind what she really wanted to do. Six months had turned into a year and then another, and now five years had gone by and here she was pinioned in place under the weight of their monstrous mortgage.

Walking through the double doors into the office, Amira was struck all over again by the strange new atmosphere. In the Gill days, people would have been hovering by each other’s desks, cradling cups of coffee and chatting before getting down to the business of the day. But now everyone was at their stations, computers on, eyes down. The daring few who risked walking past the new boss’s office to the kitchen did so with heads bowed. Where they used to take it in turn to do a coffee round (well, some had more turns than others, it had to be said), now they made quick, solitary forays to the kettle, making single cups that took just minutes to prepare and could be carried surreptitiously through the office without drawing too much attention.

Waiting to be called into Rachel’s office for her one-to-one, Amira texted Tom.
Shitting self. Guillotine poised above head.
Only as she clicked send did she notice her phone had auto-corrected ‘guillotine’ to ‘guilt’. Great. So now Tom would start reading all sorts of weird meanings into a text that was supposed to be light-hearted. She toyed with the idea of texting him again to correct it, but decided against it. Let him wonder.

‘Amira?’

Paula had materialized by her desk, noiselessly like a ghost.

‘Rachel will see you now.’

Amira smiled, but Paula wasn’t really looking at her directly, rather at a point slightly to her left. She seemed tired, Amira couldn’t help noticing. Her pale eyes were made paler still by the smudged purple shadows underneath. It must be stressful, living in that little terraced house with an estranged husband and adult kids who, as far as Amira could see, did bugger all to help. If only Paula would stand up for herself a bit. She should have chucked Ian out when they split up, broke or not. He’d have had to stand on his own two feet then, give up that vinyl business that was never going to make him any money and go out and get a proper job.

Making her way across the office, Amira couldn’t help feeling that everyone was clocking her uncharacteristically high heels and judging her for trying too hard.

Rachel Masters was in efficiency mode, lining up the edges of the stack of papers in front of her that turned out to be copies of Amira’s annual reviews, plus various progress reports and even her original
CV
, sent in when she applied for the job.

She said some complimentary things about Amira’s work appraisals and the positive comments that had been made by her supervisors. Then she laid down the heavy engraved silver pen she had been turning between her elegant fingers and said, ‘Can I talk to you in complete confidence, Amira?’

Amira blinked. ‘Of course.’ She tried to make her voice sound steady, but some obstacle seemed to have lodged itself in her windpipe.

Rachel shot a glance through the closed glass door to the main office, to where the rest of the staff were working, and then she leaned in across the desk.

‘This department has been underperforming for years. I’ve been brought in to weed out anyone who is just coasting, and reward those making a proper contribution. Now I know this is delicate as you’ve all been working together as a team, but I want to give you the heads-up that there will be a vacancy coming up at deputy level, and I’d like you to apply for it.’