When She Was Bad (7 page)

But during those days when Child L’s story continued to dominate the headlines, I was still in denial. Addiction was a failure of will, not of genetics, I’d think as I carefully sipped on the single glass of wine I allowed myself each day. Working on the Child L case was my chance to move irrevocably beyond my mother’s reach, or rather the reach of her legacy to me. It would be a gate into the rose garden she’d never been able to access, an escape route away from her perpetual and paralysing disappointment. Whenever Dan Oppenheimer and his cronies would whisper about me in the canteen when I passed – those old rumours about exactly why Ed Kowalsky had picked me for the case, reasons that had more to do with my long blonde hair than my professional qualifications – I’d remind myself of where I was headed and the small-town narrowness I was going to leave behind.

Ed Kowalsky and I had a very specific remit. We were to assess Laurie over a period of weeks or months to ascertain the degree of psychological damage she had suffered; based on that, we would then make recommendations for her long-term future. Putting it bluntly, Laurie was four and a half years old. If we judged her to be deeply, even irrevocably, damaged by what she’d seen and experienced in the House of Horror (as the papers had predictably dubbed her family home), we would recommend her to a specialist children’s psychiatric facility and she would be made a permanent ward of the state. However, if we felt the effects of such emotional trauma as she’d sustained would fade in due course, we would recommend her to be adopted. In this respect our assessment differed markedly from that of Laurie’s younger brother, which Kowalsky was also overseeing with the assistance of Dan Oppenheimer. In Child D’s case, it was assumed the psychological and physical scars would render adoption an impossibility, so the assessment was to determine his long-term treatment. Laurie, however, had a chance.

Things were very different back then. We didn’t know all the things we do now about the long-term effects of early childhood trauma and the different ways it can come out in adolescence or adulthood. This was before all the controversy over False Memory Syndrome where adults, often undergoing psychological treatment, claimed to have recovered memories of infant abuse. We genuinely believed that as long as the damage was not too extreme, if a child was young enough, and placed in a stable, loving environment, he or she would form a new set of memories, and leave the past behind. In those days we thought the best chance of a new life was to sever all links with what had gone before and start afresh. If Laurie was approved for adoption, we’d already talked about placing her somewhere overseas where no one would know her story, and where the chances of her coming across the details in later life would be minimal. These were pre-internet days when it was still possible to lose oneself and stay lost. Or to lose someone else.

So there was a lot riding on us, and we wore our responsibilities particularly heavily on our third meeting with Laurie. This time Jana brought her into the medical school together with her own young son, Barney, a year Laurie’s junior. Her older daughter, Lisa, was in class. For the first quarter of an hour we exchanged chit-chat while watching the children play. I was particularly keen to observe the interaction between the two. After all, Laurie had been brought up essentially as an only child. She wasn’t used to sharing. To that end I brought out a simple but brightly coloured building-block game.

‘Here’s something you can both play with together while Jana and I talk,’ I said casually, wanting Laurie to feel she was unobserved.

As Jana, Ed and I discussed the unusually mild fall weather and the heavy traffic on the main highway into town, I watched Laurie from the corner of my eye. She was concentrating on building a tower, the tip of her tongue protruding slightly between her lips. Periodically she reached out to pick up a block from the pile in front of her to add to her tower. Barney was watching her intently.

‘I play,’ he said, reaching out a chubby hand to pick up a brick.

Laurie didn’t reply, so intent was she on making sure her tower didn’t fall over. Barney’s bottom lip wobbled.

‘I play,’ he repeated and placed his brick heavily on the top of Laurie’s tower, sending the whole lot crashing to the floor.

While Jana chatted to Ed about the family’s holiday in Vermont the previous summer, I waited, tense, to see how Laurie would react. She got to her feet and took a step towards the little boy. I could sense Jana watching, even while she carried on talking.

‘No, Barney!’ Laurie was cross. That much was sure. And yet it was nothing out of the ordinary, just a normal level of crossness for a child of not yet five. She bent down and started picking up the bricks which were littered across the floor around Barney’s sandalled feet.

‘Sowwy.’ He bent down to help her pick them up.

The three adults let out the breath we’d all been holding.

‘She’s amazingly good really,’ Jana whispered as the two youngsters chattered together about how best to rebuild the tower. ‘She’s really patient with him on the whole. More patient even than his own sister. There was only that one incident . . .’

Ed Kowalsky, who’d seemed distracted – almost bored – up to this point, swung around in his seat as though someone had wound him up like a clockwork toy.

‘Incident?’

Jana glanced over to the small children on the floor. She was more formally dressed today in a midi-length blue dress that swirled around her legs, revealing a tan leather beaded thong around one ankle, and flat sneaker-type shoes, also in faded blue. The sleeveless dress made her brown arms appear endless and I saw how Ed’s eyes, magnified behind his glasses, were drawn to the long slope of her collarbone, smooth as a razor clam.

‘Why don’t we call Kristen in to take the children off for a soda,’ he said. ‘Kristen is one of my research students,’ he explained to Jana. ‘Kids just love her.’

He looked at me, and I realized that when he’d said, ‘Why don’t we’, what he’d meant was why didn’t I. As I went out into the corridor I reminded myself that he was the one who’d given me this opportunity, and it was fair enough for him to ask me to do the things he didn’t want to do himself. But still it rankled. As did the way he was looking at Jana. Let’s get this straight, there was nothing attractive to me about Ed Kowalsky. He was a married older man who just happened to be my departmental senior. But I’d got used to a certain level of . . . appraisal. It gave me a slight feeling of power. And it was galling to discover that power was all in my head.

Kristen was a plump girl with a wide, doughy face, who always blinked before talking to you as if trying to expel an unwelcome image that had come unbidden into her head. After she’d led the children off towards the lifts on the way to what was cheeringly called the ‘cafeteria’ on floor one but was actually just three vending machines and a few padded chairs in faded pale blue and orange, Ed depressed the pause button on the cassette player and we leaned in towards Jana, partly to better hear what she was about to say and partly because she was just the kind of person you instinctively want to get closer to.

‘There were two incidents, but they’re nothing really,’ she said now, pulling her long silky ponytail forwards over one shoulder so she could play with the ends. The sun was slanting through the slats of the blinds, striping the planes of her face with golden bands of light.

‘Everything you tell us is useful, Jana,’ said Ed, leaning so far in I thought he would end up with his head on her lap. ‘Every little piece of information helps us build a picture of what’s going on inside Laurie’s head. And that’s the only way we’re going to be able to really help her.’

‘The first incident happened a few days ago. Laurie was playing with Barney and, as I say, normally she’s very good with him but on this day she was tired and a bit out of sorts and he was playing with something she wanted and she gave him a little slap. Not hard, but I guess I rebuked her quite sharply. Anyway, she ran upstairs and by the time I followed her up there, she’d locked herself in the bathroom. I tried to talk to her through the door but she just said she was bad and bad children needed to be locked up. Then it went quiet for a while and when she came out, it was just like none of it had ever happened.’

Ed and I exchanged glances. This was distressing to hear, but at the same time not unexpected.

‘And the second incident?’

Ed Kowalsky leaned still further, looking as if he would like to take a giant straw and suck Jana up in one big gulp.

‘It’s probably nothing, really. It’s just that I was reprimanding Lisa – that’s my eldest – about something. I can’t even remember what it was now. Laurie was in the room colouring or something, but I hadn’t really been aware of her, you know. Then all of a sudden Lisa says, “Mommy, what’s wrong with Laurie?” and I looked and she was just standing there with this really kind of weird expression.’

‘Weird?’ I queried, wanting to understand.

Jana shrugged her shoulders.

‘No, not weird – she’s only four years old. More like disturbing. It was a kinda set expression like someone much, much older. But it was her eyes that were the problem. It’s like they were totally empty, like there was nothing there.’

‘Did she say anything?’ asked Ed.

‘She was muttering. I think she was saying something like “bad Lisa”. Or “Lisa’s been bad”. But it wasn’t really what she was saying as much as that dead look on her face.’

‘How long did it last?’ I asked.

‘Oh goodness. Really not long,
at all.
Minutes. Seconds even. Then she was completely fine again. And like I say, most of the time she’s a little doll.’

‘And still no curiosity about her parents? Her brother?’ My voice stumbled over the last word as if it contained an untruth.

‘Like I said before, she mentions them from time to time but mostly in terms of things. Like she’ll see someone wearing red shoes and say “Mommy has red shoes”, or like when I was reading the other night, she said, “Daddy has lots of books in his study.” But she doesn’t really ask about them in terms of where they are. Debra, the child welfare officer, has told her that sometimes parents aren’t very nice to their children and when that happens they have to go away for a while – and she seems to accept that without question. It’s kinda scary.’ Jana paused and bit down softly on her bottom lip.

‘Scary?’ Ed repeated.

‘Well, Lisa and Barney are my whole world. If I was separated from them it’d be like my life was finished. It’s hard to believe that they could be separated from me and for them it would be like I was just this person who came into their mind when they saw a particular colour of shoe.’

After Jana had left with the two children, hyped-up and fractious after their soda, Ed Kowalsky and I played back the recording of the session and made notes in silence. Eventually Ed sat back in his chair and clicked the end of his pen thoughtfully a few times before speaking.

‘I’m encouraged by how Laurie seems able to compartmentalize her experiences,’ he said. Click, click, click. ‘That suggests she might be capable in future of separating off those parts of her psyche where the damage lies.’

I nodded, but more because I was programmed to nod when someone senior was talking than because I actually agreed with him.

‘But don’t you think, Profess— Ed . . . that there’s also a danger that she might be suppressing her thoughts, rather than dissociating from them? And could that kind of extreme suppression lead to psychological problems further on down the track?’

He leaned back and crossed one leg on top of the other, ankle to knee, in an oddly suggestive way.

‘I understand where you’re coming from with that, but as you know, the optimal outcome for Laurie would be if she was able to separate off the things that have happened to her and keep them separate until it’s as if they happened to someone else.’

‘But those behavioural patterns Jana mentioned – the aberrant reaction to punishment situations?’

‘I don’t think I’d call those a pattern, Anne.’ Click, click. ‘Jana stressed they were unrepresentative incidents. It might be that something was said – just a word, or a look even – that triggered a learned response. But the probability is, those triggers will fade now that she’s been removed from the source of them. I’m by no means complacent, but I am cautiously optimistic.’

I think it was then I felt the first prickling of unease. True, my name would be on this report alongside Ed’s – but what if the conclusions were his alone?

13
Chloe

Chloe had never had someone dislike her before. At school she’d been one of those girls teachers appoint to show the new kids around. She captained the school netball team and when they won the county trophy she was careful to stress it was not her victory but totally down to the other players. Boys both liked and fancied her, even if secretly they sometimes wished she’d let rip a bit more. And girls were generally happy to be her friend.

As a result things had tended to fall into her lap. Three decent but not brilliant A levels from a leading North London state school (‘I came through the state system,’ she’d say modestly, choosing not to add that her parents paid over a million pounds for a house in the school’s tiny catchment area) led to an English Literature degree from Bristol University – missing out on an upper second by only the narrowest of margins, she’d inform people, shrugging her narrow shoulders in a what-can-you-do gesture. She hadn’t intended to go into recruitment but her mum knew someone who’d got her an internship and then Gill had offered her a junior role. Really she wanted to go into TV production but there was plenty of time. She was still very young, as she pointed out to her older colleagues with some regularity. The other reason she stayed in the department was Ewan.

Chloe had had boyfriends before. From year ten to year thirteen she’d gone out with Alex Macdonald, ending the relationship by phone once she was safely ensconced in Bristol and receiving the attentions of a boy who’d once modelled for a high-street chain. Then in her last two years at university she’d gone out with an American exchange student and had even talked about moving out to live with him after they graduated, but somehow that had just fizzled out once he went back to Illinois. Only when she met Ewan Johnson on her first day in the office did she properly fall in love.