Zelah Green (7 page)

Then I get out of bed, lay my towel on the floor and do one hundred and twenty-eight jumps as quietly as I can.

There’s a thumping on the wall.

‘OCD,’ says Caro. ‘Leave it out, man. It’s
two o’clock in the bloody morning.’

I have to finish so I do the rest as fast as I can.

Then I crawl back on top of the sheets and beg my mobile phone to ring until daylight creeps back in.

C
aro’s back downstairs the next morning, stirring two tablets into a glass of water.

She grunts at me as I slide two slices of white bread into the toaster.

‘Headache,’ she says. ‘Some idiot kept me up half the night by banging up and down on the floor.’

She’s looking at my flushed skin and baggy eyes.

‘Sorry,’ I say. ‘Just had to finish something off.’

Caro raises a spoonful of cornflakes to her mouth and then lets the contents slop back into the bowl again. She does this ten times.

‘Is this how you eat, OCD?’ she says. She’s in one of her foul, grumpy, razor-sharp moods.

I feel a rush of anger and panic.

‘Just ignore her, Princess,’ says Lib. She’s sitting at the table twiddling the dial on her iPod. ‘Caro’s the first to poke fun at everyone else, but she’s the worst psycho in here.’

Caro gives an angelic smile. She picks up her glass of water, takes a dainty sip and with one savage movement chucks the rest over Lib’s face.

‘Oh dear, whoops,’ she says. ‘Clumsy old me.’

She gets up so violently that her chair tips over. She leaves it on the floor and slams out of the room.

‘That’s nothing,’ says Lib, checking her iPod for damage. ‘She cut off my hair in the night once.’

‘And smashed a glass coffee table with her fist,’ says Alice. As usual her hair covers half her face. She’s taking tiny nibbles round the edge of
a cracker with the faintest smear of Marmite across it.

I scrape my own knife over the toast and sit down.

‘Why is she so cross all the time?’ I say. ‘What happened to her before she came here?’

The girls exchange glances.

‘We’re not supposed to say,’ says Lib. ‘The Doc’s always banging on about patient confidentiality.’

I nod. I’d rather they didn’t find out about Mum and the cancer, or Dad leaving, or my difficult relationship with my stepmother.

We’ve all got secrets in this place.

‘Great morning,’ says Josh, ambling in with the milk. ‘Makes you glad to be alive, doesn’t it?’

‘Yuk,’ says Lib. She’s grinning.

From two floors up the rumble of Marilyn Manson starts again.

*

My session with the Doc takes place up in my own bedroom. As we pass Caro’s door I see her framed in that window seat again, head bent over her sketchbook.

‘You let her have it back, then,’ I say.

‘Only thing that keeps her quiet,’ says the Doc. ‘Despite our doubts as to the subject matter, there’s no denying that she’s very talented. Seen any yet?’

‘She won’t let me.’

‘She will do at some point,’ says the Doc. ‘Caro never does anything until she’s ready. I think she likes you, actually. You might do her some good.’

‘If liking somebody means growling at them and taking the piss, then yes, she must like me a lot,’ I say.

The Doc laughs. Her eyes sparkle and crinkle up in the corners.

Maybe this session won’t be too bad after all.

*

The Doc pulls back my curtains and lets sunlight flood over the floorboards. She takes a chair from the dressing table and sits in the middle of the room.

‘You can sit on the bed, as we’re being informal today,’ she says.

I curl up on the duvet and lean back against the wall in a position where I can see the Doc and the display screen of my mobile phone.

‘One thing,’ she says. ‘Do you mind putting that in your drawer, just for the session? I want your full attention.’

I wasn’t expecting that. I tense up. What if Fran chooses that very moment to call? Will I hear the ringer from inside the drawer? Is my voicemail working properly so that she can leave a message?

My face is going through a variety of worried expressions, judging by the Doc’s reaction.

‘OK, compromise,’ she says. ‘Pass it here and
I’ll put it in my pocket. I’ll feel if there’s a ring. Then I’ll give it back to you. Promise.’

I snap the phone back into its plastic cover so that the Doc can handle it without making fingerprints. It disappears into the deep white pockets of her linen shirt.

‘Now,’ she says. ‘First thing to say to you is that OCD is an illness. It is not you. It is not soul-of-Zelah. It’s a separate thing.’

I chew on this one for a moment. It certainly feels like me. I try to imagine life without my rituals and I feel so dizzy that I bang my head against the wall and the bed threatens to shoot out from under me and leave me sprawled on the floor. What was I like before the rituals came into my life?

All I can remember is Mum. We hugged, lots. We held hands and went to the park. Hands seem to figure a lot in my memories of those days. Cool hands on my damp forehead
when I was sick. Proud hands clapping in the air after the school play, so fast that I could see more than one pair at a time. The black opal ring on her fourth finger moving over my homework as she helped me, her dark head bent close to mine in the lamplight. Hands bathing me and rubbing shampoo into little lathery peaks on my head, holding out the soft towel for me to step into. Hands that were busy, plucking items from supermarket shelves and handing crisp bank notes to cashiers, bundling goods into plastic bags faster than they were being scanned in, pressing the beeper on the car key to unlock the doors. Capable hands, driving me home to tea and bed.

Holding Mum’s thin hand in the hospital when she was dying.

‘You miss her a lot, don’t you?’ says the Doc, doing one of her spooky mind-reading things.

I can’t speak. I’m looking at my hands and
wondering how long it is since I let somebody hold them. Over two years, I reckon. Only Fran has been allowed to get close. And now where is she?

I swallow, looking at the outline of my phone in the Doc’s white pocket. I’m expecting it to ring. People always ring at the most inconvenient times.

‘I think,’ says the Doc, ‘that you developed your OCD after your mother died as a way of staying in control of your feelings.’

She’s flicking through a folder as she says this. I recognise it as the one Heather passed to her on the doorstep when I arrived.

I shift on the bed, feeling hemmed in against the white wall behind me.

‘Tell me how you feel if you miss any of your rituals,’ she says.

That’s easier.

‘Sick,’ I say. ‘Panicky. Weird. Like the whole
day’s sort of gone out of time.’

‘What might happen if you don’t do them?’ she asks. ‘For instance – if you didn’t do your jumping tonight, what do you think would happen to other people?’

I wonder if this is a trap. If she’s going to try to stop me jumping, I’m leaving this house. I don’t care where I go. I’ll run down the motorway and hitchhike all the way to Heather’s house. She’ll understand. She’ll take me in.

‘If I don’t do it, it feels like someone I love will probably die,’ I say. ‘Mum died. Maybe if I’d had my rituals then, things would have turned out differently.’

The Doc is nodding, her gaze frank and warm.

‘I can tell you something, God’s honest truth,’ she says. ‘Nothing can stop the spread of that type of cancer. Your mother was very unlucky. It wasn’t your fault.’

I don’t believe this for a second, but I give
her what she wants, a brief nod and smile. I want my phone back. I want to get on with my washing. I need to rearrange my wardrobe to stop my things touching.

‘We’re going to do one small exercise right now,’ says the Doc. ‘Just to show you that nothing bad is going to happen to you if you come into contact with a bit of dirt.’

She glances over towards my sink.

In a flash I understand.

Major Germ Alert!

My breath starts to come in short gasps and my heart is pounding.

‘I – can’t,’ I start.

The Doc goes to the sink and places her hand on one of the taps.

‘I’ll go first,’ she says. She keeps her hand there for a few seconds and then removes it.

‘Nothing bad is going to happen to me for doing that,’ she says. ‘Josh is still speaking to
Caro. The cat is still lying in the vegetable patch. My Aunt Maureen will be pottering around her garden in Brighton with a pair of shears and she won’t have stabbed herself to death with them. More’s the pity.’

I’m keeping a wary eye on what she’s doing with the contaminated hand, but I snigger at the last part.

‘Your turn,’ says the Doc. ‘I want you to touch one of the taps. Whichever one you prefer. For about two seconds. Then I want you to resist washing it for a whole minute. I’m going to time you.’

I get off the bed. The air in the room seems to have expanded. I am standing in the middle of an enormous empty space with nothing to hold on to. The tap looms, large, an occasional drip falling in slow motion into the white enamel.

‘Go on,’ says the Doc. ‘I promise you that
nothing bad will happen. And I don’t lie. Well – only about my age.’

I can’t believe I’m even considering doing this.

‘Can I put a tissue round part of the tap?’ I say. I’m standing by the sink now, about half a metre away from touching it.

‘No need,’ says the Doc. ‘It won’t bite you.’

I take a deep shaking breath and extend one of my red fingers towards the cold metal. I’ve forgotten what it feels like to touch something someone else has just touched without the padding of a soft white tissue in between.

‘Hold it for two seconds,’ says the Doc.

I gasp as my finger brushes the chrome.

‘One,’ counts the Doc.

My whole body has gone into spasm. Tears stream down my face.

I screw up my eyes. I use every bit of strength to keep my finger in place. I can feel
the germs penetrating into the fibres of my skin and flooding through my body.

‘I want to stop,’ I spit out through clenched teeth.

‘Two,’ she says. ‘You did it!’

My legs give way. I collapse backwards on to the bed, holding my finger out in front of me so as not to touch anything else with it.

‘That was the longest two seconds ever in the history of time,’ I say.

‘No, it was just two seconds,’ smiles the Doc.

I need to wash, and fast. I can see the germs, evil, black and grinning at me from my frightened fingertip.

‘No washing for one minute, starting from – now,’ she says, frowning at her wristwatch.

I hold the finger as far away from my body as possible and grip that arm with my other one to stop the shaking.

‘Thirty seconds to go,’ says the Doc. I swear
she’s counting seconds in minutes today.

‘Twenty,’ she says.

I’m holding my breath now to avoid breathing in the germs.

My lungs ache. My eyes water and I can feel myself going puce.

‘Five,’ says the Doc. ‘Four – three – two – one – wash if you want to.’

If I want to?

I’m at the sink faster than you can say ‘dirt’. Nothing has ever felt so good as that cascade of warm water running over my dirty finger. I lather it up with plenty of soap and do thirty-one quick washes. I’m aware that all the time I’m doing this, the Doc is observing me and scribbling notes in her book, but I’m past caring.

When I’ve finished washing, I dry off my hands on a clean towel and sit back down on the bed.

The Doc snaps her book shut and removes her round spectacles.

‘Well done. You did it,’ she says. ‘I know that touching a tap is one small step for mankind but a huge step for Zelah Green. I’m impressed.’

‘You’re not going to make me do anything else, are you?’ I say. The blood has drained out of my body. I want to curl up and hibernate.

She laughs and pops my mobile phone back on to the chest of drawers.

‘Goodness, no,’ she says. ‘That’s enough for the first session. I’m going to put you on some medication as well, and we’ll arrange the next session for early next week.’

She closes the door behind her, leaving a scent of starch and dried roses in the air.

It’s only lunchtime, but I’m shattered.

I check my mobile phone and lie down on the bed, intending to rest for a bit and then go down to lunch.

I fall asleep in about five seconds flat.

When I wake up, the afternoon is losing light and I’ve slept right through the lunch gong. The Doc or someone has been up with a tray and put it round the door. There’s a plate of ham and mustard sandwiches and a glass of cranberry juice, along with a tiny white envelope.

Inside is a hand-drawn card with a cartoon of a black-haired girl with big scared eyes reaching out towards a giant-sized tap with an evil mouth full of spiky metal teeth.

It’s clever. I laugh out loud. Caro.

The message in the card says, ‘Well done for taking the first step,’ and everyone has signed it. Lib’s name is big and brash and followed by an exclamation mark. Alice has signed hers in a tiny spider scrawl. Caro has drawn a face with crossed eyes inside the ‘o’ of her name. Sol has just written ‘Sol’. Josh and Erin have squeezed
their names into the tiny amount of space left at the bottom.

I bite into the sandwich and enjoy the tang of the yellow mustard against the pale smoothness of the ham.

I sit on the bed and hug my knees and gaze at the card.

I did it
, I think. I touched something for two seconds without a tissue. And nothing bad happened.

I finish my lunch and lie on the bed listening to the growl and howl of Marilyn Manson’s voice through the wall. I’m getting used to it.

This afternoon would be a good one.

If only Fran would ring.

Maybe tomorrow.

T
he radio’s on in the kitchen and Alice is standing over a brown pottery bowl, beating something to death.

‘Morning,’ she says. ‘Caro’s birthday.’

I’m nearing the end of my second week at Forest Hill House and getting used to the routine. Alice and Lib are the first ones down for breakfast so that they can chat without Caro’s sarcastic comments. Sol slopes in half an hour later. And Caro has to be dragged out of her bed with huge dark circles under her eyes.