Nicci French - Blue Monday

‘Hmm. Well, it was a good theory. In fact, it’s still a good theory – it just applies to you instead of your patient.’

‘Ingenious.’

‘I’m half serious – you’re anxious about Alan, you can’t get to the bottom of him. So you’re attaching his fantasy son to a convenient symbol.’

‘A snatched child is hardly a symbol.’

‘Why not? Everything is a symbol.’

‘Rubbish,’ said Frieda, but she laughed. Her mood had lifted. ‘What about you?’

‘Oh, OK,’ said Reuben. ‘It’s your turn to give advice. Here I am. No woman. No job. I’ve been drinking gin out of coffee cups. What do you recommend, Doctor? Is it all to do with my mother?’

Frieda looked around. ‘I think you should tidy up,’ she said.

‘You’re a behaviourist, are you?’ asked Reuben, sarcastically.

‘I just don’t like mess. You’d feel better.’

Reuben slapped his head so hard that Frieda flinched. ‘There’s no point in clearing up out here if you’re fucked up in here ,’ he said.

‘At least you’ll be fucked up in a tidy house.’

‘You sound like my mother.’

‘I liked your mother.’

There was a loud knock at the door.

‘Who the fuck can that be?’ said Reuben, irritably. He shuffled out of the room. Frieda took her mug of coffee and poured it over the dishes in the sink. Reuben came back into the kitchen. ‘There’s some guy asking for you,’ he said.

He was followed by Josef.

‘That was quick,’ said Frieda.

‘Is he a cleaner?’ said Reuben.

‘I am a builder,’ said Josef. ‘You have had a party?’

‘What’s he doing here?’

‘I asked him to come,’ said Frieda. ‘As a favour. For which you will pay. So be polite. Josef, I wondered if you’d fix about five things here. Like the doorbell and a broken window and there’s a light that’s come off the wall.’

‘The boiler doesn’t work properly,’ said Reuben.

Josef looked around. ‘Your wife is gone?’ he said.

‘She’s not my wife,’ said Reuben. ‘And yes. As you can see. I did this all by myself.’

‘I am so sorry,’ said Josef.

‘I don’t need your sympathy,’ said Reuben.

‘Yes, you do,’ said Frieda. She touched Josef’s shoulder lightly with her hand. ‘Thank you. And you’re right. Talking isn’t always enough.’

Josef inclined his head in his characteristic courtly gesture of acknowledgement.

‘Frieda?’

‘Sorry.’

‘You’re miles away. What were you thinking about?’

Frieda hated it when people asked her that. ‘Nothing much,’ she said. ‘The day ahead. Work stuff.’ She had slept so badly that her eyes stung. Now she felt brittle and on edge and she didn’t want to make conversation with Sandy, who had slept beside her, murmuring things in his dreams she couldn’t make out.

‘There are things we should talk about.’

‘Things?’

‘Yes.’

‘Is this the how-many-men-have-I-slept-with conversation?’

‘No. We can save that for later, when we’ve got enough time. I want to talk about our plans.’

‘What am I doing this summer, you mean? I should warn you that I hate flying. And sunbathing on beaches.’

‘Stop it.’

‘Sorry. Ignore me. It’s seven thirty in the morning and I’ve been awake most of the night with my brain fizzing. The only plans I can make right now are ones for the next eight hours.’

‘Come to mine tonight. I’ll cook us something simple and we can talk.’

‘That sounds ominous.’

‘It’s not.’

‘I have a patient at seven.’

‘Come after that.’

Frieda never took notes during a session; she did that afterwards, then wrote them up on the computer in the evenings or at weekends. But she occasionally made drawings or simple doodles on the pad of paper she kept at hand. It helped her to concentrate her thoughts. She did that now, sitting in the repaired room, newly painted a colour called ‘Bone’, to Josef’s obvious disapproval. She loosely sketched Alan’s left hand, which rested, for the moment, on the arm of his chair. Hands were difficult. His had a thick gold band on his wedding finger, chewed skin round his thumbnail, prominent veins. His index finger was longer than his wedding-ring finger; that was supposed to mean something but she couldn’t remember what. Today he was more than usually restless, twisting in his seat, sitting forward, then shifting backwards, rubbing the side of his nose. She noticed a rash had broken out on his neck and there was a toothpaste stain on his shirt. He was talking, very fast, about the son he wanted. Words that had been forbidden and jammed inside him for so many years now spilled out. She drew in the knuckle of his little finger and listened very carefully, trying to quell the unease prickling through her, raising goose pimples on her skin.

‘Being called Dad,’ he was saying now. ‘Having him trust me. Never letting him down. He plays football and likes board games. He likes being read to at night, books about dinosaurs and trains.’

‘You’re making it sound like he exists.’

‘Is that a problem?’

‘You’re missing something so badly that you’re making it come true in your mind.’

Alan rubbed his hands all over his tired face, as though he was washing it thoroughly. ‘I want to tell someone,’ he said. ‘I want to be able to speak it out loud. It’s like when I fell in love with Carrie. I’d had girlfriends before, of course, but nothing that felt like that. I felt freed from myself.’ He looked at Frieda and she stored away the phrase for later. ‘Those first few months, I just wanted to say her name out loud to anyone. I’d find ways of getting her into the conversation. “My girlfriend Carrie,” I’d say. It made it feel real when I said it to someone else. It’s a bit like that now, as if I just have to say it to someone because that eases this pressure inside me a bit. If that makes sense.’

‘It does. But I’m not here to make what isn’t real seem real, Alan,’ said Frieda.

‘You said everyone needs to make a story out of their lives.’

‘So what do you want to do about this story?’

‘Carrie says we can adopt. I don’t want to. I don’t want to fill out forms and have people decide if I’m fit to be a parent. I want my son, not someone else’s. Look.’ Alan took his wallet out of his jacket pocket. ‘I want to show you something.’

He pulled out an old photograph. ‘Here. This is what I imagine my son to look like.’

Frieda took it reluctantly. For a moment, she couldn’t speak.

‘Is this you?’ she asked eventually, staring at the slightly chubby little boy in blue shorts standing by a tree, a football under one arm.

‘Me when I was about five or six.’

‘I see.’

‘What do you see?’

‘You had very red hair.’

‘It started going grey before I was thirty.’

Red hair, glasses, freckles. A shiver of disquiet ran through her and this time she voiced it. ‘You look very like the little boy who’s gone missing.’

‘I know. Of course I know. He’s my dream.’

Alan looked at her and tried to smile. A single tear ran down his face, into his smiling mouth.

He mustn’t eat anything. He knew that. It was all right to drink water, warm stale water from a bottle, but he mustn’t eat. If he ate, he wouldn’t be able to go home ever. He would be stuck here. Hard fingers forced open his mouth. Things were pushed inside him and he spat them out. Once some peas went down and he coughed and choked to make them come back again but he could feel them going down. Did a few peas count? He didn’t know the rules. He had tried to bite the hand and the hand had hit him and he had cried and the hand had hit him again.