The Half Sister Page 29

  Every visit is worse than the one before. He can’t talk to her about Mikey, can’t think of anything else to talk about. A nurse says some people find it helpful to bring something in to read and share, a newspaper, for example: ‘Inquiry finds car park developers responsible for poor construction’ – we’ll leave that well alone; extraordinary picture here of a man who they said would never walk again and now they’ve rigged him up with some sort of electronic legs and he’s just climbed Snowdon. Behind that impassive face is she wondering, like him, if they might at some point in the future take these leaden limbs and fit them with electronic chips, plug her in and watch her walk and talk and tell?

  Shaking the creases out of the paper with force, Edmund continues again out loud: ‘That TV presenter, he’s been found to have over a thousand images of tortured children on his . . .’

  Sometimes he resorts to the crossword.

  What about twenty across? Spy tracks down hidden communication system in strange land.

  Fantasies often preoccupy his well-trodden route from the car park to the ward. He imagines a solemn nurse taking him to one side – the consultant would like a word; variations on a theme of the announcement of the deterioration or death he secretly craves for his wife. And now, on a weekend visit with Mikey, with a catch in his breath, he believes his wish is about to come true. Here is a doctor who wants to have a chat. Please God, he prays with his fingers crossed in his pocket, please God.

  Diana is stable enough to see if they can withdraw the sedation and start to bring her out of a coma.

  Mikey kicks off when he tells him. ‘No, no, no.’ There is a struggle, fingers scratching, the bed moves, the high-pitched monitor is screaming for attention and Mikey is punching him, baring his teeth. Staff are running from all directions. Then the alarms are switched off, the crowd disperses, and the space settles down again, leaving the squeak of shoes on clean floors and reassurances about faulty connections.

  The nurse puts her hand on Edmund’s arm. ‘I expect the alarm frightened him.’

  That happens a lot with Mikey. People misread the sequence of the chicken and the egg.

  Twelve hours later, Diana opens her eyes. Later that night, had Edmund been by her side and had he held a mirror to her mouth, he would have seen the clouded glass.

  The timing of the start of Mikey’s therapy could not have been better. At exactly ten o’clock, the therapist opens the door to her room. Sofia is small, but conveys simultaneously a sense of great energy and great calm. Her speech is accented, but Edmund can’t place it. French? Italian? Instinctively, he feels he’d like to know her better, but acknowledges that he never will, nor does he understand his momentary reluctance to hand over Mikey. In the waiting area, he cannot concentrate on the papers he’s brought to read while he waits; it’s the geological report on the Riverside Development so it’s pretty important, but all he wants to know is what’s going on in there. He wants to be in there with them, he wants to be in there on his own.

  Someone mentioned something called life story work. That would be something.

  Suddenly, Mikey appears, half way in, half way out of the therapy room, opening and closing the door. Unseen, Sofia is talking from the other side.

  ‘You seem very interested in the door.’

  Again, Mikey comes out into the waiting room, and this time he stays out, pressing the keypad with different combinations of four numbers over and over again, pausing at the end of each attempt to try the handle beneath.

  ‘Looks like you really want to crack that code and be in control of the door.’

  Immediately Mikey jumps back inside and slams the door behind him.

  A magic trick comes into Edmund’s memory – keys and newspaper and the drawing room – and yet another row with Diana in the garden.

  ‘Do you think it’s a good rule, only adults knowing the code?’

  Once again Mikey is outside, this time with the door propped open with his foot.

  ‘Maybe part of you wants to be here and part of you wants to leave.’

  Wriggling, Mikey takes off his school sweatshirt, gets his elbow stuck in the sleeve, then uses his top as a doorstop. Now Edmund can hear everything, see nothing.

  ‘I’d prefer it if we could work with the door closed, but I can see you have left a way open so you can get out. Or perhaps it is for other people to come in.’

  Giggling, something is knocked over.

  ‘I notice you haven’t said anything and now you’ve got your shirt over your face, you can’t see either.’

  . . .

  ‘And goodness me, now you’ve got your hands over your ears, you can’t hear either. I suppose the only thing left is touch.’

  . . .

  ‘You’re good at not bumping into things, perhaps you can see more than people might think.’

  . . .

  ‘Would you like me to take your hand?’

  . . .

  ‘It looks as though you do want me to take your hand, so that’s what I’m going to do.’

  Has she held his hand?

  ‘Oh, now you’ve taken it away. I wonder how it is to want to hold my hand and to want to stay away, both at the same time. Like speaking, I suppose, sometimes you say things, other times you say nothing.’

  . . .

  What’s happening now? Bizarrely, Edmund finds himself not just wanting therapy to help Mikey, but for Mikey to be good at therapy; he feels that a lot nowadays, the burning sensation of wanting other people to see in Mikey the unique and talented and loving child that he sees, for things to go well for the child, and the physical pain of realising he cannot do it all for him.

  ‘You can go ahead and explore the room and the boxes.’

  What does it look like in there? Are there toys? At a meeting, Sofia explained something about the therapy room, but he found it hard to listen and now he can’t remember, can’t imagine it. Something is being dragged across the floor.

  ‘Go ahead. You can stand on the box to look out, but the window doesn’t open, not the whole way. It’s fixed that way to stop people falling out.’

  A terrible noise, a frightening noise, banging on the glass, over and over again.

  ‘Michael, it’s a safety window. It won’t break. It must be very painful to think that your aunty fell from a window and nothing or no one was able to keep her safe.’

  The hammering continues. Edmund gets to his feet. He wants to burst in there and rescue Mikey. Safety should be that woman’s first priority, shouldn’t it? He’ll take Mikey home and not come back if she can’t even keep him physically in one piece.

  ‘You look as though you really need to break that window. I wonder what it is that you need to get away from. It must be a very frightening thing if you want to break the glass.’

  Forcing himself to sit back down, and covering his ears, Edmund leans forwards and rocks slightly. The point of therapy may be to get it all out, but what happens when it all comes out? It had not occurred to him that this therapist might discover the truth just like that, in the first session, that she will discover that Diana did terrible things to the boy and she will have to tell social services. That was made clear at the introductory meeting. And would they let Mikey continue to live with a man whose wife was a torturer? With a man who might have guessed his wife was demented beyond the point of safety, if only he’d taken the trouble to look and listen? With a man who did guess, no, more than that, a man who knew, but got on a plane and left to save himself instead? He knows why Mikey is obsessed with escaping and it is only a matter of time before the therapist puts two and two together and makes four. Inside his head underwater sounds reverberate, the roar of water over a weir, heard in darkness, from a distance. Abruptly, he takes away his hands, struggles to reconnect with the therapist’s voice and a less frantic banging.

  ‘That’s better. Perhaps it’s helpful if someone notices how frightening things can be for you.’

  Something strange is happening, the mad hammerin
g is developing a rhythm, like a football chant – de de dedede dedede de, de de – then the glass is abandoned in favour of clapping.

  ‘So all those scary feelings have become a song, a game? That’s fine, but it’s also okay to feel angry or scared or sad. You’ve had hard times over the last year.’

  . . .

  Is he sitting? Hiding? Crying? Mikey nearly always cries silently, even now. Even when he speaks, he doesn’t really say anything. Why doesn’t the woman say something? She shouldn’t leave him like that, alone with his silence. Edmund has such fear that Mikey will slip under the surface and he will lose him again to that underworld.

  ‘Maybe you’re very tired, with that blanket from the playhouse pulled right up to your chin. You can sleep if you want to.’

  . . .

  ‘Is Michael asleep? I don’t know. Sometimes memories and feelings spoil sleep and give us horrid dreams, but Michael really does seem to be fast asleep.’

  Six minutes . . . six minutes of silence. One. Two. Three. Four. Five. Six. How can the therapist just sit in there with this deafening absence. The little hand of the clock on the wall of the waiting room hauls itself uphill as though it takes all its energy to reach the top.

  ‘There is one minute left of our time, Michael.’

  Fingers grab the sweatshirt, Mikey careers out of the room, and the door slams behind him. He swings round and kicks it. Sofia appears behind him.

  ‘Goodbye, Michael, I’ll see you next Thursday.’

  Mikey runs at her, tries to push past her to get back in the room, or tries to push her into the room. Whatever he wants, he looks out of control. Edmund is going to hold him back, but Sofia’s words are apparently more powerful than his hands.

  ‘Our time is finished now. Here’s Edmund, he’s been waiting here for you.’

  The long drive home happens with the mute button on.

  The next day, Edmund phones the therapist from the office.

  ‘I’m sorry, I had to call. I found it so hard just sitting in the waiting room. I could hear bits of what was going on, but I couldn’t make head nor tail of it.’

  ‘It’s early days. Michael did well. He stayed in the room for nearly the whole session, which is more than a lot of children do to start with. I think he’ll make very good use of therapy.’

  ‘But what did it all mean? All this toing and froing and banging on the window?’ Therapists are probably wise to fishing expeditions, but he has to cast.

  ‘Well, he’s preoccupied with entrances and exits, but so are a lot of people when they start therapy. It’s part of being unsure about the process itself. And . . .’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘And it would be easy to draw conclusions about his mother being unable to escape the earthquake and the blame attached to him for that, perhaps even his aunt being in a locked-in state. He may have heard that phrase. But it’s early days and it’s as much about the transference of emotion in the room as what he actually does. It wasn’t all fear and hopelessness, there was also a sense of a battle for control. We have a lot of work to do.’

  Sofia thinks it’s definitely worth continuing, she believes Michael may even be able to share some of what has happened to him.

  ‘Can I just add one more thing?’ she says before she rings off. ‘He is a very unhappy boy, but I also get a sense of great warmth deep down in him, that he has been very much loved in the past and will therefore hopefully be able to allow himself to be loved in the future, in fact may already be letting that happen. You’re doing a great job, Edmund. I could see that when I saw you both walking hand in hand to the car park, when I heard the two of you singing.’

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Edmund has chosen a more mundane route to sanity. His GP is prescribing him something to help him sleep.

  ‘I don’t really care about myself, to be honest,’ he says to the doctor, ‘but I owe it to Mikey. To stick around.’

  ‘No one can really look after anyone else if they can’t be kind to themselves,’ says the doctor. Having gone for medication, Edmund is ill-prepared for wisdom or sympathy. He puts on his coat and feels for his keys.

  ‘I wondered if you knew that your wife made an emergency appointment at the surgery before her accident.’

  His mind is kicked sideways into touch. She didn’t attend, apparently, didn’t respond to a reminder either, and, no, the doctor did not know what prompted it and no one would ever know if it might have made a difference. Edmund remembers suggesting to her that she should see a doctor; her reply was that a marriage counsellor would be more help, or an exorcist (she hadn’t specified whether the latter was for her, for him, or for Mikey). Or a support group for women with passive-aggressive husbands, that’s the other thing she said once, which was very hurtful. Driving home from the surgery, Edmund pauses for some teatime trick-or-treaters, skeletons and ghosts holding hands with their mothers under the fluorescent lights at a zebra crossing. He does a three-point turn and heads back to the supermarket where he buys the last two pumpkins on the shelf.

  Self-consciously he plays with Mikey at the kitchen table, stringy heaps of scooped-out flesh on the chopping board, pips discarded like baby teeth the fairy forgot. They are sculptors, of sorts.

  ‘Be careful with that knife,’ says Edmund.

  Mikey touches the point of the blade to the scar on his hand.

  ‘When did you do that?’

  ‘When you were gone.’

  That’s his favourite sentence at the moment. He speaks as usual without looking up, concentrating on the gaping mouth, then the knife slips, the serrated fangs are severed and swallowed by the pumpkin. There is little point in Edmund saying it doesn’t matter, these things are always catastrophic for him. His face flushes with rage and the pumpkin is stabbed over and over again in a frenzy, then the pulped body is taken into the garden and kicked like a football under the floodlights until it disintegrates entirely and Mikey disappears up to his room, hands down his tracksuit bottoms.

  Later he presents Edmund with a printout of a Google search and a picture.

  ‘The tribe played soccer with the head of their conquered opponents.’

  There is no denying he is very competent on the computer.

  The one remaining pumpkin is finished by them working together and the shared talisman is placed outside the front door. Mikey arranges the elite of his circus animals in a circle around it. Either side of the curious shrine, they cup their palms against the wind and hold the match to the wick. The candle flickers behind the eyes and the light catches the bronze boy, whose muscles quiver.

  ‘The pumpkin’s meant to keep away ghosts,’ says Edmund, then regrets it.

  Under the catalpa tree, the flame has become sunlight filtering through the huge leaves and his mother is resting in her wheelchair, only half asleep. If anything is true, it is that time and history and memory and chronology are unreliable partners and that ghosts lose their faces.

  ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’

  ‘I believe in souls.’ Edmund is aware he is whispering.

  ‘Why?’

  Because if not, what’s the point of the candles and the lilies and the prayers and the chapel? Because he experiences his parents as the people on the far bank watching him cast over the river. Because, before turning back, he himself has seen the ferryman, hand out for the silver.

  ‘Diana did.’ The boy’s voice is coming from behind the yew hedge. ‘She believed in ghosts.’ There he is back on the edge of the lily pond, dancing for the bronze boy. ‘No more secrets, no more lies,’ he sings. ‘That’s our song. Me and my mum.’

  It’s nearly midnight when Edmund puts Monty out, and the candle in the pumpkin is just holding its own against the rising wind. That’s the first time Mikey’s mentioned Valerie; it’s almost impossible to believe that he might have caused her death. From the park there’s a muted rumble like faraway thunder. Edmund wonders if it’s another tremor, or maybe time itself is rolling over in its sleep, as well
it might on a night like this when the living and the dead are too close.

  In the broad light of the next day there is a battle over what should happen to the remains. Edmund wants to throw the pumpkin on the compost heap. Mikey pokes the sagging cheeks and one eye collapses, and he insists on having it in his room. And there it stays until Grace calls time several days later when the smell of decay has got as far as the hall and Edmund goes upstairs to seize the hostage. There are good times, then there are times like this, when the feral child is back. As soon as he touches the circus animals’ cardboard box in an attempt to tidy up, there are fingernails in the flesh, boots against the ankles. Edmund is too tired for this right now: climbing a mud-sucking footpath up the side of the mountain, the sliding back makes the summit look more and more unachievable. He too has a temper if he chooses to lose it. Part of him wants to shout at the boy, why do you think you’re the only one who has the right to kick and scream and bite? I want to. We all do. Every one of us on this earth, we are all full of rage, we just make an effort to control it. In the bathroom, he checks his hand and is relieved there is only a faint imprint of tooth marks on the skin, no blood. The staff at the office might notice, but they won’t comment, at least not to him; new excuses for his injuries are becoming harder to invent.