24

There were at least two points of connection between Emily Parks and the small, tidy woman kneeling in prayer at the end of the pew. One was the obvious: they had both walked into the same church. The other, though neither knew it, was Professor Sturrock. The small, tidy woman was Mrs Temple, who was praying for the Professor, praying that he continue to find the strength to help David, who had accompanied her to church this morning, and was now waiting outside for her.

Emily was attending Mass for the first time since she’d left school. Though she’d gone to a Catholic girls’ school, she remembered their visits to church more for the laughter and the larking around on the way there. God and Jesus were like names in a book, or lyrics in a song, and she did love to sing along. But she’d listened to the Mass every week without it ever meaning as much as it seemed to mean to other girls. She was not from a very religious family. Her parents were irregular churchgoers, though since the fire, her father had taken to going more often, especially during the week when nobody else was there, to pray for Emily. She’d hated the idea of him doing this – wasting his breath on a God who perhaps didn’t even exist. But now, as she watched a queue of worshippers shuffling forward to take communion, she felt she understood her father better. She felt calm, at peace within herself.

It was a feeling that had begun on her walk the previous day, the first time she’d gone for a walk in daylight. She’d set out without a destination in mind and somehow found herself able to go as far as the Holloway Road, even though the pavements were packed with Saturday shoppers and football fans heading towards the Emirates Stadium, where Arsenal had a home match. At first, it had been terrifying, for she knew she was heading towards an area even more crowded than the Caledonian Road. When she went out in daylight to the hospital, she had no choice, and she had the cocoon of her mother’s car, and with it her mother’s smothering concern. Here, each step was a choice, and as she made another step forward, she felt a tiny grain of confidence building within her. She pulled her headscarf tighter around her face and avoided looking at anyone. She just focused on one step at a time, and got caught up in the crowd, all now moving towards the same destination. She turned with the masses into Drayton Park, and walked past lines of police vans, programme sellers and fast-food outlets. Then, as she passed the stadium, she found hundreds of people now moving towards her, as they too headed to the ground. She knew she ought to feel scared, but she didn’t.

She came to Gillespie Park, the council-run ecology centre where once she had taken her class for a whole day’s nature study, and as she left the crowds, and opened the wooden gate into the park, she found herself smiling as she breathed in the cleaner air and enjoyed the sudden quiet. She walked past the smaller of the two ponds, down the little trail towards the bigger pond, and sat down on the long bench that overlooked it. She blew out her breath and saw the beginnings of a fog in the air. A young couple walked by, so lost in each other that they didn’t notice her, and she smiled at that too. To her right, an elderly man was painting the scene, equally oblivious to her.

She sat for a while, watching two ducks glide slowly across the pond. One was leading the other, very slowly, so they left barely a ripple in the water behind them. She made a note to tell Professor Sturrock that she sat for a good half-minute and watched the ducks glide by. He was forever telling her to find new experiences and record them in her ‘Pain Diary’. ‘Pain Diary’ was Emily’s term for it, not Professor Sturrock’s. He had simply asked her to divide each page into two columns and record her feelings, good on the right and bad on the left. She called it her Pain Diary because page after page was filled with bad feelings, while the right-hand column was largely empty. But, little by little, as she sat by the pond, she started to find things she could write in the diary to go alongside the bad. The ducks. The calm she had felt on entering the park. The feeling of the cold air on her face. The low autumn sun on the water. Even the occasional muffled roar that emerged from the stadium had a vibrancy that pleased her. She wished she had brought her notebook with her, so she could record all this while it was there in front of her.

This morning, she’d gone for the same walk. The streets were deserted compared with yesterday, yet still she was being seen by dozens of people. She was able to walk a little more quickly. Close to the entrance of the park, a man was walking two dogs, one a Dalmatian, the other a terrier of some sort that was constantly jumping up and down against the Dalmatian’s side. She wasn’t sure what possessed her, but she lifted her hand to her neck and loosened her scarf, pushed it back so that it rested at the top of her head, and flapped fairly loosely around her neck. As the man got nearer, she told herself to say ‘Good morning’ in a neutral, friendly way. It was the kind of thing that, before the fire, she always used to say to strangers out walking their dogs. She couldn’t stand all that reserve that went with living in a busy part of the metropolis. It was why she used to love her visits to her grandparents in their little village in Warwickshire where on a Sunday morning all you could hear were the church bells and the echo of ‘good morning’ as people greeted each other as they went about their business. But that was then and this was now and she knew it was a big moment for her. She was about to say it, but he beat her to it.

‘Morning,’ he said. ‘Bit cold, but stayed fine.’

There was no doubt about it: her face was clearly exposed to view. He must have seen it, but his expression had not changed.

‘Morning,’ Emily replied. ‘Yes, isn’t it a beautiful day?’ And he was gone.

She walked into the park, and as the second pond came into view, glinting in the morning sun, she started to run down the muddy trail towards it. As she caught sight of the ducks, she felt a sensation as close to happiness as she had felt since before her disfigurement. She had brought some stale bread with her and she broke it into little pieces and tossed them onto the water. Immediately, seven ducks came towards her. She couldn’t be sure if the two from yesterday were there. They’re like raisins, she thought. No two ducks are the same. Once the bread was all gone, she sat on the long bench. She stayed there for an hour. For twenty minutes she studied the trees, watching one leaf and counting how many times it moved in a different direction. Seven. For half an hour, she looked at one small area of the pond. She watched the light patterns change, tried to follow one ripple and see where it led, waited for one of the ducks to come through that part of the pond, then followed the duck for a while, loving the little line it left behind it, then loving the way the line disappeared.

On the way home, she’d passed the church. The doors were open, and a hymn was being sung by a large congregation inside. She had only a vague purpose in entering. She thought it would be nice to hear the singing, and it would be a good place to have lots of new people see her face. But once she was inside, she found herself whispering her thanks.

She couldn’t really explain how she had got here. It had happened so quickly. It was as though all the different parts of a psychological jigsaw had been hanging in space above her, sometimes moving to fit another shape, but then breaking apart again and flying elsewhere. Some were her own pieces. Some were her family’s, their desires and fears for her. Sami the shopkeeper, with his kindness and offer of a job, was a big piece of the jigsaw. So was Professor Sturrock and the things he had said to her, which at the time she hadn’t really taken in, or even listened to: his ideas on what makes a person, what is good and what is bad, what a lesson about the past really means, dreams, forgiveness, grief for what we lose when alive, living in the present tense. All these different ideas flying around in the space above her head and then somehow coming together in a way that made her want to see and be seen. The raisins and the ducks and the light on the water. How could it be that a fire had destroyed her and a raisin had helped to rebuild her? But it had. A humble raisin had taught her a lesson that no RE or social sciences teacher had ever been able to.

Last night, before going to sleep, she’d read a few chapters of the book Professor Sturrock had given her, about people who had survived trauma and disaster. She found herself flicking through to find the stories that involved fire. They included examples of suffering far greater than hers. A soldier with third-degree burns to most of his body and who was now running a soup kitchen for down-and-outs in Detroit. A firefighter who defied the orders of a superior in entering a collapsing warehouse to look for one last remaining person, and who broke his neck and back, and was burnt all over his face and body, when the roof caved in. There was a picture of him before the accident, resplendent in a new fire uniform, a huge smile creasing his face, and another of him now, in a wheelchair, wearing a neckbrace, an old fire brigades union baseball cap covering the damage to his scalp, his face scarred almost as much as Emily’s. But the smile was the same, and the caption said simply: ‘Kenny Macleod, firefighter, Glasgow, Scotland – “I lived to tell the tale.”’ And a nine-year-old girl who was the sole survivor of a blaze in Northern Ireland which killed her parents, two sisters and two brothers. The little girl was quoted as saying, ‘When I heard the others were dead, I wanted to join them, but I had such a lot to do, what with the operations and the grafts. I live with my aunt and uncle now and they’ve been a real help. I miss everyone a lot but my uncle said so long as I’m here, a little bit of them is here, and I like thinking about that.’

Emily felt bad that she was grading the disfigurement of the people she read about, but she couldn’t help herself. She put the American soldier at five stars, the Scottish fireman and the little girl from Northern Ireland at four, maybe three and a half. She put herself at three slash two and a half. She wondered if that was why Professor Sturrock had given her the book, to lead her to the insight that there were people worse off than she was. But she liked to think there was more to him than that. She doubted that he graded suffering. He struck her as someone who would look at every case on its own merits, and do his best for each. She then graded them for inspiration value. This time it was the little Ulster girl who gained five stars, while the fireman and the soldier got three. Perhaps it was the fact that they were doing a job they would expect to take them into dangerous situations, so perhaps had more forewarning, whereas she was just a little girl sleeping in the wrong place at the wrong time. She had lost loved ones, not merely her health.

She thought about how many stars she would give herself for inspiring others. It was an important moment, and a very solitary one. Even if she really tried to put a positive gloss on how she had handled herself, she could only go to one. Without the gloss, she wondered if she wasn’t closer to zero. Perhaps that was why he gave her the book to read. Perhaps this was the conclusion she was meant to reach, that how she inspired or sought to inspire others would decide how well she recovered from the mental scarring. Yet far from inspiring her family, she knew she saddened them. She had walked away from them, preferring her own company to their constant efforts to make her feel better. As for inspiring anyone else, she had been avoiding people. The thought of baring her scars to a charity’s cameras was one she had never had.

She was analysing not just her own reactions, but how they might fit into the psychiatrist’s expectations of the process. She was determined to make her next session with him more productive and less confrontational than the last. She had noticed before how much their discussions on the Friday played around in her mind over the weekend. It must be strange for the Professor, she thought, to have all your patients out there at the weekend, ruminating, reflecting, some getting better, some getting worse, but all linked in to him, putting hopes in him. And it wasn’t just the patients who did this, it was people like her mum who liked to think that he was some kind of miracle worker who would succeed where they had failed.

She reached for her Pain Diary, which she kept on the floor beside her bed.

‘I cannot describe the feeling as I sat by the pond,’ she wrote. ‘I felt a serenity today that I cannot explain. It was a feeling of being alone, but I was fine about being alone. I felt vulnerable, but that was OK, because we are all vulnerable. Out in the park today, I felt that there was a greater power than all of us, and it was guiding me to a better place. It was telling me to appreciate beauty wherever or whatever it may be. It was telling me that I came close to losing my life, but I still have life, and I should make of it what I can.’

She wrote a final sentence. ‘I feel like I have been walking through a forest where the trees are so tall and so tightly packed together that there is no light to guide me. Then I have seen a clearing and followed the trail that it’s exposed. The trail was a long hilly climb through the last part of the forest. And then I find myself standing at the top of a mountain range and below me hills are rolling down to a beautiful lake, water shimmering in sunlight, and I am standing in awe of what I see.’

In the church, the choir had started to sing again. Emily joined in.