I WAS TWELVE and a half the first time I met Roan Fours.
I’d been cutting myself for more than two years by this stage.
I’d just started year eight; kids were turning from twelve to thirteen and boys were becoming a problem.
All the attention, the look in their eyes, the idea of the things they were thinking, of the things they were saying about me to each other—I’d spent most of my childhood hanging out with boys, so I knew what happened behind the scenes—was starting to make me feel tired, used, worn-down. I quite liked the idea of therapy, of being in a quiet room with a quiet man talking quietly about myself for an hour or so.
I’d been picturing a wild-haired guy in glasses, maybe a tweedy jacket, even a monocle. I had not been expecting a cool guy with eyes too blue and cheekbones too sharp and long, spidery legs in black denim that he crossed and uncrossed and crossed and uncrossed until you were almost dizzy with it. And hands that moved like some weird pale exotic birds whenever he wanted to describe something. And dope trainers. You know, really good ones, for an old guy. And a smell, of clean clothes, my favorite smell, but also of trees and grass and clouds and sunshine.
I didn’t clock all of this the first time I met him, obviously. When I first met him I was still a child and just thought he was kind of cool-looking, in a Doctor Who kind of way.
He looked at a notebook for quite some time before he looked at me.
“Saffyre,” he said. “That is a tremendously brilliant name.”
I said, “Yeah. Thanks. My mum chose it.”
It’s totally a name a nineteen-year-old mum would choose for a baby, isn’t it?
Then he said, “So, Saffyre, tell me about yourself.”
“Like what?” Everyone knows you shouldn’t ask kids open questions. They suck at answering them.
“Like, tell me about school. How are you getting on?”
“Good,” I said. “I’m getting on good.”
Here we go, I thought, some bloke ticking boxes, filling in forms, going home to watch Game of Thrones and eat quinoa or whatever with his wife. I thought: This is not going to work.
And then he said, “Tell me, Saffyre, what’s the worst, worst thing that ever happened to you?”
And then I knew we were going to get somewhere. I didn’t know where yet, I just knew that I was at a point in my life when I needed someone to ask me what the worst thing that ever happened to me was, rather than ask me if their eyebrows were on fleek or if I wanted chicken or fish for dinner.
I didn’t answer him immediately. My head flooded. The obvious thing came first. The thing that happened when I was ten. But I didn’t want to tell him that. Not yet. He waited, a good minute or so, for me to answer. Then I said, “All of it.”
“All of it?”
“Yes. All of it. My mum died before I knew her. And my grandma. My granddad was a single dad raising three children and a grandchild, then he got so ill that my uncle had to look after all of us from when he was, like, my age. So he had no proper life. Ever. We had a budgerigar. It died. The lady next door who used to fix my hair for me, her name was Joyce—she died. My favorite teacher at primary school, Miss Raymond, got cancer and died just after she got married. My granddad’s got arthritis and is in pain nearly all the time.”
I stopped abruptly, just short of the defining event of all the bad events, the event that had brought me to his door. I stared at him, at the blue, blue eyes that reminded me of one of those dogs that look like wolves. I wanted him to go, “Oh, poor you. No wonder you’ve been cutting yourself all these years.”
Instead he said, “Now tell me the best thing that ever happened to you.”
I was taken aback, to be honest; it was like nothing I’d just said meant anything. Like maybe he hadn’t even been listening.
For a moment I didn’t even want to answer him. I just sat there. But then something suddenly came into my head. There was a girl at primary school called Lexie. She was very popular, very kind; all the teachers loved her, and all the children loved her. She lived in a nice house on a nice street with crystal chandeliers and velvet sofas and she always invited the whole class to her birthday parties, even me, who wasn’t really one of her proper friends.
One year she had an animal party. A man with white hair came with a van full of boxes and cages and in each box and cage was a different animal, and we were allowed to touch them. He brought a chinchilla, a snake, some stick insects, a vole, a ferret, some birds, a tarantula. He also brought a barn owl. It was called Harry.
The man with the white hair looked around at all the children and he saw me and he said, “How about you, would you like to hold Harry?”
He brought me to the front and gave me a big leather glove to wear, and then he put Harry the owl on my outstretched arm, and I stood there and Harry turned his big head and looked at me and I looked at him and my heart just blew up with something warm and velvety and deep and soothing. It was like I loved him, like I loved this owl. Which was just stupid because I didn’t know him and he was an owl.
So I looked at Roan Fours and I said, “The time I held an owl at Lexie’s birthday when I was nine years old.”
And he said, “I love owls. They’re extraordinary creatures.”
I nodded.
He said, “What did it feel like when you held the owl?”
I said, “It felt like I loved him.”
He wrote something down. He said, “Who else do you love?”
I thought, Hmmm, aren’t we supposed to be talking about owls? Then I said, “I love my granddad. I love my uncles. I love my nieces.”
“Friends?”
“I don’t love my friends.”
“What does love feel like?”
“It feels like… it feels like need.”
“Like need?”
“Yeah, like you love someone because they give you what you need.”
“And if they stop giving you what you need?”
“Then that’s not love. That’s something else.”
“And the owl?”
I stopped. “What?”
“The owl. You said it felt like you loved the owl.”
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t need the owl.”
“No. I just loved him.”
“Did it feel the same as the way you love your granddad?”
“No,” I said. “It felt… pure.” I realized that sounded wrong and corrected myself. “Not that there’s anything not pure about the way I love my granddad. But I worry about him. I worry that he’ll die. I worry that he won’t be able to give me what I need. And that makes me feel bad. I didn’t feel bad about the owl. I only felt good.”
“Do you think both types of love are equal?”
“Yes.” I nodded. “Yes, I do.”
He stopped then and looked up at me, and he smiled. I hadn’t been expecting him to smile. I thought that it was in his contract not to smile during therapy. But he did. And maybe it was because we’d just been talking about it, I don’t know, but I got that feeling again, the soft, velvet-owl feeling.
So yeah, maybe I needed Roan Fours already, even before I knew it.
The first time I saw Roan outside of a therapy session at the Portman was about a year or so after our first session. I was walking home from school and he was just leaving an appointment at the school opposite my flat where one of his patients was a student. He was all smart and briefcasey, wearing a blue shirt, and he was talking to another man, also smart and briefcasey. Then they separated, and Roan turned to cross the street and he saw me looking at him.
I thought he might just wave and walk on. But he didn’t. He crossed the road and came to stand with me.
“Well, hello,” he said. He had his hands in his pockets and kind of rocked backward on his heels. It made him look like a teacher for some reason, and I had that really eww feeling you get when you see a teacher out of school, like they’re naked or something. But at the same time I felt really pleased to see him.
I said hi and wondered what I looked like to him. I was wearing false eyelashes that day; this was early 2016—everyone was wearing false eyelashes. I didn’t think I looked stupid at the time but I probably did.
“Finished school?” he said.
“Yeah. Just heading home.” As I said this, I looked up at the tower, to the eighth floor. I always recognized my floor from the ground because of the ugly red-and-green-striped curtains in the window of flat thirty-five next door. It was like a marker.
“Up there?” he said.
“Yeah,” I said. “Up there.”
“Nice views, I bet?”
I shrugged. I’d happily forsake the views for a home with more rooms in it.
“So, our next appointment…?”
“Wednesday,” I said.
“Five thirty p.m.?”
“Yep.”
“See you then.”
“Yeah. See you then.”
I headed toward the entrance to the flats. I turned around as I pulled the door open, because for some reason I expected Roan to still be standing there, to be watching me. But he wasn’t. He was gone.
Roan and his family moved to a flat near the Portman Centre January last year. How do I know this? Because I saw them, literally on the day they moved in. I was walking to the village, up those big roads that go up the hill from my estate, those roads of mansions and Teslas and electronic gates.
And there was this van double-parked with hazards flashing and some young guys unloading boxes and lamps and chairs and whatnot. The door to the house was wide-open, and I always like to look inside an open door, and I saw a woman; she was thin and wearing jeans and a pink jumper and trainers. Her hair was blond and fine and shoulder-length. And there was a boy, a teenager, and they were carrying things through a door at the end of the hallway, and then a man appeared coming the other way and it was him. It was Roan. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans. He went to the back of the van and was saying something to one of the guys inside the van, and I almost walked on but I suddenly had this urge to let him know I’d seen him. I was about to cross over the street and say hello when the woman in the pink jumper appeared. I didn’t know she was his wife then, but I assumed she must be.
They said something to each other and then both disappeared inside the van, and I caught my breath and carried on my way.
But before I left, my eye took in the number on their front door: seventeen.
I never told Roan I’d seen him move into his new home. We didn’t talk about stuff like that. I’d never even really thought about where he might live or what his life might be like outside our room at the Portman. When we had our next session, about four days after I saw him moving house, we just went straight down to business as usual. He didn’t tell me he’d moved and I didn’t tell him I knew.
Then about two weeks later, Roan said that he thought we were ready to start thinking about terminating our therapy. He said this as though I should be pleased, as though I’d actually quite like to finish therapy, as if it were school or swimming lessons or something. He said he thought another two or three sessions should “bring us to where we need to be.”
Strange, you know, because I’m not stupid but I’d been stupid enough to think that therapy would just keep on and on until I was ready to stop. Or maybe, you know, forever.
“How do you know?” I asked. “How do you know where we need to be?”
He smiled that weird, lazy smile of his, like he’s not bothered but then thinks, Fuck it. “That’s my job, Saffyre.”
“Yeah, but don’t I have some say?”
“Of course you do. Of course. What would your say be?”
I had to stop then and really think about my answer, because I didn’t exactly know what I wanted. On a fundamental level I wanted the weekly punctuation marks of an hour in Roan’s room; the familiarity of the suspended ceiling with the three halogen lights, one sickly yellow, two bright white; the double-glazed window with the view of a snapped branch on a tree that swung back and forth on winter nights when the wind blew, cutting shadows through the sodium glow of a streetlight beyond; the two red chairs with the nubby fabric; the low wooden table with the tissues and the little white lamp; the brown carpet with the crusty white patch near the foot of the armchair; the muted sounds of people walking past the door. I wanted to carry on seeing Roan’s feet every week, in leather lace-up shoes, in his dope white trainers, in nasty strappy Velcro sandals, in snow boots. I wanted to hear his low, measured voice asking me questions, the slight clear of his throat as he waited for me to answer. And then after the session, I wanted to walk past the drama school, past the tube, past the farmers market, past the theater, feel the seasons changing in the textures beneath my feet: slippery wet leaves, hot paving stones, slimy snow, dirty puddles, whatever; all the months and months and now years and years of Roan Fours, how could it end? It was like telling me that day and night would no longer exist, that there would no longer be twenty-four hours in a day. It was that fundamental.
Eventually I said, “My say would be that I don’t think I’m ready.”
“In which ways, would you say, are you not ready?”
I shrugged. I said some bullshit about still thinking about hurting myself when I hadn’t thought about hurting myself for over a year.
He gave me a look, calling me on my bullshit with his eyes. “Well,” he said. “We’re looking at another two or three weeks yet. I’ll get the process in motion. We can always double back on it closer to the time if you still feel we need to. But genuinely I don’t think you’re going to feel the need to. You’re amazing, Saffyre. The work we’ve done is incredible. You should be pleased.”
I still hadn’t told him about the bad thing that happened to me when I was ten. I wanted to say that to him, to shut him up. I wanted to say, Someone did something unbearable to me when I was ten years old and you’ve been talking to me nonstop for more than three years and you still don’t know that, so how can you say I should be pleased? I wanted to say, You’re a shit psychologist. I wanted to say all sorts of things. But I didn’t. I just left.
Roan Fours signed me off three weeks later.
He tried to make a big, happy moment of it.
I pretended it was OK.
But it was not OK.
It was far from OK.