DID I TELL you that I am a trained killer? That I’m a ninja warrior?
Well, I’m not really. But I am a black belt in tae kwon do. There’s a martial-arts school just over the road from me, in the sports center. It’s what’s known in the trade as a dojo, and I’ve been going there since I was about six years old. So you’d think I’d have been able to defend myself from a puny eleven-year-old boy with wandering hands and a sick mentality. But no, I was pathetic, let it happen, and then punished my own self for it for years afterward while Harrison John got to swan off to secondary school without a backward glance.
He would have said that I enjoyed it, because I was so passive. But I didn’t.
At tae kwon do classes every week I kick and grunt and sweat, pretending every blow is on Harrison’s head. I picture the walls splattered with his blood, bits of his tiny pea brain, fragments of his skull.
But at school, when I was a small child, I just let it happen.
I let it happen three times.
I still go to tae kwon do once a week; it’s just habit really, but my skills have come in very useful the past few months. I’m not a small person: I’m five feet eight, and when my hair is loose I look even taller. I take up space in the world. People see me. But I can move light on my feet; I really can. I can move about like a shadow if I need to. I pull up my hoodie, keep my chin down, eyes up. I reckon I could walk past my own uncle on the street and he wouldn’t see me, if I put my mind to it.
The first week that went by without me having a session with Roan was OK. I’d missed the occasional session before if I’d been ill, or he’d been on holiday or whatever. It was when the third week loomed up that I suddenly felt this cold drip in the pit of my stomach, like icy water. I imagined Roan sitting in our room, on our nubby chairs, with some other kid, some kid with stupid annoying issues, and he’d have to pretend to be as interested in theirs as he was in mine.
I was walking home from school one afternoon. It was about twenty past five, and I remembered that this was the exact time I would normally have been on my way to the Portman for my session with Roan.
Suddenly, I found myself turning right instead of left, walking those familiar streets toward the Portman Centre. The sun was just setting, and I was wearing a big black Puffa over my school uniform, black tights, black shoes, hair scraped back, hood up. I crept between the trees in the parking area to the front and peered up at his window.
Do you know how long I stood there for?
I stood there for nearly an hour.
It was March and it was cold. Really, really cold.
I saw occasional suggestions of movement, then I saw the lights ping on in all the consulting rooms and I realized it had turned to nighttime. My teeth were chattering, but I felt like I’d been there so long that I couldn’t go now, that I couldn’t go until I’d actually seen him.
He finally appeared about twenty minutes later. He was wearing a big black coat and a pull-on hat. I could see his breath even from a distance, the yellow cloud of it in the streetlight. He smiled then, and I thought for a moment that he’d seen me, but he hadn’t—he was smiling at someone else, a girl coming behind him. She looked about eighteen, nineteen. He held the door for her, then the girl lit a cigarette and I watched them share it. I thought: You don’t share a cigarette with someone unless you know them really well. I also thought that I’d never seen Roan smoke, not once in all the years I’d been his patient.
After they’d finished smoking the cigarette they went back into the building, Roan held the door for her again and he seemed to press himself against her as he followed her through. I saw her turn and smile at him.
I’d come to the Portman to sate some weird need for the familiarity of him, but I had set my eyes upon him and I had seen him as another person, a person who smoked, who stood too close to young women.
I was not sated. If anything, my appetite for seeing him was increased. I stood outside for another half an hour, until the car park began to empty out, the front door opening and shutting constantly as staff left for the day, calling out cheery goodbyes, talk of a quick one, comments about how cold it was. I recognized some of the people, the secretaries, receptionists, nurses I’d dealt with over the years. And then Roan reappeared. He was with the young girl again. Again, he held the door for her, chivalrously, and she exited beneath his outstretched arm, like a move in a dance, smiling at him as she did so. I took a photo. Call me weird, but it just seemed like something I needed to be able to study at my own leisure in the privacy of my own room. I needed to analyze the girl’s body language and Roan’s smile and work out what was happening, what I’d seen.
I kind of expected them to go somewhere together, but they didn’t. They had a little hug, a kind of half embrace, where only their shoulders and cheeks touched, then she hitched her bag up on her shoulder and walked away in the direction of the tube station. Roan stopped for a moment, pulled out his phone, and tapped his screen a few times. I saw his face in the glow of the screen; he looked old. Then his face lifted and lightened, and he put his phone away and he turned and caught up with the girl and they were close enough now for me to hear him call out to her. “Wait, Anna, hold up,” he said.
She stopped and turned, and I could see the glitter of multiple earrings in her ear.
“I’ve got half an hour,” he said. “If you’re not dashing home, maybe we could have that coffee? Or something stronger?”
He sounded nervous, like a bit of an idiot.
But the young girl smiled and nodded. “Sure,” she said. “Yes. I’m not in a rush.”
“Great,” said Roan. “How about that new place that’s just opened, opposite the tube?”
“Fab,” said Anna.
They fell into step, their footsteps ringing out in the cold dark against the tarmac, and away onto the street, me still there, frozen to the core, invisible between the trees.