Thanks to Joe’s message it’s the first weekend for ages I haven’t wanted to be somewhere else, but after breakfast Dad bursts the bubble. It’s my day to see the psychologist and I’ve forgotten.
‘It’s on the wall diary,’ Dad says. ‘I couldn’t make it easier for you.’
He could make it easier by cancelling the whole thing, but I don’t say so. I send Joe a text saying ‘have 2 go out. Maybe later’ then trail upstairs and get the Thought Diary from under my bed – where the most recent things I’ve written look so completely stupid she’s bound to know I haven’t been keeping it properly. I call her the ‘Shrink Woman’ because that sounds less scary; less like I’m actually crazy. She’s meant to help me deal with how I feel about Sam dying, but it’s a waste of time.
My phone buzzes in my pocket as I go downstairs. It’s Joe. ‘Let go of the past – the fall is not as far as you think.’
For a moment I wonder how he knows where I’m going, but he can’t of course. He’s just a bit mad, like me.
‘Good to see you smiling,’ Dad says as we drive away, so I wipe the smile off in case he thinks I’m happy.
We never speak on the journey there. Dad listens to the radio and I sit with my head turned to the window with my eyes half-closed, trying to think of nothing while the fields drift by, dotted with horses and isolated buildings. The clinic used to be a house, I think. A big building with carved gables and gardens, but it’s no house now. When you go in and see the smart reception desk and the people sitting around in chairs, you know where you are.
On my first appointment I didn’t say a word – nothing at all. I just sat there looking at a patch of brown stuff on the carpet and a cat outside the window as it played with a bird. Seeing the struggle and the flapping and the blood made talking seem pointless. Anyway, I didn’t belong there. I wasn’t like those other people crying into their handkerchiefs. I wasn’t crazy.
‘No one here is crazy,’ Dad’s always insisted.
‘Only you,’ I’d say, ‘paying all this money for nothing. You’re the biggest nut of all.’
The psychologist is very glamorous, like she should be in a movie or something. Piled up silver hair, huge blue eyes and what they call ‘good bones’, which means she’ll always look wonderful, even when she’s ancient. I suspect she changes clothes between clients like some kind of chameleon woman. Buddhist for the middle-aged trendies, prim for the nervous and clip-on dreads for the alternative types. Whenever I go it’s all African jewellery and joss sticks; I watch the smoke curl like ghostly snakes up the white walls and listen to her questions, which I never answer. They’d only lead to other questions and so we sit there – her in one armchair and me in another with a view of the garden. Poor old Dad, he pays all this money and she just looks at me and waits, and I look at her and make her wait some more. Until today that is, when she picks up the Thought Diary and to distract her I blurt out: ‘I saw a tramp. He talked to me. He was a bit like Sam.’
She doesn’t move, just lifts an eyebrow. ‘Oh yes?’ she says.
‘Yes. He came over and sat down. He could have been anyone – a vampire even, but I didn’t care.’
‘That’s an interesting choice. Why a vampire?’
‘I dunno; only that he could have been anyone.’
We look at each other.
‘Tell me something about him,’ she says, and I think.
‘He had really nice eyes.’
She smiles. ‘I’m surprised you noticed.’
Outside, the trees dance in the wind.
We’ve broken the silence now and she glances at my folder, at a piece of paper where I wrote stuff down before my first appointment.
‘And how is the other thing?’ she says. ‘The Pit.’
I consider The Pit. This is the term I use to describe the way I used to feel all of the time, but less often now.
It’s like one of those holes you dig on the beach. The ones you spend all day on when you are a kid. In the end it’s home time, and there you are standing at the bottom. It’s probably not very deep to anyone else, but to you it’s almost Australia. The sides are steep and narrow and cold, and right down at the bottom is a pool of smelly water. Here is where you’ve been sitting.
The frightened feeling comes back again and I clench my fists together, then apart and then together again.
‘What?’ she says. ‘What is it?’
But of course, if I knew that, I wouldn’t need to be sitting here, would I?
We drive home through slow traffic. The Thought Diary is on the back seat. The Shrink Woman wants me to write in it at least once a week, but I doubt I will.
The radio’s on and Dad hums tunelessly under his breath. He stops halfway home at a café and the warm air and clatter of knives and forks makes things all right again. There’s something so normal about cheese on toast. You can’t imagine traitors eating it for a last meal, or ordering Earl Grey tea with lemon-not-milk to go with it as we do now, trying not to swallow too loudly and watching the other people come and go as if we’ve only been shopping or something. I wonder what the Shrink Woman made of what I said; I wonder why I brought it up at all. I wonder what the tramp is doing now and how long it is since he had cheese on toast, so hot that it comes to his mouth still bubbling.
Dad nods at me across the table. A little lump of cheese sits on his top lip.
‘You all right?’ he asks me, and the little lump drops onto the table cloth.
I don’t say anything. Not because I can’t, but because I don’t want to. Dad waits a minute and then looks away, transferring his little smile from me to the waitress. Then we go home.