The therapist’s office was small and shabby and there was a sense that nothing went on in it, that it was rarely used, as if therapy was a cover for one of those money-laundering scams that Eileen had read about in detective novels, or seen on the afternoon television shows. Eileen didn’t know why she thought of this, she just knew she had to think of something other than the sequence of almost biblical plagues that had brought her here. The clouds of blown ants had persisted until the September rains came, and that her son was personally responsible for the infestation was an accepted fact in the rumour mills that congregated around the 30 bus stop and the vegetable shop at the junction of Lavender Terrace and the Sutton Road. On Snapchat, Facebook, Twitter and whatever else substituted for corner-shop gossip. But for the natural decency of Carmen, whose parents ritually crossed the roads when Eileen passed them, and her understandable embarrassment, the authorities would have been called in to investigate whatever happened in the dunes that morning. So the rumour mill went, anyways (as the mothers would have put it). Eileen had shared her memory of the rats with nobody, not even her husband Jim, but school was coming up and they had both discussed their worries about the return of their incommunicative son to that raucous establishment in St Anne’s Park. Another explosion of gossip would be almost as intolerable as the explosion of flying ants, and they had both decided to consult the child psychiatrist that helped the young McEntee down the road, when his adolescent moods had developed into a condition called bipolar, which was once termed depressive, or manic, or both, and affected close to 10 per cent of growing teenage boys. Although, as the reassuring voice on the phone said, when Eileen had rung to make the appointment, there is so much happening in youths of that age, so many hormones coming to bursting point, so many physical and mental changes, that a touch of what parents perceive as ‘moodiness’ is only to be expected. As Jim was, naturally, busy, it fell to Eileen to accompany Andy to the old Georgian building by the Five Lamps, and Eileen sat there examining the features of this drabbest of rooms, trying to occupy her mind with anything other than the absence that sat beside her.
He was rubbing one hand off another, the nails scouring small white streaks along the skin, and she had the awful sense that if he pushed the nails in a slight bit harder, those streaks would turn red. So she looked at the carpet, which had a pattern of interconnecting circles, brown upon green. Was it brown, she wondered, or had it once been black, the severity of the circular whorl smudged brown by feet? Then she had no more to think about this, and in a fit of panic wondered what else she could think about, what else would take her mind from the boy beside her, and she looked at the wallpaper. It was equally unpromising, but had a strange set of repetitive illustrations, a fading shepherdess with a staff that curled at the top and spread across the wall to the unlit fireplace, above which a framed diploma hung, that read ‘Gerard Grenell’ beneath the copperplate logo of a therapeutic institute. And as she couldn’t read the name of the institute, so ornate was the print, she set her mind to trying to remember the name of the shepherdess. And when she couldn’t remember that, she tried to remember the term for the staff that rose above her bonneted head. A crook, she remembered, a shepherdess’s crook. And then the inner door opened, and the name suddenly, and uselessly, came to her.
Bo Peep was the shepherdess’s name, of course. Little Bo Peep.
A man was walking towards her, through the open door. He had a kind face and corkscrew red hair that rose unbidden above his crown, no matter how carefully it was combed. And as he introduced himself, Eileen wondered did he know what a crook was for.
But she knew that was the last question she should ask him. There was only one question she was here for, and it was to do with her son beside her, who, to her shock and surprise, was already standing, shaking hands with the kindly Dr Grenell, or was he even a doctor, she couldn’t be sure. Until he was gracious enough to shake her hand too and ask the question ‘Mrs Rackard?’ Well, it wasn’t a question really, but it was phrased like one, and Eileen nodded as her right hand was angled up and down by his and tried to smile when he said Dr Grenell and would have even curtseyed like Bo Peep on the wallpaper, she was that anxious.
He brought them inside, to a smaller office with more plaques on the plain wallpaper of the wall, and here Eileen noticed it had two doors. One door to lead patients out, she assumed, and another, through which all three of them had come, to lead people in. Did men in white coats ever manage the transition between the two, she wondered, and then said to herself, you have to stop, Eileen, being so dramatic.
Because her son, oddly enough, had perked up in front of the therapist. And Eileen, who could think of him more clearly now that her thoughts were mediated through another, wondered was that because he was at the age where he needed role models of men, and not of women. Was that why his eyes crinkled with something like pleasure when he saw the smudged ink-blot drawings the therapist held up, answering rapidly in a stream of word association that surprised even her?
Until suddenly he stopped dead.
‘Is there a problem?’ the corkscrew-haired therapist asked. And Eileen thought to herself, he really ought to have it cut before it grew like a plover’s crest above those luxuriant eyebrows. ‘I find it hard to concentrate,’ Andy was saying, smiling at the therapist in a way that seemed to imply: if I hadn’t got a friend before, I have one now.
‘And why is that?’ the therapist asked, equally brightly.
‘Too many people,’ the boy said, and they both exchanged a glance and Eileen thought, well thank God someone can make eye-contact.
‘Well,’ the therapist said, smiled at Eileen a little too brightly and asked her softly, ‘Will you give us some time alone together?’
So Eileen found herself back in the waiting room, alone now, looking at the Bo Peep wallpaper, wondering what on earth a crook was and however did she lose her sheep?