Now we are forgiven, p.5
Now We Are Forgiven, page 5
‘Would it be an awful imposition? I hate to ask, but I don’t fancy a hotel. Obviously only if it’s before your new arrival.’
‘We’d welcome it,’ said Nodge, putting his hand on JJ’s narrow left shoulder and giving it a slight squeeze. ‘Really we would. You can sleep in the nursery. I’ll set up a cot for you.’
‘You are princes. Princes among men. Would you have one of them mobiles that hang from the ceiling I could tinkle by any chance? And a nightlight perhaps. I do get scared of that dark. It’s the monsters that concern me, the ones under the bed.’
‘No such thing,’ says Owen.
‘As my old mother used to say, there’s plenty of monsters you can’t see. They’re the worst ones.’
JJ examines Owen and Nodge closely, darting his small bright dappled eyes with their heavy thatch of greying brow and wrinkles piled below like blown desert sandbanks, from one to another in quick succession as if looking for signs that they might have been forced into polite acceptance of his request. Finally, convinced that they are being sincere, he nods firmly as if to seal the contract.
‘Thank you, boys. I’m very much appreciative.’
His smile holds firm, but his hands remain inside his pockets, fists gripped tight as if trying to throttle something invisible.
Chapter Two
December 2019: Brighton
The therapy consultation room, part of a shared work hub in an anonymous office building in Hove, is designed to be neutral. There are two straight-backed armchairs, upholstered in grey wool, the therapist’s slightly larger but no higher than the client’s.
The room is filled with light from two large windows and there is an unused fireplace, the entrance to its flue blocked with fresh flowers. In between the two chairs, there is a glass coffee table with a pot plant on it, a beaker of water and a box of paper tissues.
On the wall are three small prints of rural scenes. There is pastel wallpaper, pale grey showing white flowers in relief, leaving the impression of a diluted William Morris print. On a small desk facing the rear window sits Veronica’s Apple Mac. The only slightly jarring element is the carpet of hard brown coir, which responds with a harsh scratching sound to any shoe sole dragged too heavily across it.
On the smaller of the chairs sits Vincent Canby, a stubby, pugnacious, overweight figure resembling a fair-haired Tony Soprano. His tidy grey suit trousers are oddly short for his truncated legs. He is sporting a fresh black eye on the left side of his face. He crosses his fat arms, which are hidden under a sharp blue shirt – expensive, Veronica guesses – with a brilliant white collar.
Veronica, dressed in a simple black business suit, no makeup and pinned hair, is looking down at her notepad and prepares herself to ask the Question, which lately has come to seem pointless and unilluminating. But she finds herself with nothing else in her head left to say after three quarters of an hour of diligent inquiry and careful listening.
‘How does that make you feel, Vincent?’
Vincent squirms, crosses his arms and leans forward. ‘Defensive body language,’ writes Veronica in her small plain notepad.
‘I don’t know how it makes me feel. How am I supposed to answer that?’
‘You seem angry.’
Vincent shifts in his chair, making his trouser hems shift further up his calves, revealing novelty socks that are decorated with depictions of small chipolata sausages. It was an oddly whimsical choice, thinks Veronica, for a successful architect, one who is struggling with his ten-year marriage and is full of unnameable dreads and anxieties. He first came into the consulting room six months previously, demanding to be ‘fixed’ and staring at Veronica defiantly as if he was on to her scam. But he had attended faithfully twice weekly ever since.
‘Most feelings don’t have names, do they?’ says Vincent. ‘You can call them sadness, or excitement, or irritation, or disappointment or frustration; you can give them names. But that’s not what they are – is it? Apart from anything else, I don’t know where my thoughts end and my feelings begin. They sort of – bleed into one another. Do my thoughts make me angry or does my anger produce my thoughts? I don’t know. It’s all a mess in here.’
He taps his head violently with one finger, takes a sip of the water in front of him, replaces it on the coaster then cradles his arms once more across his chest.
‘Events seem to connect to my emotions – and my emotions to events – in a very unpredictable way. As I told you, my dog died last week. I felt okay about it – I’m not sentimental about animals like my wife is – and then two days later I got in a fight in a pub. My fault entirely. Hence this black eye. I don’t know what the hell is going on. Do emotions just sit there and suddenly explode without warning?’
‘Sometimes.’
‘I paid you to fix me,’ says Vincent suddenly. ‘And you haven’t.’
‘Have I upset you?’ says Veronica, glancing at the clock behind Canby’s head, urging the minute hand onward.
‘Have you? Or is that simply your perception?’
‘Why don’t you tell me?’
‘That’s what I’m trying to say. I don’t know if you’ve upset me. Or if I’m just upset.’
His small hard eyes dart back and forth, avoiding contact with Veronica’s.
‘What do you think?’
‘I don’t know what I think.’
Veronica feels her stomach muscles tighten slightly. She says nothing.
‘If you’re waiting for me to say something, I’m afraid haven’t got anything left to say,’ says Vincent.
His left foot is tapping incessantly on the floor and he is wringing his hands. Veronica nods but still says nothing. This is what she is trained to do. Allowing another thirty seconds to tick away, she finally speaks the incantation, the spell of release.
‘I think our time is up now.’
Vincent, who has been torpid and lackadaisical throughout most of the session, abruptly rises from the chair, grabs his raincoat from the distressed white-painted coat stand and thrusts his arms, one by one, violently into the sleeves.
‘At last something we can agree on.’
He takes his wallet from his coat pocket, fishes out three twenty-pound notes, screws them into a ball and throws them, as if soiled, onto the table that separates client from therapist.
‘I can tell you what emotion I’m having now. I’m feeling like a total fool. Does that have a proper name? The feeling of being foolish?’
‘Vincent. I don’t think it would be a good idea for you to end our sessions before… ’
‘I’ve had enough. Six months, more than a grand down the drain, and I’m more confused than when I came in the first place.’
‘If you’re having financial difficulties… ’
‘I’m not having financial difficulties. I’m having therapy difficulties. I’m having you difficulties.’
He waves his hands in front of him, as if seeking to pull words out of the air.
‘Don’t you… you must sometimes wonder whether all this that you do is just snake oil?’
‘I’m not out to “cure” you, Vincent. It’s an… ’
‘… “Exploration”. I know. And we’ve ended up in… I don’t know – darkest fucking Borneo, drifting along shit creek without a paddle. Or at least I have. Meanwhile, you’re on easy street.’
Before Veronica can reply Vincent turns, yanks open the door to the room and leaves, not quite slamming the door behind him, but hard enough to make a clear enough parting statement. Veronica turns her gaze on the twenty-pound notes. Two are on the table, one has fallen onto the carpet. She bends and picks up each note as if it were unaccountably heavy. She feels tears well up and fights them back. It is important not to get too involved. This is what her training tells her. Unfortunately this distancing lately appears to be increasingly impossible. She had really thought she was getting somewhere with Vincent – with his depression, his anxiety, his inappropriate emotional outbursts. She had thought they had gone on an interesting journey together. Maybe they had. But it had ended up, as he said, nowhere. If he said it was nowhere, perhaps that was where it was. Maybe she should have just told him to go and get a prescription for Prozac from his doctor.
Vincent is right – in a way. She doesn’t understand him. People cannot be understood. She doesn’t even understand herself. Harrowed by this thought, Veronica reaches into her plain black leather handbag, big enough to hold the Mac, and finds a packet of cigarettes in a zip pouch at the back. She gave up years ago, for Silas’s sake as much as her own, but earlier in the year she started again. She doesn’t know why. An act of rebellion, perhaps.
She opens the window, lights the cigarette and puts her head outside the window. She smokes half the cigarette, then tosses it to the car park below, finding the taste simultaneously disgusting and appealing.
She visits the bathroom that is adjacent to her office and brushes her teeth to prevent Silas noticing any odour, then slips a Mento into her mouth. Then she locks the cigarettes in her drawer, slides the laptop into her bag, switches off the lights, secures the door and heads down two flights of stairs to the car park. Arriving, she locates and picks up the cigarette butt with a tissue before disposing of it in a municipal litter bin.
* * *
As Veronica makes the short drive home in her racing green Mini Cooper from Hove back to the house in Brighton, the session with Vincent continues to nag at her. She enjoys the process of therapy; she has worked hard to build up a good practice; she gets reliably paid for it – but could she actually point to any of her clients and say, with certainty, that she had made them ‘better’? What did that even mean? Better than what? She had heard older colleagues warn her about wanting to ‘fix’ her clients, but if she couldn’t help them – or at least help them to help themselves – what was the point?
Certainly, some clients improved, the majority even, but that might have happened anyway without her intervention. She was meant to be the expert but sometimes she felt she didn’t have a clue what she was doing. Not about anything. Not even in her own life. Silas, for a start. Why was she with him? Come to that, why did she marry Frankie before that? Her long-time therapeutic supervisor, Elizabeth Pember, suggested that it was because Veronica had wanted to get back at her cold, snobbish mother by marrying a rough-at-the-edges estate agent from Shepherd’s Bush.
Perhaps Elizabeth was right, but she had loved Frankie, she was sure of it. Even after she slept with that person – she cannot bring herself to name her ex-husband’s friend, the worthless man whom she had so impulsively thrown herself at – she had loved Frankie. But somehow, his neediness, his desperation to be loved, pushed her away, even as at the same time she loved him for his helplessness, for the sincerity of that helplessness, for the transparent disguises he plastered over the fear, the sorrowful, spirited mask of the hustler.
The damage was done now anyway. Even though Frankie had wanted to stay in the marriage, despite finding out that she had been unfaithful. She knew she had broken it beyond repair. She was pretty sure she had done so deliberately. The fact that Frankie had gone bankrupt as a result of his lying and cheating – the reason she told everyone she had ended the marriage – was incidental to the fact that something deeper in her had demanded a change. Now she had ended up with Silas. He was certainly different from Frankie. Middle-class, privately educated, excellent manners, ticked all the right boxes. Above all, took a pride in his honesty. There was to be no more lying.
But did she actually love him? It was hard to say, since you couldn’t strip wishful thinking out of the equation, or denial for that matter, or selective memory, or confirmation bias, or projection, or transference – all the things she had learned about while studying to be a therapist. At least Silas was not helpless, not by any definition – he was capable, confident, compassionate. He could put up a shelf, cook a meal, build a fence, change a fuse. He was straightforward, in touch with his feminine side, a good father to Mason and a decent stepfather to China, however much China resented him (which was only natural). But what was it to love a man, or for a man to love a woman? The question remained unanswerable. Vincent was right. The language of feeling was hopelessly impoverished.
At the end of the ten-minute journey, Veronica pulls into a residents’ parking bay outside the pink house behind Silas’s five-year-old silver grey Volvo S-90, takes her handbag from the seat, locks the car and walks slowly up to the front door of the house, still lost in her thoughts. She keys the lock and steps into the hall. In front of her to the left are stairs leading to three bedrooms and a bathroom. Ahead of her there is a corridor leading to the kitchen. To her right, a door leads to a living room that extends from the front of the house to a second connecting door at the back of the room, also leading into the kitchen.
She hangs up her coat and makes her way along the short corridor, containing a small privy to the left, until she reaches the main kitchen door. As she enters, she sees Silas standing at the stove wearing a pinafore. The slogan on it reads ‘This is what a real feminist looks like’ in spidery pastel script. Three copper pots are steaming on the hob. The Verve are playing from a Bose speaker.
‘Hi, bud.’ He glances up at her, shoots a quick smile and returns to the cooking. ‘How was your day?’
‘I’ve had better.’
‘Me too,’ he says, sprinkling some herbs into one of the pots. ‘I drove all the way to Saltdean because I heard there was a half-price deal on firewood. They’d sold out. So instead of saving money I spent it on petrol.’
‘Sad story.’
Silas stops working at the stove and switches the music off.
‘What’s the matter, Vronky?’
‘I don’t know. Tired, I suppose.’
He wipes his hands on a tea towel and takes a step toward her.
‘Bud. Have you been crying?’
Silas takes off his pinafore, moves another step towards Veronica, grasps her hand and leads her through the door into the sitting room. He pulls her towards the three-seater sofa, which isn’t nearly as comfortable as it looked when they saw it in the showroom. Silas had insisted on it because it was reduced by 20 per cent. He sits down, dragging at her hand. She reluctantly lowers herself onto the space next to him.
‘Ouch! Fuck!’
She looks under her rump. A sharp metal toy has been left there by Mason, some kind of retro robot.
‘I wish that bloody kid… ’
She checks herself. She puts the toy on the rustic yew coffee table, crafted by Silas and retaining its original knots and boles. Small items frequently fall through two small naturally occurring gaps in the wood and onto the floor beneath.
‘Sorry. I’ll have a word with him. Now – tell me about what’s upsetting you.’
Veronica stares into his watery, bulging eyes – she finds them off-putting, but tries to ignore the vague frogginess they suggest – and regards, objectively, the mottled, calloused, pasty hand that is holding hers. The manual worker’s skin seems incongruous with its fruity-voiced, soft-spoken owner. She looks up at his face again. He has a galaxy of dark brown freckles running across the bridge of his nose and across his cheeks. Silas claims that the copious freckles are to do with his mixed-race background.
Veronica searches for the right words to express what she has been feeling. In the end, ‘I wish you’d stop calling everyone “bud”, Silas’ is all she can manage. Silas nods. Veronica knows that he is ‘holding the space’. He has done his homework. He has been on men’s personal growth weekends and removed his shirt and beat his chest and screamed his male rage at the skies until it was exorcised. He smells of Fairy Liquid and cumin.
‘I’ll try,’ says Silas, his voice dripping empathy, like spilled cleaning fluid.
‘Thank you.’
‘So what’s really the problem?’
He squeezes her hand gently. Veronica can detect the faint sheen of sweat. Or was it the washing-up liquid?
‘Can we talk about it later?’
Silas pauses. His eyes seem to expand slightly more as if some pressure from behind was suddenly going to force them out of his head completely and send them flying across the room. She imagines them sticking to the wall opposite, then slowly descending like slugs to the floor.
‘Of course, hon. Whenever you like.’
‘I’m going to take a shower.’
‘I’ll get back to making the supper, then,’ says Silas with a jarring cheerfulness. ‘It’ll spoil.’
Veronica makes her way along the corridor to the stair. As she does so she hears the Verve again, Silas lustily singing along.
* * *
China is standing by the window in her room, facing the small patch of rear garden that shows through a gap in the curtains. Scrolling down the contacts on her phone, she comes to one entry that simply says ‘Fairy Godfather’, filed under ‘F’. She deletes the word ‘Fairy’ and re-files it under ‘N’. It isn’t funny anymore. It never was. Not that Nodge would have minded. He doesn’t really mind anything. His inability to be offended is one of the things she loves about him.
She is wearing mismatched baggy clothes from the charity shop – a paisley shirt, a frilly white lace skirt, junk necklaces and rings. She doesn’t believe in chain store shopping, all sweatshops and boring and ugly anyway and bad for the environment. She takes a selfie of her outfit, brandishing a pout, and posts it on Insta. Caption ‘nouveau normcore, mixed with Downton vibe’. She waits a minute for likes. None appear.
Sighing, she makes her way across the room, past the rarely played cheap guitar – a birthday present from Silas – and a beanbag designed to look like a trainer. She throws herself into the hanging egg chair, dislodging Kardashian, who squeals then falls immediately asleep again, this time on the beanbag. She goes to her FaceTime app and rings Nodge. After a couple of buzzes, the screen flickers and Nodge materializes, blinking, cheerful, solid. He is wearing Cubitts designer glasses with super thick black frames that make him look more like a philosopher than a taxi driver.
