It was a punishment her subconscious mind had picked out for her, and she knew she deserved it, but it wrought badly on her nerves.
She had one other visitor at Winstanley: her Aunt Brenda, who was to all intents and purposes her only living relative. Her father was out there somewhere, but in so many ways Barry really didn’t count. Brenda came in on two sticks, looking way too big in the narrow cell. The chair creaked ominously as she lowered herself into it. She brought fruit and chocolates, as though Jess was still in hospital rather than in jail, and apologised for not coming sooner.
“There were reporters on my lawn,” she said. “Lots and lots of them. I didn’t want to go out and talk to them about you, so I hunkered down and waited.”
Brenda didn’t bother to mention the other factor – that her surgery had left her still in pain and about as mobile as the average barnacle. She looked older and a lot more tired than when Jess had seen her last, her hair showing streaks of white at the sides and her shoulders slightly stooped. The injury to her back had taken a lot out of her, and the surgery had taken even more.
“It’s okay,” Jess said, hugging her with great care. “I’m glad you’re here now.” Brenda’s friendship, Brenda’s love were precious things to her, and all the more because they weren’t built on any closeness between Brenda and Jess’s mother, Paula. The two sisters had drifted out of touch a long time before Paula died, mostly because of arguments about Barry. You should kick him out. Change the locks. Tell the police the next time he comes around. Brenda took no prisoners and asked for no quarter.
And presumably she had also had to work through her own feelings about her niece accidentally killing an innocent kid. But she tried not to bring that up, the same way you might avoid the word “cancer” in a cancer ward.
“How are you coping?” she asked instead.
“Not all that well,” Jess admitted. She told Brenda about her bad dreams. The whispers in the dark and the sense that she wasn’t alone.
“Like your nightwalks,” Brenda said. Her face creased with concern.
“My what?”
“Your nightwalks. When you were little. Don’t you remember?”
“No, I really don’t. Wait, yes. Do you mean all that crazy stuff I did with Tish?”
Tish had been her imaginary friend. They had wandered together through lots of half-baked fantasy landscapes based on Where the Wild Things Are, One Monster After Another and the Faraway Tree stories. Jess had laboured hard on those adventures, working out the details while she was still awake and trying to carry them with her over the threshold as she dozed off.
Brenda winced visibly. It seemed her back was still giving her problems. “No, no,” she said. “Not Tish. I meant the other times. When you said you could walk into our dreams.”
“I don’t remember that at all,” Jess said.
“Oh, you were adamant about it. When your mum asked for details, you told her you’d seen her on a big ship. She asked you what she was doing on the ship and you said she was shooting a bird with a bow and arrow.”
“That’s from The Ancient Mariner.”
“Yes, it is.” Brenda nodded. “And you had never read that poem. You were only six years old. But Paula was reading it for her Open University course.”
“Then I must have heard her reading it out loud.”
“Perhaps you did. But she was a little shaken up all the same because she’d had a dream about it that night. It was just a coincidence, obviously, but it really did look as though you’d managed to open up her head somehow and take a look inside.”
“I don’t remember any of that.”
“Well, it happened. And then a few weeks later, when you were staying the night at my house, you did it again. You told me you’d seen me dancing with Gene Kelly.”
“Had we just watched Singin’ in the Rain by any chance?”
Brenda laughed. “We’d watched it a month or so earlier, so I suppose that was a lot less spooky. You used to visit me a lot back then. I don’t know why I dreamed about Gene Kelly that night though. Maybe we talked about him, and that was why he was on both our minds. But then there were your angels.”
“My angels?”
“They stood around your bed at night, you said.”
“Angels stood around my bed?”
“Well, no, it wasn’t exactly that, was it? You had to go and visit them. That was how it worked. They lived in what you called the Other Place. Which was like the seaside except that it was all on fire.”
Jess felt a slight tremor at the back of her mind: a tectonic shift which was small only by virtue of being very far away. She had no recollection of seeing these things but she remembered talking about them. The words had a tautness to them. Some big, submerged memory hung below them like the weight on a plumb line.
“Mum got angry,” she ventured.
“Well, she got scared, I think. This all seemed very real to you, and you were talking about it all the time. About the angels, and about being able to see what was going on in other people’s heads when they were asleep. You did sound very convincing, I must say. You said you kept losing your way and you were scared you might get stuck there one night in this Other Place. None of us knew what to make of it. Paula took you to a child psychologist in the end. NHS. You were on the list for ages before the appointment came through. With… no, I don’t remember her name.”
Jess did. It had bobbed to the surface of her mind, unlooked for and unwelcome. “Carter. It was Dr Carter.”
Brenda tapped her forehead with one finger, admonishing her poor memory. “That’s right. She saw you loads of times. She was saying at first you might have a… what was it? An incipient psychosis. But she changed her tune. In the end she just said you had a really active imagination and there was nothing to worry about.”
Jess remembered the doctor now: a smiling, grandmotherly type, with her hair in a sugarloaf bun, but she asked about a million questions and the smile stayed on her face no matter what her voice did, so in the end it didn’t mean anything.
She remembered lying. Hiding. Saying what she thought would go down best. Because every kid knows when they’re in trouble just by reading the faces of the adults around them. Every kid gets an instinct for when to lie low. She gave her name, rank and serial number. She said she was okay. She said she made it all up. How could the sea catch fire? That was just crazy talk!
All the while gauging from Dr Carter’s face how this was going down. Triangulating into a sweet spot defined by nods of the head and minute variations in the intensity of that everlasting smile. Dr Carter’s final diagnosis was that Jess’s night-time escapades were signs of mental health rather than mental illness. “When a child’s life hits a crisis of any kind,” she told Paula Moulson briskly, “they’ve got to have a refuge from it. Or if not a refuge, then a workaround. I’m not prying, but has there been something like that going on for Jess recently? Some sort of upheaval?”
Paula just nodded. She’d married an upheaval, and he was home right then on an extended visit.
“Well then,” said Dr Carter with an expansive shrug. “You should be thankful that Jess is able to play these conflicts out in her mind rather than in reality. This night world of hers seems to be a place of turbulence and confusion – an internalisation of those same forces as they appear in her daily life. The imagination is a plastic power, Mrs Moulson. A shaping power. We make the things we need. And then when we don’t need them any more, we set them aside. All you have to do is to let that happen.”
In other words, Jess was off the hook. She went home, got into bed and pulled the covers up over her head.