‘Uh, Nick’s artistic skills aren’t the best,’ said Duncan.
‘Sometimes,’ Mr Psychiatrist said quietly, ‘we can read into this sort of thing what we expect – what we’re afraid we might find. It’s the sentiment that’s important. There’s a lot of affection here, wouldn’t you say, for his family?’
But Maggie didn’t want to look at the drawing again.
Two days later, having put up with Nick’s sickly smiles and exaggeratedly concerned questions long enough, Maggie decided to go on the offensive and search his room, a long, low space up in the eaves of the house with a prime view of Billy McLetchie Hill from four wee windows. It wasn’t the typical teenage boy’s room – it was dead tidy. And there was nothing personal in it apart from three framed photographs of Nick and Duncan on top of his chest of drawers – one of Nick as a wee boy playing football with his da, one of the two of them on top of a hill, and one of them standing in the garden, Duncan making a daft face, arms round each other.
She found the psychiatry textbook at the bottom of the wardrobe.
A library book called The Human Mind: What we Know. She took it to one of the windows and thumbed through it.
She supposed it was meant for professionals in the field or maybe medical students. He must have used this to work out what to say and how to act to fool the psychiatrist into thinking there was no harm in him.
She slammed it shut and took it outside. Duncan was in the garden somewhere with Isla. As Maggie marched across the lawn, a bird cooed from a tree and a bee buzzed right past her nose. On the rough grazing on the side of the hill, cotton-wool sheep troddled about. Right enough, it was like she’d rocked up in the Garden of Eden.
Shame about the snake.
A deep rumble cut through the sounds of nature and brought her back to reality as a massive lorry passed on the road at the foot of the garden. Then another. There was a forestry operation about a mile away, and at five o’clock every afternoon two lorries stacked with timber thundered past. A piercing cry rose up, allowing Maggie to pinpoint where Duncan and Isla were.
Duncan was pushing the pram round the rose garden. As he turned to her with a smile, Maggie shoved the book at him.
‘This was in Nick’s room. He’s obviously been using it to bamboozle that fuckwit of a shrink.’
Nick appeared without making a sound, as he often did.
‘You’ve been in my room?’ he asked mildly, a hand on the roof of the pram. ‘Rummaging around? That’s a bit of an invasion of privacy, Mags.’
‘I was cleaning it.’
Nick reached out for the book and opened it. ‘I was reading up on the effects of –’ He lowered his voice. ‘Childhood abuse. I was trying to understand you.’ He turned his bright blue eyes, all concerned, on Maggie. ‘What happened to you was so terrible. I wanted to try to understand why you fly into rages the whole time. And your issues around trust.’
‘My what?’ Maggie half-screamed. Jesus – he was turning this round on her?
‘Apparently, childhood abuse can stop the prefrontal cortex developing properly, which can lead to problems with rational thinking –’
‘You little fucker!’
‘– And impulse control,’ he finished in a small voice, stepping back. He looked at Duncan. ‘Can make people lash out for no reason.’
She just lashed out for no reason. That was what the prosecutor had said at Maggie’s trial for GBH when she was seventeen. Had Nick somehow got hold of the trial report in the local Paisley paper? He was crafty enough to have found it. To have sent off for it to a press cuttings agency.
Her lawyer had tried to argue that Maggie hadn’t been in her right mind at the time of the assault in the nightclub, which was true enough. Something that bitch had said or the way she’d said it had conjured up Ma, and before she knew it Maggie had picked up the ice bucket and walloped the lassie on the side of the head. It was like it was Ma standing there laughing at her, and Maggie wasn’t a helpless bairn any more, she was a grown woman with an ice bucket in her hand.
Gillian Menzies, her ‘victim’ had been called. Maggie still sometimes wondered about her, how she was doing. She’d been in a coma for two days, and when she came out of it she wasn’t right. Wobbled when she walked. Had cross eyes. Problems concentrating.
Maggie had been in a fugue state, her lawyer had argued. Having a flashback to her traumatised childhood. The sheriff hadn’t bought it, and Maggie had been sentenced to three years in a YOI. Which was fair enough.
She took a deep breath. She nodded at Duncan, to tell him I’m fine, I’m not losing the head here. And then she turned and walked away from them both.
But on the other side of the line of wee trees, she stopped.
Nick was going, ‘Mr Stirling-Stewart said I have to be more accepting of Maggie and her problems and stop panicking all the time that she’s about to kick off. But . . . Dad, I’m still worried. I’m still worried about what she might do.’
‘We’ve been through this,’ went Duncan.
‘I know, but . . .’
‘Maggie’s offending behaviour stemmed from what she suffered as a child and was effectively addressed long ago. Yes, she’s been a little short-tempered lately, but that’s because she’s in protective new mum mode. You have to cut her some slack and remember her bark is worse than her bite. In fact, she doesn’t even have a bite.’
‘But what if she got really angry with me or you? Or with Isla?’
‘For God’s sake, Nick. You’re being ridiculous now. Maggie would never hurt any of us.’
‘But how can you be so sure? I know you do all that amazing work with troubled people. I know you’ve already helped Maggie a lot, but maybe she needs, I don’t know, more specialist help?’
‘Maggie’s fine,’ said Duncan. ‘She doesn’t need “help”.’