?I did behave myself. I followed my individualized care plan, did my cognitive behavioral therapy to cure my post-traumatic stress disorder, went to occupational therapy to teach me to live an independent and productive life, did my physiotherapy for my hand and my leg, my speech therapy to get rid of the slurring. The doctors liked me; I think I made a nice change from the vast majority of the guys whose problems were inborn, to be managed like hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, with no expectation of any underlying improvement. With me, they felt like they could get places. Maybe they did; anyway they seemed pleased with my progress. When, on only my third try, I got my conditional discharge, all of them seemed genuinely delighted. I was one of their success stories.
By that time the Ivy House was long gone. My parents had hired me the best solicitor and the best defense barrister that money could buy (another reason, I’m sure Susanna wanted to point out, why I wasn’t serving life as some roided-up smack dealer’s bitch), and the sum of money in question was, unsurprisingly, eye-popping. The expert psychologists, who had spent countless hours asking me confusing and exhausting questions and running batteries of incomprehensible tests, hadn’t come cheap either. The decision to sell the Ivy House to pay for it all had apparently been unanimous. It was, everyone agreed, what Hugo would have wanted.
My job was gone too, of course. Richard apologized for that, from the heart, as if I might have expected him to hold it open indefinitely on the off chance that I might be back someday. Even if he had, I don’t know if I would have been able for it. The various forms of therapy had helped a lot—apparently nothing except surgery would fix my eyelid, but the slur in my speech was barely noticeable except when I was tired, same for my limp, my hand grip still wasn’t great but I had learned lots of inventive ways of working around it. But my mind still had ravaged places in it, gaping holes full of drifting things; I had a hard time holding on to complicated sets of instructions, I needed a planner full of lists so I didn’t lose track of what I needed to do and what I’d already done, and even with those I occasionally lost hold of big chunks of time or couldn’t work out what day it was. Just thinking about my old job—no routine, no one telling me what to do, deftly juggling a dozen balls at once—made my head spin.
I had to hold down a job to keep my conditional discharge, and for a while there I had visions of twelve-hour shifts loading pallets in a warehouse full of immigrants who would hate my guts and spit in my lunch, but by the time I got out my family had come to the rescue again. Oliver had pulled strings with a friend at a big PR firm and got me a nice simple job that could have been done, and probably had been up until then, by a fifteen-year-old on work experience. I went in there under my middle name (Charles, after my grandfather; I went by Charlie). I’m not sure it fooled my co-workers for any length of time—there had been a few tabloid snippets when I got out, “‘INSANE’ COP KILLER FREE ON OUR STREETS” and a blurry God-knows-where shot of me being sinister by wearing sunglasses—but at least it stopped clients from having me thrown off their accounts in case I stalked them home and ax-murdered them in their beds. The work went fine. My co-workers were shiny twentysomethings with hectic social lives, and overstretched thirtysomethings with complicated childcare hassles; they were chummy, in a preprogrammed way, but none of them had the room to put much thought into me, which was fine with me. They invited me along to the Friday drinks sessions; sometimes I went, although the pub they used was loud and I mostly got a headache after an hour or so. There was one girl, a sparky, energetic redhead called Caoimhe, who I was pretty sure would have gone on a date with me if I had asked, but I didn’t. Not that I was afraid I would pollute her innocence, or anything, I didn’t get that far; just that I couldn’t come up with enough emotional engagement to bother.
I had trouble feeling anything much about anyone, actually, not just Caoimhe. Small things could bring me to tears of what felt confusingly like loss—frost on a dark windowpane, frail shoots of green sprouting from a pavement crack—but when it came to people: nothing. I knew it had something to do with that night in the garden, of course, but I wasn’t sure exactly how: whether that flashover of fury had ignited everything inside me with a ferocity that had vaporized the lot and scorched the earth; or whether, while my suicide attempt hadn’t managed to go the distance, it had taken me just far enough over the line that I couldn’t find my way back.
The upside was that it turned out to be true, what I’d told Martin: I had no desire at all to go after Tiernan. I kept waiting for the rage, the urge to track him down and beat the living shit out of him, but it never came. Maybe it was just that emptiness, or maybe all those sessions with the hospital shrinks had done their job, who knows; or maybe it was that, deep down, I was less sure than I would have loved to be that Tiernan had had anything to do with the breakin. At heart Tiernan was intensely careful of himself. Sneaking a couple of paintings into a show had had him shitting bricks; just the thought of anything that might involve jail time would have given him a heart attack, and I wasn’t sure losing a job would have been a big enough upheaval to change that. Whatever the reason, my overwhelming feeling about Tiernan was that I never wanted to think about him again. If I could have had a very specific lobotomy to slice every memory of his existence out of my brain, I would have done it.
My apartment was still there, rented out (by my parents) to a nice young couple, teachers or nurses or something like that. I had no intention of taking it back. The rent was enough that, even with my laughable salary, I could afford to live basically wherever I wanted, given that I needed very little else. In the hospital a big topic of conversation had been the things people were going to do when they got out (poker tournaments, island-hopping in Greece, escort services), but that had been mainly from the guys who were going nowhere; those of us who had an actual shot at the outside world had had a much harder time picturing it. Now that I was there, it didn’t seem any more real or more accessible than it had from the hospital. I couldn’t think of anything that I particularly wanted to do, except hole up in my new apartment clicking on random internet links and watching an awful lot of bad TV.
Somehow, though, I couldn’t stay put. My PTSD had faded a lot—the cognitive therapy or just time, I don’t know, but I didn’t leap at loud noises or people coming up behind me any more. I could go out walking, even in the dark. The only thing that was still a problem was being at home at night. When I first moved into a new place I would be fine, but over a few months—as if I could feel at the back of my neck some searcher gradually closing in, some tracking circle homing tighter and tighter—I would start to get edgy: first double-checking locks and alarms, then lying awake with my ears straining, then pacing my apartment till the sky paled outside the windows. At that point I would give the landlord my notice and find somewhere else to live, and the cycle would start all over again.