The conjunctivitis was gone by Tuesday morning. She’d applied the first drops the minute she got upstairs to the department on the Monday evening, and the next day she was clear and evangelical about antibiotics’ supernatural powers. What on earth will the human race do when this medicine stops working? Die in childbirth again. Go blind with conjunctivitis. Kidney failure from cystitis. Commit suicide during a bout of toothache. She thought about it a bit, darkly, and then, on with the day! She’d been briefly full of gratitude, too, towards Alan Prenderghast, but this had evaporated just as fast as the infection so that by Wednesday afternoon, she’d forgotten that she was ever encumbered. She hadn’t got round to thanking him, and then she didn’t feel like it any more.
It is more than that, she realises now, sitting opposite Bryony and the pressure she exudes. She can’t communicate … what? Something nuanced and complex about why she doesn’t want to get involved with him. The way she stands back from the web of interaction because she can’t commit to being inside it. Her sheer ambivalence, which Bryony sees as straightforward but is anything but. Contact is difficult.
‘And yet you will put out for whatever hairy sociopath comes your way on the Internet?’ Bryony is saying.
Manon shrugs, as if to say, Search me.
‘There’s no helping you. I literally give up.’
‘I keep meaning to ring him,’ says Manon, and she notices how her voice sounds: slow and dissociated, as if very far away. ‘I just don’t get round to it. I don’t know why.’
‘I do. He might actually be nice to you. He might treat you well and give you babies.’
‘Come off it,’ she says, frowning, and she’s angry now at being bulldozed. ‘You don’t know shit about him, Bri.’
‘I know he’s already better than the totally awful specimens you normally go out with.’
Manon has stood up abruptly. She’s had enough. ‘You fucking go out with him then.’
She walks away, hearing Bryony say, ‘Manon, come back, I—’ before the doors to the canteen shut behind her.
Helena
Her breathing comes in jolts, stepping down in her solar plexus, then up again, catching in her throat. A ladder of tears. ‘They’re com-ing to get me,’ she says. ‘They are com-ing to ge-et me.’
‘I think if we can just go back to the dream, we can try to unravel this,’ says Dr Young, still voice of calm.
‘The-ey are com-ing to ge-et me. The papers … It’s all ov-er the papers … Oh G-o-d, oh God …’ She places her palms over her face, wet and puffy from the torrent. She wants to hide, for the earth to open and for it to close over her head, welcome grave. Exposure is everywhere, about to happen. She is about to be named. She is filthy.
‘The dream,’ he says.
In the dream, she was running down suburban streets – Newnham or her parents’ street in Bromley, she couldn’t tell. Breathless, her clothes torn, pursued by a flock of enormous black crows, with wings flying out behind them like academic cloaks, and angry beaks. Running and running from them as they gained ground, and then she turned a corner and saw her parents’ house, the front door of her childhood, and she felt a surge of relief that she would be safe. They would open the door to her and she would get inside and the crows would be barred. She reached the front door and banged with her fists on it and the crows were at the gate. But the door didn’t open. Her parents didn’t answer, and the horror, the horror, she feels herself collapsing again, folding in on herself. She saw her parents at the window looking at her from the safety of the lounge, leaving her outside to face the crows.
‘They wouldn’t let me in,’ she gasps, her palms wet over her face, the tears seeping to the webbed crooks between her fingers. ‘Because I am disgusting.’
‘How are you disgusting?’
‘Because … because … the newspapers are saying she had a female lover, but I’m not, I’m not … Everyone will think I was her lover, but I wasn’t. It wasn’t like that, but everyone will think it was dirty, sordid, that I did something to her.’
‘Why would anyone make that connection? Is there something about your relationship with Edith, something about that night that you’re not being honest about?’
‘No, no, you see? You think it. You see “female lover” and you think of me. Her best friend, with her on the night she disappeared. It’s all over it – the innuendo.’
Silence.
‘But you know what did happen,’ he says. ‘The truth about that night.’
‘Yes, I know. No, no I don’t mean that. I don’t know what happened to Edith, I don’t know that. You’re trying to trip me up. You’re trying to get me to say I was involved.’
Silence, this time of a kind which seems incriminating.
‘I wonder,’ he says, ‘if you feel that I am locking you out – leaving you to the black crows – in the gap between now and our next session on Monday. All this press interest, the feeling you have of exposure … Three days is a long time to be on your own with it all.’
She is silent, except for the uneven steps of her breathing.
‘We have to leave it there,’ he says.
Davy