Secret Smile (26 page)

'No,' I said. 'Wait. I've got to get this
straight, for myself as much as anybody. It's like this: there are awful things
in the world, right? I feel terrible about them. Your job as a therapist is to
stop me feeling bad about it. But maybe what I should really do is deal with
the awful things in the world.'

'No,' she said.

'There's something narcissistic about
this, if that's the right word. I mean, if people came to you and were
suffering from depression because of the poverty and suffering and injustice in
the world and you had a pill to make them stop worrying about it, would you
give it to them? Would you dole out this pill that would make people
indifferent to what is wrong in the world rather than go out and make it
better?'

There was quite a long pause. Katherine
Dowling was probably starting to regret what she'd let herself in for. I blew
my nose and sat up straighter in my chair. Outside the window, the sky was a
lovely pale blue.

'This,' she pointed at me. 'This is called
grief. Do you hear me?'

'He even made me into his fucking alibi,' I
muttered. 'God, he must have laughed!'

'Listen!' she said and I subsided again.
'People come to me and often what I do is help them find patterns, make shapes
out of chaos, make stories of their lives so that they can understand them. But
here I am going to say something quite the opposite to you. You are making a
pattern that isn't there. You are trying to find a meaning, an explanation, tie
everything up neatly, take responsibility, place blame. In the past few months,
you have lost two people whom you loved a great deal. And you have been through
a painful and disturbing episode with a man. This Brendan. Because these things
have happened together, you connect them, like cause and effect. Do you
understand?'

'I
do
connect them,' I said.

'Now: we can talk about what happened with
Brendan; in fact, I think that might be helpful. We can talk about your
bereavement, and why you feel such guilt. But we will be looking at
you
—
at what is going on inside you after these traumas. We will not be looking at
why these two young people had to die one after the other. They died. Now you
must mourn.' Her voice grew gentler. 'You must let yourself mourn. Not cast
around for explanations.'

'But if...'

'It takes time,' she said. 'There's no
easy way.'

I made myself consider what she had said.

'Sometimes I have felt that I was going
mad,' I said at last. I felt like a rag doll lolling on the chair. 'I used to
have this life that I understood. Things made sense. I could work out what was
going to happen next and make plans. I feel I've lost control. Anything could
happen. Everything seems hostile and out of kilter. It's like a nightmare, but
I can't wake up out of it. It just goes on and on.'

'Well, we can talk about that too,' she
said. 'We should. Would you like to come again, Miranda?'

I nodded. 'Yes,' I said. 'I think I
would.'

'Good. This time next week would suit me
if that's all right with you. Now, as your brother's watch will show you, it's
time for you to go.'

Before I had time to find excuses, I changed
into my running clothes and stepped out into the spring afternoon once more. I
ran to the Heath. I ran up the hill where I had last glimpsed Laura, but I
didn't stop. I ran until my legs ached and my lungs hurt and I had a stitch in
my side.

When I got home I had a shower and made
myself a bowl of pasta with olive oil, chopped spring onions and Parmesan
cheese over the top. I ate it and stared around me. Everything was drab and
neglected. I'd been stumbling through my life, coming back here just to sit
staring out of the window, then crawl into bed at nine o'clock and sleep for
hours and hours. I'd been sleeping for ten or eleven hours every night,
sometimes even more, and still woken in a fog of dreary, heavy-eyed,
leaden-limbed fatigue.

I thought of Katherine Dowling pointing
her finger at me. 'This is grief,' I'd let myself become clogged up by grief,
sodden and hopeless with it.

I stood up and put my bowl in the sink.
Then I filled a bucket with hot, sudsy water and started to wash the windows,
to let in the light.

CHAPTER 29

The next morning I woke early and knew
before I even opened my eyes that it was a warm and lovely day outside. The
strip of day between the curtains was blue. There was a warmth in the room.
And, for the first time in a long while, I didn't feel clogged with tiredness,
but alert, as if there were something that I had to do. Although it was a
Saturday and I didn't have to go to work, I got up at once.

I stripped my bed and put the sheets in
the washing machine, then put on my running clothes. I went to the Heath again,
but this time ran to the wilder part, where the trees are thick and you can
even fool yourself that you're not in the city with millions of people around you
in every direction. The sun, still low and pale, shone steadily. There were
primroses and tulips among the tangle of bushes, fresh, unfurling leaves on the
branches above me. I ran as hard as I could, until my legs ached and, as soon
as I stopped, sweat trickled down my forehead. I felt as though I were cleaning
out the inside of my body, making the blood run faster, the heart pump
stronger, opening up my pores.

Nearing home, I stopped at the baker's and
bought a loaf of wholemeal bread that was still warm. I had a quick, hot
shower, washed my hair vigorously and pulled on a denim skirt and a shirt. I
put on Troy's watch, but for once the sight of it didn't make my eyes well up
with tears. I made a cup of peppermint tea and tore a hunk of bread from the loaf,
eating it just as it was, chewing slowly and letting the doughy texture comfort
me. I vacuumed the carpets, plumped up the pillows on the sofa, piled old
newspapers and magazines into a box and opened the windows to let in the bright
day.

Before I could change my mind, I pulled on
a jacket and walked to the underground.

Kerry was already behind her desk when I
walked in. Someone was sitting across from her, leafing through brochures and
pointing things out, so she didn't see me immediately, and when she did her
face flickered through various emotions: surprise, discomfort, pain, welcome.
It smoothed out again into politeness as she turned back to the woman.

I watched her as she leaned across the
desk, pointing at pictures with a finger whose nail was a delicate pink. She
looked much better than I'd been expecting. I'd grown used to seeing her
pinched and blotchy. Now she looked rosy and plumper. She was growing her hair
again, and it fell in blonde waves round her smooth, pale face.

'Fancy a cup of coffee?' I said, when the
woman left, clutching a pile of brochures, and I eased myself into her seat. I
smelt Kerry's perfume, something subtle and sweet. Her skin was satiny, her
lips glossy, and she had tiny gold studs in her ears. Everything about her
seemed considered, delicate, well cared for. I looked down at my hands on the
desk, with their dirty, bitten nails. I saw the cuffs of my shirt were slightly
frayed.

Kerry hesitated, looked at her watch. 'I
don't know if I can.'

'Go on,' called a woman at the next desk.
'We'll be busy soon and then you won't have the time.'

She looked at me and gave a nod.

'I'll get my coat.'

We didn't talk until we got to the cafe
down the road. We took our coffee downstairs, where they had a sofa and
armchairs, and looked uncertainly at each other over the rims of our steaming
mugs. I said something about the new flat she was renting, and she said
something about being frantic at work. We lapsed into an awkward silence.

'Sorry I haven't been in touch,' I said
eventually.

'You've been busy.'

I waved away the polite words.

'That's not the reason.'

'No, I suppose not.'

'I didn't know where to begin.'

'Miranda

'You said something to me — just after he,
you know . . . just after Brendan walked out. You said everything was ruined
and he'd just kicked over the last standing stones. Something like that.'

'I don't remember.' She put her mug down
on the table. There was the faint red semicircle from her lips on its edge.

'Of course not. Why would you? I don't
know why it stuck in my mind, but it did, maybe because of my job — that image
of him razing everything to the ground until we were all just standing in the
rubble of our lives. That's what he did to us.'

'You shouldn't think about him so much,
Miranda,' she said. 'You should let him go.'

'What?' I stared at her.

'I have,' she said. 'He's out of my life.
I never want to think about him again.'

I was startled by what she had said.

'But everything that happened...' I said,
stammering. 'With you and me. The whole family. With Troy.'

'That's got nothing to do with it.'

'And Laura.'

'Do you think I didn't care about Laura?'

'Of course not.'

'Do you think I felt a little stab of
pleasure when I heard? That some sort of revenge had been taken?'

'No,' I said. 'Of course not.'

'Well, I did. Just for a moment. I hated
Laura so much and I'd wanted something bad to happen to her and then the worst
possible thing did happen and I felt some kind of triumph for a second and then
I felt terrible, as if I were responsible for it in some way.' She had looked
fierce for a moment, but then her expression turned sad again. 'In the end I
just felt, well, what has any of it got to do with me? I decided we've just got
to put it behind us.'

'Don't you want to talk about it at all?'
I asked.

'I want to get on with my life.'

'Don't you want to think about it? To
understand what happened?'

'To understand?' She blinked at me. 'Our
brother killed himself. My fiancé left me.'

'But...'

'I'm not saying it wasn't terrible. I'm
saying that it was quite simple. I don't know what there is to talk about.'

I sat for a few moments. All the
turbulence, the waves of emotions and hatred and despair that had battered our
family, was now a calm, dark pool.

'What about us?' I asked at last.

'Us?'

'Us, you and me, the two sisters.'

'What about us?'

'You hated me.'

'I didn't,' she said.

'You blamed me.'

'A bit, maybe.' She picked up her mug and
drained the last of the coffee. 'That's in the past. Are you all right? You
look a bit...' She left the sentence dangling.

'I've been a bit down.'

'Of course.'

I couldn't just leave our conversation
there.

'Oh, Kerry — I wanted to make it all right
between us,' I said, then, realizing I sounded like a two-year-old asking to be
kissed better, I added, 'I thought there were some things that ought to be
said. Made clear.'

'I'm quite clear about everything.'

'I hope you know now that I was never in
love with Brendan. Never. I left him and

'Please, Miranda,' she said in a disgusted
tone. 'Let's leave that.'

'No, listen, I just want you to understand
that I was never trying to wreck things between you two, never; I wanted you to
be happy; really I did; he was the one who was...' I let my words trail away,
realizing what I sounded like. 'Like you said, it doesn't matter any more.
That's all finished with. He's out of both of our lives. I wanted to know if
you're all right, that's all, really. And that we were all right. It would be
terrible if we allowed him to alienate us from each other.'

'I know,' she said in a small voice. Then
she leaned forwards and for the first time her face lost its smoothness. 'I
should tell you something.'

'What?'

'It feels almost wrong. After Troy and —
you know, I thought I'd never be happy again. And it's all happened so
suddenly.' She blushed. 'I've met someone.'

'You mean

'A nice man,' she said. 'He's quite a bit
older than I am, and he really seems to care for me.'

I put my hand over hers. 'I'm very, very
glad,' I said warmly. Then: 'No one I used to know, I hope?'

The stupid attempt at a joke fell flat.
'No. He's a junior hospital manager. His name's Laurence. You must meet him
sometime.'

'Great.'

'He knows about everything…'

'Of course.'

'And he's very different, from, you know…

'Yes. Good. Great.'

'Mum and Dad say they like him.'

'Good,' I said again hopelessly. 'Really
good. I'm so happy for you.'