The Disappeared (2 page)

The
fresh-faced Dr Allen, as punctilious as ever, reached for the thick black
notebook he reserved exclusively for her sessions. He turned to the previous
entry and carefully read it through. Jenny waited patiently, prepared with
polite replies to the questions about her son, Ross, with which he usually
opened. After a short while she began to sense that something was different
today. Dr Allen seemed engrossed, distracted.

'Dreams
. . .' he said. 'I don't often put a lot of store by them. They're usually just
reprocessed garbage from the day, but I confess I've been doing some reading on
the subject.' His eyes remained firmly on the book.

'Really?'

'Yes.
I dabbled in Jungian analysis when I was at college, but it wasn't really
encouraged; something of a cul-de-sac, I remember my professor saying. Never
known a patient who'd been cured by understanding the meaning of his dreams.'

'Does
this mean I've driven you to despair?'

'Not
at all.' He flicked back through his notes, searching for an earlier entry.
'It's just I remember that before the medication you used to have some quite
vivid ones. Yes . . .' He found what he was looking for. 'An ominous crack
opening in the wall of your childhood bedroom to a dark forbidding space
beyond. A terrifying presence lurking in there that you could never see or even
fully visualize ... an unspeakable horror of some description.'

Jenny
felt the vessels of her heart enlarge, a pulse of heat cross her face, a flutter
of anxiety in her solar plexus. She tried to keep her voice steady. Act calm,
stay calm, she repeated silently to herself.

'You're
right. I used to have those dreams.'

'How
old were you when you first had them?' He turned back to a blank page, ready
and alert.

'I
was in my early thirties, I suppose.'

'A
time of stress, juggling work and motherhood?'

'Yes.'

'And
how old are you, as the dreamer, in your dream?'

'I'm
a child.'

'You're
certain about that?'

'I
don't ever see myself ... I suppose I just assume.'

'And
as a child you feel helpless? Terrified of a threat you have no power to
control?'

She
nodded. 'And I think I know what you're going to say next.'

'What's
that?'

'That
it's nothing to do with childhood. That the dream merely reflects my state of
fear and paralysis.'

'That's
one interpretation.' His face fell slightly at having his theory anticipated so
easily.

'I
agree. But I still have no memory between the ages of four and five. And don't
tell me I've imagined that.' She fixed him with a look that gave him pause.

'There
is one school of thought which says that a memory gap is a subconscious defence
mechanism,' he said, 'a buffer if you like, a void into which the conscious
mind can project a credible reason, a logical explanation for its distress. An
intelligent, rational mind like yours - so the theory goes - would head for the
answer most likely to satisfy it: hence while the pain persists, your mind has
to satisfy itself with the notion that the cause remains undiscovered — '

She
interrupted. 'It does.'

'But
what if we're looking for the wrong cause? What if the cause is utterly simple
and straightforward - mere stress, for example?'

Jenny
allowed herself to consider the possibility, though she remained aware that he
might merely be attempting to blindside her, to distract her with one novel
thought before firing the penetrating question while she was off guard. She
waited for his follow-up, but it didn't come.

'So
what do you think?' he said, his eyes alight with the ingenious simplicity of
his diagnosis.

'You'll
be telling me to take a long holiday next, or to change my job.'

A
sterner note entered his voice. 'To be fair, you have stubbornly resisted
trying either of those tried and tested methods.'

Jenny
smoothed out the creases in her skirt as a way of hiding her despondency. 'Is
this a polite way of telling me we've exhausted what you can usefully do for
me?'

'I'm
only trying to rule out the obvious.'

'And
having done so?'

'An
extended holiday, at least—'

'I'll
tell you what happens to me on holidays: everything comes flooding back. The
anxiety, the unwanted thoughts, irrational fears, dreams . . .' She paused, her
tongue feeling thick in her mouth - a recent addition to her ever-increasing
palette of symptoms.

'What,
Jenny?'

She
saw the tears land in her lap even before she felt them flood her eyes.

'What's
making you cry?'

There
was no immediate reason, just a vague, familiar sense of dread that was slowly
tightening its grip, like vast, suffocating hands around her mind. 'I don't
know—'

'The
last word you said was dreams.''

Another
river of tears and the inchoate fear became sharper; a shudder passed through
her body and left her hands trembling as she reached for the ever-ready box of
tissues.

'Tell
me about your dreams.'

She
began to shake her head - the medication had blocked, or saved, her from dreams
- but then the image flashed behind her eyes, a single frame that connected
with her fear, causing a further tremor, like a dull electric shock, to pass
through her.

'You've
had a dream?'

'I
had one . . . the same one — ' Her words stuttered out between stifled sobs.

'When?'

'Years
ago ... I was nineteen, twenty . . .'

'Tell
me.'

'It's
a garden.' The image held fast in her mind. 'There are lots of children, young
girls in skirts and pigtails . . . They're following each other in groups of
three, holding each others' hands and skipping, it's joyful. And then . . .'
She pressed the soggy Kleenex to her eyes. 'They stop. And in their groups of
three two girls hold a skipping rope and the third jumps . . . and as the ropes
pass over their heads, they vanish.''

'Who
vanishes?'

'The
girls in the middle.'

Dr
Allen wrote in his notebook. 'Where do they go?'

'Where?
I don't... I don't know . . . It's just nothingness.''

'And
the girls left behind?'

'They
don't seem to notice.'

'And
that's it?'

'Yes.'
Jenny sucked in a breath, the tide of fear slowly washing out, leaving her
beached and numb. She stared out of the window at the sodium light catching the
rain falling on the barren patch of garden.

'How
old were you when you had this dream?'

'I
was at university ... It kept coming. I remember it lingering on throughout
days that should have been carefree.'

'What
does it represent to you?'

She
shook her head, pretending to herself that she didn't know, but words were
forming by themselves and spilled out almost against her conscious will. 'For
every something there is a nothing. For every object an absence . . . It's not
death I'm afraid of, it's emptiness.'

'You
fear being disappeared?'

'No
. . .' She struggled to put her mental state into words. 'It's of being where
there is nothing . . . and of not being where there is everything.'

Dr
Allen's face registered his struggle to understand. 'Like being trapped on the
wrong side of the looking glass? Out of time, out of place, out of context.'

'I
suppose.'

There
was silence as the doctor scanned his notes, then rubbed his eyes, straining
with a thought his expression said he found troublesome but necessary to
express. He looked up and studied her face for a moment before deciding to
voice it. 'Are you a woman of faith, Mrs Cooper?' His use of her surname
confirmed his unease.

'Why
do you ask?'

'The
trinity is a powerful Christian symbol. Father, Son and Holy Ghost. . .'

'Lots
of things come in threes: mother, father, child. Good, bad, indifferent.
Heaven, earth, hell.'

'An
apt example. You were brought up in faith, as I remember. The concepts are
vivid to you.'

'We
were sort of Anglican, I suppose. And there was Sunday school.'

Dr
Allen looked thoughtful. 'You know, I think you're right. There is a piece
missing - the girl, the space beyond the room. Whether it is emotional, or
physical, or spiritual I couldn't yet say. But sometimes what we fear most is
what we need. The most powerful stories are often those about strange saviours,
demons who become an inspiration . . . like St Paul, or —’

'Darth
Vader?'

He
smiled. 'Why not?'

'This
is sounding like a good old-fashioned diagnosis of suppression. Believe me,
I've tried letting it all hang out; it wasn't a happy experience.'

'Would
you do one thing for me?' He was suddenly earnest. 'I really would like to have
one big push to crack this open.'

'Fire
away.'

'For
the next fortnight, keep a journal. Write down your feelings, your impulses,
your extremes, no matter how bizarre or irrational.'

'In
the hope of finding what, exactly?'

'We'll
know when we see it.'

'You
can be honest. Is this a last throw of the dice?'

He
shook his head and smiled gently. 'I wouldn't still be here if I didn't think I
could help you.'

Jenny
pretended to be comforted, but couldn't help feeling that psychiatry was a slow
road to nowhere. She had a small grain of faith that somehow, some day she
would look up into a clear sky and feel nothing but undiluted happiness, but
how that would come to pass was something she couldn't yet begin to answer.
Perhaps her discussions with Dr Allen were worthwhile; at the very least he
stirred her up from time to time, made her look into the corners she would
otherwise avoid.

Later,
as she drove home through the starless night, a single phrase of his kept
repeating itself: strange saviours. It was a new idea to her. She liked it.

Jenny
had become used to living with the noise of a sixteen-year-old in the house,
and part of her missed it when Ross spent the weekend with his father in
Bristol. She would have phoned Steve, the infuriatingly free spirit she
described as her 'occasional boyfriend', but he hadn't called her for nearly a
fortnight, even though he had been forced to acquire a phone; the architects' practice
he was articled to during his final year of study had insisted on it. She had
encouraged him to break out from his self-imposed exile on the small farm above
Tintern, where, for ten years, he had tried to live out a self-sufficient
fantasy. Now that he went to work in the city and spent his nights at a
draughtsman's desk they scarcely saw each other.

She
didn't like to admit to loneliness - escaping from a suffocating marriage to
live in the country was meant to be a liberation - but driving south along the
twisting Wye valley early on Monday morning through the dense, leafless woods,
she was glad that she'd shortly be relieved of her own company. A workaday week
awaited: hospital and road deaths, industrial accidents and suicides. She drew
a certain comfort from dealing with others' unimaginable traumas with
professional detachment. Being a coroner had given her an illusion of control
and immortality. While Jenny Cooper the forty-two-year-old woman was still
struggling to stay sane and sober, Jenny Cooper the coroner had come to enjoy
her job.

With
a take-out coffee in one hand and her briefcase in the other, Jenny shouldered
open the door to her two-room office suite on the ground floor of the
eighteenth-century terrace off Whiteladies Road. While her small domain had
been made over, the common parts of the building remained tatty and the boards
in the hallway still creaked under the threadbare carpet. The landlord's
refusal to pay for so much as a coat of paint irked her each time she crossed
the threshold. Alison, her officer, was pleased with the compromise, however.
Having spent most of her adult life in the police force, she was comfortable in
down-to-earth surroundings and suspicious of outward show. She liked things
simple and homely. The stylish kidney-shaped desk at which she now sat, sorting
through the pile of documents that had arrived in the overnight DX, was home to
a selection of pot plants, and her state-of-the-art computer monitor was
decorated with inspirational message cards bought at the church bookshop:
Shine as a Light in the World, encircled with childlike angels.

'Hi,
Alison.'

'Good
morning, Mrs Cooper. Fifteen death reports over the weekend, I'm afraid.' She
pushed a heap of papers across the desk. 'And there's a lady coming in to see
you in about five minutes. I told her she'd have to make an appointment, but-'