This Must Be the Place (37 page)

The counsellor laced his fingers together, realising, with a dismaying jolt, that he had no idea what ‘asinine’ meant. ‘I’m sensing a reluctance in you, Ari, a discomfort at being in this room.’

‘Well, then, your senses are finely tuned. I should be in double history now, preparing for my imminent and extremely important exams instead of in here answering simplistic questions about my family.’

The counsellor glanced down at the file, to glean some kind of insight into this boy.
Far and away the most intelligent pupil I have ever taught
, he sees, in a colleague’s handwriting.

‘Just to get back on track,’ the counsellor said, ‘you haven’t lived with your father—’

‘Since I was four,’ Ari said quickly, too quickly, the words running into each other. ‘I don’t see him and that’s fine. He works incredibly hard and he’s very committed to what he does. I have what you might call a father-figure in my stepfather: I’ve lived with him since I was six. I accept the way things are. It’s always been like that and it’s really no problem at all, so if you’re trying to find a route to a source of trauma or stress in my life, I suggest you direct your attention elsewhere.’

The counsellor was thinking not so much about what Ari had said but the way in which he had said it. Those sudden breaks in the middle of words, the repetition of certain syllables. ‘Ari, have you ever had any counselling before?’

Ari shook his head.

‘Any therapy? Of any description?’

Ari rubbed his forehead. ‘I think,’ he said, ‘what you’re getting at now is-is-is …’ he winced, turned his head one way and then other, seemed to grip his hands into fists ‘… th-the way I speak. Yes?’

‘Yes.’

‘I have a stammer,’ Ari said. ‘Had. Have. One of the two.’

‘But you’re over it now?’

‘You’re never over it. There exists a theory in speech therapy,’ he spoke in a toneless voice, as if he’d explained this countless times, ‘that a stammer is like an iceberg.’

‘An iceberg?’

‘Only a small part of it is visible, while under the water is a large, jagged, dangerous mass of ice.’

The counsellor smoothed the pages. ‘It interests me that you used the word “dangerous”.’

‘Does it?’ Ari said. ‘I suppose you want me to ask why.’

‘Not necessarily. Does it interest you?’

‘No.’ The boy sighed, placed his hands on his knees. ‘Look, why don’t we get to the point? We both know why I’m here.’

‘Do we?’

‘Yes. Because of Sophie.’

The counsellor leant back in his chair. At the meeting he’d attended yesterday, the subject of Ari Lefevre Lindstrom Wells Sullivan and Sophie Bridges had been top of the agenda. They had been going out for a month or two, he’d been told, and several members of the teaching staff were uneasy about the relationship. The counsellor had shifted in his seat, bracing himself for tales of trauma, unhappiness, victimhood, manipulation, abuse even. He was ready with numbers of helplines, with ways of handling parental input, with psychological support. But, no, the problem with Ari and Sophie was that they were too involved, too intense, too happy. They had stopped fraternising with other students, the history teacher said. They spent break and weekends together in Ari’s room, reading. They took walks, they listened to music, they sat together at meals. They had stopped sneaking out, like other sixth-formers, in the evening and instead were watching old movies on Ari’s laptop. Sophie, who came from a good Home Counties family, had mentioned post-structuralism in class the other day. She had cut her sensible blond hair into a brunette bob. She wanted to do her coursework on Simone de Beauvoir and her multimedia incarnations.

It didn’t reflect well, the headmistress said, on the school or the pupils, this kind of adolescent intensity. We like our pupils to be healthy, outgoing team-players.

‘The pupils here,’ the counsellor said to Ari in his office, ‘are encouraged to be healthy, outgoing team-players. We emphasise—’

‘The pupils here,’ Ari interrupted, ‘are brainless drones, encouraged to regurgitate pre-prepared knowledge so that they can replicate the narrow, self-regarding, white middle-class lives of their parents.’

‘Well,’ said the counsellor, ‘now, this is a viewpoint that—’

‘The pupils here,’ Ari continued, ‘indulge in astonishing levels of drinking, drug-taking and promiscuity, to such a degree that you and your cohorts couldn’t even imagine. But you don’t choose to confront that, do you? You don’t investigate that. You don’t drag in those people selling weed and pills of questionable origin and purity. No, you choose to cast aspersions on two pupils who choose to step away from that kind of activity and form a relationship that is entirely—’

‘I’m told you’ve been spending the night in her room.’

Ari shrugged.

‘Do you deny that?’

‘No, I don’t deny it. Sophie and I want to be together. You and your spies can’t put a stop to that.’

‘It’s against the rules, Ari.’

‘Well, it’s a ridiculous rule.’

‘It’s an important rule. It protects—’

‘What about the rules of no drinking or no consuming drugs or no being a total and complete tedious idiot? Because everyone here is guilty of breaking those rules. Everyone.’

‘Everyone except you and Sophie?’

Ari got to his feet. He bent to pick up his newspaper. Straightening, he shook his head. ‘My mother was right,’ he muttered.

‘Right about what?’

He looked the counsellor in the eye. ‘School,’ he said, gesturing round him. ‘All this. You. Square pegs and round holes. The whole thing.’

‘Tell me about your mother,’ the counsellor said.

Ari let out a short laugh. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I won’t. I won’t tell you about my mother.’

‘The staff say they’ve never met her, that she’s never been here.’

‘She hasn’t. So what?’

‘Your teachers say they have spoken to her on the phone but it’s only ever your stepfather who comes to the school, your uncle and, once or twice, your grandmother.’

Ari looked up at the ceiling and crossed his arms over his newspaper.

‘Why doesn’t your mother visit the school?’

Ari smirked. ‘At a wild guess, I’d say because she doesn’t want to meet people like you.’

‘I’ve been told that you’ve been overheard having quite heated phone calls from her in the last few days.’

Ari shut his eyes and shook his head.

‘You were heard speculating on the whereabouts of your stepfather.’

The counsellor left a pause for Ari to speak, which he didn’t.

‘Has your stepfather left? Is everything OK at home? Ari, does your mother suffer from depression?’

Ari looked at him and started to laugh. He laughed so much that he had to bend over and clutch his well-tailored knees.

‘Why are you laughing, Ari? Depression is a serious thing but it can be treated. It can be—’

‘I think what amazes me most,’ Ari said, ‘is how wrong you’ve got everything. You’ve clearly read my notes, researched what you can of me but the result is a picture so skewed and erroneous it’s really quite remarkable. I commend you for consistently getting the wrong end of every single stick, I really do. And now,’ Ari said, standing, ‘I think this interview is over. I’m heading back to my history class.
Adios
.’

The door slammed shut behind him. The counsellor took a breath, a deep, cleansing breath that he hoped would clear this boy, his aggression and his vocabulary out of his airspace.

He picked up his pen and inscribed the date in Ari’s file. Then he stopped short, realising he had absolutely no idea what to write next.

You Do What You Have to Do

Daniel, Brooklyn, 1986

D
aniel pushes at the door of the thrift store, knowing that the bell will leap on its spring, giving off that atonal two-note interval. He tries to cover his ears but it’s too late. The jangling bell has set up an answering tinnitus in his left ear, just as it always does.

It’s made up of a repetitive baseline of a
shurr-shurr
sound, with the odd high clang or ting thrown in for good measure, as if someone is sweeping the floor near his head or going at their clothes with a brush, all the while wearing a cowbell around their neck. He shakes his head, like a dog trying to rid itself of excess water or unwanted scent, but the movement seems to unbalance him. The mat must be rucked under his feet or the door too narrow or the step too high. Either way, he is stumbling, the door jamb lurching to meet him, his shoulder coming into painful contact with its sharp edge.

He is aware, as he rights himself, leaning heavily on a conveniently placed tapestry chair, that certain codes of behaviour require him to nod at the ladies behind the counter, to bid them hello but it seems too late, now that he’s stumbled into their shop, now that he has dislodged a display of crystal animals from a small table with the tail of his coat.

The tiny glinting animals lie scattered about the carpet, like the victims of some terrible glass-based genocide. He sees an upturned squirrel, with one missing eye, a cat with ears of sharp glass, what is possibly a hippo.

It is important, he tells himself, to remain upright, to appear calm, collected and, above all, sober. He picks his way through the fallen animals and moves towards the goods and wares, the racks and displays.

The rich, sour, yeasty smell of thrift stores the world over fills his nostrils, makes his throat ache and sting.

Sober, sober, sober, he is chanting to himself, as he circles the aisles: racks of men’s jackets, shiny at the elbows, a basket of woollen scarves, coiled like serpents, rows of lace-up shoes, rubber boots. The sad residue of human lives, washed up here to be resold, rehomed.

Sober, sober, calm, calm. The eyes of the ladies upon him, peering at him through their spectacles, muttering to each other, one of them over by the animals, replacing the crystal diorama. He has every right to be there: he would like to say this to them. Sober. How to achieve this when he hasn’t slept in – how long? – two nights, maybe three, hasn’t eaten since he can’t remember when, hasn’t been home for a long time, camping out at the apartments of aunts and uncles, on his youngest sister’s sofa, when—

Daniel is brought to a halt by a box of trinkets, perched on top of a bookcase. A brooch in the shape of a terrier, a ring of adjustable circumference, a beribboned bangle, a lone earring. He reaches down and plucks out a hair comb. A curving band of clear turquoise plastic, radiating out from which is a row of long, sharp spines. A kind of flattened miniature porcupine. He holds it up to the light. One spine is half broken. Bubbles are trapped in the plastic, lens-like, tear-shaped.

His mother had some of these. He knows she did. He has a distinct memory of her sitting in the kitchen, the newspaper open in front of her on the table, her hair held back at the sides by these plastic combs. Were they turquoise? Yes, he’s positive they were.

He feels his pulse quicken, his lungs compress, as they always do when he finds something of Teresa’s. He has three things now, no, four – the shoes, the silk scarf with blue swirls, that yellow cardigan, the gold bracelet – and this comb makes five. He clutches it in his hand, so hard that the teeth make a neat row of impressions on his palm, but it is a good kind of pain, a real kind of pain, the sort that feels clean and uncomplicated and purely physical. It is hers. It has to be. He lifts it to his face and sniffs it. Yes. It smells of her. It does. It really does.

‘Can we help you with something?’

The question comes from close behind him and is not really a question at all, conveying as it does the exact opposite of its semantic implication. Does that, Daniel finds himself wondering before he turns around, count as a rhetorical question? Not really. It doesn’t contain rhetoric, merely threat. There ought, he feels, to be a special linguistic coinage for this type of enquiry. One that purports to be helpful but is anything but. Maybe he will invent one. He could write a paper on it, perhaps, introduce the concept to the world, claim it as his own.

He turns, comb still in hand. The thrift-store ladies are upon him. Three of them. Weird sisters indeed. He bares his teeth in something he hopes passes for a grin. ‘I’m just browsing,’ he tells them, lifting the hand that holds the comb.

‘Sir,’ the tallest one says, and Daniel laughs with delight at this appellation – to be called that while being thrown out of a shop is too much, too fantastic, the semantics too elastic to be believed. He should definitely do some research into this. ‘We need to ask you to leave.’

‘May I ask why?’ Daniel says. He is keen to enter into and sustain this display of politeness-as-hostility.

That floors them. They exchange faltering glances; they lace and unlace their hands.

‘I merely,’ he says, ‘wish to purchase this comb and then make a further perusal of your most interesting stock. Is that not what you philanthropic ladies are here for? To sell said stock to benefit the city’s unfortunates?’

More exchanged glances. Shifting feet. The tallest lady, the one who called him ‘sir’, mutters something under her breath, then shuffles back to her position behind the till. Daniel is watching her progress, then contemplating an embroidered handkerchief folded on the counter next to her – familiar or not? – when he feels a hand on his arm.

‘Did you find anything else of your mother’s?’

Daniel looks down at the woman. She is, he would guess, older than his mother, in her late seventies or even early eighties. Whereas Teresa will never now see seventy. ‘How do you know about my mother?’ he says to this woman, who mentions her so casually, so intimately, as if she knows him, knows them, knows all about it.

‘You told me,’ the old lady in the glasses and string of beads says, a kind face she has, with rheumy eyes and cheeks that Daniel finds he would like to touch, slack and cushiony they would feel, he is sure, ‘about what your father did. When you were in here yesterday.’

‘I was in here yesterday?’

The lady nods. ‘And the day before. You come in every day, dear.’

‘I do?’

The lady smiles at him again, then nods towards the other woman at the till. ‘Don’t mind her. You do what you have to do.’