Our House(76)

‘Two million. That’s the best they can do, they can’t get any more from their lender. Rav recommends we accept the higher one, give them a reasonable period to agree a sale on their place.’

‘There’s no time for that,’ Mike said. ‘Two mil will have to do.’

Like it was pin money, like beggars couldn’t be choosers.

‘So you want me to accept?’ I said.

‘I want you to accept.’

*

I couldn’t have designed weather more minutely matched to my psychological state as I walked through Alder Rise to the GP’s surgery on the north side of the Parade. The skies drooped so smotheringly low they almost touched the rooftops, while, underfoot, the leaves disintegrated to dust.

I’d booked a session with the head of mental health services, Dr Pearson.

‘I can’t go on,’ I told him, truthfully.

To his credit, he did his best to uncover the issues, but I stuck to broad strokes: I can’t cope, I constantly feel like I’m about to have a panic attack, everything’s falling apart, I want to cry all the time.

‘I’m going to write you a prescription for an antidepressant,’ he said. ‘We’ll start with a month and, if you’re happy with it, we’ll extend the prescription in the New Year. But medication is only a part of treatment and I strongly recommend that you talk to a therapist as well.’

I made some indecipherable response, non-committal, already adding him to my list of people I would never see again.

‘I can refer you through the NHS or, if you’d like to get started sooner, you can use a private therapist?’

‘I’ll use a private one,’ I said to get him off my back, and he gave me a link to a website that listed the local options. I imagined being probed about poor lifestyle choices and stress management by some earnest biddy the wrong side of fifty. ‘Listen, you stupid cow,’ I’d say, ‘I’ve caused a child’s death. I’ve killed someone and now I’m being blackmailed into taking part in criminal fraud and if I don’t co-operate I’ll be jailed for ten years. The blackmailer is fucking my wife and threatening my children and I fantasize all the time about killing him, but if I do I’ll have to kill his accomplice as well, who, by the way, I’ve slept with, and even then the police might still get to me because there could be other witnesses out there, not to mention the surviving party herself, who for all I know might have PTSD that’s preventing her from remembering the incident properly but that might lift at any time . . .’

No, better to keep my troubles to myself.





39


Bram, Word document

Since the collision, I had seen nothing of the story on the television news, either national or local; whoever the arbiters of death were, they had not judged Ellie Rutherford’s worthy of so high-profile a medium. I continued to watch, however, night after night (when I wasn’t in the pub), for the single despicable reason that bad news made me feel better. A war atrocity, a serial killer’s spree, a gangland knifing: each succeeded in convincing me that my crime wasn’t so bad.

Sick, I know.

Then one night in late November, when I was consoling myself with a bottle of wine and the tragic imagery of an Indian train wreck, thinking what did it matter that I made a terrible mistake two and a half months ago when there were seven billion other people who were just as fucked as I was, the local news headlines came on and turned me cold with horror:

‘Tonight, we speak to the mayor about safety concerns for construction workers on a new building on the South Bank that will dwarf its neighbours . . . Also this evening: following the government’s announcement of sterner sentences for dangerous driving offences, we ask why it is that over two months after the road rage incident in South London that killed ten-year-old Ellie Rutherford there have still been no arrests. Ellie’s father talks to Meera Powell in an exclusive interview . . .’

I waited in breathless agony for the segment about the skyscraper – excruciatingly in-depth – to end. Then, after ten seconds of a studio talking head, a long shot of Silver Road filled the screen and a voiceover began recapping the known facts about the collision over archive footage of Thornton Heath traffic and the entrance to Croydon Hospital. Next came a sequence of images from the funeral – children in yellow clothing, flowers arranged in the shape of a butterfly – followed by video of the Rutherford family gathered in a well-appointed living room, a large fern in the window and shelves crammed with books. Ellie’s teenage brother was helping his mother up from her seat and supporting her as she moved painfully to the mantelpiece to look at a framed school photograph of Ellie. Then the camera picked out a fold-up wheelchair in the corner and a small pile of wrapped presents on a side table. ‘It’s Ellie’s birthday this week. She’d be turning eleven,’ the voiceover explained.

Finally, there was an appeal by Tim Rutherford, admirably, miraculously composed:

‘We’re not saying the police aren’t working hard on this, because we know they are. We’re just asking that everyone watching this goes over that evening one last time. Look back at your diary and see where you were after work that day. It was a Friday, mid-September, so still light; you might have been coming home from the office or heading out for a drink. You may not have witnessed the collision itself, but you may have seen a black hatchback Audi or VW leaving the area at speed. You might have noticed if it was a man or a woman at the wheel, what sort of age they were, how they were dressed. A little detail like that might be the breakthrough the police need.’