The Family Upstairs(66)

The girl looks at them and says, ‘They asked for an emergency appointment.’

She turns back to them and smiles uncertainly. ‘Hello?’

It is clear that she does not like people walking in asking for emergency appointments.

But Miller is unfazed and gets to his feet. ‘Sally,’ he says. ‘My name is Miller Roe. This is my friend Libby Jones. I wonder if you might be able to spare us ten minutes or so?’

She glances back at the girl called Lola. Lola confirms that Sally’s next appointment is not until eleven thirty. She beckons them into her office and then closes the door behind them.

Sally’s consulting room is cosy in a Scandinavian style: a pale sofa with a crocheted blanket thrown across it, pale grey walls, a white-painted desk and chairs. The walls are hung with dozens of framed black and white photographs.

‘So,’ she says. ‘What can I do for you?’

Miller glances at Libby. He wants her to start. She turns back to Sally and she says, ‘I just inherited a house. A big house. In Chelsea.’

‘Chelsea?’ she repeats vaguely.

‘Yes. Cheyne Walk.’

‘Mm-hm.’ She nods, just once.

‘Number sixteen.’

‘Yes, yes,’ she says with a note of impatience. ‘I don’t—’ she begins. But then she stops and narrows her eyes slightly.

‘Oh!’ she says. ‘You’re the baby!’

Libby nods. ‘Are you Sally Thomsen?’ she asks.

Sally pauses. ‘Well,’ she says after a moment, ‘technically, no. I reverted to my maiden name a few years ago, when I started this practice. I didn’t want anyone to … well. I was in a bad place for quite some time and I wanted a fresh start, I suppose. But yes. I was Sally Thomsen. Now listen,’ she says, her tone suddenly becoming clipped and officious. ‘I don’t want to get involved in anything, you know. My daughter, she made me swear never to discuss anything about the house in Chelsea. Never to talk about it. She suffered from years of PTSD after what happened there, and really, she’s still very damaged. It’s not my place to say anything. And as much as I’m glad to see you here, alive and well, I’m afraid I’m going to have to ask you both to leave.’

‘Could we, maybe, speak to your daughter? Do you think?’

Sally throws a steely gaze at Miller, the asker of this question. ‘Absolutely not,’ she says. ‘Absolutely not.’





50




CHELSEA, 1992


My mother never really recovered from losing the baby.

She slowly withdrew from community life. She also withdrew from David. She began to spend more time with my father, just the two of them sitting quietly side by side.

I of course felt completely responsible for my mother’s unhappiness. I attempted to remedy the situation by feeding her concoctions from Justin’s books that claimed to cure people of melancholia. But it was virtually impossible to get her to eat anything, so nothing I did made any difference.

David seemed to have abandoned her. I was surprised. I would have expected him to want to be involved in her rehabilitation. But he was distant with her, virtually cold.

One day, shortly after my mother lost the baby, I asked David, ‘Why aren’t you talking to my mother any more?’

He looked at me and sighed. ‘Your mother is healing. She needs to follow her own path towards that.’

Her own path.

I felt a wave of fury begin to build inside me. ‘I don’t think she is healing,’ I responded. ‘I think she’s getting worse. And what about my father? Shouldn’t he be getting some kind of care? Some kind of treatment? All he does is sit in that chair all day. Maybe in the outside world someone could do something for him. Maybe some kind of therapy. Maybe even electric shock therapy or something like that. There might be all sorts of medical advances being made for stroke victims that we don’t even know about because we’re all just stuck in here …’ I’d begun to shout and as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I knew I’d passed into a bad place and then there it was, the cold, sharp skin of his hand, hard against the side of my jaw.

I tasted the metallic sting of blood inside my mouth, felt a numbness building up around my lips. I touched the blood with a fingertip and looked at David in horror.

He stared down at me, his big shoulders hunched up around his ears, a vein throbbing on the side of his head. It was incredible how quickly this quiet, spiritual man could turn into a raging monster. ‘You have no right to talk about these things,’ he growled. ‘You know nothing about anything. You are an infant.’

‘But he’s my father. And ever since you came you’ve just treated him like shit!’

His hand came back, this time across the other side of my face. I had always known this was going to happen. I had known from the moment I first saw him that David Thomsen would strike me if I confronted him. And here it was.

‘You ruined everything,’ I said in a nothing-to-lose-now rush of emotion. ‘You think you’re so powerful and so important but you’re not! You’re just a bully! You came into my home and you bullied everyone into being what you wanted us to be. And then you made my mum pregnant and now she’s sad and you don’t care, you don’t care at all. Because all you care about is yourself!’