Girl A(11)

‘How do you feel about that?’ Dr K said.

‘I don’t know,’ I said. An hour later, when I was alone, I came up with my answer, which was: unsurprised.

Mother, they said, was in custody. She, too, had been in possession of a toxic substance, but had declined to take it; they had found her sitting on the kitchen floor with Father’s head in her lap. She guarded the body like those dogs you read about, which refuse to leave their master’s corpse.

‘And the others?’ I said.

‘Rest, now,’ Dr K said. ‘Let’s talk more tomorrow.’

I understand, now, that there were things that they were working to resolve. We had a whole team, a vast new family: the police; our psychologists; the doctors. They’d stand looking at old photographs of our faces on a whiteboard, headed with the names by which the world now knew us: Boys A to D; Girls A to C. There were lines drawn between us, and words written along those lines: ‘Close proximity’, and ‘Potential violence’, and ‘Relationship to be determined’. New details would be noted, offered or ascertained from hospital beds. The map of our lives began to appear, like constellations at dusk.

Often, Dr K and I would sit in silence. ‘Would you like to talk today?’ she would ask, and I would be too tired, or in pain from one of the operations, or hating everything: hating her beautiful clothes and composure, and mortified, in contrast, by the way my body looked in the bed, the angles of it avian and strange, none of it working as it was meant to. At other times, when the detectives were with her, she would ask me about everything that I could remember: not just the Binding Days or the Chaining, but before that, when we were children. My audience recorded everything that I said, even the things that seemed irrelevant, and so I talked more: about the books that Evie and I liked, for example, or the holiday in Blackpool.

‘How long has it been since you went to school?’ Dr K asked. I was embarrassed: I couldn’t remember.

‘Did you start at senior school?’ she asked.

‘Yes. That was my last year. I don’t remember the exact time I stopped, but I know where we were up to in all of the subjects – in almost everything.’

‘How would you feel about going back?’ she said, smiling.

After that, a hospital tutor came to visit me each afternoon. Dr K never mentioned it, but I recognized her quiet magic. She had procured a Bible for me to read, because I liked the familiar passages before bedtime. She sensed when I was becoming tired of the detectives’ questions, and shut her notebook, closing the conversation. To say thank you, I tried to talk to her more, even when I did hate her.

Sometimes, too, we talked about the future. ‘Have you ever thought,’ she said, ‘about what you would like to do?’

‘Like a job?’

‘Maybe a job, but other things, too. Where you would like to live, or places you’d like to visit, or activities you’d like to try.’

‘I liked history,’ I said, ‘at school. And maths. I liked most of the subjects.’

‘Well,’ she looked up at me, over her glasses, ‘that’s helpful.’

‘I had a book of Greek myths,’ I said. ‘So I’d like to go to Greece, maybe. Evie and I agreed that we would go together. We told each other the stories.’

‘Which was your favourite?’

‘The minotaur, obviously. But Evie got scared. She liked Orpheus and Eurydice better.’

Dr K set down her notebook and put her hand next to mine on the bed, as close as it could be without touching. ‘You will go to Greece, Lex,’ she said. ‘You will study history and maths, and lots of other subjects. I’m quite sure of it.’

The team concluded that our best chance of living normal lives would be through adoption. Following careful consideration, each of us would be adopted by a different family. We had diverse, specific needs and problematic sibling dynamics; besides, there were so many of us. I have no basis for it, but I see Dr K lobbying for this approach, standing in front of the whiteboard and fighting for it. Above all things, she believed – with work, and with time – that it was possible to discard parts of the past, like an old season’s coat that you never should have bought.

The frantic activity of that time was delivered to us in the months and years that followed, packaged in neat conclusions. The younger children went first: they would be malleable, and easier to save. Noah was given to a couple who wanted to remain anonymous, even to the rest of us; it was an approach approved by Dr K, and supported by secondary and tertiary psychologists. Noah would remember nothing of his time at Moor Woods Road. The first ten months of his life could be erased, neatly, as if they had never taken place. Gabriel went to a local family, who had followed the case closely, and who gave a series of emotional statements requesting that people respect their privacy. Delilah, who was the most photogenic of all of us, was adopted by a couple in London who hadn’t been able to have children of their own. And Evie got luckiest: she went to a family on the south coast. Nobody told me much about it at the time, other than that she would have two new siblings, a boy and a girl, and that the family lived close to the beach.

I remember that Dr K was appointed to tell me this, and I remember asking her, absolutely sure that it couldn’t be too much more effort, if they may have room for one more child.

‘I don’t think so, Lex,’ she said.