Girl A(56)

‘Look,’ Oliver said. ‘If it hadn’t been me – it would just have been somebody else. Gabriel – he always needs somebody.’ He remembered something – the scene of some precise degradation – and chuckled. ‘He’s special like that.’

‘He is special. He survived it. He very nearly escaped himself.’

There was a tremble to my voice. Fury, erupting as tears. Not here. On the train, maybe, in a swaying bathroom, with nobody to see it.

‘Prison won’t be so different,’ I said. ‘Do you think that you’ll be special – when the time comes?’

I took his wrist. That’s how it feels, I thought. Tighter to the flesh than you’d like it. And you – with your clean hands, and your nice teeth, and a propensity for smugness – wouldn’t survive it.

‘There’s another interesting thing,’ I said, ‘about court proceedings. Even the small claims are on the public record. Even the ones that aren’t successful. It’s a good way to find people.’

He gave me a long grin, with a kind of pride to it.

‘I can see how you got out,’ he said. He nodded, agreeing with himself. ‘You and me – we could have made some real money together.’

He rummaged in his inside pocket and conjured a scrap of paper. The card was warm, with worn corners, but I could make out his name, and the word Agent, in raised print. Then he was past me, and into the hospital. I waited on the tarmac, watching him walk away, and when I looked up to Gabriel’s window, I saw the tired moon of his face, hanging there, watching too.

On the drive to the station, I wondered what would become of Gabriel, and then, as I often did, how his life would have turned out if Dr K had been assigned to take care of him – or any one of the others – rather than me. Her approach was different. She had acknowledged that from the beginning. She had become famous in her field over the years after our escape: she contributed to Supreme Court cases, and her TED Talk had nearly two million views. She mentioned me, of course, although only ever as Girl A. The lecture was titled ‘The Truth, and How to Tell It’.

She had discharged me six years ago. July. I graduated from university the week before, with a First. My job at Devlin’s firm was secure. The month had been dappled with sunlight and farewells, and now the rest of the summer sprawled out ahead of me. I would return home, to be with Mum and Dad, and to read in their garden, lying on the trampoline. I travelled to London in the late afternoon, begrudging the heat and the hassle of it; it felt like a final obstacle before weeks of freedom. Mine was the last appointment of the day.

Dr K’s waiting room was at the bottom of a grand carpeted staircase, and she collected each patient in person. She still wore excellent shoes, and she always made an entrance. This time, she came down the stairs with a bottle of champagne in one hand and glasses in the other, and her arms open. I stood to meet her.

‘Congratulations,’ she said, holding me. ‘Oh, Lex! Congratulations.’

Instead of ascending to her office, as we usually did, she led me through a fire door, and down the escape to a little paved garden in the shade of the building. We sat on discarded milk crates, and she popped the cork. ‘I like to think,’ she said, ‘that this is where Karl worked at his painting.’

‘Neutral territory,’ I said. ‘This is new.’

She asked about the graduation ceremony; about Christopher and Olivia; about my plans for the summer. Then, with her face turned away from me, up to the jumbled townhouses and the strips of sky between them, she smiled.

‘I don’t think that I need to see you any more, Lex,’ she said.

‘I’m sorry?’

‘It’s been nine years,’ she said. ‘More than nine years, actually, since that first day in the hospital. Do you remember it? I’m sorry. Of course you do. But what you may not know is that I was nervous. Young, and nervous. I worried about every single thing that I said. You’ll know what I mean, once you start work. Early on, one worries about every damn thing. And now – here we are. It’s a kind of vindication, I think. For us both.’

‘You never seemed nervous,’ I said.

‘Good.’

‘Are you sure, though? That this is it?’

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I am. You’ve done it, Lex. You, and me, and the Jamesons. And I know that there were some terrible days, and things that were very hard to hear. Yet here we are. With the rest of your life waiting.’

She had already been drinking that afternoon. There was a mania to her joy which I hadn’t seen before. In the autumn, when I started law school, I read that she had been appointed as a guest fellow at Harvard, and I wondered if this had been the day she found out. In that case, it wasn’t just that she had served her purpose to me, but that I had served mine to her.

‘It’s up to you, of course,’ she said. ‘We can see each other for however long you would like. All I’m saying is that we no longer need to.’

‘It seems like the right time,’ I said. ‘I guess.’

We talked into the darkness, even after the champagne was gone. I told her that Dad was considering retirement: ‘But who will I call,’ she said, ‘when I’m losing all faith in humanity?’ I told her that he had cried at graduation, straggling behind Mum as they walked across the lawn after the ceremony, using the spare few seconds to scrub his eyes. ‘That,’ she said, ‘doesn’t surprise me at all.’