Haven't They Grown(59)
‘Why?’
‘I don’t know. I’m trying to work it out.’
Next to us, a girl with blonde curly hair in bunches starts to cry. Her mother leans across the table and says, ‘Jessica, you’ve already had one. You’re not having another. It’s bad for you.’
Lou says, ‘I ought to find your story implausible from start to finish. I ought to be horrified, but … in a strange sort of way, everything you’ve told me feels right. All the suspicions I’ve had about the Caters and what might be going on … they’ve never been ordinary. I’ve never thought, “Oh, maybe Mr Cater’s sleeping with the nanny and Mrs Cater’s furious about it.” I think I’ve always known, deep down, that something was really wrong, but not known that I knew it. Or not let myself know I knew it because it was too big and horrible. Does that make sense?’
I nod.
‘But, like, at the same time, I don’t see how it can be true? I had no proof of anything. And if my intuition about it was so strong, how come none of my colleagues agreed with me that there was a problem?’
‘Intuition isn’t something most people have time for,’ I say.
‘I suppose it’s easy for me to say this now, but I do think I knew. Two things, really: that the behaviour I saw, however unusual, wasn’t half as odd as whatever was behind it. The cause.’
I wonder how much she’s allowing what I’ve told her to distort her memory of what she used to think. ‘What’s the second thing?’ I ask.
‘That the explanation, whatever’s really going on with the Caters, must be something so strange that I couldn’t ever imagine it,’ Lou says. ‘No matter how hard I tried.’
15
‘It makes quite a difference,’ says Pam Swain, as I smooth away a hard knot beneath her left shoulder. Many people would say, ‘Ow!’ or make distressed noises, but not Pam. She can handle my pressure. She’s used to it. ‘It’s funny, you wouldn’t think I’d notice, with me lying face down for the hour, but the purple’s definitely more soothing and relaxing than the white was.’
‘It’s not purple, Pam,’ I say mock-sternly. ‘It’s aubergine. Remember?’
‘Yes, sorry.’ She laughs. ‘Aubergine.’
‘I still love it – though I was worried I’d hate it as soon as I’d put down the paintbrush. But it works because it’s deep in a soft way. Not bright.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ says Pam.
She’s fifty-nine, a nurse at the Rawndesley General Infirmary, and she’s been coming to me for two years. Like so many of my clients, she’s become a friend. Rarely do I give a massage in silence. All my regulars like to chat – probably because my massages aren’t the kind that allow clients to zone out and nod off. The aim isn’t inner peace or pampering. My work is about increasing flexibility and removing chronic pain. If you want someone to rub pretty-smelling oil into your back while a bland Sounds of the Ocean CD plays on repeat, I’m not the massage therapist for you. I don’t apologise for any of this; I advertise it upfront, and my work diary is full of people still wanting more after years of coming to me.
‘I wouldn’t want more than one wall this colour, but I’m glad I have one,’ I tell Pam. ‘I so nearly didn’t do it.’
‘I remember. And you wouldn’t have done it if Zannah and Ben hadn’t already changed their walls from white to something else.’
This is true. I’ve always been a strict white-walls-only person, but I persuaded myself that I was allowed to paint my treatment room aubergine by thinking, ‘No radical change is happening here. You are already somebody with two non-white rooms in your house.’
Zannah’s bedroom has mint-green-and-gold diamond-patterned wallpaper that she insisted would look amazing and has hated from about a fortnight after it went up. She refuses to let me or Dom strip it or paint over it, though, because of something about the importance of remembering one’s mistakes and learning from them – advice she got from a YouTube star’s Pinterest quote board. Instead, across the whole of one wall, she has spray-painted the words ‘Big Mistake’ in pale pink, graffiti-style. The other walls she’s covered in collages of photographs so that the wallpaper is barely visible: pictures of her and Murad, friends, family.
When Ben heard Zannah lobbying to have her room redecorated, the principle of equality obliged him to join in, even though he didn’t and doesn’t care what his bedroom looks like. He chose pale grey for the walls, but couldn’t be bothered to test the various shades, so Dom – who, despite being a graphic designer, also has zero interest in the difference between one colour and another when it comes to doing up our house – picked one for him at random. It looks good. Zannah immediately said, ‘Ben, your room looks a hundred times better than mine, you little shit.’
Ben chose a couple of posters of Kate Moss, the supermodel, wearing clothes with the word ‘Supreme’ on them, and asked me to get them framed. At the same time, he took down all the pictures that he thought were too childish, apart from the very first one I ever bought for him that was his before he was born – framed and waiting for him in his room. It’s a black and white drawing of a five-bar gate in a field, with teddy bears sitting on the gate’s bars and in a semi-circle in front of it. The bears are all grinning happily. Most recently, they’ve been grinning at Kate Moss in her Supreme T-shirt across the no-man’s-land of Ben’s clothes-strewn floor.