He wandered through to reception to look up her details but that old cow was back behind the desk. Maybe later. He fixed his most charming smile in place and strolled over, no harm in a bit of practice. He had learned early on that life was much easier if people liked you. If they trusted you and you were clever, you could make them do whatever you wanted. He’d studied his father with his clients, the way he put them at ease, made them feel comfortable and safe. He’d watched for the facial expressions, the tone of voice and the words that conveyed empathy.
He leaned across the desk. “Afternoon, Mrs. C. Heard you’d been off; you feeling better? You certainly look good today.”
Mrs. Kerr looked up from her screen and blushed. “Oh, hello, I didn’t realize you were there. I’m fine love, it was just a bit of a cold, that’s all. You’re sweet to ask though.”
She smiled up at him and he caught the faint scent of lavender talcum. He smiled back, gifting her with the full wattage, while inwardly shuddering to imagine what frowsty crevices she’d been dusting. If his mother survived, which was unlikely, she would eventually be like this. Old and ugly and useless and stupid, even more repellent than she was at the moment with her scraggy hairless scalp and her wigs.
“I was just making some tea Mrs. C, do you want one?”
It was his private joke, calling her Mrs. C. She’d once laughed and told him it was Kerr with a “K” and he’d almost said, “Whatever made you think the C was for Kerr you old. . .” but stopped himself just in time.
Thinking about it, perhaps he should call his mother the Big C. God he was funny.
Perhaps this could be his golden girl’s consolation; she would never have to get old or ill but could stay young forever.
3
“Houses are like people—some you like and some you don’t”
—L. M. Montgomery, Emily Climbs
We are nearly there. The countryside rolls endlessly by, a blur of green monotony, and my good intentions of earlier roll away with it. No matter how hard I try, how much I rationalize, my apprehension mounts with each passing mile. Tom is oblivious. I glance sideways to see him smiling to himself, fingers drumming on the wheel to a soundless song and I spitefully imagine something bucolic. Probably involving cows and combine harvesters.
I hadn’t realized quite how close we are to the county border. Thorpwood House, if it still exists, is just beyond the hills, no more than a handful of miles away. Thorpwood House, my alma mater, that place where I was last truly me. The landscape feels familiar to me like an echo of the past reverberating with each beat of my heart.
I struggle with traveling, my anxiety increasing the farther we get from home and the greater the distance from the places I know. My therapist has told me it could be my damaged brain becoming overloaded by new stimuli, or it could be post-traumatic stress disorder. A need to feel in control of my environment, to have the security of familiar surroundings and to feel safe. Whatever the reason I must always fight it lest I allow the boundaries of our lives to shrink still further. I have good days and bad but many of the things that others take for granted, like a weekend away or a holiday, are for me a challenge. This is what makes me angry, with myself for allowing it to be so and with my attacker for stealing away that piece of mind. Before him I would do anything, go anywhere without a thought of danger or consequences. The lack of any parental input had allowed me to be reckless, wild even, but not now. The teenage me would roll her eyes in that way she had and cringe with embarrassment at what she became.
My parents were in New York at the time of my attack, attending to one of my father’s business interests. They flew back immediately of course and spent the next few weeks and months at my bedside, each as ineffectual as the other in their own way.
My mother was, and still is in her own mind, a budding starlet of the seventies who spent most of her formative years clinging to the hope of fame by the skin of her frosty-pink fingertips. Her main claims to that fickle mistress include a bit part in The Spy Who Loved Me and on occasion being at the same parties as such celebrities of the time as Michael York and Susan George. Unfortunately, she wasn’t destined for cinematic greatness and by the time she was twenty-four she had met, married and fallen pregnant by my father—not necessarily in that order. At the time of “my accident,” as she euphemistically insisted on calling it, she was thirty-eight and while still attractive was more “mumsy” than she cared to acknowledge. My father’s wealth allowed her to concentrate her time exclusively on languid inactivity and on holding back the physical ravages of time, both of which she was rapidly making her life’s work. Parenthood had never come easily to her; she approached it as a rather tedious part for which she hadn’t quite mastered the lines, and I’ve always felt the idea of a child appealed to her much more than the inconvenient reality. The realization of what she’d done had sunk in almost before my umbilicus was healed and I was bundled off to Thorpwood House as soon as was decent. The long trips my parents took abroad providing both the reason and the conscience salve. My hazy recollections of her in the weeks following the attack involve much dramatic sighing and weeping, interspersed with peevish demands that the nursing staff fetch iced water—for her of course, not me.
As for my poor father, the strain almost broke him. He found the only way he could hold things together was to fuck his secretary hard and often, a cliché that could conveniently be relied upon to help him forget the various misfortunes life placed in his way.
I have always felt ambivalent about my father; on one hand I have craved his love but on the other despised him for his obvious shallowness and belligerent masculinity. He is not an attractive man. Too swarthy and hirsute to meet any traditional requirement for handsomeness but he does have the power money conveys, coupled with a certain lupine quality that some women find alluring. Personally, I find him rather repellent and fail to imagine what young and ostensibly intelligent women found so irresistible that they would succumb to his hairy advances. He did eventually marry this inamorata and went on to produce beautiful twin girls, a replacement for me plus a handy spare, of whom I’m surprisingly quite fond.
On my release from hospital I was transferred initially to a rehab unit and eventually into dear mummy’s reluctant care, by which time my father had moved out of the family home. My mother had, in some perverse way, come to blame me for my father’s leaving and it began to feel as though I had deliberately gone to the effort of having my skull bashed in just to ruin her life. The fact that I could remember nothing of the incident further frustrated her. It made her view me with frank suspicion as though I had perhaps made the whole thing up as an extreme form of attention seeking. It was a relief to us both when I was deemed well enough to live independently.
I now have little contact with either parent although I do occasionally see my father when I meet up with my half sisters. The passing years have not been kind to him. His graying hair, coupled with the certain guilty shiftiness he exhibits when he sees me, have accentuated his wolfishness such that on the rare occasions when he has visited my home I’ve been seized by the sudden urge to check he hasn’t eaten one of our cats or pissed on the furniture.
My contact with my mother is limited to the occasional stilted telephone call, usually initiated by me and driven more by an urge to irritate her than by any filial affection. My favorite ploy is to feign concern over her drinking habits, always guaranteed to provoke the desired reaction and cheer me up at least a little.