CHAPTER 11
“Jessica”

“Yes. He caught me with her when I was about eleven. I was just putting her skirt on when he came into my bedroom.”

That was nasty, but I thought I could play a game of my own for a while. I had spent too long hiding from it to face it so easily, and a little bit of sport delayed the confrontation. There was almost a flicker from Sally’s face, a slight resetting of the jaw. She waited a few seconds, for me to fill the silence, but I had played that game for too many years. So had she, though.

“No games, Adam. Jessica”

“She was my friend before Tabitha. We had had a schools charity project, where we were making teddy bears to be sold at the school open day, fete thing. Pretty rubbish, really, made out of fun fur fabric…”

I had always wanted a friend like Jess. The spark had come with that edition of ‘Sparkle’, one of those identikit weeklies for pre-teen girls that live in the uncomfortable gap between childhood and the angst-ridden pubescence of ‘Just Seventeen’. Wendy Prentice had brought her copy to school, and the cover had borne a picture of a smiling rag doll and the words ‘make this’. My moment of shame, theft from a child. It made no difference to me that I had been one too, I always felt a small quiver of embarrassment and a churning of the stomach. I had quickly stuffed the slim comic into my rucksack, and a few days later began the process of finding the necessary bits and pieces. I raided Mam’s sewing box, and each time any clothing or linen was thrown away I filed it under my bottom drawer for later.

“I learned to sew on pre-cut patterns in fluorescent furry crap, Sally. Then I made Jessica for myself”

“Was she difficult?”

“Finding the right stuff was, sometimes. And I had a few false starts where I had to put stuff back in a hurry, like when Greg ripped something and Mam had to do some repairs. But I got there…”

“Why that name?”

I grinned at that one. “Tradition, Sally. That’s the sort of name a dolly should have, something girly but refined. And I made her some clothes, of course.”

“And your father found you together”

And shouted, and yelled, and the belt came off and swang out at me, and more shouting.

“He burned her. Out in the garden with Mam watching. Poured some petrol over her and lit it.”

“What did you feel?”

“Alone again”

“What happened then?”

“He started toughening me up, and Greg went to be a Fusilier, and….”

“Yes?”

“I found a place in one of the old quarries where nobody went, and I started making Patricia”

“How did you lose her?”

How did you know that? “I hadn’t taken account of the climbing that went on there, I mean I wasn’t into that scene. Somebody found her and used her for boot wiping or something.”

Well, wiping, anyway. That had hurt.

“Toughening you up”

“Yeah….he had me start at the under 12s as soon as the pre-season training started. I ended up as a winger. I already knew how to run...”

“Rugby”

“South Wales, aye? What else? That lasted till I was seventeen. Just seventeen, apt really, and he beat the nursing out of me, especially when Greg came back in a fucking coffee tin”

The parade through the village by the airfield, the Warrior shipped to Tidworth for repair and cleansing of bits of my brother and his mates. The inquiry, with the two pilots safe overseas. No, sir, we don’t see why our brave boys should be pilloried for a small error of identification. Just like that cable car incident.

“I miss my brother. He was almost a different species, you know, but he was my big brother and he’s now in a hole. Children shouldn’t go before their parents, it’s not the right way, Sal….”

She passed me a tissue. “So you ended up in the police”

“Well, I had my moments, where I considered telling Dad where to go, but after Greg…then Mam got ill, and it was just easier”

“Why the bike?”

Oh, what a question, and such a simple answer. I had read so much about and by people I thought were like me, and so many of them gravitated to bikes of one sort or another. Gravitation was the word; we seemed---we---to fall into solitary pursuits like cycling, opportunities to be away from the world of carefully filtering one’s words and hiding thoughts. There are no giveaways, no tells, when cycling. Just lungs, legs and the bike, you and your thoughts.

“Solitude, Sally; space”

“Adam. What is it that you are not telling me?”

Who I am. “What do you mean, Sally?”

“Still the rehearsal, the filter before you speak. What are you frightened of?”

Failure. I can live neither my own life, nor the one my father laid out for me. “I don’t know what you mean”

“Yes you do”

She stood up and walked to the window, looking out at a bird feeder mobbed by blue tits. With her back to me, she started to speak quietly, not much above a whisper.

“Adam, my turn at a speech. I usually avoid them, but just this once I will indulge myself. I have spent a long time specialising in two areas of my profession, and I have a decent reputation in them. If I have any faults, in my arrogance, I think it is that I can sometimes get involved in my patient’s problems. That leads to two things.

“Firstly, I care for them, and work harder at giving them such respite as I can. Secondly…secondly, if things go pear-shaped, I hurt. In a way, I have my own little taste of PTSD, which I am more than satisfied is one of your problems. Nobody with a soul can endure the things you have without scarring. That is indeed one of my specialisms. As for the other…”

She turned back to me, head cocked just a little. “Adam, I am going out on a limb here, so if I fuck up just bear with me. This is based on the conversations we have had, as well as my observations of the way you are with our friends. I just need the answer to one question.”

“If I can….”

“Adam….how long have you been wondering who you are?”

Shit. “I know who I am, Sally”

“Then tell me, please, why you are hiding yourself from everyone”

Why had I ever agreed to this? Everything she asked opened the wounds further, dragged my oldest nightmares back into the waking world. The ones before the Job, before I was able to talk to Tabby. Before I had tried to make the best of what I had been handed, and certainly before I had realised that I never could.

“I can’t, Sal. It’s too late, and I’m too tired”

“Bollocks, Adam. I’ve seen worse than you, trust me. Look at Melanie…she was such a mess, but she had strength. If it hadn’t been for a selection of vermin that should have been strangled at birth, I’d have introduced you. Are you telling me, as a police sergeant, as a man, that you haven’t got that strength yourself? Mind you, she was a Royal Marine Commando, so I suppose that you would never be able to live up to that. Higher form of life, no?”

I was speechless, mouth working. Tears were rolling down my face; how the hell could she be so callous? How could any man ever expect to match what people like her, and Stewart, had lived through?

“Why lash out at me, Sally?”

“Because you haven’t got half the courage I saw in Mel, nor in a couple of my other patients. I get to sleep with someone who has his own nightmares, but he doesn’t wander off and start his own suicide, and if he did it would be a clean one, not this half-arsed scheme you have picked. You’re not a man, Adam”

I just shook my head. No, not me, not at all. Sally’s voice softened.

“Sorry, Adam, but I had to poke you a bit there. I wasn’t trying to hurt you, just to get under your skin. Adam….who are you, inside all that pain?”