Living on the Knife's Edge Page 2

  "Come on into the kitchen, Shiels, you're like family by now. I'll make us a cuppa."

  "Thanks, dear, let me just dash to the loo, my back teeth are floating!"

  And, just before Sheila gave up and left, there was Bet coming through the front door.

  "Bet! Sheila's come to see you, isn't that nice!"

  "Great." Bet's enthusiasm would have refrozen a hot meal from the chippie down the corner.

  "Come and sit down, I'll get you a cup of tea."

  "Nah." Bet plonked herself into an armchair, and watched resignedly as Sheila waddled through from the kitchen to the sitting room.

  "So, Bet, how are you doing with your classes, then?"

  "OK."

  Sheila waited with an expectant look on her face, but nothing more was forthcoming. She reseated herself with a wriggle, and tried again.

  "Are you understanding what the teachers are doing?"

  Bet gave her a vaguely interested but blank look.

  "What I mean is, do they explain the lesson so that you can understand it?"

  Bet grinned evilly. "Are you asking if I'm too fucking stupid to understand school?"

  "Bet!" that was Molly, from the kitchen.

  "Now, dear, there's no need to swear. It's so unattractive for a young lady to use foul language."

  Bet was regarding Sheila with a distant interest. The social worker might have been a reptile in a zoo which had just done something unusual but rather repugnant, like swallow a whole dead chick. What planet was this woman from?

  "Bet, dear, I'm only here to try to help. Is there anything that's bothering you? Any problem at school, or with friends?"

  "Nah. The only problem is I don't get to relax when I come home. I'm going up to my room. See you." And she got up and left.

  Molly came through and sat on the sofa with Sheila, and the two commiserated with one another.

  Molly knew that Bet smoked, and drank beer at friends' parties. She suspected that Bet might be sleeping with some of the boys, and sometimes wondered fearfully if she might be doing drugs. But when Bet had a miscarriage, and Molly found out about it, that was when she made herself face the fact that Bet was on a path to self-destruction. Molly decided something had to be done. She didn't know what, but something.

  Sheila suggested the Lynwood Centre. Bet could get professional counselling, get the drugs out of her system, get her head straightened out. It was a good idea, except that there was nothing wrong with Bet's head. It was her heart that was messed up.

  Lynnwood Centre was a place to bring people that had broken, one way or another, where the staff were supposed to fix them up, or try to.

  Adam Reid was in med school, doing practical psychiatric work at the Centre. He hated it. Mental illness, emotional trauma, nervous breakdowns, they saw all of these. Collateral damage from divorce, drugs, suicide in the family, all the fractures in people that life had just put too much stress on. Bones fracture under stress; so do hearts, and personalities.

  Adam saw how the staff, and even the family members, looked at these broken people with a kind of fascinated horror. He observed the way that they distanced themselves from life's victims, and he saw the same distaste in himself, and wished that he didn't. Adam didn't like what working at Lynnwood showed him about himself. He didn't like what it showed him about the system either.

  Adam was sitting behind his desk in his clean and tidy office. His dark hair was rumpled as usual, from his habit of running a hand through it when pondering; perhaps this was a substitute for pulling it out. His brown eyes were on a patient file in front of him, his lean face thoughtful. He was wearing the obligatory white coat and plastic badge, and a leather jacket hung from a coathook in the corner.

  There was a knock at the door, and Adam called without looking up, "Come in."

  The door opened and a big male nurse wheeled in a frail old man, wispy white hair falling half over his face. The patient was wearing a light blue cotton dressing gown, loosely fastened. Adam looked up. The patient had a fresh bruise on his left cheekbone, and an obvious anxiety on top of his usual mental confusion.

  "Watkins," Adam spoke to the nurse. "Did you hit him?"

  "No, doctor, he just overbalanced a bit when we put him in the chair." The response was sullen. Why should you care? What difference does it make when we have to find a way to handle these head cases? Watkins' thoughts were so transparent to Adam that he might as well have spoken aloud.

  Adam sighed, "Leave Mr. Hill with me. I'll call when we're done."

  The session completed, Adam had entrusted the old man to the care of Smithy, another of the male nurses but one with rather more warmth towards the patients. He considered for a moment, made a note on the file and then called scheduling to let them know that he was taking a ten minute break. He got up and walked down the passage.

  Lynwood Centre's Director was Dr. Ann Beecher. When Adam entered her office she was replacing her telephone receiver on its cradle. She wore a business suit rather than a white coat, which Adam thought was a fair reflection of her priorities. A slim, tidily groomed woman in her early forties, she wore reading glasses which now hung around her neck. Hazel eyes greeted Adam enquiringly as she looked up at him.

  "Watkins has been hitting the patients again," he announced baldly.

  Dr. Beecher sat back and exhaled, but looked unexcited by the news.

  "Can you prove it?" she asked.

  "I can prove that someone hit Mr. Hill. And it was Watkins who brought him in."

  "You know that's not enough to lay a charge against him."

  "Ann, there has to be a way to stop him. There must be a dozen incidents like this. We know he hits the patients. Every time, there's trauma of some kind and Watkins is there. Surely the cumulative weight of circumstantial evidence must count for something! And he's not the only one."

  "Exactly. 'He's not the only one.'" Dr. Beecher sat up and motioned Adam to take a seat.

  "Adam, please try to understand. We suspect that there may be a problem with the way patients, especially mental patients, are treated by some of the staff. But we do not 'know' that Watkins hits the patients. If, as you claim, he's not the only one, it could easily be someone else who hit Mr. Hill just before Watkins brought him to see you. We are not in a position to prove it was Watkins; we can only allege the possibility. And if we did even that much, the union would have the staff out of here in a moment. Then what? What happens to patient care with no staff? And what would the tabloids have to say about it? I have no desire to see 'Brutal Lynnwood Centre' as a newspaper headline."

  She sighed.

  "Adam, I would love to get rid of Watkins and those like him. But if we bring this into the open without being in a position to settle it once and for all, the publicity would quite possibly kill Lynnwood Centre before we got anything resolved. The longer we allow the situation to go on, the longer we are at risk of a serious incident, a patient death even. And that would be even worse for business. But we cannot start something we are not in a position to finish."

  "I'm sorry, Adam, I know you mean well. And I sympathise. But as Director it is my responsibility, and I have to take the broad view of what's best for the Centre as a whole."

  It happened that Adam was there in the foyer when they brought Bet in. She wasn't exactly a voluntary admission. She was swearing, screaming, struggling. They had to physically drag her in, 'they' being her mother, the social worker, and Centre staff. Her mother had committed her for drug rehab at least, with a request for psychological evaluation on top of that. Her behaviour didn't impress Adam much, but her looks, even in a fighting rage, did catch his eye. He was twenty-two years old, and he was assigned to her case.

  His first counselling session with her was so to say a waste of time, professionally speaking. He looked at her, he spoke to her, and she stared out of the window and fidgeted. Adam wasn't particularly bothered by that. He spent a half-hour just drinking in her face: the big grey eyes, her cheekbones, her luscious
lips. She wore her dusty blonde hair in a rough pigtail, or maybe the nurses had just done that to keep her hair out of their way. Maybe Janine – she was one of those who had a heavy handed way with the patients.

  One day he asked her, "Who are you angry with?" While he didn't know it, that question struck a chord within her that went on vibrating. She was cast unexpectedly into confronting the question, and wondering what the answer was. She gave no outward sign, but just went on staring out of the window as usual. But long after the interview was over, even when she'd been given her pill and was drifting off to sleep that night, it buzzed within her, trembling in her nerves and her stomach. It was like having a loose tooth; it made her feel slightly sick to meddle with it, but she was unable to leave it alone. Who am I angry with? Brad? Myself?

  She'd been in the Centre for a month by then, and when she felt like it she could communicate perfectly. Nevertheless, she was stubborn, and often refused to give Adam any satisfaction, or any hope, as her clinician. Her usual practice was to ignore him. She would stare out of the window, or at the things in his office; anywhere but at him. To all appearances, she was stone deaf to his efforts to get her to engage.

  All the same, in the next session with him she looked straight at him, instead of out of the window, and she spoke. "My mother," she told him. "I'm angry with my mother." She'd wrestled her way within herself from denying even the possibility, to the realisation that the answer to that intrusive, nagging question was that she was angry with her mother, whom she loved.

  With conscious effort, Adam kept himself from smiling. He had a connection, and now they could begin to make progress. And it was a key piece of her heart. It wasn't that easy, like making one's way from one place to another, where one could see a steady progress. First he had to get her to accept, and not just on the conscious level, that being angry with someone wasn't mutually exclusive with loving that person at the same time. That was just one little step, but Bet's psyche was a tangled mess after a couple of years of trying to fix itself, or break itself; but trying to find a way to live with the unendurable.

  For Adam, it was complicated. Because, as he admitted to himself, with every session, whether she spoke or not, whether she fought with him or worked with him or resisted him, she worked her way further into his heart. It was hard to keep his professional objectivity when he cared so much about her healing.

  Molly would come by nearly every day, to see Bet and, if she happened to see him, to ask Adam about her progress.

  "Molly," he had to tell her one day, "come into my office." And when he'd closed the door he took a deep breath and started.

  "Molly, I have to tell you something, and you're not going to like it. I'm afraid your visits aren't helping Bet to get better. I'm sorry, but her relationship with you is one of the problems she's working her way through. She needs to resolve her issues with you, and every time you see her, it actually sets her back. I'm going to have to ask you not to come back for at least two weeks, and then to see me first to check whether it's okay for you to visit her."

  Molly's face crumpled. "She - doesn't want me?"

  Adam sighed. "She's angry with you, and she loves you. She doesn't know how to put that together." He laid a sustaining hand on her shoulder. "It's not that she doesn't want to see you. I'm saying to you as her doctor that she needs to not see you. For a little while."

  "Why?" Molly cried out. Her eyes filled with misery, confusion and guilt.

  "It's my fault, isn't it - all her troubles, it was my fault!"

  She folded onto Adam's shoulder, crying hopelessly.

  Adam held her lightly, professionally, and rather feebly patted her back. He was, after all, only twenty-two, and he hadn't had very many mothers collapse into his arms yet.

  In another session with Bet she told him, "I like that picture." They weren't sitting over a little table anymore, but on a beige lounge suite arranged around the room, she being curled up in an armchair in the corner and Adam sitting in the other. She was a little more relaxed with him now.

  She nodded to a print on the wall, Manet's A Bar at the Folies-Bergère. The one with the barmaid staring out at you.

  "I like her," Bet said. "I bet she's like me. Or I'm like her. I bet if we two girls got together we'd have a lot in common." So they talked a little about the barmaid, and Manet, and Impressionist painters. Adam told Molly about that, and Molly bought her a coffee-table book on the Impressionists.

  And Beth asked, in a later session, "What the hell was wrong with Van Gogh? What kind of a nutter cuts his own ear off?"

  Adam gave a mental wince; he'd been hoping they wouldn't run into Vincent, or at least not the suicidal aspects. Then he reminded himself that he was supposed to be a professional, and to be able to cope with these little problems. Or, at least, he was aiming to become a professional

  This was an opening, and he decided it was time to use it. "What kind of nutter cuts off her own mother?" he countered. It was risky, he realised that. It was a big risk. But he felt that there was a fair amount of trust in their relationship by then, and he hoped it would be enough.

  She looked at him, her face closing up. He watched the shutters coming down in her eyes, her face stiffening.

  Adam couldn't stand it. He got up and went over to her, took her hands and got her to stand up. Then, very gently and carefully he put his arms round her and told her, "We love you. We want you to get through this. We don't want to lose you."

  "Please, don't go away from me like that. Please be brave. Talk about it . I'm with you."

  She just stood there, shaking. For long moments the tableau was unchanged.

  "I confess," he said, "I'm breaking all the rules here, but I love you. I love you. Your mother loves you, and I do."

  "I want to go back to my room now, please," she told him, coolly.

  "Bet... please!"

  She pulled back a bit and he let her go at once.

  They looked at each other, she with this wry smile on her face, "I don't love you, you know. I like you, but I don't love you. And I doubt you're really in love with me. It's just an infatuation."

  Adam couldn't say a word. He just looked at her in mute appeal. He felt pathetic, awkward, and afraid that he'd made an irreparable error out of the most unprofessional feelings.

  She sighed, and suddenly she was herself again.

  "Okay, okay, relax," she said to him. "I want to go back to my room because I need to think a few things through in peace and quiet. Then we'll talk, okay?"

  Adam's stomach unclenched, and his eyes filled with tears. She kissed him lightly on the cheek, and left.

  It was more than a hope that she'd given him, he thought, it was a promise.

  He couldn't wait, that night, to tell Molly that Bet was going to make it. They sat in Molly's tiny front room, and he told her everything. Well, nearly everything. It wouldn't help, after all, to tell her that he was in love with his patient. Molly had a comfortable face; she'd lived in it, and had never been afraid to face the world with who she was. She listened to everything he had to say, and they spoke for a while.

  Then she sighed. She was looking into the electric fire as she spoke, "I'm not ever going to get Beth back, am I? Bet might make it, but little Beth is gone forever."

  What the hell could he say to that, Adam wondered. He could see the grim tension around her jaw. But as he watched her it eased into tenderness.

  Then she said, "I'll just have to get to know my Bet the way I knew Beth."

  And Adam thought that was one of the bravest things he'd ever heard.

  Bet's brightening prognosis continued as the centre of their discussion.

  "She really likes that Impressionist book? She's my daughter, all right! You wouldn't know it now, but I was an art student when I was young," Molly shared.

  "I might have been good, but, well, then there was Beth..." Her eyes laughed at him, like sunlight sparkling on a shadowed sea.

  Adam told her, "She's started sketching now
, as well as just admiring pictures. I'm no artist, but I think she has talent. And it's the sort of thing the therapists love."

  Three months later, Bet was discharged. She was still on a course of tranquilizers, but nothing more than what she might need for the transition back home, and the prescription would not be renewed unless something untoward happened.

  Adam became a regular visitor at the Marlborough Street flat. Bet was at the Chelsea Arts College now, and when he came to pick her up he would usually wait there for her to come back from the school. Bet dressed semi-Goth now, usually in black, with a stud in one eyebrow, but without the very heavy makeup. Adam thought the look suited her slim figure.

  On the other hand, Adam's professionalism prevented him from making any serious move on Bet. He knew she was still fragile, still healing, and he never tried to get her into bed, however much he might have liked to. He was content to wait, happy as long as she was part of his life.

  Bet was more amused by him than anything else. At least, she liked having him around; it was like having a large, protective dog with you, a Labrador maybe. And for Adam, that was enough at the time.

  Molly's mobile buzzed, and she looked and saw a text from Adam. She smiled, and put the kettle on. He'd be there in minutes, she knew. She hummed as she puttered around in the kitchen, getting tea ready.

  Thank God for Adam, she thought. She was thankful to have her daughter back, even if this version wasn't quite the one she'd lost, and she knew that he'd played a big part in getting that to happen.

  The doorbell rang, and she stepped through to open it.

  "Adam!" she said, "What a surprise!"

  He laughed and hugged her. "You knew I was coming," he reminded her.