appointment. There is talk of new cutbacks which could lead to Oxsmith closing for good. But raw from my enforced exclusion from what rehab called ‘the cut and thrust’, I can’t afford to be choosy about my employment. In the absence of a long-term plan, part of my persuasive argument to myself, in deciding to resettle, is that a short-term strategy in a strange place is better than none, in a familiar one.
Amid the broken staplers, the withered spider plant and the old styrofoam coffee cups of Joy McConey’s vacated office is a greetings card, the kind that’s ‘left blank for your personal message’. Inside, in small, frantic- looking handwriting, someone has stated, cryptically: ‘
I am not a nice person.
I have gleaned this much from my fraught fellow-workers: I’ve been assigned Bethany Krall as one of my main cases because no one else wants to deal with her. As the newcomer, I have no choice in the matter. Bethany has been labelled intractable by everyone who has dealt with her so far, with the exception of Joy McConey, whose notes are not in the file — very possibly because she never wrote any. While I’m not nervous about having Bethany Krall on my list, I am not enthusiastic either. My perspective on physical violence has shifted since my accident. I now want to avoid it at all costs, and have taken every possible measure to do so, with the exception of having my strangulation-length hair cut short because I’m vain about it. But perhaps, with Bethany Krall on my list, I’ll be visiting the hairdresser after all: according to the case-notes, my new charge is something of an extremist in the aggression department.
After ten years of dealing with criminally psychotic minors I am used to stories like Bethany Krall’s, but the reports of her mother’s murder still manage to stir up a familiar, heart-sinking queasiness, a kind of moral ache. The full-colour police photos are shocking enough to make me blink, redirect my gaze out of the window, and wonder what kind of person decides to opt for a career in forensic pathology. Apart from the turbines in the distance, there isn’t much to comfort the eye. The shimmering tarmac of the deserted basketball court, a line of industrial-sized rubbish bins, and beyond the electrified perimeter fence, a vista that twangs a country-and-western chord of self- pity in me. For a brief moment, when I first arrived, I thought of putting a photo of Alex — Laughing Alpha Male at Roulette Wheel — next to my computer, alongside my family collection: Late Mother Squinting into Sun on Pebbled Beach, Brother Pierre with Post-Partum Wife and Male Twins, and Compos Mentis Father Fighting
The happy drawer.
Before taking the lift up to the room christened, with creepy institutional earnestness, the Creativity Workshop, I go through the rest of Bethany Krall’s file, setting aside the more detailed notes of her drug regimen and physical check-ups to glance at later. The facts are stark enough. Two years ago, on April 5th, during the Easter school holidays, Bethany Krall stabbed her mother Karen to death with a screwdriver in a frenzied and unexplained attack. At fourteen, Bethany Krall was small and underweight for her age. Remarkable, then, that her mother’s savaging should have been so ferocious and sustained: the child had drawn huge strength from somewhere. But there was no question she had committed the murder: the house was locked from the inside and her fingerprints were all over the weapon. Bethany’s father Leonard, an evangelical preacher, was away at a prophecy conference in Birmingham at the time, having left that morning. He had spoken to his wife and daughter separately just an hour before the tragedy, and reported that Karen was concerned about Bethany’s loss of appetite, while Bethany herself had complained of severe headaches. Karen Krall had put the phone on the loudspeaker, and they had all prayed together. This was a family tradition.
At ten-thirty that evening a neighbour heard violent screaming and raised the alarm, but by the time the police arrived Karen Krall was dead. They found her daughter curled on the floor next to her in a foetal position. In this photograph, you don’t see Bethany’s face, but you see the part of her mother’s that isn’t blood-covered. The screwdriver is rammed deep into her left eye, its yellow plastic handle protruding. It has an odd jauntiness, like a dinner-fork stuck upright in a joint of meat cooked rare, and abandoned mid-meal. The pool of blood on the floor has developed the kind of skin that acrylic or emulsion paint will form. Another photograph, taken from above, shows an open waste bin containing, according to the notes, ‘the charred remains of one King James Bible’. A physical examination immediately after the tragedy showed recent bruising on Bethany’s body, particularly the upper arms, and damage to both wrists. From this it was concluded that a severe physical struggle had taken place.
On the next page is a happier portrait of the Kralls, taken a year before the family imploded. It shows a dark-haired, sharp-faced child, and on either side of her, the parents: a good-looking father and his pale, more meagre wife. They are all smiling widely — so widely, in Bethany’s case, that the braces on her teeth take centre stage. Unhappiness takes many forms, I reflect. But happiness, or the semblance of it, can be as limited and unhelpful as the word ‘cheese’. Bethany’s teachers described her as highly intelligent but disturbed. Reading between the lines I suspect that like so many kids of her generation, she is a classic product of the last decade’s ‘interesting times’, of its food shortages and mass riots and apocalyptically expanded Middle East war, and in her case, more specifically, of the Faith Wave that followed the global economic crash: preacher’s strong-headed teenage daughter, who questioned the dominant role of fundamentalist Christianity in her life and rebelled. At school she was self-destructive, and had very possibly had sexual relationships with boys, but she paid attention in class, showing a particular aptitude for science, art and geography. There were no obvious signs of mental illness, though at the end of that spring term, in a staff meeting, concern was expressed that she seemed ‘more unhappy than usual’.
I flick through to the next section, which is the attending police psychiatrist’s report. Dr Waxman’s write-up is verbose, but the story it tells is straightforward enough. In the immediate wake of the murder, Bethany’s coping mechanism was as brutal and efficient as a field amputation in time of war: she lost her memory. She did not deny committing the crime, but claimed to have no recollection of it, or what had provoked her to such drastic action. Nor would she speak to her father, when he returned, distraught, from his trip to Birmingham. Her refusal led to distressing scenes. ‘Elective amnesia as a form of denial, or refuge, is not uncommon among those who have experienced trauma,’ notes Waxman. ‘This can be just as applicable to the perpetrator of a crime as to its victim.’ On committing her to the care of Oxsmith, Waxman pronounced himself hopeful that she would make progress within the next few weeks and months, and moved on to his next case.
But Waxman’s optimism about the beneficial effects of Ox-smith Adolescent Secure Psychiatric Hospital was misplaced. Two years into her institutionalisation, Bethany Krall had made four attempts on her own life and seriously attacked another patient. Her memory had returned, but she refused to speak about the murder or what triggered it. She began to starve herself and, after being diagnosed with acute depression, was given a panoply of mood-altering drugs, none of which proved effective in improving her morale. Bethany showed no interest in co- operating in therapy sessions, and remained largely mute. When she spoke, it was to express the belief that her heart was shrinking, her blood was poisoned, and she was ‘rotting from the inside’. Increasingly experimental drug combinations were applied, some of which made her state of mind worse, and led to side-effects such as trembling, dribbling, lethargy and, in one instance, convulsions. She exhibited extreme disturbance, cutting herself frequently, and becoming dangerously underweight.
One day, in the wake of a severe thunderstorm during which she mutilated her throat with a plastic fork, Bethany insisted that she was dead, and that her body was slowly putrefying. To prove that as a corpse she was unable to digest food, she stopped eating altogether. At this point, Cotard’s syndrome — a nihilistic conviction that one’s body has expired — was aired as a diagnosis, and after some discussions, it was agreed that she should undergo electroconvulsive therapy as a last-ditch resort.
The results are described as ‘dramatic’. Bethany began to eat, talk and respond more positively to therapy.
