“We could turn her off sex.”
“That sounds like a bonus.”
Julianne didn’t find this funny. She has visions of Charlie succumbing to low self-esteem, which apparently is the first step on the slippery slope to eating disorders, rotten teeth, a bad complexion, tumbling grades, drug addiction and prostitution. I’m exaggerating of course, but at least Julianne turns to me for advice.
We’re estranged, not divorced. The subject is raised occasionally (never by me) but we haven’t got round to signing the papers. In the meantime, we share the raising of two daughters, one of them a bright, enchanting seven-year-old, the other a teenager with a smart mouth and a dozen different moods.
I moved back to London eight months ago. Sadly, I don’t see as much of the girls, which is a shame. I have almost come full circle-establishing a new clinical practice and living in north London. This is how it used to be five years ago when Julianne and I had a house on the border of Camden Town and Primrose Hill. In the summer, when the windows were open, we could hear the sound of lions and hyenas at London Zoo. It was like being on safari without the minivans.
Now I live in a one-bedroom flat that reminds me of something I had when I was at college-cheap, transitory, full of mismatched furniture and a fridge stocked with Indian pickles and chutneys.
I try not to dwell on the past. I touch it only gingerly with the barest tips of my thoughts, as though it were a worrying lump in my testis, probably benign, but lethal until proven otherwise.
I am practicing again. There is a bronze plaque on the door saying JOSEPH O’LOUGHLIN, CLINICAL PSYCHOLOGIST, with various letters after my name. Most of my referrals are from the Crown Prosecution Service, although I work two days a week for the NHS.
So far today I have seen a cross-dressing car salesman, an obsessive-compulsive florist and a nightclub bouncer with anger management issues. None of them are particularly dangerous, simply struggling to cope.
My secretary, Bronwyn, knocks on the door. She’s an agency temp who chews gum faster than she types.
“Your two-o’clock is here,” she says. “I was wondering if I could leave early today?”
“You left early yesterday.”
“Yes.”
She departs without further discussion.
Mandy enters, aged twenty-nine, blonde and overweight, with terrible skin and eyes that should belong to an older woman. She has been sent to see me because her two children were found alone in a locked flat in Hackney. Mandy had gone clubbing with her boyfriend and slept over at his place. She told police that she felt her daughter, aged six, was old enough to look after her younger brother, four. Both children are fine, by the way. A neighbor found them fluttering like chickens over the biscuit crumbs and feces that dotted the carpet.
Mandy looks at me accusingly now, as though I’m personally responsible for her children being taken into care. For the next fifty minutes we discuss her history and I listen to her excuses. We agree to meet next week and I write up my notes.
It’s just after three. Charlie’s train arrives in half an hour and I’m going to meet her at the station. I don’t know what we’ll do in Oxford on the weekend. I’m due to talk at a mental health symposium, although I can’t imagine anyone showing up, given the weather, but the tickets have been sent (first class) and they’ve booked me into a nice hotel.
Packing my briefcase, I take my overnight bag from the cupboard and lock up the office. Bronwyn has already gone, leaving a hint of her perfume and a lump of chewing gum stuck to her mug.
At Paddington Station I look for Charlie among crowds of passengers spilling from the carriages of the First Great Western service. She’s among the last off the train. She’s talking to a boy who is pushing a mountain bike with all the nonchalance of a Ferrari driver. He’s wearing a duffel coat and is cultivating sideburns.
The boy rides away. Charlie restores a set of white earbuds to her ears. She’s wearing jeans, a baggy sweater and an overcoat left over from the German Luftwaffe.
She offers me each cheek to kiss and then leans into a hug.
“Who was that?”
“Just a guy.”
“Where did you meet him?”
“On the train.”
“What was his name?”
She stops me. “Is this going to be twenty questions, Dad, because I didn’t take notes. Was I supposed to take notes? You should have warned me. I could have written you a full report.”
The sarcasm she inherited from her mother, or maybe they teach it at that private school that costs me so much money.
“I was just making conversation.”
Charlie shrugs. “His name is Christian, he’s eighteen, he comes from Bristol and he’s going to be a doctor-a pediatrician to be exact-and he thinks he might work in the Third World for a while, but he’s not my type.”
“You have a type?”
“Yep.”
“May I ask what your type is?”
She sighs, weary of explaining things. “No girl my age should ever date a boy her parents would approve of.”
“Is that a rule?”
“Yep.”
I take her bag and check the departures board. Our train to Oxford leaves in forty minutes.
“So is there any news I should know about? Any latest developments?”
“Nope.”
“How’s school?”
“Good.”
“Emma?”
“She’s fine.”
I’m interrogating her again. Charlie isn’t a talker. Her baseline demeanor is too-cool-to-care.
We buy sandwiches in plastic triangles and soft drinks in plastic bottles. Charlie puts her headphones back in her ears so I can hear the fuzzy thunga-thunga-twang as we board the train and sit opposite each other.
She has dyed her hair since I saw her last and has an annoying fringe that falls over her eyes. I worry about her. She frowns too often. For some reason she seems compelled to figure out life too early, long before she has the equipment.
The train leaves on time and we pass out of London, the wheels playing a jazz percussion beneath my feet. Houses give way to fields-a landscape frozen into still life, where the only signs of life are smudges of smoke rising from chimneys or the headlights of cars waiting at crossings.
A couple are kissing in the seats across the aisle, locked together. Her leg is pressed between his thighs.
“That’s disgusting,” says Charlie.
“They’re just kissing.”
“I can hear suction.”
“It’s a public place.”
“They should get a room.”
I glance at the couple again and feel a Pavlovian twinge of arousal or nostalgia. The girl is young and pretty. She reminds me of Julianne at the same age. Being in love. Belonging to someone.
Just outside of Oxford, the train slows and stops. The wheels creak forward periodically and then shudder to a standstill. Charlie presses her hand against the carriage window and watches a long line of men move across a snowy field, bent at the waist, as though pulling invisible plows.
“Have they lost something?”
“I don’t know.”
The train nudges forward again. Through the sleet-streaked window I see a police car bogged axle deep in snow on a farm track. A muddy Land Rover is parked on the nearby embankment. A circle of men, figures in white,
