mind.
Then, on the following Sunday morning, Michael Daley had suddenly turned up. I was in the garden piling planks, canes, old branches on to a bonfire when his Audi pulled into the drive. He didn’t come over but removed a dozen or so stuffed Waitrose bags from the back. Was he buying food for us now? No such luck. He had brought some of Finn’s clothes which the police had released from the house.
‘Where am I supposed to put all of this?’ I asked as we ferried bags up the path into the hallway.
‘I thought it might be a step back into normality,’ Daley said.
‘I wondered how long Finn could keep padding around in my rolled-up jeans.’
‘Sorry I can’t stay,’ said Daley. ‘Give her my regards.’
‘Regards,’ I said. ‘I never know what they are.’
‘You can think of something.’
‘Are you all right?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You’ve lost another patient.’
‘Is that a joke?’ he asked and said nothing more. He left without seeing Finn. I called her down.
‘Look what the doctor brought you,’ I said.
She was visibly startled. She pulled a maroon crushed-velvet blouse from one of the bags and held it up.
‘I’ve got some work to do outside,’ I said. ‘I’m burning almost everything that’s movable in the garden. I’ll leave you to go through it, if you want.’
She nodded but said nothing. I left her, and when I looked back, before closing the front door, I saw her kneeling on my hall floor holding the velvet to her cheek, as if she were a tiny lost child.
Gardening would always be a mystery to me, but I loved making fires. There had been rain and it was a tricky business but that only increased the ultimate satisfaction. I had screwed newspaper into balls at various points on the windward side of my pile of rubbish. I lit them and they crackled, glowed and went out. I looked in the shed and found an almost empty box of firelighters and a washing-up-liquid bottle that didn’t smell of washing-up liquid any more. I wrapped up the entire box in newspapers and pushed it deep into the recesses of the rubbish pile. I sprayed all that was left of the petrolly liquid over it. I had created a small incendiary device and wasn’t sure whether it would ignite my pile of rubbish or simply blow it up. I lit a match and tossed it at the heap. There was a low thud, as if a punch-bag had been dropped on to a concrete floor. I saw a yellow glow, heard crackling, then flames escaped from the pile, and I was pushed back by a soft invisible pillow of heat against my cheeks and forehead.
I felt the usual thrill at the transition from the stage when the fire couldn’t be started to the stage when it couldn’t be stopped. I began to feed the flames with scraps from all over the garden. There were old grey wooden lattices, a pile of ancient planks by the back wall of the house, all of them soon cracking in the core of heat, sending sparks flying high. I felt a presence at my side. It was Finn, the reflection of the flames dancing in her eyes.
‘Good fire, eh?’ I said. ‘I should have been a pyromaniac. I
Finn leaned close to me, placing a hand on my shoulder. I could feel the brush of her lips as she whispered into my ear. She finished and moved back, but she was still close. I could see the golden down on her cheeks.
‘Are you sure?’ I asked.
She nodded.
‘Wouldn’t you like to drop it into an Oxfam shop or something?’
She shook her head.
‘I don’t want anybody else to wear it.’
‘Whatever you think is right.’
So she went back into the house and a minute later she emerged with an armful of skirts, dresses and shirts. She came past me and heaved them on to the pyre. The bright fabrics ballooned, bubbled and burst. She made trip after trip. There were some beautiful things among them, the things she must have bought after she’d lost weight, and Finn must have detected a wistful expression on my face, because she broke off from one of her journeys to push a trilby hat on my head and wind a damson cashmere scarf around my neck. The hat fitted me perfectly.
‘Rent,’ she said with a smile.
She kept nothing for herself at all. When it was all over we contemplated the fire together, watching the fragments of braid and ribbon being consumed, and I felt a little sick, like a champion eater who has been out- gourmandized.
‘So what do we do now?’ Finn asked finally.
‘I think that tomorrow I’ll take you shopping.’
‘I’m sorry, Sam,’ Finn said, swallowing the last of her coffee. ‘Oh, it’s bitter. Nice. I know it was melodramatic, burning them all like that. It felt like something that I had to do.’
‘You don’t have to explain it to me.’
‘Yes, I do. This is hard for me to put into words, but what I feel is something like this. In a way I feel contaminated by those people who tried to… you know. My life has been ripped apart and completely changed by them. Do you see what I mean? You like to feel that your life has been directed in a good way. But I felt, feel, that my life has been put in a certain direction by people who hated us. I had to cut all that away and be reborn. Remake myself. Do you see what I mean?’
‘I understand completely,’ I said with deliberate bland acceptance. ‘But you’re used to doing that, aren’t you?’
‘How do you mean?’
‘You suffered from anorexia, it was life-threatening. But you moved on. You know how to recover, and that’s a wonderful thing.’ I paused for a moment, wondering how far I could take this. ‘You know, it’s funny. The first sight I had of you was in some old photo of you, plump, jolly-looking. And here you are, a different person, secure, alive.’
I looked at Finn. Her hand was trembling so much she had to put her knife down.
‘I hated that girl. Fat Fiona Mackenzie. I feel no connection to her. I made myself a new life, or thought I had. But now it’s hard for me to accept the good things. Meeting you and Elsie and all of this. I sometimes think that I’ve met you and Elsie because of, you know,
I kept feeling different things and I was rather afraid that I was saying different things at different times. If I was discussing her case with a colleague we could have considered the different therapeutic options and the varying, much-disputed rates of success for each one. With one or two of my most trusted friends, I might have remarked that in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder we were still stuck in medieval times, in the age of superstition, of humours and agues and bleedings. Finn was looking to me for the sort of authority people expect from doctors. And I knew so much about the subject that I was less certain about it than somebody who knew less man I did might have been. Most of what people thought they knew about trauma and its treatment was wrong. The truth seems to be that talking about the experience makes some people better, some people worse and leaves other people about the same. That isn’t what people like to hear from doctors.
I took a deep breath and aimed for as much of the truth as we could both manage.
‘I don’t know, Finn. I wish I could give you an easy answer and make you feel better, but I can’t. I want you to feel that you can tell me anything. On the other hand, I’m not the police. I’m not after you for evidence. And I can’t say this too often: I’m not your doctor. There isn’t some schedule of treatment involved here. But if I can be disloyal to my great and noble profession for a moment, that may not be entirely a bad thing.’ I reached across the table and took Finn by the hand. ‘I sometimes think that doctors find it particularly difficult to accept suffering. You had a most terrible, unspeakable thing happen to you. All I can say is that the pain will diminish over time. It will probably be better when the bastards who did it are caught. On the other hand, if you have specific physical symptoms, you must mention them to me or to Dr Daley and he’ll deal with them. All right?’
‘Sort of.’
‘Good enough.’
‘Sam?’
