The safe house

‘I did not promise.’

‘I’m telling of you.’

We’d been up three hours already, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock. Elsie had slipped into my bed before six, scrambled up beside me, pulling the duvet off in the icy dawn, scratching my legs with her toenails, which I’d failed to cut, putting cold little feet against my back, butting her head under my arm, kissing me with a warm, wet, pursed mouth, peeling back my eyelids with her expert fingers, turning on the bedside light so that for a moment the room full of unpacked boxes and cases from which creased clothes spilled had disappeared in a dazzle of pain.

‘Why can’t you collect me?’

‘I’ve got to work. Anyway, you like Linda.’

‘I don’t like her hair. Why do you have to work? Why can’t Daddy work and you stay at home like other mummies?’

She doesn’t have a daddy. Why does she say things like that?

‘I’ll come and get you as early as I can from Linda, I promise. I’ll make you your supper.’ I ignored the face she made at that. ‘And I’ll take you to school in the mornings. All right?’ I tried to think of something cheerful. ‘Elsie, why don’t we play our game? What’s in the house?’

‘Don’t know.’

‘You do know. What’s in the kitchen?’

Elsie closed her eyes and wrinkled her brow with the effort.

‘A yellow ball.’

‘Brilliant. What’s in the bath?’

‘A packet of Coco Pops.’

‘Fantastic. And what’s in Elsie’s bed?’

But I’d lost her. Elsie was staring out of the window. She pointed at a low, slatey cloud. I turned on the radio. ‘… freezing weather… high winds… north-easterlies’. Did that mean from the north-east or towards the northeast? What did it matter? I turned the knob: crackles, jazz, crackles, stupid discussion, crackles. I switched it off and focused on the landscape, such as it was. Was it for this I’d left London? Flat, furrowed, grey, wet, with an occasional industrial-looking barn made of aluminium or breeze-block. Not a good place to hide.

When I was trying to make up my mind about the Stamford job, I made a list. On one side I’d listed the pros, the other the CONS. I love lists – every day at work I make long ones, with priorities asterisked in a different colour. I feel in control of my life once I’ve reduced it to a half-sheet of A₄, and I love crossing off the things I’ve done, neatly. Sometimes I even put at the top of the list a few neatly crossed-out tasks I’ve already completed, as a way of getting some momentum which I hope will get me through the things I haven’t done.

What had the pros been? Something like this:CountrysideBigger houseMore time to spend with ElsieJob that I’ve always wantedMore moneyTime to finish the trauma projectWalksPet for Elsie (?)Smaller schoolWork out relationship with DannyAdventure and changeMore time (this was asterisked several times since it engulfed all the other reasons)On the con side it simply said:Leave London.

I grew up in the suburbs and through my teenage years I only ever wanted to get to the centre, the hub, the bull’s eye. I used to go shopping in Oxford Street with my mother when I was little and she was still choosing my clothes (demure circle skirts, polo-neck tops, neat jeans, navy sandals with nibbly little buckles, sensible coats with brass buttons, thick ribbed tights that never stayed up properly, and ‘Oh, look at you, you’re getting so tall,’ my mother would say as she tried to force my gangly body into clothes for dainty girls). I’d sit at the top of the double- decker bus and stare at the crowds, the dirt, the chaos, the wild-haired youths swinging down the pavements, couples kissing on the corners, the hot bright shops, the disorder of it all, the terror and the delight. I always said I was going to be a doctor and move into the centre of London. While Roberta was dressing her dolls and carrying them around, clutched to her chest, cooing, I was amputating them. I was going to be a doctor because no one that I knew was a doctor, and because half of my class at school wanted to be nurses and because my mother raised her eyebrows and shrugged every time I told her my ambition.

London to me meant tiredness, early-morning starts, traffic jams, jaunty radio stations every notch along the dial, dirt in my clothes, dog shit on the pavements; meant I was called ‘doctor’ by men who looked like my father; meant advancement and money in the bank that I could spend on loud ear-rings and unsensible coats and pointy shoes with loud buckles on them; meant sex with strangers on strange weekends that I could hardly remember now, except for the sense in my euphoric body that I’d abandoned Edgware, not Edgware the place, but the Edgware in my mind with its Sunday lunches and three streets to get to somewhere that wasn’t a house. London meant having Elsie and losing her father. London meant Danny. It was the geography of my coming of age. As I drove into Stamford, having unpinned Elsie’s fingers from my jacket and kissed her suddenly flushed cheeks and promised on an impulse to collect her from school myself, I suddenly missed London as if it were a lover, a far-off object of desire. Though, actually, the city had betrayed me after Elsie was born, had become a grid of playgrounds and creches and babysitters and Mothercares. A parallel universe I’d never even noticed until I’d joined it, working in the week, pushing a buggy on Saturday and Sunday, swearing revenge.

This was what I had dreamed of. Time. Me, alone in the house, and no child and no nanny and no Danny and no schedule that ticked away in my mind. There was a miaow and a prickle of claws on my leg. Opening the cat food at arm’s length, I filled Anatoly’s bowl and shoved it and him out of the back door. A breath of air blew a whiff of the tuna and rabbit in jelly back into my face, provoking a heaving cough and memories of seasickness. How could something like that be good even for a cat? I washed up Elsie’s bowl and mug from breakfast, and made myself a cup of instant coffee with water that hadn’t properly boiled, so the granules floated to the surface. Outside, rain dripped on to my waterlogged garden; the pink hyacinths that I’d been so excited about yesterday had tipped sideways in the rubbly soil, and their rubbery petals looked grimy. Apart from the sound of rain I could hear nothing, not even the sea. A feeling of dreariness crept over me. Normally, I would have been at work for two, maybe three or, in a crisis, four hours by now; the phone would be ringing, my in-tray would be overflowing, my secretary would bring me a cup of tea and I’d be dismayed by how quickly the morning was going. I turned on the radio: ‘Four small children died in a…’, and turned it off again hastily. I wished that someone had sent me a letter; even junk mail would be better than nothing.

I decided I ought to work. The drawing that Elsie had done for me last week, when I’d complained about forlorn spaces on the sallow, peeling walls of my study, gazed accusingly down at me from where I’d pinned it above my desk. The room was dank and chilly, so I switched on the bar fire; it heated up my left leg and made me feel droopily in need of a morning nap.

The screen of my word processor glowed green. A cursor pulsed at a healthy sixty beats a minute. I clicked the mouse on the hard disk, then on the empty folder called Book. ‘Even a journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step,’ somebody irritating had once said. I created a file and labelled it ‘Introduction’. I opened the file and wrote ‘Introduction’ again. The word sat, pitifully small, at the head of a green, blank space. I highlighted it and upped the typesize, then changed the font so that it thickened and slanted. There, that looked better, more impressive anyway.

I tried to remember what I’d written in my proposal for the publisher. My brain felt as shiny and empty as the screen in front of me. Perhaps I should start with the title. What does one call a book about trauma? In my proposal I’d simply called it ‘Trauma’, but that sounded bald, a kind of scholarly idiot’s guide, and I wanted this to be controversial, polemical and exciting, a look at the way trauma as a label is misused, so that real sufferers remain invisible, while disaster junkies jump on the bandwagon. I typed, in large print, above the ‘Introduction’, ‘The Hidden Wound’ and centred it. That sounded like a book about menstruation. With a smooth swipe of the mouse, I erased the letters. ‘From Shell Shock to Culture Shock’. No, no, no. ‘Trauma Victims and Trauma Addicts’? But that was a small strand of the book, not its overall pattern. ‘Soul Searching’. That was a title for a religious pamphlet. ‘On Griefs Track’. Yuk. How about ‘The Trauma Years’? I’d save that for my memoirs. At least time was passing now. For nearly three quarters of an hour I typed and erased titles, until at the end I was back at the start. ‘Introduction.’

I ran myself a bath and filled it with expensive oils and lay in its slippery warmth till my fingers shrivelled, reading a book about end-games in chess and listening to the sound of rain. Then I ate two pieces of toast with