I figured sugar was what was needed most. So I brought hot sweet tea. Then I took round a box of chocolate bars I’d taken from the shop, after they’d got some carbs down in the form of sandwiches and baguettes.
“I shouldn’t really,” one of the youngest said. “I’ve told my mum that I’ve stopped eating those.”
“Well, she’s not here, is she?” I said. “And I won’t tell her.” He laughed and took one. I could have been at a church fete.
The other priests were in black cassocks, because this was their church and it gave them a clear identity. The phone was ringing off the hook upstairs in the office. The Daily Mail, The Times and ITN reporters trying to find out what was going on.
“Tell them to fuck off,” said one of the older priests.
“They only need to know what’s going on,” I said. “Then they’ll go away.”
I took three of the calls.
“Who am I talking to?” asked the first.
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Just say I’m one of the priests here.”
I realised I didn’t want my name in the papers again. Not this time.
Downstairs, the shift was changing. I heard the priest who’d taken the aggressive media stand on a mobile phone.
“Are you all right, love?” he was saying softly. Turned out his daughter had been on the Circle Line through the City that morning. Different time, but he couldn’t be sure. She was safe at home. He hadn’t mentioned it before. I wanted to kiss him.
There was a big bloke standing slightly apart, his tunic loosened at the neck. He was doing that stare into the middle distance, unfocused. I poured a mug and put three sugars in. “Tea?” I said. He took it. “I’m Nat.”
He didn’t look at me, but I’d given him permission to say something. So I just waited.
“Sometimes you wonder if they’d be better off dead. There’s a girl down there. Can’t be more than twenty. Both legs gone above the knee. Sometimes you think they’d be better off dead,” he repeated. There was a long pause that neither of us filled. “I thought she’d be better off dead.”
Ah, there it is. She must have been borderline G3. And he’d wished her dead. He needed somewhere to put the guilt.
“Well done,” said the police officer at the door when he’d moved away. “They’re told to talk about it quickly afterwards. There’s some counselling too, but it’s pretty useless. It’s the other halves who get it all in the end. They’re the ones who find them whimpering and wet with sweat in a corner of the bedroom in the middle of the night.”
I went outside and sat next to a priest on a bench in the churchyard. He talked amiably about suicide bombers and newspaper reporters. I noticed one side of his face bore the scars of an old burn and I wondered how it had happened, but I didn’t ask him. We sat and looked out over the empty streets and listened to London in the distance, a shortened lifetime away.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Do what?”
“Punish yourself ?”
I looked at Dr Gray as he slumped in his button-back chair, corduroyed short legs crossed and away to one side, silly maroon-patterned socks in scuffed slip-on brown shoes.
“Well, I thought it was your job to tell me that.” That was quite an answer for a fifteen-year-old and I was proud of it. It was the same sort of approach I took some years later when I went to that selection conference to be a Church of England priest.
I’d never had an eating disorder. We’d been through all that. Dr Gray, a bumptious middle-aged man, seemed so fixated on me having anorexia or bulimia that I’d wondered for the first session whether he’d got his files mixed up. This would have been around my third session and I only went about six times.
“I told you. I cut myself.”
“Well, that seems a very unpleasant thing to do.”
He was so useless, I wonder today whether he was qualified at all. I’d told him I self-harmed out of pity for him really. I needed to give him something. He had a consulting room in a mock-Tudor parade of shops, with net curtains and cursory ornaments, scruffily piled books on a cheap self-build bookcase.
“Shall I tell you why I do it?”
“Go on, then.”
“I want to see what’s inside me. It’s hard to explain, but I also feel a pressure in me that needs to be released.”
I would drag the pointy end of a pair of scissors up the loose white of the inside of my forearm, or the flank of a thigh as I sat on the loo. If you pull with little more than the weight of the blade, as a harrow might bounce over stony, dry earth, little red beads pop up in its furrow, like beads of blossoming vegetation. The trick is to extract blood that can be wiped away, leaving a blushing pink trace, but healed, as easily dried as tears.
“How often does this happen?”
“Most days. On the way to school. In a corner of the bus. Sometimes in the loos at dinner time. Even on a couple of occasions in class.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yes.”
Scissors were good, but those little plastic white knives from supermarket snacks had a useful little serrated edge that helped with applying exactly the right pressure, and I liked the red against the smooth virginal white. Even the spike of a geometry protractor worked, though it lent itself to jabbing with an angry clenched fist. I was never into jabbing.
“So why did you come to see me?”
“My form mistress noticed. She thought it might be drugs.”
“Do you take drugs?”
“No.”
I had to tell this child therapist something, so I told him
