“Why do you think you want to hurt yourself ?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you feel depressed?”
And then I stopped and that seemed to please everyone, which is all I wanted to do at that time really, I realised. Pleasing people is easy, like passing exams, as easy as wiping away blood on soft toilet tissue, or on to a sanitary towel to make it look like my periods had started.
“Are you all right now, Natalie, do you think?”
“Yes, thank you, Dr Gray, I feel much better.”
“Good. Now are you having any trouble with food? Do you find it disgusting to eat at all?”
Towards the end of the afternoon, the church had got quieter, the paramedics gone. Most of the crews were now in and out of the entrance to Aldgate station, providing access for forensics and the traffic to mortuaries. I decided to take a tray of tea and cans of fizzy drinks over there.
When it was made, I swung easily over the low churchyard wall and started towards a couple of police officers on the far side of the entrance. But at that moment there was a flurry of activity from within, two or three paramedics moving quickly, almost at a run, towards open ambulance doors reversing in our direction.
A short stretcher emerged between two bearers, something blackened and indistinct on it, under reflective silver blanketing, like a burnt Sunday dinner in tinfoil. My first instinct was that this was a child, but later I deduced that this was a shortened adult body. They have smaller stretchers for that?
A policewoman followed and stopped about three yards in front of me. The action and raised voices had moved to the ambulance, her role complete. She held her fists under her nose suddenly, then turned towards me.
I let the tray fall, cups and tea spilling and smashing across the pavement, and held her as she buried her face in my shoulder. Her peaked cap tilted absurdly upwards as if in a raised salute. She was only there a moment and there was no sob, just a stiff little body, tight all over. Then, composed again, she pulled away. She had mousy hair and poor skin.
“Sorry, Vicar,” she said, gesturing at the tea and broken china. “Bad day at the office.” And she was gone, back on the job.
I’m told the security services recruit broken people for the dirty work. The Church certainly does. I wondered if they knew this stuff. Incredible if they do, from school reports or doctors’ notes or wherever, because I barely know about this stuff myself. The psychopath doesn’t know she’s a psychopath, right? Obviously I tick some of those boxes.
Everything looks so normal, dull even, from where I stand. Then I look at what I’ve done and it’s not like anyone else’s stuff. And it looks like someone else did it, but I know it’s just me, the one who can present this normal front to the world. Is everyone like this? I hope so, because then that makes me part of a mass of humanity, like anyone else.
There was a boy at school. Jon. After I humiliated him, I could see he’d been crying and that was good, because it showed he cared. I heard later on that he’d failed a load of exams and I wondered if that was my fault. But I can’t say I cared. I wish I could.
He was square, but not short, not really shy, but diffident in that way boys have in their mid-teens before their character kicks in, if they have one. We were paired in some physics experiment, latent heat or something similarly forgettable. He stood there a bit like my assistant at a cookery demonstration, holding the thermometer and a stick of candlewax and glancing between the whiteboard and the apparatus, not much bothered that I appeared to be doing all the prep. I was always practical, always did the heavy lifting.
Anyway, the wax in the copper pan began to form an inflating dome before us and we stared at it with a kind of fascinated detachment. Then it burst open with a koi carp pout, splattering hot foam over the front of Jon’s trousers, and subsided into itself, a retreating monster.
With a voice I hadn’t heard before, Jon said in a nasal, officious tone: “Leave him, doctor, there’s nothing more you can do.”
It wasn’t as if it was that funny, but it burst the tense piety of the physics lab. I gave an involuntary snort and sprayed our submerging creature with spots of saliva, which hissed on the pool like a geyser for a second. I was shaking, with one hand over my mouth and the other on Jon’s thermometer-bearing forearm. He had bowed his head to conceal himself behind the row in front and was hissing rhythmically.
Some arcane, distant instructions from Mr Paton, the teacher, made matters worse – I couldn’t breathe and felt a small emission moisten me down below. I turned for the door, hand still self-suffocating, as the adult words, “Are you all right, Natalie?” followed me through the door and into the corridor.
The loos were a short skip away and in that sanctuary I howled, joyously, abandoned, like grief in a war zone, watching my distorted image in the cracked mirror as the peals turned to moans and I regained control. It must have been ten minutes later, school-maximum eyeliner restored and the door clatter of lessons ending to an electric bell, that I emerged, hyperventilated and lighter. Jon ambled along the wall against the tide, his files hung at the hip, naturally, not trying to be cool – I liked that – and asked, “Are
