bag of pasta, a jar of sauce, a bag of salad and a bottle of red wine. Back at her front door, she was fumbling for her key when she felt a touch on her shoulder that made her jump.
‘Alan,’ she said. ‘What the hell are you doing here?’
‘I’m sorry. I needed to talk to you. I couldn’t wait.’
Frieda looked helplessly around. She felt like a wild animal that had been tracked back to its lair. ‘You know the rules,’ she said. ‘We have to stick to them.’
‘I know, I know, but…’
The tone was pleading. His duffel coat was wrongly buttoned and his hair was dishevelled; his face looked blotchy from the cold. Frieda had her key in her hand and it was hovering near the lock. She had many rules, but the absolute one, the inviolable one, was that she never let a patient into her house. It was always the patient’s fantasy, to get into her life, to discover what she was really like, to get a hold on her, to do to her what she was doing to them, to find out her secrets. But so many rules had been broken. She put the key in the lock and turned it.
‘Five minutes,’ she said.
He held his hand in front of him. Fingers turned to twigs. No one would want to eat him now. Dirty bare feet; they weren’t feet any more. They were roots creeping into the earth and soon he wouldn’t be able to move at all.
But they tore him up and they wrapped him round and he could feel his twigs snapping and his roots were stuffed into a sack and his mouth was stoppered up with soil and he was crammed into new darkness. They were taking him to market. This little pig went to market. Who would give a gold coin for him? He was gripped and picked up and he sank down further to the bottom of the sack and the voices grunted and said rude words and the witch shouted that Simon Said, Simon Said but Simon didn’t say anything because his mouth was shut and his voice was all gone now.
Bump, bump, bump. Then he was lying on something hard and there was a bang above him. The darkness was even darker and there was a new smell, oily and deep. He heard a loud cough, a splutter, a hum, which felt like the noise the witch-cat made when it dug its paws in and out of his sore skin, but louder. His body was bouncing up and down. His head was banging up and down on the hard surface.
Then he was still again. There was a click and he felt hard fingers pincer him through the sack, locking on to his shoulder, his soft thigh. He knew his body was falling apart because he could feel pain running through him like a river, into every crack of him. He didn’t know the word for ‘why?’ and he couldn’t remember the word for ‘please’. Nothing left. No Matthew left. Bumped along the ground. Cold. So cold. Cold like fire. There was something rattling and heaving and the voice grunted again and then suddenly he was being pulled from the sack.
Two faces in the gloom. Mouths opening and shutting. Simon Said no but he couldn’t speak. They were pushing him into a hole. Was it an oven, even though his fingers were twigs, were icicles, too sharp to eat? But it couldn’t be an oven because there was no heat, only a throbbing cold darkness. Mouth unravelled and he opened it but nothing came out. Only breath.
‘Make a sound and you’ll be cut into little pieces and fed to the birds,’ said the voice of the master. ‘Do you hear?’
Did he hear? He heard nothing now, except the sound of stone being dragged over earth and then it was black night and cold night and silent night and lost night and only his heart still spoke, like a drum under his stretched skin. I-am, I-am, I-am.
Chapter Twenty-nine
‘I saw Alan yesterday,’ said Frieda.
It was almost the first time she had spoken. When Josef had picked her up in his van, he had talked about Reuben and about work and about his family. When Frieda at last spoke, it was almost as if she were speaking to herself.
‘He is your patient, no?’
‘He came to my house. He found out where I lived and came to my house. I told him that if he was in trouble, he could get in touch any time. But he was meant to phone me, not knock on my door. It felt like a violation. If things had been normal, I would have sent him away. I would probably have stopped seeing him, referred him to someone else.’
Josef didn’t reply. He was steering his van across several lanes. ‘We take the motorway here, right?’
‘That’s right.’ Frieda moved her hands up in an involuntary gesture of self-protection as Josef swung his van into a gap between two lorries.
‘It’s OK,’ said Josef.
Frieda looked around. They were already at the beginning of a kind of countryside, frosty fields and lonely trees.
‘A violation,’ said Josef. ‘Like when I came to your house.’
‘That’s different,’ said Frieda. ‘You’re not my patient. I’m a mystery to them. They fantasize about me and quite often they fall in love with me. It’s not just me. It’s part of the job but you have to be careful.’
Josef looked across at her. ‘Do you fall in love also?’
‘No,’ said Frieda. ‘You know everything about them, all their fantasies, their secret fears, their lies. You can’t fall in love with someone if you know everything about them. I don’t tell patients about my life and I don’t let them anywhere near my house.’
‘So what did you do?’
‘I broke my rule,’ said Frieda. ‘I let him into my house, just for a few minutes. For once, I had to admit that he had a right to be curious.’
‘You tell him everything?’
‘I can’t tell him everything. I don’t understand things myself. That’s why we’re driving out here.’
‘So what you tell him?’
Frieda looked out of the window. Funny to live in a farm ten minutes out of London. She’d always thought that if she lived out of London it would be somewhere far away, somewhere that would take hours, days to get there. An abandoned lighthouse, that would be good. Perhaps not even abandoned. Could analysts retrain as lighthouse keepers? Were there still lighthouse keepers?
‘It was difficult,’ said Frieda. ‘I tried to make it as painless as possible for him. Maybe I was making it painless for
‘He was angry with you?’
‘He didn’t really react so much as go all still,’ said Frieda. ‘People are often shocked into a kind of strange calmness when you tell them really big things, things that change their whole life. I said there was more that I’d be able to tell him soon, but that the police might become involved again – although of course I don’t know about that. I don’t know if this has anything to do with the little boy or if everything has just got tangled up in my imagination. Anyway, I said I was sorry about that if it did happen, but that this time it was nothing at all to do with him. That’s a lot to deal with in one go.’
‘What did he say?’
‘I tried to get him to say something, but he didn’t want to talk. He put his head in his hands for a while. I think he might have been crying, but I’m not sure. He probably needs to go away and think about things, let them settle.’
‘He will meet his twin?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Frieda. ‘I keep thinking about it. I have this feeling that it won’t happen. Anyway, I think the issue for Alan is the guilt that he feels but doesn’t understand. It was when I told him I was going back to the police that he looked most shattered. It’s hard for him to face any more of that. It was better he heard it from me. I thought he might get angry with me but he seemed in a state of shock. He just left. I felt I’d let him down. My real job is to help my patient.’
