Edge. Part 35

Josh let go of her hands and sat on the bed.

"You've no idea how warfare" remembering fourteen years old and the rifle coming up and his head exploding years old and the rifle coming up and his head exploding but that was not the worst of it "screws you up." but that was not the worst of it "screws you up."

"We can deal with this later," said Suzanne. "And I mean it we will deal with it."

"Maybe there are things that shouldn't be... but it's Richard we need to think about. Sorry, my l... Sorry."

Her lips twitched.

"Everyone," she said, "has the resources they need to deal with their life and make it better, and I mean everyone."

"What if I want to learn Chinese, and I have no materials and no ability? There's positive thinking and there's delusion."

"I didn't say you could learn the language in ten minutes, but that's more than enough time to dissolve whatever holds you back, like the false belief that you can't learn a language. I worked with a webmovie writer who'd been blocked for three years. Freeing up the block took five minutes. It still took him a year to write the next script, but he did it, that's the point."

"And you didn't discover what caused the block?" he said.

"Actually, the guy knew precisely what had caused it, but if he hadn't, I wouldn't have tried to find out. I didn't need to know. It's a form of brief therapy, and that's a technical term."

This was what he did not understand about her work. Despite the counselling he had been through, he still thought of therapy as uncovering hidden pasts.

"So treating traumas, you don't need to know the details."

No heads exploded in his memory. Her presence kept him calm.

"It depends. If someone was in a traffic accident, not their fault, just something dreadful they had experienced... then all I need do is recode the memory, so they don't re-experience anguish whenever they think of it. Not amnesia, but no overwhelming emotion, either. Delving back into their childhood and how they related to their parents would be nonsense, because it's not the problem."

"All right."

"The old opponents of that approach called it treating the symptom instead of the cause, but sometimes treating the symptom is all you need. For example, sweating is a symptom of bubonic plague. During the Black Death, if the victims had been given more fluids, many would have lived, because it was the dehydration that got them."

This was not what he wanted to hear, because there was something odd about young Richard's reactions,

and not just to witnessing his friend fall.

"On the other hand, if the trauma patient is a victim of violence" Suzanne glanced down at her own inner forearms "then recoding the memory is not enough, because two-thirds of such people become victims again within eighteen months. Their behaviour patterns mark them out as soft prey for predators, so then I do have to explore their world, use the psychodynamic approach, and help them get more freedom in their lives."

"So maybe you need to uncover Richard's past."

"Ah. That's what you're after."

"Look, obviously my first sight of him was when he's under stress. But he gave this strange reaction..."

He described the soft cry that Richard emitted, seeing the bulldog logo on the back of a paramedic's jumpsuit. And how his catatonia if that was what it was started then, not at the moment Opal fell.

"I'll ask," said Suzanne. "But when the moment is right."

"OK.".

"So what are you going to do next?"

"I thought I'd take a drive to Surrey."

"To Richard's father?" She glanced at the closed door.

"Yeah, but maybe I should do it after you've talked with Richard some more."

"That would be wise."

"Why don't I go fetch my car from the hotel, and bring it back here?"

"To take Richard home?"

"Only if he's ready."

"All right. I may not have anything for you. Uncovering memories is delicate, because it's too easy to implant false ones, vivid hallucinations of things that never happened."

"I have vivid memories of last night. Something I must have imagined."

She leaned over, and their kiss was fire.

"A shared hallucination," she said.

"Relax now, in trance everything is fine, and my voice will go with you as you go deeper still into the tranceinside-the-trance, and go back in time to a moment when..."

Richard felt himself floating in a vast, star-filled cavern, totally calm; and when the memory rose up, he held still instead of screaming, knowing he was strong enough to watch.

It is a world of giants, the adults, and they do not seem to realise how confusing it all is. The plane travel is wonderful, then boring, seeming to last for days. He plays games on his pad, sleeps, eats food he does not like, knowing Father will shout if he leaves any behind.

"Twenty-one countries," says the lady in uniform, "in twenty-five days. Even I don't do that."

He has no idea how to reply, or quite what the words mean, but at least she is friendly. Then there is

A ripple moved through him, a tightening of his stomach, but then her hand was on his shoulder and he relaxed, calm again.

"Tell me. Go back to just before the time you were afraid."

Father's presence, big and comforting however much it frightens, because this is Father, strong and unbeatable, around whom the world revolves. The whole trip has been a chaos of dislocating sights: corridors and rooms, smiling faces looking down on him, fake-cheerful voices, adults chivvying him along, their words without sense.

There is the clinic and the grinning dog on the wall, the cartoon dog called Timmy he has seen before. Big hands press his shoulder blades, urging him forward, and he feels the grown-ups might trample him like the elephants they saw yesterday or the day before, those legs longer than he had expected for such round, heavy creatures with amazing trunks that Father said were prehistoric or something like that, and if only Father would hold his hand while the smiling men and women showed them round all these places but there was grown-up work to do, Father said so, which was why everything was a jumble of adults who

The hand on his shoulder.

"Closer to that time, Richard. To just before the fear started, and you can tell me about it now."

do not notice when he slips away by sort-of accident, staying behind when they turn, continuing into the s.h.i.+ning white place they had partly explored. Somewhere a toy had squeaked, so perhaps there are other children here, boys and girls he can talk to and maybe play with. He goes through the big doors that slide back with a whoosh, the air feeling very cold as he steps further inside.

There is a chair beside the raised thing that looks like a metal bed with a curved gla.s.s casing over it. Climbing up, he is able to stare inside.

She is very pretty, the sleeping girl beneath the gla.s.s.

For a long time he wonders whether he should try to waken her, but if she's tired or maybe sick then that would be a bad thing. So he climbs down, and moves to the next one in the row, wondering if it's a boy or girl inside and whether they'll be awake. He is just about to climb up when voices sound and he crouches down, shaking, wondering what will happen if they catch him, and how much Father will shout when he finds out.

There are six of them, two of them sort-of white

Her fingertip made him pause. Then her question came.

"Tell me more about sort-of white."His voice seemed to speak by itself: "Like Chinese, but I was young."

"And the others were white?"

"No, the other doctors were black."

"Like me?"

"No. They were dark. So were the others."

"What others, Richard?"

"In the big rooms. Offices. Wearing suits."

"So... Tell me about the doctors. What happened next?"

He returned to the star cave, then the dream. and the gla.s.s raises up, one of the bed-things, and he can see the boy inside has no clothes, which seems funny, and he's lying there while the doctors get things ready, a trolley with metal stuff on it, and those tubes from the ceiling dangling over the boy, and something is not right which is why he is frozen and his mouth opens wide in a scream as the first doctor raises his hand and it's s.h.i.+ning when he, when he, when he

Hand on his shoulder.

"Just breathe, and breathe, and step outside yourself as if you're watching a movie of what you did, watching yourself in the scene, that's right, and tell me what happened next."

I am watching crouched down, trying to hide, screaming without sound when the s.h.i.+ning metal descends and the skin splits open, everything inside so liquid with globs of stuff and twisted things like pipes inside his body. I stumble away, knocking against a bed or something but the monsters, the doctors, are too busy to notice as I run, too scared to say anything, swearing I will say nothing if only I can get back to Father because otherwise they will cut him as well as me chop him up slice us up cutting and slicing and cutting and

Hand, the dream fading, only the star-filled cave and a feeling of soft ease.

"Sleep now."

Drifting.

[ TWENTY-THREE ].

Josh travelled by Tube, smiling at fellow pa.s.sengers. Back in his hotel room, he exercised and showered, got changed, packed a few clothes and toiletries in his gym bag but leaving the rest, making no a.s.sumptions about Suzanne wanting him to stay the night again and carried the bag out to his car. Then he drove into the heavy traffic, feeling relaxed: he was in a travelling armchair, when you thought about it, and the speed he moved at was irrelevant. The slow stop-start progress made him calmer by the minute.

Wow. Suzanne.

Some forty minutes later, he pulled up in front of her place, used the keychip she had lent him to get through the ground floor entrance, then jogged upstairs to her flat. There, the door opened, and she smiled at him.

"Hey."