‘Oh,’ she says, the strange darkness starting to lift slightly. ‘That’s amazing! Are you going to do it?’
‘Too right I am! Extra ￡1200 a month. That’ll pay for a decent holiday or two. A couple of new sofas when we move home. Plus I really like Gerry. And I got free pasta. So yeah. A no-brainer, really.’
He glances down at her and he smiles and it’s a great, great smile, free of any editing or hidden agenda. He had a good lunch with a good person and now has a good job that will provide them with a good holiday and some good sofas. She cannot help but return the smile in the same spirit.
‘That’s brilliant,’ she says. ‘Really brilliant.’
She wants to ask why he didn’t mention the lunch when they were talking this morning. She would tell him if she was meeting someone for lunch to talk about a job. But she bats the complaint away and holds on to the good feeling.
They reach the top of the hill and Hampstead village opens up to them like a dream or a film set as it always does. They find a pub down a cobbled alleyway with fires burning in the grates and dogs stretched out on gnarled old floorboards and although they’d said it would be an anti-Valentine night, Roan comes back from the bar with a bottle of champagne and two chilled glasses and they toast his new job, and their faces fall in and out of shadow in the light of a dancing flame, and Roan’s hand finds hers on the seat between them and he takes it in his and it feels nice, and for quite some time Cate forgets about the card in the drawer at home.
10
SAFFYRE
I was twelve and a half the first time I met Roan Fours.
I’d been cutting myself for more than two years by this stage.
I’d just started year eight and boys were becoming a problem.
All the attention, the look in their eyes, the idea of the things they were thinking, of the things they were saying about me to each other – I’d spent most of my childhood hanging out with boys so I knew what happened behind the scenes – was starting to make me feel tired, used, worn-down. I quite liked the idea of therapy, of being in a quiet room with a quiet man talking quietly about myself for an hour or so.
I’d been picturing a wild-haired guy in glasses, maybe a tweedy jacket, even a monocle. I had not been expecting a cool guy with eyes too blue and cheekbones too sharp and long, spidery legs in black denim that he crossed and uncrossed and crossed and uncrossed until you were almost dizzy with it. And hands that moved like some weird pale exotic birds whenever he wanted to describe something. And peng trainers. You know, really good ones, for an old guy. And a smell, of clean clothes, my favourite smell, but also of trees and grass and clouds and sunshine.
I didn’t clock all of this the first time I met him, obviously. When I first met him I was still a child and just thought he was kind of cool-looking, in a Dr Who kind of way.
He looked at a notebook for quite some time before he looked at me.
‘Saffyre,’ he said. ‘That is a tremendously brilliant name.’
I said, ‘Yeah. Thanks. My mum chose it.’
It’s totally a name a nineteen-year-old mum would choose for a baby, isn’t it?
Then he said, ‘So, Saffyre, tell me about yourself.’
‘Like what?’ Everyone knows you shouldn’t ask kids open questions. They suck at answering them.
‘Like, tell me about school. How are you getting on?’
‘Good,’ I said. ‘I’m getting on good.’
Here we go, I thought, some bloke ticking boxes, filling in forms, going home to watch Game of Thrones and eat quinoa or whatever with his wife. I thought: This is not going to work.
And then he said, ‘Tell me, Saffyre, what’s the worst, worst thing that ever happened to you?’
And then I knew we were going to get somewhere. I didn’t know where yet, I just knew that I was at a point in my life when I needed someone to ask me what the worst thing that ever happened to me was, rather than ask me if their eyebrows were on fleek or if I wanted chicken or fish for dinner.
I didn’t answer him immediately. My head flooded. The obvious thing came first. The thing that happened when I was ten. But I didn’t want to tell him that. Not yet. He waited, a good minute or so, for me to answer. Then I said, ‘All of it.’
‘All of it?’
‘Yes. All of it. My mum died before I knew her. And my grandma. My granddad was a single dad raising three children and a grandchild, then he got so ill that my uncle had to look after all of us from when he was like, my age. So he had no proper life. Ever. We had a budgerigar. It died. The lady next door who used to fix my hair for me, her name was Joyce – she died. My favourite teacher at primary school, Miss Raymond, got cancer and died just after she got married. My granddad’s got arthritis and is in pain nearly all the time.’
I stopped abruptly, just short of the defining event of all the bad events, the event that had brought me to his door. I stared at him, at the blue, blue eyes that reminded me of one of those dogs that look like wolves. I wanted him to go, ‘Oh, poor you. No wonder you’ve been cutting yourself all these years.’
Instead he said, ‘Now tell me the best thing that ever happened to you.’
I was taken aback, to be honest; it was like nothing I’d just said meant anything. Like maybe he hadn’t even been listening.
For a moment I didn’t even want to answer him. I just sat there. But then something suddenly came into my head. There was a girl at primary school called Lexie. She was very popular, very kind; all the teachers loved her and all the children loved her. She lived in a nice house on a nice street with crystal chandeliers and velvet sofas and she always invited the whole class to her birthday parties, even me, who wasn’t really one of her proper friends.
One year she had an animal party. A man with white hair came with a van full of boxes and cages and in each box and cage was a different animal, and we were allowed to touch them. He brought a chinchilla, a snake, some stick insects, a vole, a ferret, some birds, a tarantula. He also brought a barn owl. It was called Harry.
The man with the white hair looked around at all the children and he saw me and he said, ‘How about you, would you like to hold Harry?’
He brought me to the front and gave me a big leather glove to wear and then he put Harry the owl on my outstretched arm and I stood there and Harry turned his big head and looked at me and I looked at him and my heart just blew up with something warm and velvety and deep and soothing. It was like I loved him, like I loved this owl. Which was just stupid because I didn’t know him and he was an owl.
So I looked at Roan Fours and I said, ‘The time I held an owl at Lexie’s birthday when I was nine years old.’
And he said, ‘I love owls. They’re extraordinary creatures.’
I nodded.
He said, ‘What did it feel like when you held the owl?’
I said, ‘It felt like I loved him.’
He wrote something down. He said, ‘Who else do you love?’
I thought, Hmmm, aren’t we supposed to be talking about owls? Then I said, ‘I love my granddad. I love my uncles. I love my nieces.’
‘Friends?’
‘I don’t love my friends.’
‘What does love feel like?’
‘It feels like … it feels like need.’
‘Like need?’
‘Yeah, like you love someone because they give you what you need.’
‘And if they stop giving you what you need?’
‘Then that’s not love. That’s something else.’
‘And the owl?’
I stopped. ‘What?’
‘The owl. You said it felt like you loved the owl.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you didn’t need the owl.’
‘No. I just loved him.’
‘Did it feel the same as the way you love your granddad?’
‘No,’ I said. ‘It felt … pure.’ I realised that sounded wrong and corrected myself. ‘Not that there’s anything not pure about the way I love my granddad. But I worry about him. I worry that he’ll die. I worry that he won’t be able to give me what I need. And that makes me feel bad. I didn’t feel bad about the owl. I only felt good.’
‘Do you think both types of love are equal?’
‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’
He stopped then and looked up at me and he smiled. I hadn’t been expecting him to smile. I thought that it was in his contract not to smile during therapy. But he did. And maybe it was because we’d just been talking about it, I don’t know, but I got that feeling again, the soft, velvet owl feeling.
So yeah, maybe I needed Roan Fours already, even before I knew it.
The first time I saw Roan outside of a therapy session at the Portman was about a year or so after our first session. I was walking home from school and he was just leaving an appointment at the school opposite my flat where one of his patients was a student. He was all smart and briefcasey, wearing a blue shirt, and he was talking to another man, also smart and briefcasey. Then they separated and he turned to cross the street and he saw me looking at him.