The River House
Copyright © 2005 by Margaret Leroy
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First eBook Edition: June 2009
The characters and events in this book are fictitious. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and
not intended by the author.
The author is grateful to Taylor & Francis for permission to quote the extract on page 145, which is taken from page 171 of
A Celtic Miscellany: Translations from the Celtic Literatures,
copyright 1951 by Kenneth Hurlstone Jackson, revised edition, Penguin 1971.
ISBN: 978-0-316-07710-1
Contents
ALSO BY MARGARET LEROY
Postcards from Berlin
HAPTER
1
H
E’S BUILDING A WALL FROM
L
EGO
. There’s no sound but the click as he slots the bricks together and his rapid, fluttery breathing. His face is white as wax.
I know he’s very afraid.
“You’re building something,” I say.
He doesn’t respond.
He’s seven, small for his age, like a little pot-bound plant. Blond hair and skin so pale you’d think the sun could hurt him,
and wrists as thin as twigs. A freckled nose that would wrinkle if he smiled—but I’ve yet to see a smile.
I kneel on the floor, to one side of him so as not to be intrusive. His fear infects me; the palms of my hands are clammy.
“Kyle, I’m wondering what kind of room you’re building. I don’t think it’s a playroom, like this one.”
“It’s the bedroom,” he says. Impatient, as though this should be obvious.
“Yes. You’re building the bedroom.”
His building is complete now—four walls, no door.
It’s a warm October afternoon, syrupy sunlight falling over everything. My consulting room seems welcoming in the lavish light,
vivid with the primary colors of toys and paints and Play-Doh, and the animal puppets that children will use to speak for
them, that will sometimes free them to say astonishing things. The walls are covered with drawings that children have given
me, though there’s nothing of my own life here—no traces of my family, of Greg or my daughters, no Christmas or holiday photos;
for the children who come here, I want to be theirs alone for the time that they’re with me. The mellow light falls across
Kyle’s face, but it doesn’t brighten his pallor.
He digs around in the Lego box, looking for something. I don’t reach out to help him; I don’t want to distract him from his
inner world. His movements are narrow, restricted; he will never reach out or make an expansive gesture. Even when he’s drawing,
he confines himself to a corner of the page. Once I said, Could you do me a picture to fill up all this space? He drew the
tiniest figures in the margin, his fingers scarcely moving.
He finds the people in the box. A boy and an adult that could be a man or a woman: just the same as last time.
“The people are going into your building. I’m wondering what they’re doing there.”
He’s grasping the figures so tightly you can see his bones white through his skin.
I feel a slight chill as a shadow passes across us. Instinctively, I turn—thinking I might see someone behind me, peering
in at the window. But of course there’s nothing there—just a wind that stirs the leaves of the elms that grow at the edge
of the car park.
There’s a checklist in my mind: violence, or sex abuse, or something he has seen—because I have learned from years of working
with these troubled children that it’s not just about what is done to you, that what is seen also hurts you. I know so little.
His foster parents say he’s very withdrawn. His mother could have helped me, but she’s on a psychiatric ward, profoundly depressed,
not well enough to be talked to. The school staff were certainly worried. “He seems so scared,” said the teacher who referred
him to the clinic. “Of anything in particular?” I asked. “Swimming lessons, story time, male teachers?” She had riotous, nut-brown
hair, and her eyes were puzzled. I liked her. She frowned and fiddled with her hair. “Not really. Just afraid.”
“Perhaps a bad thing happened in the bedroom,” I say now, very gently. “Perhaps the boy is unhappy because a bad thing happened.”
Noises from outside scratch at the stillness: the slam of a door in the car park, the harsh cries of rooks in the elms. He
clicks the figures into place. The sounds are clear in the quiet.
“You can talk about anything here,” I tell him. “Even bad things, Kyle. No one will tell you off, whatever you say. Sometimes
children think that what happened was their fault, but no one will think that here.”
He doesn’t respond. Nothing I say makes sense to him. Yet I know this must be significant, this room with the child and the
adult, over and over. And no way out, no door.
Perhaps this is the detail that matters. I sit there, thinking of doors. Of going through into new, expectant spaces: of that
image I love from
Alice in Wonderland,
the narrow door at the end of the hall that leads to the rose garden. Maybe he needs to experience here in the safety of
my playroom the opening of that door. I feel a surge of hope. Briefly, I thrill to my imagery of liberation, of walking out
of prison.
“Perhaps the boy feels trapped.” I keep my voice very casual. “Like there’s no way out for him. But there is a way. He doesn’t
know it yet, but there is a way out of the room for him. He could build a door and open it. All that he has to do is to open
the door. …”
He turns so his back is toward me, just a slight movement, but definite. He rips a few bricks from his building and dumps
them back in the box, as if he’s throwing rubbish away. His face is blank. He stands by the sandpit and digs in the sand with
his fingers and lets the grains fall through his hands. When I speak to him now, he doesn’t seem to hear.
After Kyle has gone, I stand there for a moment, looking into the empty space outside my window, needing a moment of quiet
to try to make sense of the session. I watch as Peter, my boss, the consultant in charge of the clinic, struggles to back
his substantial BMW into rather too small a space. The roots of the elms have pushed to the surface and spread across the
car park; the tarmac is cracked and uneven.
The things that have to be done tonight pass rapidly through my mind. Something for dinner. The graduates’ art exhibition
at Molly’s old school. Soy milk for Greg and buckwheat flour for his bread. Has Amber finished her Graphics course work? Fix
up a drink with Eva. … A little wind shivers the tops of the elms; a single bright leaf falls. I can still feel Kyle’s fear:
He’s left something of it behind him, as people may leave the smell of their cigarettes or scent.
I sit at my desk and flick through his file, looking for anything that might help, a way of understanding him. A sense of
futility moves through me. I wonder when this happened—when my certainty that I could help these children started to seep
away.
I have half an hour before my next appointment. I take the file from my desk and go out into the corridor.
HAPTER
2
L
IGHT FROM THE HIGH WINDOWS
slants across the floor, and I can hear Brigid typing energetically in the secretaries’ office. Clem’s door is open; she
doesn’t have anyone with her. I go in, clutching the file.
“Clem, d’you have a moment? I need some help,” I tell her.
Her smile lights up her face.
Clem goes for a thrift-shop look. Today she looks delectable in a long russet skirt and a little leopard-skin gilet. She has
unruly dirty-blond hair; she pushes it out of her eyes. On her desk, there’s a litter of files and psychology journals, and
last week’s copy of
Bliss
, in which she gave some quotes for an article called “My Best Friend Has Bulimia.” We both get these calls from time to time,
from journalists wanting a psychological opinion; we’re on some database somewhere. She gets the eating disorder ones, and
I get the ones about female sexuality, because of a study I once did with teenage girls, to the lasting chagrin of my daughters.
In a welcoming little gesture, Clem sweeps it all aside.
“It’s Kyle McConville,” I tell her.
She nods. We’re always consulting each other. Last week she came to me about an anorexic girl she’s seeing, who has an obsession
with purity and will only eat white food—cauliflower, egg whites, an occasional piece of white fish.
“We’ll have a coffee,” she says. “I think you need a coffee.”
Clem refuses to drink the flavored water that comes out of the drinks machine in the corridor; she has a percolator in her
room. She gets up and hunts for a clean cup.
“When does Molly go?”
“On Sunday.”
“It’s a big thing, Ginnie. It gets to people,” she says. “When Brigid’s daughter went off to college, Brigid wept for hours.
Will you?”
“I don’t expect to.”
“Neither did Brigid,” she says. She pours me a coffee and rifles through some papers on a side table. “Bother,” she says.
“I thought I had some choc chip cookies left. I must have eaten them when I wasn’t concentrating.”
She gives me the coffee and, just for a moment, rests her light hands on my arms. It’s always so good to see her poised and
happy. Her divorce last year was savage: There were weeks when she never smiled. Gordon, her husband, was very possessive
and prone to jealous outbursts. She finally found the courage to leave, and was briefly involved with an osteopath who lived
on Wesley Street. Gordon sent her photos of herself with the eyes cut out. About this time last year, on just such a mellow
autumn day, I took her to pick up some furniture from the home they’d shared, an antique inlaid cabinet that had belonged
to her mother. Gordon was there, tense, white-lipped.
She looked at the cabinet. She was shaking. Something was going on between them, something I couldn’t work out.
“I don’t want it now,” she said.
“You asked for it, so you’ll damn well take it,” he said.
As we loaded it into the back of my car, I saw that he’d carved “Clem fucks on Wesley Street” all down the side of the cabinet.
She sits behind her desk again, resting her chin in her hands. There are pigeons on her windowsill, pressed against the glass;
you can see their tiny pink eyes. The room is full of their throaty murmurings.