Chapter Fifty-Eight
At Dr. Twist’s smart Dover Street office the following morning, Jane smiles at the lady behind the walnut reception desk—not the same lady as the one pictured on his website, but not entirely dissimilar—and says, “Jane Trevally. Here for my ten a.m. with Dr. Twist.”
The receptionist directs Jane to a sofa next to a water cooler.
Jane has no idea how this is going to go.
She has lightly researched how to wheedle information out of a medical professional but come back with no more than she’d expected.
It is acceptable to divulge a patient’s personal details only if the patient poses a significant risk to individuals or the public, or where there is immediate danger to self or others.
Well, Jane is pretty sure that Daisy Black is currently at significant risk and in immediate danger from her so-called uncle, Jasper Black, so she hopes that Dr. Twist will be prepared to cough up.
Dr. Twist is wearing a sky-blue shirt tucked into crisp jeans and shiny brown brogues, as if he has googled how to dress like a modern doctor but not got it quite right.
“Miss… Ms.…?”
Jane nods.
“Ms. Trevally. Lovely to have you here today. Can I get you anything to drink?”
“No, thank you. I’m fine.”
He takes a seat behind a big modern desk and smiles at her. She can’t age him because he has so much hair. He could be anywhere between forty-five and sixty. “So, how much do you know about EMDR?” he begins.
“Well, to be frank, not a lot. I mean, I feel I would be a good candidate from what I’ve heard.
I had a very difficult childhood and have made all sorts of terrible decisions throughout my adult life that have led me to becoming rather insular, and, well, very lost. I’m fifty-five and I have another twenty good years, and I want to make them incredible.
But I am so often my own worst enemy. I need recoding.
And I think, possibly, that that’s what you can offer? ”
He smiles at her and clears his throat. “Yes,” he says. “I suppose, in a way. Although, really I am recoding your trauma, rather than you.”
“Yes,” says Jane, “that’s right. Exactly.
That’s what I want. I want my trauma recoded, carved into another shape.
A better shape. My parents died within six months of one another when I was nineteen, you see.
And then my brother, my only sibling, died ten years after that.
And they were all addicts. All of them. Drugs and alcohol.
And my childhood was what I’m sure my parents would like to have called benign neglect, but the further I get from it, the more I know it was just neglect, pure and simple.
My parents didn’t just like a glass or two of Beaujolais at the end of a long day, they liked a glass or two of Beaujolais before the day had even begun.
I barely went to school. My father used to piss anywhere he found himself in the house.
Up against walls, in cupboards. My mother stank.
I didn’t know she stank because I was used to it, but I heard someone saying that she stank.
Social services came all the time. I was put into foster care once for three months; my parents cleaned up their acts, got me back; within six months my dad was pissing in wardrobes again.
I had head lice all the time. I broke my wrist once and nobody took me to the hospital.
I was seven years old, and I walked all the way into the village—two and a half miles—to ask the nice lady in the chemist what to do.
She took me to the hospital, but it had already half healed—look… ”
She shows her wrist to the doctor, the strange crick in it, then she pulls her arm back onto her lap and sighs.
“I mean, I could talk and talk and talk; talking about it isn’t the problem.
The problem is this…” She indicates her physical form with gesticulating hands.
“What’s left. This stupid woman. Who I hate. ”
“You hate yourself?”
“Of course I do. I had a horrible childhood. Then I made lots of men miserable. I have blown all the money I ever had and refused to sell the hellhole house where my parents neglected me and now I’m just flailing around looking for meaning and purpose and wishing my parents were still here so I could scream at them and kick them in the fucking shins. ”
Jane feels blood race to the surface of her skin, surge though the veins in her throat, her hands, her heart. “I just need to stop rewinding everything back to that. Stop letting that be my reason for everything. Scratch it out. Urgh.”
Dr. Twist rearranges his legs and leans slightly toward her. “Right,” he says. “Well, thank you, Ms. Trevally—”
“Jane.”
“Jane. I’m very grateful for your candor and your articulacy. I’m going to say that normally patients I see in this office have a harder time accessing the roots of their issues. I feel like you’re already a long way down the road.”
“I’ve been this far down the road all my life. I just need to get across this hump.”
“I can see that, yes. And I do think you’d be a good candidate.
So what I’d like to do now is to spend a while explaining exactly what it is we do here.
I’m sure you’ve read a bit online and in the pack my assistant emailed you when you booked the appointment, but I think it’s helpful to hear it from me, with more nuance, and I can express it more specifically in terms of what you’ve just told me. Is that OK?”
Jane nods. “Absolutely. I’m all ears.”
Dr. Twist leans back into his chair twenty minutes later and eyes Jane thoughtfully. “Any questions?”
Jane is fizzing with positive energy. She wants it; she wants all of it.
She wants Dr. Twist in her head, in her eyes, bleaching it all out with his dark magic, his mystical powers.
She shakes her head enthusiastically. “No,” she says.
“No questions. It sounds incredible. You sound incredible. I want it. Please. When can I have it?”
“Well, I’m slightly booked up at the moment at this practice.
We’re looking to at least the end of the summer before I have any slots available.
But I could put you on the waiting list for my practice at Charing Cross?
It’s a slightly faster turnaround: I have more slots, I could get to you quicker that way.
And also, obviously, it would be a lot more cost-effective. ”
“You mean, free?” says Jane.
“Yes,” says Dr. Twist. “Free.”
Jane glances at the clock on Dr. Twist’s desk and sees that there are only ten minutes remaining of their appointment. She pulls her chair closer to the doctor’s desk and takes a deep breath.
“I’m afraid I haven’t been fully transparent with you today, Doctor.
I mean, everything I’ve told you about myself and my need for therapy is true, and I absolutely one hundred percent would like to see you again, I would like treatment.
But you should know that I’m also here in a semiprofessional capacity, that of a, er, private investigator.
” She stumbles slightly over the descriptor again, feeling that same frisson of fraudulence.
“I’m searching for a missing girl called Daisy Black.
Her uncle is called Jasper Black and I believe he is a former patient of yours. ”
She sees a flash of dark recognition pass across Dr. Twist’s eyes; then she pulls out her phone, which she has preloaded with Jasper’s photograph.
“This is him. He was a little older than this when you saw him, no doubt. And listen, I know you have your patient confidentiality to protect, but this boy, this man, he’s potentially an abuser, and Daisy Black is, I believe, in grave danger from him. ”
She pauses and looks at Dr. Twist. She has no idea what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling about this curveball. He issues a small nod and says, “Ah.”
She stares at him, waiting for him to expand on the syllable.
“Well,” he says eventually. “Obviously I’m not allowed to share personal details with you, but yes, he was my patient, and yes, I believe he might present a danger to young women.”
She sees his cheeks draw in as he blinks slowly at her. He has a slight flush as though he is embarrassed somehow.
“God,” says Jane, blowing out her cheeks with the horror of knowing that her fears were fully founded. “Is there anything else you could tell me? Anything that might help me track him down? I believe you wrote to him, about a year ago?”
“I did,” he says gravely. “I’d seen a story in the papers, an attack on a young woman, a similar assault to the ones he told me he’d been carrying out when I first met him, and I was concerned that maybe his old behaviors were breaking through again.
So I wrote to him out of the blue to see if he’d like to resume his treatment. ”
“And?” says Jane. “Did he?”
“No. I didn’t hear from him. I wasn’t surprised.” He pauses. “Look. I shouldn’t really be having this conversation with you, but on the other hand, I’ve been feeling uncomfortable ever since I saw that news article. I’ve been almost, as it were, waiting for something like this to happen.”
There is a small, brittle silence between them. Neither of them is moving or even, it seems, breathing. They are both behaving in ways that are outside their remits.
“What shall I do?” Jane asks.
He looks at her apologetically, and shrugs.
“I mean, do you have any idea where he might be? Where he might have taken Daisy? Did he ever mention anywhere that was important to him?”
Dr. Twist shakes his head. “No. Never. In fact he barely spoke. The only place he ever told me about was his home, where he grew up. He described it as a hellhole. He told me that he dreamed about his home every night of his life. Dreamed that he was back there, trapped.”
Trapped, thinks Jane. Just like whoever was once chained to the chair in the outhouse. And as she so very nearly was when she was just twenty-nine years old.
Once again, Jane realizes, it all comes back to that house, that terrible, impenetrable house, and she knows, more than anything, she has to get inside again.