The Madness Underneath. Maureen Johnson

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СКАЧАТЬ of the sitting rooms in the front, a big golden retriever . . . and I like dogs. A lot. So I petted him. I didn’t even hear Mrs. Haverty come in. I just turned around and there she was. I guess I expected her to be in a hoop skirt or covered in spiderwebs or something, but she was wearing one of those sportswear things that actual senior citizens wear, pink plaid culottes and a matching T-shirt. She was incredibly pale, and she had all these varicose veins—her calves had so many blue lines on them, she looked like a road map. I thought I’d been caught. I thought, ‘This is it. This is when I get killed.’ I was so busted. But she just smiled and said, ‘That’s Big Bobby. Wasn’t he beautiful?’ And I said, ‘Was?’ And she said, ‘Oh, he’s stuffed, dear. Bobby died four years ago. But he liked to sleep in here, so that’s where I keep him.’”

      It took Julia a moment to realize that that was the end of the story.

      “You’d been petting a stuffed dog?” she said. “A dead one?”

      “It was a really well stuffed dog,” I clarified. “I have seen some bad taxidermy. This was top-notch work. It would have fooled anyone.”

      A rare moment of sunlight came in through the window and illuminated Julia’s face. She was giving me a long and penetrating stare, one that didn’t quite go through me. It got about halfway inside and roamed around, pawing inquisitively.

      “You know, Rory,” she said, “this is our sixth meeting, and we really haven’t talked about the reason why you’re here.”

      Whenever she said something like that, I felt a twinge in my abdomen. The wound had closed and was basically healed. The bandages were off, revealing the long cut and the new, angry red skin that bound the edges together. I searched my mind for something to say, something that would get us off-roading again, but Julia put up her hand preemptively. She knew. So I kept quiet for a moment and discovered my real thinking face. I could see it, but I could tell it looked pained. I kept pursing and biting my lips, and the furrow between my eyes was probably deep enough to hold my phone.

      “Can I ask you something?” I finally said.

      “Of course.”

      “Am I allowed to be fine?”

      “Of course you are. That’s our goal. But it’s also all right not to be fine. The simple fact of the matter is, you’ve had a trauma.”

      “But don’t people get over traumas?”

      “They do. With help.”

      “Can’t people get over traumas without help?” I asked.

      “Of course, but—”

      “I’m just saying,” I said, more insistently, “is it possible that I’m actually okay?”

      “Do you feel okay, Rory?”

      “I just want to go back to school.”

      “You want to go back?” she asked, her brogue flicking up to a particularly inquisitive point. You want tae go back?

      Wexford leapt into my mind, like a painted backdrop on a suddenly slackened rope crashing down onto a stage. I saw Hawthorne, my building, looking like the Victorian relic that it was. The brown stone. The surprisingly large, high windows. The word WOMEN carved over the door. I imagined being in my room with Jazza, my roommate, at nighttime, when she and I would talk across the darkness from our respective beds. The ceilings in our building were high, and I’d watch passing shadows from the London streets and hear the noise outside, the gentle clang and whistle of the heaters as they gave the last blast of heat for the night.

      My mind flashed to a time in the library, when Jerome and I were together in one of the study rooms, making out against the wall. And then I flashed somewhere else. I pictured myself in the flat on Goodwin’s Court with Stephen and Callum and Boo—

      “We’re at time for today,” she said, her eye flicking toward the clock. “We can talk about this some more on Friday.”

      I snatched my coat from the back of the chair and got it on as quickly as possible. Julia opened the door and looked out into the hall. She turned back to me in surprise.

      “You came by yourself today? That’s very good. I’m glad.”

      Today, my parents had let me come to therapy by myself. This was what passed for excitement in my life now.

      “We’re getting there, Rory,” she said. “We’re getting there.”

      She was lying. I guess we all have to lie sometimes. I was about to do the same.

      “Yeah,” I said, stretching my fingers into the tips of my gloves. “Definitely.”

       WASN’T GOING TO BE ABLE TO COPE WITH MANY MORE of these sessions.

      I like to talk. Talking is kind of my thing. If talking had been a sport option at Wexford, I would have been captain. But sports always have to involve running, jumping, or swinging your arms around. You don’t get PE points for the smooth and rapid movement of the jaw.

      Three times a week, I was sent to talk to Julia. And three times a week, I had to avoid talking to Julia—at least, I couldn’t talk about what had really happened to me.

      You cannot tell your therapist you have been stabbed by a ghost.

      You cannot tell her that you could see the ghost because you developed the ability to see dead people after choking on some beef at dinner.

      If you say any of that, they will put you in a sack and take you to a room walled in bouncy rubber and you will never be allowed to touch scissors again. The situation will only get worse if you explain to your therapist that you have friends in the secret ghost police of London, and that you are really not supposed to be talking about this because some man from the government made you sign a copy of the Official Secrets Act and promise never to talk about these ghost police friends of yours. No. That won’t improve your situation at all. The therapist will add “paranoid delusions about secret government agencies” to the already quite long list of your problems, and then it will be game over for you, Crazy.

      The sky was the same color as a cinder block, and I didn’t have an umbrella to protect me from the dark rain cloud that was clearly moving in our direction. I had no idea what to do with myself, now that I was actually out of the house. I saw a coffee place. That’s where I would go. I’d get a coffee, and then I’d walk home. That was a good, normal thing to do. I would do this, and then maybe . . . maybe I would do another thing.

      Funny thing when you don’t get out of the house for a while—you reenter the outside world as a tourist. I stared at the people working on laptops, studying, writing things down in notebooks. I flirted with the idea of telling the guy who was making my latte, just blurting it out: “I’m the girl the Ripper attacked.” And I could whip up my shirt and show him the still-healing wound. You couldn’t fake the thing I had stretching across my torso—the long, angry line. Well, I guess you could, but you’d have to be one of those special-effects makeup people to do it. Also, people who get up to the СКАЧАТЬ