Creeping Ivy Read Free

rubbed a generous puddle into her short dark hair. Foam seeped into her eyes, burning, and she turned her face up to the water. It streamed over her head and face. With her eyes stinging and her throat closing against the soapy water, she could not keep out the thoughts of all the children she had encountered who had been suffocated and starved, raped, beaten, or simply bullied and denied affection all their short lives. She wondered whether she would ever find a way of caring less.
    Clean again, but unrefreshed, Trish emerged from the shower and wrapped herself in the biggest of the scarlet towels that hung over the hot rail. The whole bathroom was fogged with condensation, the mirrors already dripping so that she could not see her face in any detail. That did not matter; the blurred outlines were quite enough for her.
    Her face, which had variously been described as beaky, predatory and magnificent at different stages of her last love affair, was all right, she had decided long ago, but it would never be beautiful. When she had rubbed the worst of the wet out of her hair, she ran her fingers through it to mould it roughly over her well-shaped head and left it at that.
    Enough of the condensation had cleared by then to give her a glimpse of her dark eyes in the mirror, and she saw that they were full of all the fears she was doing her best to ignore.
    ‘Oh, Charlotte.’
    Grabbing the tail of her self-control as it whisked past her, Trish wondered aloud whether there was any point trying to go on working. She would never be able to concentrate, so she might as well do something else. The trouble was that she couldn’t think of anything except Charlotte.
    Having, as her mother had always said, worked far too hard for eleven years, Trish had begun to realise that she had become too involved with her clients, but she had not known how to free herself. Their anguish was so real to her, and her inability to change much for them so obvious, that she had been in danger of getting completely bogged down.
    A series of minor but recurrent illnesses had kept getting in the way of her work and she had eventually gone to the doctor. Recalling their encounter, Trish was amazed at how patient and good-humoured he had been. At the time, all she had felt was outrage when he told her she was suffering from stress and advised her to find a way of managing it better.
    Later, little by little, she had begun to see her resistance to his advice for what it was and had tried to do as he had suggested. She had learned how to snap less at people who did not understand her instantly, or asked stupid questions about the instructions she had given them, to eat more sensibly and drink in moderation, to take life a scrap more lightly and even – occasionally – to sleep the night through without pills.
    It had been difficult because there was always another case, another ten- or eleven-year-old who, never properly fed since birth, had taken to stealing money as well as food and become uncontrollable by anyone; or perhaps a child who had been sunny and eager to learn until the age of six or seven, when she had suddenly changed – and only later told her teacher about what her uncle, or her stepfather, or her elder brother was making her do. With clients like those needing her to win them the protection of the law or defend them against cruelty or vengeance, Trish had not been able to take life much more easily.
    Dry at last, she let the towel fall off her body on to the floor by her bed and rummaged in the cupboard for clean underclothes to wear under the crumpled jeans she had pulled off the previous night, and a daytime sloganless T-shirt. She shoved her feet into a pair of suede moccasins that had long ago lost whatever shape they had once had, and had turned from bright red to a kind of mud colour. They were supremely comfortable and she did not mind the slapping noise they made on the hard rubber and wood floors of her flat. And luckily there was