Thursday's Children Read Free Page B

makes you feel that?’
    ‘We’ve been on a journey,’ said Frieda. ‘And I think we’ve come to the end. Or
an
end. I’m grateful. I really am.’
    ‘As you well know, Frieda, usually when patients end therapy, they do it gradually. It can take weeks or months.’
    ‘I don’t like goodbyes. Usually, I like to leave without saying goodbye at all.’
    Thelma’s face wrinkled again. ‘If I was your therapist, I’d want to discuss that. Oh, hang on …’
    Frieda couldn’t stop herself smiling. ‘You think I’m wrong?’ she asked.
    Thelma shook her head slowly.
    ‘When you first came to see me – when was it? Eighteen months ago? – I wasn’t sure what therapy could do for you. I’d never seen anything quite like it. When you called me up wanting to see me, I knew you’d been attacked and almost killed. You’d obviously been through a severe trauma and needed some kind of help. But then, just before we began, you were also involved in a terrible incident where a man was killed, a close friend badly hurt. You told me how you had walked all the way home, twenty miles, covered with blood.’
    ‘It wasn’t my own blood.’
    ‘I remember you making that point to me, and I honestly wondered whether what you really needed was time in hospital.’
    ‘I was on fire,’ said Frieda, ‘and I didn’t know how to put myself out.’
    There was a long pause.
    ‘I think the image you used is about right. Not the one about being on fire, though that may have been true last year. I mean the one about being on a journey. You’ve got to a station and it might be a good time to get off.’ She paused. ‘For a while, at least.’
    ‘Because it’s only a station on the way?’
    ‘We’ve talked a lot in this room and I think we’ve developed.’ She stopped for a moment. ‘I don’t think you’ve shed all the pain of the episode that made you seek me out. I think you’ve absorbed it, made it a part of you, learned from it. But maybe what you can’t put your finger on is that itinvolves all the things you never talked about with me: your past, your parents, where you came from.’
    ‘When I see patients, they generally talk about their childhood and their parents, and also about their lovers. I know I haven’t done that.’
    ‘No.’ Thelma regarded her. ‘But you’ve talked a great deal about Dean Reeve.’
    ‘It’s true. For everyone else, Dean is dead. The police think he’s dead. His ex-partner thinks he’s dead. His body – what people took to be his body, rather than that of his poor brother Alan – has been cremated and the ashes scattered. He used to be the media’s favourite villain but even that has faded. He’s gradually becoming forgotten, but not by me. For me he’s alive. He’s like a ghost, but he isn’t dead. He watches me, watches over me in a way. I feel like he’s out there and he’s waiting for something.’ Frieda saw Thelma’s expression and shook her head. ‘He’s not a figment of my imagination, not some kind of Freudian other. Dean Reeve is a murderer and he’s out there in the world.’
    ‘I don’t know about him being in the world, but he’s inside your head. He haunts you.’
    ‘He does haunt me. But he’s alive.’
    ‘Alive for you.’
    ‘No. He’s alive. Therapy can help me with my feelings, my fears about Dean, but it can’t help with that.’
    ‘So, you’re saying that you haven’t talked about your parents and your lovers because Dean Reeve gets in the way?’
    ‘I’ve actually been thinking about the past. The distant past, I mean. A couple of days ago a woman came to seeme, someone who’d been in my class at school. She wasn’t a friend, I hadn’t seen her since we were sixteen years old, but she wanted me to talk to her daughter. I saw her yesterday, and I have this feeling about it. Something I can’t put my finger on.’
    ‘Try to put your finger on it.’
    ‘It felt like my past has come for me.’
    ‘Perhaps that’s a good