Wish You Were Here, page 2
Moments later, Kris placed a cup on the table in front of her, followed shortly by a plate with an egg sandwich on it. The thought of food turned Sian’s stomach, but she took a sip of coffee, then a bite of the sandwich, and felt a bit better. Kris had a habit of doing this: giving her the things she hadn’t even realised she needed. She wasn’t about to tell him that, though. ‘Thanks,’ she said instead, taking another big sip of coffee.
He sat down opposite her and tucked into his own sandwich. ‘So’ – he swallowed – ‘it’s today, right? Your appointment.’
Sian nodded, chewing, glad of the excuse not to say anything out loud. She had done everything he’d wanted her to do. Seen her doctor, got referred for help. The psychiatrist who had done her assessment interview said that trauma had great outcomes with treatment and had booked her in for a course of Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. She wished she could share this medical professional’s confidence in the idea but she really couldn’t imagine getting better. The issues the doctor had diagnosed as ‘Complex PTSD’ felt as much a part of who she was as her eye colour.
‘You are going to go, right?’
Sian nearly choked on the sandwich. ‘Course!’ she said, annoyed. But the truth was that she wasn’t so sure. She had wasted her time with things like this before. The educational psychologist at school who had made no bloody difference at all and just led to her being teased about visiting the ‘mad’ doctor or being sent to ‘Mapperley’. Funnily enough, Mapperley was exactly where she lived these days, although the famous psychiatric hospital her schoolmates were referring to had been closed for several decades. So, no, she wasn’t sure that she would go to the clinic this afternoon. She might go for a run instead or take Elvis out on the country park. She might go down to the gym and hit people, or at least a bag, for a few hours. Running and organised violence had always been her chosen therapies, so why change that now?
Kris was staring at her. ‘You are going to go, right?’ More intent and serious this time.
She was annoyed. Why did he have to have this skill where he saw right through her? This was the problem with letting someone get close to you; she could barely get away with anything. ‘I told you I’d go,’ she said. She knew she was lucky to have Kris in her life, that he was good for her, but it wasn’t always easy. A year ago, the way he was clucking around her right now would have been enough to send her head off on a spin to the point where she’d have needed to get away from him. At least there had been progress.
Sian looked away, focusing on her sandwich. She pulled the crispy egg white out and threw it to Elvis, who caught it briskly and munched down, overjoyed. Kris had stopped eating and reached for her hand. ‘Sian,’ he said, ‘c’mon.’ He was using her first name, which meant things had taken a turn for the serious. She let him take her hand and she looked across the table at him. ‘You’ll go, right?’ he said. ‘Promise me?’
Sian nodded and pulled more egg white from the sandwich for Elvis.
‘Out loud!’ he said.
Sian rolled her eyes. He knew her far, far too well and was far, far too good for her. ‘I promise,’ she said. Her stomach roiled again. She’d made another promise a few months before, to herself, an important one: that she wouldn’t lie to Kris. She would definitely need to find a time today to punch people because now she had to go to the clinic. Damn him. And even though this annoyed her, she found those words wavering on her lips again. Why was it so hard to say three simple words out loud?
Tearing at the bread and eating a few bites, Sian fed the crust to Elvis. ‘You are a good boy,’ she said, ruffling the dog’s coat.
‘Thanks!’ Kris replied, smiling and sounding pleased with his own joke.
Sian shivered; a disturbance in the force. She had kind of been talking to Kris, but he wasn’t supposed to know that. ‘I should get dressed,’ she said. She stood up too quickly and, for a moment, thought she might faint. Why did she always have to overdo it when they met up with other people? It wasn’t like she was a heavy drinker generally but ‘being sociable’ was impossible without alcohol.
‘You wait right there,’ Kris said, crossing the dining area in two strides. ‘C’m’ere.’ He reached for her and pulled her close. She felt sick and faint again but, at the same time, warm in his arms. She let him hold her and didn’t say a word. Yup, definitely progress, then. No doubt her shiny new therapist would call it that, anyway.
*
The walk into the centre of Nottingham from Sian’s house took nearly forty minutes but it was a good way to clear her head and, anyway, she hadn’t been able to face the bus. There was a light drizzle that seemed to hang in the air rather than fall and it wasn’t at all unpleasant. Sian breathed in deeply and enjoyed the coolness against her face. She wondered how many years on this planet it would take for her to learn that drinking was bad for her; not so much physically, but emotionally. More than fifty, apparently.
Walking up Mansfield Road and past the big shopping centre, Sian felt her mobile phone vibrate. She pulled it from her pocket. Her mum. She rejected the call and put the phone away. She’d made the mistake of telling her mother about the therapy session and Ruth seemed to be keen to talk about it with her. Probably more concerned about family secrets getting spilled than Sian’s wellbeing. She really wasn’t in the mood for mother-wrangling this morning and she needed a coffee before she’d be ready to talk to anyone. There was a shop across the road, a chain, and although she knew she should support the indies, she didn’t want to go somewhere she might be expected to chat.
Sian managed to order and obtain her coffee exchanging minimal pleasantries. Then she walked the last few hundred yards to her building and headed up two flights of stairs to the small, serviced office she rented. It was typical of those in the city centre: in an old building above one of the shops. There was no lift, just narrow, uneven steps that spiralled up one corner of the building. She liked that having to take the stairs was regular exercise for her. It was less good that there was no real access for disabled clients, and she knew she ought to move for this reason. She would, when she was a little less busy.
Gabriella Kennedy was waiting in the second-floor reception area when Sian arrived, around twenty minutes ahead of the time they had arranged to meet. She turned and looked up at Sian, her cool stare with those big blue eyes. Sian took a sip of coffee and tried to smile.
‘You don’t have to see me early,’ Gabriella told her. ‘I’ll wait.’ She flicked her long blonde hair and Sian wondered if people who arrived too early for appointments were worse than those who were late.
‘Give me five minutes,’ Sian said. She tried to sound professional and polished, even though she felt scruffy and unsure. Gabriella was paying good money to find out stuff she really didn’t want to know, after all.
Sian put her coffee down carefully on a different surface before turning on her PC and logging in. She waited for everything to load, then did a very quick check of her inbox for any urgent emails and mainlined some of the coffee before grabbing Gabriella’s case file from the shelf and opening the door to invite her in. This meeting would not be much fun. But, as always, she had promised to tell her client the truth and so that was what she’d do.
The young woman sat down at the desk opposite Sian. They hadn’t even started to talk but Gabriella’s eyes were welling with tears, which made them look even bluer. She knew the answer she was about to get already; in Sian’s experience, people usually did. Sian wondered if she should reach for Gabriella’s hand to comfort her and wished she was better at the touchy-feely stuff. But she wasn’t, so she didn’t. She cleared her throat and got straight to business.
‘OK,’ she said, placing the piece of paper with the DNA results down on the table. ‘This is the thing. Let’s go through the numbers. You share 1500 centimorgans of DNA with your sister. Don’t worry too much about what a centimorgan is; it’s just a measurement, like an inch, but one that makes sense in the context of DNA chains. What you need to know is that this is in the range for half-siblings, or double-cousins, like cousins who are related on both sides. And the upshot of all of that is that one of you has a different father, with close to a hundred per cent certainty.’ Sian stopped and let this sink in, looking over at her client to assess whether she’d understood or if she appeared distressed.
Gabriella didn’t speak but she nodded for Sian to continue talking.
‘Well, given what you’ve said about all the doubts you’ve had and all the reasons for those doubts, it could well be you who has a different father. There was a reason that it was you and not your sister who came to me, after all. I can’t tell you for sure, though.’ She paused, letting out a whistled breath. ‘Unless your dad…’ She let this thought hang in the air.
Gabriella was shaking her head. ‘No,’ she said, ‘I can’t.’ She caught her breath. ‘I won’t.’ Sounding certain now. ‘And you are absolutely sure about this?’
Sian held on to the report and pulled it closer, as if to examine it again. But in truth, she knew exactly what it said. ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I’m sure. I can take you through some of the theory if it helps.’
Gabriella’s pretty face screwed up and she shook her head. She breathed out tears then grabbed for the report. She stared at the papers, despite the fact that she wouldn’t have a clue what any of the charts or figures meant.
‘Look, I promised you that I’d tell you the truth. And this is the truth.’ Sian considered saying she was sorry but concluded that would be disingenuous. She had nothing to be sorry about. She’d done her job, got the answer that her client had requested. ‘It’s not even close to being a match for full siblings,’ she added. If she couldn’t be comforting, she would at least be clear.
Gabriella stared at her as if she wanted to hit her. Sian weighed up the danger. Gabriella was about eight stone, tops. They lived in the UK, so it was doubtful that she was armed. And Sian could easily block any blows that came her way and immobilise someone of this size if she needed to. The probabilities ran through her head like the digits raining down the screen in The Matrix, and it struck her that it was sad, this, that she was always weighing up whether she could beat someone in a fight.
Gabriella’s face softened then. Sian came to, as if out of a trance, and grabbed the box of tissues on her desk and offered them over.
‘Thanks,’ Gabriella said, sniffing and taking a tissue. She swallowed, then blew her nose, clearly working hard to stop herself from crying.
‘I’m sorry I don’t have better news,’ Sian said, echoing something she remembered her doctor saying to her mum when her father was on life support after a heart attack. This seemed to have helped as Gabriella managed a smile in her direction.
‘It’s not your fault,’ the younger woman told her.
‘I can look into it further if you want,’ Sian said. ‘Try to find your biological father?’ She realised as she said it that this might sound like a sales pitch, but she hadn’t meant it that way. She genuinely wanted to help Gabriella if she could.
‘You could do that?’
Sian shrugged. ‘There are no guarantees, but it’s certainly something I could investigate. It just depends on whether family members of his have added themselves to the commercial DNA databases.’ Sian could see that her client was confused. ‘If they’ve done ancestry tests or anything like that for their family trees. It’s getting to the point where enough people have that we can find lost relatives for most people.’ Often relatives who didn’t want to be found, Sian knew, but she wasn’t about to say that while Gabriella was still so upset.
Her client nodded, sniffing and wiping her face with the tissue. ‘I’ll think about it,’ she said.
Sian nodded. ‘You can take the report.’
Gabriella pulled the papers from the desk in a swift movement and stood up. ‘Thanks,’ she said, though she didn’t look very thankful. She gave Sian the smallest of smiles and then turned and walked from the room.
The medical centre had that very specific smell that was typical of such places. Sian couldn’t put her finger on exactly what it was. There was a whiff of disinfectant about it, but something else, too – overcooked dinners or something reminiscent of primary school. It was a smell she’d never liked. She scoped the room and all the exits, the way she always did when she arrived somewhere unfamiliar. The waiting room was calm and fairly empty. Sian walked over to the computer check-in screen and typed her details, then took a seat towards the back, where she could see all the entrances and exits, and most of the room. But not too far from the door that she couldn’t escape quickly if she needed to.
She sat and chewed on a nail, wondering how big a mistake this was. She had promised Kris and so she was here, but that didn’t mean she had to believe in it. As she examined the mess she’d made of her cuticle, the idea that she could solve her problems by any kind of therapy felt as silly as manifesting, where people truly thought they could write the life they wanted on a piece of paper and it would just happen.
With a thick breath out, she reached for a magazine. A woman a few rows away gave her the evils but Sian ignored her. She’d picked up Psychologies. On message. At least it was vaguely scientific, she supposed, as she flicked through. She turned pages mechanically, superficially registering their content. Articles about how you needed to leave teenage boys alone so that they could sort out their own shit – well, wasn’t that true for everyone? Something about women with autism often not being diagnosed until their forties – well, there was a reason for that, wasn’t there? One of the things Sian had hated about social media was the way everyone seemed to look for a label to prove they were neurodiverse. They just wanted to be special, and she was prone to telling them so and losing friends that way.
There was a loud beep. Sian jolted in her seat like she’d been woken. The sign above reception lit up with a name and a room – not hers. She realised her heart was beating faster and wondered why she felt so nervous. Cognitive Behavioural Therapy. To Sian, this sounded like an experiment you might do on rats that would involve electric shocks. She took out her phone, even though there was a discouraging sign in front of her, a picture of a mobile phone with a big red cross through it. The phone drawn on the sign was as out of date as the sentiment. She smiled at the idea that such a thing would persuade anyone not to look at their screen here and now, in 2022. Ridiculous.
Another beep, and this time it was her name on the screen. Room 5. She stood up and looked for the signs, following them to the right of reception and then around and behind it. The sign on the door read Ms M Gilmour.
Sian swallowed and knocked.
‘Come in.’
There was something familiar about the voice. But then a lot of people sounded the same in Nottingham, of course. That was why they called it an accent. Sian’s brain was racing through possibilities and trying to place the voice as she opened the door. She got there just before her eyes confirmed it.
‘Hello.’ The woman sitting at the desk looked calm and unruffled.
‘It’s you,’ Sian said, as if the woman needed clarification of her own identity. The M on the sign stood for Morgan – the less annoying member of the dinner party couple from the previous evening. If Sian had believed in such things, this would have felt like the universe affirming her unease about being here at all.
‘I thought it must be you,’ Morgan said, her voice calm and professional. ‘I didn’t think there could be two people with that name, but I had no idea you were a doctor.’
Sian tried to smile. ‘Well, not a medical doctor,’ she said, ‘It’s a PhD. I’m a DNA expert.’ She said the final word pointedly and immediately regretted it. It was as if she were trying to bring the conflict from the previous evening here with her. But it was too late. A song by Crowded House about taking the weather everywhere buzzed in her head, and the earworm persisted as she tried again to smile.
‘Take a seat,’ Morgan said, gesturing as if Sian could fail to see the chair in front of her. ‘We need to talk about what you want to do.’
Sian didn’t want to sit down. Her fight-or-flight instincts were kicking in. The idea of therapy was bad enough without the counsellor turning out to be someone who knew her brother and Ginny. Worse, someone with questionable opinions who she’d argued with at a dinner party.
‘Please,’ Morgan said, gesturing at the chair again. ‘I won’t bite, I promise.’
Sian’s legs were feeling wobbly so she sat. ‘I’m just a bit surprised,’ she said. She breathed in then out again. ‘To be honest, it’s taken me a lot to come to this appointment.’ She wasn’t sure why she was telling Morgan this, but it slipped out before she had chance to stop it.
‘Yes, of course.’ Morgan pushed a pair of glasses up her nose and placed a pen down on the table. ‘Listen, I can imagine that. And that this feels a little awkward too.’ Her voice was soft and soothing.
‘So, do we go ahead with the session?’ Sian tried to imagine what she’d do if someone she knew turned up at her office. She was, after all, the only DNA detective in town. Well, they’d know who she was from the sign above the door or from the website that they’d use to get in touch. It wasn’t the same. She realised that Morgan had access to her medical records – might have read them already – and she felt a chill push down from her neck, into her body.
‘We don’t have to cancel,’ Morgan said. She cleared her throat. ‘It’s not like we really know each other. We met the once. You can decide if you want to go ahead and work with me or if you want me to find a different person to treat you.’
‘OK,’ Sian said. She felt frozen inside, as if making any decision were impossible.
‘What I can promise you is that I’ll be a consummate professional. Nothing of what has passed between us before will come into what happens in this room. Nothing that happens in this room will be passed on to anyone outside of your treatment team or have any bearing on anything that happens if I see you in real life again. Apart from a short write-up at the end for your medical records, what goes on here is between you, me and these four.’ Morgan indicated around her, at the walls. ‘The only exception to that is if you tell me something that leads me to believe you could be of harm to yourself, or someone else. In that case, there would be steps I’d need to take professionally. But nothing you say here would ever be repeated to friends we have in common.’
