‘He said he loved me.’
‘He say that to every girl he sex. Every woman, too. Every grandmother. Pylyp sex everyone. Except me. He never sex me.’
Beverley looked up in disgust. ‘Well, I should hope not,’ he said. ‘You’re his mother.’
‘I know. I just say.’
‘Well, it’s a bit of a peculiar thing to say.’
‘Oh no,’ said Dr Tataryn, putting a hand to her face. ‘Writer of silly stories think brain surgeon say peculiar thing! How will I get over hurt? Is shame too great to live with. I go now, take gun, and blow head from shoulders.’
‘I loathe sarcasm,’ said Beverley, gathering up her coat and bag and standing up. ‘You’re a very rude woman, Dr Tataryn.’
‘Boo hoo,’ she replied, pretending to cry. ‘Stupid writer who like sexing the little boys, she call me rude. I hang myself from nearest lamp-post.’
‘How childish.’
‘Moment you leave, I gather all pills in house and swallow them with whisky.’
‘This is not a conversation that I want to continue.’
‘Police come later and they find wrists sliced open with scalpel.’
‘Oh, shut up.’
Beverley made her way towards the front door before turning around and offering one final salvo.
‘You can tell your son that if he thinks he can make a fool of me, he’s got another think coming,’ she said. ‘After all, I still have his tortoise!’
OVER THE RAINBOW
‘I’m sorry, you did what now?’
Dr Angela Gosebourne placed her pen and notebook in her lap and stared across at Nelson, uncertain whether she’d heard him right. Her eyes were red-rimmed from crying, something he’d noticed when he’d entered her office.
‘I quit my job,’ he said. ‘At the school. I told them I didn’t want to work there any more.’
‘I see,’ she replied, nodding her head as she considered this. ‘And when did all this happen?’
‘A few hours ago,’ he said. ‘I was waiting for Mr Pepford outside his office when he arrived. The funny thing is, it was exactly the same seat that I used to sit in when I was a boy and being blamed for being bullied. When he showed up, he gave me his usual look of disdain before saying that he didn’t have time to talk to me as he’d been out with Martin Rice the night before and had a rotten hangover. I told him that I didn’t much care, that I had something to say and he could listen or not listen, just as he pleased, but I was going to say it anyway. That shocked him, I don’t mind telling you.’
‘The worm has turned, it seems.’
‘I’m not a worm,’ said Nelson, frowning.
‘No, I didn’t mean that you are. It’s just a saying, that’s all. A bon mot.’
‘I know it’s a saying. I’m not an idiot. I just don’t like being compared to a worm, that’s all.’
Angela said nothing for a few moments, uncertain whether she should congratulate herself on instilling some much-needed confidence into her patient or whether she should throw him out for his rudeness. She really wasn’t in the mood for this today. Not after what she’d just discovered.
‘My apologies,’ she said finally. ‘So what happened then?’
‘Well, I told him that I no longer wanted to be a teacher. That I loathed the children and thought he was a total twat.’
‘You said that?’
‘I said exactly that.’
‘Gosh. An ad hominem attack. Okay. Go on.’
‘Then I said that it had been a mistake for me ever to seek employment at the same school where I had been a student and that I no longer wanted to be cloistered in an institution where favouritism and bullying ran riot and we had a special code word for every time one of the girls got knocked up by one of the boys. His face went puce – I doubt anyone had ever spoken to him like this before – and he just stared at me as if I’d gone mad, before bursting out laughing and sitting down behind his desk. You’ve obviously had a bad night’s sleep, Cleverley, he told me. I suggest that you get back to work and we forget this conversation ever happened or you might find yourself in detention.’
‘Detention?’
‘I know! I’m a teacher, I told him, not a student. You can’t put me in detention. But he was right about one thing, I said. It wasn’t just that I’d had a bad night’s sleep. I’d barely had any sleep at all. In fact, I’d been shagging all night long and only got about two hours.’
‘Good Lord!’ said Angela, astonished. ‘And is that true?’
‘Oh yes. I barely got a wink.’
‘I can’t imagine he liked that very much.’
‘He didn’t. He told me that if I said one more word, then he’d fire me. And I told him that he must be as deaf as he is stupid because – hello! – I’d already resigned. Things went rather downhill from there.’
‘In what way?’
‘He took off his shoe and threw it at me.’
Angela sat back in surprise. ‘He did what?’
‘He took off his shoe and threw it at me. His right shoe. Then he took off his left and threw that one too. I was only standing about twelve feet away, but he missed both times, which I thought was a bit lame. It reminded me of that time a journalist in Baghdad threw his shoes at President Bush.’
‘I remember that. He actually dodged them very well.’
‘He did. Lightning-quick reactions.’
‘Still, an extraordinary thing for a headmaster to do.’
‘That’s what I thought.’
‘And what happened then?’
‘He sort of sank back into his chair and repeated that he had a terrible hangover and wasn’t even sure this conversation was taking place. I told him it definitely was. And I had meant every word. That’s when things started to get strange. He went very quiet, then turned around in his chair and looked out the window and began singing “Somewhere Over The Rainbow”.’
‘“Somewhere Over The Rainbow”?’
‘Yes. From The Wizard of Oz.’
Angela stared at him, utterly bewildered now. ‘But … why?’ she asked.
‘I wondered that too. I asked him whether he was all right and he spun back and, in a rather good soprano, sang of how someday he’d wish upon a star and wake up where the clouds were far behind him. Then his face went a strange colour, sort of lavender I’d call it, and I asked whether he needed some water. There was a bottle on a side table and I turned around to pour some into a glass and, when I turned back, he’d taken his trousers off. He’d gone quite mad, you see.’
Angela frowned. ‘As a clinical psychologist, you must understand that I don’t much care for the word mad.’
‘No, but there’s really no other way to put it. He stood up and danced around for a little, then sat back down again, in his shirt and underwear.’
‘Good heavens. It sounds like quite the cri de cœur.’
‘Then he started calling me Roger, for some inexplicable reason, and said that he’d fought with T. E. Lawrence in the Battle of Aqaba. A man of peculiar tastes, he said of Lawrence. I pointed out that, as far as I was aware, Lawrence had died in the thirties while he himself could not have been born until the late sixties, and he stood up and told me I was a fool to believe all the rubbish that’s written in the newspapers, that Lawrence was alive and well and living in a commune in Milton Keynes. At that point, I called one of the school secretaries and she came in and found him lying on the sofa, weeping like a baby. An ambulance was called, and that, as they say, was pretty much that.’