Kind of Cruel Read online

  Kind of Cruel

  Sophie Hannah

  www.hodder.co.uk

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by Hodder & Stoughton

  An Hachette UK company

  Copyright © 2012 Sophie Hannah

  The right of Sophie Hannah to be identified as the Author of the

  Work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright,

  Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,

  stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any

  means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be

  otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that

  in which it is published and without a similar condition being

  imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance

  to real persons, living or dead is purely coincidental.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library

  ISBN 978 1 444 70834 9

  Hodder & Stoughton Ltd

  338 Euston Road

  London NW1 3BH

  www.hodder.co.uk

  For Juliet Emerson, who helped me to solve many mysteries, both autobiographical and fictional

  Contents

  If you ask someone ...

  1 Tuesday 30 November 2010

  What is the difference ...

  2 30/11/2010

  One way to approach ...

  3 Tuesday 30 November 2010

  But we’ve walked ourselves ...

  4 1/12/2010

  So. The answer is ‘the key’ ...

  5 Wednesday 1 December 2010

  If something happens once ...

  6 2/12/2010

  All right, confession time ...

  7 Thursday 2 December 2010

  I’m starting to get ...

  8 2/12/2010

  At last, an accusation ...

  9 Thursday 2 December 2010

  Did you know that ...

  10 2/12/2010

  Let’s have a few minutes ...

  11 Friday 3 December 2010

  Since you don’t want ...

  12 3/12/2010

  13 Friday 3 December 2010

  14 9/12/2010

  15 Friday 10 December 2010

  Thank you for coming ...

  Acknowledgements

  About the Author

  Also by Sophie Hannah

  If you ask someone for a memory and they tell you a story, they’re lying.

  Me aged five, curled in a ball behind the doll’s house, hiding; scared the teacher will find me, knowing it’s going to happen, trying to prepare myself – that’s a memory.

  Here’s the story I turned it into: on my first day at primary school, I was furious with my mother for leaving me in a place I didn’t know, with strangers. Running away wasn’t an option, because I was a good girl – my parents were always telling me that – but on this occasion I objected so strongly to what had been inflicted on me that I decided to protest by absenting myself from Mrs Hill’s classroom as thoroughly as I dared. There was a large doll’s house in one corner of the room, and, when no one was looking, I tucked myself into the space between it and the wall. I don’t know how long I stayed there, hidden, listening to the unappealing noises my classmates were making and Mrs Hill’s attempts to impose order, but it was long enough for my deception to start to feel uncomfortable. I regretted hiding, but to show myself suddenly would be tantamount to confessing, and I had no desire to do anything so rash. I knew I’d be found eventually, and that my punishment would be severe, and I became increasingly scared and agitated, crying quietly so that no one would hear. At the same time, part of me was thinking, ‘Say nothing, don’t move – there’s still a chance you’ll get away with it.’

  When I heard Mrs Hill tell all the children to sit cross-legged on the carpet so that she could take the register, I panicked. Somehow, although I’d never been to school or even nursery before, I knew what that meant: she was going to call our names, one by one. When I heard mine, I would have to say, ‘Yes, Mrs Hill’. Wherever I was, I would have to say it. The possibility of remaining silent didn’t occur to me; that would have involved a level of deceit and rebellion I wouldn’t have been prepared to contemplate, let alone attempt. Still, I didn’t move from my hiding place. I have always been an optimist, and wasn’t willing to give up until I absolutely had to. Something might happen to prevent Mrs Hill from taking the register, I thought: a bird might fly in through the classroom window, or one of my classmates could suddenly fall ill and have to be rushed to hospital. Or I might come up with a brilliant idea in the next three seconds – some amazing exit route out of this mess I’d got myself into.

  None of those things happened, of course, and when Mrs Hill called my name, I decided the best course of action was a compromise. I said nothing, but raised my hand from behind the doll’s house so that it was clearly visible. I was doing my bit, I thought – admitting to being present, raising my hand responsibly – yet there still remained the miraculous possibility that no one would notice, that as a reward for declaring myself, I would get to miss the entire school day. And then I could turn up the following day and do exactly the same again. That was my fantasy; the reality was that Mrs Hill spotted my protruding arm at once and demanded that I come out from behind the doll’s house. Later, she told my mother what I’d done and I was punished both at school and at home. I don’t remember the punishments.

  How much of that story is true? At a guess, I’d say most of it. Ninety per cent, maybe. How much of it do I remember? Hardly any. Two emotional states, that’s all: the mixture of fear and defiance I felt while I was behind the doll’s house, and the terrible humiliating defeat of having to come out and face the class. Everyone knew I’d taken a risk, then lost my nerve and given myself up. I remember feeling shamed by the memory – seconds after the event; a memory within a memory – of my stupid bet-hedging gesture of staying hidden while silently raising my hand. I was pathetic: too good to be naughty and too naughty to be good. I remember wishing I was any other child in the class, anyone but me. I’m pretty sure I had all those feelings, though at five I didn’t yet have the vocabulary to describe them.

  The problem – what prevents me from being certain – is that for forty years, my story about what happened that day has been trampling all over my memories, so that by now it has effectively replaced them. True memories are frail, fragmentary apparitions, easily bulldozed into submission by a robust narrative that has been carefully engineered to stick in the mind. Almost as soon as we’ve had an experience, we decide what we would like it to mean, and we construct a story around it that is going to make that possible. The story incorporates whichever relevant memories suit its purpose – positioning them strategically, like colourful brooches on the lapel of a black jacket – and discards the ones that are of no use.

  For years, I told a different version of my first-day-at-school story, a version in which I emerged from my hiding place with a cocky smile on my face and said with absolute confidence, ‘What? I wasn’t pretending not to be here. I put my hand up, didn’t I? You never said I couldn’t sit behind the doll’s house.’ Then one day I caught myself mid-anecdote and thought, ‘Can that really be what happened?’ Sometimes we need to demolish our endlessly told tales in order to get to the real memories. It’s a bit like stripping layer after layer of paint off a brick wall. Underneath, we find the original bricks – stained and discoloured, in poor condition after years of not being able to breathe.

  The funny thing is that, now, both versions of the story – the
one in which I brazen it out and the one in which I’m humiliated – feel like memories to me, because I have told both so many times, to myself and to other people. Each time we tell a story, we deepen the groove it occupies in our mind, allowing it to burrow further in and seem more real with each telling.

  A true memory might be a fleeting image of a red coat, a lemon tree (you don’t know where), a strong feeling, the name of someone you used to know – just the name, nothing more. Genuine memories do not have beginnings, middles and ends. There’s no suspense, no obvious point to them, certainly no moral lesson learned – nothing to satisfy an audience, and by ‘audience’ I mean the teller, who is always the first audience for his or her own story.

  All this can be applied to Christmas 2003 and what happened at Little Orchard, which – as you’ve probably guessed by now – is not a memory but a story. Hopefully, it’s a story that can be used to retrieve a few memories embedded within it, and maybe some rejected ones too, ones that didn’t fit with the overall flow and were ditched accordingly. As an experiment, I’m going to assume, for the time being at least, that the Little Orchard story is one in which every detail is false.

  None of it really happened. Nobody woke up on Christmas morning to find that four members of their family had disappeared.

  1

  Tuesday 30 November 2010

  Look: there is nothing special about this place. Look at the gaps between the bricks in the gateposts, where the pointing has fallen out. Look at the ugly UPVC window frames. This is not a place where miracles happen.

  And – because I’m more than willing to shoulder my share of the blame in advance – there is nothing special about me. I am not a place where miracles happen.

  This isn’t going to work. So I mustn’t be disappointed when it doesn’t.

  I’m not here because I think it’s going to help. I’m here because I’m sick of having to plaster a receptive smile on my face and make pleased and surprised noises when yet another person tells me how brilliantly it worked for them. ‘You should try hypnosis,’ says everybody I meet, from my colleagues to my dentist to parents and teachers at the girls’ school. ‘I was really sceptical, and only went as an absolute last resort, but it was like magic – I never touched cigarettes/vodka/cream cakes/betting slips again.’

  I’ve noticed that anyone who advocates a wildly implausible solution to a problem always stresses how cynically unconvinced they were at first, before they tried it. No one ever says, ‘I was and am exactly the kind of desperate idiot who’s ready to believe in anything. Weirdly, hypnotherapy really worked for me.’

  I’m sitting in my car on Great Holling Road, outside the home of Ginny Saxon, the hypnotherapist I chose quite randomly. Well, perhaps not entirely. Great Holling is the nicest village in the Culver Valley; might as well go somewhere picturesque to waste my money, I thought. Very few places are so idyllic that one notices a backlash against them – people describing them as being ‘not the real world’ or ‘up their own arse’ – but it’s almost a cliché around these parts to thumb your nose at the beautiful seclusion of Great Holling by opting, instead, to live in a noisier, dirtier place that, coincidentally, contains cheaper houses. ‘But even if I could afford to live in Great Holling, I wouldn’t. It’s just too perfect.’ Yeah, right.

  Still, maybe I should be more trusting. Plenty of people have money and choose not to use it to improve their situations. Some fools I know hand over their hard-earned cash to quacks and ask to be mesmerised, hoping they’ll come round to find that all their problems have disappeared.

  Ginny Saxon’s address, like her brand of therapy, is a con. She doesn’t live in Great Holling. I have driven all the way out here on false pretences – even more false pretences than a silly placebo treatment, I mean. I should have looked more carefully at the address and realised that the double helping of the village’s name within it – 77 Great Holling Road, Great Holling, Silsford – was protesting too much. I am not in Great Holling, but on an A-road on the way to it. There are houses on one side, including Ginny Saxon’s, and brown and grey sludgy-looking fields on the other. This is agricultural land masquerading as countryside. In one of the fields there’s a building with a corrugated metal roof. It’s the sort of landscape that makes me think of sewage, even if I’m being unfair and can’t actually smell any.

  You are being unfair. What’s the harm in having an open mind? It might work.

  Inwardly, I groan. The disappointment, when this charade I’m about to participate in leaves me exactly as it found me, is going to hurt – probably worse than after all the other stuff I’ve tried that hasn’t worked. Hypnotherapy is the thing everybody does as a last resort. After it, there’s nothing left to try.

  I look at the time on my car clock. 3 p.m. on the dot; I am supposed to be arriving now. But it’s warm in my Renault Clio, with the heater on, and freezing outside. No snow here, not even the kind that doesn’t settle, but every night snow is forecast with a little more glee on the part of the local news weather lady. The whole of the Culver Valley is in the grip of that peculiarly English weather condition – inspired as much by schadenfreude as by sub-zero temperatures – known as ‘Don’t think the snow won’t come just because it hasn’t yet’.

  ‘On the count of three,’ I imagine saying to myself in my best deep hypnotic voice, ‘you will get out of your car, go into that house across the road and pretend to be in a trance for an hour. You will then write a cheque for seventy quid to a charlatan. It’ll be ace.’ I pull my written instructions out of my coat pocket: Ginny’s address. I check it, put it back – a delaying tactic that establishes nothing I didn’t already know. I’m in the right place.

  Or the wrong one.

  Here goes.

  As I walk towards the house, I see that the car parked in the driveway is not empty. There’s a woman in it, wearing a black coat with a furry collar, a red scarf and bright red lipstick. There’s a notebook open on her lap and a pen in her hand. She’s smoking a cigarette and has opened her window, despite the temperature. Her ungloved hands are mottled from the cold. Smoking and writing are obviously more important to her than comfort, I think, seeing a pair of woolly gloves lying next to the Marlboro Lights packet on the passenger seat. She looks up and smiles at me, says hi.

  I decide she can’t be Ginny Saxon, whose website lists giving up smoking as one of the things she can help with. Sitting in her car outside her house with a fag in her gob would be an odd form for that help to take, unless it’s a carefully thought-out double bluff. Then I notice something I couldn’t see from the road: a small free-standing wooden building in the back garden with a sign on it saying ‘Great Holling Hypnotherapy Clinic – Ginny Saxon MA PGCE Dip Couns Adv Dip Hyp’.

  ‘That’s where it all happens,’ says the smoker, with more than a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘In her garden shed. Inspires confidence, doesn’t it?’

  ‘It’s more attractive than the house,’ I say, slipping easily into nasty-girl-at-the-back-of-the-school-bus mode, praying that Ginny Saxon won’t pop up behind me and catch me slagging off her home. Why do I care about ingratiating myself with this chippy stranger? ‘At least it hasn’t got UPVC windows,’ I add, aware of the absurdity of my behaviour but powerless to do anything about it.

  The woman grins, then turns away as if she’s had second thoughts about talking to me. She looks down at her notebook. I know how she feels; it would have been better if we’d pretended not to notice one another. We can be as sarcastic as we like, but we’re both here because we’ve got problems we can’t sort out on our own, and we know it – about ourselves and about each other.

  ‘She’s running an hour late. My appointment was for two o’clock.’

  I try to look as if this doesn’t bother me; I’m not sure I succeed. That’ll mean . . . Ginny Saxon won’t be able to see me until four, and at ten past I’ll have to leave if I’m going to be home in time to meet Dinah and Nonie off the school bus.

  ‘
Don’t worry, you can have my slot,’ says my new friend, tossing her cigarette end out of the window. If Dinah were here, she would say, ‘Go and pick up your litter, right now, and put it in a bin.’ It wouldn’t occur to her that she’s only eight, and not in a position to give orders to a stranger more than five times her age. I make a mental note to retrieve the cigarette stub and put it in the nearest wheelie bin if I get the chance, if I can do it without the woman seeing me and taking it as a criticism.

  ‘Don’t you mind?’ I ask.

  ‘I wouldn’t have offered if I minded,’ she says, sounding noticeably jollier. Because she’s off the hook? ‘Either I’ll come back at four, or . . .’ – she shrugs – ‘. . . or I won’t.’

  She closes her car window and starts to reverse out of the driveway, waving at me in a way that makes me feel I’ve been conned – a mixture of flippant and superior, a wave that seems to say, ‘You’re on your own, sucker’.

  ‘Do come in out of the cold,’ says a voice behind me. I turn and see a plump woman with a round pretty face and blonde hair in a ponytail so limp and casual that most of the hair has fallen out of it. She’s wearing an olive green corduroy skirt, black ankle boots with black tights and a cream polo-neck top that clings around her waist, drawing attention to the extra weight she’s carrying. I guess that she’s between forty and fifty, closer to forty.

  I follow her into the wooden building, which is not and has clearly never been a shed. The wood, both inside and out, looks too new – there are no marks to suggest that a muddy trowel or an oily lawnmower has ever lived here. One wall is covered from top to bottom with framed botanical prints, and there are curvaceous sky-blue vases filled with flowers in three of the room’s four corners. A white rug with a thick blue border takes up most of the wooden floor. On one side of it, there’s a maroon leather swivel recliner chair and matching footstool, and on the other, a brown distressed leather sofa next to a small table piled high with books and magazines about hypnotherapy.