two are at university now. It seems to happen so suddenly. But I’ll tell you one thing—you never ever stop worrying. Whatever you do, you always feel you might have got it wrong.’
‘Yes. I can imagine that.’
Her husband calls her in to help with the patient before me: she doubles as his dental nurse.
I glance across at the woman with the bruising. I wonder about her life, and the little steps, each seeming perhaps so innocuous, that have brought her to what looks like a very bad place. How easily this can happen—sleepwalking into trouble. Maybe she senses my gaze on her; she glances up, catches my eye. I feel myself flush and turn back to the magazines, pulling out a local paper, the Twickenham Times.
I keep my eyes down, looking at the paper, pretending to be interested. There are pictures of school prize-givings. I read my horoscope. There’s a recipe for grapefruit and poppyseed cake, which sounds delicious and which I attempt to memorise. I wonder if poppyseeds are expensive, and whether they stock them at Somerfield.
Something catches my eye then, a double-page spread in the centre of the paper. ‘The Real Ghost-Busters: Cynthia Johnson Reports.’ Intrigued, I start to read. It’s all written in that bland, gossipy style you find in small local newspapers.
Things that go bump in the night are all in a day’s work for Dr Adam Winters, of the Psychic Institute at Hampton University. Adam talked to me in the disappointingly prosaic setting of his office in the Department of Psychology. A soft-spoken man, whose gentle voice belies his evident energy and fascination with his subject, he has investigated ghosts, poltergeists and cases of telepathy. Sounds like an exciting job? ‘Mostly it’s quite routine,’ says Adam. ‘For instance, if someone claims to have telepathic powers, we might set up an experiment where they have to make predictions, and we analyse the results to see if their guesses are better than chance. Basically we’re applying scientific methods of inquiry to the things that happen to people that they can’t explain…’
There’s a photo of Adam Winters with the article. It’s a grainy photo; you can’t really see him clearly. He’s lean and dark, and his chin is shadowed with stubble, and he has a startled air, as if someone has just called his name. I contemplate the photo for a moment. I decide he’s the kind of man who’d corner you at a party and stand too close and talk at length about some obsession of his: someone who’d undoubtedly think that I was rather frivolous. Then I smile at myself, for conjuring up this entire persona for him.
I can hear the edgy, mosquito whine of a drill from one of the surgeries. I don’t want to think about it. I focus on the article, which has lots of stories of local ghosts. There’s a gallery at Hampton Court that’s haunted by the ghost of Kathryn Howard, whom Henry VIII beheaded: dogs won’t go over the threshold. Adam Winters and his colleagues visit the sites of the hauntings, and measure fluctuations in electromagnetic fields.
I ask him if he believes in ghosts, but he’s guarded and non-committal. He tells me, ‘A scientist should never say that anything is impossible…’
I look up as the woman in the black business suit is called in. I notice how stiffly she moves, her body fragile as eggshell. Then the door bangs shut behind her, and I’m alone in the room.
I turn back to the paper. I skim through the rest of the article, and am about to turn the page when the last few lines spring out at me as though they are illuminated.
But Adam doesn’t confine his researches to ghostly apparitions. One of the cases he’s currently investigating is that of four-year-old Kevin Smith (not his real name). Kevin wakes sobbing every night and says he wants to go home, and sometimes he talks about a place where he says he used to live. His mother wonders if Kevin is remembering a previous life…
The room tilts. I can feel my heart, its rapid, jittery beat.
I put it to Adam that many children live in a fantasy world. ‘Of course,’ he says. ‘And that’s why we have to look at these cases very carefully. In fact, accounts of children apparently remembering past lives are actually quite common, though most of them come from cultures which have a belief in reincarnation, like the Druse of Lebanon.’ And he tells me there are psychiatrists who claim to use past life regression to heal physical symptoms and phobias…
I ask him what he thinks of all this. ‘I’ve never investigated a past life case that I found completely convincing,’ he tells me. ‘But there’s a US psychiatrist, Dr Ian Stevenson, who devoted his life to exploring this phenomenon—and some of his cases are really very persuasive.’
I jump as my dentist’s door swings back. An elderly man in a drab grey coat comes out; he’s touching his face with his fingers, as though to check that it’s still there. The dentist’s wife takes his credit card. I read hungrily on, my heart juddering.
So what does Adam make of Kevin? He’s diplomatic: he gives me a guarded smile. ‘As a scientist, I never say never,’ he tells me.
Have you had an experience that you can’t explain? Adam Winters would love to hear from you. You can contact him at this e-mail address…
I grab my bag and scrabble around for a pen.
‘Ms Reynolds, could you come in now?’
The dentist is standing at the door of his surgery. I fold up the paper and tuck it under the magazines.
I get in the chair, and the dentist pokes around in my mouth. He’s a bony, lugubrious, kindly man. He allows himself a melodramatic sigh.
‘And when did you last come to see me?’ he says.
‘I can’t remember exactly. I’m afraid it’s quite a while.’
He shakes his head, as though wearily resigned to human weakness.
‘I’ll see what I can do,’ he says mournfully. ‘But in the end we’ll probably have to extract it.’
He drills my tooth, puts in a filling, prescribes some antibiotics.
‘To be honest, I really don’t know if this is going to work,’ he says. ‘You should make an appointment for eight weeks’ time. But any trouble, you come back sooner, OK? Any twinges.’
I promise that I will.
I go back into the waiting room. The dentist’s wife follows. If she weren’t here, I might steal the Twickenham Times. The work will cost a lot: I arrange to pay in instalments. She fixes my next appointment.
Outside, I’m amazed that everything is just the same as it always was: the lumbering buses, the crowd of pedestrians jostling at the traffic lights—all solid, vivid, predictable, just as they were before.
CHAPTER 10
It’s a cold, dreary December: dark days, with a raw, searching wind that often has flakes of snow in it, and sometimes a rain that looks like water but feels like ice on your skin. In our garden, the mulberry branches are bare, and the lawn is muddy and sodden, and leaves from the trees in the Somerfield car park drift up against the wall, their extravagant russets and yellows darkened and dulled by the wet. It’s a struggle to keep the flat warm, with the ceilings so high and the heating so elderly and erratic; the wind sneaks in through every little crack. At night I pile my coats on top of Sylvie’s duvet.
At the flower shop, we’re
