The Other Side of You. Salley Vickers

her life attempting to unravel the twisted minds of the criminally insane. It’s my opinion no one could ever disentangle that knot of evil and sickness, but for her it is the grail that infuses her work with the ardour of a mythic quest. My colleague, Dan Buirski, had a bee in his bonnet about eating disorders. I used to kid him, a long cadaver of a man himself, that he liked nothing more than a starving young woman to get his teeth into. I said once, ‘You’re no example, you’re a mere cheese paring yourself,’ and he laughed and said, ‘That’s why I understand them.’ He’s lucky with his metabolism, but his grandmother and his two uncles died in Treblinka. Starvation is in his blood and he’s converted that inheritance into a consuming interest in humankind’s relationship with food. It’s a strange business, ours.

      And what was my peculiar bent, the glimmer in my eye which has in it the capacity to lead me into dangerous swamps and mires? For me it was the denizens of that hinterland where life and death are sister and brother, the suicidally disposed, who beckoned. Like is drawn to like. Alter the biographical circumstances a fraction and my colleague who worked with psychopaths would make an expert serial killer: she had just the right streak of fanatical perfectionism and the necessary pane of ice in the heart. And for all his badinage, Dan had a hard time keeping a scrap of flesh on him. I saw him once, after he’d had a bad bout of flu, and I nearly crossed myself he looked so like a vampire’s victim. But despite the concentration camps, death wasn’t his particular lure. That was my province.

      It was a landscape I knew with that innate sense which people call ‘sixth’, with the invisible antennae that register the impalpable as no less real than a kick in the solar plexus from a startled horse. To some of us it can be more real. It is said that the dead tell no tales, but I wonder. When I was five, my brother, Jonathan, was killed by an articulated lorry. It was my third day of school and our mother was unwell; and because our school was close by, and my brother was advanced for his six and a half years, and was used to going to and from school alone, she allowed him to take me there unescorted. The one road we had to cross was a minor one but the lorry driver had mistaken his way and was backing round the corner as a preliminary to turning round. Jonny had stepped off the pavement and had his back to the lorry to beckon me across. Although he was mature for his age he was small, too small to figure in the mirror’s sight lines. I was on the pavement and I watched him vanish under the reversing lorry and I seem to remember—though this could be the construction of hindsight—that it was not until the vehicle started forward that I heard a thin, high scream, the sound I imagine a rabbit might make as a trap springs fatally on fragile bones.

      I doubt there was a bone left unbroken in my brother’s body when the lorry drove off, leaving the mess of shattered limbs and blood and skin which had been Jonny. I believe I saw what was left of him, before I was whirled away in the big, freckled arms of Mrs Whelan, who lived across the street and had heard the scream and rushed me into her house, which Jonny and I had never liked because it smelled of dismally cooked food, and terrified me by falling on her knees and dragging me down with a confused screech, ‘Jesus, Mary and Joseph, the blessed lamb, may he rest in peace.’

      Afterwards, I didn’t know where my brother was but I was pretty sure it wasn’t with Jesus, Mary or Joseph. The belief I clung to was that Jonny was still in the pine tree he had assured me was ‘magic’, on whose stately curving boughs we used to swing together in Chiswick Park. I heard him more than once, when I was allowed back to play there. He was singing ‘He’ll be coming round the mountain when he comes’, which was the song our mother sang when we were fretful, the two of us, on long car journeys. Later, when Mother had my twin sisters, born one behind the other within the hour, she sang other songs to them.

      From that time onwards, it was always ‘the girls’ and ‘Davey’. I, Davey, was the wrong side of the unbridgeable fissure that had opened up in our family, and although I’m sure my parents loved me I was a reminder of that small bloody mess they’d left behind. The lorry driver never recovered and had to be pensioned off, unfit for work. But my mother was made of sterner stuff. She had in her a fund of life that was not to be defeated even by life’s only real enemy. She was not a woman who lived on easy terms with her emotions. She was the daughter of a judge and her upbringing, though liberal, had not bred in her a place for the easy expression of the finer shades of feeling. And I knew, too, though nothing in her outward demeanour ever gave this away, that if she could have chosen which son she had to lose it would not have been Jonny.

      I didn’t blame her. After that, I was never going to be right for her again. I was the living witness to a calamity, the deeper reaches of which she could not afford to acknowledge if she was to continue to hold her self, and our family, together. Very likely she blamed me for the catastrophe. Why wouldn’t she? I blamed myself for it.

      My mother, for my father’s sake, for them to go on together, and for the family to survive, had to set her shoulders and turn her back on the disaster. She faced a choice, and she made it by abandoning me and jumping the ravine which had opened with Jonny’s death to the other side. It was a leap to the side of life and the proof of this came in the form of my twin sisters, apples of my father’s eye and each other’s best companion.

      For a long time I was expecting my lost brother to come round that mountain, with all the confidence with which he had stepped off the kerb of the pavement and into the lorry’s fatal path. He was my closest companion, my hero, my single most important attachment to life. And when he didn’t come, and I heard only the echo of his voice in my ear, as I swung alone on the low pine branch, pretending, for my mother’s sake, that I was enjoying myself, a part of me wanted to go after him, for company.

       2

      AT THE TIME I AM SPEAKING OF I WORKED IN TWO PSYCHIATRIC hospitals in the south of England: a big red-brick, mock-Gothic pile in Haywards Heath, and a cosier, less oppressive place near Brighton on the south coast. In addition, I had a small private practice, where occasionally I saw some paying patients.

      From her appearance Mrs Cruikshank might have been one of those. She had the voice and mannerisms of someone born middle class. But I came to learn that this was part of a wellcrafted veneer—like a piece of good furniture, she had a discreet sheen which was far from ordinary. In fact, she was the child of two immigrants, her father an Italian communist, who had come to England before the war, her mother, a refugee from the prerevolutionary Yugoslavia, the illegitimate daughter of one of those two-a-penny Eastern European counts, or so she claimed. When I got to know her better, my patient told me she thought this may have been a compensating fantasy for the fact that her mother worked for a time as a dinner lady in the local primary school, the one her own daughter attended. Possibly the idea had conferred on the child a tincture of the aristocratic. Fantasies, if they are convinced enough, are also an element in the reality which shapes us and there was a tilt to my patient’s narrow nose which might have given an impression of looking down it.

      She was the only child of a marriage that, given the natural antagonism of the backgrounds, was bound to be somewhat rocky. The parents were ill-matched in character, as well as history. It was a pattern I recognised. The mother was pushy and ambitious, the father, though something of an intellectual, more passive, content to read about revolution in Marx and Lenin but to let his own life take its course without putting up much fight. They bickered constantly, and as a result my patient left home early, in order to escape an atmosphere which grew increasingly abrasive as her mother’s insatiable discontent was left unassuaged.

      My patient was of the type of whom a first impression suggests that either they are phenomenally bright or slightly deficient. When I established that it was the former—though the very bright are almost by definition always also somewhere deficient—I recognised it as the kind of intelligence which is unconscious of its own reach. In my experience this is more often a feature of mental illness than is commonly acknowledged. Living in the world is hard enough, but if you see through it, yet lack the resources to deal with that keener vision, it can be a whole lot harder. I concluded that the school my patient had attended could not have provided the nourishment necessary to feed her potential. There had been none of those inspirational teachers who rescue many hidden intelligences.