“Put these in the bin, would you?” Oscar is handing me the leaflets that came through the letter box with the post. “I’m sick of this junk mail. We should get a sign up. That’s what they’ve got next door, have you seen? ‘No cold callers, no circulars, et cetera.’ That’s what we need. Make a note to ask them where they got it.”
A beat. The air is very hot and very still.
“Mina?”
“I’m going to do it, Oscar.”
He leans in the doorway with his arms folded, a look of puzzled amusement on his face. Humoring me.
“You’re not serious?”
“Yes, I am. I bloody am. I leave tomorrow.”
“Okay, Mina. Okay. Let’s just— Gosh, let’s just have a drink, all right? Something nice and cold. It’s this air, it’s too humid. Did you know heat waves are linked to a rise in violent crime? You’d wonder who had the energy for it.”
“Oscar, please. I want to talk about this. The train leaves at nine-thirty tomorrow morning and I intend to be on it.”
“You won’t find Eddie this way, Mina.” His voice is so quiet and flat I almost mistake it for the hum of the fridge. “All this expectation. It will crush you.”
“What do you mean?”
“You know bloody well what I mean.” He sighs. “Look, I get it, Mina. I do. I know how much you miss your brother. I know how much you want to see him again, how tightly you hold on to the idea that he can somehow navigate back to you.”
Tears spring into my eyes. The room blurs and then prisms into sharp little points of light. I turn and brush them away. Oscar is still talking.
“But this? You’re looking for something that isn’t there. You’re just prolonging pain.”
It hurts, and he can see it, and I know he’s trying to be kind but oh, it hurts. I jump as his hand takes mine tenderly, standing so close I can smell the soap on his skin.
“You’re in purgatory, Mina. Death by a thousand cuts.”
Sam had asked myopinion. As a psychologist, he’d said. As a professional. I admit to having felt a small swell of pride, brightas a red balloon. I straightened up in that hard little chair. It felt good to be necessary.
“Well, it could be that Alice is suffering from some form of temporal lobe epilepsy. That would go some way to explaining some of the states you described—hearing voices, visual disturbances. Or there could be more to it—a tumor maybe? I read once about a man who suddenly woke up only able to speak German. It turned out he had a pea-sized tumor pressing against his pituitary gland. Then you’ve got any number of psychotic disorders that can cause these symptoms, she’d need to be assessed properly for those. As for the vomiting, you know what pica is?”
Sam shook his head. I took a quick glance at my watch. It was almost quarter to three. I could still make it to the caterers if I left soon.
“Pica is a compulsive eating disorder in which people eat nonfood items—clay, dirt, even soap. It’s very common for people with anemia to do this—it’s the body’s response to a nutritional deficiency. It might explain the hair and the pins, though again, this is just my opinion, and I’m not a doctor. This vomiting, did anyone actually see her do it?”
“No. Her mother just collected the bowl.”
“So Alice could have put the pins and hair into it herself, right?”
Sam frowned.
“I guess.”
“You’re taking a lot of this at face value,” I told him, stirring the ice in my glass with a straw. “Aren’t reporters supposed to be cynical?”
“There’s a story here, Mina, I’m just not sure what type it is yet. It’s my job to find out.”
I nodded. Sam’s voice was strained and it looked as though he hadn’t been sleeping, eyes ringed with dark shadows. Besides, I thought, was what he was telling me any crazier than seeing a ghost in a photograph?
“So you think she’s faking?” Sam asked. He tapped his cigarette into the ashtray.
“I didn’t say that, but yes, that’s the assumption I’d start from.”
“But it’s not normal teenage behavior?”