Swimming With Goldfish

Lucy looked squarely at the woman sitting opposite her.

The psychologist squirmed under her direct glare and pulled at the hem of her skirt. It felt too short. Why did she allow Lucy to make her feel so inadequate? Her client was intimidating.

‘I asked you a question, Lucy,’

Lucy’s eyes mocked her.

‘Answer me please.’

Lucy lowered her gaze from Helen Chalker and examined her fingernails for thirty seconds. Helen counted them off in her head; Lucy was playing the game, always playing the game. Satisfied that her nails were clean of underlying debris she spoke slowly, in her own time, making her therapist wait until she was ready to speak.

‘I refuse to swim in a goldfish bowl.’

‘Is that how people make you feel? As though you are constantly swimming against the tide, against society? Talk to me, Lucy, tell me.’

‘Is that how you analyse my comment? How can you assume that is what I meant? What makes you so sure of your interpretation of my thoughts?’

The blue eyes bore into Helen’s until the therapist dropped her gaze and picked at a piece of imaginary fluff in her lap. Lucy had taken the advantage again.

‘I’m not sure, so why don’t you explain to me, Lucy, tell me what you’re thinking.’

‘Wouldn’t it be more logical to assume that I meant my world is closing in? That I feel trapped with nowhere to turn, ceaselessly swimming in small circles. I’m just one more mindless goldfish in a bowl with blue Chippings and a stone castle covered in algae?’

Damn her, she had blocked every question with one of her own. It was early days with Lucy. She had yet to face up to what had happened to come to terms with it and accept responsibility before being able to properly deal with things. She was in denial. Helen had to be patient and tread carefully. At least Lucy was skirting the taboo subject. Although she hadn’t directly referred to it she was subconsciously expressing a need to talk about it by mentioning things that were connected.

‘Is that what you meant? You feel trapped.’

‘No.’

‘Then why put forward that interpretation?’

‘Why not?’

‘Why are you being purposefully obtuse?’

Lucy’s brow furrowed in concentration. She twined her fingers and shifted in her seat. Helen had shaken her for the first time. She struck her advantage home with a small surge of power.

‘Well?’

‘What does obtuse mean?’ asked Lucy in a small voice. She had diminished; Helen knew that Lucy wouldn’t like admitting that she didn’t know something. Part of her condition was her need to feel superior. She considered herself all knowing and better than her contemporaries. She shrank so far into her seat that Helen felt a momentary pang of pity for her. She thought about the Scenes of Crime photos to dispel any feelings of compassion for the broken person in front of her.

‘It means that you are being difficult or intentionally awkward. Obtuse means that you are trying to sabotage our session. Why do you feel the need to do that?’

Lucy looked at Helen from beneath her eyelashes. Nobody should have lashes that long or naturally black. They offset her sapphire eyes. The small smile that trekked in the wake of the look was sly. Her elfin face turned to Helen; the eyes narrowed and her shimmering, ebony hair framed a face that was the epitome of beauty. A perfect mask of carefully constructed innocence belied the evil that lurked behind the pretty blue eyes.

‘I think you’ll find that obtuse is a blunt angle, or, it can be used to describe somebody being purposefully slow.’ She opened her eyes wide and looked at Helen with a mixture of sly cunning and feigned childish innocence. ‘Do you find me slow, Miss Chalker? Do you think I’m a retard? Perhaps I’m a dimwit or an imbecile? Shall I take another IQ test? The results of the last one may have been inaccurate. I wonder Miss Chalker, what is your IQ?’

Helen knew that Lucy’s IQ was not only higher than her own but almost double that of her own rating. The session was being led by the nose at the hands of her client. She had to try and regain some level of direction.

‘Lucy, I don’t doubt your intelligence or indeed your abilities’ Helen clasped her hands together to quell the tremor that if she felt Lucy had surely noticed.

‘Lucy, tell me about your Mother’ Helen had raised her voice to make it not a request but a command.

Lucy’s head shot up. She sat erect in the chair and her hands churned round and over themselves in her lap. She rocked violently in the seat, each forward movement bringing the back legs of the chair off the ground, each backward motion causing them to crash to the tiled floor with a bang. Helen was worried that the chair was going to tipple over backwards and that her client would be hurt but she was determined not to show any weakness.

‘Tell me about your mother, Lucy,’ she spat.

‘My mother’s a cock-sucking whore. Mother’s a bastard, bastard, bastard. She’s a cum-swallowing dog. I hate her. I’m glad she’s dead. Rot in hell, Mother.’ Lucy screamed the last four words. Her face had contorted into a grimace of rage and a vein pulsed visibly in her temple. She clenched her fists into two tight balls and a trickle of blood dripped from the palm of her right hand.

Helen was shocked by the vehemence and aggression. Lucy rocked harder, her eyes blazing. The chair was leaving the floor in both the backward and forwards tilt. Helen was shaking, her hands trembled in her lap. She rose from her seat not knowing what to do as the girl continued to scream profanities about her late Mother. Helen glanced at the two-way mirror as though her colleagues on the other side of the glass could give her the answers. Should she call the session to a halt? Request sedation? She was used to behaviour of all kinds from her clients and had a panic button two inches from her hand should she need back-up but this sudden change in Lucy’s demeanour was so unexpected that she had been taken by surprise. And then there was Lucy herself. What she was. Helen masked her distaste as she watched her client’s tantrum.

As suddenly as Lucy had started to rock, she stopped. A wide and disarming smile spread across her face and her features set into a serene and pleasant countenance.

She giggled softly.

‘Is that what you want, Miss Chalker? Is that how I’m supposed to act? What should I do now? Chew my fingers off? Defecate myself? That’s shit to you, Miss-Chalker-with-the-limited-vocabulary.’ With cool appraisal she noted Helen’s reaction.

Helen dropped back into her seat and drew a hand across her eyes. She’d treated some cool patients, old hands that knew how to play the system, but this one was remarkable. She was a true sociopath without any hint of remorse or regret. Helen fought to bring her breathing under control.

‘Tell me about your pictures, Lucy.’

‘I draw. What’s to tell?’

‘Your subjects are a little unusual.’

‘So are Eschers.’

‘Escher used mathematics to produce his work.’

‘And your point is?’

‘Tell me where you get your inspiration from?’

‘From my imagination of course’

Helen picked up the A3 sketch pad from her desk and leafed through the work. She felt the gorge rising in her throat as she flipped from piece to piece and fought it down in an effort to concentrate on the style of the artwork rather than the subject. Perhaps flattery would reap rewards.

‘These are fantastic. The perspective is perfect and the colours are so—,’ she gulped, ‘—vivid. The craftsmanship of your work is exquisite.’

Lucy looked bored.

‘Please don’t insult me with false praise and insincerity, Miss Chalker. You don’t like my pictures; they make you feel sick. You want to puke right there on the floor. Be warned though, you’d better keep contracting that scrawny throat of yours because if you do vomit I’ll paint it. Only, I’ll paint you sitting by your waste eating it with a dessert spoon. Would you like that, Miss Chalker?’

Helen swallowed again and quickly closed the book. The picture she had finished on was drawn in pastels and pencil. The detail was fine and precise. The perception was scale perfect with the quality of photographic reproduction. The work had been appraised by some of the world’s most prominent art critics and though the subject matter was shocking and distasteful, the quality was said to be among the best that they had seen.

Helen tried to focus on Lucy. She forced the image of the python eating a human baby from her mind.

Some of the pictures were sexually explicit showing acts so obscene that Lucy had been interviewed for hours over their content.

Had she ever been sexually molested, abused, raped? Had anybody ever done any of these things to her? Helen had counselled people who had been abused and yet there was nothing to suggest that anything of the sort had ever happened to Lucy.

‘You have quite an imagination Lucy,’ said Helen.

‘Thank you. You have quite a nose. Have you ever thought of having it fixed?’

Lucy had gone back to looking at her fingernails. She’d tired of the session and slumped in her chair, releasing waves of bored indolence.

‘Is there anything you want to say before we finish, Lucy?’ asked Helen. The session still had over twenty minutes to run but she felt that she was getting nowhere. It was better to end the session and start fresh on her next appointment, when Lucy might be more co-operative.

‘Yes. I’m sorry the fish died.’

Helen was wary. Was this just another of her games? Lucy’s eyes had clouded with unshed tears. She seemed to be genuinely upset. Helen wasn’t expecting this, it had come out of nowhere. But she was ready for her this time and wouldn’t be caught off-guard.

‘Why Lucy? Why are you sorry about the fish dying?’

‘Because they didn’t deserve it.’

‘And your mother did?’

‘She made her choices. She chose to have me.’

‘Because she chose to have you, you think that she deserved being murdered?’

‘Not deserved, exactly, but she made herself open to that eventuality.’

‘Why did you kill her, Lucy?’

Helen tried to control her body language. Her heart rate had risen and her breathing was rapid. She didn’t want to indicate to the girl that she was excited. Finally, they had broken into the forbidden subject after weeks of consultation and Lucy seemed to be amenable to talking about it.’

‘Because I needed a new picture.’

‘So where do the fish come into it?’

‘They needed a new home. Can you imagine living your whole life in that little glass bowl, going round in endless circles? Your entire view of the outside world would be distorted and horribly misshapen. Their perception of us was warped. It’s offensive.’

‘You were offended that the goldfish didn’t have clear perspective?’

‘Aren’t you?’

Helen had to bring the subject back to Lucy’s crime but she was aware that Lucy could clam up again at any moment. All this talk about the fish was just a smokescreen.

‘And anyway,’ Lucy continued, ‘it’s modern art. Monet said that you must never be frightened to experiment with form and texture to give your subject expression.’

‘Did he also tell you to cut off your mother’s head?’ Helen held her breath.

‘Oh please, don’t look so horrified. You’d have done the same thing in my position. Anyone would.’

Helen felt queasy again and the room seemed smaller. The force of her client’s personality was sapping all of the oxygen from the room. She pulled distractedly at the collar of her blouse.

‘You don’t see any wrong in what you did?’

‘Not at all. She deserved it and you have to admit that the end result was worth it, apart from the poor fish, of course. I still feel bad about them. But it’s one of my best pictures.’

‘Why did she deserve it? It must come down to more than just because she had you. Why are you so angry with her?’

Lucy laughed, her eyes crinkled in amusement. She had a sweet laugh.

‘I’m not angry with her. I’ve already explained all that. I thought you therapists were supposed to listen. By having me she made the possibility of matricide an option but she didn’t deserve to be killed just because of that. The stupid cow wanted me to draw a vase of flowers. Can you believe that? She expected somebody of my ability to draw a vase of putrid flowers. Have you any idea how many people who think they have talent, have drawn flowers and fruit bowls? She placed the vase of manky old flowers on the unit and was sickeningly condescending.’

‘So what happened?’

‘”Draw these flowers, darling,” she said. “They will make such a pretty picture,” she said. I was standing by the windowsill at the time. You shouldn’t keep fish in strong sunlight, you know, it turns the water green, but we did. I wanted them to see me climbing the oak tree in the garden. But from their distorted little outlook it would have been ruined for them. I lost my temper and swept the goldfish bowl off the windowsill. It smashed. There was a lot of water on the carpet and all those little blue stones, thousands of them. The fish landed on the carpet, too, amidst all the glass. It was Mother’s fault. She shouldn’t have asked me to draw flowers. I wanted to draw the fish floundering like that on the carpet but by the time I’d drawn them they would have been dead.’

‘Oh, so the fish were already dead when you put them….’ Her voice tailed off, she was unsure how to continue.

This time Lucy’s laugh was rueful.

‘No, the fish were fine; I put them in a mug of water. Their death was an error of judgement on my part. It was stupid of me, really stupid. I didn’t think it through properly. They shouldn’t have died, not with the carrier bag in there, it must have been the toxins. Why did my fish die, Miss Chalker?’

She looked so vulnerable sitting on the green plastic chair with one leg pulled over her other knee. She was fiddling with her trainer lace. In other circumstances the mourning of the goldfish would have been touching. In this instance it was sickening.

‘I don’t know, Lucy, but I don’t think it was good for them.’

‘No, neither do I. It made a good picture, though.’

Helen shuddered.

‘I’m tired now, Miss Chalker. May I go to my room and draw a picture, please?’

Helen motioned in the two-way mirror for orderlies to take Lucy back to her room. The eleven year-old girl allowed herself to be meekly led away. Helen wondered how a child so petite and dainty ever found the strength to cut through her mother’s head with an electric carving knife.

A neighbour had called at the house that Saturday afternoon.

She knocked and walked through into the kitchen. Lucy turned her head as Mrs Ellis came in and put her finger to her lips.

‘Shush, Mum’s sleeping,’ she said.

Mrs Ellis looked at the still form huddled in a duvet on couch against the far wall.

‘Okay Pet, I’ll be quiet’ she whispered.

‘Do you like my picture, Mrs Ellis?’ asked the child. Lucy was sitting at the kitchen table with a sketchpad opened in front of her.

Mrs Ellis walked over the thick carpet. Her blue, mule slippers flapped onto the soles of her feet with each step. The skin at the back of her heels was hard and callused. Lucy had thought that out of human decency she really should wear full slippers.

The frumpy, overweight neighbour looked over Lucy’s shoulder, preparing to ooh and ah over the child’s picture. She was nervous around Lucy, lots of people were. There was something disconcerting about such an astute intellect coming from a child so young but it was more than the Mensa membership, the child was weird. If Linda was asleep then she wouldn’t bother staying for a cup of tea, the child made her feel uncomfortable with her direct questioning and forthright manner.

There was a moment of confusion as the image on the pad made its way from Hilda Catlow’s retina, along her central cortex and into her brain. Then there was a split second of stunned silence.

Hilda followed Lucy’s gaze to the unit in front of her and she forgot her promise to be quiet.

She ran from the house screaming.

Two police officers left their burger lunch in the late Linda Taylor’s geranium beds. Even the more world weary seen-it-all-before officers from the Scenes of Crime team couldn’t equate the grizzly tableaux in front of them with an eleven year-old child.

After she had scooped out her mother’s brains Lucy had liquidised them and fed them to the cat. This had nothing to do with disposal of body parts because the rest of her mother lay covered on the couch. Lucy said that she thought her mother might have a headache. She fed the brains to the cat in the hope of giving it human intelligence.

After she had removed everything that she could from her mother’s skull, she turned the head upside down with the face pointing outwards and Linda’s long hair arranged prettily so that it cascaded over the rim of the unit. She put a carrier bag inside the severed head and filled it with water. Then she put Atlas and Ulysses into her mother’s head. The goldfish seemed to like it and swam into all of the crevices. Lucy was pleased with their new home and felt sure that they’d find it far more interesting than their last one.

Lucy was still sitting at the kitchen table when the police broke the door down and burst in. She was adding the finishing touches with a red pastel.

‘Do you like my picture?’ she asked with a smile.