my leg, my speech therapy to get rid of the slurring. The doctors liked me; I think I made a nice change from the vast majority of the guys whose problems were inborn, to be managed like hemophilia or cystic fibrosis, with no expectation of any underlying improvement. With me, they felt like they could get places. Maybe they did; anyway they seemed pleased with my progress. When, on only my third try, I got my conditional discharge, all of them seemed genuinely delighted. I was one of their success stories.
By that time the Ivy House was long gone. My parents had hired me the best solicitor and the best defense barrister that money could buy (another reason, I’m sure Susanna wanted to point out, why I wasn’t serving life as some roided-up smack dealer’s bitch), and the sum of money in question was, unsurprisingly, eye-popping. The expert psychologists, who had spent countless hours asking me confusing and exhausting questions and running batteries of incomprehensible tests, hadn’t come cheap either. The decision to sell the Ivy House to pay for it all had apparently been unanimous. It was, everyone agreed, what Hugo would have wanted.
My job was gone too, of course. Richard apologized for that, from the heart, as if I might have expected him to hold it open indefinitely on the off chance that I might be back someday. Even if he had, I don’t know if I would have been able for it. The various forms of therapy had helped a lot—apparently nothing except surgery would fix my eyelid, but the slur in my speech was barely noticeable except when I was tired, same for my limp, my hand grip still wasn’t great but I had learned lots of inventive ways of working around it. But my mind still had ravaged places in it, gaping holes full of drifting things; I had a hard time holding on to complicated sets of instructions, I needed a planner full of lists so I didn’t lose track of what I needed to do and what I’d already done, and even with those I occasionally lost hold of big chunks of time or couldn’t work out what day it was. Just thinking about my old job—no routine, no one telling me what to do, deftly juggling a dozen balls at once—made my head spin.
I had to hold down a job to keep my conditional discharge, and for a while there I had visions of twelve-hour shifts loading pallets in a warehouse full of immigrants who would hate my guts and spit in my lunch, but by the time I got out my family had come to the rescue again. Oliver had pulled strings with a friend at a big PR firm and got me a nice simple job that could have been done, and probably had been up until then, by a fifteen-year-old on work experience. I went in there under my middle name (Charles, after my grandfather; I went by Charlie). I’m not sure it fooled my co-workers for any length of time—there had been a few tabloid snippets when I got out, “‘INSANE’ COP KILLER FREE ON OUR STREETS” and a blurry God-knows-where shot of me being sinister by wearing sunglasses—but at least it stopped clients from having me thrown off their accounts in case I stalked them home and ax-murdered them in their beds. The work went fine. My co-workers were shiny twentysomethings with hectic social lives, and overstretched thirtysomethings with complicated childcare hassles; they were chummy, in a preprogrammed way, but none of them had the room to put much thought into me, which was fine with me. They invited me along to the Friday drinks sessions; sometimes I went, although the pub they used was loud and I mostly got a headache after an hour or so. There was one girl, a sparky, energetic redhead called Caoimhe, who I was pretty sure would have gone on a date with me if I had asked, but I didn’t. Not that I was afraid I would pollute her innocence, or anything, I didn’t get that far; just that I couldn’t come up with enough emotional engagement to bother.
I had trouble feeling anything much about anyone, actually, not just Caoimhe. Small things could bring me to tears of what felt confusingly like loss—frost on a dark windowpane, frail shoots of green sprouting from a pavement crack—but when it came to people: nothing. I knew it had something to do with