So I looked at Roan Fours and I said, ‘The time I held an owl at Lexie’s birthday when I was nine years old.’

  And he said, ‘I love owls. They’re extraordinary creatures.’

  I nodded.

  He said, ‘What did it feel like when you held the owl?’

  I said, ‘It felt like I loved him.’

  He wrote something down. He said, ‘Who else do you love?’

  I thought, Hmmm, aren’t we supposed to be talking about owls? Then I said, ‘I love my granddad. I love my uncles. I love my nieces.’

  ‘Friends?’

  ‘I don’t love my friends.’

  ‘What does love feel like?’

  ‘It feels like … it feels like need.’

  ‘Like need?’

  ‘Yeah, like you love someone because they give you what you need.’

  ‘And if they stop giving you what you need?’

  ‘Then that’s not love. That’s something else.’

  ‘And the owl?’

  I stopped. ‘What?’

  ‘The owl. You said it felt like you loved the owl.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you didn’t need the owl.’

  ‘No. I just loved him.’

  ‘Did it feel the same as the way you love your granddad?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘It felt … pure.’ I realised that sounded wrong and corrected myself. ‘Not that there’s anything not pure about the way I love my granddad. But I worry about him. I worry that he’ll die. I worry that he won’t be able to give me what I need. And that makes me feel bad. I didn’t feel bad about the owl. I only felt good.’

  ‘Do you think both types of love are equal?’

  ‘Yes.’ I nodded. ‘Yes, I do.’

  He stopped then and looked up at me and he smiled. I hadn’t been expecting him to smile. I thought that it was in his contract not to smile during therapy. But he did. And maybe it was because we’d just been talking about it, I don’t know, but I got that feeling again, the soft, velvet owl feeling.

  So yeah, maybe I needed Roan Fours already, even before I knew it.

  The first time I saw Roan outside of a therapy session at the Portman was about a year or so after our first session. I was walking home from school and he was just leaving an appointment at the school opposite my flat where one of his patients was a student. He was all smart and briefcasey, wearing a blue shirt, and he was talking to another man, also smart and briefcasey. Then they separated and he turned to cross the street and he saw me looking at him.

  I thought he might just wave and walk on. But he didn’t. He crossed the road and came to stand with me.

  ‘Well, hello,’ he said. He had his hands in his pockets and kind of rocked backwards on his heels. It made him look like a teacher for some reason and I had that really eww feeling you get when you see a teacher out of school, like they’re naked or something. But at the same time I felt really pleased to see him.

  I said, ‘Hi,’ and wondered what I looked like to him. I was wearing false eyelashes that day; this was early 2016 – everyone was wearing false eyelashes. I didn’t think I looked stupid at the time but I probably did.

  ‘Finished school?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah. Just heading home.’ As I said this, I looked up at the tower, to the eighth floor. I always recognised my floor from the ground because of the ugly red and green striped curtains in the window of flat thirty-five next door. It was like a marker.

  ‘Up there?’ he said.

  ‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Up there.’

  ‘Nice views, I bet?’

  I shrugged. I’d happily forsake the views for a home with more rooms in it.

  ‘So, our next appointment …?’

  ‘Wednesday,’ I said.

  ‘Five thirty p.m.?’

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘See you then.’

  ‘Yeah. See you then.’

  I headed towards the entrance to the block. I turned around as I pulled the door open, because for some reason I expected Roan to still be standing there, to be watching me. But he wasn’t. He was gone.

  Roan and his family moved to a flat near the Portman Centre January last year. How do I know this? Because I saw them, literally on the day they moved in. I was walking to the village, up those big roads that go up the hill from my estate, those roads of mansions and Teslas and electronic gates.

  And there was this van double-parked with hazards flashing and some young guys unloading boxes and lamps and chairs and whatnot. The door to the house was wide open, and I always like to look inside an open door, and I saw a woman; she was thin and wearing jeans and a pink jumper and trainers. Her hair was blonde and fine and shoulder-length. And there was a boy, a teenager, and they were carrying things through a door at the end of the hallway, and then a man appeared coming the other way and it was him. It was Roan. He was wearing a hoodie and jeans. He went to the back of the van and was saying something to one of the guys inside the van and I almost walked on but I suddenly had this urge to let him know I’d seen him. I was about to cross over the street and say hello when the woman in the pink jumper appeared. I didn’t know she was his wife then, but I assumed she must be.

  They said something to each other and then both disappeared inside the van and I caught my breath and carried on my way.

  But before I carried on walking, my eye took in the number on their front door: seventeen.

  I never told Roan I’d seen him move into his new home. We didn’t talk about stuff like that. I’d never even really thought about where he might live or what his life might be like outside our room at the Portman. When we had our next session, about four days after I saw him moving house, we just went straight down to business as usual. He didn’t tell me he’d moved and I didn’t tell him I knew.

  Then about two weeks later, Roan said that he thought we were ready to start thinking about terminating our therapy. He said this as though I should be pleased, as though I’d actually quite like to finish therapy, as if it was school or swimming lessons or something. He said he thought another two or three sessions should ‘bring us to where we need to be’.

  Strange, you know, because I’m not stupid but I’d been stupid enough to think that therapy would just keep on and on until I was ready to stop. Or maybe, you know, forever.

  ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘How do you know where we need to be?’

  He smiled, that weird, lazy smile of his, like he’s not bothered but then thinks, Fuck it. ‘That’s my job, Saffyre.’

  ‘Yeah, but don’t I have some say?’

  ‘Of course you do. Of course. What would your say be?’

  I had to stop then and really think about my answer, because I didn’t exactly know what I wanted. On a fundamental level I wanted the weekly punctuation marks of an hour in Roan’s room; the familiarity of the suspended ceiling with the three halogen lights, one sickly yellow, two bright white; the double-glazed window with the view of a snapped branch on a tree that swung back and forth on winter nights when the wind blew, cutting shadows through the sodium glow of a street light beyond; the two red chairs with the nubby fabric; the low wooden table with the tissues and the little white lamp; the brown carpet with the crusty white patch near the foot of the armchair; the muted sounds of people walking past the door. I wanted to carry on seeing Roan’s feet every week, in leather lace-up shoes, in his peng white trainers, in nasty strappy Velcro sandals, in snow boots. I wanted to hear his low, measured voice asking me questions, the slight clear of his throat as he waited for me to answer. And then after the session, I wanted to walk past the drama school, past the Tube, past the farmers’ market, past the theatre, feel the seasons changing in the textures beneath my feet: slippery wet leaves, hot paving stones, slimy snow, dirty puddles, whatever; all the months and months and now years and years of Roan Fours, how could it end? It was like telling me that day and night would no longer exist, that there would no longer be twenty-four hours in a day. It was that fundamental.

  Eventually I said, ‘My say would be that I don’t think I’m ready.’

  ‘In which ways, would you say, are you not ready?’

  I shrugged. I said some bullshit about still thinking about hurting myself when I hadn’t thought about hurting myself for over a year.

  He gave me a look, calling me on my bullshit with his eyes. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘We’re looking at another two or three weeks yet. I’ll get the process in motion. We can always double back on it closer to the time if you still feel we need to. But genuinely I don’t think you’re going to feel the need to. You’re amazing, Saffyre. The work we’ve done is incredible. You should be pleased.’

  I still hadn’t told him about the bad thing that happened to me when I was in year five. I wanted to say that to him, to shut him up. I wanted to say someone did something unbearable to me when I was ten years old and you’ve been talking to me non-stop for more than three years and you still don’t know that so how can you say I should be pleased? I wanted to say you’re a shit psychologist. I wanted to say all sorts of things. But I didn’t. I just left.

  Roan Fours signed me off three weeks later.

  He tried to make a big, happy moment of it.

  I pretended it was OK.

  But it was not OK.

  It was far from OK.

  11

  Did I tell you that I am a trained killer? That I’m a ninja warrior?

  Well, I’m not really. But I am a black belt in taekwondo. There’s a martial-arts school just over the road from me, in the sports centre. It’s what’s known in the trade as a dojo and I’ve been going there since I was about six years old. So you’d think I’d have been able to defend myself from a puny Year Six boy with wandering hands and a sick mentality. But no, I was pathetic, let it happen, and then punished my own self for it for years afterwards while Harrison John got to swan off to secondary school without a backward glance.

  He would have said that I enjoyed it, because I was so passive. But I didn’t.

  At taekwondo classes every week I kick and grunt and sweat, pretending every blow is on Harrison’s head. I picture the walls splattered with his blood, bits of his tiny pea brain, fragments of his skull.

  But at school, when I was a small child, I just let it happen.

  I let it happen three times.

  I still go to taekwondo once a week; it’s just habit really, but my skills have come in very useful the past few months. I’m not a small person, I’m five feet eight and when my hair is loose, I look even taller. I take up space in the world. People see me. But I can move light on my feet, I really can. I can move about like a shadow if I need to. I pull up my hoodie, keep my chin down, eyes up. I reckon I could walk past my own uncle on the street and he wouldn’t see me, if I put my mind to it.

  The first week that went by without me having a session with Roan was OK. I’d missed the occasional session before if I’d been ill, or he’d been on holiday or whatever. It was when the third week loomed up that I suddenly felt this cold drip in the pit of my stomach, like icy water. I imagined Roan sitting in our room, on our nubby chairs, with some other kid, some kid with stupid annoying issues, and he’d have to pretend to be as interested in theirs as he was in mine.

  I was walking home from school one afternoon. It was about twenty past five and I remembered that this was the exact time I would normally have been on my way to the Portman for my session with Roan.

  Suddenly, I found myself turning right instead of left, walking those familiar streets towards the Portman Centre. The sun was just setting and I was wearing a big black Puffa over my school uniform, black tights, black shoes, hair scraped back, hood up. I crept between the trees in the parking area to the front and peered up at his window.

  Do you know how long I stood there for?

  I stood there for nearly an hour.

  It was March and it was cold. Really, really cold.

  I saw occasional suggestions of movement, then I saw the lights ping on in all the consulting rooms and I realised it had turned to night-time. My teeth were chattering but I felt like I’d been there so long that I couldn’t go now, that I couldn’t go until I’d actually seen him.

  He finally appeared about twenty minutes later. He was wearing a big black coat and a pull-on hat. I could see his breath even from a distance, the yellow cloud of it in the street light. He smiled then and I thought for a moment that he’d seen me, but he hadn’t, he was smiling at someone else, a girl coming behind him. She looked about eighteen, nineteen. He held the door for her, then the girl lit a cigarette and I watched them share it. I thought: You don’t share a cigarette with someone unless you know them really well. I also thought that I’d never seen Roan smoke, not once in all the years I’d been his patient.

  After they’d finished smoking the cigarette they went back into the building, Roan held the door for her again and he seemed to press himself against her as he followed her through. I saw her turn and smile at him.

  I’d come to the Portman to sate some weird need for the familiarity of him, but I had set my eyes upon him and I had seen him as another person, a person who smoked, who stood too close to young women.

  I was not sated. If anything, my appetite for seeing him was increased. I stood outside for another half an hour, until the car park began to empty out, the front door opening and shutting constantly as staff left for the day, calling out cheery goodbyes, talk of a quick one, comments about how cold it was. I recognised some of the people, the secretaries, receptionists, nurses I’d dealt with over the years. And then Roan reappeared. He was with the young girl again. Again, he held the door for her, chivalrously, and she exited beneath his outstretched arm, like a move in a dance, smiling at him as she did so. I took a photo. Call me weird, but it just seemed like something I needed to be able to study at my own leisure in the privacy of my own room. I needed to analyse the girl’s body language and Roan’s smile and work out what was happening, what I’d seen.

  I kind of expected them to go somewhere together, but they didn’t. They had a little hug, a kind of half-embrace, where only their shoulders and cheeks touched, then she hitched her bag up on her shoulder and walked away in the direction of the Tube station. Roan stopped for a moment, pulled out his phone, tapped his screen a few times. I saw his face in the glow of the screen; he looked old. Then his face lifted and lightened and he put his phone away and he turned and caught up with the girl and they were close enough now for me to hear him call out to her. ‘Wait, Anna, hold up,’ he said.

  She stopped and turned and I could see the glitter of multiple earrings in her ear.

  ‘I’ve got half an hour,’ he said. ‘If you’re not dashing home, maybe we could have that coffee? Or something stronger?’

  He sounded nervous, like a bit of an idiot.

  But the young girl smiled and nodded. ‘Sure,’ she said, ‘yes. I’m not in a rush.’

  ‘Great,’ said Roan. ‘How about that new place that’s just opened, opposite the Tube?’

  ‘Fab,’ said Anna.

  They fell into step, their footsteps ringing out in the cold dark against the tarmac, and away on to the street, me still there, frozen to the core, invisible between the trees.

  12

  OWEN

  Through the plate-glass window of the third-floor reception area, Owen watches flakes of snow tumble lazily from a heavy grey January sky. He hates London snow, the way it promises so much but delivers nothing but treacherous pavements, late trains and chaos.

  Owen teaches Computer Science to sixteen- to eighteen-year-olds at Ealing Tertiary College. He’s been teaching here for eight years. Right now, though, he is not teaching anyone. He is currently waiting to be called into the principal’s office for some unspecified but rather ominous-feeling reason. His stomach roils unpleasantly at the prospect.

  Finally, the principal’s secretary calls him in. ‘Jed’s ready for you,’ she says, putting down her phone.

  In Jed’s office, Owen is surprised to see Holly McKinley, the head of human resources and Clarice Dewer, the student welfare officer. The atmosphere is weighty and murky. Clarice doesn’t look at him as he enters and he’s always thought of Clarice as a friend, or at least as a person who sometimes talks to him.

  Holly gets to her feet. ‘Thank you for coming in to see us, Owen.’ She holds out her hand and Owen shakes it, aware that his hands are damp, resisting the urge to apologise.

  ‘Please, take a seat.’ Jed gestures at the empty chair before them.

  Owen sits. He glances down at his shoes. They’re quite new and this is the first day since he bought them that they haven’t hurt. They’re not his usual style; they’re brown leather, slightly pointy, kind of trendy. He keeps expecting someone to notice them, to say nice shoes, but so far nobody has. Now he looks at them and wonders why he bought them.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Clarice begins, ‘that we’ve had a complaint. Well, in fact we’ve had two complaints. Both pertaining to the same incident.’

  Owen squints slightly. His brain scrolls through everything that’s happened at work over the past few months for anything that could be described as an incident, but he finds nothing.

  Clarice drops her gaze to her paperwork. ‘On December the fourteenth last year, at the Christmas party?’

  Owen squints again. The Christmas party. He hadn’t intended to go. He hadn’t been for the two preceding years. As a member of staff at a students’ party there was a sweet spot between being a dour observer and an overenthusiastic participator and if you missed the spot it was no fun at all. But he’d bowed to pressure from two girls in his second-year class, Monique and Maisy.

  ‘Come on, sir,’ they’d said (they insisted on calling him sir even though everyone else called him Owen). ‘We want to see your moves.’

  There was nothing new about this form of reverse sexual harassment. It happened all the time: because Owen was a quiet man who didn’t like to reveal much about his private life, because he had a tendency to awkwardness and a need to maintain clear lines between his professional and personal personas, certain students made sport out of trying to breach his defences. Usually girls, and usually using their sexuality to do so.