‘It makes quite a difference,’ says Pam Swain, as I smooth away a hard knot beneath her left shoulder. Many people would say, ‘Ow!’ or make distressed noises, but not Pam. She can handle my pressure. She’s used to it. ‘It’s funny, you wouldn’t think I’d notice, with me lying face down for the hour, but the purple’s definitely more soothing and relaxing than the white was.’
‘It’s not purple, Pam,’ I say mock-sternly. ‘It’s aubergine. Remember?’
‘Yes, sorry.’ She laughs. ‘Aubergine.’
‘I still love it – though I was worried I’d hate it as soon as I’d put down the paintbrush. But it works because it’s deep in a soft way. Not bright.’
‘That’s it exactly,’ says Pam.
She’s fifty-nine, a nurse at the Rawndesley General Infirmary, and she’s been coming to me for two years. Like so many of my clients, she’s become a friend. Rarely do I give a massage in silence. All my regulars like to chat – probably because my massages aren’t the kind that allow clients to zone out and nod off. The aim isn’t inner peace or pampering. My work is about increasing flexibility and removing chronic pain. If you want someone to rub pretty-smelling oil into your back while a blandSounds of the OceanCD plays on repeat, I’m not the massage therapist for you. I don’t apologise for any of this; I advertise it upfront, and my work diary is full of people still wanting more after years of coming to me.
‘I wouldn’t want more than one wall this colour, but I’m glad I have one,’ I tell Pam. ‘I so nearly didn’t do it.’
‘I remember. And you wouldn’t have done it if Zannah and Ben hadn’t already changed theirwalls from white to something else.’
This is true. I’ve always been a strict white-walls-only person, but I persuaded myself that I was allowed to paint my treatment room aubergine by thinking, ‘No radical change is happening here. You are alreadysomebody with twonon-white rooms in your house.’
Zannah’s bedroom has mint-green-and-gold diamond-patterned wallpaper that she insisted would look amazing and has hated from about a fortnight after it went up. She refuses to let me or Dom strip it or paint over it, though, because of something about the importance of remembering one’s mistakes and learning from them – advice she got from a YouTube star’s Pinterest quote board. Instead, across the whole of one wall, she has spray-painted the words ‘Big Mistake’ in pale pink, graffiti-style. The other walls she’s covered in collages of photographs so that the wallpaper is barely visible: pictures of her and Murad, friends, family.
When Ben heard Zannah lobbying to have her room redecorated, the principle of equality obliged him to join in, even though he didn’t and doesn’t care what his bedroom looks like. He chose pale grey for the walls, but couldn’t be bothered to test the various shades, so Dom – who, despite being a graphic designer, also has zero interest in the difference between one colour and another when it comes to doing up our house – picked one for him at random. It looks good. Zannah immediately said, ‘Ben, your room looks a hundred times better than mine, you little shit.’
Ben chose a couple of posters of Kate Moss, the supermodel, wearing clothes with the word ‘Supreme’ on them, and asked me to get them framed. At the same time, he took down all the pictures that he thought were too childish, apart from the very first one I ever bought for him that was his before he was born – framed and waiting for him in his room. It’s a black and white drawing of a five-bar gate in a field, with teddy bears sitting on the gate’s bars and in a semi-circle in front of it. The bears are all grinning happily. Most recently, they’ve been grinning at Kate Moss in her Supreme T-shirt across the no-man’s-land of Ben’s clothes-strewn floor.
‘Change really is the most frightening thing,’ says Pam with a sigh.
I know my next line in this dialogue, and Pam just gave me my cue. ‘It’s true,’ I say. ‘But change is good for us. If we never make any changes that scare us at first, we end up missing out.’ I vary the wording slightly each time Pam and I have this conversation.
‘Yes,’ she says quickly. ‘I think one of the worst mistakes we make is investing so much significance in details of our lives that don’t matter at all. We can just choose. It doesn’t matter all that much, and maybe there’s no wrong choice.’
‘Mm-hmm.’
‘It’s like me, with moving house,’ says Pam, as if she’s never said it before. ‘Or rather, not moving house. I know I could live somewhere nicer, quieter and for half the price. I don’t likeliving on a busy street in the centre of a town. But Ed loved the house, and I’ve lived in it since we got married. The thought of moving’s frightening. I might not be able to be me in a different house – that’s what I say to myself. But that’s rubbish, of course.’
‘And you’ll still be you if you stay where you are,’ I say cheerily. Here is where the discussion always stalls. Pam will change the subject now, and we’ll spend the rest of our hour together talking about other things. I don’t mind the repetitive element of my sessions with her. She seems to need it, and I keep hoping that one day she’ll pluck up the courage to do what she so obviously wants, on some level, to do: sell her enormous townhouse that’s much too big for her now that Ed’s died and her children have all left home, and move to a cottage in a country village.
I swore to myself that I would never advise her directly, or tell her that’s what I think she ought to do, even though sometimes I’m tempted to scream, ‘Just do it and stop fretting!’ I’m not sure whether she would prefer a new house to her current one, but I’m convinced she’d feel happier and more confident if she demonstrated to herself that she’s brave enough to take a risk once in a while and live with the consequences, whatever they might be.
‘So, what’s been keeping you so busy?’ she asks. ‘It’s not like you to cancel on me twice in one week.’
‘I know. I’m sorry.’
‘No need to apologise! I know you wouldn’t do it if it wasn’t necessary. You’re so reliable. I was a bit worried about you, that’s all. Is everything okay on the home front?’
‘Fine. There was something I had to pursue. Something I can’t really talk about, I’m afraid, but nothing for you to worry about.’
‘Well, you pursue away!’ she says. ‘You’re the sort of person who’d make a success of whatever you decided to do.’
‘Am I?’
‘Oh, yes,’ Pam says confidently.
Apart from persuading PC Pollard to check on the Cater children.We still haven’t heard anything from him. I wanted to ring him this morning, but Dom said we ought to give it more time. ‘If he doesn’t get back to us by the end of Thursday, we can ring him then,’ he said.
It’s Monday today. Pollard’s already had long enough. I’ve spent the days since we saw him trying to prove to Dom that I can put the Braids and the Caters to one side and get on with normal life. He’s been impressed and so have I. I’ve done better than I thought I would. Every time a new theory occurs to me and I’m about to say, ‘You know, another possibility …’ I manage to stop myself in time.
If I ring Pollard on Thursday and find out he’s done nothing …
‘He will have done,’ Dom assured me this morning. ‘If he’s doing it properly, through child protection channels, it might take a while. There’ll be processes they have to go through. It’s probably all underway. Be patient.’
