Read Online In The Garden Of Stones by Lucy Pepperdine - Free Book Online Page A

interesting
concept.”
    “ Something for you to think about and work on for next time,
eh?”
    Grace’s
gaze darts to the clock on the wall, standing proud at three
o’clock. “What! No. Time can’t be up already.”
    “ I’m afraid it is.”
    “ But I have something to tell you … to show you. Can I have
one more minute? Please?”
    Mal
glances at his watch, as if it and the clock might differ. “Okay,
but just one. My next patient will be waiting.”
    She
hoiks up the sleeve of her sweater to show him the elbow roughly
seized by Colin McLeod, and the four small purple stains in her
pale skin.
    “ What do you make of these?” she says.
    Mal
gives the marks a cursory glance. “A collection of small bruises?
How did that happen?”
    “ Look closer.”
    He lifts
his glasses and puts his face close to her arm. “They look like the
marks left when fingertips have been pressed into the
skin.”
    “ That’s exactly what they are. Remember I told you Colin had
me by the elbow when he tried to force me to leave?”
    “ I thought you meant metaphorically.”
    “ No. He actually did grab me. Roughly too, and it hurt,
although he did apologise when I threatened to report him for
assault. Who would I report an imaginary person to by the
way?”
    Mal
scrutinises the marks a second time. “You’re saying he did this?
Your imaginary friend made actual physical marks on your skin when
he took hold of you?”
    Did
anything ever sound quite so ridiculous?
    “ Yes,” she says, and Dr Malcolm Pettit makes a low humming
sound deep in his throat.
    And that
sound says it all, the pitch the tone conveying one bland fact – he
doesn’t believe her. Although he does not come out and voice his
accusation, she can tell what he’s thinking - she made the marks
herself, to play for sympathy, to seek more of his time and
attention. Well, she wasn’t going to get it.
    “ I’ll see you same time next week, Grace,” he says, dropping
her file onto the coffee table and heading for the door. “You’ve
done really well, made some great inroads.”
    He’s
making the effort to sound sincere, encouraging even, yet to
Grace’s ears, the words come across more a polite dismissal, and
she can see the disappointment in his eyes.
    They
exchange brief and terse farewells, and in the time it takes for
her to cross the threshold of his office she has already decided -
there may not be another appointment.
    She
trudges through the outer office, past the secretary, who bids her
a bright, “Cheerio”, and a young man already on his feet and on his
way into Mal’s office to take her place in the chair by the
window.
    Already
withdrawn into her own gloomy despair, Grace notices
neither.
    The rhythmic tapping of her heels echoes in the hollow
emptiness of the bland green corridor, and then tick-tock tick-tocks as she trots down
two flights of steps to the innocuous wooden door with its peeling
paint. She pushes it open and steps out into the street, heading
for the bus stop.
    Across
the road, she pauses just long enough to glance up at the window of
Mal’s office, its blinds now closed, already convinced she would
not be seeing the inside of that room again any time soon, if
ever.

Chapter 8
     
     
    It had been going so well, and she and Mal had been making good progress. Had been, past
tense, until the minute she fucked everything up with her ludicrous
suggestion that the made-up Colin had caused the bruising on her
arm.
    People who are only figments of imagination don’t make
finger shaped bruises in living skin, only real people do that. If
she had thought about it properly before opening her big fat mouth,
she would have realised that the chances were she had done it to herself,
by gripping onto her own arm in her sleep.
    Stupid. Stupid. Stupid.
    “ Why don’t you go for a walk?” Alec says.
    Grace is
sitting on the sofa, knees drawn up, the TV remote control in her
hand, systematically flicking through the channels.