The policewoman reached for a seam in her jacket and pulled out a pin. She played the flame up and down it.
‘This is to sterilise the pin,’ she explained, kindly. The flame vanished with a click, and she passed the lighter back and leaned forward.
Geena clenched her fists on top of the armrests, straining against the clamps around her forearms. The policewoman prised up the middle finger of Geena’s left hand, and pushed the pin under the fingernail.
There was no language. There were no words.
Sheet of paper. Small print; boxes to tick.
‘Sign this.’
A smile. Another sheet of paper: smaller, folded in three, with coloured font.
‘Take this.’
Geena looked down at it.
Trauma counselling. Helplines.
They returned her glasses and her bag. She stuck the leaflet in the outer pocket.
They opened the doors.
She went home.
9. Paper Tigers
The following morning Geena awoke sobbing. Her boyfriend, Liam, sat up and leaned over. His face interrupted her fixed gaze at the ceiling. Hair tousled, cheeks bristled, eyes bleary; breath garlicky from last night’s chicken curry. She shut her eyes on his anxious gaze.
‘What’s the matter?’ he asked, from far away.
‘Nothing,’ she said. ‘Just a bad dream, that’s all.’
‘Aw…’
He laid a hand on her shoulder, pulling her towards him. She shrugged him away and rolled over, hauling the duvet.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Nothing,’ she said, muffled. ‘Just let me get back to sleep.’
She heard his breathing above her head for a minute, then a sigh as he turned away. He heaved himself under the covers, his back to her, and lay there until the alarm beeped. Then he got up. Geena heard him in the bathroom, in the shower, getting dressed, in the next room making his breakfast.
He came back into the room and kissed the top of her head.
‘I’ve made you some coffee,’ he said.
‘Thanks,’ she said, her face still to the pillow. ‘Have a good day.’
He waited, then:
‘You too. Bye.’
‘Bye.’
As soon as the outside door closed, she jumped out of bed and hurried through to the front-room bay window just in time to see Liam go up the street. Tall and thin, he walked with his hands in his jacket pockets and his elbows out, shoulders moving in sync with his stride, as he always did. And as always, he turned at the corner, smiled and waved, though he probably couldn’t see her. Geena waved back, slightly self-conscious at still being in her pyjamas.
When he’d gone, she sat down in one of the two old rug-thrown armchairs that faced each other across where a fireplace had once been. She held up her left hand. It shook a little. The dull pewter of the monitor ring on her wedding finger gleamed in the early sunlight. The blue sticking-plaster around her middle fingernail reflected more brightly, a jade satin ribbon of SynBioTech manufacture, its pad still dispensing antisepsis and analgesia in calibrated dosage. Adhesion, calculated too: when the plaster had done its job, it would drop off, like a scab.
The smell of coffee called her to her feet. She stepped barefoot across raffia to the corner with the table and the cooker and the sink, and pushed down the plunger of the one-shot cafetière. The monitor ring gave her its usual morning warning twinge about the caffeine. She ignored it, filled a mug, and sat down to sip, wrapping the injured hand around the hot china.
The obvious thing would be to call Maya. Geena flinched from the thought. She’d named Maya, she was sure of that. Fairly sure. She didn’t remember all she’d said, blabbed, blubbered. Everything. Everyone. What a little sneak she had been. And it wasn’t even as if she had suffered real torture. Just the clinical, sterile application of pain. Routine. Helping with enquiries. Nothing to write to Amnesty about. She must be weak, far weaker than she’d ever imagined.
Then, as her thoughts circled, like crows over roadkill, and her self-incriminations yelled accusations at her, she realised that this too was part of the ordeal. The aftershock was an intended result.
But they’d given her the trauma counselling leaflet! They must understand! They’d agreed she was innocent! They didn’t intend her to feel like this. Or if they did, they’d provided a helpline. No doubt there was a call centre. Probably in China. Or, if the leaflet was personalised, Brazil. They spoke Portuguese there. A sympathetic shoulder, a familiar idiom, a friendly female voice and face on the phone. She could feel it now like a hug. It would be like calling her mother, whom she couldn’t call because she didn’t want to drag her into this, and because her mother would be ashamed.
No. This too. Trauma counselling was part of the process. Proactive prophylaxis against the possible disarticulation of the subject position. Or, to put it in plain English, they didn’t want people just going to pieces. That wouldn’t do at all. How many people, Geena wondered, had been through this and never spoken about it, except to a trauma counsellor? Nobody had ever told her about it. Not in so many words. So why had she panicked at the prospect of going into the van? A lifetime of glances, shaken parental fingers, averted looks, dropped hints, sick jokes in the playground. She had known, all right. She had known what went on in police vans. She had known more.
There had been that time, in Southall, when she’d carried a fragrant paper bag of coconut barfi out of a café, and stepped out on the pavement, and a man a few metres away had exploded in a red mist. Next thing she knew, she was sitting on the parapet of the bridge over the canal, by the pub, looking down at a paper bag butcher-shop-splattered on the outside and with a few yellow crumbs in the bottom corners, and all the front of her clothes sticking to her skin.
She should have had trauma counselling for that, Geena thought, as she drained the mug. Hah. She rinsed it in the sink and went to have a shower, ready to face the day. She knew who to talk to.
The Institute for Science Studies offices, all five of them, were in the Mechanical Engineering block, somewhat to the annoyance of the remaining Mech. Eng. lecturers, not one of whom didn’t still think the taunt that if you lot think science is ideology why don’t you step off the roof? was to the point. Geena spared a glance as always for the vast blue-painted cylindrical machine, a turbine she guessed, whose function she had never got around to enquiring about, that dominated the entrance hall, and hurried up the broad concrete stairs. Around and around, to the fourth floor. At each landing a helpful notice informed her how high a mountain a daily ascent to that level would represent over an academic year. This had never struck Geena as a sensible yardstick. Her Goan great-grandmother could climb Mount Snowdon if given three-hundred-odd days to do it, and look at her.
The door of Geena’s supervisor’s office was open. Geena leaned in and knocked sideways.
‘Uh, Ahmed…’
‘Ah, good morning, Geena! Come on in.’
Dr Ahmed Estraguel was a man in his mid-thirties, of short and agile build, with a walk like a dancer or a bantamweight boxer, and an alert, darting gaze. Black hair to the collar of his open denim shirt, pointed black beard, skin somewhat lighter than Geena’s own. He stood for a moment, half-bowing to shake hands across the cluttered desk, and waved to the low-slung armchair in front of it. Geena settled, screwing up her eyes slightly against the sunlight slanting through the window over his left shoulder.