Fullepub 
Chapter Five
FIVE
At the police station, a policewoman—a young woman, with a kind smile—scraped beneath Laura’s fingernails, took a swab from the inside of her cheek, combed her hair, slowly and gently, a sensation Laura found so soothing and so deeply reminiscent of childhood it brought tears to her eyes.
• • •In Laura’s head, Deidre spoke again. You’ve no self-worth, that’s your problem, Laura. Deidre, the scrawny, hard-faced woman in whose arms her brokenhearted father had sought solace after Laura’s mother left, could, if pressed, come up with a whole litany of Laura’s problems. Low self-worth was a particular favorite. You don’t value yourself enough, Laura. Fundamentally, that’s your problem. If you valued yourself a little more, you wouldn’t just go with whoever paid you any attention.
A few days after Laura turned thirteen, she went to a party at a friend’s house. Her father caught her sneaking back into the house at six in the morning. He grabbed hold of her shoulders, shaking her like a doll. “Where were you? I was going out of my mind, I thought something had happened! You can’t do that to me, chicken. Please don’t do that to me.” He hugged her close to him; she rested her head on his broad chest and felt as though she were a child again, normal again. “I’m sorry, Dad,” she said quietly. “I’m really sorry.”
“She’s not in the slightest bit sorry,” Deidre said an hour or so later, when they were sitting at the breakfast table. “Look at her. Just look at her, Philip. Like the cat that got the cream.” Laura grinned at her over her bowl of cereal. “You’ve got that look,” Deidre said, her mouth pursed in disgust. “Hasn’t she got that look? Who were you with last night?”
Later, she heard her father and her stepmother arguing. “She’s got no self-respect,” Deidre was saying. “That’s her problem. I’m telling you, Phil, she’s going to end up pregnant before she’s fifteen. You’ve got to do something. You’ve got to do something about her.”
Her father’s voice, supplicating: “But it’s not her fault, Deidre, you know that. It’s not her fault.”
“Oh, it’s not her fault. That’s right. Nothing’s ever Laura’s fault.”
Later still, when Deidre came upstairs to Laura’s room to call her for dinner, she asked: “Did you use protection, at least? Please tell me you weren’t stupid enough to do it without a condom?” Laura was lying on her bed, staring up at the ceiling. Without looking, she picked up a hairbrush from her bedside table and hurled it in her stepmother’s general direction. “Please just fuck off, Deidre,” she said.
“Oh yes, that’s charming, isn’t it? I’ll bet your filthy mouth is not your fault either.” She turned to leave but thought better of it. “You know, Laura, you know what your problem is? You don’t value yourself enough.”
Low self-worth was indeed one of Laura’s problems, but it wasn’t the only one. She had a whole host of others to keep it company, including but not limited to: hypersexuality, poor impulse control, inappropriate social behavior, aggressive outbursts, short-term memory lapses, and quite a pronounced limp.
• • •“There now,” the policewoman said, once she was done. “You’re all set.” She saw that Laura was crying and she squeezed her hand. “You’ll be all right, love.”
“I want to phone my mum,” Laura said. “Is it all right if I phone my mum?”
Her mum wasn’t answering her phone.
“Do I get another call?” Laura asked. The officer at her side shook her head, but seeing Laura’s dismay, she glanced this way and that along the hall and then nodded. “Go on, then,” she said. “Quickly.”
Laura rang her father’s next. She listened to the phone ring a few times, her hopes soaring as the call connected, only to be immediately dashed as she heard Deidre’s voice. “Hello? Hello? Who is this?” Laura hung up, meeting the officer’s inquisitive look with a shrug. “Wrong number,” she said.
The police officer took Laura to a tiny, stuffy room with a table at its center. The officer gave her a glass of water and said someone would bring some tea in a minute, but the tea never materialized. The room was overheated and smelled of something strange and chemical; her skin itched, her mind felt muddied with exhaustion. She folded her arms and laid her head down upon them and tried to sleep, but in the white noise she heard voices, her mother’s, Deidre’s, Daniel’s; when she swallowed she thought she could taste metal, and rot.
“What are we waiting for?” she asked the police officer eventually, and the woman ducked her head, shrugged.
“Duty solicitor, I think. Sometimes it takes a while.” Laura thought about her groceries, the frozen pizzas and the ready-meal curries she’d spent her last tenner on, sitting on the counter in her kitchen at home, gently defrosting.
After what felt like hours but was probably ten minutes, the detectives turned up, solicitor-less. “How long do you think this is going to take?” Laura asked. “I’ve got a long shift tomorrow, and I’m fucking knackered.”
Egg looked at her long and hard; he sighed, as though he were disappointed in her. “It could be a while, Laura,” he said. “It’s . . . well. It’s not looking great, is it? And, you see, the thing is, you’ve got form on this score, haven’t you?”
“I bloody have not. Form? What are you talking about? I don’t go around stabbing people, I—”
“You stabbed Warren Lacey,” Eyebrow chipped in.
“With a fork. In the hand. Fuck’s sake, it’s not the same thing at all,” Laura said, and she started laughing, because, honestly, this was ridiculous, this was apples and oranges, the one thing was not like the other in any way, but she didn’t really feel like laughing at all; she felt like crying.
“It’s interesting,” Eyebrow said. “I think it’s interesting, in any case, that you seem to find this so amusing, Laura, because most people—in your situation, I mean—most people I don’t think would find this all that funny.”
“I don’t, I don’t think it’s funny, I don’t . . .” Laura sighed in frustration. “Sometimes I struggle,” she said, “to match my outward behavior to my emotional state. I don’t think it’s funny,” she said again, but still she couldn’t stop smiling, and Eyebrow smiled back at her, horribly. She was about to say something else, but they were at last interrupted by the long-awaited duty solicitor, a harassed-looking, gray-faced man with coffee breath who failed to inspire much confidence.
Once everyone was settled, introductions made, formalities out of the way, Eyebrow continued. “We were talking a moment ago,” she said, about how you struggle to match your outward behavior to your emotional state. That is what you said, isn’t it?” Laura nodded. “You have to speak up, Laura, for the tape.” Laura muttered her assent. “So, it’s fair to say that you cannot always control yourself? You have emotional outbursts which are beyond your control?” Laura said they were. “And this is because of the accident you had when you were a child? Is that correct?” Laura answered in the affirmative again. “Can you talk a bit more about the accident, Laura?” Eyebrow asked, her voice reassuring, coaxing. Laura jammed her hands underneath her thighs to keep herself from slapping the woman across the face. “Could you talk about the accident’s effect on you—physically, I mean?”
Laura glanced at her solicitor, trying to communicate a silent Do I have to? but he seemed incapable of reading her, so, sighing heavily, she reeled monotonously through her injuries: “Fractured skull, broken pelvis, compound fracture of the distal femur. Cuts, bruises. Twelve days in a coma. Three months in hospital.”
“You suffered a traumatic brain injury, didn’t you, Laura? Could you tell us a bit about that?”
Laura puffed out her cheeks, she rolled her eyes. “Could you not just fucking google it? Jesus. I mean, is this really what we’re here to talk about? Something that happened to me when I was ten years old? I think I should just go home now, because frankly, you’ve got fuck all, haven’t you? You’ve got nothing on me.”
The detectives watched her, impassive, unimpressed with her outburst. “Could you just tell us about the nature of your head injury?” Egg asked, his tone polite, infuriating.
Laura sighed again. “I suffered a brain injury. It affected my speech, temporarily, as well as my recall.”
“Your memory?” Eyebrow asked.
“Yes, my memory.”
Eyebrow paused, for effect, it seemed to Laura. “There are some emotional and behavioral consequences to this sort of injury, too, aren’t there?”
Laura bit her lip, hard. “I had some anger management issues when I was younger,” she said, looking the woman dead in the eye, daring her to call her a liar. “Depression. I have disinhibition, which means sometimes I say inappropriate or hurtful things, like for example that time I called you ugly.”
Eyebrow smiled, she rose above it, she pressed on. “You have impulse control problems, don’t you, Laura? You can’t help yourself, you lash out at people, you try to hurt them—that’s what you’re saying, isn’t it?”
“Well, I . . .”
“And so, on the boat on Friday night, when Mr. Sutherland rejected you—when he was, as you put it, cold and offensive, you lost your temper, didn’t you? You attacked him, didn’t you? Earlier you said you hit him. You really wanted to hurt him, didn’t you?”
“I wanted to rip his fucking throat out,” Laura heard herself say. Next to her, she felt the solicitor flinch. And there it was—the police didn’t, as she’d said, have fuck all, because of course they had her. They had Laura. They didn’t need a weapon, did they? They didn’t need a smoking gun. They had motive and they had opportunity and they had Laura, who they knew could be counted on, sooner or later, to say something really stupid.
