Page 6 of The Man Made of Smoke

His expression settled a little.

“What is it about the van that made you angry?” I said.

“It’s not the van. There’s a big queue for it, and I know we don’t have the money anyway. I asked my mother earlier and she said no.”

“Why are you angry then?”

“There’s a girl standing beside it. I don’t like her.”

“What does she look like?”

“She’s only little. Maybe five or six. She has a white T-shirt on, and these jeans with suspenders that go over her shoulders. Red shoes.”

I made a note in my file, and then asked a question to which I wondered if I already knew the answer.

“What about her hair?”

“Long,” he said. “Black. Curly.”

“Why don’t you like her?”

“She’s looking at me.” His fists clenched harder. “She’s with her mum and dad. Her dad hashis fucking handon her shoulder. Just resting gently there. And she’s eating an ice cream. She’s looking at me, and when she sees me looking back, shesmirksat me.”

I wondered if that was true.

Perhaps the little girl had simply smiled. It was even possible that she hadn’t noticed him at all, and that the sight of a happy child with an ice cream and a loving family had been enough to embed itself into Richard’s mind. But in a sense it wasn’t important whether it was actually true. What mattered was that it was true to him.

“I want you to relax,” I said.

He frowned.

“I don’t know what it means though.”

I glanced at the file on my knee. It would be facile—ludicrous—to imagine that this brief encounter with a little girl as a child had led Richard, decades later, to commit murder, even if all three of his victims had been women with black, curly hair. And yet this memory had been here all these years, locked away behind a door in the basement of his mind.

The hour was nearly up; it was time to bring Richard out of his mild trance and call for the orderly to escort him back to his cell.

I don’t know what it means though.

“Neither do I,” I said. “But perhaps we can find out together.”

Back in my office, I sat down at my desk and typed up my notes on that morning’s session. When I was finished, I opened a separate document on the computer to record my personal thoughts. That was a habit I’d fallen into over the years. I found it helpful to work through my feelings and impressions in a more abstract and unguarded fashion. The knowledge that nobody else would ever read them freed me to speculate and get my thoughts into some kind of order.

It is interesting to note how an event that becomes formative for a patient might appear utterly inconsequential to an observer. We can never know the importance of our actions, however small and innocent they might seem. An interaction that, for us, is gone in a heartbeat might be something that another person finds impossible to forget.

I leaned back in my chair.

The incident Richard had described to me was utterly trivial. Brief eye contact with a stranger. Perhaps a smile of some kind. It was something that happened millions of times every day, and which most people would barely register. Assuming the little girl was real, I doubted she would have any recollection of what happened that day, or any idea of the influence it might have had. Equally, I might have expected Richard, as an adult, to take his anger out on men who resembled the ones who had abused him. And yet it was the random image of this girl that had lodged in his mind.

I don’t know what it means though.

And that was the rub.

Richard Barber’s childhood contained a number of markers that were familiar to me from the offenders I saw. Poverty. Neglect. Abuse. Addiction. Those factors were so disproportionately represented in the prison population as a whole as to be unremarkable.

But they were not, of course, predictive in reverse. While people who went through extremely traumatic experiences in childhood would almost certainly carry issues into adulthood, the vast majority became decent, well-adjusted adults.

We are shaped by our pasts, not defined by them.

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