Page 11 of The New House

Medical professionals are reluctant to diagnose a child as a psychopath, even if they’ve just strangled the family cat. They tiptoe around the elephant in the room with labels likecallousandunemotional traits.

Because our ‘condition’ is considered untreatable. Tell a parent their kid is a sociopath, and it’s like giving them a terminal diagnosis.

My own parents did a magnificent job of burying their heads in the sand. They ignored my awkward early attempts to manipulate those around me. They wilfully neglected to notice my lack of friends at nursery school.

I was left to sink or swim on my own. And to begin with, I sank. I lied all the time.

I broke things. I burned things.

I bruised people.

I stole from my classmates. I gave the little girl who sat next to me a wrist burn because she used the red crayon when I wanted it. Sociopathic kids don’t ‘grow out’ of who they are. It’s not just a ‘phase’. But we live in a society where survival is dependent on fitting in. Better grades, better chances for college, better jobs, a better life: it’s all better when you’re part of a tribe.

So eventually we learn to swim. We figure out how to conceal our behaviour, and censor what we really think. At least the smart ones among us do. We hide in plain sight, though we never truly make friends. We endure relationships with people who don’t really know us. We get jobs at places where we’re tolerated, but never understood.

We learn the words, but we never feel the music.

We have no control over how we feel, but we know it bothers you. So we figure out how to blend in.

But full immersion in a foreign language is tough.

And it’slonely.

It might surprise you to know this, but sociopaths have an inbuilt longing to be loved and cared for, just like everyone else. It’s a desire that often goes unfulfilled, because our natures make it so hard for us to get close to people, and that’s where we tend to go off the rails.

The human brain wasn’t designed to function without access to emotion – even in people like us. And the constant effort required to act like a ‘normal’ person and survive in your world is exhausting.

Overload the system, and eventually it short-circuits.

When I was three years old, Mrs Evans, one of the teachers at my nursery, brought in a papier-mâché model of her house that her teenaged son had made her forMother’s Day. It’d taken him a month to build it in secret, and Mrs Evans couldn’t stop smiling with pride as she showed it off to us.

That day was my day to have the class mascot on my table, a privilege that was shared out among the class on a strict rota system.

But then Mrs Evans gave Benjy to one of the other children, a mouth-breather with a permanent nasal drip.

‘Sammy’s doggie just died,’ she told me, pulling a face I’d learned meantsad. ‘You don’t mind if I let him have Benjy today to cheer him up, do you?’

That afternoon, when Mrs Evans was supervising nap-time, I asked to go to the bathroom, which we were allowed to do on our own if we were potty-trained.

And then I went into her office, where she’d left her son’s papier-mâché model sitting on her desk, pulled down my pants, and peed all over it.

chapter 07

stacey

The woman seems to know the house better than Stacey herself. She doesn’t wait for the estate agent to show her from one room to the next: she’s already moving ahead of them, clearly familiar with the property’s inverted layout.

‘I like the way you’ve redone the kitchen,’ she says. ‘Moving the island to run horizontally across the room makes for much better sight lines. And you get to take full advantage of the morning light.’

‘That’s whatIthought,’ Stacey says.

The other woman runs her palm over the smooth quartz countertop, custom-ordered an extravagant three inches thick. ‘I always felt placing the island perpendicular to the western aspect was an odd choice,’ the woman muses. ‘I can only assume the architect didn’t have a hand in the final decision.’

Thisis why Stacey insisted she be here herself when the estate agent showed prospective buyers around: she needs to be the one to choose exactly the right person for the Glass House. Someone who’ll fall in love with the house, just as she did, and will do anything –anything– to get it.

‘The architect died just before the house was finished,’ Stacey says. ‘The executors wanted to get it completed as quickly as possible in order to sell it, so they brought in a new building firm who cut corners to save money. When we bought the house we located the architect’s original drawings and restored things in keeping with his design – not just in the kitchen, but elsewhere, too.’

‘Did you remove that pony wall in the master bathroom? I can’t believe the architect ever intended it to be there.’

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