Pal Re eke Ee
THAT AFTERNOON I WENT TO CAMBRIDGE, to visit Alicia's cousin, Paul Rose.
As the train approached the station, the lands cape flattened out and the fields let in an expanse of cold blue light. I
felt glad to be out of London—the sky was less oppressive, and I could breathe more easily.
I left the train along with a trickle of students and tourists, using the map on my phone to guide me. The streets were
quiet; I could hear my footst eps on the pavement echoing. Abruptly the road stopped. A wasteland lay ahead,
muddy earth and grass leading to the river.
Only one house stood alone by the river. Obstinate and impos- ing, like a large red brick thrust into the mud. It was
ugly, a Victorian monster. The walls were overgrown with ivy, and the garden had been overtaken by plants, weeds
mostly. I got the sense of nature encroaching, reclaiming territory that had once been hers. This was the house
where Alicia had been born. It was where she spent the first eighteen years of her life. Within these walls her
personality had been formed: the roots of her adult life, all causes and subse- quent choices, were buried here.
Sometimes it’s hard to grasp why the answers to the present lie in the past. A simple analogy might be helpful: a
leading psychiatrist in the field of sexual abuse once told me she had, in thirty years of extensive work with
pedophiles,
never met one who hadn’t himself been abused as a child. This doesn’t mean that all abused children go on to
become abusers, but it is impossible for someone who was not abused to become an abuser. No one is born evil. As
Winnicott put it, “A baby cannot hate the mother, without the mother first hating the baby.” As ba- bies, we are
innocent sponges, blank slates, with only the most basic needs present: to eat, shit, love, and be loved. But
something goes wrong, d epending on the circumstances into which we are born, and the house in which we grow
up. A tormented, abused child can never take revenge in reality, as she is powerless and de- fenseless, but she
can—and must—harbor vengeful fantasies in her imagination. Rage, like fear, is reactive. Something bad happened
to Alicia, probably early in her childhood, to provoke the murder- ous impulses that emerged all those years later.
Whatever the provocation, not everyone in this world would have picked up the gun and fired it point-blank into
Gabriel’s face—most people could not. That Alicia did so points to something disordered in her inter- nal world.
That’s why it was crucial for me to understand what life had been like for her in this house, to find out what
happened to shape her, make her into the person she became—a person capable of murder.
I wandered farther into the overgrown garden, through the weeds and waving wildflowers, and made my way along
the side of the house. At the back was a large willow tree—a beautiful tree, majes- tic, with long bare branches
swe eping to the ground. I pictured Alicia as a child playing around it and in the secret, magical world beneath its
branches. I smiled.
Then I felt uneasy suddenly. I could sense someone’s eyes on me.
I looked up at the house. A face appeared at an upstairs window.
An ugly face, an old woman’s face, pressed against the glass— staring straight at me. I felt a strange, inexplicable
shiver of fear.
I didn't hear the footst eps behind me until too late. There was a bang—a heavy thud—and a stab of pain at the back
of my head.
Everything went black.