Waiting for Wednesday

mad, really mad, finding
your own hidden meanings in a chaotic world. She thought of the troubled, sad people who
came to her for help, and then the even more troubled, sadder people who were beyond
anything she could do, the people who had voices in their heads telling them about
conspiracies, how everything made horrible, terrifying sense.
    Frieda looked at her clock. It was a couple
of minutes after seven. Fearby must have waited for a permissible time to ring her. She
got up and had a cold shower, so cold it made her ache. She pulled on some jeans and a
shirt and made herself coffee. She couldn’t face anything else. What if Fearby had
left a message? She didn’t even want to hear his voice, but now she’d
thought of it, she couldn’t stop herself. She retrieved the phone from upstairs
and called her voicemail. He probably wouldn’t have said anything. But he had.
    The message began with a nervous cough, like
someone starting a speech without knowing quite what to say.
    ‘Erm. Frieda. It’s me. Jim.
Sorry about everything yesterday. I should have thanked you for all you’ve done. I
know I come over as a bit of a nutter. And an obsessive. Anyway, I said I’d keep
you in touch. Which is probably not what you want to hear. I’m in London.
I’ve been going over things, the files on the girls. I’ve had a thought. We
weren’t thinking about them properly. We didn’t hear the engine. I’m
going out to have another look. Then I’ll call round to you and fill you in.
I’ll be there at two. Let me know if that’s no good. Sorry to go on so long.
Cheers.’
    Frieda almost wished she hadn’t heard
the message. She felt she was being sucked back in. It was clear that Fearby would never
let go. Like those people obsessed with theFreemasons or the Kennedy
assassination, he would never give up and nothing would change his mind. She was tempted
to ring him back and tell him not to come but then she thought: No. He could come one
last time and she would hear what he had to say and respond rationally and that would be
that.
    The day was almost as much of a blur as the
night had been. Frieda thought she might read a book but she knew she couldn’t
concentrate. Normally at a time like this she would have done a drawing, of something
simple, like a glass of water or a candle. She didn’t even want to go out, not in
the daytime, with the people and the traffic noise. She decided to clean her house. That
would do. Something that required no thought. She filled bucket after bucket with hot
water and cleaning fluid and took objects off shelves and wiped them down. She sprayed
the windows. She mopped floors. She polished surfaces. The more she cleaned, the more
she had a comforting sense that nobody lived in the house or had lived there or had ever
been there.
    The phone rang periodically, but she
didn’t answer. She didn’t know whether it had been a surprisingly long time
or a surprisingly short time, but she looked up at the clock and saw it was five to two.
She sat in a chair and waited. There was going to be no coffee. Certainly no whisky. He
could say what he had to say, she would respond, and he could go. Then it would be over,
and she could go to talk to Thelma Scott and start to deal with all of this because it
just couldn’t go on.
    One minute past two. Nothing. She actually
went to the door and opened it and stepped out. As if that would help. She sat back
down. Ten past, nothing. Quarter past, nothing. At twenty past, she called Fearby and
went straight to his voicemail.
    ‘I was wondering where you were. I need
to go out soon. Well, not that soon. I’ll be here until half past four.’
    She thought he might be one of the people
who had called during the day. There were fourteen messages on her answering machine.
They were the usual suspects: Reuben, Josef, Sasha, someone about a possible patient,
Paz, Karlsson, Yvette. She tried her voicemail. Nothing. For the next half-hour she
answered the phone three times. One was a fake survey, one was Reuben, one was Karlsson.
Each time she said she couldn’t talk. By three o’clock she was genuinely
puzzled. Had she got the time wrong? She’d deleted Fearby’s message as soon
as she’d heard it. Was it possible she had misheard? God knew, she hadn’t
been thinking all that clearly. Was it really two o’clock? Yes, she was sure about
that. He’d even said that if she couldn’t make that time, she should ring
back. Could he just be late? Caught in