Free Blind to the Bones by Stephen Booth Page B

behaviour was caused by fear conditioning, the need to avoid the triggers that had caused the fear in the first place. But it could be overcome by experiencing the triggers in a safe context – the process of cognitive behavioural therapy, a treatment for part of the brain the therapist called the medulla. He said new memories had to be created which would over-ride the fear. Extinction memories. A new life to replace the old one.
    Fry had begun to imagine this process as being like painting a new picture over a previously used canvas. As a child and a young teenager, she had liked to draw. It had been something she could do alone, absorbing herself in her pictures in her room at Warley. But sometimes a finished pencil drawing had bothered her, and she had rubbed it out with an eraser. That had never seemed enough, though, so she would draw over it again, trying to create a happier picture on paper that was already grubby and smeared with charcoal from the old one.
    Then a boyfriend had taken her into Birmingham City Art Gallery one wet Brum afternoon, to try to raise her cultural standards. There had been a special exhibition on, and it was there she had seen one of the visions of Hell painted by Breughel the Younger. There had been a lot of other stuff, too, but it had been the Breughel that impressed her. She had kept the memory of it for much longer than she had kept the boyfriend. He had lasted only a few weeks. But the vision of Hell was still with her twelve years later.
    Now Fry imagined her fear as one of those Breughel visions, all demons and flames. With the therapist’s help, she had learned to cover her mental painting with a pastoral landscape rendered in gentle colours – brown and white cows grazing in a wildflower meadow, a cottage with clematis growing by the door, a cat relaxing in the sun on a window ledge. And always in her picture there was a young girl. She stood right in the middle foreground, clutching a wicker basket in her bare arms, smiling as she scattered grain for the hens around her feet.
    The picture had stayed intact for a while. The cows had never seemed to run out of grass in their pasture, the sun always shone on the cat. And the girl had never aged, so that her skin had remained pink and fresh, and unbroken. Just like the photograph of Emma Renshaw.
    But Fry’s picture didn’t have the advantage of photographic permanence. It had been done with cheap paints. After a year or two, the colours had worn thin. They were scoured away by the rubbing of her hands, by her constant touching and stroking to make sure the picture was still intact. When she had handled her picture too often, the Breughel showed through again. That was when she had to go back for help, to prevent the faces of the tormented souls emerging once more from the red petals of the poppies, to convince herself that the hooves in the grass were those of cattle and not goat-footed demons. She needed reassurance to make her see the leaves of the clematis instead of the flames leaping from the pit. She needed help to see the innocence of the girl, not the scaly claws of the birds at her feet.
    Each time she had to lay the paint on thicker, layer upon layer of it, with a bigger and bigger brush and in brighter and brighter colours. Finally, the picture had become so garish that she could no longer see anything but what lay underneath. She saw only blood in the poppies, and mould in the grass. She saw the bones under the skin of the girl.

6
    B en Cooper and Tracy Udall found the Reverend Derek Alton in his churchyard. He’d taken a bit of finding, because he was almost invisible among the weeds and overgrown shrubs. Alton was wearing wellingtons and corduroy trousers, and he was clutching a scythe in gloved hands. Thistle burrs and bramble thorns had stuck to his trousers. Now and then, he took a half-hearted swipe at the weeds, flattening them, but not cutting through them. In between swipes, he paused and