Zo

by Leanne Owens

  ‘No!’ exclaimed Sandy, upset that Ally would think that. ‘I don’t know how any of it is possible, but it’s not the symptom of a mental disorder. It’s all too structured and real. You’re describing people you knew and emotions you felt.’

  ‘A break with reality,’ Ally murmured, closing her eyes as she leaned back in her chair. ‘While I clutched the life of Elli to my chest and hid her from everyone in this life, it all seemed so real. Now, after sharing her, I am considering the option of a form of psychosis resulting in hallucinations and delusions. A childhood psychosis that led to over fifty years of escaping to an imaginary world of friends.’ She opened her eyes and fixed her violet eyes on Peter. ‘That’s possible, isn’t it, Peter?’

  He met her gaze. He had remained silent for the entire morning as she spoke of Elli’s life in the Renaissance.

  ‘It’s possible, isn’t it, Peter?’ she repeated. ‘You’re the expert here in mental disorders and forms of psychosis that can result in altered states of reality.’

  ‘It would be unusual,’ he began slowly, trying to ensure he did not trip on his words, ‘to have such a long-running psychosis which appears to be anchored in fact, and which progresses in chronological order. Imaginary friends who appear real are uncommon in adulthood, but do occur. Isolated events, such as experiencing an alien abduction, are a well-known form of psychosis, but an entire lifetime of experiencing life in another time? That would be unprecedented as far as I’m aware.’

  ‘But possible?’ she asked again.

  He shrugged, ‘I want to accept your story, Ally. I don’t care if it is a mental break or if it is impossibly real – it is part of who you are, and we love you as you are. I want to accept Elli and her love for Zo – your love for him - and have you in our lives again. I don’t need to know why you have that facet to your life. I acknowledge that it is there. I don’t want to destroy it, or modify it, or remove it. I recognise it as a crucial part of your being, and I do not question it anymore. I want us to move forward from here, knowing all of you, which includes Elli and her love.’

  Sandy, Lynette, and Andrew murmured assent.

  ‘You don’t know all of me, though,’ Ally’s gaze grew cool as she moved her thoughts to the darkest place of her mind. Shoved in a cupboard, locked away in a room, down a guarded corridor, remained the memories of a past that she had fought all her life to forget. ‘I believe that if I am to move forward, I have to tell you about something that I swore I would never talk about. It could be the catalyst for a psychosis of this level.’

  ‘Would you rather speak to one of the psychiatrists?’ Peter enquired gently.

  ‘Yes, Peter,’ Ally snorted in amusement, ‘I would, which is why I am speaking to you. You are a psychiatrist, remember?’

  ‘But would you prefer one you don’t know personally?’

  ‘No, this is fine,’ she managed to give him one of her cheeky winks to show that she was not angry in any way. ‘This has been a long session this morning, sorry. Let’s go and have lunch. This afternoon, can we meet in one of the conference rooms? I think that what I have to say requires a more formal surrounding.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Ally’s Confession

  After lunch, they moved to a room that was quite different from the jaunty and colourful rooms they had experienced so far at Kamekura. A rectangular polished wood table sat in the centre, with twelve high-back chairs around it. The walls were clinically white, broken by a series of paintings of jacaranda trees, the blooms the same shade of lavender as Ally’s eyes. A sideboard held coffee and tea making facilities, as well as a range of biscuits, cakes, and savoury snacks. It could have been a small conference room in any city office building. Its saving grace was the view of the gardens outside the windows.

  Ally sat at the head of the table, with Peter, Lynette, and Nick in the first three chairs along one side, and Sandy, Andrew, and Marcus on the other side. Glasses and jugs of water sat in front of them, along with several fruit platters. To their amusement, the staff who prepared the room included legal pads and pens, along with a container of white board markers.

  ‘Feel free to take notes,’ Ally smiled as she held up her lined paper and pen. ‘Seriously, it might not be a bad idea since we have several lawyers here, and you are about to hear information which will make you accessories after the fact in relation to a crime.’

  Although there was a smile on her mouth, her eyes were deadly serious. There was an uncharacteristic hardness in their depths that was unnerving. As Peter regarded her, he thought of cases where patients seemed to have aspects to their personality so different from other parts that it could appear to be a ‘split personality’, not that he subscribed to any belief in the Hollywood version of multiple personality disorder. Yet, here was Ally, looking remarkably different from the person he knew.

  ‘A crime?’ enquired Marcus, his legal mind snapping to attention. ‘How serious?’

  ‘The most serious,’ she replied in emotionless tones.

  No one was sure of what to say, so they remained silent.

  Ally looked at Peter. ‘If you thought there needed to be an event or a trauma that would trigger a psychotic event, such as hallucinating about living in another time, then I believe I have the event. I killed my father.’

  Incredulity met her statement, and Sandy was the first to speak, putting her hand on Ally’s arm in a gesture of empathy. ‘No, it was an accident. You can’t blame yourself for that. You were a teenager who lost her mother, and then your father. Of course, there will be guilt.’

  ‘I appreciate your support,’ Ally patted the movie star’s hand that rested on her arm, ‘but it wasn’t an accident. It was pre-mediated murder, undertaken with cold calculation and resulting in no regret.’

  ‘You need a lawyer,’ Marcus leaned forward. He had witnessed enough criminal cases to recognise the seriousness of her claim. She was not joking, she was confessing. ‘I advise you to stay silent until you have proper legal advice.’

  ‘I’m not going to stay silent,’ she said with determination. ‘I’ve known since waking up that I had to speak about this. In that period when I hovered in a grey place, Zo was able to talk to me, and he made it quite clear that to continue living, I had to do three things. He was always one to remind us that we should choose life – in a time when plague could take whole villages, and people died of infections and appendicitis, life was a valuable choice. I let him down by trying to end my life, but it allowed him the opportunity to speak to me, so I have no regrets about that. Oh, one,’ she grinned at Peter. ‘I feel vampirish for nearly draining your blood. You really are a poop-head for not letting me know we were the same blood type.’

  ‘Poop-head? Really’ Peter squinted at her, a mocking gleam in his eyes. ‘Didn’t we stop using that word when we were twelve?’

  ‘It deserves to make a come-back,’ mischief coloured Ally’s voice, the seriousness of her confession evaporating as she recalled some childhood phrases. ‘Along with our old favourites, the insult dung-for-brains and the descriptive shoe-poo-goo.’

  With his brows arched high, Nick looked at Lynette. ‘I might regret this, but can I have that last one in a sentence, please?’

  ‘The stew on tonight’s menu looks like a pot of shoe-poo-goo,’ said Lynette, finding amusement in their childhood expressions, and putting aside Ally’s confession as though it hadn’t occurred. Sometimes, it was easier to pretend nothing was wrong. ‘Or, you might say that you love the Bay City Rollers as much as you love a smelly load of shoe-poo-goo.’

  ‘Which is a total lie, by the way,’ put in Sandy. ‘We pretended to dislike Eric, Woody, and the others, and we felt very superior to the teeny-boppers who wore tartan in plain sight to show their BCR love, but, behind the scenes, we knew the words to every song and had at least one bit of tartan secreted under our clothes.’

  ‘Not me,’ Peter held up his hands.

  ‘I did,’ Andrew winced at his admission.

 
‘What are the three things?’ Marcus turned the conversation back to focus on the issue at hand. He thought it was bizarre to have a murder confession followed by jokes about silly words, but he’d noted that Ally’s mood often seemed to jump from one strong emotion to another and assumed, this time, it was a distraction from something she had avoided most of her life. ‘You said Zo told you to do three things.’

  Dropping the nonsensical talk, Ally became serious again. ‘First, I had to trust my friends and tell you our story. He said it was important for you to share the memories with me. I think I’ve done that. Secondly, I had to release the dark secrets of my life. If I am to start living from this point, I need to open the locked rooms of my mind, particularly all that relates to my father and his death because, even if I’m not aware of it, those events have echoes all through my life. All jokes aside, which is difficult as they help me deflect the things I wish to avoid - if you or anyone else would prefer not to listen, you are welcome to leave.’

  ‘I am a defence attorney,’ Marcus stated in his professional voice, all casualness gone. ‘If you agree to be my client, I can’t testify against you. I advise that you take on a team of lawyers at this point, none of whom can testify against you. You can then confess, if you wish, and as long as you don’t hand us any physical evidence, such as a murder weapon, we are not compelled to disclose our knowledge.’

  ‘I have a law degree,’ said Nick, following Marcus’s lead. ‘I haven’t used it in years, but I’m happy to be on your team of lawyers if it means we can protect you with our silence.’

  ‘And us,’ Lynette pointed to herself and Andrew. ‘We make the third and fourth in your team, Ally. And Peter is your psychiatrist, so has patient-doctor confidentiality. I don’t know what we can do about Sandy, though…’

  ‘I do,’ snorted Sandy. ‘You do realise that I’m a brilliant actor, don’t you? I’ll lie my head off for Ally, and no one will ever know.’

  ‘You would perjure yourself?’ Marcus asked, his brows raised.

  ‘For Ally? Absolutely. If she killed her father and this isn’t a case of her having misplaced guilt about him dying, then I’d commit perjury if questioned about it. If you killed him,’ she patted Ally’s arm, ‘I know you’d have had good reason.’

  ‘I did,’ Ally nodded, her expression deadly serious as she opened the door to where her secrets lay and let the fly out. ‘He murdered my mother, and he’d been raping me since I was seven years old. The sexual abuse continued until I was fourteen, when his medication interfered with his ability to have sex with me. Mother challenged him about it when I turned fifteen, and she drowned in a bath accident. Dad drowned her. I saw it. I killed him a few months later because he deserved it, and because he would have killed me as soon as he had the opportunity.’

  When she stopped, no other voice filled the shocked silence.

  Peter thought of the warrior girl at primary school who stood over him and protected him from the bullies. She had been so confident and strong. It was hard to equate that picture with a girl whose father raped her. She was a goddess worthy of admiration and adoration, and the thought of a man violating and defiling her perfection made him ill. If only he’d known. If he’d known, he would have… what? He asked himself. What would I have done? I was Baa-Baa-Barker, scared and small. I could not have done anything. I would have turned away from her. And she knows that.

  In Lynette’s mind were the memories of her own abuse at the hands of the priests and nuns at the orphanage. No wonder Ally understood what was going on. She had been a victim of an incestuous paedophile but had managed to hide the indications from others. Rage at Ally’s father built inside of her. How could a man do that to his daughter? How had she found the strength to build all of them into the people they became when that horror was at her core?

  Sandy dropped her head into her hands, remembering back to their teenage years. They had drawn strength from Ally. She had always seemed so filled with light and power that they took from her without thinking that she needed someone to support her. It was no excuse to say that she hid the truth from them – they should have known. Ally recognised their inner demons and exorcised them, but they had failed her. Seven, she thought in horror, he raped her when she was seven years old. How had she managed to maintain such a normal exterior with those physical and emotional abuses hidden away?

  ‘So much suffering,’ Andrew said quietly, after a minute of silence had lapsed. ‘I am so sorry, Ally. I can’t believe that none of us knew. I am so sorry we didn’t help you when you were helping us.’

  ‘I neither expected nor asked for help. There is no need to apologise.’

  ‘But we should have known,’ said Peter with anguish in his words. ‘We should have known.’

  ‘How could you?’ Ally gave him a comforting smile. ‘I had perfected the art of locking that part of my life away where no one could see it, or even suspect it existed. We were children. We didn’t understand the depraved ways of adults. No one even knew what the words paedophile or incest meant. When we were at primary school, you and Sandy thought women got pregnant by using the same towel as a man on their privates – how were any of you going to understand what my father did to me at night?’

  ‘That was the pain, wasn’t it?’ Marcus’s shrewd eyes examined her face. ‘When you wanted to die from the pain, or couldn’t go to school because of the pain, it was your father’s abuse.’

  Ally nodded, her expression steely, ‘It was painful. He quoted the Bible to me and said children had to bear their suffering in silence. He put the fear of God into me from the age of seven. That was why I could never have children – there was too much damage done.’

  Peter turned his head away, overcome with illness at the thought of what that child had suffered. His heart wept for little Ally and he wished they could go back in time and save her.

  ‘Did your mother know?’ Sandra asked gently.

  Ally nodded again. ‘She knew. She told me – repeatedly - that at least we were alive. If we tried to tell anyone, or tried to stop him, we knew that he would have killed us both. His power over us wasn’t just physical, it was this total and absolute belief that even if I stood at his bed while he was sleeping and pointed a gun at his head, he wouldn’t die – he would wake, torture, and kill me.’

  ‘And that first time you went to Florence,’ Lynette recalled the start of Ally’s story, ‘when time ripped open and you were Elli, it was during one of these…acts?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And in subsequent episodes of abuse?’ Sandy’s eyes were limpid with empathy.

  ‘Every time,’ said Ally. ‘Several times a week, as soon as he approached me or my bed with that intent, I was gone. I had no control over it. There was a shadowy person nearby who took my hand and pulled as soon as my father came to me, and each time he tugged at my hand, I opened my eyes as Elli.’

  ‘A shadowy man?’ Marcus narrowed his eyes at her. ‘Zo?’

  ‘I believe so. I think he was always there, watching over me. Before it began, when I had tea parties by myself, I had an imaginary friend, a man who was kind and gentle. He enjoyed listening to me prattle about life. He liked watching me have tea parties, and he smiled. But he wasn’t real. He couldn’t pick up a tea cup, and no one else could see him. I couldn’t see him, not really – it was just an impression of someone being there. Years later, when I saw Zo watch his own children with the same smile and sense of joy, I knew he was my imaginary friend.’

  ‘He was there when your father abused you?’ asked Sandy.

  ‘I remember having the impression of the shadowy man crying for me. His longing to help me was palpable, but there was nothing he could do. Whenever it happened, I was aware of a presence in the room – someone who cared for me and who was desperate to save me. But isn’t that what every child would want to believe? That someone who loved them was nearby and wanted to rescue them?’

  ‘You were that person for me,’ Lynette said softly.

&n
bsp; ‘And Zo was the one for me,’ Ally blinked back some tears as she recalled the fear and suffering of her childhood, the breathless anxiety of hearing her father’s footsteps approaching her door at night, and the agony of what followed. ‘I believe – or I want to believe – that he has always been here for me, and somehow, when I was nine, he found a way to open time so that my mind could travel back to Elli. If anyone could do that, he could – he took impossible problems, and he solved them. He could not stop my father, but he could open a door to allow my mind to escape.’

  ‘And that split your life into three pieces,’ said Andrew, his heart aching for the child she had been. ‘The child everyone saw at school. The victim of abuse who had to keep that secret. The girl in Florence whose life had to be kept hidden.’

  ‘It’s enough to trigger psychosis,’ Ally tucked her mouth up at the corner in a wry expression at the thought. When looked at clinically, and discussed by those around her, it seemed that the option she’d contested all these years had merit. ‘I don’t want to think about that right now. I want to finish my confession.’

  Both Lynette and Sandy reached out to cover her hands with theirs in a gesture of support. It helped, thought Ally as she looked at their hands. She had exposed the shame and the crime that lurked at the start of her life, and they did not turn away from her. The revelation of incest hadn’t caused them to look at her with disgust – they loved her. All of her. It was a revelation that gave her a sense of release. The dark rooms were open to the light, and they still loved her. Zo was right. He had faith in them when she had doubted.

  ‘When I was fourteen, Dad started medication for high blood pressure, as well as anti-depressants. A side effect was erectile dysfunction, which gave me a break. It didn’t stop the trips back to Florence as that had become like a path through the jungle – the first trips were difficult, but the more I travelled it, the clearer the path became, and I could find my way there without the need to escape the pain. It was a well-trodden path through time that I could follow whenever I wished. So, his abuse ceased and as soon as I realised what the medication was doing, I stole a prescription pad from our doctor and forged prescriptions so that I could ensure Dad was always well medicated.’