A Good Enough Mother

by Bev Thomas

  My cursor falls on Denis Watson. I know him well by now. He was twenty-two when he disappeared on holiday in Corfu more than ten years ago. The photo is of him standing in front of a marina, in the sunshine. He’s wearing a Hawaiian shirt, laughing as he squints into the camera. He went missing from a place we’d once been to on holiday. There were posters up everywhere when we’d gone to the island eight years ago with the kids. I wouldn’t have recalled his name, but as soon as I saw his story on the site, I remembered who he was. Now I know him so well, it’s as if he’s a member of my own extended family.

  It was our first trip abroad. At my insistence, a nod to my student years, we’d flown to Athens, then taken a ferry to the island. It was a mistake. Languid hours of sunbathing on deck as a nineteen year old was a million miles away from keeping two kids entertained on a hot sticky boat journey. We were staying in a small village called Messonghi, in an apartment on a rocky outcrop, overlooking the sea. The beach was sandy, shaded by tamarisk trees, and the twins spent the days in and out of the water with snorkels, tumbling on and off their brightly coloured lilos. Tom, in particular, spent hours floating in the shallows, head underwater watching the sandworms and the shoals of silvery fish.

  It was on an early evening walk that we stumbled upon it, in the hills behind the apartment. Tom spotted it first. ‘What are those for?’ he asked, pointing at a small neat pile of stones. They were flat and smooth and some were initialled or had scribbled messages on the side. Nearby, there were posters of Denis Watson, laminated and fixed to the trunk of several trees. His smiling face, that colourful shirt of palm trees. ‘Missing’ in bright red letters over the top.

  ‘What’s happened?’ His voice was panicky. ‘Is that a grave? Is there a body?’ Tom’s face was stricken.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘A man’s gone missing,’ I explained, pointing to the poster. ‘His family are trying to find him.’

  Tom stood and read the poster, standing in front of it for a long time.

  ‘He was here – and now he’s not,’ he fretted. ‘So, where is he? How can he just get lost?’ He was on the verge of tears.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, taking his hand. ‘But all the stones are like good wishes. Left by other people. To help him come home.’

  He spent ages picking out a smooth flat stone. Then when he’d found the right one, he painstakingly wrote his message, come back safe, in purple nail varnish I’d found at the bottom of my bag.

  Denis’s family now have a website. There’s a link on the site. I often find myself idly trawling through. It’s updated regularly, most weeks in fact. Three times a year his brothers fly out, to re-energise the search. They have reconstructed pictures of how he might look now. They are tireless in their efforts. They post photographs from family events; weddings, christenings, birthdays he has missed. There are messages from friends and family; new nieces and nephews that he won’t have ever met. Then just a couple of weeks ago, a wedding picture, ‘to my brother and best man. You are in my heart today. I miss you.’

  One time, I might have been judgemental. Perhaps it might have been something in the picture; a tattoo, a piercing, or a t-shirt that may have suggested a certain ‘type’. The sort of person who decides to leave home and have no contact with his family. Now I have become part of this club, I view the rules of membership in an entirely different way. I know there’s no ‘type’. I am kinder. They are all lost. They all have people who love and miss them, who post pictures in the hope of fresh news. And then I scroll further down until I rest the cursor on Tom’s face. I’d chosen a photo that was taken earlier in the year he disappeared. He was in the garden, digging at the unruly vegetable patch at the back. I called his name, and the spring sunshine caught his face as he looked up. There’s a hint of a smile. He looks quizzical. Wearing the green sweatshirt that he always wore.

  I click on the photo. No messages. No reported sightings. No nothing. I post a birthday message and stare at my son for a moment – then idly scroll down, to the new photos that have been added since I last went on the site. There’s a blonde-haired girl from Devon. Just sixteen. Recently been depressed. A man in his fifties who went to get cigarettes and never returned home. His wife and son write: Please get in touch. A young man in his thirties who took a trip to Southampton to see his team play, but then never got on the train home. What’s happened to all these people? I scroll over the faces and the messages. It’s addictive. All these lives.

  I became overwhelmed by the grief, the loss, but somehow, I couldn’t stop. In the end, it was Minty, in her burning bible belt of Virginia, who made me turn away. Minty was one of the regular contributors to the chat room. In those early months, I was messaging all the time, as I topped up the glass of wine on my desk. I didn’t know what to do with the ache in my chest. I poured it all out on screen and she was the first to respond. ‘Hi hon,’ she’d begin, before offering up words of comfort. She always seemed to be online. Her replies were almost instant, and she seemed to know the right thing to say. But some months in, something changed. Her support and sympathy took a more sinister turn, as she embarked on an attempt to save my ‘sinful soul’. Things happen for a reason. It’s an opportunity to find the Lord. To dedicate yourself to Jesus. Jesus listens to those who repent their sins. On and on it went. I had to get out before I said something I’d regret. No wonder your daughter ran away was what I’d typed one day. Luckily, I was sober enough to delete the message. I closed down the site and blocked her email address. Even Jesus couldn’t find his way past my firewall.

  It’s just as I’m returning to Denis Watson’s website that the email from Robert comes in. He can see me at eight o’clock on Monday morning. I reply to confirm, and quickly shut the computer down.

  Nine

  ‘One of my patients brought up Mark Webster.’

  Robert nods for me to sit down and pours me a glass of water. His movements are slow and methodical and solid. But I notice it. The small giveaway twitch of his eyebrow. For a demeanour that always presents unruffled acceptance, it’s like throwing a rock into a pool.

  I’ve seen Robert for supervision in the same consulting room for the last seventeen years. Nothing has changed; the pictures, the plant on the window sill, the jade green sofa, and the couch in the corner for his therapy clients. I could draw it all from memory. Once, I was unsettled by a change in the room, and it took me the whole of our time together to realise the old bamboo waste paper basket had been replaced by a sleek black metal one.

  Robert, I imagine, is in his late sixties, but there’s something strangely ageless about him. People who’ve known him longer than I have say he’s looked the same for decades. Sometimes I picture him in his twenties, with the same wisps of white hair, balding hairline and those striking blue eyes.

  There is something gently reassuring about him. He is intellectual, wise and insightful. Sometimes challenging. Always supportive. Usually, just stepping into his room and sitting down can feel a source of comfort. My Atticus Finch. The father who doesn’t leave. And in the seventeen years I’ve been coming, I’ve only seen him flustered once. It happened a couple of years ago, when he was unable to locate his mobile phone. It rang abruptly in the middle of our session. Disturbed by the sudden intrusion of noise, he checked his pockets to retrieve it. He searched his jacket, his briefcase, and yet, for some reason, he was unable to find the phone. His movements were still methodical and slow, but his increasingly flustered state was etched on his forehead. The ring became like a shriek. A wild animal he was unable to track down and silence. The more he searched, the more it seemed to evade him.

  As he continued to look for it, he explained he’d just bought the phone. ‘I’ve resisted getting one of these for a very long time,’ he said with quiet exasperation, and when eventually he managed to retrieve it from one of the internal compartments of his briefcase, he was unable to switch it off, or turn it to silent mode. ‘And now I can see why,’ he said with a frown. When the room fell back int
o silence, neither of us seemed able to recover from the violent intrusion into the normally calm quiet space. Robert was red and flushed and seemed distracted for the rest of the session, and while I pressed on with a description of my client case, I was conscious of his unease and of the echo of the phone ringing in my ears.

  That was the last I saw or heard of the phone. I was never given the number. In my head, I imagined him ending our session, opening the back door, carefully lifting the lid of the dustbin, and calmly dropping the offending item inside. I then imagined him tying up the black bin bag tightly and securely, with several satisfied knots, as if to make sure that this wayward and disruptive intruder was properly dispensed with, and not able to find its way back into the house.

  ‘Tell me about this patient,’ he says, his eyes fixed on mine.

  And so, I talk about Dan. I tell Robert about the brutal rape. His symptoms of PTSD. I tell him how he seemed to come into the unit with a sense of complaint and grievance; the clinic, the police, the parole officers, the whole system, ‘all figures of authority’.

  ‘He said the clinic was scruffy—’

  ‘He’s right,’ nods Robert, the flash of a smile on his lips.

  ‘He said he thought it would feel more “special”.’

  ‘And what about the beginning,’ he asks, ‘the very start of the work with you?’

  I tell him that almost before I’d even started, he seemed to view us as a source of disappointment, ‘people who hadn’t done their jobs properly.’

  I tell Robert how he drew attention to my dead plants, ‘hoped I do better with my patients.’ I tell him how he was reluctant to talk about the past and his family. I tell him about the cuts on his arms. The lateness to his third session. My pushback. His competitiveness with the patient who comes before him. I also tell Robert how all the film references confuse me, make me feel like I’m trying to solve a riddle.

  ‘Then when he mentioned Mark Webster, I was completely thrown.’

  I tell Robert everything. Except for the most important part. The fact that he bears a striking resemblance to my son. The fact that my heart aches when I look at him. That I have the sensation of falling when he comes into my office. That sometimes, I struggle even to formulate sentences because I am distracted by the very sight of him. By the urge to press my hands on his cheeks. To pull him to me and hug him. I don’t tell him that when I dream about Tom, I sometimes see Dan’s face. That their faces are becoming interchangeable. I don’t say any of this.

  Robert knows about what happened with Tom. He’s the only person connected to my working life I’ve talked to. It was Robert who saw me through the worst times.

  When I come on to talk about how he mentioned Mark Webster, how shocking it was, I feel the words clog up in my throat.

  ‘It was eight years ago. I mean – an FOI request – who bothers to do that?’

  Robert listens very carefully. He nods. He asks a few questions, but otherwise, he is still and calm.

  After a while, he sits forwards. Makes a few notes in his pad.

  ‘We have a patient who has a sense of grievance before he begins. He’s suffered a brutal attack. He wants a “quick-fix”. He’s evasive about his family and his past – and indications are that he probably has very complex attachment issues. He draws attention to the dead plants on the window sill …’

  I have a sudden and irrational urge to defend myself. To tell him that I’ve rescued some. That some are now thriving. They’re not all dead, I want to say.

  ‘… and so he wonders if maybe your patients – i.e. he, himself – will suffer the same fate? Then,’ he says, leaning back in his chair, ‘he offers up his trump card, as it were. The suicide of one of your former patients.’

  As he’s talking, I feel heavy in my chair.

  ‘What did you feel – when he mentioned Mark Webster?’

  I tell him that I felt panicky. Guilty and exposed, ‘like I’d been found out. Like he’d uncovered my dirty secret.’

  I think for a moment, then add, ‘But mostly I felt like a failure. Not good enough. That I made a mistake.’

  Why can’t people do their jobs properly?

  ‘So, he leaves you feeling criticised. At fault,’ he muses. ‘Perhaps he too has felt criticised or persecuted in the past. Perhaps he wants you to feel a little of what it’s like to be him.’

  He pauses.

  ‘What’s the consequence of him exposing this “big mistake”?’

  ‘For him – or me?’

  ‘Both.’

  ‘For me – a loss of confidence. It will roll into the work. Become a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don’t do a good job. I don’t do my job properly. He’s right.’

  ‘And for him?’

  I try to focus. But I feel filled with thoughts of Mark Webster. Of my own failings. I shake my head. ‘I can’t think.’

  ‘So – it’s working,’ he says, ‘he’s got inside you. Stopped you thinking.’

  I nod.

  ‘For him, by deciding you are a “failure” before you even begin – it stops him starting therapy. It’s his way out. It keeps you at bay. He doesn’t have to risk getting dependent on you. He can crush the work – before it even starts. But without taking this risk – of entering into the therapeutic relationship, there can be no healing and reparation. He can thwart efforts that might be helpful. A form of self-sabotage.’

  I remember what Dan told me about friends. ‘He said they all let you down in the end.’

  Robert nods. ‘People who avoid dependency are people who feel it will always lead to profound disappointment. Possibly because it always has.’

  Afterwards, I will think about that session. The things I said and didn’t say. How it’s Robert’s job to work with the things I show him – and if I don’t take him into a specific room, he can’t shine his torch around and have a look. There were rooms into which I chose not to take him. And how, in many ways, it mirrored my work with Dan. There were rooms he didn’t show me, but I also chose not to open those doors.

  He nods. ‘So what’s the common theme,’ he asks, ‘with all the things he’s focusing on?’

  I think for a moment

  ‘A lack of care.’

  ‘Exactly. Dead plants. Dead patients. He wants to know that you can take care of him,’ he says. ‘Can he really trust you with his story? Or will you too behave how others have behaved before. Be negligent? Careless? Not do your job properly?’

  ‘Will I be good enough?’

  ‘Yes. He’s testing you.’

  We sit in silence.

  ‘I think he’s frightened of his anger,’ I venture after a while. ‘The violence of the attack – and his inability to retaliate …’

  Robert nods. ‘What’s his pattern of managing his anger in the past?’

  ‘Avoidance, I think,’ and I refer back to the films. And as I’m speaking, I’m remembering I need to call the Hackney GP practice and follow up on the Bristol notes.

  We talk some more about Dan’s film watching. The references that pepper the sessions. How he said films taught him to feel.

  ‘He’s very split,’ Robert observes, ‘he cuts things off.’

  ‘He has an odd way of talking,’ I say. ‘When he mentions scenes from a film, or lines a character has said, I feel blindsided. One time it was Dead Poets Society, the other week, it was something else. I don’t know what he’s trying to say. I mean I’ve seen these films, years ago. I can’t remember them all – but they get in the way of the work. All the time, I’m trying desperately to remember the scene he’s talking about.’

  Robert’s advice is to engage more fully with the films he brings up, ‘rather than simply seeing them as an obstacle to climb over. Ask him more. See if it offers a way to dig deeper, explore the feelings. Where’s the anger?’

  He’s silent for a moment as he leafs back through his notes.

  ‘Earlier you mentioned that he’d discovered your “dirty secret” – moving forward, we might
wonder what his might be?’

  I nod.

  ‘Do you feel your boundaries pushed by him?’

  ‘No,’ I lie.

  ‘I get a sense that you might.’

  He pauses to glance up at the clock. ‘You’re doing very well with him,’ he says. ‘He’s not easy. Let’s make another time soon.’

  As I reach into my bag for my diary, I feel calmer. Sometimes, it’s less what he actually says, and more the way he says things. His slow, accepting and open stance. I stand up feeling lighter, unencumbered.

  As he walks me to the door, he places a hand on my arm. It’s a comforting gesture.

  ‘Any news?’ he asks.

  I dip my head down low. I don’t want to see his soft blue eyes. I can’t bear to look at the kindness. I shake my head, then I push on the door out into the sunshine.

  Where’s the anger? I think, as I walk back up the hill to work.

  *

  It was waiting for me in the main office. A tray of six geraniums on the floor by the filing cabinet. The tight buds just beginning to unfurl in a flash of blood red.

  ‘For you,’ Paula says, passing me a small white card with my name on. Ruth Hartland, printed in neat blue ink.

  ‘That’s it? No note?’

  She shakes her head. ‘They were left on the front desk at reception this morning. The porter just brought them up.’

  *

  Later that afternoon, I see Stephanie. She’s ready with her case notes and ring binder, but she looks tired, a little distracted. She starts with a new referral, then talks about the PTSD group. It feels like she’s avoiding Samira.

  Towards the end of the session, I ask.

  ‘It went well,’ she says flatly. ‘Jackie, the care co-ordinator, was great. Helped Samira buy a lot of the stuff. Most of the clothes, the bed. Lots of toys. Then she helped her set everything up. Made the bedroom look really nice.’