by Bev Thomas
His face gives nothing away.
‘But you weren’t,’ he says, with another smile.
‘Weren’t what?’
‘With another patient.’
I start to speak.
‘Is she away?’ he cuts in. ‘The girl who comes before me?’
And before I have a chance to answer, he’s darting his head back and forth to comic effect, stay – go – stay?
‘I can go back and wait,’ he says. ‘Shall I do that?’
I glance up at the clock. It’s five minutes before four o’clock.
I’d been doing my monthly figures. Various patient case notes are open across the table. A half empty glass of water. I feel caught off guard. He has again shifted the power.
All patients are asked to report to the department reception, and then take a seat in the waiting room. The receptionist then rings through to us – and we come and collect our patients. The instructions are clear and consistent. It’s the ‘frame around the mess’. For the most part, they are followed, but it’s not uncommon for patients to try to challenge these rules. ‘The door was open,’ they might say, or ‘I was running late, so I came straight round,’ or ‘I didn’t see anyone on reception.’ They may say all manner of things, present all manner of reasons for appearing unannounced, for choosing not to adhere to the instructions they’ve been given, and previously followed. Almost always, it’s an attempt to push at the boundary that’s been set. Can the rules be broken? Is it really safe? Am I really contained? It’s a small display of rebelliousness to counter their own helplessness. Sometimes it’s about control. About wanting to by-pass reception, to have direct access to the therapists. It can be a desire to stand out from all the other patients. A desire to feel special.
Usually, when this happens, I look up politely and calmly, and ask them to wait in the waiting room. It confirms the message they have already been given. There is safety in rules and boundaries. Usually, at some point, if not in that session, in the next, it will come up again. The patient may be angry. Feel rejected. The meaning gets explored in the session, becomes central to the therapeutic work.
That day, as I glance at the clock, I find myself reasoning that by the time Dan goes back down to the waiting room, I’ll be back to collect him. I also know that I’m being pulled in. I know that he wants to feel special. I feel it that day, like a palpable ache in my chest.
‘No,’ I say, ‘it’s fine. It’s nearly time. Come in. Sit down,’ and I gesture over to the chairs. ‘I’ll be with you in a few minutes.’
He wants to feel special, and I let him.
Hastily, I close the open files, and find his own from the filing cabinet. I feel his stillness, in the chair. I know I am flustered from his sudden arrival at the door. I am self-conscious as I return to my desk. As I sit there for those minutes until four o’clock, the small pocket of time expands like elastic. With the pen still gripped in my fingers, I pretend to continue with my notes. My face feels hot, and though my hand moves across the paper, I write nothing. Swirls and loops like a love-struck teenager in class. As I sit there pretending to ignore him, the opposite seems to happen. The presence of him in the corner of my room burns in my chest. I feel it on my face, in the movement of my body. It’s a strange sensation. Like when you’re trying to ignore someone from afar, but out of the corner of your eye, every single pore of your body knows exactly where they are and what they’re doing. I can visualise the contours of Dan’s body. The way he has crossed one knee over the other. The exact position of his head. And I know, without looking at him, that he is watching me.
At exactly four o’clock, I put my pen down, close the file, and cross the room to join him. I sit on the chair opposite him, the small coffee table in between us.
‘Plants look better today,’ he says, nodding over to the window sill. ‘You’ve been taking care of them.’
‘I have some new ones,’ I say, and I scan his face for a sign that he has brought them.
‘Nice,’ he says. His expression is neutral.
I ask him how he’s been.
‘A little better,’ he says, ‘I made it to college most days. We’ve been told to pick a film to analyse.’ He looks animated, excited.
‘Ordinary People,’ he tells me when I ask.
‘Why that one?’
He thinks for a moment, ‘I’ve watched thousands of movies,’ he says. ‘Ordinary People is a perfect film. A perfect piece of filmmaking.’
‘What is it that you like?’ I ask, remembering the brittleness of the Mary Tyler Moore character. The husband played by Donald Sutherland. And a hazy memory of a scene with a camera and a family photograph.
‘Family flaws. Parents. The limits of a mother’s love,’ he sounds guarded. ‘I’ll show you my essay when it’s done. I like the way it ends,’ he adds, ‘the inevitability of the ending. There’s no great Hollywood reconciliation. They separate. They have to. Some endings are inevitable – aren’t they?’
‘It makes me wonder about your own family,’ I say tentatively. ‘Were they fragmented?’
He feigns shock, shakes his head. ‘We were like the Partridge Family,’ he says.
I think about my time with Robert, the need to open more doors. I ask him more about how he became interested in films.
He shrugs. ‘There was a rental shop on the corner of my street, I watched everything. Films were exciting. Taught me to feel stuff – things I hadn’t experienced before.’
‘Did you watch with your parents?’
There’s a momentary look of surprise. ‘No. On my own.’
‘Did your parents work?’ I ask.
‘Dad was a teacher. Mum was a nurse, though she only worked part-time.’ He looks vague. ‘She just wasn’t around very much.’
He tells me he liked films about misfits, kids who didn’t fit in. ‘For years I thought I was adopted. There were no photos anywhere of me as a baby, or small child. For a long time – I thought that was why.’
‘How did your parents get on?’
‘They were very compatible. A tight twosome. Never raised their voices.’ He gives an apologetic smile. ‘Sorry – I told you it wasn’t very filmic.’
The session feels achingly slow. I’m asking too many questions, going around in circles. Getting nowhere. As if at any moment, I might see that quicksilver flick of his tail.
I try again. I realise I’m leaning forwards in my chair.
‘What was the main thing that films taught you to feel?’
‘Pain,’ he says, without hesitation.
I feel a creeping sense of unease. A prickle at the back of my neck.
‘I can’t remember the film,’ he says, ‘I was very young, maybe five or six. I saw this scene where a family are in a hurry to go on holiday and the boy gets his hand caught in the car door. It was an accident. The parents were distraught.’ He tells me how they bandaged it up and took care of him.
‘So I tried it,’ he says.
The prickle becomes a chill of fear. ‘Tried what?’
‘Shut my hand in the door. Broke two fingers of my left hand. I felt so high. Like I was on drugs.’
‘You shut your hand in the door deliberately?’
He nods.
‘Problem was – when I did it again, it wasn’t as good. It’s what a user says after the first hit of heroin.’ He pauses, meets my gaze. ‘I had to move on to other things.’
‘Other things?’ I ask and I can feel the moment slow down.
‘Ninety per cent of accidents take place within the home,’ he says, ‘it’s amazing how much harm can be done with household appliances. A kettle. A toaster …’ He pauses. ‘A cheese grater,’ and I wince as he looks down at his fingers.
I feel he wants to shock me, yet instead of saying so, I am pulled right in.
‘What about your parents? Your mother?’ My words come out too forcefully.
He blinks back at me, perhaps startled by the emotion in my voice.
‘My parents
cared for me; food, clothes, paid for books and my video membership etc. – but they didn’t care about me,’ he says, his voice calm, matter of fact. ‘They took me to the doctor, and to the hospital when it was necessary for x-rays or to fix any broken bones. My welfare didn’t interest them.’
The fear has turned into a different kind of feeling. My jaw clenches. He then tells me he went through a phase of watching films about missing children.
‘It became a bit of an obsession,’ he says. ‘They were those “every-parent’s-nightmare” sort of films – when the child goes missing in a moment of carelessness. They’re swept off by a stranger. Or they simply disappear.’
They simply disappear. There’s a pull in my stomach.
‘These sound like films for grown-ups?’ I say, alarm bells ringing as I try to understand.
‘They were. I tried some of the things,’ he says jauntily. ‘I’d wander off when we were out somewhere. They were always so wrapped up in each other. It was easy.’
My hands tighten into fists.
He tells me the first time was when they were all at a fairground. He was still in primary school. ‘I was about ten, I think. We were standing by the dodgems and I wandered away. Away from the bright lights. I ran across a field and turned into a road. It was dark. It wasn’t long before a car pulled over. An old bloke, with a fat and sweaty face. I remember how the seat belt stretched across him, cutting his belly in half, like two big tyres.’
As I listen to the story, I can hardly breathe.
‘As he reached for my seat belt, his fingers brushed across my face,’ and as he recalls the moment, he sounds excited, exhilarated. ‘I could smell the sourness of his breath.’ He shrugs. ‘It didn’t work out so well that time.’
That time?
‘He took me straight to the police station. My parents came to collect me.’
I feel giddy. I’m struggling to find words. To make proper sentences.
‘What about your injuries, the trips to the hospital? The police … the doctors? What did they do?’
Suddenly, it all falls into place. People who haven’t done their job properly. The sense of injustice. Of grievance. His powerlessness. I feel rage and incomprehension, there’s anger in my voice.
‘My parents said I was accident prone, clumsy. Doctors diagnosed dyspraxia. Poor balance and co-ordination. I was referred to a specialist physiotherapist.’
I look at him aghast. ‘But your parents?’
‘By then my father was a headmaster. A magistrate. A pillar of the local community. My mother was a nurse. They were good people.’
And then I ask the question that’s been hanging there between us. The one I’ve been trying not to ask.
‘Was there ever a suicide attempt?’
He looks taken aback.
‘Kill myself? Never.’ He shakes his head. ‘I just wanted to hurt myself. It felt good to push myself as far as I could,’ he says, and again, I feel a terrible shiver of fear, ‘and the closer I got to the edge, the more it became clear that my parents wouldn’t be there to catch me.’
What I remember most about listening to Dan was the absence of his emotion. A space where any feelings should be. And the emptier the space, the more I fill it with my own fury. I can feel my face radiate with heat. I am alarmed by the strength of my rage. By the rush of blood to my cheeks.
This is my moment to translate what’s happening between us into words that will make sense to him. This is what I’m good at. Finding the right moment to comment on his detachment from his anger. To say how full of horror I feel at what he is telling me. I am listening to you tell me a dreadful story. Something truly awful. To comment on the fact that he seems to be normalising their behaviour. How split off this experience feels. And that in the absence of any feelings in him, I am full of them. Perhaps it feels too painful, or too frightening to connect with these feelings of rage? Any feelings of anger have been cast to one side, they sit in the corner of the room like an unexploded bomb. It’s my job to put my hands around his own, and help him pick it up. To help him see that the bomb belongs to him. His feelings. His emotions. And by picking it up, he can control whether to let it explode or to work at understanding how it can be defused.
The problem is, I have picked up the bomb, and I don’t seem to be able to put it down.
Perhaps he has noticed the flushed red of my cheeks or my fingers curled into a fist. He blinks back at me. ‘What’s the matter?’ he asks. ‘Are you all right?’
‘I feel so angry,’ and it comes out like a spit of rage. ‘How dare they?’
‘What?’ He looks surprised.
‘Why would your parents behave like this? Your mother? How could she?’
He bristles in his chair. ‘They didn’t much care for me. I wasn’t to their taste. It wasn’t like I was abused or anything. Compared to what others go through. Neither of them laid a finger on me. Ever,’ he says emphatically. ‘In fact, I don’t remember them touching me at all.’
I open my mouth to speak, but I can’t find the words.
‘Indifference,’ he says, looking me squarely in the eye. ‘It’s not a crime, is it?’
‘Indifference?’ I say. ‘You weren’t to their taste? You make it sound like you were an item on a menu. Negligence and neglect is abuse.’
‘Perhaps they had a reason?’ he says. ‘Perhaps I was someone that needed to be punished.’
It’s a struggle to concentrate on what he is saying. I feel a throbbing ache at the back of my head. I can’t believe I’m arguing with him.
‘Perhaps I did something to deserve it.’
I think about the attack in the park. How he described it as a punishment. Karma.
‘I believe there must have been a reason for my parents’ dislike – and indifference—’
‘You were just a child.’
‘I used to think that maybe it was connected to this odd nothingness feeling. Like there was a gaping wide hole. I used to fantasise there was a secret. Like my adoption theory. Something they kept from me. Perhaps I was the result of a rape? Or not my father’s son? Or some other kind of secret.’
A dirty secret.
‘There was always something odd. Something just not there.’
‘The nothingness you described?’
He nods. ‘But like I say, it’s not exactly a crime, is it?’
I talk about parental responsibility. The ‘duty of care’ of a mother. The unwritten rules of parenthood. To protect. To look after. To love.
‘She did the best she could,’ he says defensively. ‘Who are you to judge?’ he adds with a flash of irritation.
It’s like the bubble of tension has burst. I sit back in my chair.
‘You’re right. And I’m sorry.’
I try to recover. To be his therapist. I tell him the things he has told me have been very difficult to hear. That they will be things we will need to return to at the next session.
‘I do just want to say that there is no excuse – no possible excuse – for a parent to treat a child like this.’
He brings his hands together, makes a steeple with his fingers. ‘Well – you say that,’ he says. ‘In fact there was something; it was eight years later when I found out what it was.’
He glances down at his watch. I can see the clock behind him. We both know it’s time to finish.
‘Next time,’ he says, getting up from his chair.
When he has gone, I feel wounded. My body aches.
I know that whatever I have tried to do in those closing minutes of the session I have failed him as a therapist. That regardless of the extent to which I tried to back-pedal and recover myself, he has seen me. Furious. Outraged. Like an audience member of some puerile ‘true life’ chat show. I know I have not done my job. I have not helped him connect with his anger. And as he leaves the room that day, I am conscious of his rage, like white-hot fury, in freefall, somewhere high above our heads.
*
Minutes after he’s
left, Paula rings through. She asks me to come down to the office.
‘There’s a delivery here for you.’ In the background, I can hear laughter. Animated conversation. It’s a relief to get out of my room. To walk along the corridor.
‘What’s this?’ I say, looking down at the large cardboard box with holes around the top and sides.
‘A hamster.’
‘What?’
‘It’s for you. Just your name. No note.’
I stare back at her.
‘Delivered this afternoon. It came with a bag of food. And a book on “How to care for your hamster”.’
Paula is laughing. She doesn’t notice my blanched face. The hand that’s on the side of the desk to steady myself.
‘We looked it up,’ she giggles, ‘to see if “live pets” were listed on Trust protocol for disallowed presents. A section on pets!’ she roars, ‘Wouldn’t that be funny!’
There’s a small scratching sound from inside the box.
‘New plants. And now a pet?’ She leans in conspiratorially. ‘Secret admirer?’
News travels fast and ‘Hamstergate’ becomes the talk of the unit for the rest of the day. There’s the curiosity both about how it came to arrive, and where it will go.
‘I don’t suppose you want it?’
‘No,’ I say, ‘I don’t.’
After a series of phone calls, Paula finds a home for the hamster in the children’s day unit, alongside a family of gerbils.
Eleven
It’s on the Monday that I bump into Julie. A random encounter that changes everything.
I’m in South London to meet a team who have requested urgent support. When I’d briefly outlined the circumstances at our staff meeting, it was met with a horrified silence, then a flurry of questions that I answered to the best of my knowledge. I understood the need to visualise something, to make a picture from the details. Besides, it wasn’t difficult to understand their shock in the face of the kind of tragedy I was describing.
The Community Drug Rehabilitation Team have their offices round the back of Balham High Road. Given its proximity to the main road, it’s surprisingly quiet. A no-through road, with a newsagent, some flats and an industrial estate at the end. The entrance to the building is via a car park, with the team name and NHS logo on the wall by the video intercom. There’s a strip of crime-scene tape on the railing, flapping back and forth, like a yellow ribbon in the breeze.