A Good Enough Mother

by Bev Thomas

  As we began to prep the walls, Carolyn suggested the audio books. ‘The classics,’ she said. ‘Women authors only.’ We listened as we started at different ends of the room, working our way along with masking tape and sugar soap, until we met somewhere in the middle.

  On the surface, they were days of quiet and soporific repetition; the movement of the brush, the metronome of spoken words in the background, but in my own internal world, there was turmoil. I was a little battered tent in a storm. Sometimes, I’d blink, startled to find myself in the kitchen, feet on tiles, brush in hand, and it often felt like my daughter was the one small guideline that was tethering me to the ground. I have never been more grateful to have her by my side.

  We painted through Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, Pride and Prejudice, but when I suggested To Kill a Mocking Bird, she hesitated. ‘A courtroom drama? Really?’

  I chose Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein instead.

  After the painting was done, she busied herself with finishing touches, fixing two new lamps over the table. Big frosted globes that she picked up at a market.

  ‘Come and see,’ she called out to me.

  I gazed in awe at the finished room.

  I thought about her homemade cards. Her pencil sketches. The clothes she used to make. How she always took such care and attention over the details. How she would make small choices over the preparation and serving of food that transformed a simple meal into a thing of beauty.

  ‘You always make things look so lovely,’ I said.

  She flushed under the compliment and I felt a stab of guilt that this light had shone down on her so infrequently. That she wasn’t more accustomed to such praise. Or able to glory in her talents and achievements. The fact that they came to her so easily should have made them more, not less, of note. I found myself questioning her decision to read law. I worried that this flair and creativity would get lost under the weight of Contracts and Tort. Still, I knew better than to voice this out loud.

  Less than a week later, she told me she’d been sent her reading list.

  ‘I thought I’d feel more excited,’ she said flatly.

  I willed myself to listen. Not to jump straight in with advice.

  ‘I worry that I might have been swept along with something,’ she continued. ‘That it was the right thing to do. In the midst of—’ she stopped, ‘—everything else.’

  I nodded.

  We were both silent for a moment.

  I sat down next to her, held her hands in mine.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said.

  A few days later, she was reading on Tom’s sofa. She looked up and told me she was going to take up the place.

  ‘If it’s not for me, I can always change my mind and come home.’ She shrugged. ‘Would that be such a disaster?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘it wouldn’t be a disaster at all.’

  Twenty-five

  When I stepped into the court to give evidence, I looked over at Dan. He was unrecognisable. His hair was cut short. He wore a plain white shirt, grey trousers and a navy tie. Whether he was Stephen Connolly or Dan Griffin, he looked nothing like my son. I stared at him, but he never once glanced in my direction. He kept his head still, his eyes fixed forwards, gazing into the middle distance.

  Frank had come to London for the trial; sitting next to him was a small grey-haired man. Julie’s father. He looked thin and papery in his grief. At times, during the most painful parts of the evidence, I saw him wince. More than once, I thought his frail body might crumble under the weight of those graphic witness statements.

  A defence of diminished responsibility placed considerable emphasis on Dan’s previous contact with mental health services. As the Trauma Unit had been his current place of treatment, my work as both the director of the unit and his therapist came under particular scrutiny. Understandably, much was made of my professional failings and the domino effect they had on the outcome of events.

  When I stood in the witness box, the defence barrister began her cross-examination with my training, the history of my career and the rise to director of the unit. She asked about the model of work. She wanted the psychodynamic approach explained for the court.

  ‘Can you explain the importance of “the transference” to the court?’

  After a lengthy explanation, she clarified it for the jury.

  ‘So the relationship between the patient and therapist is particularly significant in this type of therapy?’

  ‘Yes. That’s correct.’

  ‘This very relationship is the place where the patient can bring his or her issues from childhood, feelings about their own parental figures and re-enact them, as it were, in the sessions?’

  ‘“Re-enact” sounds a little contrived,’ I say. ‘But yes, the relationship is the place where unresolved and difficult feelings around parental figures can be surfaced.’

  ‘And for the court, can you tell us therefore, about the importance of boundaries and containment within this model of therapeutic practice?’

  Afterwards, she moved onto my family. To the breakdown of my marriage. Then to Tom and his difficulties. His suicide attempt. She asked why I didn’t tell people that he had gone missing. The court was referred to my email requesting leave for my ‘back surgery’.

  ‘You lied to your employers?’

  ‘Yes. That’s correct.’

  ‘Can you tell the court why?’

  For a moment, I didn’t know what to say.

  ‘I was …’ and I searched for the right word, ‘struggling.’ I take a few moments. ‘Grief is not linear,’ I explained. ‘Nor is it rational. I made the decision at the time to keep it hidden. Not to let my personal life contaminate my professional life.’ I paused for a moment. ‘I felt it would be better for my work. Better for my patients, to keep it away.’

  ‘Better for your patients?’ she repeated and couldn’t resist a smirk.

  And that’s when I see it very clearly – by hiding it from work, I was hiding it from myself. My denial. My own undigested rat. Splitting it off was a way to keep going.

  I didn’t say this. It wouldn’t interest her. Why would it?

  When we moved to the likeness between Dan and my son, the jury were referred to a selection of photographs in their packs. The woman on the end, with cropped grey hair, studied the photos carefully. She looked up at Dan, shook her head ever so slightly, before shooting me a cold hard stare.

  ‘If a colleague presented you with a similar conundrum – a likeness between a patient and a member of their own family, a likeness that they thought could have a detrimental impact on the work – what would you do?’

  ‘I’d advise them to refer the patient onto someone else. It would be in the patient’s best interest,’ I said without hesitation.

  The court was still.

  The barrister looked around at her audience. ‘In the patient’s best interest,’ she nodded, as she flicked over a page of notes. ‘Can you explain why you didn’t properly chase up the notes from the surgery in Hackney? Records show that you left messages, but failed to follow it up successfully. Can you explain why you didn’t speak to the Bristol GP yourself?’

  I told her I had spoken to the Bristol receptionist who had referred me back to Dr Davies. I talked about the fact that Bristol was a single-handed practice. I listed my various phone calls, explained that my attempts had been thwarted by an administrator off sick. I said all the things I had been reminded to say.

  She was nodding as I spoke, as if to hurry me along.

  ‘Ordinarily, are a new patient’s notes transferred to their new GP?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And when a patient is referred to your unit, is it normal practice to request the notes?’

  ‘Mostly. Particularly if the patient is not known to the referrer.’

  ‘And ordinarily, when the notes don’t arrive, what would you do?’

  ‘I would follow it up. Ring the surgery. Look into what the hold-up might be.’

&n
bsp; ‘Did you do all of these things?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Would you agree there was a significant delay in you obtaining the notes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘If you had seen the notes, you would have known all about the defendant’s previous hospital admission …’ A deliberate pause, for dramatic effect. ‘A three-month stay in a psychiatric unit in the north of England,’ she said, looking up, ‘two years prior to the defendant’s arrest. Might this knowledge have altered your work? The focus of your therapy?’

  ‘I don’t know the details. But yes – quite possibly.’

  Obtaining the notes from his previous surgery would have alerted us to his different birth name. And this, more than likely, would have alerted us to his complex past and his previous psychiatric admission. I did make a number of calls, but I didn’t follow them through with the rigour I ordinarily would have. I could say that following up the notes slipped to the bottom of a list of priorities. But that wasn’t the whole story, of course. Freud would say there’s no such thing as forgetting, and that by then, I was too tangled up in my own web, my own version of the truth. The narrative I wanted to see. Somewhere, I think, deep down, I knew he was very disturbed. And somewhere wrapped inside all of that was my own omnipotence. However damaged he was – I felt that I could save him. I accepted the unknowability of him because I didn’t want to discover a reason to stop seeing him. In the void where once stood the trophy of my son, he was the small consolation prize I’d wanted to cling on to.

  After the recess, she moved on to the other dominoes that I had set in motion.

  ‘Is it your usual clinical practice to lie to your patients?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Is it common practice to cancel sessions with your patients?’

  ‘No. But the session wasn’t cancelled. It was rescheduled.’

  She raised an eyebrow. ‘Have you rescheduled sessions in the past?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘A tribunal … a funeral, are two reasons that come to mind.’

  ‘Can you tell the court the reason you cancelled, sorry, rescheduled, the session with the defendant on the 16th of May?’

  ‘To attend my grandson’s birthday party.’

  The court was silent.

  ‘Thank you. And for the record, please note this was the day after Stephen Connolly, the man you knew as Dan Griffin, was invited to spend the night in your house.’

  She paused.

  The judge looked up. ‘Is there a question for the witness?’

  ‘It was on the 16th of May that the defendant followed you to South London, and saw you with your grandson, and took a series of photographs of you holding the baby.’

  Members of the jury were referred to the relevant pictures in the file.

  ‘Can you confirm that this took place after the therapy session when the defendant told you about his dead baby brother, and had shown you a photograph of his own mother cradling her son?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  I felt hot and dizzy. I reached for the water.

  ‘Is it common practice to let patients stay overnight at your house? Are you operating some kind of therapeutic B & B?’ she said, with another smirk.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Can you confirm that it was during this overnight stay when the photographs of your children on the walls would have made it obvious to the defendant that you’d lied to him?’

  ‘That’s correct.’

  ‘We put it to you that it was your own trauma, the physical likeness of this patient to your missing son Tom, that altered your professional judgement.’

  There was a collective intake of breath.

  The barrister was all puffed up when she said this. As if ready for some sort of combat. A war of words. These were the sort of moments they thrived on.

  ‘Yes,’ I said nodding, ‘that’s correct.’

  She looked momentarily deflated.

  ‘So are you saying it was your own selfish need that swayed your judgement – and it was this that led to the tragic event on the 23rd of May?’

  It was shocking to hear it out loud. It was like a sharp slap against my face, but it also came as some relief to not try to duck away.

  ‘That’s correct,’ I said too quietly.

  ‘I’m sorry – can you repeat your response?’

  ‘Yes. That is correct.’

  ‘Would you say it constitutes a serious clinical misjudgement?’

  ‘Yes.’

  The defence pursued this line, snaking her way to the impact of my own blurred boundaries on the therapy work … the lie … the overnight stay.

  ‘You stepped out of role. Would you agree?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I suggest that you became more of a mother-figure to your patient, and it was this very confusion that became a trigger for his subsequent anger and jealousy. Anger and jealousy that you had already surfaced in therapy. Anger and jealousy it was your job to contain.’

  She was pacing back and forth now, her hands gesticulating in front of the jury.

  ‘Is it possible,’ she asked, ‘that the sight of you holding another baby, so soon after he had described the torment of his own childhood rejection, was difficult for him?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it possible that this, coupled with the altered appointment time, left him feeling rejected all over again?’

  ‘Yes. It’s possible.’

  ‘Then once you are suspended from work, he has yet another cancelled appointment. It was reported that he arrived in an agitated state. Perhaps desperate to see you. And you were not there. He then went to South London and it was precisely during your booked appointment time that the murder took place.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Perhaps,’ she mused, looking around at the jury, ‘none of this would have happened if you’d done your job properly.’

  I thought then of Robert. His quiet, wise voice. ‘It’s all in the beginning,’ is what he always said. And so it was. People who don’t do their jobs properly.

  After the break, there was a long session that focused on my ‘fixation’ about Dan’s suicide risk, and my belief he was likely to harm himself. When it was proposed that I may have been misled by the films he talked about, his barrister was prepared.

  ‘But what about When Harry Met Sally? The Deer Hunter? The Godfather?’ Dan claims he mentioned many films in the course of your sessions.’ Then she peered dramatically down at her papers. ‘The Sound of Music?’ she said triumphantly. ‘Where’s the suicide there?’

  There was a murmur of laughter around the court.

  It was suggested to the court that I was caught up in my own unprocessed drama, my own hypothesis of suicide and self-harm, to the detriment of everything else. Links were made to the Mark Webster case, and then to ‘the very shocking suicide attempt’ by my own son.

  Hayley was of course called as a witness. She looked small and terrified in the dock and I felt sorry for her. She kept her eyes from mine. Answered as quickly as possible.

  ‘Did the accused tell you that he could see Dr Hartland for as long as he needed?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did Dr Hartland lose her temper?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said quietly.

  ‘Can you please describe what happened during your fifth session with Dr Hartland on the 15th of May?’

  Her words were hesitant. Her hands holding tightly onto the stand.

  The photographs were produced as evidence.

  ‘Can you confirm that these are the photos that you took? That these are the marks on your arms?’

  And so it rolled on. The court felt airless. Tight. Things moved incredibly slowly, sifting over small grainy details. It was an atmosphere so far from the image presented in the media or on a fast-paced entertainment drama. Mostly, it was tiny movements. Back and forth over the minutiae. It reminded me of the fairground slot machines I loved as a child, where a bar pushes back
and forth, gently nudging a pile of money forwards, until one or two coins eventually fall over the edge. On a daily basis, the biggest challenge was trying to find enough air to keep breathing.

  There were many inconsistencies. Things I didn’t pick up. I was thrown many breadcrumbs by Dan. Some, I gobbled up eagerly. Others, ones that might have led me on a different path, I chose to ignore. What wasn’t in question was the fact that he was a deeply disturbed and troubled man.

  There was a brother, Michael. He was eighteen months old when he died. Dan was three and a half. According to the records, Michael was in the living room, playing by an open fire in a polyester dressing gown that caught alight. The flames roared up his small body in seconds. He had ninety per cent burns and died five days later in intensive care. Dan’s mother had left the two of them alone when she went upstairs. She was convinced the fire guard was in place when she left the room. How it fell away from the fire was unexplained. Did it fall? Was it kicked away? It didn’t really matter. Dan was only three. Such a little boy to be burdened with such a traumatic experience. It was reported that he had no recollection of the event. It was highly likely that the event had been ‘forgotten’, and was buried somewhere deep inside, leaving him with a scar of blame and shame.

  As I listened, I recalled the session he told me about the rape. His fixation with the lighter. The flame next to his cheek. That smell. Burning. I felt like I couldn’t breathe. It was soon after, that Dan had wondered if the attack had happened for a reason. Karma, he’d said. Because I’m bad. Perhaps there was an unexpected association. Perhaps the sense of smell had triggered a fleeting, but unidentifiable memory, some connection he couldn’t make.

  There were lots of things that weren’t clear. The two different names. Two different NHS numbers. A false National Insurance number. Multiple layers of truths and untruths. Some of what he told me was true. Some was expanded so far away from the truth so as to be unrecognisable. Whatever was true or untrue, it didn’t really matter. What I knew, beyond all doubt, was that the session when he talked about his childhood was real. The drive away from the fairground in the car, his memory of searching the kitchen cupboards for sharp utensils, whether they actually happened or not (and I suspect they did), they were real in his mind, and an accurate reflection of how he felt. The feelings of isolation. Of not being loved. Of finding ways to hurt himself to take away the terrible pain and emptiness. That was real.