by C. S. Barnes
‘Come on then, girl.’
He gave a tug on the chain-link lead. When they moved to leave the park, I moved to follow.
The dog walked two steps ahead, pulling the lead taut as animals are inclined to. But it soon forced out a coughing fit. They paused and the owner lowered himself down, voicing concern for his pet.
I had stayed a measured twenty paces behind them since leaving the park, but this break in their stride disturbed me. I could have turned in the other direction and made my escape, or I could have continued walking, moved straight past them. But instead, I intervened.
‘That sounds like a nasty cough.’
The dog was enduring enthusiastic throat rubs from its owner. Its eyes had narrowed into slits and small grumbles were now rising from its throat in place of the cough.
‘She never learns, do you, Peaches? Say no, Pops, I never learn, and I never listen to my pops when he tells me that I shouldn’t pull on the lead.’
His language deteriorated into something that I had previously heard referred to as baby talk; this seemed to be something that animal lovers employed on a regular basis. The dog appeared to be enjoying the whole thing – I made a mental note of it for future reference – and as a result was now making determined attempts to lick the man’s face. He repeatedly dodged her advances. Baby talk was one thing, but kisses were clearly too much.
I watched their display and, just for a second, I wondered: Who would miss them?
‘Christ, how rude of me.’
He pushed himself into an upright position as he spoke; by the time his legs were fully extended he was at least six inches taller than me. He would be incredibly hard to subdue.
‘I’m Paul, and this mutt is Peaches.’
One hand remained wrapped around the end of the dog’s lead as he spoke, while the other was buried inside his front left pocket. I was grateful that he had skipped the handshake.
‘I thought you were Pops?’
He laughed and I took this as a cue to smile.
‘Guilty as charged. I am one of those embarrassing animal-loving types who believes that their pet is their child. Ergo, I am Peaches’ pops.’ He followed this with another laugh; it felt awkward to flash another smile but I wasn’t sure how else to continue. ‘Honestly, it’s a more common affliction than you might realise.’
‘I believe you.’
‘Anyway, thank you – Christ, how rude of me again, I didn’t even get your name.’ He laughed again. This one was awkward, embarrassed. ‘I promise that I am usually much better at this conversation malarkey.’
‘I’m Gillian.’
‘Well thank you, Gillian, for stopping to check on this silly mutt of mine.’
The dog let out a disgruntled moan that was timed so perfectly I wondered whether their conversations were rehearsed.
‘Peaches and I are heading up this way. Are you–’
‘Oh, I’m up this way as well,’ I lied. By now I was already a forty-five-minute walk away from home.
Paul and Peaches lived an additional ten minutes of walking in the opposite direction, and Paul was a conversation enthusiast. During those ten minutes I discovered a little about him: single, freelance website designer, Prescott Lane.
‘It’s a recent move, actually. Nasty break-up – you’ve probably heard that romantic little tune a thousand times, right?’
Faerie Tale Theatre. 1987. Lesley Ann Warren. ‘There’s more to life than romance.’ I offered him a smile and nodded, hoping for a convincing expression.
‘She kept custody of the house; I got custody of the dog.’
Peaches’ backstory sounded almost as downtrodden as that of her owner. She had apparently been abandoned outside a shelter at four months old, covered in various cuts and scrapes. She was adopted by Paul who had treated her like ‘a four-legged queen’ in the five years that he had owned her. I made a special effort to ‘Aww’ in what felt like the right places.
‘This is where we get off I’m afraid. Peaches and I are in the park the same time most days, so perhaps we’ll all bump into each other again.’
I gave Paul my best smile before saying my goodbyes to both him and Peaches.
‘It’s been a real pleasure,’ I said. And I meant it.
Chapter 9
There isn’t much in this world that you can’t get, as long as you’re willing to pay for it. Which would perhaps explain why my mother – just thirty-five hours after leaving – was calling to tell me she’d managed to get an emergency therapy appointment for me, with a woman based just ten minutes from our house. She gave me the details slowly, sounding out each syllable as though talking to a hard-of-hearing child. And another eighteen hours or so later, I was working up a draft of which guts I was allowed, or expected, to spill to this new woman in my life.
I felt what might have been nerves – or maybe apprehension – on the journey to the therapist’s office. In the hope that I could delay the appointment for as long as possible, I even opted to walk rather than drive. But, standing outside the main entrance to the building, the therapist-to-patient confrontation suddenly seemed unavoidable. The appointment room itself was fairly unremarkable. I’m not sure what I’d been expecting of the interior of the woman’s office space, but it seemed too simple by comparison to her ornate personal exterior. Her hair was pulled back into a perfect – compulsively neat, some might say – ponytail that sat dead centre at the back of her head; it made a pendulum of itself as I followed her from the reception area to her office, so captivating that I was almost saddened when she turned to face me. Her clothes weren’t impressive on their own – an expertly pressed black blouse coupled with darker-than-navy blue jeans – but they worked to give her a casual look. Which, given this potentially vulnerable (for me) situation, I thought might have been a deliberate effort on her part. On entering the office, she steered me away from the professional desk, and the high-backed chairs that were positioned around it, encouraging me instead towards the two sofas that sat opposite each other at the other end of the room. The door had hidden them – although I couldn’t say whether this was accidental or strategic – when I’d first walked in. Between the two sofas there sat a low coffee table that held a jug of water and two squat glasses. I wondered how often those tumblers were changed.
‘Please, help yourself.’
She had caught me looking. I held up my hand and shook my head as she continued to skim through a small selection of papers. This was only our opening consultation; how much information could she possibly have already, and why had my mother provided it?
‘Before we get started, Gillian, is there anything that you want to ask me?’
‘What’s your name?’
The woman tutted quietly, at herself, I assumed, as I could see nothing tut-worthy in what I’d asked her. There was a very real possibility that I should already know her name, that it was something my mother might have told me during her initial reveal of the appointment. But the information had tumbled out somewhere between then and now.
‘I’m Louise.’ Doesn’t ring a bell, I thought. She leaned forward as she spoke, holding her hand in an appropriate pre-shake position, despite us already having completed this formality five minutes earlier. I reciprocated the gesture before falling hard against the back of the sofa. ‘Quite rude of me, Gillian, my apologies. It’s been a long old day.’
I nodded, smiled. I was unsure of what to say.
‘We’ll get started then?’ she said.
‘Okay.’
‘I have a few introductory questions here, if that’s okay with you.’
I nodded, again.
‘In your own words, Gillian, why are you here today?’
‘My mother told me that I needed to be.’
A small laugh erupted from her as she made a note of something on her pad. When she glanced back to me, she found my deadpan expression looking back at her.
‘Oh.’ She crossed out whatever she had just written. ‘Okay, and is that bec
ause she thinks that there’s something to be gained from this, do you think?’
‘Or she just wanted to rob me of an hour of my afternoon.’ I punctuated the line with a tight smile, to soften the blow.
‘Okay, different phrasing then. Why do you think that your mother wants you to be here today? A serious answer.’
There was a window to my left. It was too inconvenient a distance away to observe anything specific outside, but it was certainly close enough to gaze through while putting my answer together.
‘My father has recently passed away, under difficult circumstances, especially difficult, I mean, and I think my mother is concerned that I’m not handling the whole thing as I should be.’
‘And how should someone handle the death of a parent?’
I searched for a point of reference: Bambi? A little juvenile. Batman? A little too honourable.
‘I’m glad that you’ve stalled on that, Gillian, because you’re illustrating my point for me. There are no shoulds when we lose someone who is close to us, so I’d like to put that word itself on the back-burner for now?’ Her heavy inflexion made a question of the sentence. I nodded a quick confirmation and she continued. ‘Okay, good.’ She added something to her notes before setting the pen and paper down on the stretch of sofa alongside her. ‘You said that your father died under especially difficult circumstances. Maybe you can tell me something more about what you mean by that?’
There was more, much more, but I momentarily wobbled over which version of events I should offer her. I had walked for at least forty minutes to attend this appointment. This woman was far enough from my own neighbourhood for my father’s death to have missed the area’s idle gossip. But still, she was one Internet search away from verifying the whole story.
‘There was an accident at home. My father was something of a drunk.’
As soon as the words popped out I was shaking my head at them. I was inexplicably flustered, but I knew that those sentences didn’t fit together – at least, not without something else sandwiched in between them.
‘Take your time, Gillian. There’s no rush.’
But there was. Mum had only paid for an hour.
Determinedly, I started again: ‘My father was an alcoholic, and physically abusive towards my mother. One evening they had a drunken altercation and my mother tried to defend herself and, I suppose because my father didn’t exactly have his full wits about him, I don’t know, something that would have been a harmless shove under normal circumstances just became something more fatal.’ I shook my head at my own phrasing. ‘Not that there are degrees of fatality, obviously.’
Louise flashed a sympathetic smile. ‘And when did this happen?’
‘It’s been seven weeks and four days.’
‘That’s very precise, Gillian.’
I wasn’t sure what I was expected to say to that.
‘I have to be precise,’ I replied.
Louise gave a quick nod as she reached for the pen and paper from her side. She wedged the paper against her left thigh, angled in such a way that I could see nothing of what she was writing. I wondered what I’d said that was noteworthy.
‘Have you always had to be precise, or is that a recent habit?’
It felt like there was an unspoken section of the sentence but, try as I might, I couldn’t find it. I turned it over for six seconds and after that it felt not only polite but absolutely necessary that I say something in response. Louise sat with one leg crossed over the other and her hands slightly parted, as if physically braced to catch my answer.
‘Yes, I’ve always had to be.’
She paused, scribbled, and picked up her speech again. ‘It’s still very early days, Gillian. Both you and your mother are very much in the infant stages of this process; not that it’s an exact science, of course. But given that there’s no timeline for this, it’s important that you unpack some of the feelings you’re having, so we can really get to grips with this stage, you see? I’d really like your own thoughts on this. Because you must have some, Gillian, maybe even some that you’ve been keeping from your mother?’
Entirely by accident, my right eyebrow had arched midway through her speech, which was, I thought, likely to be the reason behind her final words of encouragement. Perhaps she was right; perhaps I did have some thoughts about the whole mess. Unfortunately she was also right about my unwavering reluctance to reveal those thoughts to anyone else, which saw us sink into a solid minute-long silence while I considered my options with more panic than I was accustomed to feeling. What was I meant to say here versus what was I allowed to say here? That I was angry, disappointed? That in all my wildest fantasies not once had I imagined such a crushing anticlimax? That the only thing I missed when it came to my father was the opportunity to get rid of him more effectively – dare I say, more enjoyably?
‘You can be honest here, Gillian.’
But not that honest, I thought.
‘I feel angry.’
‘At your mother, or your father?’
I hadn’t realised that I was allowed to be angry with either of them, specifically, but rather just the situation as a whole. I tried another thought on for size: ‘At both of them, I think.’
‘Because?’
Because he died too quickly? Because she took the credit for it?
‘Because they’re my parents and they should have done things better.’ A heavy sigh fell from Louise to punctuate my answer and, for a second, I was flustered by the thought that it perhaps hadn’t been a believable one. ‘That sounds childish, I know–’
‘It sounds reasonable, Gillian.’ Interruptions typically irked me but this one felt like a salvation. ‘Our parents love and support us, and we rely on them for that. When that natural order becomes disturbed, we’re allowed to not feel okay about it, and you are certainly allowed to feel angry. I wouldn’t encourage you to hold that anger in, either.’
There was a twinge of something in my stomach. ‘You wouldn’t?’
‘Absolutely not. There are stages, Gillian, and if you stall at one then all you do is stop yourself from moving on to whatever comes next, which just creates an entirely new problem in itself. Do you understand that?’
I thought I did, yes. I nodded.
‘I’d like us to talk a little more about your father, if that’s okay with you? You said that he was physically abusive to your mother. Just to your mother?’
This was a line of questioning that I should have anticipated, really.
Do you remember when it started?
Were you always aware of it?
Did it happen often?
To what extent was he violent?
And so, I answered – ‘Yes, just my mother’ – and all of the questions that followed, until we hit on an entirely new area of questioning. A notably more difficult one, in fact.
‘And how does that make you feel about your mother?’
‘I’m sorry?’
‘Presumably it had an impact on your relationship with her?’
Had it? Did it? How would I even know? I spat out several false starts before grabbing at a thread that I felt comfortable pulling.
‘It may have done but I don’t really have a wider point of reference for that.’
She nodded, scribbled, spoke: ‘Okay then, how would you describe your relationship with your mother?’
By the time I was seven years old my numeracy and literacy skills belonged to someone two years my senior. I was pushed – by teachers, never by family – to excel academically in both English and Mathematics, and this encouragement didn’t waver until I was twelve. Then Mr Burton noted my natural aptitude for the sciences – biology in particular – and after that my efforts switched subjects. In one field or another, at one time or another, I have always been of above average intelligence. So what was so goddamn difficult about Louise’s question? My relationship with my father had been so temperamental, beginning as far back as I could recall, that my quiet and understated relations
hip with my mother had always felt satisfactory enough to me, normal enough to me – by comparison, that is. It was a new thought – a troubling thought, I’ll admit – that my relationship with my mother may actually be below par as well, by a different comparison.
Noting that she had thrown something of a spanner into my internal workings, Louise said: ‘Gillian, we’ve done a lot of work for one session. Maybe we should save this for the next time I see you?’ She paused, for confirmation I assumed. I smiled, more in response to her presupposition that she would see me again, and she continued: ‘Rachel can set you up with another appointment now, or you can phone her another time, maybe when you’ve had some time to digest the things from today?’
‘I’d like to discuss things with my mother, really.’
It was, of course, a complete lie. I had no idea why I’d even said it.
‘Of course. Whatever you’re more comfortable with.’ As she spoke she walked to her desk. She returned holding an off-white business card. ‘Bear in mind, Gillian, that I haven’t met your mother. However, from what we’ve discussed today, this may be useful.’ She handed me the card.
Alison Warren.
‘Alison runs an outreach programme for people who have or have been in…’ She paused, searching for the most appropriate phrase. ‘Difficult relationships, of varying degrees. It may be useful for your mother to get in touch with her.’
I slipped the card into the back pocket of my jeans and thanked Louise, for both the business card and for her time – my mother had paid perfectly good money for the luxury of both things, despite my not wanting either of them. Louise saw me out of her office and – inappropriately, I thought – said that she looked forward to seeing me again.
We shook hands then, said our goodbyes, and I left the building, already drafting a number of perfectly feasible excuses to explain to my mother why I wouldn’t ever be going back.
Chapter 10
I was far from being a committed fan of social media. It had always seemed disingenuous to call strangers friends and to share your emotional innards with them through the medium of an Internet connection. What recent information could I even have shared with my primary school comrades and undergraduate associates?