‘I don’t know,’ I said.
‘Is it because it’s all getting too intimate?’ she asked me. ‘Is this a dependence issue? You don’t want to depend on this?’
‘Yeah,’ I said, sighing. ‘I think that’s it, I think I wanted to control it.’
‘Yeah, I think that might be it,’ she said, thinking out loud. ‘What’s going on in your outside life is reflected in here.’
‘That makes sense.’
‘What are you trying to control?’
‘Everything,’ I said, realizing it as I said it out loud. ‘I’m trying to have a hand in everyone’s opinion of me. How everyone behaves towards me. I’m trying to stop bad things happening. Death, disaster, disappointment. I’m trying to control it all.’
Her epiphany was my epiphany; I decided to give way to the process. I handed myself over to Eleanor, with trust, and began a new cycle of our time together.
‘You need to keep coming here and we need to keep talking,’ she told me. ‘We need to talk and talk and talk until we join everything together.’
I think part of the problem was that I had reached a point where I couldn’t bear that Eleanor got to know so much about me – the darkest recesses of who I am, my most sacred, embarrassing, humiliating, awful, precious experiences. And I didn’t get anything about her in return. Sometimes I imagined Eleanor at home; I thought about what her life might be like when she wasn’t being a therapist. I wondered what she said about me to her friends, whether she ever read my articles or looked at my social media feeds or googled me like I googled her the first time I received an invoice with her full name on it.
A few weeks later, she asked me how I was finding therapy and I revealed that I resented not knowing anything about her. I told her that I understood this was the appropriate exchange, but sometimes I felt like that exchange was unfair. Why did I have to be naked every week and she always got to be fully clothed?
‘What do you mean, you don’t know anything about me?’ she asked, genuinely puzzled.
‘I don’t know anything about you as a person.’
‘Yes you do,’ she said.
‘No I don’t, I couldn’t tell my friends one thing about you.’
‘You come in here every week and we talk about love, sex, family, friendship, happiness, sadness. You know exactly what I think about all these things.’
‘But I don’t know if you’re married, I don’t know if you have children, I don’t know where you live. I don’t know where you go out. I don’t know if you go to the gym,’ I said, thinking specifically about her toned arms that I always found myself looking at in particularly difficult moments, wondering what weights she used.
‘And do you think knowing any of that stuff would help you understand who I am?’ she asked. ‘You know a lot about me.’
Over time, I learnt Eleanor language. After a particularly weepy session, she always said: ‘Take good care’ – emphasis on the ‘good’. That meant: ‘Don’t get completely leathered this weekend.’ It was also bad when she said ‘Oh boy’ when I told her something. But the worst by far was: ‘I’ve been worried about you this week.’ When Eleanor said she’d been worried about me that week, it meant I had given her a real shit show the previous Friday.
I never stopped dreading Fridays, but I dreaded them less and less. Eleanor and I laughed together more. I told her that sometimes after our sessions I went straight into Pret and ate a brownie in about five seconds flat or went into a shop and bought a piece of ten-quid crap that I absolutely didn’t need. She said it was because I was worried about what she thought of me – and I agreed. It’s not a natural thing to sit in a small room with someone removed from the rest of your life and tell them all your raw, uncensored stories – the ones you’ve never said aloud before, the ones you’ve never told anyone, maybe not even yourself. But the healthier I got, the less judgement I projected on her. Her true form started to take shape in front of me: a woman who was on my side.
When a friend told me that it is the relationship between patient and therapist that brings healing, rather than the talking, I understood. My incremental sense of calm and peace felt like something we were building together – like a physio who strengthened a muscle. I carried a small part of her with me and I’m sure I always will. The work helped me develop a new understanding of myself that I’ll never be able to dismiss and bury. That’s what she called it: ‘the work’. And that’s what it always felt like. My time with Eleanor was challenging and confronting and hard. She didn’t let me get away with anything. She made me think about the part I played in everything. I sometimes tried to remember a time when my behaviour had no consequence; after particularly difficult Friday afternoons, I wondered what life would be like if I hadn’t decided to go on this hike into myself. Would it have been easier to have just carried on being a drunk dick in a taxi hurtling down the M1 at four a.m.? A person whose behaviour was never examined, but shoved to one side, only to repeat again the following weekend?
Eleanor loved to tell me that life is shit. She told me every week. She told me it was going to disappoint me. She reminded me that there was nothing I could do to control it. I relaxed into that inevitability.
When we came up to our one-year anniversary, our conversations began to flow with familiarity and ease; she recommended books she thought I would find helpful. She mostly said ‘Goodbye’ instead of ‘Take good care’. She stopped saying ‘Oh no’ in a concerned way when I told her a story and I started hearing a genuinely ecstatic ‘Well, this all sounds GREAT!’ fairly regularly. One Friday I actually ran out of stuff to tell her.
I didn’t know exactly how long I wanted to be there or how free I wanted to feel. But I knew that the longer I spent there, the more things came together. I talked myself into some harmony, just as she had predicted. I joined the dots; I noticed the patterns. The talking started connecting with the action. The gap between how I felt inside and how I behaved got smaller. I learnt to sit with problems, to go deeply, uncomfortably internal instead of on a trek to the Outer Hebrides of Experience when things went wrong. The drinking happened less and less frequently and, when it did, the intention was celebration rather than escape, so the outcome was never disastrous.
I felt steadier; I felt stronger. The doors inside me unlocked one by one, I emptied the rooms of all my shit and talked her through every piece of old toot I found in there; then I threw everything out. Every room I unlocked, I knew I was getting closer. To a sense of self, a sense of calm. And a sense of home.
12th June
Dear Dolly Something Alderton,
Congratulations! You have won a place to the wedding of Jack Harvey-Jones and Emily White. Well done for getting this far – you got down to the last two for the final invite to the actual wedding as well as the reception along with Emily’s cousin Rose. We chose you in the end because you’re loud and drink quite a lot, which we thought could liven up the table of Jack’s introverted friends from LSE. Rose will now only be coming to the reception but that’s fine as we weren’t invited to her wedding when she and her husband ‘eloped’ and Rose has got a prominent birthmark on her face so she’d ruin the daytime pictures anyway.
So! Drum roll please! Mr and Mrs Keith White request the pleasure of your company at the marriage of their daughter Emily to Mr Jack Harvey-Jones in the Vale of Nowhere.
(I know it sounds a bit mental saying ‘Mr and Mrs Keith White’ but Jack’s posh parents have insisted that’s what you write and they are paying for the welcome booze so we can’t be bothered to fight them on it.)
You are cordially invited to watch Emily’s father give her away and be enthusiastically received by another man like he’s selling a second-hand car. When Emily’s rad-fem friends question her on this, she will lie and say the church said we had to and it wasn’t our choice, and we’d appreciate it if you could give this same party line.
Now – please – we beg of you, no presents, just your presence! OK, well if you ABSOLUTELY INS
IST then you can choose a little token gift from our registry at Liberty, where you will have the privilege of ordering something banal – like the fifty-pound salad mixer – or decadent – like the giant porcelain rabbit figurine wearing a top hat. Really, your choice.
Also donate to a charity if you want, not bothered which one, we just thought it would be good to suggest it. (Please someone buy the chesterfield for our living room!!)
We are aware, Dolly Something Alderton, you are single with an income of £30,000 at best while we have a joint annual earning of £230,000. We also understand that we live in a £700,000 flat in Battersea, the deposit on which was paid in its entirety by our parents, while you struggle to scrape together £668 every month to pay your rent, so by this logic we thought it would make sense for you to be the one to give us expensive presents to adorn our already fully furnished home.
No, but seriously, we just want you there, so don’t worry at all about the present or the charity thing or whatever. If you turn up empty-handed we’ll just make barbed comments about it at dinner parties to our mutual friends when you’re not there for the following year. And, actually, that suits us fine, because we need to carry on talking about the wedding until we get pregnant, so hopefully your selfish decision to not celebrate our love with a Le Creuset set will give us enough material to bring it up in every conversation until we can move on to trimesters and water births, so thanks.
On to the booze! Every guest will receive a glass of champagne/unidentified fizzy white wine in a champagne flute on arrival. Then there’s a cash bar, I’m afraid. We tried to make the £75,000 wedding budget stretch to booze for 120 people, but sadly it didn’t quite cut it. Bloody weddings!
Attached are the details of an extremely overpriced bed and breakfast that comes highly recommended from all of us; it’s where we’ve had many a lovely Sunday lunch. No pressure to stay there though, you can stay wherever you like in the rural and remote village where we’re getting married.
Enjoy it and book fast!
So, see you there. Oh, and by the way, I know that every person you know has been given a plus one because they’re all in relationships. And no, we don’t know half of their partners, we just thought it would be nice for them to have someone there, you know, because people in relationships like being together. Sadly, you are not granted this kind of support (☹) and you have to come on your own. Sorry about that, it’s just a numbers thing. Please ring Jack’s pervy brother because I think he’s the only other single guest so might be fun to get on a train and share a room with him! Although he might be bringing that French girl he met on that conference, so maybe let us double-check first.
Dress code: morning dress, whatever that means.
Getting there: the church and venue are utterly picturesque, so we’d ideally like no cars on the day as we don’t want to ruin the photos or the calm atmosphere. We recommend getting a train from London – the nearest station to the Vale of Nowhere is twenty-two miles away. There is a local taxi company to get you to the church but please ring in advance as they are only in possession of three vehicles.
Other formalities: we want the vibe of the wedding to be very relaxed, so we encourage some super-fun confetti throwing outside the church. PLEASE DO NOT BRING YOUR OWN CONFETTI. There will be a Tupperware container of confetti HANDED OUT BY ALISON, MOTHER OF THE BRIDE, who has been air-drying delphinium petals one by one for four years for this occasion. Delphiniums look great on camera, are cheaper than rose petals but are also environmentally friendly – paper confetti will cause distress to the local wildlife and the reception venue have said if there are ANY PIECES OF PAPER CONFETTI found in the grounds, the reception will be immediately cancelled, the catering staff will be ordered to leave and the evening won’t go ahead. So wait your turn and you’ll all get a SMALL HANDFUL of confetti (please, only small, we want everyone to have a go) for you to throw over the happy bride and groom as they enter the world as man and wife.
Please write your favourite song on the RSVP and our DJ will try his very best to play it, but only if it’s ‘I Would Walk 500 Miles’ by the Proclaimers or ‘Umbrella’ by Rihanna.
We have a hashtag for Instagram pictures on the day which is ‘jemily2016’. We wanted to have just ‘jemily’, but sadly that’s the name of a brand of personal lubricant, as we discovered when we searched the hashtag, so ‘jemily2016’ will have to do.
Kids welcome!
Absolutely no lounge suits – no tie, no entry. It’s our special day, not a cricket dinner.
If you can’t make it, don’t worry, as we’re going to do another casual reception party in the city next month, for our less close but highly Instagrammable London friends. Then the following month we’re going to do another ceremony and party in Austria, where a lot of Jack’s family come from. Then we are going to do a blessing in Ibiza, along with a group holiday which you’ll all be invited to. Basically, our wedding is going to be like a band on tour for the next year, so just find one of the dates that suits and book a ticket come along.
All our love and can’t wait to see you guys there!
Jack and Emily xxx
PS Sorry you had to pay to receive this invitation, we were in a bit of a mad rush when we posted them and got the wrong stamps for their weight. This means you all paid £0.79 which will be reimbursed on entrance to the venue. Jack’s brother, Mark, is in charge of the kitty and will be standing by the topiary arch. NO RECEIPT – NO REFUND.
PPS Sorry about the heart-shaped sequins that have fallen out of the envelope and gone all over your carpet you only just hoovered today.
Heartbreak Hotel
I woke up to three missed calls from Farly before seven a.m. and a message asking to call her. Before I had a chance to dial her number, she was ringing again. I knew it wasn’t good. I thought about the last eighteen months since Florence had died and the way Farly had pulled away from all her closest friends and buried her grief in the distance. How I had tried to bring her back to me; to know what to say to soothe her. Those moments when we would laugh about something and I’d see a flash of her old self, then the laughing would turn to guttural sobs and she would apologize for not understanding how her entire mind or body was working any more. Selfishly, I had just one thought: I don’t know how I’ll get her through this again. I took a deep breath and picked up the phone.
‘Dolly?’
‘What’s happened?’
‘No one’s died,’ she said, noting the panic in my voice.
‘OK.’
‘It’s Scott. I think we’re breaking up.’
It was eight weeks before their wedding.
Farly was alone in their flat when I arrived an hour later; Scott had gone to work and she had been given a few days’ compassionate leave by her boss. She talked me through the conversation they had had the night before, moment by moment. She told me that she hadn’t seen this coming – that right now the wedding was the least of her worries and she would do anything to save her relationship. Her dad and her stepmum were at their house in Cornwall for the weekend and we decided to drive down there so she and Scott could have some time apart to think.
We worked out a plan of what she wanted to say to him on the phone. She asked if I could sit in the same room as her when he called – she was a nervous wreck and wanted to have me in her eyeline to steady herself. I sat on their sofa as she paced about their flat on the phone and I looked around at the home they shared; the life they’d built together. There was a fresh-faced photo of them in their respective early and mid-twenties, grasping each other lovingly; a photo of them on their last holiday with Florence. The burnt-orange rug I had helped them pick out; the sofa the three of us lay on drinking red wine until dawn while watching election results on the telly. The Morrissey print we bought for their engagement hanging on the wall.
I had a strange and difficult thought. For so many years, this was all I had wanted. I used to hope that, at some point, one of them would move on from the other, we�
�d always talk fondly about Scott the First Love and I’d get my best friend back. But now that moment was here and I felt nothing but wrenching sadness and longing for her. They had been through so much together and I wanted desperately for them to make it work.
We had all thought of Farly and Scott’s upcoming wedding as a sort of Polyfilla over the hole that was left in their family. Whenever her family or any of our friends talked about what the day would be like we all agreed it would be full of both great soaring happiness and inescapable sadness – but it would definitely mark a new chapter in their lives. A beginning rather than an ending.
After Florence’s death, I had taken on the role of her maid of honour as if it held the gravitas of a knighthood. AJ, Lacey and I organized a hen do with the same ambition and scale as the Olympic Opening Ceremony. After months and months of begging and negotiating, an East London hotel gave us their top-floor function room overlooking the city at a highly discounted rate to host a big dinner. I booked the London Gay Men’s Chorus to come sing a surprise set of wedding-related songs to Farly while wearing T-shirts on which her face was printed. I devised a cocktail called The Farly with a mixologist. I ordered a life-size cardboard cut-out man from eBay and stuck a photo of Scott’s face on it, for people to have their photo taken with him. I recorded dozens of video messages from people wishing her good luck with her marriage to screen on the night like a This Is Your Life VT. These included 1990s EastEnders actor Dean Gaffney, two cast members of Made in Chelsea, the boy she lost her virginity to and the manager of her local dry-cleaners.
Everything I Know About Love Page 18