‘So it was Matt who changed, not you?’ said Sarah.
‘Yes, he—’ I stopped, seeing where this was going. I looked suspiciously at Sarah, who smiled faintly.
‘It’s not a test, Grace. I’m just wondering what happened, because clearly something did.’
I let out a long breath that sounded like defeat. ‘Matt and I decided to go to the beach for Christmas,’ I said. ‘We went to a place called Khao Lak and were caught up in the Boxing Day tsunami. We were lucky,’ I added quickly. ‘We both survived, but I guess it made us realize that we wanted different things out of life. Matt was keen to come home and settle down to what he insisted on calling “real life”, but to me that felt like jumping deliberately into a great big rut, so we agreed to go our separate ways.’
Memories were a dead weight, pressing me back into the chair. I could hear my voice thinning, tautening, under the pressure and I swallowed. ‘It was no big deal.’
Sarah did more thoughtful chin-stroking. ‘What do you remember about the tsunami?’
‘Why?’ I said rudely. Her calm voice and her calm manner and her calm, cool house were getting on my nerves. ‘What does it matter?’
‘You’ve just implied that the tsunami was a major turning point in your life.’
I banged down my mug and got to my feet. I half-expected Sarah to tell me to sit down again, but she didn’t. ‘I survived it,’ I said, going over to the window. The Minster towers were blurred and watery through the rain. ‘I wasn’t even hurt.’
‘Tell me about it anyway. What were you doing when it happened?’
I blew out a frustrated sigh. ‘We were on our way to the beach. We’d felt the tremors earlier, when we were in bed, but we’d laughed about them. We used to laugh a lot,’ I remembered, then squared my shoulders, hoping that Sarah hadn’t noticed the embarrassingly wistful note in my voice. She would be bound to make too much of it.
But when I glanced at her over my shoulder she just nodded, and waited, and then I had to go on.
‘Matt gave me a jade pendant for Christmas the night before, and I’d just realized I hadn’t taken it off.’ My hand went unthinkingly to where it nestled in the base of my throat. ‘I loved it, and I didn’t want to lose it, so I said I’d go back to the room and leave it there. We were quite near the beach,’ I said. ‘You could see it through the coconut palms. There was a little boy digging in the sand, in our place.’ I made myself sound casual. ‘You know what it’s like when you go to the beach. You find a favourite spot, and that was ours. Anyway, we agreed that I would go back to the room and leave the pendant somewhere safe, while Matt bought some water, and then we’d meet under “our” tree.’
I turned back to the rain. ‘Sometimes I think, if I hadn’t been fretting about the necklace, we’d have been together,’ I said slowly. ‘They say that makes a difference, doesn’t it? But then we might not have survived, if we had just kept on walking together. We’d have been in a different place when the wave hit. It would all have been different.’
Sarah let a beat or two go by. ‘Then what happened?’
‘Then it was just . . . chaos. It was so fast, so strong.’ I hugged my arms together and kept my eyes on the Minster. ‘One moment I was walking along this track in flip-flops. I could feel the sand under my toes. It was warm and very fine. I could feel the sun on the back of my neck. I’d tied up my hair, and the clasp on the chain was getting hot.
‘I was happy, I remember that,’ I told Sarah. ‘I could smell coconuts. There were dried husks scattered under the trees, but I think it was probably from my suntan lotion. It might have been that.’
I’d forgotten I was in York by then. I’d even forgotten Hawise. I was looking at the Minster, but I wasn’t seeing it. I was remembering the way the fringed leaves of the coconut palms threw a jagged pattern of shade across the track. I remembered how I had thought: I’ve never been this happy before.
‘And then?’ prompted Sarah after a while.
‘Then there was shouting, screaming. Suddenly people were running.’ I lifted my hands in a helpless gesture and let them fall again. My skin was shrinking from the memory. I had to brace myself against it. ‘I turned and there was this wall of water coming towards me.’
I hadn’t even recognized it as the sea. The day before it had been a perfect serene blue, but this water was brown and boiling and savage, gobbling up everything in its path like some ravenous monster.
‘I couldn’t comprehend what I was seeing,’ I told Sarah, ‘and I didn’t have time to make sense of it anyway. I was staring at it, and then it just . . . ate me up. It was like being tossed around in some washing machine. I was tumbling round and round, and there were trees and poolside chairs and beach umbrellas and God knows what else . . . ’
I trailed off. How could I describe the force of the water, the power of it? The noise and the horror of it? What it was like to choke and fail and drown?
‘What happened next?’ Sarah asked quietly after a moment.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ I said.
Sarah said nothing. After a moment I went back to sit in the chair. I looked at my shoes. I looked at her three perfectly positioned books. I looked at the cold tea. I shifted the mug so that it was sitting on a mat.
‘I was pushed into some railings and I grabbed onto them,’ I said abruptly. ‘I’ve never held onto anything as tightly as I held onto those railings. Then—’
‘Then?’ she prompted when I stopped, panic squeezing my lungs.
I couldn’t talk about it. I wasn’t ready.
‘I . . . nothing. I mean, I didn’t know what was happening,’ I lied. ‘It was like a nightmare, you know. Nothing makes sense.’
Sarah nodded. She probably understood the not-making-sense bit, anyway.
‘I lost my grip on the railings,’ I told her. ‘There wasn’t anything I could do. The water just grabbed me back, and the next thing I knew, I popped up in the middle of the sea.’
It had felt endless – nothing but noise and water and fear – and then suddenly I could breathe and all that mattered was being able to drag oxygen into my desperate lungs.
‘There was debris floating all round me,’ I said. ‘I hung onto a branch, and eventually a boat came round. They were picking up bodies, and people who’d been badly hurt, but I was fine. Some cuts and bruises, but fine.’ I attempted a smile. ‘I was still wearing the pendant Matt gave me.’ I pulled the chain out from my throat to show her. ‘I haven’t taken it off since.’
Letting the pendant fall back into place, I lifted my chin. ‘Everyone told me how lucky I was, and they’re right, I was. I am.’
Sarah was silent for a while. ‘Grace, have you heard of post-traumatic stress disorder?’ she said eventually.
‘I’m fine,’ I said instantly. ‘Matt’s fine. We weren’t traumatized. I’ve told you. I wasn’t even hurt.’
‘Let me tell you a bit about it,’ she said as if I hadn’t spoken. ‘People react to traumatic events in different ways. Some re-experience the trauma, and that can be triggered by a particular sound or a smell associated with the event. So, for instance, you mentioned the smell of coconuts. Someone else in your situation might find that smell would tip them back into all the feelings they had had at the time of the trauma.’
I folded my arms, looked away from Sarah. I think I was probably looking mutinous. I felt spiky, uneasy, but I was listening.
‘Then there’s avoidance,’ she said. ‘A refusal to think or talk about what happened. And others still have symptoms that we call “arousal”: irritability, sleeplessness, and so on.’
‘I don’t have any problem sleeping.’
Sarah nodded. ‘You seem to be functioning without any difficulty. I suspect you’ve been avoiding it, but nothing you’ve told me makes me think you’re not a normal person having a normal reaction to an abnormal event,’ she said. ‘As I said earlier, this isn’t a formal interview, but if it helps, I don’t think you need clinical treatme
nt.
‘You say you’re fine, and physically you are, but I wonder whether you’ve ever come to terms with the psychological impact of what must have been a terrifying experience,’ Sarah went on. ‘Sometimes when we go through a traumatic experience, the memory of it is so overwhelming that we choose to put it away,’ she said. ‘We put it in a little box in our heads, and we say that we’re not going to look at it. We tell ourselves that if we can’t see it, it’s not there. But it is there, and the more we don’t look at it, the more frightening it becomes. It gets bigger and bigger and more and more horrifying, so that we’re afraid to think about it. We’re afraid of feeling, because feelings make us vulnerable.’
‘I feel,’ I protested. ‘I’m a very sensory person.’
‘How many people have you been intimate with since Matt?’
‘I’ve had boyfriends,’ I said quickly. ‘It’s not as if I never got over him or anything.’
Sarah’s expression didn’t change, but I could tell that she was unconvinced. ‘How many of those boyfriends did you let close to you, Grace?’
‘It’s not about being close,’ I said irritably. ‘It’s about having a good time. I’ve never been good at all that touchy-feely, let’s-talk-about-our-relationship stuff, and none of the guys I’ve been out with have wanted to do that, either.’
‘Of course they haven’t. I suspect you deliberately choose men you can easily keep at a distance,’ said Sarah. ‘Because if you let someone close, they might want you to start talking about your feelings, mightn’t they? They might want to look right inside you and wonder what you kept hidden away in that box. Perhaps you learnt to do that when your mother died, so it was natural for you to close off even further when you experienced another, very different trauma.’
I chewed at my thumb. I didn’t like what Sarah was saying, but I recognized myself.
‘You said this post-traumatic stress disorder is a normal reaction,’ I reminded her.
‘It is.’
‘So is there anything I can do about it?’
‘Is there anyone you can talk to? Someone you trust?’
My mind flickered to Drew Dyer, and then away. I didn’t know why I thought of him. ‘My best friend,’ I said. ‘I trust her.’
‘Does she know what happened to you?’
‘Not in any detail.’ I’d brushed aside Mel’s concern and questions.
‘Then why not tell her?’ Sarah suggested. ‘It’s not a magical cure, but if you let yourself remember once – if you’re brave enough to look in that box – you might find that it’s not quite as horrifying as you remember. You might find that it can’t hurt you the way you’re afraid it will and, knowing that, you’ll be able to look at it another time, and gradually you can learn to deal with the memories.’
I thought about what Sarah had said as I walked back to Lucy’s house. I was so relieved that she had used the word ‘normal’ that I forgot I hadn’t told her the whole truth about what had been happening to me.
Was it possible that Hawise was just a repressed part of my personality that had temporarily taken over my imagination? Perhaps instead of putting them into the box that Sarah had talked about, I was dealing with my memories by recasting them into a strange, but vivid story.
The more I thought about it, the more it did seem to make a kind of sense. It wasn’t hard to see some parallels between Hawise and me. We were alike in personality and appearance – we even had the same birthmark – and we’d both lost our mothers early, but otherwise our experiences were completely different. I was independent, while Hawise was a servant and then a wife. She lived a circumscribed life in the city, while I’d travelled to places she could only dream of.
And the very first time I’d dreamt of her, she had been drowning.
It seemed odd that my mind should choose to work out its trauma in such a way, but weren’t dreams supposed to be a way the mind processed experiences? Of course that didn’t really explain how vivid my experiences as Hawise were, or where I had got such details from, but then, I reasoned, how was I to know whether or not they were authentic? Drew had more or less said that there was no way of checking whether Hawise had really existed or not. I might be making it all up.
So I let myself be reassured, because I wanted to be. After all, Sarah was a psychiatrist. She would have been able to tell if I were mentally ill, surely? Instead she had agreed that I was a functioning adult. A normal person having a normal reaction – that was what she had said. Perhaps now that I understood what was happening to me I would be able to cope with it better.
That was what I told myself, anyway.
By the end of that week I was feeling much more myself. I liked teaching a group of mixed nationalities, and my classes were going well. I clung to Sarah’s theory that I was suffering from a bizarre form of post-traumatic stress disorder, and whenever I found myself wondering about Hawise and what had happened to her, I would remind myself firmly that she was just a figment of my imagination. For some reason that I couldn’t fathom I was avoiding thinking about the tsunami, by inventing a parallel world where a girl like me was brutalized by one man and handed over in marriage to another.
Poor cow, I thought. Married or not, Hawise had effectively been raped that night after her wedding. I could still taste the rasp of the wine Ned had poured, still feel the soreness between my legs, and the suffocating panic at his weight on top of me . . .
And that’s when I had to catch myself up. It hadn’t happened. Still, I avoided the older buildings in York whenever I could. I skirted around churches that were uncannily familiar, and walked back to Lucy’s house the long way so that I didn’t have to walk under Monk Bar. Every time I headed down the street, I had to brace myself against the memory of the fields and garths; every time I let myself into the house, I braced myself against the smell of apples rotting in a neglected orchard.
It seemed to work. If I was careful, I could keep the memories at bay. I concentrated on my classes, and on clearing out Lucy’s things. John Burnand had assured me that the house was ‘eminently sellable’, but I wasn’t so sure. The dark paint and witchy decor felt oppressive to me, and I planned to redecorate before it went on the market. Nothing fancy – just neutral colours slapped on to brighten the place up. I had it all worked out: sell the house, finish the course I was teaching, get on a plane.
I emailed Mel to tell her to expect me before the end of the year. Christmas in the Yucatan? I wrote.
Fab, she replied. Cant wait.
She left out the apostrophe, just to annoy.
It felt better to be getting on and doing things. I even spoke to John Burnand about Drew’s kitchen wall, which now had a large damp patch, thanks to the overflow pipe that had leaked while I was in the bath. He said he would sort out the insurance. I knocked on Drew’s door to tell him, and on impulse invited him and Sophie to supper that Saturday. ‘To thank you for putting me in touch with Sarah,’ I said. ‘She was really helpful.’
I was glad of the prospect of some company, I had to admit. The evenings were harder. Alone at night, I could feel Hawise, baffled, frustrated, nudging at the edges of my consciousness, calling still for Bess. No matter how insistently I reassured myself that it was all in my head, an icy feeling coiled itself around my spine every time I heard that desperate whisper that was not really a whisper at all. But as long as I fixed on the here and now, on the everydayness of teaching and cleaning and cooking, I was in control.
I was fine.
‘I thought it might be a chance to get to know Sophie a bit better,’ I said, even as I sneered at myself for feeling that I needed to find an excuse for talking to Drew. But it was true. I felt bad that I hadn’t tried to talk to his daughter earlier. I saw Sophie occasionally, usually stomping along the street on her way to or from school, but the time never seemed right to propose a girly coffee. I wasn’t convinced Drew was right about Sophie admiring me, either. I couldn’t see any reason why she should, but once or twice – more than
that, if I’m honest – I’d found myself remembering how my eyes had met Drew’s. You are exciting, he had said.
Sophie, it turned out, would be with her mother that weekend, so I could hardly withdraw the invitation, and we agreed that Drew would come on his own.
‘That’d be great,’ he said after the tiniest of hesitations. ‘Thanks.’
If I’m honest, I was a little miffed that he wasn’t more enthusiastic. He was the one who had called me exciting, after all.
Not that I cared particularly. I would be leaving York as soon as I could, I reminded myself. I just fancied some company, that was all.
I decided to make opor ayam, a basic chicken and coconut dish that was easy to prepare. It reminded me of Indonesia and the kind of person I had been before I came to York. I went shopping on the way back from my morning class that Friday lunchtime. There was a farmers’ market in Parliament Street and the awnings were still dripping from the downpour earlier. Huddled into their coats, the stallholders grumbled about the weather, while a busker defied the dreariness and belted out opera to the accompaniment of a portable CD player. Nobody was in the mood to linger and listen, though. The rain was relentless. Every day you woke hoping for a glimpse of the sun, only to find the clouds lying sullen and heavy over the city again. It made people sour and scratchy.
I bought chicken, onions, fresh ginger and lemongrass in the market and went home to lay out my ingredients. I’m a methodical cook, and I like to prepare everything in little dishes, as if I’m a television chef. Mel gives me a hard time about it, but there’s something about having each ingredient in its own little compartment that appeals to me.
The knife felt odd as I trimmed the excess fat from the chicken pieces. I kept hefting it in my hand, pursing my lips as I studied my array of ingredients. Garlic, ginger, lemongrass. Oil. Coconut milk. The can tugged at my eye as if there was something strange about it. I’d forgotten something vital, I was sure of it.
Exasperated with myself, I pulled the onions towards me and started peeling them. The fumes stung my eyes and made them water. Squeezing them shut with a grimace, still holding the knife, I lifted my arm to cover them.
Time's Echo Page 15