The Betrayals: The Richard & Judy Book Club pick 2017

by Fiona Neill

  Lisa describes the interior of the house as ‘shabby shabby’. It basically looks as though someone has tipped the entire contents of a Marrakech riad on it. There are dusty, faded throws that smell of joss sticks and cat pee draped over every available surface, lamps veiled in colourful fabrics, moth-eaten kilims on floors, and woven cushions that give me immediate allergies.

  We go into the huge sitting room where the rest of the group are sitting cross-legged on cushions, waiting for us. Jenna, who competes most with Lisa for Gregorio’s attention, is in the lotus position with her hands meditatively clasped together.

  ‘Girly swot,’ I whisper in her ear as I walk past.

  Lisa nudges me. ‘For God’s sake, Nick! Grow up.’

  I sneeze loudly.

  ‘It’s fine, Lisa,’ says Jenna, patronizingly. ‘I feel sorry for Nick for not being open to the possibility of expanding his bandwidth.’

  ‘I’m resolutely stuck on Radio 4,’ I confirm.

  Gregorio sits with his back to the window so his tanned naked torso is strategically washed in late-afternoon sun. The owners of the house, Hamish and Rowena, are on his right-hand side. They wear brightly coloured flowing clothes and jewellery with stones as big as walnuts that make them look like exotic birds. Apart from Lisa, they are probably my favourite people in the room because a) whenever Gregorio is out of earshot they refer to him as the Wizard of Oz, and b) over breakfast this morning they questioned Lisa about her decision to keep her cancer diagnosis secret from Rex and Ava, something I am seriously concerned about now their arrival is imminent.

  ‘Gregorio says the negative energy from their worry could jeopardize my recovery,’ Lisa explained.

  ‘But the positive energy from their love for you could help the healing process,’ argued Rowena.

  It’s a measure of how bad things have got that I appreciated this intervention. I am seriously beginning to think the reason Gregorio has instructed Lisa not to tell her family is that he doesn’t want other people questioning his methodology. Or worse, going after him when his treatment fails.

  I learnt in our first session that Hamish and Rowena suffer from anxiety and memory problems following years of hard partying. Gregorio diagnosed a blockage in their subconscious. When I asked if he wanted me to fetch a plunger, they laughed hysterically.

  I explained that the nerve pathway affected by Ecstasy is the serotonin pathway, and serotonin regulates mood, anxiety, memory and perceptions. Gregorio looked interested when I mentioned perception but his face darkened when I said that Ecstasy users have significant reductions in the way serotonin is transported in their brain and that this could account for Hamish and Rowena’s symptoms. I also pointed out that there’s been consistent research showing Ecstasy users put themselves at risk of impaired hippocampus-dependent memory function.

  ‘The hippocampus is where new memories are stored. No one knows how you can reverse those effects.’

  ‘This is the kind of negative thinking that Lisa complains about,’ Gregorio admonished me. ‘The subconscious is the body’s hard drive. It can be rebooted just like a computer.’

  ‘Well, let’s hope Hamish’s is an AppleMac.’

  I’ve never heard so much bollocks in my life but I don’t say any more. It’s the Dunning-Kruger effect: the less you know the more likely you are to perceive yourself as an expert. There is another woman who has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer called Sonia, who is also very nice. Her parents live abroad and she has no one to look after her. She told the group that she’s worried she won’t be able to cope with the juicing regime on her own so, without even consulting me, Lisa promised she could come and stay with us. Everyone apart from me applauded Lisa’s generosity. I was panicking about anything, from how I could carry eighteen kilos of fruit and vegetables on my bike to what would happen if Lisa died and I was left looking after Sonia? My heart was beating so fast that I imagined I could see it through my T-shirt. I have lost all control over this situation.

  Easily the most annoying couple is Jenna and Hal, who are competitive with Lisa and me about their superior progress in discovering their true spiritual nature together. Hal has an attitude of patronizing sympathy for Lisa because of her bad luck in choosing a self-sabotaging partner like me (his words, not mine), and Jenna offers to stroke and massage Lisa so much that I think she’s probably bisexual. Or maybe I’m just hopeful. Sex has been so off the cards that I wake up in the morning horny as a teenager and Jenna has a great arse, pert and full without being overbearing. I’m literally mesmerized by the upside of her downward dog.

  I take my place on the cushion that doubles up as a dog bed for Rowena and Hamish’s flatulent old Labrador. Gregorio begins with some breathing exercises.

  ‘Inhale love and exhale gratitude,’ he instructs us.

  I’m relieved I can close my eyes so I don’t have to look at his wiry little body any more. His smooth chest and tiny feet give me the creeps. I can’t believe that less than three months ago I actually felt indebted to him for helping Lisa come to terms with her illness. He prattles on for a while about how the sea is his spirit guide, although he has that irritating habit of calling it the ‘ocean’ to highlight his mid-Atlantic credentials.

  ‘If you swim with the power of the ocean, rather than against it, then anything is possible,’ he says portentously, as if he has just discovered relativity. Everything he says is so irritatingly banal.

  He introduces the theme of this morning’s session: evolving the subconscious. At least I more or less understand what he’s getting at. Yesterday it was systemic constellation, which involved dismantling negative and unseen energetic forces across time and space. It sounded like the plot of Star Wars. I discovered that Lisa’s cancer was her grandmother’s fault, for walking out on her marriage, and got sent out of the room for pretending to be a Jedi warrior when we were doing role play to alter the course of history.

  Gregorio goes on for a good twenty minutes about how most human behaviour is driven by the subconscious and that if you harness its power you can make whole and complete patterns for change. I don’t disagree with this basic premise. I just don’t like the way he claims all this came to him one day as he was meditating in front of the ocean, when he is sketching the principles of cognitive behavioural therapy, which is older than me and available on the NHS. I show admirable self-restraint in remaining silent. I count how many hours there are until we can leave. It’s less than twenty, which fills me with the kind of positivity that the Tibetan pulsing failed to trigger.

  ‘Please can you all hold hands,’ says Gregorio solemnly. ‘We’re reaching the apex of the weekend. After forty-eight hours of intensive work nourishing mind, body and soul, we are now ready to start sharing the positive energy we have released to overcome the issues that have brought us all here.’ He stares pointedly at me.

  Rowena squeezes my right hand in a gesture that I hope is sympathy rather than an attempt to transfer positive energy. Jenna takes my left hand and I swear I can feel her finger rub the palm of my hand. I think about her body as a way to counteract Gregorio and feel a vague sense of loss that I will never sit behind her in another yoga class.

  ‘Jenna, please can you swap places with Sonia,’ orders Gregorio.

  He isn’t a mind-reader. I feel a bit dirty admitting I have anything in common with Gregorio but we obviously share the same taste in women.

  ‘Bad memories and experiences create blockages so our energy can’t flow freely, and we get sick. If we release that stuck energy then our problems will start to be resolved.’

  His tone has gone all Darth Vader. I open my eyes and see his Adam’s apple bob up and down with the effort to lower his voice.

  ‘The subconscious mind is way more powerful than the conscious mind, and if it can be programmed there are no limits to what you can achieve. You will open yourself up to more self-love and healing. It is the imbalance between the conscious and subconscious mind that causes disease.’

&
nbsp; I see Lisa nodding. I imagine the cancer cells in her body planning a big hedonistic party where they can all divide and reproduce without any threat to their existence.

  ‘Before we move to the next level does anyone have any questions?’

  Hamish and I both put up our hands. Hamish says that he’s not sure he has made as much progress as everyone else because he’s still waking up with his heart racing. When Gregorio doesn’t say anything Hamish tentatively wonders if he should sign up for another intensive weekend of work.

  ‘The answer is in the question,’ responds Gregorio sagely. He turns to me. ‘Nick, Nick, Nick,’ he says in his most patronizing tone.

  ‘Greg, Greg, Greg,’ I say. ‘I want to make sure I am understanding you correctly. Are you suggesting that Lisa’s cancer can be cured by hope marinated in organic vegetable juice?’ It’s an extraordinary statement. I feel as though I have walked into the New Testament and Gregorio is playing the role of Jesus in the feeding of the five thousand, but this might be because I am so hungry. I gamely continue. ‘So if she dies, is it because she didn’t believe enough? Or drink enough kale juice? So that she thinks it’s her fault? Because that’s not just irresponsible, it’s cruel.’

  Gregorio’s chill eyes narrow.

  ‘Science and technology undermine our innate wisdom and leave us at the mercy of experts, who reduce our power to self-heal, and pharmaceutical companies, who conspire to make us dependent on their drugs,’ he says. ‘I am simply a facilitator to help release the body’s innate capacity to do what it does best.’

  ‘I know who I would choose,’ I mutter.

  ‘Perhaps, Nick, you should consider the role you have both played in creating the conditions for Lisa’s blockages.’

  ‘Greg, you’ve lost me,’ I say, adopting his passive-aggressive habit of using my name every time he addresses me.

  ‘Perhaps you should assess the psycho-emotional roots of her illness, Nick. Cancer is caused by negative emotions, trauma and unfinished business.’

  ‘Don’t you think the fact that Lisa’s mother and grandmother both had breast cancer suggests there might be a genetic component to the disease?’ I struggle to remain composed. I tap my bare feet nervously on the floor like Daisy used to do.

  I try to remember how Rosie explained it all. I wish she were here because, unlike me, everyone always listens to Rosie. People warm to her. Eight sets of eyes bore into me as I struggle to articulate how cancer strikes across generations. It feels as though I am fighting for my life in the scientific equivalent of Max’s favourite childhood book, The Hunger Games. Then it occurs to me that actually I’m fighting for Lisa’s life, which makes me feel sick with nerves. I get caught in cul-de-sacs about DNA repair genes. There are dangerous bends in the road when I lurch from explanations about the difference between protective tumour suppressor genes and oncogenes. But I really lose people during a long stretch about gene mutations. It strikes me that the problem with contemporary scientific knowledge is that human beings need a basic narrative of how life works, and this is too complicated for most people to understand.

  ‘If Lisa had done the family constellation therapy years ago, this destructive cycle could have been broken,’ says Gregorio serenely. ‘We would have seen the emotions that hadn’t been expressed by her grandmother, and the destruction would have stopped.’

  ‘I can’t believe that anyone is seduced by this crap,’ I say. I look towards Hamish and Rowena for support but they resolutely stare into the middle distance.

  ‘Relationships are like plants, they need good soil to grow, especially at the beginning, and from everything that Lisa has told me, the roots of your partnership were nourished in deception, lies and other people’s misery,’ says Gregorio. There is a nip of triumph in his tone that I hope Lisa notices.

  ‘That’s got nothing to do with her illness.’

  Lisa blushes bright red. Everyone turns to me. Rowena is no longer holding my hand.

  ‘Lisa understands that her illness is in part the result of the pain you both caused the people closest to your heart – her best friend, Rosie, her ex-husband, Barney, your daughter, Daisy, who was made ill by the negative energy surrounding it – and the poison that seeped into her relationship with her own children. If you can accept this, you will all begin to heal together.’

  I can’t believe that Lisa has shared intimate details of our relationship with this ridiculous man. I’m stunned into silence. I turn towards her but she won’t catch my eye. For a moment I think I’m going to burst into tears at the absurdity of it all. But then Gregorio might think he has made a breakthrough. Or even worse, won the battle.

  ‘I think perhaps you should all do some family constellation therapy together,’ Gregorio suggests. ‘What do you think, Nick?’

  ‘This is what I think.’ I get up, stride over to him and shove his shoulders as hard as I can and, because he’s sitting in the lotus position, he can’t unravel his legs fast enough so he topples backwards like a skittle.

  For the first couple of hours on the drive back to London we don’t speak to each other. We’ve never had a big disagreement before so there’s no well-rehearsed format where we shout a while, recriminate, and sulk. We haven’t yet reached the distrust-disillusionment phase of a relationship where words are weaponized to inflict maximum damage. So I flail around, trying to read Lisa’s body language for clues, and even in the way she blinks and sniffs I sense her disapproval.

  Eventually she falls asleep with her back to me, head resting against the passenger window. When the traffic snarls up I gently run my hand down her back and feel the gnarled bony undulations of her vertebrae through her heavily quilted jacket. She’s starving to death. It’s unbearable.

  She’s warned Rex and Ava that she’s doing a detox but they are bound to notice that she has lost too much weight, especially Ava, who hasn’t seen her mother since she moved to Portland a year ago. She’s arriving a few days early to spend ‘quality time’ with Lisa, and I’m staying well out of the way in case I’m turned to ice by her cool disdain. Ava very noisily and publicly sided with Barney after their divorce and I can tell from the emails, where she makes comic mockery of our wedding by referring to it as The Big Day, that she means to cause trouble. She’s threatening to bring her musician boyfriend, who is apparently the reincarnation of Kurt Cobain, although when I look him up I see his band has less than fifty Spotify streams. Hopefully my irritation with Ava will cancel the guilt I feel for Rex, whose quiet failure to launch is most definitely connected to the way he ended up looking after his father through the dark days of our abandonment.

  I take advantage of Lisa sleeping to stop at the drive-through McDonald’s on the M4, where I buy a double Big Mac and fries, which I eat too fast. Sometimes I wonder if I’m trying to eat for two. I notice my stomach now presses into the steering wheel. A few miles later I pull up on the hard shoulder and am violently sick. As I heave into the hedge I wonder what kind of man I am that I can’t persuade the woman I love to take my advice over that of some pseud she met at her yoga studio less than four months ago?

  As I retch the answer becomes glaringly obvious: on some level Lisa trusts him more than she does me. There is nothing I can say or do that will change her mind. In fact, it’s worse than I thought: it isn’t that she truly believes Gregorio’s treatment will work, it’s more that he has made her feel she deserves to be ill.

  I wipe my nose and mouth with my sleeve.

  Any certainty ebbs away and I’m left facing myself on the hard shoulder with cars noisily speeding by but not loud enough to drown out the voice in my head telling me that I’m a fraud, and a fool whose children don’t care about me because I failed to resist the itch and made my daughter ill. When I get back in the car and turn on the engine Lisa is awake. I pretend the wind has made my eyes water.

  ‘I invited Hamish and Rowena to our wedding,’ she says. ‘I hope you don’t mind.’

  ‘Of course not. The more the merrier.’


  I smile but it feels like a grimace. Frankly I’m relieved she still wants to go through with it. We embark on a neutral discussion about the wedding. At what point will the children read from The Prophet? Should I buy crabs the day before? Where will everyone sleep? I answer all these questions with my customary decisiveness.

  When we get back to the flat, I realize that we don’t have enough fruit and vegetables for Lisa’s regime the following day. I can’t go out early tomorrow morning because I’m doing a talk at the Ministry of Justice on how to avoid misleading witnesses with poor questioning techniques. So I end up cycling like a maniac to The Whole Foods Market and get to the shop just as the man with the luscious lips and beard from the exotic fruit counter is closing the steel shutters. Gasping for breath, I approach him to see if he will take pity on my predicament but instead he locks himself in and threatens to call security.

  ‘I know you,’ he shouts. ‘Go home and look after your fiancée instead of hanging around here, you fricking freak show! In any case she doesn’t work on Sundays.’

  ‘That’s not very peace and love,’ I shout back.

  But he’s gone inside. I curse him and I curse Gregorio. Hippies can be such bloody fascists. I remember a late-night Caribbean shop, which sells exotic fruit and vegetables, close to my old home. I get back on my bike and pedal fast, ignoring the red traffic lights and one-way streets, along a route so familiar that I could cycle it in my sleep, wishing – as I do whenever I’m under pressure – that I could return to the ease of a world where I’m still married to Rosie and my children believe in me like they once believed in Father Christmas.

  Sometimes it makes me dizzy to consider all the different lives I could have lived if I had made different decisions along the way. If I hadn’t taken magic mushrooms would I have got together with Rosie? If Barney hadn’t turned into a drunk might I still be married to her? If I hadn’t been so distracted by the girl in the fruit shop would I have noticed how Gregorio was more than a karmic joke? At the moment I think a lot about the life that will now be unlived because the future I had envisaged with Lisa has been stolen from me twice over: firstly by the cancer and secondly by Gregorio.