by Nigel Latta
Stuart clearly felt the same way. ‘Uhh…’
‘Good,’ said Tom. ‘Let’s continue.’
What I didn’t understand back then was that Stuart was a master game player. He was a career paedophile who had offended against dozens of boys over the course of his life. His intent was solely to disrupt the process. He’d seen enough shrinks to know that all you needed to do was mention suicide and everyone would back off. What he didn’t know was that Tom was a very clever man, and a very good therapist, one of the best I’ve ever met. Stuart was out of his league from the moment the bell rang. In any case, he didn’t kill himself that weekend, or any other to the best of my knowledge.
It was when they started talking about what they’d done that it finally started to dawn on me where I was.
‘What did you do to her?’ asked Andy.
He was speaking to Roy, the bloke who looked as if he’d got lost on the way to the boardroom. Roy wore casually expensive clothes and casually expensive aftershave.
‘Not much, nothing like these guys,’ he said, glancing around nervously. Roy was talking about how he’d sexually offended against his 10-year-old daughter.
‘Really?’
‘Yes.’
‘Not as bad as these guys?’
‘Well…no.’
Again, at the time I didn’t know the game that was being played, but Andy did. It was the me-and-them game. I’m not like them. I did a stupid thing, but it wasn’t as bad as them.
‘So what did you do?’
‘I just touched her a little bit.’
‘Just?’
‘Yes.’ Roy had this slightly indignant number going on. He clearly wasn’t used to being challenged. What he didn’t know was that Andy was just warming up.
‘Was she relieved?’
‘I beg your pardon?’
‘Was she relieved?’
‘What do you mean?’ Roy’s voice had a real pissy tinge to it now. He was getting riled.
‘Was she relieved that you just touched her?’
‘What are you getting at?’
‘Well, you said that you just touched her. Like it was somehow better than what these other guys have done.’
‘But that’s all I did.’
Andy shrugged. ‘That’s not so bad then, is it? If that’s all you did.’
Roy paused, probably feeling the ice cracking under his feet. ‘I suppose.’
‘Where did you just touch her?’
Roy swallowed, looking affronted that he should have to answer such personal questions. ‘The vagina.’
Even then I could feel the air crackling.
Roy said the word ‘vagina’ in his best man-in-a-suit boardroom voice. I’m not scared of you, he was saying with his confident use of the word. You don’t scare me at all.
What he didn’t realise is that it wasn’t Andy he should be scared of, it was himself. Roy would be his own undoing.
‘How long did you do this to her for?’
He shrugged. ‘Not long, only a couple of minutes.’
Andy nodded. ‘Not long, that’s good. What did she do when you touched her?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘That’s right, nothing.’
‘Didn’t move? Didn’t speak?’
‘No.’ Roy’s voice was clipped and tight. You could tell he was furious. No one talked to him in this way. If this was a boardroom he would have stomped the life out of Andy, but it wasn’t; this was the Darklands, and here different laws applied.
‘She was very still?’
He paused. ‘Yes.’
Andy nodded. ‘Very still. Was she breathing?’
‘Of course.’
‘How was she breathing?’
‘What do you mean?’
‘How was she breathing?’
‘I don’t know, just normally I guess. I can’t remember.’
‘Show me.’
Roy frowned. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Show me how she was breathing. Breathe like she was.’
‘I can’t.’
‘Just try,’ said Andy.
Roy sat there. ‘This is stupid.’
Andy didn’t respond.
Roy frowned again. ‘What?’
‘That’s good,’ Andy finally said. ‘Just keep breathing like that.’
‘This is stupid,’ Roy repeated, although the boardroom strut was gone now.
‘Now close your eyes.’
‘What?’
‘Close your eyes.’
I remember watching Roy, wondering if he’d do it. The tension between the two of them was immense. To my surprise he did.
‘Now,’ said Andy, ‘I just want you to imagine something. I just want you to imagine her lying there, alone. She’s alone and there’s no one to help her, no one to stop it. And you’re touching her, the man who’s supposed to protect her from harm.’ Andy’s voice is soft, hypnotic. ‘She can’t stop this…can’t move…can’t even speak…so she just lies there as you do it…helpless…alone…’
And in the silence Andy started to breathe, barely audible. A small hitching breath, like a child. Over and over.
I closed my eyes too, ever the keen researcher, wanting to experience what that would be like for Roy. The silence was absolute. No one moved. There was only the sound of that small hitching breath.
And even though I knew it was really Andy, I also knew it was the sound of that little girl, and I felt as if she were lying beside me.
I had to open my eyes again, feeling the air clog in my throat. It was horrible listening to that lonely sound. I felt like weeping for her, this poor wee thing alone in the dark with him.
That went on for only two minutes, but it felt like days, the breathing and the silence stretching out like an echo of some long-dead pain. The longer it went on the more I tried not to think about it, but it was impossible. She was there, and it drenched me.
‘You were right,’ Andy finally said.
Roy didn’t move. He looked stricken.
‘You were right,’ Andy repeated. ‘It was good.’
Roy looked up, opening his eyes like a man emerging from a dream. I could see the tears in his eyes even from where I was sitting. ‘What was good?’ he asked, his voice shaking.
‘It’s good that you just touched her, isn’t it? It’s good that you only did it for a couple of minutes. Don’t you think?’
Roy just looked down into his lap, and I watched the tears drip onto his hands.
So you should, you bastard, I thought.
Objectivity is something that takes practice in the Darklands. I didn’t understand then that it’s compassion, not anger, that holds the most currency. Compassion can plough the stoniest ground; anger simply blunts itself on the rocks.
But I was young then, and it hurt listening to what they’d done, so being angry was OK with me at the time.
‘Who’s next?’ asked Andy.
That’s how it went throughout the night as each man told his sorry story. On and on. Each one taking us deeper, further away from the light.
‘She was twelve…’
‘He was four…’
‘I touched her vagina…’
‘I made her touch me…’
‘I put it in her mouth…’
‘She cried…’
‘He said nothing…’
‘Ten times…’
‘Over three years…’
I listened for as long as I could, till I felt sick, exhausted, and sadder than I had ever felt in my life. There were so many children, so many stories. And the worst thing was that they were all true. If I could have left without looking as if I couldn’t handle it, I would have.
Later that night, after the group was finished, we went back to our room.
‘Fuck,’ I said, slumping down on a mattress.
‘How are you doing?’ Andy asked, smiling.
‘This is horrible,’ I said.
‘Yeah. It is pretty awful stuff.’
What else was there to say?
I slept like the dead that night, and I’m happy to say that if I did dream, I woke the next day not remembering any of it.
I thought that was the worst of it, that it couldn’t get any bleaker, but it turned out Friday night’s games were only just the start. That was just getting our toes wet. The real work came the next day and night.
Psychodrama.
It sounded like the technical term for the murderers’ club annual Christmas pantomime. Psycho-drama. At the time I’d stumbled headlong into the victim-empathy weekend I was a fairly conservative young man. I thought psychology really was a science and I wanted to be the scientist-practitioner psychologists were supposed to be. Evidence-based practice, that was for me. You can keep all your frilly hippie touchy-feely nonsense. There was no room in my world for any new-age sitting-on-pillows sharing-your-feelings bollocks.
But then I participated in 13 hours of victim-empathy psychodramas and the physics of my world slid off into the deep blue sea. It was as if someone has just said that Einstein was completely full of shit and it was really all about wizards and goblins.
Psycho-heavy-goddamned-shit-dramas, was how I summed it up to anyone who would listen over the next week or so.
The man who invented the technique, Jacob Levy Moreno, was born in Bucharest in 1889. Ironically Moreno developed the process from his observations of children playing in Vienna. Essentially psychodrama is a very sophisticated form of role-playing.
Now, I’m the first to admit that as soon as anyone says ‘role-play’ most people’s eyes do their own rolling. Before that weekend I would have scoffed at the idea of role-plays as a way to get sex offenders to understand some of the damage they’d caused to their victims.
It really comes down to a question of skill and sophistication. Skilfully done psychodrama is to role-plays what an F-16 fighter is to a hang-glider. They both fly, but that’s about all they have in common.
Moreno himself described the essence of psychodrama as two people meeting face to face and tearing each other’s eyes out so they can exchange them and look at the world from another perspective, and that’s the image that stays with me when I’m using psychodrama in this context. Two people standing facing each other, blood dripping down their cheeks, freshly torn eyes staring out at the world, blinking in the light, which seems suddenly bright. Seeing for the first time.
The psychodramas started just after lunch on Saturday. By then the group was very different to the one that had started the weekend. Things were happening inside them; well, most of them. Things were certainly happening inside me.
‘We’re going to move on now,’ Tom said. ‘We’re going to move into something much deeper. It’s going to be hard for some of you, very hard, but it’s good that we do this work. It’s important.’
Jesus, I remember thinking, how much harder can it get?
During the morning each man had drawn a life-sized outline of one his victims and written inside the outline in the first person how they thought the victim had felt. Then each man had to get up in front of the group and kneel down holding the drawing in front of them. The group leaders took it in turns interviewing each man as if they were talking to the child. It was simple and very powerful, as this excerpt from my evaluation field notes at the time conveys:
This is bloody awful. Each man stands up and reads out his account of how he thinks his victim has been affected. They’re just drawings but each drawing represents a real person who lived through this stuff and still lives with this stuff. When I’ve finished writing this thesis and it sits on some shelf gathering dust they will still be living with this stuff. After each man is finished he sticks his drawing up on the wall. They watch us, these paper children stuck up on the wall. It’s like a bizarre form of crucifixion. I just feel like grabbing them and shaking them and saying don’t you dare do this again!!! Don’t you dare do this again!!!
How much worse could it get? Plenty as it turned out.
‘So you need to be supporting each other,’ Tom continued. ‘You need to help each other through the rest of the work that we’ll be doing.’
‘What is it?’ one of the men interrupted, with mock concern that didn’t quite cover the real worry underneath.
‘We’re going to do something called psychodrama, which is kind of like a role-play. We’re giving you the chance to step into your victim’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to be them, to feel how they feel.’
‘I’m not good at role-plays,’ the same man chipped in again. Gordon, in his sixties, was here for molesting both his daughters and his granddaughters.
‘You don’t have to be good at it,’ Tom said. ‘You just have to let yourself participate in this as fully as you can. That’s going to be hard for some of you…’ He paused, letting the moment draw out. ‘Because this is going to hurt. It’s going to be really painful. You might feel things you’ve never felt before.’
In that moment I had no doubt at all that would be the case. It’s hard to convey here the finesse Tom used in his warm-up. He modulated his tone, volume and pace like a master violinist, slowly building an expectation that something really big was about to happen. Some heavy shit was coming and I remember feeling a little scared, even as an observer.
‘Who’s first?’ Tom asked.
The stillness was so intense you could almost hear hearts creaking as they strained not to beat.
Thank Christ I don’t have to do this, I thought.
‘Robert, how about you?’
And everyone turned to look.
Robert was 40-something, self-employed, and had recently been charged with the repeated sexual violation of his 12-year-old stepdaughter over a period of several years. He looked like a nice guy, he talked like a nice guy, and in many ways he was. He was far too nice. He was polite to everyone, and said all the right things; he just didn’t seem to feel anything.
I was feeling pretty bloody ragged by that stage, as if someone had taken a wire brush to my emotions. Robert, on the other hand, simply sat there as if he was handling the whole thing.
If I wasn’t handling it, and I was just the observer, how the hell was he handling it so well? How come he wasn’t screaming on the floor?
Back then, I don’t think I really understood anything.
Imagine this: a massive earthen dam holding back a vast reservoir of shit, the stinking remains of years of poison. It’s a very old dam and great cracks thread across it like lines across skin. Nothing lasts forever; all things fail in the end. Especially the things we build for ourselves to hold back the truth.
Standing in front of this failing structure is a man, tiny against the backdrop. He stands at its base, facing away, his feet in the fluid seeping from the dam. He looks down and sees the little stream is flowing over the top of his shoes, staining the leather. His nose wrinkles at the stink.
Behind him the great wall creaks and groans, moving imperceptibly closer. All it would take is a single touch. If he were to lean out and lay a single finger on the surface of that dam the precarious balance would be destroyed. Then it would all give way, sweeping him off into the darkness.
So he doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe.
But he watches the flow of putrid water over his shoes slowly increase, and knows, even though he doesn’t want to admit it: soon.
‘Why don’t you come on out, Robert?’ Tom asked.
So there we all are, on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of suburbia, and Robert just gets up and moves out the front of the group. And behind him the great earthen wall moans at the sudden shift.
As he sat down on the chair next to Tom it felt as if all the heat bled from the room. Outside the sun was shining, I could hear lawnmowers off in the distance, but inside was all that mattered. The world became smaller.
Whatever it is, I thought to myself, it’s coming.
‘Why do you think I chose you?’ Tom asked, and Robert shrugs. ‘There’s a reason. What do y
ou think it might be?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Have a guess.’
‘I don’t know,’ Robert repeats.
Silence.
‘I chose you because I think you’re really ready to do this. I think you really want to do this.’
Robert shrugged. ‘I feel pretty nervous.’
‘I know,’ says Tom, nodding. ‘But you need to know that I’m here to help you, and I’m going to look after you. It’s going to be painful, and difficult, but I’m going to look after you.’
I remember having two thoughts at that exact moment: the first was that I really believed what Tom was saying, that he was going to look after Robert, and the second was wondering why Tom was being so nice instead of getting straight to the bit where he slammed the man.
Stop playing around and get the bastard, I thought. Like I keep saying, I was young and pretty stupid then. There was a lot about how people work that I still had to learn.
The strength of my reaction was understandable in many ways. I’d listened the night before as Robert described going into his stepdaughter’s room, pulling back the sheets and raping her. A little girl, only 12. He’d held her down by the wrists as he did it. He said he had to stop because she was ‘yelling and crying too much’ and so he’d masturbated until he ejaculated on her instead. Then he wiped her down with a towel, told her he loved her and went back to bed. He said that after he left he heard her get up and take a shower. Andy had asked him if he’d ever thought how she was feeling as she stood in the shower, trying to make herself clean.
He’d looked puzzled, almost shocked. ‘No.’
So, yes, I wanted Tom to slam him.
They chatted for a while, and I missed the great majority of what Tom was doing. What looked like a casual chat to my untrained eye was a very skilfully done warm-up. Piece by piece Tom was laying the foundation for the work to come. He was establishing a relationship with Robert, and laying down some gentle suggestions of what was to come.
By the time they stood up the game was three-quarters done and I still didn’t think they’d even started.
‘Choose someone to be your father,’ said Tom.
One by one they laid out the people in Robert’s life. He used other group members as auxiliaries, playing the various roles. Tom had him speak to each one and then ‘reverse roles’ by stepping into the place of the person he was addressing, such as his father, while the other person repeated back what he’d just said. Robert then got to respond as if he were his father answering the question. In this way Robert got to have conversations with people as if they were really there. I was amazed at how quickly it began to feel real, how quickly it stopped being a role-play and started becoming a real-play.