After a short while she relays my information, before I hear the click as she replaces the handset in its base. During this time Marianne has said nothing, but she has listened. Perhaps her hearing is better than mine and she could follow Ishiko’s conversation. I do not know what she said but I know she got rid of him. For now at least. But I will have to go to the office. I will have to explain my absence. When I told Gregory that I had given up work I knew that it had made him happy. I knew that he would have preferred that he alone were the reason, thanks to a set of principles that he has picked up from 1955 as if passed down through his DNA, but he accepted it as a good turn of events and I could see his delight. After this I had to stick to it. I had to stay away from work. I had no other choice.
It was a near miss the other night at The Sailing Club when Stephen Jones wandered over to our table. Thank goodness for the announcement to take our seats. My little incident more than put an end to any risk that he would be back at my side questioning my whereabouts. But I knew he would call eventually. I knew he would call because he was one of the first faces I saw peering over me amongst the star filled ceiling of fairy lights. He is what I would call inherently interested. He wants to know. I cannot even count the number of times he asked me into his office in the first weeks back at work. It seemed I was performing fine, but he just wanted to talk. How was I doing? How was I coping? Was my workload too much? What could he do to help? Could he cut my hours for me? Could he reassign some of my workload? He is all want want want. He wants to be the saviour, the helper, the one that makes life better. Another man who wants to save the nearest flailing woman. Because I just couldn’t cope on my own, right?
Men like him, like Gregory, they want to save women, shelter them, love them out from underneath the blanket of their own psychosis. Gregory wanted to do that with me once. He wanted to dispel the past and build a future. He wanted to see me smile for him every day like a good wife. But I understand his incentives now. I understand them more than he realises. When we met it was so easy for him to be with me. All of the ‘better’ women that he had dated, that he had tried to make his own, they saw him for what he was. They saw his selfishness, his needs, and they had a full life already. They could only make space for him. He worked his way down until he got to me, sacrificing a little bit more until he found somebody that would make him her everything, because she had so much space in her life that he could consume it, fill it. Be it. It was so much easier than making any personal sacrifices of his own to become something better. It was easier to fill the void of another person. Less pressure that way. It was fine whilst I was depressed. It was fine when I spent my life drowning in tears rather than the lake. He would have taken as much of that as I could throw at him and he would have held my hand through it all. But by wanting out, trying to die, it was too much for him. It meant he was a failure. If I wanted to die, it meant he couldn’t be my everything. There was a better, more attractive alternative in death, than him. He can’t get past that idea, so he has found his own alternative. He didn’t even have to leave his home. But perhaps I shouldn’t be so hard on him. Coming second place to the finality of death? Perhaps there isn’t a man in the world that could understand or accept that.
Marianne has remained quiet ever since the phone call, and I usher her out of the house. We share a few air kisses and I promise to call her tomorrow. I tell Ishiko to remind me. She watches me for a while whilst I sit in the conservatory, looking out into the fog. I am looking into it, really into it to see if anything can be seen. Sometimes the fog here is so dense that you can hold your hand out in front of you and you can’t even see the tips of your fingers. Once, whilst I was walking along the lakeside the fog began to fall unexpectedly, rolling in faster than walking pace and consuming everything in its path. It swamped me and I got lost. I was following the course of the shore but still lost my way, my feet splashing in and out of the water as I veered from the path. I had passed my house, my private road, and was leaving the town behind me. But a lucky break in fog gave me an exit back to the road and showed me the way. It was like it was playing with me, teasing me. It was warning me that at anytime it could take me, just like it had tried to before.
On the day I got lost I arrived home with wet hair and feet, my breath running in and out of my lungs at a sprinter’s speed. He was at the window waiting for me. He came out quickly and threw a blanket across my shoulders. He sat me at the edge of the fire, had Ishiko make hot tea, and as he sat rubbing my blue hands he kept telling me how awful it must have been to be lost like that. I didn’t tell him that I didn’t feel scared. I was panicked yes, but not scared. It was how I imagine a prince might feel when he hears of the King’s death. There must be panic at that time. There must be terror. All the planning and all the training cannot remove the humanity of the response. He will be a King. He will succumb to fate just like he always knew he would, in spite of the panic that he feels in that moment. Because beyond it he knows that it is his destiny. He knows that he was born to be King. There may be pain, panic, hurt, but he will get through it and fulfil the role he was born to complete. It was my destiny to be lost in the fog, to be pulled in by the water. It tried to take me once. I tried to give myself to it a second time. Both times the plan was ruined. Both times I was saved. But I will make it. I will achieve my destiny. I am clear again, the tablets have left me, I am myself. I thought for a while I might have a new destiny, a new label, mother, but now I know it’s not real. I can be no more a mother than he can be a husband. I know what I am, and in my understanding which comes to me with the same certainty as the night, I think I have also learnt what I am not.
Chapter sixteen
“I want to start today by going backwards, Charlotte. Are you agreeable with that?” I nod my head and he continues whilst I curl my hands up underneath my thighs, tight as springs so that I can feel my own weight on them. “Good. I want to cover some ground that we did right at the beginning of the therapy sessions, when we first met each other. I believe it’s a good point to refresh a little, don’t you think?”
“OK.” I know that it is possible if there is complete silence to hear the conversation in this office on the other side of the wall. I am certain that Gregory must be listening, and part of me imagines him wedged up against the door, ear pressed against the lock listening to the words I say. I feel like muttering out a few obscenities, words I know he hates like cunt or cheat or motherfucker, just to have him hear them fall from my lips. I feel my mouth part, but find even with all the will I have, which today isn’t very much, nothing comes out.
“Were you going to say something?” Dr. Abrams asks. I shake my head and he continues. “OK. When we first met here Charlotte, I asked you to give me a few words about how you were feeling. Words that described your state of mind before the accident.” He still insists, on occasion, on calling it an accident and I wonder how I am supposed to accept it as anything other than an accident if my own therapist cannot. “When I asked you to do this you found it quite difficult. You were always able to discuss matters of intelligence. It was easy for me to establish what you believe about religion, and what you have and have not learnt in life. But when it came to who you are, Charlotte, it was much harder for you to talk about your feelings or your motives.”
“I don’t remember.” There is a gardener outside sweeping the pathway. Schweep, schweep, I hear repeatedly. The gardener realises that I am watching him, and so does Dr. Abrams, so I look away, ashamed of myself and my throat feels tight. I grip at it, my fingers tangling in the chain of my pendant.
“I know that. I am aware that there is a lot that you cannot remember. There is a lot that you have blocked out from this time.” He stops to take a sip of water and I feel the urge to do the same. I mirror his actions and pick up my glass.
“Is this glass clean?” I ask before it touches my lips. He nods and I take a sip. I cannot bring my own glass here. It tastes weird and I wonder if there is a problem with his water sup
ply. “What did I say about religion?” I ask as he places his glass back down onto the desk at his side. He writes something down in the notes balanced on his knee before putting his glass back down.
“You told me that it was for the weak. That there was no such thing as a God.” He rests his pen on his lower lip, taps is a couple of times. It leaves a small ink stain that should make me laugh but it does not. I nod, uncertain what I think of my previous statement. If there is a God, I have repeatedly forsaken and angered him with my attempted rejection of life. I wonder if he would cast me out from heaven or take me at his chest in his all forgiving embrace and tell me that he was sorry for what he created for me in life. Dr. Abrams continues. “I asked you to give me individual words regarding your feelings. Your emotions.”
“Was I rude to you?”
“No, Charlotte.” He shakes his head as if he has never been more certain.
“Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. Why do you think you were rude to me?” He looks perplexed as he leafs through his pages of notes from that time as if to be sure he is correct, in order not to confuse me. He stops flicking through the pages and seeing my continued uncertainty repeats, “I am sure.”
“It’s just that Gregory tells me that I was quite rude to people at that time, when I first went home.” He remains unconvinced and shakes his head in a way that discredits what I just said as nonsense, but how could he really know for sure. He never lived with me.
“No, you were in fact the complete opposite, Charlotte,” a small smile creeping on to his face. “But this isn’t really very important anyway. Most people are conditioned to the point that for the most part in society we will act accordingly. We are conditioned to try to fit in, to be polite.” He takes another sip of water and so again I do the same. “But often how we act and how we feel are not in unison. They can be in fact quite polar.” I believe this is true for most people. There is a face that presents to the public a certain perception of the internal personality. It is how we would like to be seen. It is the face of what we would want written in our obituary, spoken in our eulogy. It’s a first impression, but it is also nothing more than a characterisation of an idea that cannot in reality be maintained for very long. It is subtle in many, almost indistinguishable from reality in the normal people of the world. In the complex characters, the killers, the cheaters, the psychopaths, and the murderers it is deeper, a smiling face which hides the absence of a heart and soul. A structure without foundation, a skin that hides no flesh. Only the brave or the crazy who walk the earth truly reveal themselves. For their efforts we scorn these people.
“But I didn’t try to do that, Dr. Abrams.”
“Didn’t do what?” he says as he puts his water down onto a small coaster which is sat on top of a pile of books, which itself looks like it is sat on top of a pile of notes.
“Try to fit in.
“You are referring to your attempted suicide?”
“Yes.” What else?
“Quite right, Charlotte. But by the time you saw me, you apologised for it and was acting sensibly. Too sensibly, like you were programmed to say what I wanted to hear. You seemed very attuned to your predica......no.” He stops, confused at himself. “That’s not the right word. I mean, your situation.”
“In the hospital?” He confirms by nodding. “How did you know I wasn’t remorseful? Maybe I regretted it and that what I said really was the truth? Maybe I was aware. I am a realist.”
“I couldn’t be certain, Charlotte. I just made a judgement.” He doesn’t say anything about my self assessment which surprises me. He is usually begging for a personal insight. He does however scribble something down in the notes, and I feel desperate to know what it is. I can’t breathe in here for the smell of wood polish, like bee’s wax.
“Based on what?” He reaches over his crossed knees and presses play on a Dictaphone sat on a small table between us. It crackles for a while, like an old long play record before the music begins. Then I hear muffled words and the date. Last August. The microphone was too close to his mouth, pushed up against his beard, but it was his voice. Then I hear myself confirm that I was happy for the interview to be recorded. I stand up and open the window. Somewhere in the distance a bird sings.
It sounds like me, the voice on the tape. I know it as my own voice. Short of that, I don’t recognise myself. I sound like a politician’s wife, an agreer, a non complainer. Whatever he asks me I give a polite answer. My name? Yes of course, Mrs. Charlotte Astor. How am I feeing today? Oh, I am very well. Please, don’t worry. I am just looking forward to going home. I am 1950’s debutante eager to please and answer correctly, to agree with whatever his version of the truth may be. I listen as I discuss my attempted suicide and say that it was a mistake. He stops the tape.
“I had forgotten that you recorded me.” I am standing by the window, sucking in the icy air but still can’t breathe a full breath, the kind that fills your lungs and expels the poisonous gas. Schweep, schweep. The gardener is still working, but he has moved further away, I think, because my staring bothers him. The bird still sings, unaffected. I take hold of the window frame, and the stability helps, grounds me somewhat and I recover and breathe.
“I know, Charlotte. But it is important today to try to recap these things. Make sure that you and I are on the same page. I want to understand where we are at.”
“OK.”
I turn to see him shift the notes file in his lap, squaring it up. Inside it is filled with papers. He is rifling through them, searching for something. He finds some small cards and reaches across his crossed knee again and holds them out to me which encourages me towards him. I take the cards and sit down. He doesn’t interrogate my actions here in the office, and I think my moving around doesn’t bother him. It is only my thoughts which trouble him. It is my handwriting on the cards. I have never seen them before.
“Charlotte, you wrote these for me in our first session after you left the hospital. I want you to take a look.” I turn the cards over in my hands. There is one word on each card. There are four of them. “I want you to read out the words.”
“Hopeful. Pleased.” I look up to him for a sign, anything, something to connect with, but he offers me, in this isolating moment, nothing. “Joyous.” I turn the last card. “Happy.” I put them in my lap and place my hands on top of them as if stifling out the last embers of a smouldering fire.
“Do you remember writing them?” He leans back in his chair and I hear the leather creak under his weight.
I brush a hair from my eye, soak in the smell of leather and wood polish mixed with honey which I think is in his tea, cold and untouched next to his water. “No,” I say. It’s the truth. I have no recollection of writing them.
“Right before writing those words I asked you to write one word on each card that described your state of mind at the time you wrote them. You wrote these words six days after your accident.” I am thinking about what to say, but I feel lost. I don’t know what to say. I do not understand these words. They don’t mean anything to me, and I imagine they never could have. I cannot imagine how I could have possibly felt this way. Right now I feel hopeless, desolate, envious, and pathetic. “Why do you think you wrote those words?” he continues to prod.
“It was obviously how I felt,” I offer, more staccato than intended, and he almost looks offended, like I have disappointed him. I snatch at a snippet of hope that he will buy it, but it is fading before I have even finished the sentence.
“We have come further than mistruths, Charlotte.” His lips are pressed together, pursed with disappointment. He sits in silence waiting for me to speak. One time when I was at school I was caught smoking with one of the older boys behind the long white wall that bordered the playground. My head teacher yelled at me and put me on detention. My form tutor, Mr. Ridgard, hung his head down and wouldn’t speak to me when I told him that there had been a misunderstanding and that it wasn’t me who had been smoking. It was a lie. H
e told me that all he ever asked of his pupils was that they tell him the truth. That we all make mistakes and that how we face up to them is the true definition of our character. That was the same week I cut my wrists. I was never allowed to return to his class. He took nearly a whole year off with stress afterwards. “How do you feel right now? Right this second?”
“Confused.”
“Why do you feel confused?”
“Because I don’t remember doing any of this.” I take the cards and put them on the nearest table on top of a brown file than has another person’s name on it. Rachael Warwick, I think, but it could be Raquel. He sits and waits, his chin resting on his forefinger and thumb. “It upsets me when people tell me I did and felt certain things. I can’t remember writing those cards or saying those things,” I say. It is a surprisingly honest answer which I had no intention in providing. Six days after I tried to die these were the words I wrote. Who the hell wouldn’t be confused?
“But there is a reason for you feeling this way. You don’t have to be upset by it.”
“The bleed?” I say, touching my head where they operated and where I refuse to let heal. I can’t find anything to scratch and his attention to my actions stops me dead. I put my hand back in my lap.
“Yes, the bleed and subsequent seizure certainly play a factor in your memory problems.” He folded up his brown leather file and placed it on top of the desk next to him. He is leaning in towards me. “I asked you to write on the back of each card the reason that you felt each of those emotions.” I look back at the cards and pick one back up. Hopeful. I turn the card back and forth. I wonder if my confusion is growing, because I cannot see any other words. My confusion has reached my face. He sees it. “You couldn’t do it.”
“Perhaps I just needed more time,” I say, returning the card to the top of Rachael’s or Raquel’s file.
PSYCHOPHILIA: A Disturbing Psychological Thriller Page 17