Dark Chapter
Page 33
Her voice is so different. Almost like a woman. “I come up here to see you, Johnny. Huh, you’ve changed. So much taller now!”
“Same as you.”
“Well, it’s been a long time.” That’s for sure. Last time he saw her, she was nine? Ten?
“How old you now, Claire?”
“Fifteen.” She grins. And he can’t believe it, but his own sister’s turning into a beour. Someone the lads would try to shift at a bar.
“You’re seventeen now, right, Johnny?”
He nods. Miserable seventeenth birthday he had, here in jail. Michael and Da and the lads brought a cake, they ate it in a room with one of them screws watching. Couldn’t have no proper drink nor nothing. Slipped him some yokes and porn mags, as a present, but later, the other lads here stole the mags, so he couldn’t even look at them when he was rolling.
“You come up to Belfast on your own?” he asks.
“You mad? Mam wouldn’t let me, all on me own. I come up with me friend Josie and her auntie Pauline. Just for a few days, you know. Belfast’s really different now.”
“Yeah, I guess.” The fuck would he know.
They chat away. Weird as fuck talking to his sister grown up. Can’t believe this is the same brat who wouldn’t stop crying, always whinging when he and Michael went off together and left her at home with the babby. She uses big words. Sounds like she’s been learnt at a school or something.
“How’s Bridget? And Sean?”
“They’re grand. A lot bigger than when you saw them. Bridget’s eleven. Sean is nine.”
He can’t imagine either of them two being able to say a normal word even. Always crawling around in nappies.
“And uh… Mam? How’s she?”
He sees the catch in Claire’s look.
He don’t want to really hear the answer. Tried not to think about Mam most of these years, how she’d react to the news about him. She never did come and visit.
Claire’s shifting her eyes around. “Mam’s, uh… she sends her love. Working hard, the three of us to look after.”
“Working? You mean, outside?”
He jerks at the thought of this.
“Yeah, she works at a creche, minding other women’s kids. It’s good work, pays decent and all. And Bridget and Sean can be there, too.”
“How long she been doing that for? Minding buffer kids?”
“Oh, a few years now.”
He wonders if Da knew about any of that. “You seeing Da or Michael at all when you’re here?”
Claire stops short, like she don’t know what to say. “Yeah, I might.”
“You might? Come up all the way to Belfast, you might not even seen your own da?”
Claire frowns at him, almost like she’s gonna speak up. “He’s not the easiest to get ahold of, y’know? Neither him nor Michael. Don’t answer their phones half the time.”
“Yeah, that’s for sure.”
“Besides…”
The drink, the lampings. Not exactly fond memories she has of Da, most likely.
“I come up here to see you. At least you don’t move around so much these days. Kinda stuck in one place, hey?”
“Aw, fuck off!” He smirks and she laughs, her teeth gleaming and nose crinkling up. He don’t think he’s ever seen Claire laugh like that.
He finds himself laughing, too. First time in he don’t know how long.
Claire asks him more questions, wants to know what it’s like inside.
Lots of buffers, but even them other pavees don’t always want to go with him. Some don’t like the Sweeneys, they’ll lay in wait to spring on him. He don’t tell her this though.
And does he have other friends?
“Mmm, some.”
Word got out what he was in for. That famous rape. Of the Chinky American woman. After that, no one wanted to be near him. Or they’d lamp him a good one when they got the chance, or tried something even worse, but the screws keep a good eyeful, at least.
“What kind of stuff they make you do in here?”
He shrugs. “Boring shite. Laundry and chores and all that. There’s a workshop where you can make things in wood or metal, if you’re lucky. They’re making me do some schooling.”
“Schooling? You?” Claire looks like she wants to laugh again. “Like, maths and reading and writing?”
“Yeah.”
“You can read?” She laughs. “I gotta tell Mam that. Go on, tell me what you can read.”
He shrugs. “I don’t know, just some kiddie books for now.”
“Like what? You read Harry Potter?”
He backs off. “Naw, that stuff’s for babies.”
“Oh, it’s too easy for you, is it?”
“Naw, it’s…” Actually, he can’t manage Harry Potter yet. “I’m not reading no books about wizards and shite.”
“So what d’ya like to read?”
“Some comic books and stuff.” Comic books and porn. Wouldn’t be able to last through prison without them two.
Claire nods, looks at him sly from the corner of her eyes.
“Sounds like you been schooling,” he says. “What, Mam got you going to school everyday?”
“Yeah, for years now. Monday to Friday.”
He shudders. “Fucking awful, that must be.”
“No, I like it.”
Now it’s his turn to laugh. “Sure you do.”
“I do! The homework’s a pain sometimes. But I like it. Now I can read the letters that come in the post for Mam. I’m gonna try and get me Leaving Cert.”
“Leaving Cert! No way, you’re joking.”
Claire giggles again. “Am not, it’s only a few more years.”
“I don’t believe it.” And he shakes his head at Claire, but still grins. “So this school, is it for buffers or Travellers?”
“Mainly Travellers. There’s some buffers, too. They ain’t too bad. Not with so many of us around.”
He’s shaking his head. “Mam working, you getting a Leaving Cert, school just for Travellers. What the fuck’s happening down in Dublin?”
“It’s good.” Claire shrugs. “We’ve a nice new house we’re living in.”
“Bigger than before?”
“Yeah. And a better area to live. And Leaving Cert would be great, but anyways, they’ll be wanting me to get married soon.”
“Why, you’ve a fella?”
Now this is too much. The thought of his little sister with some greasy chancer.
“No, I don’t.” She blushes. “No one yet. But you know all them aunties and uncles are starting on it, making comments about finding a nice boy… Annoying, really.” She rolls her eyes.
They’re quiet for a moment. Claire looks around her, at the other lads meeting with their mams and wives at their little tables, everyone chattering.
“You have trouble finding the place?” he asks.
“Naw, Josie’s auntie drove me here. She’s, uh… she’s actually waiting outside for me…”
“Oh, so’s…”
“So I should get going.”
“Oh right, yeah.” He’s surprised she’s staying for so short. Almost wishes she could stay longer. But he don’t know what to say.
“Well, uh, you have the address here, so’s you can write me if you want.”
“Can you read a letter if I send it?” Claire asks.
“I can try,” he grins. “Got a lot of fucking time in here to learn.”
“All right, we’ll see. I won’t put no tough words in the letter or nothing. Start you off easy.”
“Hey now!” He stands as she gets up, his little sister all grown, talking back like this. It’s weird, but good.
Something crosses her face. “Johnny, what was it like?”
For a second, he almost feels that clawing again. That old friend that comes back when he’s at his worst. “What?”
“The, um, the trial?”
“Oh that.” He shrugs. “Bunch of shite, really. A load of questions I didn�
��t understand. Everyone staring at me the whole time. I hated it.”
“Was it tough?”
No one’s really ever asked him that before. Da and Michael with their shrugging and muttering. Some of the counsellors in here asked him, too, but didn’t really care what he said.
“It, uh… it weren’t easy. I didn’t get what they were saying half the time.”
Claire looks like she wants to ask another question, but he’s relieved when she don’t.
“Oh, I forgot, we made some cake for you, but they says I can’t bring it in. So here’s, um…”
Claire’s fiddling with her necklace now, she’s wearing a glittery heart-shaped locket, opening it up, digging something out. A small colorful bit of paper, cut into a heart to fit the locket. She holds it out on the tip of her finger. It’s a photo of her, Mam, and must be Bridget and Sean. They’re smiling in the sun, arms round each other.
“That’s us, you see?”
He frowns, ’cause he don’t want no tears or nothing to come out. But somehow, the back of his throat is swelling. No space in that tiny heart for him or Michael or Da, it’s too crammed already. He don’t dare try to speak.
“Here, you can have it, Johnny. I can print out another at school.”
He shakes his head but Claire keeps at it.
“I’ll give it to the guard to give to you. It’s yours to keep. Honest.”
He looks at her from across the table, but his throat is still too thick for words.
Walking back to his cell, that colourful bit of paper tucked into his pocket, and that screw Elliott slides up to him, sneering.
“Got a girlfriend now, gypo?”
“She’s me sister.” He says this straight, almost protective.
“Yeah? Even better. I’d fuck her. Good and hard. Bet she’d like that, being your sister and all.”
He don’t say nothing. Just glares at Elliott and walks on.
*
“So this is our final session here at the Maudsley.” Doctor Greene is saying this, smiling. The psychologist’s blonde hair is in a pert ponytail, and outside the window, London is mellowing into a fine, tawny September. It’s nearly a year and a half after the assault.
“We normally use this time to recap all the progress you’ve made in the previous fourteen sessions, as well as think of some next steps for how you envision your recovery moving ahead. Does that sound all right, Vivian?”
It sounds a bit frightening, in fact. These appointments with Doctor Greene have been a lifeline for her in the past year. When everything else in her life seemed cast adrift on that endless grey lake, her friends unsure of how to treat her, her job no longer feasible, she always knew Doctor Greene could offer some assurance, a practical understanding of this strange, directionless place she found herself in, and a possible way forward. She wishes she could see Doctor Greene more often, but the NHS has only allocated fifteen sessions of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy for her.
“So, how are you feeling these days?”
“Better.” She looks around for the postcard of the lone palm tree on Doctor Greene’s cork board, is relieved to see it again, this time surrounded by photos of her cats.
“I mean, a lot of those PTSD symptoms are gone… I don’t have agoraphobia anymore. The panic attacks are gone, too. But I’m still really…” She pauses. “I’m just really down a lot of the time. I feel like I’m stuck.”
Doctor Greene nods. “Well, let’s think of how to get you un-stuck. Remember when I kept on asking you to tell the story of your attack? Over and over again?”
Of course she remembers. Week in, week out, having to recite the play-by-play of her assault, with as much detail as possible. Recording it on an audio tape, listening to it repeatedly, finding ‘the point of greatest distress’. And through it all, feeling nauseous, wanting to just curl up into a ball in her bed and forget anything like this had ever happened.
“And remember the way we used cognitive behaviour therapy to counter the worst emotions you felt at that moment?”
The point in the narrative where I’m being choked…
“What were you feeling at that moment?”
The memory of not being able to breathe, the boy’s fingers digging into her throat.
“I felt like I was going to die.”
“And what would be so bad about dying?”
They’ve gone through this before, but reciting it is like some reassuring litany, a familiar call-and-response between a pastor and her one-person congregation.
“That I wouldn’t live.”
“And what would it mean to not live?”
“That I… wouldn’t be able to travel to all the places in the world that I’d still like to see.”
“And what else?”
“That I’d never get to have the kind of career I’d like to have.”
“And what else?”
“That I’d never get to fall in love.”
“And what else?”
“That I’d never get a chance to have a family, or children of my own…”
The doctor nods. “But you didn’t die. You’re still alive. So you can still do all those things you want to do. You can still travel, work again, have a career, meet someone, maybe have a family.”
Doctor Greene is telling her this, as if they are abstract truths, but they seem far from the concreteness of her own reality now.
The psychologist moves to the whiteboard in her cramped office and starts to write on it in blue marker. Travel. Career. Relationship. Family.
The words are stacked vertically on top of each other, along the left side of the board. To the right of them, the board is still blank, a white space waiting to be filled.
She shudders to see her life goals spelled out so starkly, as if they were a grade-school lesson to be memorized.
“So I want you to think… what steps can you take. Even really small baby steps to start reclaiming these things which you can still have?”
To think like that seems too difficult, too single-minded. The old Vivian could have done it, flashing ahead with a solution in seconds. But now she sits daunted by these huge questions, these possibilities from a previous life. She forces back tears, the familiar feeling of uselessness.
“I don’t… I don’t know where to start.”
Doctor Greene pushes on. “Travel. What can you do to start traveling again? Or maybe you’ve already started?”
There was the Croatia trip. It went a lot easier than expected. She had conversations with men and nothing happened to her. She was fine.
“So… do you think you could travel again?”
“I’d like to.”
They talk about booking another trip, maybe one with a friend. Cheap flights within Europe are easy to find. It could just be a weekend away… For a brief moment, she feels that old sense of excitement flaming up again, a gleam of light from a door that cracks open somewhere. But then the familiar fear returns, and the door snaps shut. She is back in darkness, but she has been reminded.
“And career?”
This one is harder. She’s never returned to that office in Old Street, aware of how much energy her job as a producer requires and how little of that she has now. Last year, she cut herself loose from Erika’s company and this year, the company’s been bought out. Roles have been consolidated, workloads possibly increased and she knew she wasn’t up for the fight. All that striving, trying to prove to the world that she is full of ideas and initiative. The truth is, she isn’t. Not right now.
She shrugs at the doctor. “My old job isn’t there anymore, and I suppose in theory I’d like to work again in film, but I don’t know when I’ll be ready. And I have no idea how I’d go about getting a job.”
“Are you desperate for money?”
“I’m on Incapacity Benefit, which helps.” But it’s not enough to cover the high cost of living in London, even when she’s at her most frugal. For the moment, she’s draining her way through her life savings.
She can’t ask her parents for money. They still don’t know about the attack, and asking them for money is something she would never consider. And besides, it’s not so much about the cashflow, it’s more about feeling useful, productive, good at something. Not like a traumatized wreck with no purpose in this world.
“So as one of your steps, would you say, start applying for jobs?”
More forms to fill out.
“I guess, but…”
All the effort of completing job applications; all the joy of being rejected. Besides, she knows that’s not how jobs in the arts work. Nothing is advertised, everything is word-of-mouth. Out of the office for over a year and she feels like a complete outsider.
She explains this to Doctor Greene.
“Maybe just start thinking about the kind of job you’d like to have?”
But why tease yourself with delusions of something that can never happen? She can’t go back to being the old Vivian, living and breathing for her exciting career. That much she knows.
Doctor Greene writes Start thinking about types of jobs on the whiteboard.
“And finally, relationship.” She taps the whiteboard with the marker. “I’m going to fold the topic of family into this, as they’re kind of related. How do you feel about the prospect of dating again?”
She groans, a kind of hopeless, wordless sulk.
“I don’t feel great about it.”
“So why do you feel that way?”
“I don’t want to go on dates.”
“And why not?”
She sighs, struggling to think of how she can put her thoughts into words.
“I know that boy was so far off the scale, he doesn’t fit in the same category as most men. But… this whole thing about sex, guys wanting it. I just, I don’t know. I don’t want to have to negotiate all that again.”
“You don’t have to address sex right away. I mean, you could just start by having coffee with someone.”
Yes, but it’ll still always be there. The prospect of sex. That unspoken thing which undercuts every interaction with straight men. Even if you’re just having coffee.
Doctor Greene continues, “Think of it this way, if you do want to have a relationship some day, you will have to go on a date with at least one person in the future, right?”