She laughed softly at one of the host’s jokes; the commercials began. He put on some coffee and refilled the crisp bowl. After a few minutes the show resumed. Even shriller, it seemed, even louder. He concentrated on his breathing. Inhale slowly, slowly exhale. Ten times. With his feet on the ground.
“A convection oven,” his mother shouted. “Oven,” he wrote under her name, and saw out of the corner of his eye that she was bending over towards him and reading what he was writing. He felt her breath on his face. Suddenly he stood up. “I have to eat something,” he said, picking up an empty bowl and walking back to kitchen, where it occurred to him that the game they were playing was actually a bit weird. He’d played it for years, but suddenly it seemed different. In the past they’d spent hours sitting there coming up with things they wanted, things that never came and never would come, and he’d always stayed calm, even when he would have preferred being upstairs alone. This too was part of his life, he’d reasoned. But that no longer seemed appropriate. Maybe because his thoughts were wandering, because he couldn’t stop thinking about the girl after seeing her from so close by. Or because of the time he’d spent in prison, and all the words the psychologist had used, the words that applied to him and made him feel so different from before. Or was it the workbook? The exercises demanded so much concentration they drained him almost completely.
He dished up some leftover omelette and bread for himself and went back to the living room, called Milk over and sat down on his own chair with the dog at his feet. He sniffed and tensed his back muscles again. He thought for a moment. Maybe it wasn’t necessarily bad that something had changed about the game. He was just tired. That was why he couldn’t keep his mind on it.
“Your turn,” his mother said, and he nodded absently.
“Just a moment.” Then, to get it over and done with, “Waterbed.” He took a couple of bites, chewed carefully, then washed it down with a mouthful of squash. He manoeuvred a cube of ice between his teeth with his tongue and held it there, waiting with his mouth half open for it to melt a little, the cold passing down his spine, then cracking it in half with one hard bite. It’s just a game, he thought. Enjoy it. Still, he couldn’t stop brooding about how restless he felt and how detached from his mother and the things around him. It was all so different from how he’d imagined it. At half-nine he went upstairs, closed the door and got back to his workbook.
THE NEXT MORNING, Monday, Jonathan started work. Happily, because he hoped that regular workdays would make it easier for him to get back into his old rhythm.
And for a while his old life did start rolling again as if nothing had ever happened. He got up at five and worked through the day’s programme calmly. Walking Milk, working until half-two, taking the dog out a second time, helping his mother, cooking, walking the dog again, doing his assignments, taking care of the fish.
He spent the evenings sitting with his mother and each evening was the same as the one before. After tea she sat on the sofa and watched TV. He sat on his chair and thought about things. Time passed, then he went to make some coffee. He asked if she wanted some too and she said, “Yes, lovely, son, nice.” He watched her, the way she drank and the light from the television gliding over her face, and saw thoughts passing through his head as well. Often they would end up playing cards at the kitchen table, the window open wide. They played elbow to elbow. He endured it. Evening after evening.
Sometimes he saw her look at him and quickly avert her eyes. Often she held the cross on her necklace between her thumb and index finger to rub it cautiously. He wondered what was going through her mind at times like that. As long as she saw how hard he was working, how he was doing his very best. He got the boxes and change of address cards. That pleased her. How could it not?
But he also thought about that day with Betsy. Sometimes he got a sudden urge to walk over to his mother, lay a hand on her forehead and slide it down over her eyelids, as if that would be a way of reaching the place in her brain where the images and thoughts of that day were stored. As if he could wipe the stain away, like condensation on a window. She must know that something had happened with that child. He wanted her to just see the present, the person he was becoming. Someone better.
No matter what he was doing he was alert, watching her. He saw the toll the heat was taking on her body. She was coughing more; her breathing was getting more laboured. And every day he resolved to try even harder. To clean the house better, getting rid of the most ingrained dust, blowing the sand out of every chink and crack, sweeping, mopping.
He was relieved that they’d let him come back to work. It was because his dad had been the factory’s head foreman for fifteen years and his grandfather had founded the company before that. Otherwise he was sure he might as well have written his job off.
They put him back in his regular spot on the line, the place in the back corner where he’d always worked, under the bluish fluorescent light. Nobody deigned to meet his gaze, but he felt the other men’s eyes on him when he wasn’t looking. Burning holes in his back. He shut them out by raising his shoulders, his head tucked down into the collar of his greasy, stinking oilskins.
Just when the sun was showing itself outside, the machine started up and the gutting began. A movement that was second nature to him, that seemed to flow automatically through his shoulders, hands and fingers. He pulled his Stanley knife out of the beam, put his gloves on and pushed earplugs into his ears to block the endless drone of the machinery, then spread his legs with his boots planted firmly on the floor to avoid slipping in the pool of rinsing water and slimy waste that would soon be washing around his feet. Tails, scales, guts.
During the breaks he kept aloof from everyone, like always. According to the psychologist, secluding himself was a “survival mechanism”. That was what he called it. Everyone had survival mechanisms: there was nothing bad about it, it was normal. Good, even. And things got crowded inside his head faster than they did with other people. It was simply a question of taking what the psych called his “vulnerabilities” into account.
During the breaks he sat at the back of the canteen with a cup of coffee, reading Nature and staying out of any conversations. He wouldn’t have known what to say anyway. The other workers were foreign to him: they had loud voices and smelt of booze and rolling tobacco; they talked about women and bars and complained about the boss. They couldn’t wait until they could go home again. But he loved his job, the stream of actions that just kept coming: grabbing the fish from the belt, inserting the point of the knife in behind the gills and pulling it back towards him in one fluid movement, turning the fish over, repeating the same motion on the other side, and done, next. Often it felt like time was accelerating and at the same time draining away into the cuts he made in the skin with his knife. In moments like that the other men didn’t seem to exist. And it would be like that every day. Over and over.
At half past two precisely his shift finished. In the small room behind the canteen he wrung his stiff, clammy body out of the oilskins, sprayed them and his boots with the high-pressure hose and strolled home through the heat in his overalls and boots. There he had a quick shower, took the dog for a walk, helped his mother and was in the kitchen cooking again at six. Frying the fish he’d been allowed to bring home that day. Cod, sole, gurnard or whiting. The grease specks on the stove, the spitting oil, the flour he rubbed over the fish, powdery soft on his hands.
And every day he worked in the workbook, twice a day, no matter how exhausted he was. He was determined to become better and he would. A better person. A new person.
For a few days he’d only seen the girl out of the corner of his eye. Sometimes, when he came home, she’d be sitting on her space hopper in the middle of the bare expanse. Other times he’d see her walking, dragging the hopper behind her like a reluctant animal. A few times he saw her on roller skates at the edge of the village, drawing long lines through her boredom in the narrow streets. Each time he made sure not to catch her eye, sho
oting quickly down a side street. He was concentrating on himself and his therapy.
Today, Thursday, he had worked on what the psychologist called the ABC. It was a way of understanding and controlling the choices you made and what happened in your life. You could expand it with a D, an E and an F, but the main thing was the ABC: the Activating Event, your Beliefs about it, and the Consequences. Beliefs could be rational or irrational beliefs and they led to healthy or unhealthy consequences. He’d drawn three parallel lines with his ruler and made a column for each row, a reassuring activity. It was all linked together like a chain, that was what he had learnt. Your feelings came from your beliefs and led to behaviour that had consequences. And then you had the events, things that happened to you. They were things you had no control over. But you could choose how to deal with them.
Now he had to give his own example of a behaviour chain. He thought about it, finding it difficult, gently gnawing the end of his pencil for a while. In the end he wrote down: “Activating event: mother can’t breathe. Belief: I am responsible. Consequences: tense, worried, mistakes at work.” What it came down to was learning how to change the beliefs that made you feel and act in certain ways. Breaking the chain.
He fleshed out his example, worked at it until he’d provided as much detail as he could, then finished off with a long relaxation exercise. Lying stretched out on his back on the floor with the cotton-wool plugs in his ears. His mother was watching TV; there was no one to disturb him. He concentrated his full attention on the inside of his skull. That was a place of calm. A state he’d been practising achieving.
It was like he could hear the quiet murmur of his blood; everything inside him was suddenly so quiet, and that gave him the courage to descend further into his body, the way he’d learnt in the visualization exercises. With his eyes closed he worked his way down, through his throat to his shoulders and into his chest. He held each spot for three seconds, breathed out and continued his journey. He saw his stomach, liver, all of his organs, and imagined them the way he knew them from the fish at the factory. The liver a gleaming purple, enclosed by a soft membrane, his intestines a greyish red, grainy. He pictured his cock, which seemed soft, friendly. Hesitantly he lowered his hand to it and felt it. His balls were soft too. All the energy seemed to have flowed out of them.
The past few days he’d made so much more progress than with the assignments they’d made him do in prison. It was like he’d raised himself up to a higher level, he thought proudly. Without any help from anyone else. The psychologist had insisted that it often took years before the treatment really began to have an effect. Before men learnt to divert their thoughts, as he put it. And then they still had to put it into practice. Sometimes it was beyond them and medication was the only solution. Anti-libido drugs. But not for him, he thought, while carefully wrapping his hand around his cock and rubbing it with his fingertips. It began to stiffen and swell, but even now his mind stayed clear.
The exercises worked on him so well. If this keeps up, he thought, maybe I’ll be finished in a few weeks. He couldn’t remember ever having felt this strong. Maybe he needed to test himself again. Just go and sit down somewhere near that girl. He saw her often enough at the playground.
He raised himself up slightly on his elbows. He just had to see what happened when he saw her again, he thought, and slumped back down on the floor. His breath left his mouth in a long sigh. That psychological report had felt like a constant weight pressing down on his chest. It said that the chance of a relapse, a repeat offence, was high in the short to medium term. But right now that seemed completely wrong. And to prove it he was going to do another exercise.
He sat down again at the small table, turned to an empty page and carried on from there. His hand was aching from all the writing; a muscle was quivering. He didn’t let it distract him. “Breaking Free,” it said in his workbook. “Think of an activity in your daily life where you later realized that you were asking too much of yourself.” He thought about it until he heard his mother calling from downstairs. “Jon! Yoo-hoo!” And when he didn’t respond immediately, “Jon, you going to make some coffee?”
“Five minutes, Mum.” He wanted to carry on. It was about situations in which you demanded too much of yourself. Maybe that week last year when he did a lot of overtime. He put the earplugs back in and thought about it. Then began writing. He looked to the fish for help, and kept writing.
When he was finished, he made two cups of coffee and went to sit with his mother in the living room. “Thanks, son,” she said. “Lovely.”
THE NEXT DAY at three o’clock on the dot Jonathan was alone and ambling over the sand and gravel where the blocks of flats had stood. It had been a hard day at work and he was exhausted, his shoulders aching. Sweating in the baking-hot air that was shimmering just above the ground.
When Betsy was still around, he often took Milk for walks in the dunes with her. But only to the first part; her parents wouldn’t let her go any further. There was a big open field there where you could see rabbits hopping around even before twilight. He thought of the little squeaks she always made when she spotted one, just before covering her mouth with her hands in her astonishment, every time again, so he could only tell how big her smile was from the dimples in her cheeks and the wrinkles around her nose. He could be so envious of how free she was. Every evening he knew what was coming: she always acted the same, but he never got tired of seeing it.
But he would never do anything like that again, he thought, taking a child out of the village. That had been so stupid of him, so unbelievably stupid. He was only allowed to talk to the girl from next door up to the bench of the old playground with the swing, where he had seen her sitting yesterday. That was the absolute limit. And no longer than five or so minutes.
Suddenly he thought of one of his very first sessions with the psychologist. In his first weeks in jail he’d constantly brooded over how it could have happened. How could he have let the horrific fantasies that had slowly crept into his head become reality? He pictured himself sitting at the table across from the psychologist, his fat file between them, and felt the fear and the shame.
“Offence analysis”—that was what they were doing, going back to the exact moment, just before it happened. He would have to do it again later, the psychologist explained, in the psychiatric hospital. He was better off being prepared. He’d even have to give a presentation about his offence to all the patients and staff. Taking responsibility for what he’d done, that was what they called it, taking responsibility. Everyone had to. Just thinking about the hospital paralysed him with fear. He thought about the bustle and racket, the unexpected fights.
But now he was trying to do it, making his first attempt to sketch out a presentation, sitting at a table with the psychologist one afternoon. He struggled to answer the man’s questions, but often there was just silence in his head, he couldn’t explain himself.
He had actually wanted to be the one asking the questions. He wanted to know how he could have turned out so different from the person he’d always thought he was. Often his mother’s words sprang to mind, her claim that everyone was born perfect, created by God. If that was true, how come he, whenever he thought about what had happened, no longer felt like he was one whole? It was like his head had been crammed too full, year in, year out. Too many words, voices, questions, situations. It didn’t fit. Sometimes it got so full it seemed like his head was starting to quietly tear, to break, like he was falling apart.
He often sat silently at the table, staring awkwardly at his hands for long periods, ashamed that he had so little to say. Never before had he felt so lost. The days and nights flowed together and he just sat there in his cell. Alone. Waiting.
“I understand that it’s difficult to talk about,” the psychologist had said. “Let’s try to write it down instead, together, to see what exactly happened.” He’d given him the workbook, the exercise book, printouts with exercises. “Increasing tension before the offence
” was written next to the exercise that first time. He had to learn to know himself better, “to raise the alarm” sooner, “to learn to read his body”. Together they would work out a list of warning signs. The section about tension was illustrated with a cartoon of a barrel that was getting fuller and fuller. In the last picture it started to bubble and overflow.
“Try to keep a record of your tensions every day for seven days,” the psychologist suggested. “When does the tension increase, when does it decrease?”
He’d nodded and gathered up the papers, forcing a smile, uncomfortable. He would do his best, definitely. He always did.
The psychologist nodded too, looking at him over the top of his glasses and making notes, which he then stored away in the folder. Silence.
After a while all those pages about him were bound together with a thick rubber band. He had stared at it disbelievingly. “Is it really possible?” he’d wanted to ask. “Will I become whole again?” And: “How am I going to get by in the hospital? What will I have to do to survive?” But he didn’t say a word, he just slowly rubbed the knuckle of his left thumb with his right and waited. The man took off his glasses and folded them up. “Next week we’ll continue.”
That evening he’d drawn up a graph in his cell. A tension graph. He took a ruler, pens and pencils, paper, and drew up a grid. On the left, a scale from one to ten; along the bottom, the days. And every day he studied his workbook. He noticed that the words and the tables were keeping him company, even though he didn’t always know just what he was doing.
And when the next week came, he at least had a neatly completed graph with him. He’d even joined up the tension levels to make a smooth, descending curve. And the psychologist seemed satisfied. He smiled. “Fantastic, Jonathan. It’s going well, isn’t it?”
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