I might not be able.
She closed her eyes.
I might be rubbish at rubbing a dog’s ears.
Hector might not let me know. His breeding is against him and he wouldn’t let me know if I was doing something wrong.
She kept on, though, practising the shapes and the intentions of tenderness.
A man stands by the door in the Caterham train as it slows and approaches London Bridge. He is holding the handle of a new bright red pram and putting a slight bounce in it for the entertainment of his child. The pram is of the modern and stylish type, one which is a marked, if expensive, improvement on more traditional models: easier to manoeuvre in crowded shops – or in trains – and raising the baby up high so it can look about. The man is half smiling, bouncing the pram handle, glancing in under the hood, bouncing again.
Another man of similar age – early thirties – stands so that he will be ready when the platform is reached. He says to the recent father, ‘It’s like a Ferrari.’
‘I’m sorry …?’
‘It’s like a Ferrari. The red.’ And the stranger points to the pram with a slight hopefulness, as if it would help him greatly should a pram be able to resemble an iconic and thrilling sports car in a meaningful way.
The father nods, maybe because he would also find this helpful. ‘Oh, yes. Like a Ferrari.’ He bounces the handle with slightly more vigour. ‘It’s new.’
‘I have one that age.’ It’s unclear whether the stranger is referring to the pram or the baby.
‘My wife’s choice.’ It’s unclear whether the father is referring to the baby or the pram.
The men smile at each other. Their expressions suggest they both feel they have been assaulted in some vast way, but are now redefining their injuries as pleasures.
13:45
MEG WAS WAITING for Laura. When the bloody woman was around, she managed to over-occupy the office, but it was worse when she wasn’t there. Laura being in front of you and looking the way Laura looked was horrible, of course: she was all layers of flimsy cloth and too many colours and a bag that would suit a ten-year-old and which matched the shoes that would suit a ten-year-old and had that indelible, burrowing smell of fags and also hemp and perhaps more than one form of hemp. The whole experience could fill a ballroom to its choking point, should you have a ballroom. Meg was glorying in Laura’s absence right now, but knew there would be an eventual return to put a kink in every bit of tranquillity generated by the blissful absence.
Eventually, the expectation of Laura became worse than having to sit across the desk from Laura and trying to be happy as she clacked randomly away at her keyboard, or chatted to event-arranging people with floral names, while drinking her herbal infusions and – when off the phone – throwing out strange conversational non-starters.
The trouble with Laura was that beyond being naturally irritating – Meg thought it was fair to say that; maybe not, but she was saying it anyway – beyond being fucking annoying …
Which wasn’t fair and wasn’t how to approach the problem.
She’s not a problem, she’s a person.
No, she’s both.
The problem was that Laura reminded Meg of being in the support group and the woman who had run it – someone who had also always managed to make Meg feel afflicted. It wasn’t Laura’s fault that she resembled the group leader, she wasn’t even aware that Meg had tried to be in a support group and, frankly, Laura was never going to find that out because she would have loved having the information way too much and it would have unleashed … Well, it was hard to say: advice about more lunacy Meg ought to try; meditation, or body scrubbing, or t’ai chi. Or else an outbreak of arm patting would ensue, or just …
All of that stuff gets depressing.
I’m sorted out and getting along just fine. Today was an exception, but not a sign that I’m off the rails. I don’t need any more solutions, no more cures. I am in progress. What more can anyone ask? I’m under way.
Being given a solution that didn’t work could end up suggesting your problem was permanent, or else that you were the problem. Probably there wasn’t any problem. Possibly you were being oppressed by unnecessary cures.
In the support group we were the bloody Sisters of the Unnecessary Cure, perched on our circle of chairs – always chairs – and going nowhere. We had to sit in a circle because that’s non-hierarchical. As if I cared. And as if there wasn’t a boss. Molly was our Mother Superior, all right – no mistaking that – ruling over the Aung San Suu Kyi Room in a far too faraway and inconvenient community centre to which I will never return. The place smelled of shit, because of the Parent and Toddler Morning Mingle that was in for a three-hour booking just before us. Toddlers can produce a load of shit in three hours. I’d sit there, inhaling kid shit and being stressed after the journey and bloody angry and …
It was my own fault that I had to travel such a way to get there, though. I didn’t want to find anywhere more local, amongst the not massive array of choices. I didn’t want to be seen turning up, or discover a neighbour who’d think she had something in common with me and need to talk about it later, come round and hold an autopsy on me in my own front room.
So I went to the Sisters and joined them in their circle of pain – usually seven of them and me – which wasn’t enough people to let any air get in amongst us, let it be relaxing, let me coast for a while. Molly would kick off by reading out a piece from a book of special, womanly meditation in her special womanly and extra calm I-love-the-universe-and-it-loves-me voice. Excruciating. I wanted her and the fucking universe to get a fucking room.
Then she’d talk us through one of those going-down-steps-and-into-a-charming-garden bollocksy visualisation scripts, only she had lousy timing about it somehow and so you either felt you were hanging around on your imaginary staircase while waiting for random others to catch up, or else she drove you along your tranquil passageways and over the self-affirming lawns until you began to imagine pursuers, or else your stairs just melted and then you were plunging quick, right down into … I always saw it as a tomb. I didn’t get a garden visualised with any success; only a cellar, or a tomb. I mainly conjured up this Gothic arrangement with bones – a sepulchre – and the basic scene got quite ornate. I enjoyed it after a while: rags and costume jewellery scattered on dusty flagstones, footprints of rats. I like rats. You can always trust a rat – intelligent and faithful. Still, I wasn’t exactly being invited to explore my fucking happy place – it was more about being forced to hang about in a profoundly disturbing and focused-on-death place. For what my opinion would be worth.
And that’s how things ran at the group: listen with Mother, the drop to the tomb and then visions of decomposition and next we had to talk about our week. And pat each other.
Which was the part in particular that got me. Someone would say they’d had a bit of a funny turn in a checkout queue, or a dream, or someone was still with her partner and he’d kicked off and there’d been an incident and it was grisly, just grisly, and turned you clear over inside, but then all that happened whenever a story stopped would be that the speaker got patted. From one side or the other, someone would reach out and pat them on their arm: There, there, dear, we’re sorry that you’ll keep on being you. It’s rotten, but what are the choices …?
You’d never get a pat from my side. None of that from me. I had more respect.
And Molly – who might even have granted her personal pat, if your week had been hellish enough – would pause to raise some tension and suggest to us that she was giving the matter some thought. Then she would say what she always said, which was, ‘Thank you.’ But with no tone in it. She sounded as if she was sleeping, or computer-generated, or bored witless. ‘Thank you.’ And next there’d be this bigger pause until someone else could think of a slice of tedium from their previous seven days. Either that, or they’d drag up some honest-to-God nightmare that you didn’t want to hear.
Rehearsing the pain until we’
d got it perfect. The pain that is sex that is pain that is sex that is pain, but shouldn’t be. It should not.
Meg made her third cup of bargain coffee. It didn’t taste of much but what it managed was unpleasant. That was OK.
Molly didn’t like me. Because I didn’t speak. Because I didn’t want to.
Perhaps also because I didn’t pat.
This means, I think, that I am complaining about when they didn’t respond to the horrors and also about when they did, which could suggest that I couldn’t be pleased by them, no matter what, and that might be true.
They were still wrong, though.
When I got in the room the first day, I knew it would be no use and that if I wasn’t careful it would make me feel no use, too, and so I didn’t give the pack of them the satisfaction of hearing my specific version of then he did this and then he did that and then on that occasion I did worry I wouldn’t make it – I did think that I might die and not mind too much about it – and, by the way, the idea of kissing anyone, trusting anyone, will these days tend to catch me from a number of nasty angles and I think I’ll never do it again. I think that I would surely, really die if I genuinely tried, and how can I live like that, exist as this person? To which there is no answer.
Molly was unable to answer – not that I asked.
Molly doled out pauses and that regular ‘Thank you.’ Or if we were really lucky, we’d get a whole ‘And how did that make you feel?’
Honestly? That was her best effort? How did being assaulted make us feel? Were we not trying to get away from how it made us feel? Was our problem not that we still very much felt how it made us feel? Was it not fucking obvious how it made us feel?
And fuck that.
I mean, fuck that.
I mean, I am better than any of that.
And my answer in that situation is forever going to be, ‘How do you think? How do you actually fucking think it made me feel? How do you think you and your fucking useless autopilot clichés make me feel?’
Meg’s spoon stirred away in her tannin-stained communal mug. It served no purpose. Meg didn’t take sugar. She didn’t take milk. God knew, what there was of the coffee was fully dispersed.
I came there because I wanted to get better.
I wanted to not be about him.
I wanted to be about me.
I wanted to peel away from the sure and certain faith that touching is fatal and kindness an attempt to take by stealth.
And they didn’t help.
So I ditched the sessions. After the fourth week, I just didn’t go any more. And no one ever called to find out why.
I could have chased up other options, or something. I could have tried again. Oddly enough, telling people who couldn’t help me over and over about the thing that they couldn’t help on the off chance they might know someone who could and refer me to them didn’t really appeal.
I got tired.
She sat at her desk again and knew it was nearly lunchtime and also knew that her lunchtime was happening late today.
It doesn’t matter. Molly and the group was three years ago. But if I remember it then it makes me angry. Who wouldn’t get angry with rubbish like that? Who wouldn’t resent wasting all of a maybe good afternoon with therapy that only ever made you want to hit passers-by when you’d finished your hour, because you couldn’t harm anyone relevant – beyond yourself – and nobody there in the group was suitable for stressless punching. They’d be able to identify you later when things went to court.
They made me feel filthy and I don’t like that.
I’m not filthy or afflicted.
Meg reached down to scrub at Hector’s scalp.
They didn’t ask at the hospital this morning. No one even tried to ask me why I was upset.
The dog was out of reach, though – lolled on one side and breathing off and away into a sleep. She forgave him for resting.
I can have a rest, too. I’m a birthday girl – or thereabouts – and I am cultivating gratitude for the areas of my life which are lovely.
I can find them.
I can make them.
Meg had been staring at her computer to no effect for quite a while. A great deal of nothing was getting done.
It’s unfair to hate Laura.
She is naturally hateable, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK.
And she doesn’t mean to remind me of Molly or of a minor years-ago disaster that didn’t help me with quite different disasters which happened some other years earlier.
It’s not her fault.
And I have to work with her.
This means – bugger, bugger, bugger – that I have to be grateful for Laura. In some way. As a remedy for the poison that she brings.
Really?
Yeah. Apparently.
But really?
Yeah.
It’s what I’m told can be effective and effective is what I’m after.
Effective is what I’m all about.
Said the woman who hasn’t answered a single email, or done anything of note in almost an hour.
A message had come in from the Stewart family who would like to meet Roddy, a bull terrier with an especially lugubrious and mildly sidelong expression and a tested fondness for children, but not cats. And don’t interrupt him when he’s eating.
She replied with an appointment that might suit them.
I can be grateful. I can be grateful that Laura doesn’t work here on Wednesdays and I do.
But this is a Friday.
And Friday is a day when she does work here and I do, too.
But I can be grateful that I am putting in a foreshortened day.
But Friday is when I glance – slip, slide – over the accounts, just to help out and save them paying for too many hours of the genuine, real, not-struck-off accountant.
No one has a problem with this. Although I can no longer call myself an accountant, I can still have a look at the week’s figures in an accounting type of way. The fact that I royally screwed up my life doesn’t mean I have forgotten how to add. For example. And managing the no money I now have to live on is sharpening every skill I ever had, believe me. If you want a manager for a railway, or to run a hospital, ask someone who’s living on £750 a month, give or take. Ask someone who’s living on less – they’ll work you financial fucking miracles. They do it every day. They’re either ingenious, or done for – no half measures.
Nobody hires a bankrupt accountant – not in that capacity. I would not want them to. Them trying to would fry my brain. But there is always bookkeeping to look at and I can. If I don’t have to, I can enjoy it. If the weight of it is absent and I have no authority. I make suggestions. I am here and capable of suggesting.
And it’s not Laura’s fault that glancing at figures while she’s in the room makes me feel as if she’s disapproving and has rumbled me as fifteen kinds of fraud. This is purely a reflection of my own belief that I am not capable of anything beyond screwing up again.
And again.
And infecting all I touch with failure.
Which is why the mental discipline and gratitude are important.
I can be grateful that she hasn’t enquired into my past with any vehemence.
I can be grateful that she doesn’t insist on being friends with me. I can be grateful that she doesn’t pat me.
I am glad of these things.
So she makes me glad.
And I can assume that her mother is fond of her and so I could be – not that I’m old enough to be her mother. Not without some junior-school incident having occurred and it didn’t and that’s another cause for gratitude.
She’s plainly damaged and so am I – we have that in common. Huzzah.
And I can try to like her shoes.
Except that her shoes are vegan creations made out of vegetable leather and bloody tofu. I’m exaggerating. Vegetable leather for sure, though.
I can pray for her.
No, I can’t pray for her.
; I truly can’t.
I can’t incorporate the God thing. I’d love to, but it’s not a good fit. Meg’s mobile rang in the midst of this demonstration of spiritual ill-health.
No. I’m healthy. That’s the point – I am attempting to be spiritual, in my own way, and Laura is attempting to be – I think – spiritual in her own way and I suspect that I loathe her, if I’m honest, because she reminds me of me. That’s been known as a pattern of behaviour. It’s practically standard practice where I live.
Meg picked up her mobile, took the call, which was from Carole who was asking how the hospital visit went, because Meg had forgotten to phone and tell her.
I wanted to blast away the morning, forget it and go on as if it never was, which is the kind of thing that leads to areas of forgetting – you get these islands of blankness. I used to be mainly made of islands … But still there’s the ocean, the sound of the ocean goes on.
And Laura is trying to manage her own things and, OK, using quite pitiful methods in my opinion, but me too, probably me too. I have to rely on semi-strangers calling me up and harrying me with sympathy, or whatever, and remedies of that type. Laura ought to have my sympathy, empathy, decency.
But then I never get too much decency from me, so why should she?
‘Hello.’
And Meg listened to Carole insisting on being given information about Meg’s well-being in the way that concerned people did. This was a demonstration of friendship and should be appreciated. ‘It was fine … I’m sorry that I didn’t call …’ Carole was functional and a woman and about Meg’s age and in an apparently happy relationship – she was therefore someone who felt like several types of threat when you were with her in person. Even though she was nice. She was extremely nice. She was bothering to phone and that was nice.
I apologise to her five or six times in every conversation. Unless it’s a long conversation, in which case it’ll be more: including the apology for taking too much of her time.
‘No … yes … well … but I am sorry, and anyway, and, yeah …’ It wasn’t quite possible to tell the truth yet. It wasn’t quite safe. ‘I didn’t like it but it was fine and they’ll tell me the results in a while – it was ten weeks last time, but it might end up more … and then I’ll know.’
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