Becoming Tess

by H K Thompson

  She hadn’t realised how afraid she was that their work might be ended without the final stages of the story being delivered. So when Peter Archer had told her she could stay all the tension that she had held in her body was released with a rush. Thinking about her meeting with the Director made her feel hot again and dizzy. Her thoughts had exhausted her and her head was spinning, her mind reeling even as she lay still on the bed. The house, too, was still and quiet. If she slept now, in the morning she would be almost well again. So she slept.

  *

  Over the weekend Tess recovered from the migraine. She woke up on Friday morning feeling as if her brain were numb and injured. Her speech was slow and still slurred and she felt a dull ache in her forehead and behind her eyes that lingered and pestered her well into the afternoon. She had been weak from lack of food and the depletion that always followed attacks of the illness. Judith appeared at about eight o’clock, bringing her a cup of tea and biscuits. She asked Tess if she wanted breakfast and said that she was concerned as she hadn’t eaten for over thirty-six hours. She said that she’d been given permission to bring it to her room and Tess said, yes, she would like that if she didn’t mind.

  Judith returned with Mark about twenty minutes later. He looked concerned when he saw her pale face and encouraged her to eat some breakfast. They left her to her own devices. After a long, cool shower she found a set of clean clothes and dressed slowly, sitting on the edge of the bed to conserve the short bursts of energy that came and went with her exertions. It was like learning to be well again, she thought, and the illness had been a sort of cleansing and releasing, some strange rite of trial and purification. In her work with Evelyn she was reaching a culmination, a resolution, perhaps, that would place her on the threshold of something new and good. She threaded her watch onto her wrist and went to the door on weak and shaking legs. She must apologise to Evelyn for missing the session, she thought. She hoped that Evelyn had been informed and had not wasted a journey or her time.

  She found her descent of the staircase difficult and she held the banister firmly to steady herself. She was afraid of falling. At the bottom, and relieved that she had arrived there safely, she walked slowly and determinedly to the office door, knocked and entered. She told Mona that she wanted to check that Evelyn had been told that she couldn’t make the session and was reassured when she was told that she had known. Evelyn had also been concerned about her state but her mind was put at rest when the migraine diagnosis was given. She said that she hadn’t known that Tess had migraines and wished her better. She made her way to the garden, wrapped up against a cold and grey winter day, and sat in the potting shed, letting her mind wander, giving it no tasks to tax it and trying to relax her neck muscles which were stiff and painful. Her body ached with the release of the steely, muscular lock that had held her in its grip for days. She tried to breathe with the changes and offer no resistance to them. Her body, recently so habituated to acute tension, had forgotten how to relax. She had to remind it.

  The unit doctor had been visiting one or two of the residents that afternoon and she had been referred to him for a check-up at the end of his other consultations. He took her blood pressure, pronounced it low and told her to rest mostly but take some regular gentle exercise for the next couple of days. He said she looked pale. She said that she felt pale but she knew she would soon be better. She spent the rest of the afternoon in the TV lounge and went to bed early after an evening meal of pasta and salad. She felt as if she were healing and looked forward to a weekend of doing very little. She knew she was waiting for her next session.

  *

  Tess made her way to the therapy room on the first floor. She entered and Evelyn was sitting in her chair smiling. She said:

  “Are you better?”

  “Yes, thank you. Much better,” Tess replied. “Much better than I’ve felt in a long time, but still weak.”

  “Good. That you’re feeling so much better.”

  Tess looked down at the rug as she thought about where she would start. She paused for a few minutes and said:

  “I’d seen the four by four when I left off last time. I’m sorry to have missed a session. Really sorry.” She paused again.

  “I’d moved to the side of the track because I didn’t want to be seen. I didn’t know who was there,” she resumed exactly where she had left off.

  “It must have been about 4.45 by that time and the light was beginning to fade even though it had been fine. I knew I would be seen if I came down the drive and I decided that I didn’t want that to happen. There was something about this shiny, smart car parked in front of the cottage that made me feel uneasy. There was a curious kind of visual dissonance there, you know, broken-down cottage, gleaming new four by four. I couldn’t bring them together in my head so I decided to be cautious. I made my way along the side of the track where there were some shrubs and grass, scrub really, and where I was out of sight, I hoped, from the end window. That was the only window that looked directly up the track, I thought, but it was at the back of the house in the lean-to. I didn’t think anyone would be in there. From what I remembered it was full of rubbish. You could hardly get through the door from the kitchen.

  I was trying to be quiet. It was still, there wasn’t even a breeze, and as I got nearer the house I could hear voices. Sometimes they were raised and then they’d go quiet. I’d decided to keep hidden so I went around the back of the cottage where the light was very dim because it was so overgrown, and I found the kitchen window. There was a light on and the curtains were open. I don’t think they were ever closed. If I craned my neck I would just see into the window, see the kitchen. There were three of them with Stephen. I was shocked by what I saw, Evelyn. But strangely I wasn’t surprised. Stephen was tied to one of the kitchen chairs. He was looking at one of the men, dressed in a suit. He looked very smart. He was dark haired. It was cut short. He was a bit overweight and he wore leather gloves.

  Stephen looked even worse than when I’d last seen him. They’d been hitting him, that’s what was so awful, and the man in the suit hit him again, across the face with the back of his hand as I stood there and watched. My legs turned to jelly and I felt a real fear in me. For a second I felt like bursting in on them, distracting their attention from Stephen. I stopped myself, I’m glad to say. Then, as I watched, the other two men who had been standing next to the suited man began on him. He had nodded and the other two, the ones in leather jackets, began to lay into Stephen. I’d never seen a beating before but that’s what they did. They beat Stephen until his head hung onto his chest, until he was unconscious.

  They stood and looked at him, deciding what to do next. It was quiet. The horrible sound of fists on bone and flesh had stopped. Blood was pouring down Stephen’s face from cuts to his head and from his nose. I was so horrified and so terrified that I must have made a noise, something involuntary but distinct, that alerted them to my being there, to someone being there. One of the men in leather ran to the front door and pulled it open. It made a real racket and I pulled back around the corner of the house. If it had been daylight he would have seen me but by now it was nearly dark. To my horror, Evelyn, he walked towards me to the corner of the cottage and I ran, past an outbuilding and into the field at the back of the cottage. I’d no idea where I was going but I ran. I found the hedgerow and then a dry stone wall and jumped over it. I lay in the grass to get my breath and to listen. I could hear voices near the cottage and one called “Jake”. It must have been Jake who shouted back: “Someone over here. They’ve gone to the wall over there”. I could hear them running and the footsteps were getting nearer. I knew I had to move and I had to do it fast. I had to follow the line of the wall, keeping low and hope that they couldn’t see me in the twilight.

  I could hear them running towards me across the field so I followed the line of the wall until I came to a stream. I crossed. My feet were wet then and it was cold. I made my way through a stretch of woodland and by now it was dark
, amongst the trees. I could hear my feet cracking twigs and branches as I ran and knew I’d be heard. I don’t know how I ran so fast or for so long without running out of breath. I do know that every time I stopped to catch my breath I felt worse. So I kept running. It was as if I was finding a rhythm, somehow, and I felt I could go on and on. Adrenaline, I suppose. Anyway, I came to a lane, a very narrow one, a cart track really. I thought I was going in the wrong direction for the car and nothing I could see gave me any sense of where I was. I didn’t stay on the lane. I went through a hedge, literally, tearing my jacket and scratching my hands. And I sat there, by the side of the hedge and breathed as quietly as I could and waited. I thought that if I was very still they wouldn’t find me in the dark in the middle of nowhere. My heart was pumping as if it would burst with fright.”

  She paused, catching her breath there in the safety of the consulting room, and went on:

  “Lying by that hedge in the wet and cold, trying not to breathe so I wouldn’t be heard, blending in with the darkness and the landscape, I thought to myself that I’d probably escaped them and saved my own life because I’d been afraid that they’d kill me if they found me. It seemed to me that it’d be second nature to them, remembering how they’d been with Stephen. I waited for several minutes and then I heard and saw them stepping onto the track and standing there talking in low voices to each other, trying to decide where to go and what to do, I suppose. They couldn’t have been more than five metres away from me. I breathed so quietly, I was squatting in the hedge, trying to keep low and out of their eyeline. My ankles and the backs of my legs were screaming with pain.

  Then I heard them move away, perhaps back the way they’d come. I wasn’t going to risk anything so after a while I followed the hedge that I’d come through and came along the side of the field. When I looked up, to my amazement I could see the moon shining on the sea and the river estuary in the distance a long way below me. I couldn’t see the town but I knew it was down there. By now I was on a narrow path that led between wire sheep fencing, a sort of corridor. There was a gate at the end. I opened the gate quietly, still afraid that they had pretended to leave but that they were still there. I came into a clearing and there in the middle of the open space was the outline of some standing stones silhouetted against the sea in the far distance.

  It took my breath away for a few minutes. I stood and stared at them, these huge stones with an even bigger stone across the top, balanced above the side stones as if it was floating and bearing down onto the earth with a huge weight at the same time. They stood there as they’d stood for thousands of years, unmoving, permanent and timeless. There was a circle of smaller stones around the big stones and I sat on one and looked at the standing stones and the sea beyond lit up by the moon. I sat there with these ancient stones and they took me into a completely different state of mind. There was something defiant about them and I stopped being afraid. Perhaps it was the timelessness and permanence of them that took me into a different state of mind. For some unknown reason I felt strong again.

  And it was then I decided that I had to go back to the cottage and find out what had happened to Stephen. I had to do something even if it was risky. By now time was getting on and I had no idea how to find my way back to the road or to my car. I had my mobile in the car. I felt this strong urge to phone the hotel and tell them I wouldn’t be back for dinner so that they didn’t hang about waiting. It wasn’t entirely rational but it got me onto my feet. I looked along the path that I’d come down and in the moonlight I could see that there was no one around. There were rustles in the hedgerow but that was small animals moving about in the dark. There was no sound by now of voices and no sounds of footfalls anywhere. Either they were waiting silently to ambush me as I broke cover and came back onto the lane, or they’d gone. I decided the latter was more likely to be true.

  I began to walk in the direction that I thought I’d come but I was hazy about that, I’d been so tense and frightened. I knew I’d come from the direction away from the sea so, as I walked up the path and onto the lane, I knew I’d have to turn left and head inland. At one point I heard a vehicle coming up behind me and I jumped over a fence into a field. I was still afraid that they’d not given up their pursuit and had come back to look for me by car. But it was a small white car and it eventually disappeared over the top of the hill. I could see its headlights for a while, twisting through the lane up the side of the hill ahead. Soon after the car I took a left turn and began heading down hill in the direction I thought I’d come from.”

  Evelyn broke into the flow of Tess’s narrative. She’d glanced at the clock behind Tess’s shoulder and seen that their time was nearly up.

  “We must stop soon but before we do I have an observation. I was interested by the defiance that you saw in the stones. I can understand the projection as the defiance that you felt in yourself about what had happened, what you had witnessed and what you had experienced in being pursued. It was the defiance, I think, that led you to the decision to return to the danger of the cottage. That was risky. There is a sense I had as you were talking of something in you that believes in your own omnipotence, the other side of your fear and terror. It’s that feeling that can lead you into risky or dangerous situations.”

  “You think it was a mistake for me to go back to the cottage, don’t you?”

  “I think you were putting yourself in danger perhaps because of the defiance in you. That defiance was essential for you to survive your childhood but as an adult in the situation you were in, the defiance itself was the real danger.”

  Tess thought slowly and purposefully. “You mean I didn’t give myself a choice about whether to go back or not. I just decided to do it because my defiance told me to?”

  “Yes. Now we must stop. I’ll see you on Thursday.”

  Tess left the room and Evelyn walked to the desk in the corner of the room and sat on the old, upright chair. It creaked as it took her weight. She opened her file to a new page. She wrote her usual account of the content of what had been said, making her observations, not least about the measured fluency of the delivery. She pondered a while, gazing at the watercolour above the desk, a study of a lake and a high hill behind it. There were no people in the picture only the majestic beauty of the Highlands or Snowdonia or the Lakes. She didn’t know where. She was at a loss for words, thinking only, after several minutes, of the danger into which Tess had been intending to put herself and about her childlike defiance that ignored the threat that both Stephen and his assailants posed.

  It was a curious blind spot in her but she found the depth of it strangely moving. She was touched and alarmed by the naivety and innocence that drove Tess back to the perils of Hafod Fach. She believed that there may have been compassion, too, that impelled her to revisit Stephen, to find out whether he was injured or even dead. It was strange to Evelyn that she’d not considered calling the police and she could only put this down to Tess’s protectiveness of Stephen, her irrational and childlike loyalty to her brother. Dysfunctional families, she thought, have their own perverse and secret rules that are unfathomable to the rest of human society. She made a note of her ideas, closed the file and left the room for her elevenses.

  Chapter 18

  “I’d turned inland and was walking downhill in the direction I thought the cottage and my car were.”

  She stopped, paused thoughtfully and looked up from the rug at Evelyn.

  “I thought a lot about what you said. I was annoyed at first because I thought you were criticising me for doing something stupid. Feeling that way was enough to tell me that you’d put your finger on something. Underneath, I fight everything. I’m always in a battle and always trying to show everyone that I can do it, whatever it is. I’ve always done it and it’s led me into so much trouble. It’s funny how hard it is to see the most obvious things in myself. They’re very obvious and very obscure at the same time. They’re so obvious that you can’t see the wood for the trees. I’ve al
ways, underneath it all, felt like a victim. What I hadn’t seen was that I created the victim in myself because of this childish defiance that kept making me prove that I could manage. The fact is, I haven’t really managed all my life. That’s why I’ve ended up here. It’s all so sad.”

  She looked distraught for a moment as the tears welled up in her eyes. And then Evelyn saw her coping defiance reassert itself, in a straightening of her back and intensity in her eyes, as she pushed on with her story.

  “By this time the moon had disappeared and the sky was cloudy. The breeze had picked up from the sea and I could smell rain on the wind. I had a warm jacket on but it wasn’t waterproof and I began to get worried that I’d be caught in the middle of nowhere, in the dark and the rain, with only a jacket. As I came over an incline I could see the looming shape of Carningli in front of me and I knew that I was going in the right direction. Except for the breeze it was so quiet on the lanes and then it started to drizzle, one of those light drizzles that eventually soak you through. I turned up my collar and pulled my hands into the cuffs of the jacket. I had no gloves. I walked downhill for about ten minutes until I came to a really deep dip in the road between trees that overhung with a bridge at the bottom. There was a house there, stone built, well kept with a car parked outside and lights on. It looked warm and welcoming and I felt alone and cold. I didn’t know what I was facing and it never occurred to me to change my mind and go back to the hotel. That must be the defiance, and stubbornness as well, that always keeps me welded to any decision that I’ve made. I can’t change that decision, no matter how much it makes me anxious. What would make me more anxious would be to change my mind. I’m bound to what I’ve decided.