Lock Me In

by Kate Simants

  ‘What?’ Eyes all wide, butter-wouldn’t-melt incredulous. ‘It wasn’t me!’

  He laughed. Thirty quid a pop, the drama lessons his ex-wife made him shell out for and look what it bought.

  ‘You’re a terrible actress, Bear. Really bad,’ he said, returning his attention to the school-run gridlock. Should have walked.

  The kicking resumed, and he swung around. ‘Oi! Stop it!’

  She laughed, but then he clocked the crisps all over her almost-freshly-laundered school sweater. Busted, she started to brush at them, scattering them into the footwell.

  He blew out his cheeks. Didn’t say anything. Didn’t need to.

  ‘I’m hungry.’

  ‘But crisps, mate?’

  He wanted to leave it, because the clock on the dash gave him eight minutes to get Bear to school and wasting one of those minutes complaining about her diet meant wasting them all. When the bell rang at 8.45 he’d be looking at a clear week and a half until he got her back. But Nadia had complained enough times about having to deal with what she called ‘the BMI situation’ on her own. It wasn’t fair on her for him to just ignore it.

  He shook his head. ‘I did offer you a proper breakfast. I thought you loved scrambled eggs.’

  ‘Not since I was like three. I hate it.’ He could only see the top of her head now, but he was pretty sure she was holding back tears. ‘You never have any decent food in your stupid flat. I’m always hungry at school after I have to stay at yours.’

  ‘OK, well. I’ll stock up next time.’ The lights changed and he turned back to the road. ‘Just have to make healthy choices, that’s all I’m saying.’

  ‘All you’re saying is I’m fat and no one likes me.’ She stared angrily out of the window, nicking at the raw skin around her thumbnail with her teeth.

  ‘That’s absolutely not true.’ Nice one, Superdad. One guess what she’d remember about the visit with him now. In the mirror he saw her lean her head on the glass, and they finished the journey in silence. Could they bunk off for an hour? Take her to the park, make things okay between them so they’d part on good terms? No. Obviously not. Nadia would find out, for a start, and his approval rating was already on the floor. Things had eroded badly enough between them lately without him adding truancy to the list.

  Only three minutes late, he swung into a space miraculously close to the school entrance. He got out and went round to open Bear’s child-locked door.

  ‘My tummy hurts,’ she whined.

  ‘OK. Well, let’s get some fresh air and see how you feel in a minute.’

  ‘But I’ve got a headache.’ Her voice was quieter. He followed her gaze out across the playground to where two boys, older, were in direct line of sight. They turned away as soon as he made eye contact. Bear sighed and looked at her feet.

  He leaned across her to undo her seatbelt. ‘Friends of yours?’

  ‘No! Get off, Ben,’ she snapped, twisting away.

  He made sure the sudden sag in his chest didn’t make it to his face.

  ‘It’s Dad,’ he told her, pulling her bag and reading folder out from the back seat. This Ben thing was new this visit. No way did she call Nadia by her first name. He hadn’t even heard her shorten it from Mummy yet. He wasn’t having it. ‘You call me Dad.’

  ‘Whatever.’ She squeezed past him and stumped off towards the gate. Catching her up, he reached for her shoulder but let his hand drop before it touched her. Best not push it.

  ‘Tell you what. If you don’t give me a cuddle, I’ll cave your head in with a fire extinguisher.’ A bit too hopeful, the way it came out, but she let him draw level. He coughed, dropped his voice a bit. ‘Gouge your eyes out with a soup spoon. I will. I’ve done it before. In Helmand.’

  Which won him a very small smile. ‘You haven’t been to Helmand.’

  ‘Flipping have.’

  ‘And you’ve used that one before, too.’

  ‘Right, right. Sloppy.’ He shoved his hands in his pockets, thinking. ‘In that case I’ll just have to grate your nose off.’

  ‘Yeah? How?’

  ‘Cheese grater. Like I did in Operation Desert Knickers.’

  A single sniff of a laugh, and she glanced at him. The shape of her eyes so almost-Caucasian, hardly a sniff of Korean about her. Like even his genes were being diluted, rinsed out of her life.

  But her sideways smile was all his. She took a deep breath. ‘I’ll boil you alive and peel your skin off and sell it to the shoe shop so they can make shoes out of you.’

  The realization that she’d planned that, rehearsed it, glowed like a coal in his belly.

  ‘Nice.’ He gave her a serious look and slow-nodded. ‘What’s the score? Seventeen-twelve?’

  ‘You wish,’ she said, appeased now. ‘Nineteen-twelve.’ She cheerfully swung her bag at him, obliviously but narrowly missing his bollocks.

  Bear started to skip but stopped when she got to the gate. She was scanning the yard for those boys.

  Mae crouched. ‘If there’s anything you need me to deal with—’

  She shot him a serious look. ‘No. There’s nothing. There isn’t.’

  ‘Because if—’

  ‘Please, Dad.’

  Mae shrugged, straightened up, committing those two lads to memory: bags, hair, sneery little faces. The last of the latecomers ran past them, ushered in by her classroom assistant (Mr Walls, 29, newly qualified last year, single, previously a gardener, caution for shoplifting aged 13). Mae bent to fix the mismatch of toggles on her coat, and she let him.

  ‘Thanks for hanging out with me, Bear.’ He squeezed her shoulders. ‘See you next week.’

  She ducked him and was gone, off down the path, trying to press into a group of girls he half-recognized. Flicking a hand up briefly as a backwards goodbye. He flexed his fingers a few times in his pockets and headed back to the car.

  It didn’t get to him. Saying goodbye and not even getting a hug: it was no big deal. He dealt with assaults and suicides and RTAs, no problem, all the time. Cat C murders, child abuse, DV, the lot. All the fucking time. So, his little girl forgot to give him a hug before a whole nine days away from him, even though five minutes ago she was three years old, falling asleep in his arms as he read The Gruffalo for the eighteenth time? Christ! Take more than that to make him cry.

  From the driver’s seat he watched Bear disappear into the building.

  Music. He reached round to dig a CD out from the pocket behind his seat, and his fingers closed on a disk in a square plastic wallet. She must have left it there by mistake. He brought it out: Lady Gaga for Bear! on the disk in sharpie, and then under the hole,

  (not really, it’s Daddy’s very best CLEAN hip-hop mixtape).

  And it was clean, too: he’d checked and double-checked each track, and there wasn’t a single swear. It had taken some doing.

  He tucked it into the glovebox, then tried again and found Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle under a fine layer of fried potato crumbs. It was scratched to shit but last time had played fine up to ‘Who Am I (What’s My Name)?’, which would be long enough to get him to the nick. His speakers were almost as creaky as his brakes, but they were loud, and loud meant a clear head.

  Ignition, arm round the headrest to reverse. And off.

  All business.

  3.

  Charles Cox Psychotherapy Ltd.

  Clinical audio recording transcript

  Patient name: Eleanor Power

  Session date: 14 August 2006

  CC: OK, I think that’s recording … Good. Right, before we begin can we just confirm this because we’ve got a slightly unusual situation here. You have asked for your friend Jodie – our mutual friend, should I say – to be here during this first session?

  EP: Yes. Please. If that’s all right.

  CC: Certainly, whatever makes you feel comfortable. OK. So, what I’d like to do to begin with is to have a chat about the dissociation, and the range of what you’re experiencing on a daily basis.


  EP: OK.

  CC: And from there we can move on to having a think about where you’d like me to get you to. Does that sound OK?

  EP: Yeah. Yes. That’s fine.

  CC: So. A normal day then. How does that start?

  EP: OK well, it depends on whether I’ve had a fugue or not.

  CC: Tell me about that.

  EP: So, um, Siggy sometimes—

  CC: Siggy is your alter.

  EP: Yeah, sorry yeah my alter, she sometimes kind of takes over. I wake up at night sometimes but I’m not like, actually awake, it’s not me, it’s her. She talks to my mum sometimes, otherwise she’ll just try to go outside, that kind of thing. Sometimes we’ll only know Siggy was up because things will be moved, or lights will be on. Stuff like that. But I always know anyway because I feel her there.

  CC: Physically?

  EP: Not exactly. I mean, I always feel sick afterwards, sort of achy.

  CC: OK, so let’s say you’ve woken up, got up. What happens next?

  EP: Well, she’s always there. Just … like I can sort of sense her, whatever’s going on. It’s like she thinks things that I can hear—

  CC: Does she speak? Does she have a voice?

  EP: Well … no. Not really. But it’s like she’ll get scared or angry or whatever and I know it’s not me feeling those things. Does that make any sense?

  CC: Yes, it does. It sounds like what you experience is what I call co-conscious dissociation, which is when a person can feel that they have more than one identity at the same time.

  EP: Right. Yes, that’s what it’s like. But the times she gets me up and does stuff with me at night, and … I just have completely no memory of that at all.

  CC: OK. I’m getting from the way you’re speaking now that it’s quite distressing.

  EP: I just … I don’t know.

  [pause: 32 sec]

  CC: Would you feel comfortable going into a little more detail about the episodes you have at night?

  [pause: 12 sec]

  EP: Look, I-I don’t know.

  CC: OK: Eleanor—

  EP: Ellie.

  CC: Ellie. A lot of the people I see, they find it very hard at the beginning. They can feel like … well, they don’t know if they can trust me. Or it might be that they don’t trust that talking is going to help.

  [pause: 27 sec]

  EP: No. It’s not that. I just know what’s going to happen. We’re going to go through all this, and then you’re going to give up.

  CC: Ah, OK. Tell me a bit more about that.

  EP: I’m just … like, I’ve tried. You know? I talk to Siggy, I talked to other people, tried medicine and everything. All kinds of stuff. I don’t want to do all of that again. Just tell you all of it and then have you just say that actually you can’t help. Or that you don’t believe me.

  CC: Who does believe you, Ellie?

  EP: My mum.

  CC: She’s always believed you.

  EP: Yeah. She’s-she’s seen what happens. The fugues, and – everything.

  CC: Anyone else close to you? Other family?

  EP: I’m an only child. My dad’s dead.

  CC: OK.

  [pause: 11 sec]

  CC: OK. And was that a long time ago that you lost him?

  EP: Yes. Before I was born.

  CC: I see. It can be challenging, growing up without—

  EP: No. It wasn’t.

  CC: You don’t want to talk about your father.

  EP: No.

  [pause: 31 sec]

  CC: OK, Ellie, there’s a couple of things I’d like you to know. Sometimes therapists can be a bit mystifying. They can wait for you to work things out for yourself even if they have a good idea of what’s going on and what needs to shift in order to improve. But that can take a lot of time. In my experience I think it’s best to be up front and tell you what I think is happening, and what we’re going to do to put it right. Seems more honest, that way. Does that sound OK?

  EP: Yes. I just want her gone. I want to be better.

  CC: I hear you. So the first thing is, the aim of the psychotherapeutic work I’m going to do with you is to understand what’s happened. What I want to do is reduce the conflict between the different parts of your identity, help them cooperate.

  EP: OK. I mean, I can’t see that happening, but OK. We can try.

  CC: Good. So, the second thing I need you to know is that the kind of issues you’re having with Siggy, they’re something that almost always stem from quite a significant trauma, often something in early childhood.

  [pause: 34 sec]

  EP: OK.

  CC: And so at some point in our sessions we’re going to need to talk about that. What you yourself think is at the bottom of it, how it all started.

  [pause: 19 sec]

  CC: Would you like us to come back to this at another time?

  EP: No.

  CC: OK. I understand. The reason I’m—

  EP: I just … look, nothing happened, OK? There’s no deep dark secret. She’s just there. I don’t know why. I’m not going to come along here and just suddenly remember some massive, buried … it’s not going to happen. She’s always been there. I just want her gone. OK? I want her to leave me alone.

  [pause: 22 sec]

  EP: I just want her to leave me alone.

  4.

  Ellie

  It felt like she was gone forever. I called Matt again and again but there was no answer.

  I checked the time on the wall clock – three hours gone – and then saw the streak of pink highlighter on the calendar. I was supposed to be doing a shift that afternoon, volunteering in the children’s ward in the hospital where Mum cleaned, and Matt worked in the imaging lab. He’d set the whole thing up for me, sorting all the stuff out with the permissions, after I told him how one day I’d like to work with children. But after his effort, I’d manged to miss my slots twice in the last few weeks. The HR person had already come to see me about it, but I couldn’t explain to her what had really happened: that if I went back to sleep after a fugue, I was impossible to wake.

  Matt said I should just come clean about it, explain that I had a mental illness. It was a hospital, he said – how could they not understand? I didn’t dare, but I knew then I’d made the right decision in confiding in him.

  At first I’d been careful to stick to the rules, to censor myself. Mum knew how serious I was about him, and in his company at least, she approved of him. I’d come home once to find them roaring with laughter over a game of cards: he was genuine, polite, reliable, she said, and nothing like my father. She made me promise not to let myself fall asleep with him, no matter how tired I got, but she was still worried. There wasn’t a man alive who was patient enough, understanding enough, to be with someone who’d always sleep alone. Even good guys can break your heart, she said.

  To begin with I said nothing at all about Siggy, but I couldn’t keep the secrecy up for long. There was no boundary where I stopped and she began, and after a few months, I realized I couldn’t be myself without telling him.

  Matt had listened to it all. We’d been sitting in front of the log burner in his narrowboat, sharing a bottle of wine. I sat propped against his chest, and I told him the whole story. From the first time Siggy had got me up at night and taken me outside, until Mum, frantic at 4 a.m., found me lying underneath the car. I told him about the exhaustion I got the mornings after a fugue, the grinding headaches, the ten-tonne limbs. I told him everything.

  No. Not everything. I didn’t tell him about Jodie.

  After my very long monologue, there was a very long silence. And then he’d lifted my head from his shoulder and looked right into my eyes.

  ‘I’m not going to lie to you,’ he said. ‘I don’t understand this yet, but I’m going to. We’re going to make you OK.’

  I told Mum later, and she was silent for a long while. Eventually, she just hugged me. ‘It’s your life,’ she said. ‘Remember to be careful, though. He’s a good
guy, but I can’t protect him from her.’

  The very next morning, there were bruises all up her arms. I had no memory of what Siggy had done – what I had done. How I had slammed my own mother against a wall and thrown her out of my way.

  Like I was an empty coat, Mum said. But it wasn’t your fault.

  I heard a sudden movement and I froze, listening, but it wasn’t Mum coming back. Just boxes being moved around downstairs, from what I guessed was the stock room. Our flat was above a shop, an off-licence, and from the way sound travelled it seemed Mr Symanski’s ceiling, our floor, was made from little more than cardboard.

  I gave a start. Thin floors.

  If I could hear him …

  I pulled on my shoes and was at the front door before Mum’s warnings about him sounded in my head. Don’t talk to the neighbours. It only takes one person to suspect us.

  What was I going to say? Did you hear me leave the flat in the middle of the night? Because I’ve got a whole load of unexplained injuries and I don’t remember what happened? I stood there for a moment, my forehead resting on the cold glass of the door. Then I took my shoes back off and kicked them sullenly away.

  In the kitchen, next to the sink, Mum had left a beaker for me and a carton of orange juice. Forgetting the damage to my hand, I made the mistake of trying to twist the cap. I recoiled and knocked the whole box to the floor where it slopped out across the lino.

  Irritated, I opened the safe cupboard under the sink and took out the homemade cleaning fluid and some latex gloves. We didn’t take chances anymore: everything harmful was locked away. I couldn’t even be left alone with a bottle of bleach. I tried all the other doors, out of habit. All locked. Knives, matches, bleach, all beyond my grasp. I snapped on the gloves and clenched and stretched my hands, feeling the thin scabs on the wounds split, reasserting myself over her.

  My pain, Siggy. Not yours.

  After I mopped up the juice I carried on cleaning, using the soft scourers to attack the rest of the floor, the dented metal sink, the wood-effect laminate of the worktops. I scrubbed until my jaw ached from gritting my teeth. Folded in a corner, Siggy eyed me.