Normally, I would have been mortified by the state of our family sitting in the front garden eating banana sandwiches in September. It was OK in summer but once everyone had gone back to school, it was no longer appropriate. I always had a keen sense of what other people thought of me. But this time I didn’t care. I didn’t give a feck.
Hollow-eyed, racked with despair, I stared at the passers-by.
‘Will the man really be able to let us back into our house?’ I asked Mum again and again.
‘Yesss! For Pete’s sake, Rachel, yesssss!’
‘And we won’t have to go and live in the dump?’
‘Where did you get this notion about the dump?’
‘Do you really think the man will come?’
‘Of course he will.’
But the man didn’t come. And afternoon moved into evening, the shadows lengthened and the temperature dropped. And I knew what I had to do.
I had to confess.
Dad arrived home before the man did. It turned out there was nothing wrong with the lock, Mum had just been using the wrong key. By then, of course, it was too late. I’d spilled my guts in an attempt to right the imbalance I’d wrought in the universe.
38
I decided not to use the Easter egg story. I feared that it didn’t paint me in a flattering enough light. So when group rolled around the following morning, I’d almost none of my life story written. Josephine was cross.
‘I’m sorry,’ I apologized, feeling as if I was back at school and hadn’t done my homework. ‘But I found it hard.’
Big mistake. Big, huge, enormous mistake with a double chin, thunder thighs and love-handles.
Josephine’s eyes glinted as if she was a tiger moving in for the kill.
‘Because there was so much noise in the dining-room,’ I cried. ‘I meant that kind of hard, not the other kind. I’ll do it tonight.’
But she was having none of it.
‘We’ll wing it now,’ she said. ‘You needn’t write anything, just tell us things in your own words.’
Shite.
‘It might be better if I had a think about it and then wrote it,’ I protested. I knew my protest was shoving me closer to having to do it, but I couldn’t stop myself. If I’d had any sense at all, I’d have pretended to be delighted about the impromptu suggestion. Because then she wouldn’t let me do it.
‘No time like the present.’ She smiled, knives in her eyes.
‘Right,’ she began. ‘Your sister was in to see you on Sunday, is that right?’
I nodded, and clocked my body language. At the mention of Helen, I’d closed up. My arms folded tightly around my body, my legs crossed and curled. This wouldn’t do. Josephine would draw all kinds of imaginary conclusions from the way I sat.
I peeled my arms off me and let them hang loosely by my side. I uncrossed my legs and opened them in such a relaxed way that Mike thought his luck was in. Hurriedly, uncomfortably aware that he’d had a good look at my gusset, I brought my knees firmly together.
‘By all accounts this sister of yours caused a bit of a stir on Sunday,’ said Josephine.
‘She always does,’ I said conversationally.
I shouldn’t have. You could smell Josephine’s excitement.
‘Is that right?’ she squeaked. ‘And I hear she’s a very attractive young woman.’
I winced. I couldn’t help it. It wasn’t that I minded Helen or any of my sisters being miles better looking than me, it was people’s pity that got me down.
‘And what’s the age difference between the two of you?’
‘Six years, she’s nearly twenty-one,’ I said, trying to keep any tone whatsoever out of my voice, so that nothing could be inferred.
‘You sound very flat,’ said Josephine. ‘Does her youth upset you?’
I couldn’t help but give a wry smile. It didn’t matter what I did, something negative would be read into it.
Josephine looked questioningly at my smile.
‘I’m just putting a brave face on it,’ I joked.
‘I know,’ she said, deadly serious.
‘No! Look, it’s a joke…’
‘You must have been very jealous when Helen was born,’ Josephine interrupted.
‘Actually, I wasn’t,’ I said, surprised. Surprised because Josephine was off-target. That she hadn’t reduced me to a gibbering, crying wreck the way I’d seen her do to Neil and John Joe.
Nah haaaa. Hope she’s good at dealing with failure.
‘I can hardly remember when Helen was born,’ I told her honestly.
‘OK then, tell us what it was like when Anna was born,’ she suggested. ‘What age were you?’
All of a sudden, I wasn’t so sure of myself. I didn’t want to talk about when Anna came.
‘What age?’ Josephine asked again. I was annoyed with myself because, by not answering straight away, I’d let my feelings show.
‘Three and a half,’ I said, lightly.
‘And you were the youngest until Anna came?’
‘Um.’
‘And were you jealous of Anna when she was born?’
‘No!’ How did she know? I’d forgotten she’d asked me the same about Helen, that her method was hit-and-miss rather than omniscience.
‘So you didn’t pinch Anna? Or try to make her cry?’
I stared at her, appalled. How on earth did she know? And why did she have to tell everyone in the room?
Everyone sat up. Even Mike had taken a break from trying to make eye-contact with my knickers.
‘I suppose you hated Anna for taking attention away from you?’ she suggested.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did.’
I was hot and sweaty. Squirmy with embarrassment and anger. Raging at being pitched back into that frightening world where my actions had had catastrophic results. I’d nearly have preferred the questionnaire to this.
I did not want to remember.
Even though it was always kind of there, half-remembered.
‘Rachel, you were three years old, an age that child psychologists recognize as a very difficult one to cope with a new addition to the household. Your jealousy was natural.’ Josephine had gone all gentle on me.
‘What are you feeling?’ she asked.
And instead of telling her to get lost, my mouth opened and the words, ‘I’m ashamed,’ tearfully sidled out.
‘And why didn’t you tell your mother how you felt?’
‘I couldn’t,’ I said in surprise. New sisters were things I was supposed to get excited about, not resent.
‘Anyway,’ I added. ‘Mummy was gone funny.’
I could feel everyone’s interest move up a notch.
‘She stayed in bed crying a lot.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because I was mean to Anna,’ I said slowly. My spirit shrivelled as I forced myself to say it. I’d made my mother go to bed and cry for six months because I’d been bold.
‘So what did you do to Anna that was so terrible?’
I paused. How could I tell her and all the other people there how I’d pinched a tiny, defenceless baby, how I’d prayed for her to die, how I’d fantasized about throwing her in the bin.
‘OK,’ Josephine said, when it became clear I wasn’t going to answer. ‘Did you try to kill her?’
‘Noooo!’ I nearly laughed. ‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘Well, you can’t have been so bad, in that case.’
‘But I was,’ I insisted. ‘I made Daddy go away.’
‘To where?’
‘Manchester.’
‘Why did he go to Manchester?’
How could she ask? I wondered in shame and pain. Wasn’t it perfectly obvious ? That he’d gone away because of me.
‘It was all my fault,’ I blurted. ‘If I hadn’t hated Anna, Mummy wouldn’t have cried and gone to bed, and Daddy wouldn’t have got fed up with all of us and gone away.’ And with that I horrified myself completely by bursti
ng into tears.
I only cried briefly before saying ‘Sorry,’ and straightening myself up.
‘Did it ever occur to you that your mother might have been suffering from post-natal depression?’ Josephine said.
‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ I said, firmly. ‘It wasn’t anything like that, it was because of me.’
‘That’s very arrogant of you,’ Josephine said. ‘You were only a child, you couldn’t possibly have been that important.’
‘How dare you! I was important.’
‘Well, well,’ she murmured. ‘So you think you’re important?’
‘No, I don’t!’ I interrupted, furious. That hadn’t been what I’d meant at all. ‘I never feel better than anyone else.’
‘That’s certainly not the impression you gave when you arrived at the Cloisters,’ she said mildly.
‘But that’s because they’re farmers and alcoholics,’ I exploded, before I realized that I had said anything. I could have cut my vocal cords out with a potato-peeler. ‘I think you’ll grant me that point.’ She smiled graciously. ‘You have the over-developed sense of self-importance that a lot of addictive personalities seem to have, plus the massively low self-esteem.’
‘That’s stupid,’ I muttered. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘But that’s the way it is. It’s a recognized fact that people who become addicts often have a very similar personality type.’
‘I see, so you’re born an addict?’ I said scornfully. ‘Well, what chance do people have in that case?’
‘That’s one school of thought. In the Cloisters we see it slightly differently. We think it’s a combination of the type of person you are and the life experiences you have. Take your case – you were less… robust, emotionally, shall we say, than others might have been. Not your fault, some people are born with, for example, bad eyesight, others are born with sensitive emotions. And you were traumatized by the arrival of a new sister at an age where you were easily damaged…’
‘I see, so everyone with a younger sister becomes a cocaine addict?’ I said angrily. ‘In fact, I have two younger sisters. What do you make of that? Shouldn’t I be a heroin addict as well as a cokehead? Good job I haven’t got three younger sisters, isn’t it?’
‘Rachel, you’re being facetious. But that’s just a defence mechanism…’
She came to a halt as I howled like a hungry prairie dog.
‘No more!’ I screamed. ‘I can’t bear it, it’s all such, such… CRAP!’
‘We’ve touched on a deep well of pain here, Rachel,’ she said calmly, as I nearly frothed at the mouth. ‘Try and stay with those feelings instead of running away from them as you’ve always done in the past.
‘We have a lot of work to do where you forgive the three-year-old Rachel.’
I moaned with despair. But at least she hadn’t said those terrible, cringe-inducing words, ‘inner child’.
‘And as for the rest of you,’ she finished, ‘don’t think that just because you’re not carrying a huge burden of distorted childhood pain around with you, that you’re not alcoholics or addicts.’
All through lunch I cried and cried and cried and cried. Proper crying, that disfigured and blotched my face. Not the fake, girly tears I’d produced for Chris the day I heard Luke had shopped me. But unstoppable, heaving sobbing. I couldn’t catch my breath and my head felt light. I hadn’t cried like that since I was a teenager.
I was filled with grief. Sorrow that went way beyond the heartbreak Luke had caused me. Sadness, deep, pure and ancient, had me helpless in its grip.
The others were really nice to me, giving me tissues and shoulders to roar on, but I was barely aware of them. I didn’t care, even about Chris. I was in another place where all the raw poignancy that had ever existed was being pumped into me. I expanded to accommodate it, the more that came, the more I felt it.
‘What’s wrong?’ a voice cherished. It might have been Mike. It might even have been Chris.
‘I don’t know,’ I wept.
I didn’t even say ‘Sorry,’ the way most people do when they’re overcome with emotion in public. I felt loss, waste, irretrievability. Something was gone for ever and even if I didn’t know what it was, it broke my heart.
A cup of tea appeared on the table in front of me and the tenderness of that gesture multiplied my grief tenfold. I sobbed louder and harder and felt like puking.
‘Hob NOB?’ Someone, who could only have been Don, screeched right into my ear.
‘No.’
‘God, she is in a bad way,’ I heard someone murmur.
And, mercifully, I found myself sniggering.
‘Who said that?’ I gasped, through the tears.
It was Barry the child, and I laughed and cried and cried and laughed, and someone stroked my hair (probably Clarence who knew an opportunity when he saw one) and someone else circled their palm on my back, as if I was a baby who needed to break wind.
‘It’s nearly time for group,’ someone said. Are you up to it?’
I nodded because I was afraid to be on my own.
‘In that case…’ Chaquie said, and swept me up to our room and produced all kinds of mad stuff, like Beauty Flash and Three Minute Repair to mend my disfigured face. It was rather counter-productive because the feel of her gentle fingers on my skin set the tears flowing again in a river that washed away the expensive creams as soon as they were smoothed on.
In the dining-room, after group, Chris pushed through the sympathetic throng around me. I was glad that Chaquie and the others made way for him so unquestioningly. It showed they knew Chris and I had a special bond. He smiled a smile that was only for me and raised his eyebrows in an Are you OK?’ way. From the concern in his pale blue eyes, I’d clearly been imagining any lessening of his interest in me.
He sat down, his thigh against mine. Then tentatively, nervously slid his arm along my back and around my shoulder. Very different from the quick casual hugs he usually gave me. The downy hairs on the back of my neck stood on end. My heart quickened. This was the most intimate contact we’d had since the day he’d wiped my tears away with his thumbs.
I desperately wanted to put my head on his shoulder. But I sat rigid, unable to pluck up the nerve. Go on, I urged myself. I’d begun to sweat slightly with desire for him.
Eventually, as butterflies came to life in my stomach, I managed to lean my head against him, savouring the clean, detergent smell of his chambray shirt. He didn’t smell like Luke, I thought idly. Then felt a short brief throb of loss before I remembered that Chris was just as delicious as Luke. We sat quietly and still, Chris’s arm tight around me. I closed my eyes and, for a few moments, let myself pretend it was a perfect world and he was my boyfriend.
It reminded me of an earlier, more innocent age, when the most a boyfriend did was put his arm around you and – if your luck was in – kissed you. The enforced decorum demanded by the Cloisters was sweet and romantic. It touched, rather than frustrated me.
I could sense his heartbeat and it was going faster than usual. So was mine.
Mike walked past and leered. Misty ambled after Mike and, when she caught sight of me and Chris, glared with such venom it almost removed the top layer of skin from my face.
As embarrassed as if we’d been caught in flagrante delicto, I wriggled away from Chris. Deprived of his clean, male, scent and the feel of his big shoulder and arm through the soft fabric of his shirt, I felt bereft. I hated Misty with a passion.
‘So tell me,’ Chris said, seemingly unaware of the condemnatory glares, ‘why were you so upset earlier?’
‘Josephine was asking me in group about my childhood.’ I shrugged. ‘I don’t know why I got so upset. I hope I’m not going mad.’
‘Not at all,’ Chris protested. ‘It’s perfectly normal. Think about it. For years you’ve suppressed all your emotions with drugs. Now that the suppressants have been taken away, decades’ worth of grief and anger and all kinds of stuff will resurface.
r /> ‘That’s all it was,’ he finished kindly.
I rolled my eyes. I couldn’t help it. Chris saw me.
‘Oh no, I forgot.’ He laughed. ‘You don’t have a problem with drugs.’
He got up to leave. Please don’t, I wanted to say.
‘Funny though,’ his voice drifted back to me, ‘that you’re acting just like someone who has.’
39
After tea that evening, we were given a talk. We often had talks, usually given by one of the counsellors or Dr Billings. But I never listened. That night was the first time I’d ever paid attention, happy to be distracted from the deep grief I’d been swamped with.
The talk was about teeth and it was given by Barry Grant, the snappy, pretty little Liverpudlian woman who called people ‘divvys’ a lot.
‘All rice,’ she ordered, in a booming voice that didn’t fit with the rest of her. ‘Keeyalm jown, keeyalm jown.’
We calmed down because we were afraid she’d headbutt us. She began her lecture which I found very interesting. For a while at least.
Apparently people with drug and food disorders often had terrible teeth. Partly because of their debauched lives – ecstasy-takers ground their teeth into nothingness; and bulimics, who rinsed their teeth with hydrochloric acid every time they puked, were lucky to have a tooth left in their head; as were any alcoholics who did a fair bit of throwing up.
As well as the debauchery, Barry Grant said, they all neglected to go to the dentist. (Apart from the inmates on the other end of the scale, who went to the doctor, dentist and hospitals far too much, on all manner of trumped-up charges.)
There were lots of reasons why addicts didn’t attend the dentist, Barry Grant went on to explain.
Lack of self-respect was one; they didn’t think they were worth looking after.
Fear of spending money was another. Addicts prioritized their spending so that most of it went on drugs or food or whatever it was they were keen on.
Fear itself was the biggest reason, she said. Everyone was afraid of going to the dentist but addicts never faced up to it. The way they never faced up to anything frightening, she said. Whenever they felt afraid they drank a bottle of whiskey or ate a lorry-load of cheesecake or put their month’s wages on a dead cert.