The Skeleton Cupboard (31 page)

“Then transfer me to another placement.”

“No, that's not going to happen.”

I didn't know what to say, so instead I put my face in my hands and started to breathe heavily.

“Talk to me. Come on, let's have it.”

Did I trust this woman? Should I tell her about the worst moments of my life and let her hold them, interpret them for me? She continually surprised me with her intuition and kindness, but she also totally discombobulated me and, at times, either really irritated me or scared me.

“Harold told me that I hadn't really processed my grandmother's murder. He said that I was too angry still about her murder and hadn't grieved for her loss.”

“Harold is a wise man. And?”

“And now all I am doing is a pathetic stumble through my sessions with men and their partners and friends trying to navigate their way through the hell of impending death without any kind of emotional compass of my own.”

Chris lit a cigarette and offered me one.

“No, thanks. I'm trying to cut down.”

She exhaled. It smelled lovely.

“OK,” she said. “So did you have to be sexually abused to help Imogen?”

“No, of course not!”

“And did you have to go through the camps and survive the Holocaust for Harold to trust you with his life story?”

“Oh come on. Give me a break.”

“Listen to me. Here's the break. If you think you can only do this job by having a perfectly rounded acceptance of all the shit in your life and also a complete understanding of the pain of your patients before you can help them with theirs, then dream on.”

That statement shocked me by its informality and how it hit home.

“When I was fifteen, my grandmother was beaten to death with an iron poker by a heroin-using pregnant drug addict.”

“I know.”

How the fuck she knew bothered me but didn't stop me from talking.

“My grandmother was difficult. She was incredibly hostile toward my dad. They were like each other: creative, expansive, emotional. But she was really unpredictable. Sunday lunches were a nightmare. She'd come and after a while they'd argue loudly and aggressively and then she would go home. That defined my childhood.”

“OK. People have lived through worse. And?”

“Can I have a cigarette?”

Chris lit one and handed it to me. “Go on.”

“Dad is well known in TV. My grandmother would try to emotionally blackmail him into casting her in his shows. He did it because he felt he couldn't not, but it was a disaster because their relationship was so visibly hostile.”

“Why?”

“I'm not entirely sure, but I know she never made him feel wanted. From when he was a small boy, he could never call her ‘Mother,' only by her name—that's what she insisted on. They lived in chaos. She had her own life, with lots of lovers, while he was put into endless boarding schools. And then when she was murdered, my poor dad was a suspect.”

Chris sat forward in her chair. “Not good. What happened?”

Oh, so much happened. What should I tell her?

“The press was camped outside our house, but Mum told them to fuck off.”

Chris smiled. “I see where you get your chutzpah from.”

“My sister and I were sent to stay with family friends, who were very kind but left the TV on and we saw the news reports.”

“Not great. And?”

“There were these two detectives who knew it wasn't Dad. They found the murderer's fingerprints in blood on my grandmother's laminated medical cards and caught her, a pregnant drug addict, within three weeks.”

“And?”

“And she was arrested and tried and got a shit nothing sentence, had her baby in prison and got out within eighteen months.”

“So what did you do?”

“I read lots about the mind of the killer. I discovered psychology. I wrote to the bloody home secretary about my grandmother's murderer's pathetic sentence.”

“And?”

“And I got a trite bullshit letter back explaining the justice system and commiserating on my family's loss.”

I stood up and began to walk around the room; sitting down compressed my lungs and by this stage I was finding it hard to breathe.

Chris stayed in her chair; she didn't turn around to look at me pushing my back up against the wall at the far end of the room.

“So, just to be clear about all this,” she began, “your grandmother was bludgeoned to death.”

Nice choice of words, lady.

“Your father was implicated, but after a short while her killer was apprehended.”

I nodded, but I don't think Chris saw and so she continued.

“The sentence was paltry and the response to your question about this less than satisfactory. But you found a place that intellectually stimulated you.”

Nice summary.

“You became interested in why people do what they do, even if what they do sits on the darker side of life.” Chris turned to me. “So, you saw the nastier side of death. You are angry. Well, think about this. These men have a starring role in a horribly nasty side of death and they are all bloody angry and they don't need some trite practitioner with no sense of the guts of death to lead them through it. They need someone like you.”

Was that a criticism or a compliment?

“So here's my advice. Take that experience and put it in a box somewhere in the attic of your mind. It's not gone, but it is stored until you are ready to open it and look at the contents fully. For what it's worth, I don't think that time is now.

“Next, focus hard on what the experience of your grandmother's death has given you—an experience of the darkest side of life, and death, and an appreciation of the horror that such an experience can bring.

“Either you harness this, and objectively make it work for you and your patients, or you give up now in a way you didn't let yourself when your grandmother was murdered. You choose.

“OK,” she concluded. “I think that's all for now. You OK?”

I nodded and Chris left.

Put it in a box, place it in the attic and one day, when you are ready to do so, open it and really look at it. But not now; use the experience to do the best job you can by your patients.

Once again Chris said it short and sharp and got it totally right.

*   *   *

I was twenty-five years old, and I was a funeral veteran. Working in palliative care, with the dying, I experienced a part of life I'd never thought about much before.

The funerals were exhausting. All the usual pressures were there, plus a real worry about what to wear. These guys wanted their psychologist to be stylish to the last; a couple even gave me outfit suggestions a few days before they died.

I had to go to about three funerals a month and I was emotionally drained. The pressure to be part of the inner circle of people you had known briefly at the most intensely focused time of their life—some you had had deeply personal conversations with as they tried to sort out how they felt about dying; others you had witnessed behaving strangely because disease was eating away at their frontal lobes—that pressure was intense.

At the funerals I often didn't know what face to wear, how to look, what to say when I was pressed for intimate confidences by grieving relatives wanting to know more about a loved one's final weeks—confidentiality existed even after death. There were times when I knew the deceased had hated the family member in question: “Watch out for her. She'll be the bitch with the crocodile tears.”

Bloody hard.

It was my Sunday to have the girls around for a meal, and after something rather unspectacular (cooking was and has never been my thing), Megan, Ali and Rosie all sat on my bed to help me decide the next day's funeral attire.

This was going to be a big one. The well-known singer who had entertained us all on so many occasions on the ward had finally succumbed to this cruel virus; to be asked to his funeral was the invite of the year and I was going as Pete's plus one.

Megan wasn't impressed. “Plus one? Is this a funeral or a bloody party?”

“Both,” I said as I pulled the contents of my wardrobe onto the end of my bed.

Megan still seemed unimpressed. “Sorry, girls, call me old-fashioned, but when I die, I want somber and misery. I want you all in black and sobbing. This is just too weird.”

Megan, the girl from the Welsh Valleys, had moved to London but never lost that traditional sense of how things should be because that's how they always had been.

“Well, I'm bloody jealous!” said Ali. “Can't Pete wangle a plus two?”

Megan threw a shoe at Ali. “Pagan!”

The two girls started wrestling on the bed and Ali pinned down Megan.

“Listen here, boyo, when you die, I will be there in pink spandex!”

“You do that, sweetheart, and I'll haunt you forever!”

Some time later, while sipping a rather nasty, dismally warm Chardonnay, we applied ourselves to creating the funeral garb. Each of my girls selected an outfit, then took me solemnly to the bathroom, dressed me and made the big reveal to the others.

Ali went first and took the longest.

“Ouch! Bloody hell, Als, why the gripper knickers?”

“Because. Just shut up and breathe in.” She pulled them firmly up and into place.

“I can't breathe in or out. I'll bloody expire at this funeral.”

“Shut up and put your arms up.”

Ali poured me into a short, tight, sequined dress with my hair fully back-combed, false eyelashes and a shiny glossed porn-actress mouth.

“OK,” said Rosie slowly. “I see where you are going with this, Als, but I think too much party, not enough funeral.”

“You've made her look like a drag queen,” said Megan.

Next it was Megan's turn. She went for gothic widow in a black puffball skirt and DM biker boots.

Rosie again commented first. “OK, Megan, I can see you are trying to dilute the formal while keeping traditional, but—”

Ali interrupted. “But she looks fucking hideous.”

This wasn't going well.

Rosie locked us in the bathroom.

“OK, so what do you
want
to wear?” she asked.

“Rosie, I have no bloody idea.”

Rosie sat on the loo and, while peeing, looked pensive.

“OK, so here's the thing. You got to look the part, but also you got to look professional. Tomorrow it's the funeral; the next day you're back on the ward doing your stuff.” She yanked at the loo roll and pulled her knickers up assertively. “Wait here, I've got it.”

Ten minutes later the reveal was met with a round of applause; as always Rosie was on the button: black halter-neck pencil dress to just below the knee, short black cardigan, black sheer stockings, red lips, matching red clutch, black stilettos.

Outfit done.

The evening finished with a better bottle of wine and a lazy, simple chat.

“So, how would you want your funeral to be?”

The girls looked at me in horror.

“What the hell is that question?”

“Als, this is a serious question. Have you worked out your funeral? Who would be there? What do you want said? What about the music?”

Megan refilled the glasses. “That is just too weird!” she said.

“No, it isn't! Think about it. One of the only advantages of knowing that you are going to die is that you can plan your funeral. Loads of the guys I'm working with do it. It's awesome. They plan their final party and make it exactly how they would want it to be if they were there as a guest.”

So then we had a long debate about our culturally inhibited way of sucking the life out of a funeral.

After a while Rosie got us all a piece of paper and a pencil. Megan opened another bottle of wine and Ali put some chips in a bowl. We then all munched, sipped and wrote our ideal funeral plan.

For me, there had to be “Perhaps, Perhaps, Perhaps” by Doris Day. I also wanted “That's Life” by Ol' Blue Eyes and various other anthems. The rest is a secret until I die, but it will be one bloody good party.

And as for what the girls wrote down, well, that's a secret that only we know, and we all keep copies of one another's because we don't know which one of us will go first.

*   *   *

The placement raced to its end. I had never been so busy, living on a lot of coffee and very little sleep. I divided my clinical days between the two units and my university days and every night at home writing up case reports and slogging on with the dissertation. Even though I was tired all the time, I loved my clinical days and felt completely part of both services, especially the DDU. I began to wonder whether this was where I wanted to work once I qualified—if I qualified. The very thought of it made my heart leap with fear.

Mo had disappeared off the DDU radar and I was worried about her. Jessica was beginning to realize that she was better than results and was able to dump charlie. A few of my worried wells were now able to leave their homes and put their AIDS fear in a box in their attics.

Pete and I hugged and hugged and exchanged contact numbers. Sadly the last time I was with him was at his funeral, several years later.

And then it was time for me to say good-bye to Tom, and because it was another cold, sunny, spectacular day, we met in Soho Square.

“So where you off to?”

“I don't know, Tom. I have to graduate first. Then we'll see, but I'm hoping to work at a DDU.”

“Ooh! That'll be a laugh a minute.”

“I'll let you know when I've got there.”

“You can't let me know.”

What was he talking about?

“Why not, Tom?”

Tom took my hand. “Because we are not friends.”

I felt assaulted.

“No, listen to me, sweet cheeks. I have been your patient. You are now moving on. We no longer have contact—I believe that is how it works.”