So I go about my business: more paperwork, risk-assessment and stress-vulnerability models. So often, my job is about ‘risk’: Are they a risk to others? A risk to themselves? But I have assessed my own risk recently and decided that to be with Joe is too risky for me; maybe what I have always suspected is true, that what happened to me means I am essentially dysfunctional, that love is too risky for me – who knows? That I am destined to have relationships like the one I had with Andy. I just know that I am beginning to feel back where I was in March, before Joe’s Facebook message drifted into my inbox as silently as snow, as invisible and transformative as a spell.
Kaye has been on visits all morning. At 2 p.m., she comes into the office, looking tired but in good humour. She’s been to see Mrs Patel again, and was marooned for two hours, being force-fed onion bhajis. ‘And how are you, my love?’ she asks me. We’re both standing in front of the big grey filing cabinets that line one of the walls, looking for notes. She stands back and surveys me. ‘’Cause you look a bit pale and tired, to tell you the truth.’
‘Actually, Joe and I split up,’ I say.
Kaye stops what she’s doing, her mouth hanging open.
‘But before you say anything,’ I add, pulling out the file I need, ‘I’m fine, it was the right decision. It was
my
decision.’
She puts one hand on her hip and with the other she grips the shelf, as if to settle herself in for the lecture, the big talk. I stand back a little. I don’t want to discuss this now but her ice-blue eyes are full of questions, concern. ‘But, I don’t understand,’ she says. ‘When did this happen? Why didn’t you tell me?’
‘I’m telling you now,’ I say, with a smile, but my body language is saying,
I don’t want to talk about this now.
‘But, Kingy, what about the baby …?’
‘Well, I know it’s going to be hard.’ I’ve been thinking this might save me in the end. I’ll have so much to do as a single mother of a new baby, I won’t have time to agonize over me and Joe and everything else. ‘But I just couldn’t go through with it.’
She’s looking at me like I’m crackers. ‘But why, sweetheart?’
I clutch the file tighter to my chest, like a barricade between her and me.
‘It just wasn’t right. The pregnancy was totally unplanned, so out of the blue. I didn’t want to make a relationship just of circumstance.’
She’s doesn’t say anything, but I can tell her mind is working overtime. She is giving the look she reserves for her clients: concerned but one step removed, objective.
‘So, there we are, maybe we could go and live in that hippy commune after all, eat biscuits and grow our armpit hair!’ I say, trying to lighten things, but Kaye’s not smiling. She is giving me that look that Joe gave me, like she doesn’t know who I am any more.
‘Anyway, so I was just going to make a cup of tea,’ I say, gesturing towards the door, where she’s still hovering. ‘Fancy a cuppa and a chocolate HobNob?’
She nods and I walk through to the small staff kitchen, glad to have got away. I put the kettle on, get two mugs out, put the teabags in, but, when I look up, Kaye is standing there, watching me.
‘It’s all right. I can make a cup of tea, you know. I’m not a total invalid just yet – give me a few weeks.’
‘Sorry,’ she says, making as if to go, but she doesn’t actually move. ‘Robyn …?’ She never calls me Robyn. Ever.
‘Yeah?’
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Yeah, positive, honestly. It was the right decision, trust me. Go on, be off with yer,’ I say, flapping her away, ‘I’ll bring it over.’
I fill up the tiny white kettle at the sink. A dolly’s kettle, we always joke. They’ve cut so many budgets, we have to have a Barbie-doll-sized kettle. I look out at the gardens below. My bump is so big now it’s hard to reach the sink properly and I have to stand side on, looking at the tall, silvery birch trees swaying in the breeze, the sun, pulsing through the leaves like the flash of a camera, blinding me momentarily, so I have to close my eyes.
The kettle seems to take ages. ‘A watched kettle never boils,’
my mum always used to say, and I can hear her voice, see her standing there in our big but eternally messy kitchen, hair up, reading glasses on, and I smile at the memory. And then, the kettle clicks to say it’s boiled, clicking me out of my daydream, and steam plumes upwards, clouding the window. I pour the water into the mugs and rub at the glass, absent-mindedly. Then, I stop. Just for a fraction of a second, but he was there and it’s enough to take my breath away, and I stumble back.
I learned once, in my training, that flashbacks are your body’s way of telling you you are ready to remember, and suddenly, remember is all I do. The memories come at me like knives. But they are not the peripheries of what happened that evening down Friars Lanes, the scenes before and after that have played over in my mind so often. This is the main event and it’s like refocusing a camera lens; sliding a prescription lens in front of your own, cloudy vision and seeing everything in all its full, awful clarity.
I am there. It is happening now: the way he smelled, that petrol-mixed-with-paint smell of the turps-covered cloths that I had no option but to lay my head on. The way I smelled – not of sex and intimacy, of how things should smell, but of a terrified, dry, invaded me. There is the gearstick, black and threatening as a gun, stuck into my right thigh, the sun-warmed, synthetic material of the van-seat covers that left a friction rash on the backs of my thighs for days. The way his huge, moon-pale stomach made a slapping sound as it hit my hard, clenched one; how my arms were flung back and my eyes squeezed shut, and my teeth jammed together. The flush of red where his throat met his chest when he was done. How much it hurt. The aching inside for days, like someone had put a vice inside me and slowly creaked me open. And I was being wrenched open now. I could feel it, as if someone had reached inside me and were trying to prise my hip bones apart.
‘Robyn, oh, my God.’
And then there is a huge, thundering smash and Kaye is there, at the kitchen door, and I am standing in a sea of hot tea and broken crockery, shaking, sobbing.
‘Are you hurt? Have you burned yourself? Oh, God, are you in pain?’
No, but I wish I was. Physical pain is so much simpler than this. If I could have drawn physical pain, it would be one straight black line; mental pain looked like those nests I’d seen in the treetops down Friars Lanes. I imagined they’d be brittle to the touch.
‘What’s wrong? What happened? Don’t worry, we can clear this up.’ And then she is treading with a crunch over the broken crockery, pushing it to the side like someone treading over the debris of an earthquake, and taking me in her arms.
‘I can’t tell you,’ I say, folding, crumpling into her. ‘I can’t tell you.’
I did tell her. We went into the disabled loo, which is about the only private place in our offices, and I told her everything: about the panic attacks I’d been having, the anxiety, about losing Lily, about how all these events of my past seemed to be seeping into my present so that I couldn’t tell which was which any more and, finally, Saul Butler, what he did to me, late that August, only three months after I’d got together with Joe; how I kept seeing his face, how I felt I must surely be going mad.
‘He was eighteen, Kaye,’ I said. Kaye was sitting on the toilet seat. I was sitting on the floor, my back against the wall. Somehow, it felt like I needed to be as close to the ground as possible.
‘He probably didn’t know what he was doing. I shouldn’t have let it happen. I don’t know if it was rape. I don’t know, I’m confused. Joe told me something Saul had said to a friend of ours, that we had a thing …’ I looked at Kaye, as if for answers. ‘Maybe it’s just how I construed it?’
Kaye was listening to me, she was crying, too. She leaned forward, reaching her hand out to mine.
‘No, you were raped, sweetheart,’ she said softly. ‘He raped you. And I think you’re probably suffering, in some way, from post-traumatic stress, and that this pregnancy has triggered everything that happened then.’
Funny, I’d forgotten my best friend was a trained counsellor and a psychiatric nurse. That I was a psychiatric nurse. You’d think I’d have seen it coming, wouldn’t you? But it’s strange, I knew things were bad but I just didn’t put two and two together. It was like it happened to someone else.
‘And, darling?’ said Kaye. ‘I think you have to tell Joe.’
‘I think it’ll help you. Also, Joe deserves to know, doesn’t he? After everything you’ve been through together; why you can’t be with him at the moment. He deserves for you to tell him the truth about everything.’
I nodded. I just wondered if he’d ever be ready for the ‘everything’.
Dear Lily,
Well, I feel like I’ve come full circle. I had Joe, I lost Joe once, and it’s happened again (something tells me we aren’t meant to be). The only difference now is that I’ve told him everything. Not everything, not every single thing, because I decided at the end of the day – what good would that do him? But I told him about the rape. That’s the first time I have ever written that down, by the way, but there it is, in black and white: I was raped, but I survived, and I have told two people now (three, if I count you) and that’s a massive leap forward. I feel, despite everything, that a burden has been lifted. That at least I have finally told the truth about my life.
It didn’t exactly go well with your dad but, then, how did I expect it to go? Telling him something like that? He was devastated and furious and I felt guilty that perhaps I’d told him for my benefit, not his.
What am I supposed to do, here in Manchester, now?
he’d shouted down the phone.
Some bastard does this to you, which means you can’t be with me, the father of your child. Some total bastard has fucked you up and I can’t
do anything about it? Who did this to you? I need to know.
I was prepared for him to feel angry. After all, I have had sixteen years to deal with this, while this is news to him, and I was prepared for the fact that he was going to know who had done it but I told him I am never going to tell him that, a) because I need to pretend Butler doesn’t exist for my own sanity because, once that’s out, the whole of Kilterdale will know, and b) because if he knows, he will want to kill him. And we can’t have me, a single mum, and the dad in prison, can we? Also, if he were to find out and confront Saul Butler, I fear it would open a dark place so big inside for me, that I don’t know if I’d ever get out of there, if I’d ever recover.
The answer-machine messages Joe left over the next day or two were always the same: they started off reasonable, under the guise of enquiring how I was, then descended pretty quickly into anger and bitterness. Joe has never been able to hide his feelings, he’s just not capable. So, ‘How are you, darling? I’m thinking about you’ turned, eventually, after some cursory smalltalk about what he’d been doing, into, ‘If I ever find out which bastard did this to you …’
I did take a couple of his calls but had taken the agonizing decision not to now, at least for a while. The simple bare truth of the matter was, that I couldn’t listen to it. I couldn’t listen to his emotions, too. I didn’t feel like I could say anything that would make him feel better anyway. No, I had to look after myself and the baby now. It would do Joe and I good to have some time apart.
And of course there were my patients: Grace, someone who needed me, someone to pour my energies into, even if I had the feeling that she – unbeknown to her – might have triggered some of this.
On the Saturday of the week after Joe had left, I stood hammering on her front door, as I had so many times before, only for there to be no answer.
I knocked again – ‘Grace?’ – and peered through the viewing hole, noticing as I did that the wreath wasn’t hanging on the door as usual. This was odd. Maybe after several years, she’d finally understood that the laws of physics meant it was going to fall off every time she opened it. No, that would be far too logical for Grace, far too sane. ‘Grace,’ I called again, ‘it’s just …’ As I said the word ‘me’, I realized that the door was actually unlocked; that you only need push it with a little force and it opened. The windows were open, so it was cold inside, the ever-present odour of cigarettes partially masked for once by fresh air, or as fresh as the air gets in Elephant and Castle. I called out her name again and waited, but there was no answer, so I walked into the lounge.
The scene that greeted me told me all I needed to know about why she hadn’t wanted me to come and visit her at home recently. Grace had been busy, very busy indeed. Every wall of the downstairs of her flat was covered in writing: red felt tip in varying sizes and fonts, some curly and elegant, some jagged and angry. The wreath that Cecily had made as a child hung from the light fitting, photos of her were scattered on the floor, and the graffiti on the walls all said the same thing:
MUMMY, HELP ME. PLEASE SAVE ME.
I stood for a moment, considering what to do. Above all, I told myself,
remain calm
. She’s done some crazy stuff before – crazier than this – and she’s got on the straight and narrow again. At the same time, I knew the chances of Grace seriously flipping out were getting higher as the days went by and that the likelihood she was remaining compliant with her meds was very slim indeed. The anniversary of Cecily being taken from her was nearing, and on every other anniversary of the past five years, she’d been sectioned; so, really, her track record was poor. She was probably skipping around someone’s back garden naked right now, God love her. But I wasn’t going to give up on her now. We’d come so far. I’d leave her a note, then I’d go home. It was Saturday, she was bound to call soon.
I found a letter lying on the floor from Kingsbridge Mental Health Trust and on the back I scribbled a few words:
Grace, it’s Robyn. It’s about quarter-past two on Saturday and I’ve come over to check on you but you’re not here. Grace, I’m really worried that you’re unwell and distressed. Please call me. I’ve seen what you’ve done at home and I’m not cross, I’m just concerned.