by S Williams
This time was different.
For a start, the session was being held in a new room. Jay could tell that this put Daisy on edge. Spaces were important. They signified safety. One of the first sessions they had done together consisted of counting the steps from the entrance to the door of the room.
‘The final hurdle from the street to the workspace is often the hardest,’ the therapist had told them. Then she had taken them all down to the pavement and they had step-counted the route to the room. Then they had done it again, cataloguing the doors and corridors they passed. Then again, listing the colours. And over and over, the entire session, until they had a map of the journey completely logged in their heads.
‘So next time you will be able, as far as you can, to be in control of your environment.’ She had beamed at them. ‘And don’t let it stop there. Breaking down the spaces in your day into mappable segments can be the first steps to controlling the way you think about the world. Putting the power back in your hands.’
Jay thought it was a little too much like giving in, but she could see the worth in the effect it had on Daisy. When she had first watched her in the street it was like watching a shadow. She seemed to slide through the city, trying hard not to make an impact. Like she didn’t really exist.
Slowly, after a few contextual-space sessions, she began to assert herself. Become more tangible. Not like she was part of the city exactly but like she owned her journey through it.
So when they had arrived at the room supposed to be housing the session to find a sign saying it had moved, Daisy was already put on edge.
When they walked into the new room to find a new member, that anxiety only increased. The new woman didn’t seem to fit, somehow. She sat at the back, but seemed to attract the gaze of the room like she was a magnet. There was something about her; an anger, or dismissal of her environment. Like she didn’t want to be there.
Jay wondered if that was how she came across, when she first started.
The difference was, of course, Jay hadn’t wanted to be there. She was undercover, doing a job.
She was a fake.
When the therapist came in and started drawing the blinds, Jay knew it was only going to get worse. All the sessions they attended were in light; either sunlight or artificial. Daisy never went anywhere with dimmed lighting. She didn’t like her world to be blurry, or in gloom.
‘I don’t know who I am if I can’t see myself,’ she’d told Jay.
No sessions in the dark with candles. No sessions where you had to lie down. No sessions where you had to put your trust in someone else, like holding or catching or touching.
And no sessions involving regression. That was major.
‘I’m not interested in going back, only forward. And I’m not interested in understanding; only coping.’
Jay got it. Not everybody needed to understand why something was. They just needed a way to be able to function with it.
‘Why is she drawing the blinds?’ whispered Daisy, a slight twist of panic in her voice.
Before Jay could answer, the therapist turned and addressed the group.
‘Hello, everybody. As we have been forced out of our normal space today by a technical problem, I thought I’d turn the situation to our advantage by trying something new.’
Jay felt Daisy stiffen some more. Daisy didn’t like new, or different, or spontaneity. She liked certainty, repetition, and mundanity. The boring cogs that meant the clock could keep on ticking.
‘As you know, our normal session is all about control of our environment.’ She smiled at them. In the gloom her teeth looked predatory. ‘But as today’s forced move has shown us; we can’t always control that environment and so need to learn other techniques to help us stay in the driving seat.’
The woman reached into her bag and pulled out two tea lights. Daisy was almost concrete in her stiffness. Jay wondered if they should leave, but as the therapist lit the candles Daisy seemed to relax. Jay decided to hold off and see what played out.
‘Now the biggest hurdle is being able to feel connected. That is why we do the step-counting and the place mapping. It allows us to feel grounded; not to the places themselves, per se, but to our relationship to them. But what happens when this is not possible? How do we secure our place setting when our environment changes beyond our control? That is what I’d like to focus on today.’
‘I think she should have focused on securing the correct fucking room,’ whispered Jay, but Daisy wasn’t listening. Her whole attention seemed to be focused on the therapist.
‘To demonstrate the technique I’m going to ask for one of you to share the space up here with me. I know this is different to how we would normally interact, but then…’ her smile was warm and full and inclusive to everyone in the room as she took in her class, ‘…that’s kind of my point!’
The therapist looked around the group, until her gaze settled on Daisy.
‘Daisy,’ she said gently. ‘Would you help us out on this one? I think your particular concerns with space would be ideal to demonstrate the technique.’
To Jay’s amazement Daisy smiled and stood, walking to the front of the room and joining the woman.
‘Thank you, Daisy.’ The woman’s voice was calm and reassuring. To Jay it sounded like a countdown.
The therapist placed two chairs facing each other and sat down. After a moment’s hesitation Daisy sat on the other.
‘That’s excellent.’ The woman said encouragingly then turned to face the group.
‘The biggest obstacle we face when finding ourselves in an unsecured environment is drifting. The feeling that we are not anchored to anything. We can’t count or catalogue or spatially control. We feel like we are just flotsam washing in the swell of the city, with no agency or ability to determine.’
The therapist turned back and faced Daisy.
‘May I?’ she said, holding out a hand. After the briefest of pauses, Daisy nodded.
Everything felt wrong to Jay. The new room. The new member. The darkened setting and the breaking of a barrier they had never crossed before. The intrusion into personal space.
The woman gently took Daisy’s hand. ‘But of course, there is a stable space, an internal cityscape, if you will, that we carry about with us all the time. No matter where we are, or who we are with, there is a safe space for us to access. Does anybody know what I’m referring to?’
The room seemed to hold its breath. This was so far removed from anything they had done before that they had no reference.
‘Yourself,’ concluded the woman, smiling at Daisy. ‘No matter where you are you always have yourself with you. That, in a way, is one of the fundamentals we need to inhabit. No matter what is done to you, and who has done it, you always have yourself. Your core being. No one can take that away.’
Daisy smiled at the woman. The woman smiled back, then looked down at her hand, the smile slipping slightly.
Even in the flickering light. Even in the safe setting, Jay could see that Daisy’s grip on the woman was hard. More than hard. Her knuckles were clenched so tight they seemed to be popping. Jay knew that the therapist’s bones must be gritting together, causing her significant pain.
The woman looked up from her hand and smiled at Daisy.
‘It’s all right, Daisy. There’s nothing to fear. Inside of all of us is a central being of truth. The real us. If you can just learn to access that then you will always have a secure place. Somewhere you can call on when you need something extra.’
Daisy smiled wider and Jay stood. She could see that Daisy was only smiling with her mouth. Her eyes were cold, like buttons. Her eyes were merely reflecting, not seeing.
‘I don’t think…’ began Jay, stepping forward.
‘It’s all right, Daisy. You just need to find your centre. I know you are just reacting to inner uncertainty. But the question you need to ask is,’ the woman paused. Jay could tell she was in pain, but she was putting a brave face on it. Being professi
onal. ‘The question you need to ask is: do you really want to hurt me?’
Daisy blinked for a moment, then let go of the therapist’s hand.
The woman smiled.
Then Daisy launched at her and the room exploded in pain.
25
23rd October
‘What the fuck happened back there, Daisy? You nearly beat the shit out of her!’
The whole room had watched as Daisy had straggled the therapist, raining punches down on her, while the woman screamed and tried to fend off the blows.
Jay and Daisy sat in the doorway opposite their apartment block. Jay smoked furiously, trying to calm herself down. She had had to pull Daisy off and away, shouting apologies into the shocked silence of the room. She had half carried, half dragged her through the streets. All the way Daisy had said nothing, just allowed herself to be led here, back to where they lived. Jay had expected to hear a police siren with every step. She looked at Daisy.
‘Why the sodding hell did you hit her?’
Daisy said nothing. Just watched people walk past their building. Fat people. Thin people. People of different colours and social backgrounds. Young and old. Jay wasn’t sure if Daisy even saw them.
Jay wondered if she should phone Slane. Things had accelerated way beyond anything she could deal with. Beside her, Daisy took in a shuddering breath.
‘It was what she said. It went straight through my brain.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Do you really want to hurt me? It was what was playing down the phone when it rang again. This morning. When I threw it against the wall.’
Daisy’s voice was monotone. Like her throat was just a mechanism. No need for emotion. Just paper to print on.
‘Okay,’ said Jay. ‘That’s weird, I guess, but she was just asking–’
‘She said that deep down we’ve always got ourselves.’
Daisy continued as if Jay hadn’t even spoken. ‘That at the centre of ourselves is solidity.’
She turned and looked at Jay. Her heterochromia – the blue and the brown – made her look like she came from outer space.
‘But I don’t think I have a centre. I’m not even sure if there is such a thing as “me”.’
‘Oh, Daisy.’ Jay tossed her cigarette and reached for the woman. Daisy pulled back.
‘Daisy isn’t even my real name. It was just the name they gave me.’
‘What do you mean? Who?’
‘The Fishers. The people who made me. I didn’t have a name until I was five. Up to then I just had a number.’
Jay looked at her. At the girl who seemed to be only half in the present. It would have been better if Daisy had been crying, Jay thought. If there had been big slugs of tears leaking out of her eyes and sliding down her cheeks. Because then she might have been able to wipe them away, maybe hold her. Maybe help. Instead, there were just two different-coloured eyes, dry and dead and broken. Butterfly eyes, gassed and pinned to her face and left to desiccate.
Daisy blinked. ‘They called me “fish”,’ she said, her voice flat and old and almost too quiet to hear. Jay saw a ruby jewel of blood slip down from her lip where Daisy was biting it; an alternative to tears. Deeper and thicker and harder to fathom.
‘Don’t,’ she said softly. ‘Don’t hurt yourself, Daisy.’
‘Why not? How else am I going to know I’m real?’
Jay stared at her, helpless.
26
23rd October
Jay was sitting on Daisy’s mattress. She was propped up against the internal wall watching her friend.
‘I don’t have too many memories of my childhood,’ said Daisy. She had her back to Jay. She had taken off her coat, revealing a dark grey T-shirt, darker still where she had sweated between her shoulder blades. Jay could see the fine scars poking out of the neck of the garment, criss-crossing her skin like someone had covered her in a pain web. ‘Little snatches, that’s all. Like songs on the radio, when it goes in and out of signal. Do you know what I mean? Or like when you put on headphones to keep the world out, but little pieces of it seep in. Like a leaking bucket, only in reverse. Filling up instead of emptying out.’
Daisy was drawing on the whiteboard in her bedroom. It took Jay a minute to realise what it was. A portable radio, with headphones attached by a wire. Like a Walkman. Underneath she had written something, but the writing was too spidery for Jay to decipher without getting up and going nearer, and she didn’t want to stop Daisy. Disturb her. It was like the woman was unwinding.
‘Radios don’t go out of signal anymore, Daisy,’ said Jay. ‘Everything is digital. They just buffer. Either there or not there.’
Daisy shrugged without turning around and continued drawing. Jay was finding it difficult to breathe.
‘Whatever. Back then, they went out of signal. Or white noise would come through like it was snowing inside the radio. Or maybe it was the batteries running down. One of the first memories I have was my mother getting all her hair cut off, singing along to that song by Culture Club.’
‘“Do You Really Want to Hurt Me?”’ said Jay softly.
No wonder Daisy had exploded all over the therapist. It must have triggered something from her past. What the fuck had the woman thought she was doing?
Daisy ignored her like she wasn’t there. ‘I don’t know how old I was. We never celebrated birthdays. Except the one where we were branded the first time.’
‘Where were you living, Daisy?’ Jay spoke quietly, like she was in a room of sleeping children. The word ‘branded’ felt like a stone dropped in a poisoned pond.
‘I don’t know. It had a big garden. In the summer I used to like sitting under the apple tree and watching the ants.’
Daisy paused, like the memory had overloaded her. After they had come into the apartment Daisy had dislocated. Gone into another place within herself. Jay felt like she was an observer of the inside of Daisy’s head.
‘I’m going to take a shower. Will you pour me some water?’ she asked, before disappearing.
Jay watched as she left the room. Walked out into the corridor with steps that looked like she had learnt them from a book. Jay wanted to go outside right then. Phone her boss and tell her it was over. She couldn’t do this anymore. Tell her that she thought Daisy was about to crack open. That she needed to bring her in for proper medical care.
But then she didn’t want to leave Daisy alone. She seemed so fragile. Instead, she walked into the kitchen/living room and began looking in the doorless cupboards. Most were empty, but in one she found a stack of plastic cups. She removed two and filled them with water from the tap. Then she walked out of the living room and into the hall. Daisy was still in the shower so she placed the cups down carefully on the floor and walked to the flat entrance door. Undoing the locks she stepped out onto the landing and checked her phone for a signal. In her peripheral vision, she saw the door opposite close. The nosey neighbour. Jay made a mental note to question him later. Ask him if he’d seen anything unusual.
Like someone breaking into Daisy’s flat maybe.
Or perhaps Daisy breaking out, she thought grimly.
She checked her phone.
Seeing full bars she typed out a message to Slane. She told her about the therapist, and the memories bleeding through from the past. She asked for assistance, explaining that she was out of her depth. No longer in control. Then she snapped the phone shut and went back inside. Jay picked up the cups, took a deep breath, and walked in.
Daisy was back, drawing on the whiteboard. Pouring out her pain.
‘The memories are coming back. The garden wall was really high, and the only window I could look out of was the ground floor. But it was one of those houses where the garden was higher than the front of the house, so it kind of started halfway up the window. There was a sort of narrow run around the house at the back. Like a bank.’
Jay was momentarily confused, then realised Daisy was still talking about when she was young.
It took Jay a second to realise what she was drawing. It was the mermaid from the phone. The tattoo that had been sent to her.
Jesus, was it only this morning? she wondered.
As Daisy drew, reaching up to complete the hair on her picture, her T-shirt rode up. On her skin, just above her boxers, Jay could see a smudge of blue. The mermaid Daisy had shown her earlier. They were clearly the same.
‘Oh, Daisy,’ she whispered, feeling tears form behind her eyes.
The old tattoo, older than could possibly be legal. Put on her as a stamp of ownership.
‘I used to watch rats running in that little gap. The people in the house just put the bin bags outside, and the rats would come and gnaw at them. Every few weeks one of the Housemen would come and clear away the bags. Hose down the paving in the little gap. Then it would start again. The rubbish taken out. Old food. Fish and chip wrappers. Then the rats. Then the gnawing. I had a lot of time to watch.’
‘Didn’t you go to school? Didn’t social services come round?’
‘I don’t think I even existed. Not on any record. My mum said I was made just for the house. That I was their mermaid. Their special magical creature that only they were allowed to see. And I think they were squatting, so no landlord or anything.’
Jay felt sick. She wanted to go to Daisy, and she wanted to run away, and she wanted to scream and hit someone. The men from Daisy’s past maybe. Or Daisy’s ‘mother’. She’d waited so long for Daisy to open up; to break through, and now she didn’t know what to do except listen.
‘I had lots of free time. So I used to play games. Play games in my head. For hours and hours. Days and days. Isn’t it funny how days seem to last forever when you’re young? There was one of those portable cassette recorders in the house. It had headphones. Sometimes they let me wear them while I was being… changed.’ Daisy spat the word out like it was poison. ‘That was the best. It belonged to one of my catchers. One of The Fishermen. The one who marked us. He gave it to me as a present for my birthing day. I was listening to it when he did this.’
