I was good in an emergency. I was able to make myself cold and distant; I was able to react without emotion while other people panicked. It was an ability that I cultivated.
‘Mum,’ I said.
She looked at me. ‘Did you know about this?’ she asked, waving the piece of paper in my direction.
‘No.’
I was not lying. I did not know about the note.
‘It’s a …’ Mum paused, looked back down, read the words again. ‘It’s a love letter, written by one of your friends to your father.’
‘Which one? Which one of my friends?’
I was lying now. I knew who had written the letter.
‘Julia. I met her once. Down at the salon. While you were in Italy. I did wonder what she was doing there while you were away …’
‘She’s not my friend,’ I said.
‘Well, then how did he meet her if you didn’t introduce them?’
How deep was the betrayal – that was what she wanted to know. Both of you, or just him.
I could feel myself getting angry. I hadn’t done anything wrong. Everything wrong had been done to me.
‘She’s not my friend. She’s friends with Polly.’
‘But you knew about it. He tells you everything. You must have known.’
Mum started crying again. I was stuck to the floor. I couldn’t help her. I didn’t know how. Eventually Mum stopped.
‘Get him for me.’
Everything could change in a moment and I was inside one of those moments.
‘Where have you been?’ asked Anya. The cream had melted on my waffle, making a pool of white.
I ignored her, walking past her to my father.
I knelt down next to him and yanked a headphone out of his ear. Pop.
‘Bloody hell. What?’
‘Mum found the stupid letter from Julia. She wants to see you.’
He looked at me. ‘What did you tell her?’
‘For fuck’s sake. Nothing.’
He looked at the pool, at the people in their bikinis and shorts, having fun, laughing, eating, splashing. He drank from his bottle of beer. He put the headphone back in his ear, stood up and walked away.
I remained crouched down for a moment. Then I stretched myself out on his lounger and tilted my face up to the sun with my eyes closed. Soon enough a shadow passed over my face.
‘What is going on?’ asked Anya.
‘I think my parents are going to divorce.’
‘Oh … Shit,’ she said.
‘Mum found a letter from Julia to Dad, a love letter. Mum was reading it when I went over there just now.’
I sat up, took a swig of Dad’s beer. It was warm and unpleasant.
‘Shall we go and see what’s happening?’
I didn’t reply, but Anya started off in the direction of the villa, so I followed.
‘I don’t remember what it was like when my parents divorced, I was too little,’ Anya said as we walked. The sprinklers had been left on for the day, it was that hot. ‘But now I can’t imagine them ever being together. It’ll be the same for you soon, you’ll see.’
‘But what if he ends up with Julia?’
‘Imagine if they get married and have children. She would be your stepmother! Her children would be your brothers and sisters!’
Anya laughed and I hadn’t meant it as a joke.
We got to the villa. I could hear my parents shouting through the closed doors.
‘I deserve better than this!’
I couldn’t stand it. I couldn’t listen to it. It felt too much like that other day, everything collapsing, and all the while the sun shines and the pool sparkles and the tanned people in their swimsuits are laughing because they can’t see the devastation because it is not happening to them.
‘I’m going to the beach,’ I said.
I ran along the path, pulling off my clothes as I went. I walked into the sea, pushing my way through the water; I walked until the water came up to my chest, then I plunged in, my eyes tight shut, my face in the salt water, the safest place to cry. I dissolved into the sea, I couldn’t feel my edges, I didn’t want to, I was all water.
When I couldn’t hold my breath any more I shot up out of the sea, panting, breath ripping my lungs, water streaming from my eyes. I stood there for such a long time, swaying in the water, that my shoulders and chest and face dried to a tight dusting of salt. Nothing had changed: the sun, the beach, the heat, the wetness of the sea, everything was the same; nothing had changed except me. I dragged myself out of the water and sat on the wet shore.
Anya found me. She brought all the things we would need for a day on the beach: towels, sun cream, magazines, water, sunglasses. I lay on my front to read my book and after a while I found that I was able to be myself again.
‘It was ridiculous that my mum and dad were ever together in the first place. It was amazing they stayed together this long,’ I said.
They weren’t suited, never were; apart from the drugs and the alcohol all they had in common was me and my sister, now just me. And I wasn’t enough. Never had been. They had only really started trying to be parents when Candy arrived. And then she was gone.
We ate lunch at the beach bar: beer and chips and an omelette, and the beer was cold and the chips were salty, and I thought, I’m alive, aren’t I, things aren’t so bad, they could always be worse. You have done this before, I thought, picked yourself up and got on with things.
The door to the office swung shut behind me.
‘I need to make a call to London,’ I said to the receptionist.
‘You too, eh!’
I ignored this comment and took the phone. I dialled the number for home. It rang. Elaine picked up.
‘Hi, it’s me,’ I said.
‘Oh, hello! Is it nice out there?’
‘Yes.’
‘Great, well, the weather here has been really bad, so you’re lucky to be away.’
‘Yeah. Do you have the envelope?’
‘Sure, I’ve got it right here. I’ve already opened it. Do you want to know your results?’
‘Yes, please.’
‘Don’t worry, they’re really good.’
I smiled, closed my eyes. I’d got away with it. Thank God.
‘OK.’
‘So, you got three As, which is amazing …’
There was an icy clamp around my skull. Only three As. She kept talking. Three Bs, three Cs and a D. Cs in Chemistry and Latin. I had been predicted As in everything, I was meant to be doing Latin and Chemistry at A-level. This was the only thing I was any good at. I wasn’t pretty and I wasn’t sporty and my parents weren’t rich and that was the least of it. Clever was all I had. Clever was meant to be my way out; but I had lost that too, along the way.
‘Thanks,’ I said, my voice whispery. ‘See you soon.’
I put down the phone as quickly as I could, Elaine still speaking, saying something pointless and kind.
Mum was in the villa, cleaning her room. Dad was in the spare bedroom, the one he had wanted Julia to stay in. Mum was arranging her possessions, spreading herself out so it didn’t feel as if someone was missing. We kept having to do this.
I told her my results.
‘But, Gavanndra, that’s not what you expected, was it?’
‘No,’ I said. I was sitting on the edge of the bed. Mum had taken off all the sheets and put them in the machine to wash them clean.
21
2015, London
Fiona and I begin a process called Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR – Fiona had just had the training). The first thing I have to do is try to recall every traumatizing experience I’ve ever had and then score each one out of ten for how anxious and scared it still makes me feel. I fill out a piece of paper printed with a grid of small rectangular boxes: one box for the memory, another for how it makes me feel, another for its score. The memory of watching my sister die in a hotel room in Tunisia scores a ten. The fear, the horror, the n
umbness in my body is still as fresh as the night I saw it happen. Watching my dad run his finger up and down Julia’s soft white inner arm, his sly smile, that scores an eight.
I need an extra piece of paper because I have such a large number of traumatizing memories.
‘Is it normal to have so many?’ I ask.
‘What do you want me to say?’ replies Fiona.
‘That I am special?’
She laughs.
EMDR is meant to help people process trauma. It eases the passage of ‘trapped’ trauma out of the body and into memory, so the trauma finally becomes the past and not a constantly relived present.
I sit in a comfy chair opposite Fiona while she moves a small black wand from left to right in a rhythmic fashion. While my eyes flick from side to side, following the wand, I try to remember a specific moment of a traumatic experience. How it felt the moment I walked into the room where my sister was dying, for instance. I try to recall what I saw, the feeling of the carpet under my feet, of my heart thudding in my chest, of the numbness spreading from my fingers up my arms. I watch the wand. Sometimes my eyes go misty and sometimes my memory goes misty too. Fiona stops, asks me what I saw, what I felt, where in my body I felt it, and then we resume. This goes on for a whole session, a tiny moment explored for fifty minutes, a tiny moment that changed a whole life.
‘Think of it like watching something from the windows of a train,’ Fiona explains.
We repeat this process with many of my memories: the memory of pinching out candles as my father and his junkie friends lay unconscious on the carpet; the memory of my father holding his head thinking he was about to die the morning he was meant to be taking me to the zoo. Sometimes I worry, as I am remembering, that I am not remembering a real moment, but how I have told and been told the incident over the years. Memories have been reshaped, developed, influenced. Sometimes all I have is the taste of butterscotch or the feel of cashmere against my cheek. Some of my memories are images, a moment caught in a flash and burnt on to my brain like a photograph, still there when I close my eyes, decades later. Some of my memories are like houses with rooms where I can walk around, pick things up, put them down. Some of my memories have become five-thousand-word stories. I worry that the EMDR may not work because I am getting confused between what really happened and my remaking of what really happened.
‘Is it still real if it has become a story?’ I ask Fiona.
‘What is real is how it makes you feel,’ she says.
At nine fifty I wipe the tears from my face, put on fresh make-up and get the Tube to work.
Sometimes after a session of EMDR I am so exhausted that I have to give up, leave my desk, go home and sleep for hours. But when I come to examine my feelings I find that the memory of watching my sister die scores only six out of ten. Its horror is still a ten, but the way it makes me feel is different, less raw, more distant, something that happened over two decades ago. The aim is to get the score to a two, or even a one.
After a few weeks of this process I find I have the courage to do something I have been too scared to do for twenty-five years: read the diary entry that I made just after Candy died. I wrote the entry in a shiny pink A4 notebook. This notebook has moved with me from flat to flat, packed and unpacked with all my other diaries and books, but never reopened.
I wait for the next time I am alone at home. I get up on to a chair to pull the notebook down from the top shelf where I put it ten years ago. I blow away the cobwebs and the soft grey dust. I take the notebook into the living room. I turn the pages slowly, reverentially, like an archivist examining an ancient manuscript. I feel as if I should be wearing thin white gloves.
I find the entry and read it. The raw immediacy of it is so intense it feels as though someone is grabbing under my sternum, twisting and pulling. Here is the truth. Here is what happened. A report not a recollection. Dangerous. I lay my hand on my chest and try to calm myself. That doesn’t work so I make myself a strong vodka and tonic. It tastes good. I drink it fast and make myself another. With semi-drunkenness comes familiar and welcome relaxation in my mind and my limbs.
‘You’ve done something brave. You should be proud of yourself,’ I say to myself.
It is only when I wake up the next morning, a little hungover, that it occurs to me I have found out something new about Candy. It was there in my diary entry: ‘One of the people said that Candy looked like me and she was happy.’
I make myself reread again and again the words that I cannot remember writing about a moment I cannot remember happening.
My sister, there on the page.
22
16 April 1989
Dear Diary,
My sister Candida Meander Hodge died on Tuesday 4th April at approximately 4.30 in the morning. She was nine years old. It was in Tunisia. That night she had been fine. I remember Anya and I were sitting around the pool table with some friends we had made and Candy came over. One of the people said that Candy looked like me and she was happy.
That night she had danced with daddy for the first time ever. Before she went to bed she complained of a sore throat. At 4 mummy came into my room and asked for some Strepsils – she said Candy had a bad cough. Mummy left and I could hear Candy coughing and whooping. I then heard daddy shout ‘Candy, no!’ So I screamed and ran into their bedroom. Candy was sitting on the bed limp. She had stopped breathing. Daddy was shouting ‘Candy, no’ continually and trying to give her the kiss of life. I ran down the corridor to the main hall where mummy was trying to get the staff to call the doctor or something. So I ran back. Candy was now on the floor and she was coughing up blood. But at least I thought she was breathing again. Then they carried her to the taxi that was waiting to take her to the hospital. Daddy and mummy and I believe that Candy died here in the hotel in daddy’s arms.
That night was a horrendous nightmare which I don’t want to remember.
23
2015, London
Every time I talk to Fiona, when I pause or look away or my throat catches, she asks: ‘Where do you feel this?’ I tell her the place and she then puts her hand on wherever it is – her stomach, her throat, her sternum – as if she is trying to get me to do the same thing, to really feel it, and then perhaps to let it go.
Fear and grief are trapped in my body and Candy has lost her body (she was not reincarnated as a rabbit). It seems that I have to get out of my mind and get into my body.
I try a fascial-release massage which is meant to unlock blocked emotions. I change into paper pants in a narrow treatment room in Harrods so a sixty-year-old Frenchwoman can knead and pinch me relentlessly. When she gets to my right hamstring she grabs a fistful of flesh and pulls and pulls, as if she is trying to pull it off. ‘’Ere is the trauma!’ she says triumphantly, and pulls harder. I am so bruised afterwards.
I visit a craniosacral therapist in Harley Street who specializes in post-traumatic body work. She makes me relive, moment by moment, the night my sister died, stopping me every few moments to make me look at the carpet, the wall, so that my body understands that I am safe and not in that place any more. She explains how animals go still when they are afraid, and once the threat is gone, they quiver and shake the fear out of their bodies. ‘Which is why animals don’t suffer from PTSD,’ she says. Then I lie on a treatment bed and she cradles my skull, pressing lightly into its base. Afterwards I feel blurry and subtly altered.
I find two acupuncturists: one handsome and brilliant, who was drawn to acupuncture after the death of his father and specializes in grief (although the first points he treats me for are shock); and another who is brilliant in different ways, whom I do not see for grief, but for stress and wrinkles. I do not tell her about my sister, my childhood, anything. She just assumes I am someone with a smart job who is a bit anxious and a bit vain.
Laura’s speciality is facial acupuncture, which involves many tiny needles being inserted into the face to prevent lines and sagging. When Laura finishes inserting the needl
es, she always says ‘Now I am going to work with your energy’ and stands next to me with her hands hovering over my chest or abdomen. I close my eyes and I see colours and shapes which sometimes coalesce into faces, sometimes I even hear voices. I feel heat moving around my body or concentrating in one spot, like the sun being focused through a magnifying glass. Afterwards I always ask Laura what she has been doing, how the reiki works, but she can’t really explain.
I book an appointment with her because the psoriasis on my lips is not getting any better.
‘Oh yes, I can see,’ says Laura.
‘I’ve been using steroid cream, but I know that’s bad. I had to lie to the pharmacist to get them to sell it to me, tell them it was for my elbows!’ I say, laughing, wanting to be funny and likeable, but Laura doesn’t even smile.
I am, by this point, lying on the treatment bed in my black bra and black pants, two towels arranged over my body, a heavy beige blanket over the towels, weighing me down, forcing me to be still. Laura has already inserted four needles, two into the points between my big toe and the next one, and two more in the points behind my inner ankle bones. I am looking forward to the one that goes in my forehead; it’s like an off button, shutting down my over-active brain. Laura’s hands hover over my face, as though she is trying to decide where to place the next needle. She seems distracted, flustered even.
‘I’m sorry, but there’s someone here,’ she says.
I lift my head, expecting to see someone else in the room. I often reflect on the careless vulnerability of the therapy room; anything could happen to you, lying down virtually naked with your eyes shut.
There is no one. No one that I can see.
Laura turns up the lights. She looks at the empty black chair next to the display case containing her collection of crystals. ‘She’s very naughty, very agitated,’ she says.
Laura turns to me. ‘Was there ever anyone in your life who really liked sweets? She smells of sweets. It’s a very strong smell.’
Ever anybody? It takes me a moment to work out what she means.
The Consequences of Love Page 13
