Martin looks around and considers the changes before declaring, ‘No, no, it definitely looks nicer.’
‘It took them all week,’ Bertie says. ‘We had to eat noodles and pizzas. It was like we were camping, too.’
‘Huh,’ Martin says. ‘I would have given anything for a pizza some nights. The food in the hostels wasn’t all it might have been.’
‘But you enjoyed yourself?’ Victoria asks, still looking for clues. ‘Despite the food?’
‘It was amazing,’ Martin says. ‘It was really . . . Look, I know you’ll both laugh at this, but it was really quite . . . quite spiritual, I suppose. I really felt like I found myself up there.’
This doesn’t make Victoria want to laugh at all. In fact, she suddenly finds herself blinking back tears.
‘Right,’ Bertie says. ‘Wow.’
She adds milk to Martin’s tea and plonks the mug down in front of him, and as he looks up at her a shadow crosses his features – concern, perhaps, or confusion; sadness, maybe. And she suddenly knows she was right. He’s going to leave her.
‘The, um, landscape was amazing,’ Martin says. ‘I’ll show you the photos after lunch, if you want.’
‘Great,’ Bertie says unconvincingly. But at least he’s making an effort, just as Victoria asked him to.
She would make an effort herself, only she feels as if she’s been ushered onstage in the midst of an unfamiliar theatre piece and she has absolutely no idea what role she is supposed to be playing.
‘I made a pie,’ she says, grabbing at the first, easiest role that springs to mind. ‘And a salad. If that’s all right for you?’
‘Great,’ Martin says, clapping his hands together, and looking, for all the world, like an actor playing ‘Dad’.
Between Bertie’s presence and a host of emails and errands that Martin needs to catch up on, it’s not until they’re in bed that night that they’re finally able to talk.
Feeling quite literally terrified – trembling, in fact – Victoria climbs into bed next to Martin. Realising that he’s almost asleep already, she bounces around just enough to wake him up, then asks, ‘Are you too tired to talk?’
‘No,’ Martin replies sleepily. ‘I mean, I’m tired, but I can talk. You have no idea how nice it is to sleep in a proper, comfortable bed.’
‘But you had a nice time all the same? You’re glad you went.’
‘Yes,’ Martin says. ‘Like I said, it was great.’
Victoria sighs. She won’t get any sleep tonight unless she asks the question, but then she won’t get any sleep tonight once she gets the answer either. She rolls on to her back and looks up at the dark ceiling, at the tiny speck of orange light leaking through the curtains from the streetlamp outside, and she tries to decide.
‘Are you OK?’ Martin asks. ‘You seem strange.’
Victoria laughs sourly. ‘Thanks,’ she says, then, ‘I’m fine.’
‘You’re not,’ Martin says. ‘I’m not sure what you are, but fine isn’t it.’
‘OK, I’m not, then.’
‘What’s wrong?’
Victoria shrugs and Martin, beside her, feels the mattress move just enough to know that she has shrugged. ‘Is it the kitchen?’ he asks. ‘Are you disappointed?’
‘No. Of course not.’
‘Is it Bertie, then? He seemed a bit better to me, but . . .’
‘No, it’s not Bertie, either.’
‘So, what then?’
‘I don’t know,’ Victoria lies. ‘I think . . . well, I think, I think . . .’
‘Yes?’
‘I think I’m scared, actually,’ she says, her voice starting to crack, despite her best efforts.
‘Scared?’ Martin repeats. ‘Of what?’
‘I’m not sure,’ Victoria says, her voice trembling strangely.
Martin rolls on to his side. ‘See, I knew something was wrong,’ he says. ‘Tell me.’
‘It’s this whole Spain thing,’ Victoria replies. ‘I mean, I know you had a good time. And I know you didn’t miss me at all. But . . .’
‘Of course I missed you.’
‘But now I’m scared that you’ve realised you can have a better life without me. Without any of this rubbish.’ The tears are starting to roll down her cheeks now and she’s glad that it’s too dark for Martin to see them.
‘But . . .’ Martin says.
‘I know I’ve been useless,’ Victoria interrupts. ‘I know I am useless. But I didn’t mean to be. It just happened. I didn’t expect things to turn out like this. I didn’t want them to be like this.’
She jumps at the sensation of Martin’s fingers touching her chin in the dark. ‘Shhh,’ he says softly. ‘I did miss you. Of course I did.’
‘You didn’t say it. Not once.’
‘It’s just . . .’ Martin says.
‘Go on, say it. I need you to say it, I think.’
‘It was a strange trip,’ Martin says quietly. ‘I realised a lot of things. I don’t think I’ve had much time to think lately, what with work, and Bertie, and all the rest, and I realised things, about myself, about us. We’ve . . . we’ve fallen asleep, really. We’re getting old, we’re somehow just getting old together when we should be living. We should be having adventures, and fun, and enjoying life. I mean, we’re going to die. But we’re not having fun, are we? We’re just getting old together.’
‘You see,’ Victoria says. ‘That’s what I was afraid of.’
‘But I’ll tell you what I also realised,’ Martin says gently. ‘I realised that I can’t really enjoy myself if you’re not there. I liked all the walking, I really did. And I saw some amazing things. I mean, you saw the photos, right? But I hated every bloody minute of it. Everything I saw, I wanted to show you. Every time I felt happy, I suddenly felt sad again because you weren’t there to share it with me.’
‘Really?’ Victoria breathes as she swipes at the tears with the back of her hand.
‘I didn’t want to tell you because . . . because I felt embarrassed, I suppose. I didn’t want to admit it. But I was bloody miserable without you, Vicky. And I spent the entire time missing you. I spent the whole bloody holiday wishing that I had never gone at all.’
It is Monday afternoon, but to Penny it feels more like a Thursday. Having suffered from insomnia for two nights in a row, she doesn’t feel as if she has had a weekend at all.
Saturday night’s insomnia had been caused by their financial woes. She had lain awake until 4 a.m. creating virtual balance sheets in her mind, trying to find some magical solution whereby they could fix things without moving house. By Sunday night, she was feeling feverish, something she attributed initially to over-exhaustion. But as she had lain there sweating she had decided that she was probably coming down with a dose of summer flu, and then, terrifyingly, she had begun to wonder if these weren’t the hot flushes everyone talks about. And so, she had begun to worry about the menopause instead.
She blinks hard and tries to pull herself together. Sosamma Cherian is entering the consulting room and Penny’s worries pale into insignificance when compared with Sosamma’s. Being fully present for her client is the absolute least she can do.
Sosamma, who, according to her case notes, is a thirty-eight-year-old Syrian refugee living in yet another one-room bedsit with her husband, eighteen-year-old daughter and eleven-year-old surviving son, is a pretty yet fragile-looking woman. She’s wearing a purple headscarf and has the largest, bluest eyes that Penny has ever seen.
‘Hello,’ Penny says, speaking slowly. ‘Please take a seat. If you could close the door . . .’
Sosamma blinks shyly at her, pushes the door to and sits down, perching elegantly on the edge of the seat.
‘Before we start, Sosamma – can I call you Sosamma? Or would you prefer Mrs Cherian?’
‘Sosamma’s OK,’ she says, with a nod and another eyelashey blink.
‘Great, well, I’m Penny. Penny Andersson.’ Another nod. ‘So, before we start, can you just confirm f
or me how comfortable you are in English? I know you haven’t been here very long.’
Sosamma licks her lips and stares at her feet as she replies, ‘It’s OK. My father learned me. And a little at university, too.’
‘That’s great,’ Penny says. ‘What did you study at university?’
‘Chemistry,’ Sosamma says. ‘I s— specialise – is that right? Yes? I specialise in organic chemistry.’
‘Gosh,’ Penny says. ‘I was terrible at chemistry.’
‘That’s OK,’ Sosamma says with a faint smile. ‘You don’t work as chemist.’
‘Well, your English is excellent, which makes this much easier for me. So thank you for that.’
‘You’re welcome,’ Sosamma says, blinking and nodding again.
‘How good is your understanding of what I do?’ Penny asks. She has wasted whole half-hours in the past with women who thought she was a GP warming up for a medical consultation.
‘You are helping with the things that happen to me, yes?’ Sosamma says. ‘Psychological things. With my bad dreams?’
‘Yes. Well, I’ll try. I’m a trauma counsellor. And from what I’ve read here, you’ve had more trauma in the last six months than most people go through in a lifetime.’
‘Trauma?’ Sosamma repeats uncertainly. ‘I’m not so sure of this word.’
‘Difficult experiences,’ Penny explains. ‘Upsetting, distressing things that happen.’
‘Yes,’ Sosamma says. ‘OK.’
‘You’re having nightmares, you say? Bad dreams?’
Sosamma nods.
‘Can you tell me what they’re of? What happens? Do you remember when you wake up?’
She nods again. ‘Yes. My son. He dies. In my arms. Every night.’
‘I see,’ Penny says gently. ‘That must be very upsetting. And is this person in the dream recognisable as your son?’
Sosamma shakes her head. ‘No. He looks different. But I know. In my dream – I know. It’s my son.’
‘Is this Chandy, or . . .’ – Penny glances at the file – ‘or Kuriakose? I’m sorry. These names aren’t familiar to me, so they’re hard to remember. And to pronounce.’
‘It’s Zachary in English, I think,’ Sosamma says. ‘You can say Zachary if it’s easy.’
‘No, I need to learn,’ Penny says. ‘So, in the dream, is it Kuriakose or Chandy?’
‘It’s Chandy,’ Sosamma says. ‘The dead one.’
‘I see.’
‘It’s in the church. Where he died. Everything the same.’
‘So it’s actually a memory of what happened to you, not an invented dream?’
‘Yes. It’s like memory.’
‘Would you like to tell me what happened? Or is that too painful for you?’
‘Not,’ Sosamma says. ‘Not tell, I think.’
‘That’s perfectly fine,’ Penny says.
‘But maybe you can answer this question,’ Sosamma says. ‘Is it good to talk about or not to talk about? My husband, he says I am . . .’ She mutters something in Arabic. ‘Deny? This is the word?’
‘He says you’re in denial?’
‘Yes. I think. He says I should talk about. So maybe you can tell me this. To talk or not to talk. For the dreams to go away. Which is better?’
Penny clears her throat and leans forward. ‘As a general rule, talking about it, when you’re ready, will probably help. With something like . . . what happened to Chandy, when we lose someone close, especially a child, there is a lot of pain. And when you tell the story, you feel that pain quite strongly, yes?’
Sosamma nods and brushes a stray tear from her cheek.
‘But the pain will get less with time. That will seem impossible now, but it’s true. It will become easier.’
‘It will go away?’ Sosamma asks. Then, pointing to her chest, she says, ‘It hurts. Like real pain. Here.’
‘Yes. Well, it probably won’t go away completely, no. But it will get easier to think about it. It will become a part of you. And telling the story, that’s part of that process.’
Sosamma nods and pulls a tissue from her sleeve, then dabs at a tear in the corner of her eye. ‘So you think that Avrachan is right? That I must talk?’
‘No. Not necessarily,’ Penny says. ‘Things like this, they can sometimes feel too hard to bear. They can feel impossible. Sometimes not talking about it feels like the only way to survive. So sometimes denial is the only reasonable place to be, the only place you feel safe.’
‘Yes,’ Sosamma says. ‘Yes, I think this is true for me. But I think, too, I must do something. For the dreams. It’s every night. I’m so tired. I’m so scared. I try not to sleep.’
‘Perhaps what’s needed is for you to let yourself talk about what happened just a little bit. From time to time. You could try telling me a little piece of the story, just as much as you can bear. Maybe that would let a little bit of the pain out?’
‘I’m scared,’ Sosamma says.
‘What are you scared of?’
‘I’m scared if I cry . . . for Chandy. I’m scared I never stop crying.’
‘It’s a very common fear,’ Penny says. ‘Many people worry about this. But it’s not true, in fact. You cried just now. But you stopped.’
‘Yes.’
‘And that’s a process. A client once said that it was like a bottle full of pain, if you can imagine that. And each time you let yourself remember, each time you let yourself feel the pain, each time you cry, you empty the bottle a little bit. So it becomes easier to carry. Do you understand?’
‘I think. Like a bottle of tears, yes?’
‘Yes,’ Penny says, thinking that it’s a rather beautiful image. ‘If you like. But you can protect yourself, as well. You can do it slowly. At your own pace. When you’re ready. Not when anyone else thinks you should.’
‘Pace?’ Sosamma says. ‘I don’t think I know “pace”.’
‘It means speed. You have to do it at your own speed. Not too fast and not too slow.’
‘I see,’ Sosamma says, now blinking back fresh tears and looking at the ceiling. ‘So can we try?’
‘I’m sorry. Try what?’ Penny asks.
‘Can I try to tell you?’
‘If you want to,’ Penny says. ‘But only if you want to. There’s no obligation at all. It’s for you to decide.’
‘I like you,’ Sosamma says, forcing a tiny smile through her rolling tears. ‘So maybe we can try.’
Penny swallows with difficulty and pushes the box of tissues across the desk towards Sosamma. ‘OK,’ she says. ‘At your own pace. Your own speed. Just stop whenever you want to.’
‘OK,’ Sosamma says, taking a deep breath. ‘We were in the church. We’re Christian. You know this, yes?’
Penny nods.
‘The . . . the rebels, I suppose you call them. They were all around the town. Like a circle. And the Americans, they are dropping bombs, yes? Our building is damage. So we hide in the church. They have a . . .’ She gestures with her hand.
‘A basement? A room below the ground floor?’
‘Yes. We hide in the basement. All of us. Avrachan, Kuriakose, Eliamma, and little Chandy. There are others, too. Friends, neighbours. A priest. The children are crying. Some people are hurt. Avrachan is bleeding from a bomb before . . .’ She waves over her shoulder. ‘We are very scared.’
‘It must have been terrifying.’
Sosamma covers her eyes with one hand and nods, as if the visual memory is just too much to bear, as if covering her eyes might somehow make it stop. ‘Then they come,’ she says. ‘The rebels come in the church. They don’t care. These are bad men. Not ISIS, but the same. And they come with machine guns. The children, they are screaming. The women are crying. Some men, too. Some people, they run, and the rebels, they, they . . .’
‘It’s OK,’ Penny says. ‘Take your time, Sosamma.’
‘They shoot them down,’ she weeps. ‘All the ones who run, they shoot them down. Man, woman, child, they don’t c
are. My Chandy, he ran. I was holding him, but he got away. And he ran.’
Once Sosamma has left, Penny sits and stares at the empty chair opposite.
She has a forty-five-minute lunch break before her next appointment, and she had intended to nip to the nearby supermarket to pick something up for tea tonight, only she can’t seem to find the energy to leave her chair.
She’s surprised at this at first, but after a moment’s reflection, she realises that this is more than tiredness. This is her body telling her to pause, to reflect, to give itself time to process whatever has just happened. Because something has happened. And so she sits and stares at the empty chair and waits.
Perhaps she needs to let herself feel Sosamma’s pain, she decides. She’s an expert, has become an expert, at not feeling other people’s distress. She has learned – in order to continue doing her job without having a breakdown – to concentrate on process, not emotion. She has made herself an expert on techniques for guiding people through and beyond their pain, for teaching them, if you will, how to deal with it, rather than dealing with it herself.
But today, for some reason, seems different. Today she needs to let herself feel it, she thinks, perhaps just to prove to herself that she still can.
She starts by picturing, in her mind’s eye, the scene. She imagines beautiful, fragile Sosamma, sweaty and scared in the basement of a church. She imagines her gripping the sleeve of eight-year-old Chandy, pictures him breaking away, Sosamma begging him to return, or perhaps too scared to even speak; seeing him shot down, seeing others who have run to their own children falling, too. She can almost sense the tension in her own body, the tension of being caught between impossible choices: to run to one’s son and die with him, or to stay with the other children when their need is just as great.
And then, finally, she lets herself imagine Sosamma’s dream: Chandy, dying in her arms, his blood, and his life, slowly seeping away.
By the time she has finished, only seven minutes have passed, but Sosamma’s case notes are wet with Penny’s tears. The ink has not run but the paper is buckled and transparent where her tears have landed.
The Bottle of Tears Page 16
