by C. J. Cooke
Though as I read it this time, it occurs to me what this story is really about: a mouse defends itself against predators by making up a story about a terrifying monster that is supposedly the mouse’s bestie. The predators decide not to eat the mouse in case the Gruffalo seeks retribution, until the mouse comes across a monster who is exactly like the one he made up: the Gruffalo, his deepest fear made manifest. By confronting and outwitting this fear, he becomes the hero of the story.
By the time I’m halfway through the book, Max is already asleep. Cressida is squirming on my lap, kicking her legs and chewing Max’s teddy bear to death. I hear Eloïse padding up the stairs and walking across the landing to the bedroom. From the brisk, quiet steps she takes, I know she’s having a good day. I have learned to read her like this, become alert to the signals she sends through the rhythms of her body, speech, her line of questioning, just as she has been reading me all along, hiding the parts of her that she knew I couldn’t understand.
The past can be so full of monsters that won’t die.
Eloïse was hiding her fear, that’s all. Such a small word for so complicated a thing. She is confronting it now, day by day. And I think that makes her a hero.
I never thought of her that way.
She got out of the inpatient unit yesterday. I brought her home to a small gathering of the people who love her – Gerda, Magnus, her friends Niamh, Lucia and Vinny, and of course Max and Cressida – and although I was afraid she might not be up to it, she seemed like her old self, keen to hear all about Lucia’s baby news and delighting in Cressida’s new thing of pulling funny faces. Max joined in, too, crossing his eyes and sticking out his tongue. I think it reassured her that nobody seemed strange with her after being in hospital. It took a lot to convince her to stay, but after discussing it with Dr Goff I believed it was the best way forward.
We are still fitting the pieces of the puzzles together. I used to think that illness was illness, and you got a diagnosis, and a prognosis, and medicine, and that was that. Oh to be as naïve as I once was. Oh to be blissfully unaware of the many corners of the mind, and the shadows that live there. El’s illness is complex, severe, and the journey is far from over. In fact, in some ways we’ve barely begun.
Gerda and I met with Dr Goff – Tara – again two weeks ago, shortly after Eloïse was admitted to the inpatient unit. Tara had been meeting with her almost every day, and Gerda, Magnus and I needed to know why Eloïse had left, and whether it would happen again. Niamh watched Cressida and Max while we went to her office at Maudsley Hospital.
Maybe it sounds weird, but it really felt like the three of us were searching for El all over again. Part of her had not returned. I imagined this part as captured, held hostage, in the past, the little girl she’d been, still trapped. Marooned. No one could rescue her. We could only try our utmost to help her find the way out.
The hospital was nice, as psychiatric hospitals go. No straitjackets, no electric-shock machines. So far so good. Tara was accommodating and personable. She took us to a room dedicated to ‘family dialogue’ with windows overlooking gardens and a coffee table surrounded by plush armchairs. I knew the news wasn’t going to be good.
‘Now that I’ve had a chance to meet with Eloïse regularly,’ she told us, ‘I can see that she presents symptoms of de-realisation and de-personalisaton, whereby she sometimes perceives herself at a distance. She also presents extreme forgetfulness, even amnesia, and loses time. In the past she said she would receive responses to emails that she had absolutely no recollection of sending, or wake up in bed in the middle of the night without knowing what she’d done since that morning. I’ve not yet made an official diagnosis, but I can tell you that these symptoms are characteristic of dissociative identity disorder.’
‘You mean, multiple personality disorder?’ Gerda said. We’d all been doing a huge amount of googling since El came home and we were bombarded with strange, foreign terms. Dissociative fugue. Dissociation. Words I’d never heard before.
‘Multiple personality disorder is the old name for DID, yes,’ Tara told Gerda.
Magnus cut in, confused. ‘Forgive me, but what is dissociative identity disorder?’
‘DID is when a person dissociates, or disconnects, from themselves, usually as a result of extreme trauma and attachment disorders,’ Tara said. ‘I have to say, though – I’m not a fan of the term “disorder”.’
It was my turn to look confused. ‘Why’s that?’
‘It implies that the individual needs to be “fixed”,’ she says, making quotation marks with her fingers. ‘I see people as individuals, with very unique manifestations of mental ill-health.’ She made to say more, but stopped short. ‘Anyway, I think that’s a conversation for another time. Eloïse presents symptoms of what is classically referred to as DID. It is a form of mental illness whereby the individual forges another separate identity or personality state, and often numerous identities.’
‘Excuse me,’ Magnus said. ‘But I’m really not grasping this concept. What – exactly – do you mean?’
Tara explained that we all have different sides to our personality, but some people can experience a fragmentation of their personality into a range of different personalities or ‘alters’.
‘The reason that an individual creates these alters, or other personalities,’ she explained, ‘is part of the human mind’s brilliantly sophisticated strategy for survival. In fact, this is the reason I hate the term “disorder”. It’s a psychological phenomenon.’ She shook her head and began to lower her voice. ‘As you are all aware, she suffered abuse as a very young child and had poor parental attachment during her formative years. A four-year-old child suffering unimaginable sexual abuse does not have the capability to deal with it.’
Gerda raised a hand to her mouth. Hearing Tara say it aloud was like twisting the knife in my gut. It was unthinkable. My son’s face rose up in my mind. To think of such a young child suffering like that … It broke my heart.
Tara continued, explaining it as gently as she could.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I know this is terribly difficult to process …’
‘No, please,’ Gerda said, glancing at Magnus. ‘We need to understand. Please go on.’
Tara took a breath. ‘If a child is abused by someone they trust, a family member, say, who is kind and loving to them in public and then does monstrous things to them in secret … The mind has to devise a coping mechanism. One of these mechanisms is the ability to create other identities who take over, take charge, and enable that child to carry on.’
‘How can you call developing a whole gallery of hallucinations coping?’ Magnus said, looking from me to Gerda.
‘It’s what kept Eloïse alive,’ Tara said, deeply serious. ‘A lot of people who suffer abuse as children become drug addicts, have serious breakdowns and can’t function as normal adults. Eloïse’s response was different. What we call dissociative identity disorder is precisely what kept her functioning. It’s why a lot of people I see with DID claim to lose time. This is because their alters take over. The alters do the cooking, the cleaning, the day-to-day things that have become overwhelming for the individual,’ she said.
Magnus looked sceptical, but I’d read about this online, watched YouTube videos of people changing from one personality to the next. Now that I saw it, I knew I’d seen Eloïse do this a few times before. But I’d put it down to other things: hormones, a bad day, sleep deprivation. On the surface, she looked normal.
‘These alters are so powerful and so distinct that they have their own names, their own likes and dislikes,’ Tara said. ‘They can have entirely different expressions and mannerisms, even different heart rates. Often their own handwriting differs from the alters’.’
Handwriting. Of course, this struck a chord. ‘The notebook,’ I said, and Gerda and Magnus turned to me as if only now realising I was there. ‘Right before we found El, I came across a notebook of hers,’ I explained. ‘It was strange … the
re were some poems and stories in different handwriting, some of them Eloïse’s. I’d never seen them before. I attributed it to the writer’s group that Niamh had mentioned. There were drawings, too.’
Tara nodded as though this was entirely reasonable. ‘Alters,’ she said simply. ‘Did you notice any of their names?’
I thought back. ‘I think I saw “Joe” in there.’
‘Yes, Eloïse mentioned Joe,’ she said. ‘He was the one who looked after Eloïse’s physical injuries during the years she lived with her mother. Or in other words, she became very adept at caring for herself. She developed resources to deal with what was happening to her.’
Tara allowed a long pause for this all to drop into our heads. Finally Gerda said, ‘We would have taken Eloïse earlier, had we known what was going on. Back then it was different. Grandparents in this country have very few rights, and certainly not enough to apply for a grandchild to be taken from her mother.’
‘Eloïse never blamed you or Magnus, Mrs Bachmann,’ Tara said carefully. ‘I attempted to work through the complexity of emotional responses to her mother. I’m not sure we managed to succeed, but we tried.’
‘We tried to give her a good education,’ Gerda said. ‘Tried to put to right whatever damage had been done by Jude. We sent her money every month. If we’d known that she was using it to buy drugs …’
‘Why now?’ I said, because I sensed Gerda was about to steer the conversation towards Jude. I was sorry for Jude – actually, scratch that, I wasn’t, because she contributed to El’s suffering – but I wanted to move on. ‘What sparked El’s episode?’ I asked. ‘What made her go to Komméno?’
Tara crossed a leg over the other and steepled her hands in thought.
‘In my opinion, the fact that Max is the same age that Eloïse began to be abused is no coincidence,’ she said firmly. ‘She has mentioned it in our sessions. She was beginning to recognise herself in Max, to re-think how young and innocent she was … I believe that this new perspective jarred with the framework that she had assembled for her past. We are making a lot of headway in re-connecting to the child she had been, in deconstructing the things she had been made to believe.’
‘What sort of things?’ Gerda asked.
‘Eloïse had been taught to believe that she was to blame for the abuse. That she had somehow caused it. That if she’d been a better child, it wouldn’t have happened.’
Gerda started to sob. Magnus put his arm around her and I made myself useful by walking to the coffee machine in the corner and pouring everyone a drink. I took the opportunity to shake off the horror that was creeping into my skin at the thought of what my wife had suffered. And was still suffering.
When I returned, Tara continued, as gently as she could.
‘It’s important that you know that I see this very regularly in my work. Young children who are abused are often controlled by their abusers so that they don’t tell an adult or attempt to fight back. The child becomes compliant because they believe they deserve it.’ She cleared her throat. ‘In terms of Eloïse’s mental health issues and her disappearance, I think it’s very possible that she left the family home because she feared she might harm the children.’
‘But she would never do that!’ Gerda said, incredulous. ‘Eloïse is a wonderful mother.’
‘Yes,’ Tara said. ‘But in my opinion, Eloïse was finding it increasingly difficult to control her alters. She was physically and psychologically weak after the birth of the new baby, and Max turning four was a big thing in terms of her experiencing a child that was as young as she was when the abuse began. Her alters began to take over more frequently and forcefully, to the point where she experienced them as both personality states and hallucinations.’
At this point, I dared to ask the question that had plagued me ever since Dr Goff first entered our lives. It’s a question I will probably never be able to ask my wife.
‘Why did Eloïse never tell me?’ I said. I held back from being specific, because I knew Dr Goff would understand what I meant. Why didn’t she tell me about her childhood? Why didn’t she tell me about the abuse, about her problems? Why didn’t she talk to me instead of leaving?
Dr Goff gave me a look, then raised her eyes to the ceiling and took a long breath, formulating her answer. We both knew she could only guess – but at least it was an educated one.
‘It is extremely difficult to describe the kinds of things that your wife experienced, Lochlan. If I’m to be honest, I think silence was part of the coping mechanism.’ A faint smile. ‘It has nothing to do with her feelings for you.’
I gave her a nod to signal that I appreciated her attempt at answering the most unanswerable of questions, but I felt – and still feel – responsible for her withholding.
‘So what happens now?’ Magnus said. ‘Now that our granddaughter is in the psychiatric unit.’
‘Eloïse’s therapy will involve three stages, broadly speaking,’ Tara replied. ‘The first is about stabilisation, helping the patient feel safe to identify and label emotions. The second is trauma-focused, enabling the patient to reprocess and discuss the past, reframe their beliefs and self-shame. The third stage is about reconnection, helping the individual move forward.’ She took a breath, checking how I was dealing with this information. ‘It’s a much more delicate, non-linear process than I’ve described, of course.’
This delicate, non-linear process involved a two-week stay at the inpatient unit. It took El a while to agree to this, but I begged her. I can’t quite put it into words how desperate you have to be to plead with your wife to check into a psychiatric unit. I didn’t even tell my father. I could already hear his words. You’re putting her in the nut house? But I see things differently now. Everything has changed, and I don’t think it’ll ever be the same. How could it?
Tara took me aside when I checked Eloïse in the first day.
‘I do want to warn you,’ she said. Gerda and Magnus weren’t around, and I could tell that she wished to be straight with me now that she had a chance to speak with me one-to-one.
‘This isn’t a quick fix,’ she said, referring to the stay. Quick? I thought. El was going to be gone for two weeks. It had taken all kinds of bribes and coaxing for Max to be convinced that she was going to come home after everything that had happened previously.
‘It’s a positive step for Eloïse to stay at the inpatient unit for a fortnight, that’s for sure,’ Tara added, ‘but she’ll have to continue with her weekly sessions for a long time after that.’
‘How long?’
‘Treatment can take three to five years, maybe more. It takes as long as it takes, is what I’m saying.’
I shrugged. It wasn’t as if I’d imagined this to be anything less than a severe illness. ‘OK.’
She looked flustered, as if she wasn’t getting through. ‘But what I really want to warn you about is the impact of this illness on families.’
I recoiled. Why was she telling me this? She softened and lowered her voice. There was a path forward, she told me, but it was rocky. She had seen cases where a patient’s alter hated the patient’s partner. Where alters would swear and even hit the patient’s partner or sleep around. Eloïse might well make a full recovery in a relatively short amount of time. Or she might relapse, develop a myriad of mental illnesses, and the woman I married might not ever return.
I gave her a flat stare and said, ‘In Glasgow we have a saying.’
‘Which is?’
‘We could all be dead tomorrow.’
‘Dead?’
‘It means, let’s not waste time focusing on what bad stuff can happen. Let’s focus on the now.’
She gave a sympathetic smile. ‘Not a bad way to look at things, I guess. I do think you should get counselling, however, to prepare you for whatever lies ahead.’
I held up my hands and pulled a face. ‘Counselling? Thanks, but I think I’ll pass.’
She didn’t look convinced. ‘I want to make you aware of wha
t it’s going to take on your part. A lot of patience. A lot of time. A lot of love.’
I went straight from the hospital and resigned from my job, then sold my car. I might start looking for another job in a while, or even set up my own business. For now, I’ll be serving as El’s carer. Her illness is the real island. I won’t leave her stranded again.
Cressida is asleep in my arms, the teddy clutched to her chest. I lean forward and kiss the top of her head before laying her down in her cot on the other side of the room. Max has claimed the wall above the cot as Cressida’s art gallery, for which he has painstakingly created numerous crayon artworks on A4 sheets of paper. His latest creation has El, Cressie, Max and me as stick figures holding hands underneath a rainbow. I have black spiky hair, Eloïse is drawn with long yellow hair and a big red smile. Max is holding her hand, and she seems to float slightly in the air. Max is the only one of us to have a red heart in the middle of his stick-figure chest.
Beneath he has written in purple capitals, ‘family’.
Three Years Later, 17 October 2018
The Cressida Shelley Refuge Centre for Victims of Gender Violence, Kampala, Uganda
I’ll tell you what I never expected to see: Mamie allowing children to cornrow her hair. But there she is, sitting on a chair outside while Phiona and Blessed work their magic on her. They laugh and chatter, their voices swirling in the clear air as they tell my grandmother how much better she’s going to look once they’re done with her, and that her hair is like vanilla ice-cream and would she like red beads or the blue weaved through it? I glance over and smile to show I’m proud of her for pushing herself to be more sociable and friendly, though mostly I’m interested in how she’s going to look with those cornrows.
