Becoming Tess

by H K Thompson

  The second dream was, for Stephen, inexplicably worse than the first. In his lucid moments he considered the first dream to be like a caricature of a nightmare. Part of his denying faculty involved pouring contempt onto things that disturbed him. That way he could try and laugh them off to himself with denigration. When he did this he would momentarily feel better but he mistook this improvement for self-mastery, rather than the short-term technique that it always proved to be. It was this self-deception that sustained Stephen’s nihilistic depression and rendered him helpless in the face of his own decline.

  In some ways Stephen could relate to the first kind of nightmare. It was violent and threatening and, in that sense, familiar to him. Although he never actively allowed himself to think it, the nightmare was like the way in which he had lived his life, like his mother in the dream. He had tortured and threatened and killed but, unfortunately for Stephen, he was left with his affinity for kittens. That was the part that always threw him, that created an unpleasant dissonance in his psyche. He could never fit that piece of the jigsaw into a place where it belonged. It was a personal and secret mystery that hung around the edges of his psyche and would not go away.

  The second nightmare that recurred could not be considered a caricature and therefore was much more difficult to dismiss. It was dreamier and hazier and hard to pin down but it concerned the void at the centre of Stephen’s soul. In this nightmare Irene Dawson was represented in a very different way. She was not the fanged monster threatening death and dismemberment but an ethereal and floating figure somewhere on the distant edge of Stephen’s troubled psyche. She had no substance. When Stephen reached out to make contact with his mother his hand passed through her opaque nothingness. He could neither touch her nor be touched by her and his profound fear was that, without physical contact, he would be precipitated into an abyss and fall through the Universe, in the full and awful knowledge that there was no boundary to it and that he would never find his way back. The anxiety in his dream had no limit. It was an infinity that swallowed him up. By this point in the nightmare he was a small boy filled with the dread of extinction, of life coming to an end with only his bones left floating in the vacuum of space.

  His hopeless quest was to ensure his survival and he believed that the only way to secure that was to make contact with his mother who floated on the edge of his world. She was the only other living soul in the drama, his only hope of anchor in his boundaryless vacuum full of despair and naked terror. He reached out as his mother approached, certain that this time he would be able to touch her, grasp her clothing or hand and bring her in from the edge. He reached to the full extent of his being, his hand brushing her arm, but she slipped from his grasp and was gone again, out of reach. He felt the full force of his terror as he realised that she had gone, eluded him again. He began to run after her, calling out “Mum!” She ignored his supplication, moving away, out of his reach, always out of his reach. He fell in a heap on the ground, grasped the sandy soil in his small, defeated hand, and wept. He was desolate, broken and unbearably alone. He felt his despair and defeat intensely. He felt like giving up, propelling himself into the emptiness that surrounded him in the hope that he might never come back to attempt again a painful and fearful intimacy with his mother.

  Sometimes in this dream Stephen would become a small baby and those were the worst nightmares he could ever have. He underwent a gradual regression to infancy in which his powerlessness and helplessness became so intense that his body was racked with inchoate terror at the absence of being held, embraced by his mother’s arms, safe and secure and warm. For Stephen as an infant there was only an existence where the painful, convulsive tension and appalling sensation of being abandoned, unheld and unloved held sway. Stephen inhabited a dark and unspeakably sinister world of not understanding, not knowing who he was, where he was, what he was. He had no means to make sense of such a world of emptiness. His outer skin was barren, neither touched nor caressed, silently yearning for something to give him form, to hold him on the earth. There was nobody to whom he could attach himself, the source of succour and definition. There was no face into which he could gaze and see his own reflection smiling back. For Stephen there was nothing, only his floating mother whom he attempted to reach. As an infant he could not even run after her. This was what made this version of his awful dream more unbearable than anything he could ever conceive of in his waking self.

  When he was spared the terminal terror of being an infant he was still a small child, still without agency, still at the effect of his mother’s unattainability. She remained unreachable. And it is this unreachability that led, in the dream, to a profound rage that filled him until he was convinced that he would explode. He was afraid of this feeling. He was out of control and risking his own disintegration if he allowed it. But there was little he could do in the face of it. There was no reassurance to be had as there was no one to give it. He experienced the pressure building inside him, threatening his annihilation and again he was terrified. There was no way out for Stephen at this stage. Either he would float into the Universe, unheld and alone, or he would blow himself into 1,000 fragments with the uncontrolled power of his rage.

  In one final appeal to his mother, wandering on the edge of his world, he screamed in supplication. As she turned to face him he saw to his utter horror that where her face should have been there was nothing. There was only a blank plane. She was empty of substance and where her eyes should have been there was a vague hollowness. There was no answering look, no smiling gaze, just the blankness of the void. That was the final blow, the ultimate loss that filled him like a great wave of oblivion. He awoke. Words could never describe at that moment of waking what the hollowness at Stephen Dawson’s core was like. It was beyond death because he was still alive.

  Stephen Dawson had unknowingly dedicated his life to finding ways to endure the unendurable reality of his inner world. At the very centre of Stephen was the world represented by his hideous dreams, by the terror, rage and emptiness that were wrapped around the void at his centre. He had found it absolutely vital to build around this awful emptiness, great walls, high ramparts buttressed by isolation behind which he could construct his modus vivendi, a lethal configuration of aggression and violence, of contempt and bitterness, of vengeance. He projected onto his helpless addicts his own helpless, fractured self. When he beat them up with the usual frisson of pleasure, it gave him temporary but exquisite relief from his own suffering. For a moment he could forget his own torment by venting it on those who were in his power. For a few minutes he felt better about himself, no longer helpless or inadequate but powerful, with others at his mercy. That filled him with a fleeting but unmistakable emotional impression of triumph, of winning, of being in control.

  All these things were the opposite of Stephen’s actual reality, but they had served to secure him a tenuous hold on the events of his life. What was becoming clearer to Stephen, even in his disintegrated state, was that he no longer had a secure or even tenuous hold on his life. Control was slipping through his fingers like it had done so many times in his prescient dreams. Stephen was becoming vaguely aware that his life was falling apart and that there was neither refuge nor resolution, just as in his dreams. He was realising that everything he had built to hold himself together was slowly disintegrating and that time, like the money beneath his kitchen floor, was running out. He heard the first tap on his front door and then the more assertive knock, first with surprise and then with foreboding and a resurgence of the fear that stalked his waking hours.

  Chapter 13

  It took Stephen Dawson several minutes to summon the energy to stand up. He went through the motions of debating with himself whether he should risk giving away his presence there or whether he should pretend that he was not at home and stay still and quiet until the intruder went away. He had never known anyone knock at his door before, not even the postman. He stood still for several minutes and then decided to satisfy his mounting c
uriosity, despite his growing fear that the person who was knocking posed a threat to him. It could have been someone whom he had encountered through his now nearly abandoned drug business. They could have tracked him down. And he had heard no car approaching down his potholed drive, which meant that whoever was there had come on foot. Perhaps it was a neighbour, but he could think of no reason why a neighbour should suddenly appear. He had never sought to meet the people who lived near him.

  He left his sitting room and ventured out into the narrow, dark hallway. He saw a movement by the door, which stood ajar. It hadn’t closed properly for some time and the hallway was cold and draughty. He moved along the wall attempting to see who stood on the other side of the door. He could get no real image of the visitor on his doorstep so he approached the door and pulled it open slightly on its remaining bottom hinge. It scraped the floor as it opened; only a little more and he could see a woman standing there, peering into the gloom. He was disorientated for some minutes, firstly because the figure was female, and secondly, because he thought it was possible that he recognised her. He pulled back from the door and considered this strange turn of events. He racked his brains and struggled to get his bearings. He knew the face, even though he had only briefly looked at her, but he could not place how or where.

  Then came a voice: “Is that you, Stephen?” it asked. “It’s Tess. Can I come in?”

  Stephen was now thrown into a state of confusion and amazement. He remembered he had a sister called Tess. Was this her? What was she doing here? Then he began to feel suspicious. His initial curiosity changed into mistrust as he fabricated subterfuge in his mind.

  She spoke again: “Stephen, it’s your sister. I’ve come to visit. Mum was worried about you and she asked me to come and see you and find out if you were alright. Can I come in?”

  He heard her give a small push at the door. She knew now that he was there and so far refusing admittance.

  “Stephen?” she said, quizzically now, not accepting his reluctance, intent on pursuing her goal. He knew he had to do something.

  “What do you want?” It was neither question nor statement but a resistance to her attempts at entry, followed by: “I don’t want you here. Why are you here?”

  He was allowing her to draw him out. He had begun a negotiation and she was surprised.

  “Stephen. It is you. I’ve told you that Mum…”

  “Why did she send you here? What does she want from me? I don’t want her anywhere near me. She’s an evil old woman. Why did you come here for her?”

  It didn’t matter that Stephen hadn’t seen his mother for years, the drama inside him had been there long before he escaped from the family home. He fought her still, day and night, in order to overcome the power she held over him, but without success. Her invisible manipulations and her lavish flattery lay side by side in his psyche, never finding a resolution, always in struggle and conflict, always leaving him unsure of the ground under his feet. He was always defeated by his mother and he hated this living manifestation of his torment with implacable vehemence and fury, mistaking Tess for Irene; and mistaking Irene as she was now with who she was to him when he lived with her and in her orbit, her destructive force field. Tess knew that she was implicated in a conspiracy, a private conspiracy that Stephen lived in, with Irene Dawson firmly embedded in his head.

  Tess thought fast to distance herself from the impression that she had been suborned by their mother. She said something that was not quite true and had not been true when she set out on her quest. She said:

  “I was worried about you too, Stephen.” She concluded lamely: “I hadn’t seen you for such a long time and I wanted to know if there was anything wrong. It wasn’t just for Mum.”

  Stephen knew she was lying. He could tell from her tone of voice and the collapsing energy of her statement that she was trying to inveigle him into opening the door and allowing her in.

  “Don’t lie. She sent you. That’s why you’re here. You came because she told you to. You always did what she said because you were frightened of her. You’re still doing it.” Stephen’s voice was shrill and Tess was struck by how quickly he had summed up the situation and how accurate his summary was. “I don’t want you in here. I don’t want you here. Clear off, just go away. And don’t come back.”

  Tess thought about how far she had come and was filled with a steely stubbornness. She wouldn’t leave until she had seen him. She would have to try a different tack. She tried to imagine what Stephen would respond to but came up with nothing. She decided to be honest, realising that he would recognise any half-truth or lie. His obvious paranoia lent him powers of discernment and he couldn’t be fooled.

  “Look, Stephen,” she said wearily, “I’ve come a long way to see you and yes, mum did persuade me to come and I didn’t want to. I couldn’t say no, as usual. You’re right about that. But I’ve driven a long way to see if you’re OK and I’m not going back until I’ve seen you, even if I have to camp out on your doorstep. Why don’t you just let me in and we can get it over with. I don’t really want to be here but I don’t want to have made a wasted journey.”

  She waited. There was no sound or movement from inside. She began to feel cold. The day was still sunny but she was standing on the shady side of the cottage and the chill dampness was beginning to seep into her bones. She had cooled down after the walk up hill and the chill in the air was starting to get to her. She waited several minutes and then saw movement inside the hallway as the door scraped open several more inches. As it opened, the sight of Stephen was revealed to her. He looked ashen, his face covered in greying stubble, his clothes dirty and unkempt. He said aggressively:

  “Well, now you’ve seen me you can go away.”

  Tess thought that she detected a slight hint of embarrassment in his voice, at his obvious dishevelment, at the state in which she had found him. Somewhere in him may have been a surviving shred of dignity that he knew he had betrayed. She couldn’t be sure and it may have been that she hoped that it was so, that there was still something in Stephen that was worthy and decent. She could feel herself reach out to him but she knew to curb the impulse, that it was folly, that Stephen was even more of an unknown quantity after all these years. He was bad enough before he fell into the underworld of drugs and violence. She knew instinctively that she would be mad to trust him. She decided to be assertive and not capitulate to his hostility.

  “You could at least let me in. I want to talk to you. It’s not enough just to see you. You look awful and it looks like mum was right to be worried about you.”

  He came back at her: “She never cared before. Why break the habit of a lifetime?”

  Stephen was angry, in fact he sounded furious. There was bitterness in him and she understood why. Her lifetime with her mother had been the stuff of nightmares, but despite their unholy alliance she could see that Stephen, too, had been her victim.

  She said: “Stephen, let me in. At least for a minute or so, so I can see how you are.”

  “You can see how I am.” His reply was again angry. “Why do you want to see more?”

  Tess felt exasperated. “Oh, come on Stephen. It’s cold out here. Open the door. Please. I’m your sister for God’s sake. What harm can it do?”

  She was amazed at her own disingenuousness. Of course it could do harm to Stephen. And to her. It could bring it all back, her being there, the wounding, the fear, the dreadful confusion.

  She said quickly: “I didn’t mean that last bit. I know how bad it was, it was bad for me too. Surely we have that in common, that’s all.”

  She felt defeated and on the point of leaving. She had done her best and that was all she could do. Perhaps she simply had to respect how Stephen felt and leave him alone. She turned to leave, to walk away from the painful encounter, when the door was pulled open with a sharp wrench, and Stephen stood on the threshold and said:

  “All right. Come on then.”

  She turned in surprise and a strange in
explicable relief and smiled at him. He looked back with no expression on his face, stood back against the hallway wall as she went past and closed the door as far as it would close. Tess made her way through the dark hallway and into the room at the end, the kitchen. She was appalled by the mess, filth and chaos. Even during her worst times, after Rachel died, she had kept her home tidy and clean, maintained the order outside her that she did not have inside. She had fallen to pieces after the death of her child and her daily routine had maintained her, sustained her body with regular food and exercise even though she had never felt like either. She had insisted to herself that she must maintain her standards, not let herself go. That discipline had saved her life when she had not felt like living.

  With Stephen, it seemed to her, the opposite was true. His domestic world was an expression of his fragmented state, of his painful disintegration into the wreckage of his world. She wondered what his life had been like after he had left home, that had brought him to such a state. She could hardly begin to imagine and felt only the intense discomfort of someone confronted by a reality that was beyond them in almost every respect. The state of the kitchen frightened her just as, if she’d been honest, the state of her brother also did. She felt her anxiety rise as she turned to face him.

  “Don’t look so shocked,” he said aggressively.

  Tess had not realised that what she was feeling was so clearly displayed on her face. She realised that her jaw had dropped and she closed her mouth with a jerk, trying to hide the message that her face had given away. It was too late. Stephen read her expression as a judgement on him, a criticism of the disorder that lay around them both.

  “You’ve come here to snoop so you can report back to that bitch how I’m living so she can disapprove. Then I’ll get a letter from her prying into my life and you’ll have given her all the information she needs so that she can pity me and tell me what a bad boy I’ve been.”