by H K Thompson
“Yes. OK. That sounds good.” Tess paused, focusing in the light of the new strategy. “But, you know, I find it difficult to think about much else than leaving and what it’ll be like to be back outside and not be safe in the way I am here and no longer see you for our sessions. I’ll miss them, I think, more than anything else. No one has ever listened to me like this. It seems to me that it’s a rare thing. I’ve never been able to talk to anyone like I’ve talked here. I’ve had to learn how to do it, as if I didn’t know how before. I think that’s amazing at the age of thirty-one. What kind of world is it where I felt I couldn’t talk about myself in a way that helps me to discover who I am, how I feel, how I think? Stephen knew nothing about himself. He spread suffering and ugliness all around him and he never looked to see what he was doing. He always did that.
Perhaps I grew up somewhere promising myself that I wouldn’t do that. I saw my mother and my brother do it and I was determined not to. I think children must do that, see things they don’t like and, even though they’re surrounded by it, decide to do something different, and promise themselves.”
Evelyn listened to her words, struck by the insight and strength that Tess had developed, and by her capacity to articulate something positive about herself. To Evelyn it demonstrated a balance that was growing in her. Too often, she thought, her Wellbridge House patients could only add to the abuse that they had received from others by abusing themselves with relentless self-criticism and judgements. It was less common for her patients to say things that suggested or described good qualities and positive attributes. It was pleasing to hear Tess do that and a sign that there was something healthy growing in her, the beginnings of a core of self-worth.
“Of course,” she continued, “we don’t know we’re doing that. It’s all going on inside. It’s a secret promise and one that can’t be broken. But I suppose those promises can be bad ones too, destructive. Perhaps Stephen made a promise to himself that he would do to other people as our parents did to us. I didn’t speak about it much at the time, when we were talking about Stephen, but I think now that my father did things to him that I don’t know about. I don’t know what they were but I think they were bad things and the combination of my father and my mother was too much for him. I think he made a promise to himself to take revenge for what had been done and that his whole life was a life of vengeance, getting his own back for what had been done to him.”
She paused and thought again, waiting for a new association to enter her mind.
Evelyn stirred from her immersion in Tess’s words and said, quite spontaneously:
“Perhaps in Stephen you find the opposite of yourself now, with his destructiveness and revenge, and that he serves as a reflection of the darkness in you, the part of you that you promised not to follow as a child but that you still carry inside you.”
Tess knew that at one time such an interpretation would have floored her and sent her to her room to recover.
“Strangely, it’s a relief to be reminded of the darkness in me. I think we have a choice, that as we live we can make the world a better place or a worse place and we can choose which. Who would choose to make it a worse place? I think people just do it and don’t think about it, they act badly and they couldn’t care less what effect they have on others. I know what it’s like to have bad things done to me and I don’t want to do that to others. Stephen was the opposite. He had bad things done to him and then felt better about himself by doing the same things to other people. In the end it killed him.”
Tess paused, thinking about what she’d said. Evelyn was silent. She gathered her thoughts again, felt her breathing rising and falling in her chest.
“It’ll take a lifetime to change what I need to change in myself. I think that that is what my life is about now. Just that. Keeping that clamour in me under control and getting satisfaction from it. It’s quite a fulfilling thing to do, really. I think that’ll always be there, don’t you?”
Evelyn considered her response. Perhaps there was some important and fundamental reassurance being sought, some basic truth that Tess needed to know about. She replied.
“Yes, I think that turbulence will always be there. There’ll always be an anxiety that, at times, you won’t be able to reassure. But perhaps for most of the time you’ll be calmer and capable of resting. In stressful circumstances I think it will all come up again and you’ll have to find your way back. But you will find your way back because now you know how to, and every time you make that journey you’ll learn more about yourself and be that little bit stronger.”
Tess was affected by this new perspective on her struggles. That is what it is all about, she thought.
*
Evelyn and Tess spent their remaining sessions reviewing the work they had done and dealing with the consequences of decisions that were filtering through the system about her release, which was confirmed less than three weeks later, and then the date for her release, which was three weeks after that. The police agreed to witness protection and during her last week or so at the unit they began making the preparations with her for her new life. She had her first meeting with the Crown Prosecution Service whilst still at the unit and, as the reality of what was to happen began to emerge and rush towards her, she found stability and respite in the final two or three sessions with her therapist. Their parting was tearful for Tess but, as she walked out of the therapy room door for the last time, she felt confident that she now had the strength to embark on the next part of her journey. She felt that she had achieved what she had come to achieve.
Somewhere inside her, she thought in one of her many bouts of introspection, she had established a core. She had a reference point, a source of guidance, she thought, that she had not had before. Up until this time that core had been filled with Irene and William Dawson. It was as if that rotten core had been hollowed out and filled with something good, decent and kind over the past months. Through the talking the imprint of her mother and Stephen had begun to be less distinct and, as she walked out of the front door of Wellbridge House for the last time one fine spring morning, she felt elated and free. As she got into the car that was to take her away to a new, secret place, she turned to wave to her friends Judith and Louise, and to Mark and Mona as they stood at the front door and waved goodbye to her.
She had said goodbye to Evelyn the day before and it had felt good and clean. She had cut the cords that had attached her to Evelyn and she had cried as she did so. But she felt happy and she was becoming accustomed to the paradoxes that were part and parcel of her world of emotions. Driving away down the familiar gravel drive, passing the trees that stood sentry to Wellbridge House, she had an indescribable sense of completion. She would never be whole in the effortless way that those who had been loved are whole, but in accepting that she felt complete and at one with the world.
Letter to Evelyn Doyle
7th April
Dear Evelyn
It’s a year since I left Wellbridge and it’s spring again. I’m writing to you because I wanted to let you know what I’ve been doing and what’s been happening. I hope that’s OK with you. I just felt that I wanted to tell you, perhaps talk to you again by way of a letter. I do sometimes still talk to you as if you’re still with me, which you are, of course.
Since I left Wellbridge House I’ve had time to think about the things that happened that took me to the unit and to begin my work with you. I had no idea before I went there that I’d end up talking to you about so many things in my life, the things that directly and indirectly led me to exhume Rachel and take her to that police station. Because that was the beginning. That was the first thing in my life that I freely chose to do that I knew would be momentous and would take me to places that I’d never been to before. Then, I thought it would be actual places, like a police station and a court of law and a prison. What I realise now is that the really important places I went to were inside myself. I could never have imagined what it would be like to explore the w
orld inside me, the places that I’d avoided going to because they were too frightening, too dark, too painful. I didn’t really know, either, that there were such places and that those feelings were keeping me away from them. What I began to realise was that it was those places where I actually lived, not just in the house I lived in, the village, the county, the part of the world, but inside me, in my own house of terrors that I kept tightly shut.
With that wonderful thing, hindsight, I realise now that I was deeply depressed from when I was very young. I feel tentative saying this, but I think I was depressed since I was a small child. I can’t put an age on it but I was very young when that shadow started to fall over me. It wasn’t until the later days at Wellbridge House that I began to feel different. When you’re immersed in something all your life you have little idea that it can be different and that was me, very depressed with no idea that I was, only a vague insight that something was wrong. Of course, I understand now why I was so depressed. There was no love in my family, not even from my father. I made the best of him but it was as if I had to exaggerate in my own mind that he was good to me and kind to me, that he loved me, to make life bearable, I suppose. I don’t now think it was true. I think I probably had to make that up and believe it. I don’t think my father was capable of love either.
One thing leads to another, Evelyn, and I think writing about my father has led me to the news I received about five weeks ago, that my mother has died. I couldn’t go to the funeral for obvious reasons. It was difficult for me because part of me wanted to, the dutiful daughter part, who did as she was told. I could hear my mother telling me off the moment I heard the news and knew I couldn’t go. She’s so firmly entrenched in my poor head. I had to struggle with her tirade for days after the news came, from Ann McKenzie, as it happens. She’s been my liaison with the police and the CPS since my release (I expect you know that) and all through the court case and she’s been great. I’m so glad it’s over. I expect you know that both the men I identified were convicted. They didn’t have to rely solely on my evidence. There was some forensic evidence to convict them but I was called anyway as a witness. I suppose I clinched it for the jury. They were unanimous. The two of them were sent to prison for a long time and apparently there are other charges that may be brought against them. I think Stephen got his justice. But they never found the third man.
I seem to have wandered off the death of my mother. I wonder why? She died suddenly from a heart attack. She was only fifty-nine. It seems right that her heart killed her. It had been so firmly shut in all the time I’d known her. Even her doting on Stephen was sentimental and selfish, not love at all, just a horrible attachment to someone she could make up a deluded story about that wasn’t true. I feel I know nothing about her, where she came from, what had happened to her. When I’m feeling charitable I think that she must have had a terrible time when she was a child to turn into such a person, to do the things she did to her own children. But I’m not really convinced by my own reasonableness. I think I’ll die myself still hating her at worst, feeling contempt, and sometimes sadness at best. My own heart feels hard towards her and I don’t criticise myself for that. For it to be different from that would be expecting too much of myself just yet. Anyway, my mother is gone and I feel an enormous relief that she’s not still sitting in her dreary house in Kent hating my father, dreaming silly adolescent dreams about Stephen and not thinking of me at all unless she wants something. I suppose I should be grateful that there was little she did want from me and that she rarely did get in touch. That sounds bitter, and I think I am bitter that she never cared for me. Perhaps I’ll get over it in time. I hope so.
Looking back, I think I had a breakdown after Rachel died. Things were very bad for me for those years. Funny how they began to get better when I went against my better judgement to see Stephen for my mother. It’s bizarre how healing can come from the worst things that happen in life. I know now that it’s what we make of them and whether we want to heal that matters. There is an expression ‘mad with grief’. I was mad with grief about Rachel. It was because something precious, in fact the only precious thing I’d ever known, was lost forever. That awful space left inside me was unbearably painful. I fell apart slowly, painfully, and when I was in pieces I knew I had to rebuild myself and I didn’t know how. But actually I did know. I can remember one day, I thought to myself, ‘I’ve fallen apart, how do I remake myself?’ You see, there was no core, no starting point, nothing solid inside me to make a start with. I can remember thinking that, I felt so empty, so hollowed out.
I came to Wellbridge House not knowing anything about what you did there. I thought it was some kind of psychiatric hospital and that I’d be sedated all day and all night. Then I met you. I had some self-awareness before I met you. I knew something about myself but I had no language to describe it. You helped me find a language. You sort of trained that awareness, quietly and slowly. And you gave me a way of seeing myself and my life without judging me. Perhaps that was the most important thing of all: to not be criticised or judged, just nudged in the right direction. And I began to develop a liking for words, Evelyn. They are like precision instruments; they can describe the world inside me as well as outside me. I learnt how to talk to myself about me and the mystery that had been inside me for all the years when I didn’t know how to do that. That was the wonder, the revelation. I’ve taken to reading a lot since I came here because I like words and what they can do. I enjoy feeding that need in me. I’ve picked up a thread that began when I was young and at school and then on into university.
I read a lot when I’m not at work because that’s how I spend my time. And as I sit and read and go through my daily routine I’m gradually getting used to being someone with a new name and a new home and a new past. I feel curiously at home with being someone different, not Tess Dawson. This new identity is closer to who I am now. Tess is in the past, she suffered, she lost someone she loved and then she left that old identity behind her on the front step of Wellbridge House when she left that day a year ago. So it seems to suit me no longer being Tess and I find I’m growing into being this new person. I can make myself from scratch because I feel I have a core now, that I built with you, something of substance at the centre of me where there was once that painful void. I don’t know how it happened but I know it did. I spend some time with other people and I’m beginning to enjoy that. I’m beginning to know myself through other people, which is very unexpected. I always kept people away and lived a secret, private life. I always tried to live in the countryside but now I live in a small town and I enjoy getting to know people. These relationships are only superficial at the moment but it’s a beginning and I know that it’s good for me.
The one thing I have thought a lot about since I left is Stephen. It’s as if I’m working something out in myself which is to do with him and me and also about me. I keep thinking about him being my shadow. You remember, in one of our last sessions. I think now that Stephen died inside, when he was a child. He died and I didn’t and that meant that he lost touch with anything good in him. It’s as if the good part died and all that was left was his hatred and rage and underneath it the terror of knowing that he was dead. Can a soul die? I can’t bear to think that it might be true. I want to hold on to the belief that somewhere there was still a light, fading and dying but not dead and that somewhere he lost touch with that and never wanted to find it again. Perhaps he lost all hope that he could retrieve it from the horrors inside him. But I struggle with this, Evelyn, and I’ve never found that tranquil place with it. I’ll keep on struggling, I think, because perhaps I feel I’m keeping hope alive for Stephen. I know it’s hopeless, that he’s dead and gone but there’s something in me that won’t let go. Maybe one day…
This letter is getting rather long but I think I’ve nearly said what I wanted to say. It’s good to talk to you and to myself like this. What else do I want to say? Oh yes…. One of the biggest changes in the way I live now is to do
with the fact that now I feel in charge of my life. Until Wellbridge House I always felt as if I was someone who things happened to and I had no idea that that was so. To live in any other way was completely outside my experience and it never occurred to me that I could experience life in any other way. When I dug Rachel out of the old chimney it was the first really consciously decisive act of my life. I know I’ve said that before, but it is so true. I really did learn the difference between being conscious and being unconscious about things when we worked together. That distinction has opened up my life for me in so many ways. In doing that, I took responsibility for myself instead of keeping everything buried. It is all so graphic and obvious now. The extraordinary thing is that I had no idea what I was really doing, I just did it. (I know too that sometimes it’s important to do things on impulse, because you feel compelled. At times like that you’re cooperating with something much bigger than your small self. That could sound a bit spooky but it’s true.)
I have experiences these days, really in the last three or four months when, unexpectedly, I feel something like a soft whisper in my ear and I feel what I can only describe as joy fill me up. It happened when I was still at Wellbridge House, after or during one of our sessions. I can’t remember exactly. But it’s like an intimation of life, pure life, full and rich and deeply satisfying. I can feel euphoric and serene at the same time. It’s a warm place and I feel bathed in that warmth. I think now, perhaps it’s a bit whimsical, but I think that this feeling I have sometimes, this joy, is perhaps how I could have felt or should have felt when I was very small and that the feeling would have been at the very core of me rather than the terror and the pain. And that if I’d grown up with that feeling inside me my life would have been very different. Who knows? But I like to think that, even if it’s true and I’ve missed the ease of living from that place of comfort and security.
