The Devil You Know

by Gwen Adshead

  It was day three of Diwali. She said the street outside was teeming with people dancing, laughing and having fun. The flats were all festooned with decorations, windows full of twinkling fairy lights and candles. I didn’t want to interrupt her flow, but I was thinking, ‘She’s from a Muslim family, and Diwali is a Hindu festival, isn’t it?’ As if she’d read my mind, she commented, ‘Everyone celebrates Diwali, you know. Any excuse for a party.’ The five-day festival had fallen a little later than usual that year, butting close to Christmas. ‘These festivals are not so different, are they?’ Zahra mused. I asked her what she meant. She’d grown up celebrating both, she told me, and talked a little about how each of them marked new beginnings and signified a triumph of good over evil, the coming of light into darkness. I listened, thinking about Diwali lights merging into strings of coloured Christmas bulbs and the message in John’s Gospel of how ‘the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness cannot overcome it’.

  The third day of Diwali was when you were supposed to visit a temple, Zahra explained, which she hadn’t done. You’re also meant to spend time with friends and family – but she hadn’t done that either. She had gone to work at the garden centre, as usual, arranging all the latest Christmas stock. A few weeks earlier, she had asked her boss if she could make a Diwali display as well, so she checked to make sure all was in order, with tea lights lined up, flower garlands hanging neatly. I smiled at her description of the goddess Lakshmi balanced on her lotus flower, gazing across at Father Christmas and his reindeer in the aisle opposite. She set aside one box of tea lights to buy with her employee discount card on the way out – unlike some of her colleagues, she’d never try to pocket them on the sly.

  It was the only job she’d ever had that she liked, she said. Lovely smells of ginger and coffee drifted from the newly installed café at the back. The shoppers, their carts piled with poinsettia and ropes of tinsel, greeted each other with hugs and laughter, huddling together in their cosy groups of family and friends over steaming mugs and mince pies. Seeing them made her feel sad, she told me, but she couldn’t explain why. I suggested maybe it was because she wasn’t with her family. She shook her head – both of her brothers had invited her to come to their homes for their celebrations that week, like they did every year. But she felt ashamed and angry at them for reasons she couldn’t really articulate – and at the time, there was no one else she could talk to about such things. I nodded for her to go on, encouraged that she had come this far.

  The truth was, she blurted out, she feared to see her mother at one of those gatherings with her brothers and their families, as much as she longed to hear from her and get some inkling that the woman even knew her daughter was alive. It had been three years since they’d had any communication, and that was just one phone call, curt and abruptly cut off by Mum. And before that, another five since she’d seen her in person. It felt like forever. The bad thoughts had started up again. It had been a long time since she’d felt so low – and even so, she functioned almost as normal during the workday. Nobody knew. When everyone had been leaving work that last evening, her manager had wished her a happy holiday, asking, ‘Will you be seeing the family?’ ‘Off to my mum’s!’ she’d shot back, demonstrating a big fake smile for me as she recalled how she’d presented this lie. It had cheered her up a little, the idea that he probably believed her.

  But when she let herself into her gloomy basement flat, that bad feeling ambushed her, forcing her to curl up in a ball in the chair by the electric heater. She had to pull herself together. Then she checked her phone again, just in case. Still no reply from Mum. She opened her browser and flicked through her internet searches from the night before, making sure she’d read all the instructions. She was ready. She described how she pulled a stool over to the smoke alarm in the kitchen and, standing on tiptoes, managed, after a bit of a struggle, to disable it.

  She told me that she thought about what might happen the next day, imagining a phone call made by a stranger to her mother, thinking about what Mum would do, if she even answered. At that, she stopped short, lapsing into a moody silence. I waited a while, then prompted her, asking what she had thought her mum’s possible reaction would be to such a call. ‘Maybe … I don’t know. I figured she’d be gutted – but mainly because people would point to her as a bad mother, blame her or something.’ There was nothing her mum cared about more than what others thought.

  Zahra told me the main thing on her mind was that nobody would care if she died. She had no close friends. Her family might not even hear the news for ages; her brothers didn’t answer calls from unknown numbers on principle. When they did find out, they’d probably think they were better off without her, freed from any cloying sense of duty that made them invite her round once a year or send her a photo after the arrival of yet another fat, beautiful baby. ‘Mummy, please text,’ she wrote one last time, pressing ‘send’ before she could regret it. After a moment, she saw the word ‘Delivered’. Maybe her mother would read this final message and realise it was urgent. Her voice was flat and her tone pragmatic as she related this, despite the desperation implicit in her words. The dissonance was moving and painful to hear, and staying neutral, holding back tears, took more effort than I thought it would.

  After another half-hour or so of staring at the phone and willing it to buzz with a message, in a moment of clarity Zahra realised there would be nothing. Time was up. She scribbled a handwritten note to her mother, an apology and a goodbye. She pushed it out under the front door, hopefully out of harm’s way. Taking a tray from the kitchen, she lined up four or five rows of the little tea lights she’d brought home and set a box of matches beside them. She didn’t usually keep matches around because her cooker was electric, and anyway, matches weren’t good for her. She knew that. But today she’d bought some specially. Then she opened a bottle of sweet wine – another rare purchase. Drink didn’t agree with her as a rule, she explained to me, but that night … She trailed off. I nodded. She didn’t have to justify it.

  She quickly ate the pastries she’d brought home, washing them down with the wine. When she stood up abruptly, she remembered thinking she might vomit. Next, as part of a pre-planned ritual, she picked up the clay lamp and, methodically, making sure not to miss a spot, went round the two rooms of her flat, dashing its contents along the edges of the walls. When it was empty, she went and fetched the bottle of oil and poured out whatever was left for good measure, tracing a shiny wet borderline on the carpet, all around her bed. I imagined her climbing in, sitting there marooned on an island of sorrow, where nobody was going to come to her rescue. Nobody knew.

  Picking up the box of matches, she shook it, her heart starting to beat faster as she recalled the first time she’d heard that tantalising sound. There was a power in those little wooden sticks. She lit the tray of lights with care, ‘like a birthday cake’. As the noise increased outside, Bollywood music filtering through the walls, she recalled seeing tea lights on other Diwali nights, long ago, when people would fill her family’s home – friends and relatives and relatives of friends. A memory returned as she told me this: she recalled a time when she was ten or eleven years old, her young self peeking out of her room on the landing and watching the line of lights someone had laid out on the stairs. The little flames looked like they were dancing to the music blaring from the sitting room. But she was meant to stay upstairs and study, she said. It was her job to be a good girl and do well in school, so she would grow up to earn money and contribute to the family. Her big brothers were allowed to join the party, though; they were spoiled and adored.

  I asked her if she was always a good girl, and she shook her head, telling me that by the time she was in her teens, she had begun to climb out of her bedroom window when she should have been doing homework, drinking and smoking with some local kids who hung out in the park, in defiance of her parents. She risked a beating from her father every time she was caught. At sixteen, she talked of how she began to self-har
m in secret, cutting into the flesh on her arms and legs. Somehow, it made her feel better, ‘or at least feel nothing’. She covered the angry welts with long sleeves and wore only trousers. Nobody knew.

  She returned to the story of the fire, admitting that she couldn’t help it – before she struck a match, she had to take one last peek at her phone. There was a message on the screen, but it just warned ‘low battery’. Who cared? Nobody. She picked up the first tea light on the tray and pitched it across the room towards the curtains. Then another, and another, in all directions … until the tray was empty. As she watched, her head swimming with wine and her eyes starting to tear up from the smoke, with one great whoosh the flames leapt up, consuming the curtains and licking at the torn wallpaper. Only then did she feel panic. What had she done? That was the last thing she remembered, she told me, until she woke in a hospital bed.

  I knew from the trial documents that Zahra and her neighbours were incredibly lucky: fire alarms outside in the corridor had gone off immediately, and the fire service, already on high alert during Diwali week, was close at hand. The children next door were swiftly evacuated. She suffered smoke inhalation but miraculously escaped with a few minor burns. Unfortunately, the fireman who broke down her door and pulled her out of the smoke was badly hurt. Zahra was arrested in hospital the next day and sent to the women’s prison, where, two years later, we would meet in the HCU.

  As she described her memory of that night, I thought again of how difficult holiday times are for the lonely and the unloved, for those who have nowhere to go where they will be welcomed. Some people can manage this by working, as a way to hide from socially enforced delight. It’s not only the shops in the high street or Amazon that do the bulk of their business during this season; the Samaritans’ hotline receives its highest volume of calls in the last quarter of the year. My mind kept returning to Zahra’s fruitless texts to her mother, and the poignancy of this woman’s longing for maternal contact, even a few words to give her some shred of evidence that she existed in her mother’s mind. If many of us can relate to Zahra’s anguish in the holiday context, then perhaps we can also recognise that experience of rejection and fear when someone we love doesn’t respond when we call out to them. Why did she think she might get a response, after so much rejection? I found myself considering whether she was in part prompted by the hopeful and maternal symbolism around her: the Virgin Mary tenderly holding her baby son, the holy family surrounded by love and light; little children sitting around a tree with their loving parents. I searched for ‘Diwali images’ after our session and found the goddess of good fortune, Lakshmi, rising from an ocean of milk, full-breasted and broad-hipped.

  When Zahra finished her account, she folded her hands and looked up at me, expectant, as if I would have some great insight. I was still absorbing it, like someone who sits transfixed in a cinema after a powerful film, blind to the credits rolling and the audience heading for the exits. I could see Lakshmi and Father Christmas on their facing displays, taste the sticky pleasure of those Indian sweets, hear the fireworks exploding in the street and inside her mind, and feel the sharp pain of the texts that failed to come. I couldn’t help but have profound sympathy for her, and for the deep loneliness in her life. But most lonely people don’t set life-threatening fires. I didn’t share all these thoughts with Zahra, but I did share with her how much sorrow I felt listening to her story, adding that it made me acutely aware of how close she had come to death by fire. ‘Why do you care?’ she asked. It wasn’t an aggressive question – she really seemed perplexed. I needed to make a careful response. Again, this wasn’t about me; it was about her wish to die. ‘Well, I am glad that you are here to talk about this with me, and I am conscious that might not have been the case, that you really hoped to die. I’m also aware that you still felt that way not long ago, when you set the fire in your cell.’ She gave an almost imperceptible nod. ‘I think in both cases you wanted to hear from your mother. Is that right?’

  Zahra didn’t respond, and I worried that I had stopped the conversation. Then she spoke, almost in a whisper: ‘It’s all I ever wanted … to hear her talk to me as if she cared about me.’ She said nothing after that, for what felt like a long time. I had to remind myself to exhale as I waited for more. ‘I think’, she began again, with a firmness in her voice that I’d not heard before, ‘that my mother doesn’t really like me. And I don’t think she ever has.’ She admitted that she felt ashamed for saying such a thing. I asked if she could explain why, and she reminded me about the importance in her family and culture of honouring parents. She had always thought it must be her fault that her mother treated her as she did. I recalled the ‘late child’ label she’d spoken of, the expressed idea that she was a mistake, or some kind of a negative addition to the family. In our next session, we picked up that thread again, and she told me about another label she’d been given by her family as a teenager: she was a ‘bad girl’. This led to her telling me about her first suicide attempt by fire, when she was seventeen.

  As with the other two incidents, she had been rebuffed by her mum that day. Again, it happened near the year’s end, around the holidays; surrounded by festivity, she felt isolated, unable to speak to anyone about the pain she was in. Alone in her bedroom, feeling unbearable and unwanted, the best recourse seemed to be death. I imagined her back then, so young, so vulnerable, scars etching her forearms, rummaging in a school backpack, hand closing around the box of matches. Rattle, rattle. Those little sticks – the outsized power they had for her. Then the smoke filling the room, the mattress smouldering, the panic and the smoke and the coughing and her mother’s voice shrieking in her ear, ‘You stupid, stupid girl! What have you done?’

  She was shaken by this memory, as was I. But as this session had to end, I tried to ensure she was settled a little before I returned her to the wing, so as not to send her back in distress. I invited her to sit with me before she left and think about what we should write in her orange book about her thoughts and memories. Together we identified someone on the staff whom I could alert to the fact that she was feeling upset, so that they could help her as needed, and I assured her she was not the first person who had described to me such difficult relations with their mother.

  We would talk further about this troubled relationship in the weeks that followed. She had been surprised and relieved to hear that she was not alone and that her experience was not unique to any cultural or ethnic group. I told her that a great many women struggle with mothers, and with mothering, for a variety of reasons, and not all of us are meant to bear children. If someone has difficulty with the role, it may be because they were not cared for as a child or have some unresolved trauma and are transmitting that pain to their own child. As our therapy progressed, I invited Zahra to speculate on what her mother may have experienced as a child and as a young woman. She had come to the UK from India to marry a much older man whom she didn’t know, who was violent to her and the children, and who was not a loving partner. That didn’t excuse her treatment of her daughter, but it might help explain her deficiencies. Could Zahra forgive her mother for being cruel? Could she forgive herself for wanting to hurt herself? I also wanted to explore whether she could allow herself to receive something from her brothers, if not her mum. There were tears when we got in this deep.

  It was also crucial for me to talk with Zahra about how frightening it is for any child to be neglected or treated with hostility by a parent, even if they never lay a finger on them. Angry parents generate fear in their children, and over a long period chronic fear can impair a child’s self-esteem, their sense of value and their ability to regulate their moods. Zahra’s parents provided her with all the physical and material necessities: shelter, food, clothing. But what Zahra recalled was constantly feeling rejected, judged and unloved. Her self-harm was a response to the anguish she felt about an attention that she would never command, and eventually this escalated to arson; as far as she was concerned, her sorry self could di
sappear in a ball of flames. I thought that it was remarkable – and spoke to her resilience – that Zahra had been able to survive so much rejection and parental dislike. Many people with that kind of history have fared much worse.

  I also knew it was important that Zahra realise that as an adult, she had choices and responsibilities. She was speaking one day about her poor treatment by her family again, and I decided it was time to ask if the things she did while living at home may have been damaging to them in any way. Zahra was righteous in her anger. She jumped up from her chair, shouting at me that I didn’t care about her and I was a fucking bitch who knew nothing, adding that she knew I was ‘just in this for the money’. This rage came out of nowhere, and it was so out of character that the heat of it took me aback. I felt like I’d stumbled over a hidden landmine. Then she stormed out of the room, slamming the door so hard it rattled in its frame. After a moment of stunned inaction, I had to hurry after her: she’d forgotten her ACCT book.

  Zahra would not look at me when I caught up with her. I apologised for upsetting her, and she watched in stony silence as I made a note about our altercation in the book. I said that we could meet up next week to think more about what had happened, but in truth, I wasn’t confident she would turn up. Although I’d learned long ago, with patients like Gabriel and Tony, that it was possible for therapy to survive such an ‘upset’, I wanted to look more closely at my part in it.

  I took the time to discuss what had happened with a senior colleague, so I could process it. I told them that I felt I had overlooked something and shouldn’t have been taken by surprise by this ‘mouse that roared’. As soon as I articulated that thought aloud, I recognised I had been too distracted by Zahra’s compliance or ‘mousy’ demeanour; I also admitted that I thought I had some inbuilt belief that she was passive, a ‘good girl’, perhaps in keeping with a stereotype I held in mind of the dutiful Asian daughter who shows respect to her elders. I’m not proud of this and I wish I could say it was the last time I took someone at face value, but it’s a lesson I have had to keep learning, over and over. There’s good reason for that idiom, which derives from the world of finance; as the Israeli economist and psychologist Daniel Kahneman has explored in depth,6 it’s easy for the mind to judge only on superficials, and harder to go into deeper layers of meaning.