It Could Have Been Her(94)

She shakes her head, a tiny, barely perceptible movement. “No,” she says. “It’s good. It keeps it small in my head when I see it every day. If I couldn’t see it, I’d dream about it, have nightmares about it. It would get too big and overwhelm me. And besides,” she says, turning to smile sadly at Stuart, “it keeps me closer to my mum.”

She’d changed her name by deed poll a couple of weeks ago. Daisy Connolly is her name now. She has no interest in the woman who raised her, who now grows stronger by the day in a rambling ivy-clad rehabilitation center while awaiting trial. She has no interest in her at all. “I don’t feel sorry for her,” she’d said to Stuart just after everything had exploded. “She says she’s a victim, but I don’t feel sorry for her in the least.”

They turn their gaze away from the house at the end of the road, and head back toward the cobbled alleyways, the Christmas-lights-strung windows, the sparkling trees, the sense of innocent wonder and joy as Christmas comes to the Vale of Health.





epilogue


EIGHTEEN YEARS EARLIER

Hello,” I say to the woman behind the big walnut desk. “I’m here for an appointment with Dr. Twist? My name is Jasper Black.”

The lady taps on her keyboard and then looks up at me and smiles. “Please,” she says, “take a seat.”

I settle myself on the smart sofa and look around at the empty waiting area. Water from a cooling machine with clear plastic cups. Fruit in a bowl. Some magazines. I feel my stomach growl and complain. I’ve not had anything to eat today. I was too nervous this morning. I look at the fruit and consider an apple and then shift my gaze away from it when I imagine myself picking it up, crunching into it, the sudden terrible noise of it, the woman’s eyes on me, the humiliation of being caught eating an apple without asking. But I can’t ask, that would be too embarrassing. I pour myself a cup of water instead, slightly alarmed by the loud glug of it through the cylinder as it descends toward my cup, and drink it as quietly as I can.

Finally the lady calls my name and directs me to a door where a pleasant-looking man is waiting to greet me with an outstretched hand.

“Mr. Black, Dr. Twist, lovely to have you here, do come in.”

I like him; he puts me at ease instantly. He directs me to a nice chair, and he seats himself in his and eyes me kindly through his trendy glasses. “So, Jasper—may I call you Jasper?”

I want him to call me Patch, but I know I can’t ask him to do that, so I nod and smile. “That’s fine,” I say, and then I clear my throat.

He spends some time talking me through what he does. He’s an EMDR therapist. Someone on my clowning course told me about it when I mentioned that I’d run away from home because something bad had happened to me. I told him I’d been having nightmares, that I never slept, and he told me about how EMDR had cured his girlfriend of night terrors and other behavioral issues related to her PTSD after surviving a multiple pileup on a motorway.

I had not survived a multiple pileup on a motorway, had not been pulled from wreckage by strong, safe hands and taken in brightness to be fixed by brilliant people; I had experienced a blinding, deafening, destabilizing trauma in the quietest, darkest corners of my childhood home and it lived with me every day.

My friend told me that a man like Dr. Twist had the ability to reprogram the very essence of me by desensitizing me to my trauma without me having to utter a word, which was ideal, because I could not tell—I could not speak about the things I saw, the way I felt. I know that I will never be able to find the words, not ever, and so this—this—I can do: a silent therapy, like surgery, the doctor’s techniques like invisible knives and needles, doing their work while I remain silent. I am ready to hand myself over entirely to this man. Because not only do I live with this every minute of every day of my life, but now, as a broken adult man, I am becoming a monster not unlike those who broke me. I scare women. Deliberately. And then when I have scared them, I touch myself and I am disgusting, more disgusting than I can properly contain inside my head. It is not me and it is not Patch when I find those women and do that to them; it is someone else entirely, a clown without a name who crawls out of me and takes me over and I hate him. I want him purged and annihilated.

I turn my full attention back to Dr. Twist, who is asking me to do something difficult, so difficult I feel breathless and nauseous merely contemplating it, but contemplate it I must, before I do something I really, really regret.

Dr. Twist tells me I am to put myself, in my mind’s eye, back in the moment of my trauma, back in the place where it happened. I must see it as clearly as I can, every inch of it, every second of it, every blade of light and blot of darkness.

I do as I am told—I always do as I am told—and I put myself there, in that strange, dark place beneath my father’s study, that strange place where he put girls to live, girls with mothers and fathers of their own, girls with stories and foibles and lives and friends. The au pair girls. My father still called them the au pair girls even as he was shackling them to beds, locking them in the outhouse, raping them night after night. We all called them au pair girls, but we all knew that they weren’t.

In my mind’s eye I follow the sound of noises, of muted screams. I pull up the trapdoor under my father’s rug, and I step onto those uneven stone steps. My eyes adjust to the pale light from the night-lights on the walls. I start to see the outlines of things: the beds, the armchair, the shape of a young woman sitting against the wall. As my vision clears I see that it is Claire.