‘You didn’t make new friends?’
She shook her head. ‘My ex-friends were bitching about me, saying they could smell period from me. Everyone kept away.’
‘Jez …’ Dennis looked faint.
‘What about afterwards?’ I asked.
‘When we started secondary school, everything was different anyway. Maybe everyone had caught up? A friend of my mum’s had a daughter in my class and we started hanging out. After a while things just got more normal.’
‘Did your ex-friends ever apologize?’
‘No.’
I’d picked up her hesitation. ‘But?’
‘One of them, we ended up being friends again, sort of. Like, there were five or six of us, hanging around together. She and I, we never talked about that year. I sort of … hated myself for not having it out with her. But at the time it was just easier to go along with things.’
‘Are you in touch now?’
‘Instagram. And only because I’m hoping something really, really shitty happens to her.’ She giggled, then stopped abruptly and scanned the faces in the room, wondering if she was being judged.
‘Did you learn anything from that year?’ I asked Ella. ‘Good or bad?’
She thought about it. ‘… Feeling safe isn’t real. It can be taken away with no warning. It doesn’t take much for a person to end up totally alone.’
She read on and it was all pretty tame: good results at school, a year spent travelling in Asia followed by three years in college. She moved to Dublin, got good jobs, met her boyfriend and her friend Naaz. Until the mugging which had set her on the path to addiction, her life had been close to perfect.
‘Your doctor told you that sleeping tablets must not be taken for longer than two weeks?’ I asked. （But I already knew. I rarely asked a question to which I didn’t already know the answer.）
‘But I was badly messed up after being …’ She dropped her head and whispered, ‘Attacked. I kept having flashbacks.’
‘Did you go for counselling?’
‘… Um … well, no. Counselling is expensive. And getting time off work to go, you know …’
‘Well, if you’re sacked – and you will be if you don’t get a handle on your addiction – you’ll have plenty of time.’
She looked devastated – then rallied. ‘I’ve been off them for ten days now, I can’t be addicted.’
Internally, I sighed. Every patient I’d ever met gave me some version of that. ‘Easy to be clean while you’re in here, Ella. Your every movement is monitored. It’s very different in the outside world, where you’ve stresses and pressures – and choices.’
‘But if I was addicted, wouldn’t I be craving them?’
Another internal sigh. ‘That word “craving” has a lot to answer for.’ People think that addicts rail around, weeping and pleading for their drug of choice. ‘Addiction isn’t just a physical thing, it’s emotional, it’s mental, it’s spiritual. Those are the aspects that drive almost every relapse, not a physical craving.’
She shrugged, not interested.
‘Tell me why Jonah, Naaz and Boyd said you were addicted.’
‘I think Jonah just wants to break up with me.’
‘So he said you were addicted to tablets and made you go to rehab? That’s a bit extreme.’
She shrugged. ‘Guys.’
‘And Naaz? What’s her reason?’
She squirmed. ‘There was a … moment, with her boyfriend. It was nothing. Just a … Seriously, it was nothing. But Naaz didn’t see it that way. She’s hella possessive of him.’
‘And Boyd’s reasons?’
Her discomfort worsened. ‘Boyd … I think he had … Sorry if this sounds whatever, but I think he wanted to be with me. And when I … wouldn’t, he decided to come after me.’
‘So he sexually harassed you at work? Because that’s a serious allegation.’
‘No,’ she gasped. ‘I wouldn’t say that. I just think he liked me – then he didn’t.’
‘Were you sleeping with Boyd?’
‘No!’
‘No?’
Better get him in here, get them all in.
While I’d been quizzing Ella, Trassa had started to cry. Giles’s chair was the nearest to the tissues and fistfuls were being passed from hand to hand like buckets of water in a medieval-town-on-fire drama.