Steve comes in, apologising for being late, and we start the meeting. Ariel says she has had a good week and she’d gone to a friend’s party. The friend’s brother had walked her home and she had felt pretty safe.
Steve had gone to see the counsellor at work again. He’d been nervous of doing it, nervous it would affect his promotion prospects in some way, although everyone kept saying, ‘Don’t be ridiculous. You can’t be penalised because your bank was held up.’
‘I know,’ he says. ‘It’s just the voice inside me telling me I will be. That I have to pretend.’
Mildred, you got relatives?I ask.
She doesn’t deign to answer.
Eileen is still Eileen, smiling, making an effort but I can always see it in her, that huge loss. How could there not be a huge loss. Her daughter Daisy is gone. I’m sure I’d never recover from something like that.
But even as I think of how much Eileen has lost, my mind is working on another level – dancing around as people talk.
And then the thought begins to trickle into my brain. Farrah had done something different, she’d changed the narrative. She was refusing to get stuck in this one. Yes, she’d been coming to the group for two years and I had been coming for such a short length of time but she’d said something that resonated with me:I want to live my life.
‘I’ve changed, for sure,’ she says, when it’s her time to speak in the group, ‘but I have to live with that change and make it work.’
Her family and friends all know that she came to a victim support group, they know about what had happened to her, they know when she could or couldn’t cope. Mine didn’t.
I didn’t tell Scarlett because she was dealing with the loss of Jack, and all her hopes and dreams of being a mother. I didn’t tell Maura because she was trying to coax Gilly through her State exams and deal with a busy job and besides, she worries enough about Mum as it is. And I don’t tell Dan because ... I don’t tell Dan because I don’t want to be different. I don’t want our lives changed by this thing and yet theyhavebeen changed.
Shit happens,says Mildred in my head and I smile.
‘Yeah, shit happens, Mildred,’ I say and everyone looks at me.
‘I said that out loud again, did I?’
Everyone nods.
‘Sorry.’
‘No, go on,’ says Farrah, ‘you need to speak. I was done anyway.’
‘You sure?’
‘Sure.’
‘I was just thinking that I have all these little compartments in my life and one of them is being mugged and the fallout of what that’s done to me. I keep that compartment away from my family because I don’t want to upset them. There’s my Mum and how she takes care of my Dad, you know that. My sister’s husband left her and I think he couldn’t cope with the pain because they’ve spent years trying to have a baby. And finally ...’ I stopped. Did this hurt the most without me realising it? ‘There’s my daughter’s birth mother coming back and having the power to hurt my daughter—’
‘I don’t know what that woman is up to,’ interrupts Eileen fiercely. ‘She truly is the most selfish person ever.’
I grin. Eileen really is the sort of person you wanted in your corner.
‘I happen to agree with you on that, Eileen’ I say, ‘but I have to deal with it. I can’t change it. I worry about what it’s going to do to my daughter; what infertility and now marriage breakdown has done to my sister; I worry about my mother; I worry about my career and if we’ll be able to pay the mortgage; I worry abouteverything.
‘Then I’m presenting this happy front to everyone in public.Look at me doing some cooking in the kitchen.Aren’t my pancakes beautiful?!Happy!I spend half an hour a day doing social media to prove how happy I am. Sick or what? Do you know, until I had to cook for my darling sister, I hadn’t come up with a single recipe since I was mugged. Not one. I was just broken. But now, now I am cooking again except I’m being honest in a new way with this work.’
Nobody speaks. It isn’t a silence of shock or horror. It’s the silence of people giving me the space to talk it out.
‘Do you think sharing more of your life with the people in it would help?’ says Eileen, ‘Because you can’t keep all this pain inside, otherwise it just eats you up. I tried that and it doesn’t work.’
‘I know you’re right,’ I say, ‘I’ve got to share it, I can’t keep it in the box, because the box is never big enough. I’m different now and that’s fine. OK, total disclosure: I have this voice in my head.’
Shane looks alarmed.
‘I know a few lads who’ve had that problem after they have done too much really strong skunk,’ he says, ‘or taken a few too many mushrooms. It wrecks them, sometimes for years. You ... you haven’t done anything like that? I could tell you who to talk to but it takes a long time to get over it—’
‘No, Shane,’ I say. ‘This is not lots of voices in my head telling me I can fly after an acid overdose – this is that critical voice that says you’re an idiot or why did you do that? You know that voice?’
