Secret Smile

CHAPTER 28

'I don't really know why I'm here,' I said.

The woman opposite me didn't answer, just looked at me until I glanced away, down at my hands screwed together in my lap; at the low table between us where a box of tissues stood ready. Out of the window I could see daffodils in the sunshine. The yellow colour looked garish and excessive. I felt blank and dull and stiffly self-conscious. At least I wasn't lying on a couch.

'Where should I begin?'

At least she didn't say, 'Begin at the beginning.' Katherine Dowling must have been in her late forties or early fifties; her lined, handsome face was without make-up; she had steady brown eyes, strong cheekbones, a firm jaw. Her hair was flecked with grey and she wore quiet clothes – a skirt down past her knees, old and wrinkled suede boots, a baggy, soft-grey cardigan. She was focused on me, or trying to see into me, and I didn't know if I liked it. I shifted in my chair, unfolded my hands, scratched my cheek, gave a polite, irrelevant cough. I glanced at my watch – Troy 's watch – on my wrist. I had forty-three minutes left.

'Tell me what brought you here.'

'I've got no one else to talk to,' I said and noticed the unsteadiness in my voice. I welcomed it – I wanted grief to overwhelm me, to pour uncontrollably out of me, the way it did sometimes at night when I would wake in the small hours and feel my pillow was wet with weeping. 'The people I want to talk to are gone.'

'Gone?'

'Dead.' I felt my throat begin to ache and my sinuses thicken. 'My little brother and my best friend.' I made myself say their names aloud. ' Troy and Laura. He killed himself, or that's what everyone says, though I think, I think – well, never mind that… I found him, in my flat. He hanged himself. He was just a boy, really. He still hadn't stopped growing. If I close my eyes I can see his face. Except sometimes when I try to remember him, I can't. Laura died just a few weeks ago. She died in her bath. She was drunk and she knocked her head and drowned. Isn't that a stupid way to die? She was only my age. The last time I saw her we didn't speak. I keep thinking if I'd said something to her, if I'd done things differently, this wouldn't have happened. I know that probably sounds stupid to you, but it's what keeps coming back to me.'

Katherine Dowling leaned towards me very slightly in her chair. A lock of hair fell forwards and she pushed it behind her ear without taking her eyes off me.

'I can't believe that I'll never be with them again,' I said. I took the first tissue out of the box. 'Of course I know I won't, but I can't believe it. I can't,' I repeated hopelessly. 'It seems impossible.'

I took another tissue and wiped my eyes.

'Bereavement,' began Katherine Dowling, 'is something that everyone experiences in…'

'This is his watch,' I said, holding up my wrist. 'He left it by my bed and now I wear it and every time I look at it I think, this is the time he doesn't have any more. All those seconds and minutes and hours, ticking away. I always thought we'd grow old together. I thought I could help him. I should have helped him, my lovely little brother.'

I was weeping in earnest now and my voice was coming out in hiccups.

'Sorry,' I said. 'Sorry, but it seems so unfair.'

'Unfair on you?'

'No. No! I'm not dead, am I? I'm one of the lucky ones. Unfair on them, I mean.'

I talked and my words came out in a jumble of memories and feelings, everything mixed up together. Troy, Brendan, Laura, Kerry, my parents, Nick; a body dangling from a beam, phone calls in the night, words whispered into my ear like poison trickling into me, weddings called off, funerals, first his and then hers… Every so often I stopped and cried into the damp wodge of tissues I clutched in my hand. My cheeks stung; my nose was snotty and my eyes were sore.

'I'm like Typhoid Mary,' I said at one point. 'I'm like one of those Spanish soldiers bringing plagues to the American Indians, poisoning their world. I'm like

'What do you mean, Miranda?' Katherine Dowling's calm voice broke into my tirade.

'I'm the carrier,' I cried out, blotting my face. 'Don't you see? They were all right, more or less. I brought him into my world, and that's my problem and I had to deal with that. But it was their world as well and he's infected them, destroyed them, wrecked their lives. I'm all right. Look. Here I am, sitting with a therapist, working out ways to feel better about everything. You see, that's the problem.'

'Listen,' she said. 'Listen to me now, Miranda.'

'No,' I said. 'Wait. I've got to get this straight, for myself as much as anybody. It's like this: there are awful things in the world, right? I feel terrible about them. Your job as a therapist is to stop me feeling bad about it. But maybe what I should really do is deal with the awful things in the world.'

'No,' she said.

'There's something narcissistic about this, if that's the right word. I mean, if people came to you and were suffering from depression because of the poverty and suffering and injustice in the world and you had a pill to make them stop worrying about it, would you give it to them? Would you dole out this pill that would make people indifferent to what is wrong in the world rather than go out and make it better?'

There was quite a long pause. Katherine Dowling was probably starting to regret what she'd let herself in for. I blew my nose and sat up straighter in my chair. Outside the window, the sky was a lovely pale blue.

'This,' she pointed at me. 'This is called grief. Do you hear me?'

'He even made me into his fucking alibi,' I muttered. 'God, he must have laughed!'

'Listen!' she said and I subsided again. 'People come to me and often what I do is help them find patterns, make shapes out of chaos, make stories of their lives so that they can understand them. But here I am going to say something quite the opposite to you. You are making a pattern that isn't there. You are trying to find a meaning, an explanation, tie everything up neatly, take responsibility, place blame. In the past few months, you have lost two people whom you loved a great deal. And you have been through a painful and disturbing episode with a man. This Brendan. Because these things have happened together, you connect them, like cause and effect. Do you understand?'

'I do connect them,' I said.

'Now: we can talk about what happened with Brendan; in fact, I think that might be helpful. We can talk about your bereavement, and why you feel such guilt. But we will be looking at you - at what is going on inside you after these traumas. We will not be looking at why these two young people had to die one after the other. They died. Now you must mourn.' Her voice grew gentler. 'You must let yourself mourn. Not cast around for explanations.'

'But if…'

'It takes time,' she said. 'There's no easy way.'

I made myself consider what she had said.

'Sometimes I have felt that I was going mad,' I said at last. I felt like a rag doll lolling on the chair. 'I used to have this life that I understood. Things made sense. I could work out what was going to happen next and make plans. I feel I've lost control. Anything could happen. Everything seems hostile and out of kilter. It's like a nightmare, but I can't wake up out of it. It just goes on and on.'

'Well, we can talk about that too,' she said. 'We should. Would you like to come again, Miranda?'

I nodded. 'Yes,' I said. 'I think I would.'

'Good. This time next week would suit me if that's all right with you. Now, as your brother's watch will show you, it's time for you to go.'

Before I had time to find excuses, I changed into my running clothes and stepped out into the spring afternoon once more. I ran to the Heath. I ran up the hill where I had last glimpsed Laura, but I didn't stop. I ran until my legs ached and my lungs hurt and I had a stitch in my side.

When I got home I had a shower and made myself a bowl of pasta with olive oil, chopped spring onions and Parmesan cheese over the top. I ate it and stared around me. Everything was drab and neglected. I'd been stumbling through my life, coming back here just to sit staring out of the window, then crawl into bed at nine o'clock and sleep for hours and hours. I'd been sleeping for ten or eleven hours every night, sometimes even more, and still woken in a fog of dreary, heavy-eyed, leaden-limbed fatigue.

I thought of Katherine Dowling pointing her finger at me. 'This is grief,' I'd let myself become clogged up by grief, sodden and hopeless with it.

I stood up and put my bowl in the sink. Then I filled a bucket with hot, sudsy water and started to wash the windows, to let in the light.