A Kennedy - Serious Sweet

And that’s how things ran at the group: listen with Mother, the drop to the tomb and then visions of decomposition and next we had to talk about our week. And pat each other.

Which was the part in particular that got me. Someone would say they’d had a bit of a funny turn in a checkout queue, or a dream, or someone was still with her partner and he’d kicked off and there’d been an incident and it was grisly, just grisly, and turned you clear over inside, but then all that happened whenever a story stopped would be that the speaker got patted. From one side or the other, someone would reach out and pat them on their arm: There, there, dear, we’re sorry that you’ll keep on being you. It’s rotten, but what are the choices …?

You’d never get a pat from my side. None of that from me. I had more respect.

And Molly — who might even have granted her personal pat, if your week had been hellish enough — would pause to raise some tension and suggest to us that she was giving the matter some thought. Then she would say what she always said, which was, ‘Thank you.’ But with no tone in it. She sounded as if she was sleeping, or computer-generated, or bored witless. ‘Thank you.’ And next there’d be this bigger pause until someone else could think of a slice of tedium from their previous seven days. Either that, or they’d drag up some honest-to-God nightmare that you didn’t want to hear.

Rehearsing the pain until we’d got it perfect. The pain that is sex that is pain that is sex that is pain, but shouldn’t be. It should not.

Meg made her third cup of bargain coffee. It didn’t taste of much but what it managed was unpleasant. That was OK.

Molly didn’t like me. Because I didn’t speak. Because I didn’t want to.

Perhaps also because I didn’t pat.

This means, I think, that I am complaining about when they didn’t respond to the horrors and also about when they did, which could suggest that I couldn’t be pleased by them, no matter what, and that might be true.

They were still wrong, though.

When I got in the room the first day, I knew it would be no use and that if I wasn’t careful it would make me feel no use, too, and so I didn’t give the pack of them the satisfaction of hearing my specific version of then he did this and then he did that and then on that occasion I did worry I wouldn’t make it — I did think that I might die and not mind too much about it — and, by the way, the idea of kissing anyone, trusting anyone, will these days tend to catch me from a number of nasty angles and I think I’ll never do it again. I think that I would surely, really die if I genuinely tried, and how can I live like that, exist as this person? To which there is no answer.

Molly was unable to answer — not that I asked.

Molly doled out pauses and that regular ‘Thank you.’ Or if we were really lucky, we’d get a whole ‘And how did that make you feel?’

Honestly? That was her best effort? How did being assaulted make us feel? Were we not trying to get away from how it made us feel? Was our problem not that we still very much felt how it made us feel? Was it not fucking obvious how it made us feel?

And fuck that.

I mean, fuck that.

I mean, I am better than any of that.

And my answer in that situation is forever going to be, ‘How do you think? How do you actually fucking think it made me feel? How do you think you and your fucking useless autopilot clichés make me feel?’

Meg’s spoon stirred away in her tannin-stained communal mug. It served no purpose. Meg didn’t take sugar. She didn’t take milk. God knew, what there was of the coffee was fully dispersed.

I came there because I wanted to get better.

I wanted to not be about him.

I wanted to be about me.

I wanted to peel away from the sure and certain faith that touching is fatal and kindness an attempt to take by stealth.

And they didn’t help.

So I ditched the sessions. After the fourth week, I just didn’t go any more. And no one ever called to find out why.

I could have chased up other options, or something. I could have tried again. Oddly enough, telling people who couldn’t help me over and over about the thing that they couldn’t help on the off chance they might know someone who could and refer me to them didn’t really appeal.

I got tired.

She sat at her desk again and knew it was nearly lunchtime and also knew that her lunchtime was happening late today.

It doesn’t matter. Molly and the group was three years ago. But if I remember it then it makes me angry. Who wouldn’t get angry with rubbish like that? Who wouldn’t resent wasting all of a maybe good afternoon with therapy that only ever made you want to hit passers-by when you’d finished your hour, because you couldn’t harm anyone relevant — beyond yourself — and nobody there in the group was suitable for stressless punching. They’d be able to identify you later when things went to court.

They made me feel filthy and I don’t like that.

I’m not filthy or afflicted.

Meg reached down to scrub at Hector’s scalp.

They didn’t ask at the hospital this morning. No one even tried to ask me why I was upset.

The dog was out of reach, though — lolled on one side and breathing off and away into a sleep. She forgave him for resting.

I can have a rest, too. I’m a birthday girl — or thereabouts — and I am cultivating gratitude for the areas of my life which are lovely.

I can find them.

I can make them.

Meg had been staring at her computer to no effect for quite a while. A great deal of nothing was getting done.

It’s unfair to hate Laura.

She is naturally hateable, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK.

And she doesn’t mean to remind me of Molly or of a minor years-ago disaster that didn’t help me with quite different disasters which happened some other years earlier.

It’s not her fault.

And I have to work with her.

This means — bugger, bugger, bugger — that I have to be grateful for Laura. In some way. As a remedy for the poison that she brings.

Really?

Yeah. Apparently.

But really?

Yeah.

It’s what I’m told can be effective and effective is what I’m after.

Effective is what I’m all about.

Said the woman who hasn’t answered a single email, or done anything of note in almost an hour.

A message had come in from the Stewart family who would like to meet Roddy, a bull terrier with an especially lugubrious and mildly sidelong expression and a tested fondness for children, but not cats. And don’t interrupt him when he’s eating.

She replied with an appointment that might suit them.

I can be grateful. I can be grateful that Laura doesn’t work here on Wednesdays and I do.

But this is a Friday.

And Friday is a day when she does work here and I do, too.

But I can be grateful that I am putting in a foreshortened day.

But Friday is when I glance — slip, slide — over the accounts, just to help out and save them paying for too many hours of the genuine, real, not-struck-off accountant.

No one has a problem with this. Although I can no longer call myself an accountant, I can still have a look at the week’s figures in an accounting type of way. The fact that I royally screwed up my life doesn’t mean I have forgotten how to add. For example. And managing the no money I now have to live on is sharpening every skill I ever had, believe me. If you want a manager for a railway, or to run a hospital, ask someone who’s living on £750 a month, give or take. Ask someone who’s living on less — they’ll work you financial fucking miracles. They do it every day. They’re either ingenious, or done for — no half measures.