Maureen Johnson - The Madness Underneath

She indicated the counter by the window, on which there were several plastic containers of what looked like baked goods. Many, many baked goods.

“One of my clients is a baker,” she said. “I don’t accept money, but some people bring things, little presents. She always makes sure I’m fully supplied with baked goods. I hope you’re not one of these girls who doesn’t eat.”

“Oh, I eat.”

“I’m glad to hear it. There’s a reason they call it comfort food. I’m not saying you should eat these sorts of things all the time, but food does provide a bit of comfort. And if you’re having a bad day, a brownie might be just what you need. Give yourself a little kindness and perk up the old blood sugar. Here you go.”

She presented me with a brownie on a beautiful little china plate in a rose and white willow pattern.

“Have a taste of that,” she said. “Angela’s quite good. She uses all kinds of exotic things in her baking, curry powder, tea, chilies, herbs. Things you’d never think should go into baked goods. She’s frightfully clever with that sort of thing. I think she’s going to be on a baking show on television…must remember to look out for that.”

She filled a tray with coffee- and tea-making equipment—proper loose tea for herself, and a fancy single-serve French press for me.

“All right,” she said, picking up the tray. “Come this way. And could you get the door?”

She led me through a set of double doors. Unlike the all-black room, this room was white and silver, absolutely stark. There was a fuzzy white rug, white leather chairs, a white sofa. The walls here were bare except for a few diplomas. I could make out the names of Oxford University and King’s College. At one end of the rug was a gleaming silver ball chair, like a big egg that you could climb inside. A cocoon. A cocoon was precisely what I wanted right now.

“Go ahead,” she said, nodding to the chair. “People love sitting in it.”

She took a seat on the sofa and poured herself a cup of tea.

“Right, then,” she said. “I’ll tell you what I know about you, and you can tell me the rest. I know your name is Aurora, or Rory, and I know you were stalked and stabbed by the Ripper.”

“That’s me,” I said.

“And I imagine people have been asking you a lot about how that makes you feel. I can guess at that—I think it makes you feel not good. But looking at you, you seem to be someone who’s gotten on with things.”

“I do?”

“Well, you returned to your school, where I’ve heard—in the most conversational terms—that you seem to be getting on very well with things. Charlotte thinks very highly of you.”

“She does?”

“Absolutely.”

I took another big bite of the brownie.

“The thing is,” I said, “I’ve had therapy before, and I didn’t really…I don’t really like talking about the attack.”

“Understandable. But I’m sure you know that talking about it is often the way of dealing with it and processing it?”

“I know that. But…I can’t.”

Julia would have latched on to that and dug in, mining her way into my soul. But Jane shrugged, took off her shoes, and tucked her feet under her on the sofa.

“Some people want to talk about what happened to them, to break it down bit by bit. Other people do not. Why don’t we just talk about how things have been going since your return? We can talk about whatever you like. Why did you ring today?”

“I was doing homework and studying,” I said. “And I realized I was dead.”

“Dead might be overstating the case.”

“Not really,” I said.

“Why don’t you tell me about it?”

So, I did. I told her about school and having all my assignments in Bristol but never looking at them. I told her how I had piled my books up and how I had kind of felt nothing about them for a while, and then all of a sudden, I felt everything about them. I told her my fears of falling behind and generally not being a part of Wexford. And if I fell behind at school, I would have no place in the world, and how my future seemed so blurry to me right now, like I was driving in heavy rain. I might be on the right path, but more likely I was heading for a wall or into a rushing river.

I told her I was homesick, but had no desire to go home. I told her I was excited about having a boyfriend, but sometimes I didn’t even know why I liked him.

God, I talked a lot. Even for me, I talked a lot. I saw what Charlotte meant by feeling better around Jane—you just felt like you could say things around her. And she wasn’t checking a clock. She just listened. She didn’t try to get me on any track or on any subject. She only stopped me when I said, “I wish I was normal.”

“Let me say this…” Jane leaned forward and adjusted her long-empty tea cup. “There is no normal. I’ve never met a normal person. The concept is flawed. It implies that there is only one way people are supposed to be , and that can’t possibly be true. Human experience is far too varied.”

“But I’ve met normal people,” I said. “I swear I have.”

“You’ve met people who get on well with life, and some of the people who get on with life with the most skill are far from what most people would call normal . So I never worry about normal. I do find that there are generally two types of people, though—there are people who have seen death up close and people who have not. People who survive, people like us—”

“Like us?”

“Oh, yes.” She nodded. “I’m like you. I’ve gotten close to death as well. That’s why I’m here. That’s why I do what I do. Because I know. ”

She settled herself back in the sofa a bit and adjusted the folds of her complicated outfit.

“Where I grew up, in Yorkshire, there was a man who lived down the road from us who ran a television repair shop. I never liked him. I always felt like he was looking at me strangely when I walked past. I never actually thought there was something wrong with him, just that I didn’t like the feeling I got when he looked at me. One night, around this time of year, it was late, and I was walking back from a friend’s house. I took a shortcut across a bit of field. That sort of thing never worried me. Nothing bad happened in our village. Then I realized I wasn’t alone. He was walking behind me. I asked him what he was doing. He said he’d seen me and followed because he wanted to make sure I got home safely. And I think I knew then. I think I knew that if someone follows you at a few paces, you’re in trouble. It’s our animal instinct. When I heard him speed up, I ran. There were woods on the edge of the field, and I went for those. He overtook me.

“I’ll tell you, he didn’t expect me to fight like I did. There was a thick bit of downed tree branch on the ground, and I picked it up and gave him a right old thumping. I’ll never forget it, because the moon was so bright that night, and I was beating a man with a tree branch, using a strength I didn’t even know I had. I almost had him, too. But he managed to get the branch away from me. I ran and started screaming. The other houses were fairly far, but I think my scream must have carried over those fields. It certainly gave the sheep a start.”

Time was moving very strangely. My absorption in her story was total. It was like I was there. I knew what it was like to run across that field in the moonlight.

“Oh, he hit me good,” she said. “Knocked me right on the back of the head. I was quite dazed. I think he was in a panic by then, because he was swearing and panting for breath. He dragged me across the field, through the mud and the dung, then he gave me another good whack and rolled me into the small pond there, the one the animals drank from. It was only a few feet deep, but that was deep enough. I was unconscious for a few moments, I think, but some part of me said, ‘Stay awake.’ And I did. I fought, and I stayed awake. I was a good swimmer, and I could do a dead man’s float, so that’s what I did. I made him think I was dead. He ran off in terror, and I pulled myself out of that water and fell on the grass, and I looked up at the sky…and everything was different. After that, I felt like I had two lives. There was the me I had been before the attack, the one people knew and wanted to relate to. The one people wanted to comfort and fix. And there was another me, a hidden me that no one ever saw. There was a me who had tasted death. That me knew things other people didn’t know. Do you know this feeling?”