All this came out, all this truth, I just spilled it in front of him in the first few minutes of being in his presence. I was so ready to say it, I’d been waiting to say it to someone. But it shouldn’t have been him. He listened, his clear amber eyes on mine, his hands folded, motionless. He didn’t look around the room or make notes. He listened. And eventually he nodded slightly and said, ‘You want to take responsibility for what you have done, and you find it difficult to do that, to feel fully accountable if you cannot remember it?’
‘Yes, that’s it, that’s exactly it.’
‘So, how do we take responsibility? You can apologize – and even if you cannot remember committing your transgression, that doesn’t mean that your apology, and the sentiment behind your apology, is not sincere.’
‘But I want to feel it. I want to feel … worse.’
It’s an odd thing to say, but I think this all the time. I don’t feel bad enough. I know what I’m responsible for, I know all the terrible things I’ve done, even if I don’t remember the details – but I feel distanced from those actions. I feel them at one remove.
‘You think that you should feel worse than you do? That you don’t feel bad enough for your mistakes?’
‘Yes.’
Kamal shook his head. ‘Rachel, you have told me that you lost your marriage, you lost your job – do you not think this is punishment enough?’
I shook my head.
He leaned back a little in his chair. ‘I think perhaps you are being rather hard on yourself.’
‘I’m not.’
‘All right. OK. Can we go back a bit? To when the problem started. You said it was … four years ago? Can you tell me about that time?’
I resisted. I wasn’t completely lulled by the warmth of his voice, by the softness of his eyes. I wasn’t completely hopeless. I wasn’t going to start telling him the whole truth. I wasn’t going to tell him how I longed for a baby. I told him that my marriage broke down, that I was depressed, and that I’d always been a drinker, but that things just got out of hand.
‘Your marriage broke down, so … you left your husband, or he left you, or … you left each other?’
‘He had an affair,’ I said. ‘He met another woman and fell in love with her.’ He nodded, waiting for me to go on. ‘It wasn’t his fault, though. It was my fault.’
‘Why do you say that?’
‘Well, the drinking started before …’
‘So your husband’s affair was not the trigger?’
‘No, I’d already started, my drinking drove him away, it was why he stopped …’
Kamal waited, he didn’t prompt me to go on, he just let me sit there, waiting for me to say the words out loud.
‘Why he stopped loving me,’ I said.
I hate myself for crying in front of him. I don’t understand why I couldn’t keep my guard up. I shouldn’t have talked about real things, I should have gone in there with some totally made-up problems, some imaginary persona. I should have been better prepared.
I hate myself for looking at him and believing, for a moment, that he felt for me. Because he looked at me as though he did, not as though he pitied me, but as though he understood me, as though I was someone he wanted to help.
‘So then, Rachel, the drinking started before the breakdown of your marriage. Do you think you can point to an underlying cause? I mean, not everyone can. For some people, there is just a general slide into a depressive or an addicted state. Was there something specific for you? A bereavement, some other loss?’
I shook my head, shrugged. I wasn’t going to tell him that. I will not tell him that.
He waited for a few moments and then glanced quickly at the clock on his desk.
‘We will pick up next time, perhaps?’ he said, and then he smiled and I went cold.
Everything about him is warm – his hands, his eyes, his voice – everything but the smile. You can see the killer in him when he shows his teeth. My stomach a hard ball, my pulse sky-rocketing again, I left his office without shaking his outstretched hand. I couldn’t stand to touch him.
I understand, I do. I can see what Megan saw in him, and it’s not just that he’s arrestingly handsome. He’s also calm and reassuring, he exudes a patient kindness. Someone innocent or trusting or simply troubled might not see through all that, might not see that under all that calm he’s a wolf. I understand that. For almost an hour, I was drawn in. I let myself open up to him. I forgot who he was. I betrayed Scott, and I betrayed Megan, and I feel guilty about that.
But most of all, I feel guilty because I want to go back.
Wednesday, 7 August 2013
Morning
I had it again, the dream where I’ve done something wrong, where everyone takes against me, sides with Tom. Where I can’t explain, or even apologize, because I don’t know what the thing is. In the space between dreaming and wakefulness, I think of a real argument, long ago – four years ago – after our first and only round of IVF failed, when I wanted to try again. Tom told me we didn’t have the money, and I didn’t question that. I knew we didn’t – we’d taken on a big mortgage, he had some debts left over from a bad business deal his father had coaxed him into pursuing – I just had to deal with it. I just had to hope that one day we would have the money, and in the meantime I had to bite back the tears that came, hot and fast, every time I saw a stranger with a bump, every time I heard someone else’s happy news.
It was a couple of months after we’d found out that the IVF had failed that he told me about the trip. Vegas, for four nights, to watch the big fight and let off some steam. Just him and a couple of his mates from the old days, people I had never met. It cost a fortune, I know, because I saw the booking receipt for the flight and the room in his email inbox. I’ve no idea what the boxing tickets cost, but I can’t imagine they were cheap. It wasn’t enough to pay for a round of IVF, but it would have been a start. We had a horrible fight about it. I don’t remember the details because I’d been drinking all afternoon, working myself up to confront him about it, so when I did it was in the worst possible way. I remember his coldness the next day, his refusal to speak about it. I remember him telling me, in flat disappointed tones, what I’d done and said, how I’d smashed our framed wedding photograph, how I’d screamed at him for being so selfish, how I’d called him a useless husband, a failure. I remember how much I hated myself that day.