liked Fay, with her henna-red wispy copper wire hair, billowing black jersey dresses and spectacles perched right on the end of her nose. The weekly hour spent in the calming room with the bamboo plant and the painting of sailboats in Mousehole harbour didn’t untie the knot, but it loosened it.
A note on the wall in the lobby told me I could tackle a number of issues, including:
• Emotional Eating
• Anxiety
• Debt Worries
• Histrionic Personality Disorder
• Internet Addiction
• Managing Chronic Pain
I thought: sounds like an average weekend round mine, har har har. (Fay told me I did this as reflex, mocking myself. I told her I couldn’t take my problems seriously, given some people are sleeping rough. ‘There are always those worse off than you. Your problems are not invalid as a result, or needing to be measured against an internationally recognised pain scale before we decide if your condition is severe enough to treat.’)
I didn’t turn up to talk about Lucas, it was to discuss my dad, but the counsellor said most people end up on different ground to the area they expected to cover. In family therapy, Fay said, you’d be amazed how often parents turn up to analyse a peculiarly difficult child and we end up looking at their problems instead.
I said: Do you know, I wouldn’t.
I never told Jo or my sister or anyone else about Lucas and it felt strange to turn thoughts I’d churned on into actual consonants and vowels, in a room, with a stranger. It gave it life outside of my head.
I still didn’t tell Fay the whole story.
I think the real damage was that Lucas and I never spoke after the leavers’ party. It wasn’t just that our relationship was unconsummated, there wasn’t a conclusion of any sort. No conversation whatsoever. Exams were over, school was out forever, and we didn’t have any mutual friends to pull us back into the same orbit, that summer or ever after. When there is so much left unsaid, your mind is free to fill in the words that were never exchanged in a hundred thousand different ways, and believe me, I have. Then my dad died, I quit university shortly after, and really it’s been a race to the bottom since. Lucas hasn’t been a user of social media as far as I could tell from my searches – unless he blocked me from view – or I might have weakened and approached him in the years after. But being honest, I have no idea what I’d have said if I had found him. It would’ve been pretty tragic. Better that the temptation was taken away from me. What I wanted was to hear things from him I was definitely never ever going to hear.
At the end of that session, Fay said, What if it’s not what happened with this boy you regret, it’s you? It’s the you who you left behind. It’s who you were at eighteen and the things that happened subsequently and you look back on it as a watershed. You broke up with yourself.
This hit me as fearsomely true.
I mean, if I was Doctor Who’s new companion, and he was agitatedly racing round the Tardis, throwing levers on the control panel, the noise like bellows starting as the time machine mechanism booted up and saying, ‘Where to, Georgina Horspool?’ I’d waste no time in identifying early evening in a crap pub in northern England in the early twenty-first century.
A blonde girl in a red dress from Dorothy Perkins and uncomfortable shoes is unsteadily making her way there.
For the time being, she has no experience of managing chronic pain.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
