I nodded awkwardly at them and mumblingly introduced them to Mike, John Joe and the others.
Mum gave me a shaky, watery smile and to my alarm I felt tears start in my eyes.
Then Josephine, the MC, arrived.
‘Thank you for coming,’ she said. ‘We’re hoping you can shed light on Rachel and her drug-taking.’
I felt myself shrink and cringe and pull myself back into the chair, in an abortive attempt to disappear. I always hated hearing what people thought of me. My whole life had been an attempt to get people to like me and it was hard to listen to the extent of my failure.
Mum opened the bidding by bursting into tears. ‘I can’t believe Rachel is a drug addict.’
You’re not the only one, I thought, trying to fight off terrible wretchedness.
Dad took charge. ‘Rachel hasn’t lived at home for the last eight years.’ He’d dropped his Wild West accent for the session. ‘So we’d know very little about drugs and the like.’
Big lie. Didn’t they share a house with Anna?
‘No problem,’ Josephine said. ‘There’s plenty of other vital information you can give us. Particularly about Rachel’s childhood.’
Mum, Dad and I stiffened as one. I didn’t know why, it wasn’t as if they’d locked me in a cupboard and beat and starved me. We had nothing to hide.
‘I’d like to ask you about a time she remembers as particularly traumatic,’ Josephine said. ‘She got very upset about it one day in group.’
‘We didn’t do anything to her,’ Mum burst out, shooting me a furious look.
‘I’m not suggesting you did,’ Josephine soothed. ‘But children often see the adult world in a distorted way.’
Mum glared at me.
‘Did you ever suffer from post-natal depression?’ Josephine asked.
‘Post-natal depression!’ Mum snorted. ‘Indeed’n I did not! Post-natal depression wasn’t invented in those days.’
My heart sank. Nice try, Josephine.
‘Did anything happen to you or the family shortly after Anna arrived?’ Josephine pressed.
I squirmed. I already knew the answers and I wanted it to stop.
‘Well,’ Mum said warily, ‘two months after Anna was born, my father, Rachel’s grandad, died.’
‘And you were upset by this?’
Mum looked at Josephine as if she was mad. ‘Of course I was upset by it. My own father! Of course I was upset.’
‘And what form did this upset take?’
Mum threw me a filthy look. ‘I cried a lot, I suppose. But my father had died, what was I expected to do!’
‘What I’m trying to get at,’ Josephine said, ‘is did you have some sort of a breakdown? Rachel remembers it as a very painful period and it’s important to get to the bottom of it.’
‘Breakdown!’ Mum’s face was aghast. ‘A breakdown! I’d have loved a breakdown, but how could I, with a family of small children to rear?’
‘Maybe “breakdown” is the wrong word. Did you ever at any stage take to your bed? Even for a short while?’
‘Chance would have been a fine thing,’ Mum sniffed.
And I felt small childish voices clamour inside my head. ‘But you did! And it was all my fault.’
‘Do you not remember those couple of weeks?’ Dad interjected. ‘When I was away on the course…’
‘In Manchester?’ Josephine asked.
‘Yes,’ he said, shocked. ‘How do you know?’
‘Rachel mentioned it. Carry on.’
‘My wife was finding it hard to sleep, with me being away and it only a month since her father died. So her sister came to stay with us, and she was able to take to the bed for a while.’
‘You see, Rachel,’ Josephine said triumphantly. ‘It wasn’t your fault at all.’
‘I remember it differently,’ I muttered, finding it hard to accept this version of events as the truth…
‘I know you do,’ she agreed. ‘And I think it’s important for you to see how you do remember it. You exaggerated everything. The scale of the disaster, the length of time it went on for and most importantly of all, your part in it. In your version you played a starring role.’
‘No,’ I choked. ‘Not a starring role. More like, more like…’ I searched for the words to express how I felt. ‘… more like, the role of the baddy! The evil streak of the family.’
‘Not at all,’ Dad blustered. ‘Evil! What did you do that was evil?’
‘I pinched Anna,’ I said in a little voice.
‘So what! Anna pinched Helen when she arrived. And Claire did exactly the same to Margaret and Margaret did the same to you.’
‘Margaret pinched me?’ I blurted. I’d thought Margaret had never done a bad thing in her life. ‘Are you sure?’
‘I am, of course,’ said Dad.
‘Remember?’ He turned to Mum.
‘I can’t say that I do,’ she said stiffly.
‘Indeed you can,’ he exclaimed.
‘If you say so,’ she said, in a tone that let everyone know she was humouring her poor, deluded husband.
Josephine looked at Mum, then looked at me. Looked at Mum again, then gave a secret little smile.
Mum’s face reddened. She suspected that Josephine was laughing at her, and she might have been for all I knew.
‘The way I remember it,’ Dad gave Mum a funny look, then turned to me, ‘is that you were no worse and no better than any of your sisters.’
Mum muttered something that sounded like ‘No better, certainly.’
I felt sick.
‘Have you some kind of resentment against Rachel, Mrs Walsh?’ Josephine asked.
I reeled from her brazenness.
So did Mum from the appalled look on her face. Then she rallied.
‘No mother likes to have to come into a treatment centre because her daughter’s a drug addict,’ she said sanctimoniously.
‘Is that the only thing you have against her?’
‘That’s all.’ Mum looked murderous.
Josephine looked questioningly at Mum. And Mum tossed her head, her mouth pursed into a cat’s bum.
‘So, Rachel.’ Josephine smiled at me. ‘I hope you can see now that you’ve nothing to blame yourself for.’
Would Mum have done all that crying just because her father had died? I wondered tentatively. Had Dad left merely to go on a course?
But why would they lie? They’d no need to.
And with that I felt my past transform slightly, as if a part of it had been scrubbed clean.
Josephine turned to Mum and Dad and said ‘Tell us about Rachel, in general terms.’
Mum and Dad exchanged doubtful looks.
‘Anything at all,’ she said cheerily. ‘Everything helps us to get to know her better. Tell us about her good points.’
‘Good points?’ Mum and Dad were startled.
‘Yes,’ encouraged Josephine. ‘Like, is she clever?’
‘Ah no,’ Dad laughed. ‘Claire’s the clever one, she has a degree in English, you know.’
And Margaret’s not bad, either,’ Mum chipped in. ‘She hasn’t a degree, but I’d say if she’d gone to college, she’d have done well.’
‘That’s right,’ Dad turned to Mum. ‘She was such a good worker, that even though she wasn’t as bright as Claire, she’d have probably made the grade.’
Mum nodded conversationally. ‘Although she’s done very well for herself without a degree, she has a load of responsibility in that job, more than some of the people who have degrees…’
Josephine loudly cleared her throat.
‘Rachel.’ She smiled graciously. ‘That’s who we’re discussing.’
‘Ah, right.’ They nodded.
Josephine waited in silence until Dad blurted out, ‘Average, Rachel’s average. No eejit, but no rocket scientist either.
‘Hahaha,’ he added, half-heartedly.
‘So what are her good points?’ Josephine pressed.
Mum and Dad turned to each other, loo
ked perplexed, shrugged and remained silent. I could sense the other inmates shift uncomfortably and I cringed. Why wouldn’t my fucking parents make something up and spare me this shame?
‘Was she popular with boys?’ Josephine asked.
‘No,’ said Mum, definitively.
‘You sound very sure?’
‘It was her height, you see,’ Mum explained. ‘She was too tall for most of the lads her own age. I’d say she had a complex about it.
‘It’s hard for tall girls to land boyfriends,’ she explained.
I watched Josephine look very pointedly at the top of my mother’s head, then at the top of my father’s head, a couple of inches lower. A gesture that was completely lost on Mum.
‘But I suppose apart from her height, she can look attractive sometimes,’ Mum added half-heartedly. She didn’t believe a word of it. Neither did Dad because he interjected ‘No, Helen and Anna are the good-looking ones of the family.
‘Although…’ he added jovially.
Say I am too, I begged silently. Say I am, too.
‘… the pair of them are such minxes,’ he continued, ‘especially Helen, that you’d wonder why anyone bothers with either of them. They’d have you driven mad!’
He seemed to expect a burst of sympathetic laughter, but his words fell on silence. The other inmates were staring at their feet and I wished I was anywhere in the world other than that room. A Turkish jail would have been nice.
The time dragged by so slowly.
‘She can sing,’ Dad blurted, into the mortified quiet.
‘No, she can’t,’ Mum muttered, giving him a shut-the-fuck-up look. ‘That was a mistake.’
Naturally Josephine was all ears. So they had to tell her about the Saturday afternoon when I was seven and we were having a new kitchen fitted. The old one had been ripped out and, because I had no one to play with, I sat there on my own. In the absence of anything else to do, I sang songs. (‘Seasons in the Sun’, ‘Rhinestone Cowboy’ and other favourites of long car journeys.) Mum, who was upstairs in bed with the flu, heard me. And the combination of her delirium and the effect the empty, echoey kitchen had on my youthful voice – turning it into something high and clear and tuneful – convinced her she had a fledgling opera singer for a daughter.
Less than a week later, in a mood of high anticipation, I was despatched to a private singing coach. Who did her best with me for a couple of lessons until she felt she really couldn’t swizz my parents any longer by taking their money under false pretences. ‘It might work if all her singing could be done in kitchens that are being redecorated,’ she explained to my outraged mother. ‘But I’m not sure that could be guaranteed.’
Mum never forgave me. She seemed to think I’d deliberately conned her. ‘Why didn’t you tell me you couldn’t sing?’ she’d hissed at me. ‘Think of the money we’ve wasted.’
‘I did tell you,’ I protested.
‘You didn’t.’
‘I did.’
‘You didn’t.’
Then I stopped defending myself because I felt guilty about misleading them. While I had suspected that the whole thing was a big mistake, I had undeniably got caught up in the general thrill of it all. I had longed to be talented and special.
How I wished Dad hadn’t brought it up.
Then, because there seemed to be nothing else to say, Josephine ended the session.
That night I began packing my bag. Not that I had ever unpacked it properly. It was still thrown on the floor by the side of my bed, tights and skirts and shoes and jeans all tangled higgledy-piggledy in it.
‘Going somewhere?’ Chaquie shouted at me, as I took my good jacket out of the wardrobe and threw it into the bag.
Like Neil, Chaquie had lost the run of herself entirely since she’d admitted she was an alcoholic. She rivalled Neil as the narkiest inmate in the Cloisters. She shouted and screeched at everyone and everybody, especially her old buddy, God. ‘Why did you make me a fucking alcoholic?’ she regularly shrieked, looking heavenward. ‘Why me?’
Josephine kept assuring her that her anger was perfectly normal. That it was all part of the process. Which was scant comfort to me who had to share a room with Chaquie and got yelled at constantly.
‘The three weeks that I’m legally bound to stay for are up on Friday,’ I explained nervously to her.
‘I’d planned to escape at the end of my first three weeks too,’ she said through clenched teeth. ‘But then they brought in that fucker I’m married to and opened up the whole can of worms. Next they threatened me with an injunction and now I have to stay for the duration.’
‘Ah well,’ I said awkwardly.
‘I’ll miss you,’ I said, realizing that I really would.
‘I’ll miss you too,’ she roared at me.
52
The following morning we had the usual stampede down the corridor to the Abbot’s Quarter. We burst in the door, laughing and pushing, in our rush to get to the good chairs. To our surprise there were already two people sitting there.
Time came screeching to a halt for me as I realized in slow motion that I knew the man. I couldn’t remember where I’d seen him before but there was something about the way he looked that…
The nano-seconds groaned by as I clocked his hair, his face, his clothes. Who was he? I knew I knew him.
Was it…?
Could it be…?
Oh, my God, it couldn’t possibly be…
It was…
It was.
‘Hello, Luke,’ I heard myself say.
He stood up, taller and bigger than I remembered him. His hair was messy and his handsome face unshaven. So heartstoppingly familiar. I was suffused with delight for the briefest instant. Luke, my Luke, had come to get me! But even as a smile exploded on my face, it was already inching away in confusion. This was all wrong. He wasn’t behaving like my Luke. His expression was granite-grim and he hadn’t leapt on me, kissed me and swung me round the room.
Memories came rushing back of the terrible final scene when he’d broken it off with me. Then with scalp-crawling horror, I remembered the questionnaire. It had arrived in person. How could I have ever thought I’d avoid it?
‘Rachel.’ The unfriendly nod and the fact that he didn’t call me ‘Babe’ indicated he hadn’t come in peace. I shrank with rejection.
The instant where I turned to the tall blonde woman who stood next to him took about an hour. I knew her too. I’d definitely seen her before. Maybe not to talk to, but I knew the face.
Surely it wasn’t…?
No, it couldn’t be…?
What had I ever done to deserve this…?
‘Hello, Brigit,’ I Said, my lips mumbly and numb.
She was as unfriendly as Luke, just giving me a brief ‘Morning’. I quailed.
I turned to Mike and the others, foolishly feeling that I should introduce everyone. My knees trembled with shock and, after I introduced Mike to John Joe, and Chaquie to Misty, shakily sat down on the worst seat. Four or five springs set about gouging tunnels in my bum but I barely felt it.
Luke and Brigit also sat down, looking exhausted and miserable. You could smell the agog interest of Mike and the other inmates.
Meanwhile, I thought I had died and gone to hell. From Luke’s and Brigit’s hostility, I knew their visit indicated something bad. This can’t be happening, I thought repeatedly. This cannot be happening. I was very shaken by both of them being there. But more shaken by Luke. We’d been so close, so easy with each other, and I was devastated by the coldness between us. Whenever we’d been together he’d been wildly, generously affectionate. But now Luke was sitting on the other side of the room from me, bristling with an invisible force field that warned me not to try and touch him under any circumstances.
‘How’s it going, Rachel?’ He finally attempted conversation.
‘Great!’ I found myself saying.
‘Good.’ He nodded, miserably. I wasn’t used to seeing him look miserable, he
usually looked so alive. There were any number of things I desperately wanted to know. Have you a new girlfriend? Is she as nice as me? Have you missed me? But I was too stunned to manage anything.
I turned to Brigit. She looked the way she did when she had no make-up on, even though she was plastered in it. That was weird.
It was all weird.
The last time I’d seen or heard from her was in our apartment in New York, as I was leaving for the airport with Margaret and Paul. I’d hugged her, but she’d just stood like a plank of wood. ‘I’ll miss you,’ I’d said.
‘I won’t miss you,’ she’d replied.
And instead of getting upset about it, I’d totally wiped it from my mind. I’d just remembered.
Bitch, I thought.
Josephine arrived and said things about Luke and Brigit arriving unexpectedly from New York. ‘We’d have warned you they were coming, Rachel,’ she smiled, ‘but we didn’t know ourselves until this morning.’
She was lying. I could see it on her face. She’d known they were coming, but she’d kept it from me to cause maximum impact.
Without further ado, Josephine did the introductions and confirmed what I’d suspected. That Luke and Brigit had both come as my Involved Significant Others. Brigit hadn’t done a questionnaire because what she wanted to convey was so important a personal visit was called for.
I felt sick with dread.
‘Brigit, I realize how upset you are,’ Josephine said. ‘So we’ll proceed gently.’ It looked as if Brigit was going to be the warm-up act, with the main feature of Luke to follow.
I braced myself for her accusations, literally sweating with fear. This was the worst thing that could ever happen to me.
I wondered if people felt like this when they were taken into a sound-proofed cell to be tortured by the Inquisition. When they were aware of the horrors that awaited them, but still couldn’t believe it was really about to happen. To them. Not their friend. Not their colleague. Not their brother. Not their daughter. But to them.
‘You’ve known Rachel a long time?’ Josephine asked Brigit.
‘Since we were both ten.’ Brigit’s eyes flickered nervously over mine, then away.
‘Can you tell us about Rachel’s drug-taking.’