The trouble with Laura was that beyond being naturally irritating — Meg thought it was fair to say that; maybe not, but she was saying it anyway — beyond being fucking annoying …
Which wasn’t fair and wasn’t how to approach the problem.
She’s not a problem, she’s a person.
No, she’s both.
The problem was that Laura reminded Meg of being in the support group and the woman who had run it — someone who had also always managed to make Meg feel afflicted. It wasn’t Laura’s fault that she resembled the group leader, she wasn’t even aware that Meg had tried to be in a support group and, frankly, Laura was never going to find that out because she would have loved having the information way too much and it would have unleashed … Well, it was hard to say: advice about more lunacy Meg ought to try; meditation, or body scrubbing, or t’ai chi. Or else an outbreak of arm patting would ensue, or just …
All of that stuff gets depressing.
I’m sorted out and getting along just fine. Today was an exception, but not a sign that I’m off the rails. I don’t need any more solutions, no more cures. I am in progress. What more can anyone ask? I’m under way.
Being given a solution that didn’t work could end up suggesting your problem was permanent, or else that you were the problem. Probably there wasn’t any problem. Possibly you were being oppressed by unnecessary cures.
In the support group we were the bloody Sisters of the Unnecessary Cure, perched on our circle of chairs — always chairs — and going nowhere. We had to sit in a circle because that’s non-hierarchical. As if I cared. And as if there wasn’t a boss. Molly was our Mother Superior, all right — no mistaking that — ruling over the Aung San Suu Kyi Room in a far too faraway and inconvenient community centre to which I will never return. The place smelled of shit, because of the Parent and Toddler Morning Mingle that was in for a three-hour booking just before us. Toddlers can produce a load of shit in three hours. I’d sit there, inhaling kid shit and being stressed after the journey and bloody angry and …
It was my own fault that I had to travel such a way to get there, though. I didn’t want to find anywhere more local, amongst the not massive array of choices. I didn’t want to be seen turning up, or discover a neighbour who’d think she had something in common with me and need to talk about it later, come round and hold an autopsy on me in my own front room.
So I went to the Sisters and joined them in their circle of pain — usually seven of them and me — which wasn’t enough people to let any air get in amongst us, let it be relaxing, let me coast for a while. Molly would kick off by reading out a piece from a book of special, womanly meditation in her special womanly and extra calm I-love-the-universe-and-it-loves-me voice. Excruciating. I wanted her and the fucking universe to get a fucking room.
Then she’d talk us through one of those going-down-steps-and-into-a-charming-garden bollocksy visualisation scripts, only she had lousy timing about it somehow and so you either felt you were hanging around on your imaginary staircase while waiting for random others to catch up, or else she drove you along your tranquil passageways and over the self-affirming lawns until you began to imagine pursuers, or else your stairs just melted and then you were plunging quick, right down into … I always saw it as a tomb. I didn’t get a garden visualised with any success; only a cellar, or a tomb. I mainly conjured up this Gothic arrangement with bones — a sepulchre — and the basic scene got quite ornate. I enjoyed it after a while: rags and costume jewellery scattered on dusty flagstones, footprints of rats. I like rats. You can always trust a rat — intelligent and faithful. Still, I wasn’t exactly being invited to explore my fucking happy place — it was more about being forced to hang about in a profoundly disturbing and focused-on-death place. For what my opinion would be worth.
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?’