Meg’s spoon stirred away in her tannin-stained communal mug. It served no purpose. Meg didn’t take sugar. She didn’t take milk. God knew, what there was of the coffee was fully dispersed.
I came there because I wanted to get better.
I wanted to not be about him.
I wanted to be about me.
I wanted to peel away from the sure and certain faith that touching is fatal and kindness an attempt to take by stealth.
And they didn’t help.
So I ditched the sessions. After the fourth week, I just didn’t go any more. And no one ever called to find out why.
I could have chased up other options, or something. I could have tried again. Oddly enough, telling people who couldn’t help me over and over about the thing that they couldn’t help on the off chance they might know someone who could and refer me to them didn’t really appeal.
I got tired.
She sat at her desk again and knew it was nearly lunchtime and also knew that her lunchtime was happening late today.
It doesn’t matter. Molly and the group was three years ago. But if I remember it then it makes me angry. Who wouldn’t get angry with rubbish like that? Who wouldn’t resent wasting all of a maybe good afternoon with therapy that only ever made you want to hit passers-by when you’d finished your hour, because you couldn’t harm anyone relevant — beyond yourself — and nobody there in the group was suitable for stressless punching. They’d be able to identify you later when things went to court.
They made me feel filthy and I don’t like that.
I’m not filthy or afflicted.
Meg reached down to scrub at Hector’s scalp.
They didn’t ask at the hospital this morning. No one even tried to ask me why I was upset.
The dog was out of reach, though — lolled on one side and breathing off and away into a sleep. She forgave him for resting.
I can have a rest, too. I’m a birthday girl — or thereabouts — and I am cultivating gratitude for the areas of my life which are lovely.
I can find them.
I can make them.
Meg had been staring at her computer to no effect for quite a while. A great deal of nothing was getting done.
It’s unfair to hate Laura.
She is naturally hateable, but that doesn’t mean it’s OK.
And she doesn’t mean to remind me of Molly or of a minor years-ago disaster that didn’t help me with quite different disasters which happened some other years earlier.
It’s not her fault.
And I have to work with her.
This means — bugger, bugger, bugger — that I have to be grateful for Laura. In some way. As a remedy for the poison that she brings.
Really?
Yeah. Apparently.
But really?
Yeah.
It’s what I’m told can be effective and effective is what I’m after.
Effective is what I’m all about.
Said the woman who hasn’t answered a single email, or done anything of note in almost an hour.
A message had come in from the Stewart family who would like to meet Roddy, a bull terrier with an especially lugubrious and mildly sidelong expression and a tested fondness for children, but not cats. And don’t interrupt him when he’s eating.
She replied with an appointment that might suit them.
I can be grateful. I can be grateful that Laura doesn’t work here on Wednesdays and I do.
But this is a Friday.
And Friday is a day when she does work here and I do, too.
But I can be grateful that I am putting in a foreshortened day.
But Friday is when I glance — slip, slide — over the accounts, just to help out and save them paying for too many hours of the genuine, real, not-struck-off accountant.
No one has a problem with this. Although I can no longer call myself an accountant, I can still have a look at the week’s figures in an accounting type of way. The fact that I royally screwed up my life doesn’t mean I have forgotten how to add. For example. And managing the no money I now have to live on is sharpening every skill I ever had, believe me. If you want a manager for a railway, or to run a hospital, ask someone who’s living on £750 a month, give or take. Ask someone who’s living on less — they’ll work you financial fucking miracles. They do it every day. They’re either ingenious, or done for — no half measures.
Nobody hires a bankrupt accountant — not in that capacity. I would not want them to. Them trying to would fry my brain. But there is always bookkeeping to look at and I can. If I don’t have to, I can enjoy it. If the weight of it is absent and I have no authority. I make suggestions. I am here and capable of suggesting.
And it’s not Laura’s fault that glancing at figures while she’s in the room makes me feel as if she’s disapproving and has rumbled me as fifteen kinds of fraud. This is purely a reflection of my own belief that I am not capable of anything beyond screwing up again.
And again.
And infecting all I touch with failure.
Which is why the mental discipline and gratitude are important.
I can be grateful that she hasn’t enquired into my past with any vehemence.
I can be grateful that she doesn’t insist on being friends with me. I can be grateful that she doesn’t pat me.
I am glad of these things.
So she makes me glad.
And I can assume that her mother is fond of her and so I could be — not that I’m old enough to be her mother. Not without some junior-school incident having occurred and it didn’t and that’s another cause for gratitude.
She’s plainly damaged and so am I — we have that in common. Huzzah.
And I can try to like her shoes.
Except that her shoes are vegan creations made out of vegetable leather and bloody tofu. I’m exaggerating. Vegetable leather for sure, though.
I can pray for her.
No, I can’t pray for her.
I truly can’t.
I can’t incorporate the God thing. I’d love to, but it’s not a good fit. Meg’s mobile rang in the midst of this demonstration of spiritual ill-health.
No. I’m healthy. That’s the point — I am attempting to be spiritual, in my own way, and Laura is attempting to be — I think — spiritual in her own way and I suspect that I loathe her, if I’m honest, because she reminds me of me. That’s been known as a pattern of behaviour. It’s practically standard practice where I live.
Meg picked up her mobile, took the call, which was from Carole who was asking how the hospital visit went, because Meg had forgotten to phone and tell her.
I wanted to blast away the morning, forget it and go on as if it never was, which is the kind of thing that leads to areas of forgetting — you get these islands of blankness. I used to be mainly made of islands … But still there’s the ocean, the sound of the ocean goes on.