Читать книгу Breaking the Bonds - Paula Nicolson, Dorothy Rowe, Dorothy Rowe - Страница 21

5 Constructing Our Prison of Depression

As Pat crouched on the edge of her bed, her heart thudding with fear, one thought kept repeating over and over, ‘I have wasted my life’.

That most precious thing, her life, had slipped from her fingers and had gone, and what lay ahead was nothing but emptiness and futility, a path she had to tread until she died. She cursed herself for being such a fool, for wasting her opportunities, for not acting differently, for not seeing what was happening.

‘I kept thinking next year, later, when this is over, then I’ll do something, I’ll achieve something – I must have thought I was going to live for ever, and now it is too late.’

As she lay on her bed, staring into the darkness, she saw scenes from her life in all the exquisitely painful clarity of memory.

There was Simon, coming towards her across a field. He was wearing a yellow shirt, and her heart leapt up at the sight of him and she was suffused in joy. That was the only time in my life I was happy,’ she thought. ‘I knew it was too good to be true. I was never happy again, and I never will be.’

Even her childhood had been unhappy. She saw herself at five, standing at the front door and holding a picture she had drawn, eager to show it to her father who was coming up the path. But he just pushed past her and went into the study and slammed the door.

She saw herself at seven, bringing her mother a cup of tea, and her mother saying absently, ‘Put it on the table’, and smiling down at the baby on her lap. Pat found herself burning with the same hatred she had felt then for her youngest sister, hatred which turned into bitter, previously unacknowledged. resentment for the sister who had offered no help when their parents were ill. She thought of all the effort she had expended in keeping in friendly contact with her sisters, and how they just took her for granted.

‘They never phone me,’ she thought. ‘I always have to phone them. Well, I’ve had enough. That’s the last they’ll hear from me. They didn’t even come to my wedding. They thought I was marrying beneath me.’

She remembered her wedding, a quiet affair, with her husband pale and shaky from a night’s hard drinking at his bachelor party. ‘All that drinking was supposed to be funny,’ and she remembered cleaning up after him and trying to prevent her son from seeing his father drunk. She remembered how she would tell herself that he was a war hero, and that if she was patient he would soon be all right and that she must try very hard not to upset him. Now she burned with anger and disgust, both for him and for herself, and she thought, ‘I’ll never forgive him’, and then, ‘I’ll never forgive myself.