Читать книгу Don’t You Forget About Me - Mhairi McFarlane, Mhairi McFarlane - Страница 17

I didn’t know what loss meant until I lost Dad and I didn’t know what regret meant until I regretted Lucas McCarthy.

Although, as my counsellor Fay told me, I didn’t have complete control over the situation and the nature of my regret suggests I was entirely responsible when I only had power over my part of it. Lucas was an ‘independent actor’.

I said, ‘Hmm OK I regret my part in it.’

‘Accept that much, then. It’s yours, take it.’ She picked up a mug as a symbolic gesture, placed it on the desk and pushed it towards me. I didn’t think it worked that well really as it had a picture of King Kong on it and was obviously a personal artefact I wasn’t meant to literally accept.

I pulled it toward me and nodded. ‘Am I meant to feel any better?’

‘Not better as such, not automatically improved, like the words are a magic spell. But it can spring you out of self-defeating thought patterns where you continually berate and diminish yourself for what cannot be undone. You are not an omnipotent deity, you’re a human just going along, learning, making a mess sometimes in the process, as we all are.’

I wept then and she said it’s good that you can cry about it. I said: Seriously? Why? through whirlpools of my Lancôme liner as I plucked at the box of tissues on her desk. She said because admitting hurt helps you dispel its power and lets you get past it.

To be honest, a lot of counselling appears to be accepting you’re up to your tits in shit and finding you’re zen about it. Saying: at least my tits are warm.

I was glad I went, though. I 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.