Chapter Thirty-Four
Alex
‘Right,’ Alex’s counsellor says when he’s heard the whole story of Jess, ending with the WhatsApp message she still hasn’t replied to and the email he got from Nathan this morning, asking if he felt like their writing partnership had accomplished what it needed to.
He twiddles his grey moustache and leaves his customary silence, waiting, probably, for Alex to piece together all the clues and come up with a theory.
But if Alex were capable of doing that, he probably wouldn’t be in therapy in the first place.
‘So why do you think you reacted so strongly to her suggestion that you put better boundaries in place with your family?’
That word again. Boundaries. Therapy-speak for not being there for people when they need you.
‘I don’t know,’ he says.
‘How did you feel when she said it?’
He thinks back to the punch in his stomach, to the adrenaline surge. His breathing accelerates. ‘I suppose anger is probably how I’d describe it.’
The therapist crosses and uncrosses his legs, nods vigorously. ‘Right. But anger is a secondary emotion – it’s usually a sign of other emotions under it. Hurt, or sadness, or a feeling of betrayal, for example. Was it any of that?’
Alex rubs the back of his neck and considers this. ‘I’m not sure.’
‘How does it feel when I suggest that you should put boundaries in place with your family?’
Tedious. It feels tedious.
‘Baffling. Because I don’t know where to start. Or, really, what boundaries actually are.’
‘Hold that thought, we’ll get back to that. When you said you felt angry, do you think your anger was really aimed at Jess, or were you misdirecting it?’
Alex closes his eyes and tries to locate the anger, the way he sometimes tries to locate the source of a tension headache. Usually, he is unsuccessful at both.
‘Because …’ the therapist prompts. ‘It seems she spoke really gently, and not unkindly, and that your response was maybe out of proportion to what she’d said.
Which suggests that your anger was there, bubbling under the surface, and just needed a small trigger to come to the fore.
You lashed out. Which suggests that Jess wasn’t the cause at all. Are you angry with your family?’
The answer comes to him straight away: yes.
But he checks himself, because that seems odd.
He loves his big, messy family. He can’t think of anything any of them have directly done to make him angry.
His parents were – are – loving, as were, and are, his step-parents.
And even now, they come to his launches; they buy his books and review them on the websites that matter.
They pick up the phone when he calls them.
He laughs with them, plays board games with them, cuddles his nieces and nephews. He doesn’t feel uneasy around them.
‘Why would I be angry with them?’
The moustache twiddle again. ‘You tell me.’
He wants to shout. No. You tell me! You’re the one being paid because you know the answers! He pictures himself slamming down a fist and yelling this. But that would likely be more misdirected anger.
‘How did it feel to always be the responsible one? The one who looked after everybody else?’
Alex swallows around the lump in his throat. ‘I like looking after everyone.’
‘Yes, I can see that. But let me ask you something else. Who was looking after you?’
The question lands like a thump in his gut.
‘I wasn’t, like, neglected or anything,’ he says, but he hears his own voice catching.
‘So your parents recognised your anxiety and took you to the doctor, got you a prescription and some therapy?’
Alex isn’t sure he likes the smug way in which the therapist has said this, with the triumph of a person solving the day’s Wordle in two lines. Nonetheless, there’s only one possible answer to his question.
‘No. That’s something you and I worked out together a few months ago.’
‘Right. So is your anxiety a recent thing?’
He thinks back to his afternoons with the school nurse, a hot water bottle on his stomach while he waited for one parent or another to come and pick him up.
To his avoidance of walking on the cracks in the pavements because the last thing he needed was bad luck.
To the times he stayed up way too late finishing off homework because he wanted it to be perfect.
To the time he couldn’t stop crying after getting 99 per cent on a maths exam, because he couldn’t figure out where that missing 1 per cent could possibly have come from.
‘No,’ he admits. ‘It is not a recent thing.’
‘But your parents didn’t notice it when you were growing up.’
‘It’s possible they noticed it. It just wasn’t talked about as much back then.’
‘And how does that make you feel?’
Ah. The dreaded question again. It feels like going round and round in circles.
Alex shrugs. He can hardly blame his parents for British culture, and he doesn’t want to blame them for how busy they were with their marriages and careers and divorces and re-marriages and new babies.
But inside him, he feels the bubbling up of that rage again.
He was just a little boy, crying out to be noticed and looked after, and instead it fell to him to look after others.
‘I suppose,’ he admits reluctantly, ‘it makes me feel sad for the child I was.’
‘Now we’re getting somewhere,’ says the therapist, twiddling that moustache again.
By the end of the session, Alex has come to the conclusion that he needs to explain all of this to Jess.
He doesn’t exactly relish the thought of being so vulnerable with her, knowing full well that he used her own vulnerability against her, and she could well be tempted to do the same back – though he hopes she isn’t as petty as that.
She seemed to really like him – judging by their Godalming weekend, to really like him a lot – but he can’t stop picturing the wounded look on her face when he twisted that knife in.
She doesn’t strike him as the vindictive type, but he wouldn’t have said that about himself, either – and yet he was apparently more than capable of lashing out in pain, so why shouldn’t she be?
The problem – or at least a problem – is that she’s not replying to his messages.
He doesn’t want to be that guy, someone who wears her down with insistent texting.
He knows he needs to leave her the space to come to him when she’s good and ready.
But he wonders, too, if she’ll ever be ready, since she has no way of knowing that his lashing out wasn’t really about her at all.
He worries about her being tied down to help her grandparents but, really, those worries are a projection – the person he is actually worried about is his own younger self.
What he really needs is a woman’s advice.
Lily would be good to talk to, but he isn’t sure how to find her – doesn’t even know her surname.
Maybe with some judicious Facebook stalking, he could figure it out?
On the other hand, he runs the risk of Lily telling Jess, which is where, surely, her loyalty would lie.
But then, it comes to him – Jess’s advice, his therapist’s advice: think of a way someone in your family can help you with something.
And he needs a woman for this. He calls Louisa.
After all, she owes him one. She owes him several, in fact.
‘Sounds to me like you need to buy some flowers,’ she tells him after hearing the whole sorry tale. Well, perhaps not the whole tale. Now doesn’t seem like the time to go into why he and Jess were arguing in the first place.
‘Buying flowers is a little clichéd, isn’t it?’
He can almost hear Louisa’s shrug through the phone. ‘It’s clichéd for a reason. It works.’
There’s silence on both ends of the phone for a moment.
‘Hey, Alex?’
‘Yes.’
‘Thanks for coming to me for advice. It’s nice to do a little role reversal.’
Alex can hear the next conversation with his therapist already: And why does it surprise you so much that other people might enjoy helping you the way you enjoy helping them? He knows the answer, too. It’s because they never have. And they never have because he’s never asked.
‘I might come to you for advice more from now on. If that’s okay.’
‘I would love that.’ There’s so much warmth in Louisa’s voice. Has it always been there? ‘Especially if it ends with you being successfully coupled up. I know we’d all love to see that.’
The irony of Louisa being the one to say this is not lost on Alex.
‘Thanks, Lou. Now, one more thing: do I take the flowers to her house, or send them with a letter of apology?’
‘Take them to her house, but write the letter anyway, in case she doesn’t want to talk. That way she can at least read your apology once you’ve gone. Letters have a way of percolating and thawing rage.’
‘Sounds like you’re speaking from experience.’
‘I am.’
‘Well, thank you. That sounds like a genius idea.’
‘It’s always worked on me,’ she says. ‘Now stop procrastinating and go and buy those flowers. Love you. Bye.’
Alex had always assumed that the ‘love you’ Louisa said before ending a call was a payback for whatever favour she was asking for on the call. But there’s no favour here. No doubt his therapist would say, You deserve to be loved even when you’re not doing something for someone.
Whatever. He’ll take it.