Now
I would have no idea how much time passes in here if Sam didn’t mention it almost every time he visits.
‘It’s been four months, Greg,’ he says, just about holding back the ‘fucking’, though I sense the gap and supply the word myself.
Four fucking months.
‘The slower we go, the faster we’ll get there,’ Greg says, or some such platitude, dripping petrol onto the fire of Sam’s indignation.
Sam wants results. He wants me locked up in trauma therapy sessions twenty-four seven.
It’s not that he wants me to suffer – the opposite is true; just that he wants his wife back.
He wants his old life where he had a lover and his children had a mother.
He’s chasing that.
Sam’s also become an expert in dissociation disorder, and as we know, a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.
He has been told that there are three proven moments of my dissociation – the day I left you (the first time), the night my mother died and my final visit to Shute Park, where I splintered off from my reality so drastically that I have not spoken or connected to anyone else ever since.
I’ve had this dramatic response explained countless times and Sam has the details down off pat, a user-friendly diagnosis that he trots out to anyone who’ll listen (Alexa most recently; I recognised the jangle of her jewellery even before she sat next to me in the visitor chair, crying and then apologising about crying for what felt like for ever before she jangled off again).
Sam likes to compare my dissociation to the freeze response in animals; this is how he’s explained it to the children too.
In times of extreme trauma, dissociation helps protect the mind, he says; it offers an escape when it seems like there is no escape.
The problem is when the dissociation becomes permanent, as it has with me, so that it seems I have no memory of events and little or no connection to the people I’m supposed to know best. Throw mutism into the mix and you have a hellish, complex condition that has baffled my psychiatrist and infuriated my husband.
In our trauma therapy sessions – one person talking (Greg), one person listening or not listening (me) – there has been a great deal of emphasis on creating my safe place.
Since I don’t speak, my safe place has been selected for me and it’s our cottage, the pretty little Hansel and Gretel house with ivy-strewn walls and the long, straggling garden with a stream at the bottom.
Greg becomes really quite lyrical when describing the cottage, although I imagine he’s only seen photos; he talks about the glint of minnows in the stream and the way the early-morning light slices into the kitchen, creating pools of warmth on the oak table.
He asks me to imagine sitting at that table watching Daisy making one of her grand-scale felt-tip drawings, looking out of the window to see Sam working in the garden.
It’s true these were once treasured points of familiarity and reassurance for me, the old me.
It’s just that in my head I have a different safe place.
In my head I am always with you.