Now
It’s all about dissociation these days.
The whys and the wheres and the how-to’s, as if I’m a floating balloon that has simply snapped its string.
Greg seems to think he can fit all my pieces back together by taking me into the past, those times when I was known to disconnect.
No easy task when you’re dealing with a mute.
He talks. I listen or don’t listen.
But his words are in my bones, a slow-burning arthritis; they cut with the clarity of a scalpel.
He’s talking about my mother; he has a photograph of her that Sam must have given him and he asks me to look.
One quick glance is all that’s needed; this picture lives beside our bed at home.
She’s suntanned and laughing, head thrown right back; Sam used to say it reminded him of me.
‘I think you’re scared of pain,’ Greg says.
‘Lots of people are. You think that if you barricade yourself into this shell, into this wall of silence, you won’t feel the pain.
Trouble is, you won’t feel anything else either.
‘When you lose someone you love,’ he continues, ‘their absence is everywhere. Every room you go into, every house you visit, every shop, every street, every park is marked by the fact that they are not there. But that doesn’t stop you searching for them.
’
He lowers his voice.
‘I think you’re still searching, Catherine, aren’t you?
’
Idiotically slow on the uptake, the day my mother died, I understood what absence meant.
No more. Ever. No talking, no telling, no listening, no touching.
My aloneness was infinite.
She died in the middle of the night, and on some instinct I woke up and walked out into the corridor to see my father putting her pillows and duvet against the wall.
So I knew. Her bedding was no longer needed.
I went to see her, not breathing, perfectly still.
No chance to say goodbye.
To say, don’t go. Stay a little longer.
Another hour, another night.
And then I was gone too, Greg’s snapped string, perhaps.
There was a girl who floated somewhere watching the drama of this person in her father’s arms. ‘Catherine, Catherine, Catherine.’ He called her name, but for a moment she could not hear him.
For a moment she could not see, hear, listen or feel.
For a moment there was nothing.