Now
Something new is happening.
They say the therapy is starting to work and I think they may be right.
For though I am not talking, I am listening.
Listening with a fierce greed for any information on you.
And if I wait long enough, I find that it comes, I find that someone always mentions your name.
I am crying, too, and that’s progress, apparently.
The first time it happened, Liv pointed it out to Alison and neither of them could keep the buoyancy from their voices.
‘Oh dear, beauty,’ Alison said, crouching down beside my chair and taking hold of my hand.
‘Are you feeling sad today? It’s good to cry.
You let it out now, my darling.
’
Today Liv and Sam are here together and they are having – argument is too strong; let’s call it a disagreement about Greg’s slow-burn technique.
He is addressing each of the obstacles in my past that he believes contributed to my eventual mutism, ticking them off one by one – bereavement, shame, isolation …
Oh yes, it’s always a fun-packed therapy session.
Liv wants to know if Greg has discovered how much I remember about the night I was admitted here, the events that preceded it.
They are trying to be subtle, lowered voices, stationed a few metres away from me, but of course they do not know that I now strain to catch every word.
‘Does she know what happened? Do you think she’s remembered?
’ Liv asks, and Sam shakes his head.
‘Greg thinks she wiped it out, you know that. He’s decided not to ask her about it any more.
Thinks it’s obstructive.
He thinks she shuts down every time he brings it up.
’
‘That’s not fair on Catherine.
One of us should tell her.
How can she ever recover if she doesn’t know the truth?
’
‘But she is recovering, Liv. You’ve said so yourself.
She’s expressing emotion now.
The other day she smiled at Joe.
It meant so much to him.
To all of us.’
‘If you’re not going to tell her, then I am.
She has a right to know.
’
And here the disagreement implodes into a full-blown row.
‘Like hell you will! She’s my wife and we will do things the way her psychiatrist tells us to do them.
Do you understand, Liv?
Do you understand?’
Sam is shouting and Liv is probably crying, but I turn away from them and close off their sound.
The information I wanted is not going to come today.
Soon Sam and Liv will go and I will be alone again.
I’ll stare out through a gap in the curtains at the night-time sky, navy blue with bursts of sizzling white, just like one of Daisy’s drawings.