CHAPTER 10 #2
She placed her handbag on the seat next to her, took out her laptop and put her earphones in, claiming as much space as she could in her corner of the train.
She found the recorded sessions she was looking for on her crowded desktop, and up came a still of Henry’s face.
He was smiling, or at least about to, with a blue and white striped shirt peeking through his suit.
His dark hair was neat, parted slightly to the side.
He had his elbow on the desk in front of him, and he was resting his cheek in the palm of his right hand.
He looked relaxed. There was a light in his brown eyes.
This was the recording of his last session before he died. Before he was murdered. Pat took a deep breath and turned up the volume.
His familiar voice floated into her ears as she pressed play, the tone still so alive, so Henry. It was strange how clearly she could remember the cadence of his speech, even before the recording began.
‘It’s like I’m two people,’ he was saying. ‘I can see that my boyfriend can be cruel, unsupportive, and maybe I should break up with him. But I love him.’
Pat’s own voice came in response, calm, measured: ‘What do you mean by love?’
There was a pause, then Henry continued.
‘Well, when we do come together, it’s wonderful.
Better than any relationship I’ve been in before.
He can be kind, you know? He remembered my birthday, only one day late, but still, it made me feel like we could turn this around.
That we can be good together. Now I’m thinking, no, I don’t want to leave him.
Why throw away something that can be this good?
’ He gave a rueful little laugh. ‘Tell me what to do, Pat.’
Pat heard herself deflect, gently. ‘What does your heart say?’
‘Stay,’ Henry replied immediately.
‘And your head?’
‘Run.’
She had paused in the recording then too, before repeating his word. ‘Run?’ A pause. ‘That’s not even leaving amicably.’
‘There’s not really an in-between,’ Henry had said. ‘It’s either everything or nothing.’
Pat watched herself nod slightly on the video. ‘You said earlier that he was kind to you on rare occasions.’
‘Yes,’ Henry replied. ‘Sometimes he’ll leave a sweet note, usually after he’s been less than kind. It’s like he can’t help the cruel side, but he also wants to change.’
She heard her voice lean in, slightly softer. ‘Right. So, Henry … who else in your life was mostly not there for you, or overly critical of you, but sometimes did remember your birthday a day late?’
There was a beat of silence, then Henry sighed.
‘I think … having talked about Dad with you, saying things out loud, he’s sort of receding.
I think I’m over him. I really am. He doesn’t have the power over me he used to.
I know what you said, that even adult children feel more worthy when their parents acknowledge them.
And I do feel worthier now. I don’t depend on his validation any more.
I’m OK whether or not he’s proud of me.’
Pat had simply replied, ‘OK.’
Henry hesitated. ‘You don’t think I … I’ve replaced Dad with Derek, do you?’
‘What do you think?’ she asked gently.
‘I want to say no,’ Henry replied, ‘because I don’t want it to be true. But, you know … sometimes I think about it.’
Pat had given a soft ‘Uh huh.’
‘Maybe I haven’t, though,’ Henry added quickly. ‘You want to make sense of things, tie them up in ribbon and give them back to me, hoping I’ll use them. But life doesn’t always work that way, does it? Not everything follows a pattern. I don’t want to be a walking cliché.’
Pat heard herself say, ‘I really hear you, Henry. You want this relationship with your boyfriend to work. You’ve experienced highs with him you hadn’t felt since your dad turned up the day after your birthday with a Buzz Lightyear.
And when I suggest you might be repeating something familiar rather than discovering something new, you don’t like it. ’
‘No, I don’t,’ Henry had agreed.
There was a silence. Pat broke it. ‘I’m still noticing something, cognitive dissonance.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘You know something in your head; intellectually, rationally, you know that your boyfriend isn’t consistently kind, that he’s borrowed money and not repaid it, that he can hurt you and doesn’t seem to hesitate to do so.
But in your body, you don’t want to believe it.
In your body, you want to believe this is love.
That it can work. So your mind and your body are in conflict. ’
Henry had gone quiet. ‘Isn’t the body always right?’
‘It depends on how that body was trained,’ Pat had answered carefully.
‘You’ve lost me.’
‘It depends,’ she explained, ‘on what you got used to growing up.’
Henry had taken that in for a moment, then said, ‘I can feel you wanting me to leave my boyfriend. And it makes me want to stay with him.’
Pat’s voice had shifted, firm but warm. ‘You don’t think it might be dangerous to stay with someone who’s been violent with you?’
‘It was only once,’ Henry said quickly. ‘We’d both had too much to drink. Our argument accelerated, and it got to him. He gave me a slap. To calm me down.’
Pat swallowed, even now, watching the screen. She heard herself say calmly, ‘Even if it was just a slap, that’s one red flag too many. You had a black eye, Henry.’
She paused the video.
There he was, staring straight at the camera. If she looked closely, she could still see the bruise, the faded green and yellow mottling his eye socket, the soft purple shadows clouding his cheek. Like a sunset turned stormy. It had been a hell of a thump.
She exhaled slowly, then clicked play again.
‘I bruise easily,’ Henry said. Then added, ‘But you’re supposed to be neutral, Pat. It feels like you’ve already made up your mind.’
Her own voice was quiet but clear. ‘I care for you, Henry. And that, I’m afraid, makes it very hard for me to stay neutral. You are worthy of care. Worthy.’
There was a beat.
Henry grinned. ‘How about a paradoxical intervention?’
‘Are you on a counselling course or something?’ Pat had asked, amused.
‘Possibly.’
‘How else would you know about the technique where the counsellor encourages the client to indulge in the very behaviour they want to change?’
‘A boy can read, can’t he?’ he said with a laugh. ‘I like the idea of the paradox. That by deliberately engaging in the problem behaviour, I might gain awareness or motivation to change. It sounds like it could work.’
Pat’s tone changed. ‘So you agree that staying with Derek is problematic behaviour?’
He paused, then shrugged. ‘I don’t have to decide right away, do I? I can just go back to him for a bit and see what happens.’
There was a silence before Pat answered. ‘Sounds like a decision to me.’
She paused the video again, the screen frozen on Henry’s face. She took off her headphones and stared at the image. At his bruised eye, at the traces of humour and hope still flickering behind the pain.
Then she sat back and took off her headphones, becoming conscious of the noises of the train again.
He looked alive on the screen. His head was down, he was rubbing his chin.
Pat shook her head. What sort of decision had that turned out to be?
The correct one? The one that got him killed?
Had she aided and abetted that decision?
He was a grown man and she was not responsible for his decisions, but could she have done something else?
Guided him in another direction? Maybe he’d been right, and she ought to have given him a paradoxical intervention.
But the black eye, that was a line crossed.
Actual violence, not just threat or bluster, but harm done to another body.
That took a particular kind of disconnection.
Not just a lack of concern for someone else’s pain, but a failure to regulate the self in the face of anger or fear.
Pat had seen it before, that dangerous shift when frustration tipped into justification.
When someone convinced themselves they had no choice.
That it was provoked, deserved even! And she’d missed that Henry had justified it.
Damn! The black eye had been the session before.
Two weeks ago, if Pat worked backwards. Two weeks.
Could the fight have been the same fight that Johnno the barman had witnessed?
It seemed more than an argument about how they treated each other.
Henry was proving to be the most unreliable witness to his own murder.
‘We will shortly be arriving at London Victoria, where this train terminates!’ The guard’s nasal voice crackled over the loudspeaker. ‘Please make sure you take all your belongings with you.’ Pat sighed, remembering when all he used to say was ‘Victoria station, all change.’
Therapists usually saw a supervisor or got together with other therapists regularly to supervise each other.
Pat did both. She felt the need to discuss her clients, to see if she’d missed anything at any point.
She might, she thought, be missing something with Henry.
Her supervisor, Maria, had an office in Pimlico, above a pub on the main road going towards Vauxhall Bridge.
Pat usually walked there from Victoria, but today, she gave in to the hip and got the number 36 bus.
A therapy centre above a pub; if one way of self-soothing didn’t work, she could always try the other, she had thought when she first went there.
It all came pouring out of her when she sat opposite Maria, an eighty-year-old South African woman who appeared to have seen it all, twice.
Pat told her everything that had happened in the past few days.
Henry’s death, the police writing it off as suicide, Pat being certain it wasn’t suicide.
‘I thought I had a good relationship with Henry,’ she said, ‘just because I liked him. I thought he told me everything. But actually, I’ve been going over Zooms I recorded with him and I don’t think our relationship was as great as I thought it was.
And I think I know why.’ She looked up at her supervisor.
‘OK, and …’
‘I was telling him what to do and he was resisting me.’
‘Ah,’ said Maria, ‘because you know best?’
Pat gave a sharp sigh, ‘Well, obviously I know best. He was in a relationship with someone who hit him. I was keen that he should dump him.’
Maria put her head to one side and smiled. ‘Maybe you’d make a better agony aunt than therapist. They tell people what to do.’
Pat began to get slightly worked up. ‘Well now look what’s happened. Henry is dead. I was right.’
Maria spoke slowly and calmly, as if she was trying to contain Pat’s exasperation. ‘You can’t be certain it wasn’t suicide.’
‘There was a note left behind.’ Pat was still speaking urgently. ‘The police say he wrote it. But it didn’t feel like that to me. It wasn’t his handwriting, among other things. It doesn’t add up.’
Maria spoke even more slowly, more calmly. ‘You are quite quick to jump to conclusions.’
Her calmness appeared to seep into Pat, who answered her more thoughtfully. ‘Yup, that’s true.’
Maria knew now that Pat was more open to listening to her.
‘You’ve got some facts, yes, you have your impression of Henry and what he was likely or not likely to do and you’ve filled in all the blanks, and now you feel as certain about what you filled the blanks with as you are about the facts themselves. ’
Pat sighed. ‘The thing is, I was a bit bossy with him. I think he was picking up on my bossiness and being bossy back with me. I don’t think he told me everything either; perhaps he was scared of my disapproval. I hadn’t picked up on his possible shame, but he picked up on my bloody-mindedness.’
‘So where’s the learning here for you?’ asked Maria, and then probably wished she hadn’t, because Pat started to go off on one again.
‘It wasn’t suicide. I saw the note, I told you. Henry didn’t write notes like that. And he was fairly verbose, he would have said a whole lot more. He also wrote like a grown-up, in proper cursive writing, not scrappy capitals. And he loved his mum. A lot.’
Maria could see that Pat was working herself up, so she said, ‘No, I meant what’s the learning for your ongoing development?’
Pat huffed. ‘That maybe I should talk about some other patients. I have a potential new client who—’
Maria interrupted; she wasn’t going to allow that. ‘The learning is that you need to stay with “don’t know” rather than jumping to conclusions by filling in the blanks.’
Pat gave in. ‘Yes. You’re right. Can I talk about a potential new client?’ To herself she said, I’m not going to accept that Henry’s death was suicide.
Maria nodded.
‘This next one definitely is suicidal, and I care a lot about him already. I thought he would be a candidate for EMDR – a lot of unprocessed trauma in his childhood.’ Pat told Maria about Stefano, who had signed up for six sessions since his initial Zoom.
Then she went on to talk about Rob. ‘Rob has a friend who is into conspiracy theories but who he cannot bear to dump. It would make him feel like he’s a bad person. ’
‘What did you tell him about conspiracy theorists?’ Maria asked.
‘How d’you know I told him anything?’
‘I know you quite well now.’ She smiled at Pat.
‘I told him they cannot bear the uncertainty of not knowing.’
‘Ironic really. Pat, stay with the uncertainty around Henry’s death.’
Pat slowly shook her head and went on to talk about another one of her clients.