CHAPTER 17 #3
‘In the chaplaincy? Very.’ He shook his head.
‘There are so many suicides here. Each as tragic as the last. We find them on the beach. Twenty or more a year. I don’t know why they always come here.
But, you know, we don’t just sit inside waiting for a call or for people to wander in.
We patrol the area. Up and down the coastal path all day, keeping an eye out. ’
‘I’ve seen you and your colleagues many times. In cars as well.’
‘You can spot them, slumped on the edge, fighting with their demons and the body’s natural will to survive.’
Pat suddenly looked at him. Of course! Of course!
Henry would have been sitting for a while on the cliff edge, his shoulders slumped in despair.
Someone would have seen him. Someone would have called the chaplaincy.
It was only logical. Humane, even. When you saw someone so distressed, crumpled in a heap, doing battle with themselves, it was human nature to want to help.
‘Have you ever seen anyone walk straight out of somewhere like here, or at the Fin du Monde, say, and just run and leap off?’ asked Pat.
‘No,’ he replied flatly. ‘There was one teenage girl who I tried to speak to through a closed car window. She refused to look at me, not once. Her engine was revving and eventually I said, I’m very worried about you, I’m going to call the police.
It was a terrible mistake. She put her foot down and drove over the edge, screaming her head off.
’ He raised his eyebrows and bit the side of his mouth.
He was clearly still scarred by it. ‘But what you did today was amazing.’ He nodded. ‘It was effortless. How did you do it?’
‘It’s called steering into the skid.’
‘Right,’ he said. ‘Interesting.’
‘It’s a technique I learnt on my very first counselling course.’ She glanced out of the window. ‘I should go. It looks like it’s going to rain again, and I haven’t got my car.’
‘Can I offer you a lift home? I’d like to hear about it.’
‘If you’re sure?’ she said gratefully. ‘I’m Pat, by the way.’
‘John. And it’s no problem, really.’
Pat sat in Father John’s navy blue and yellow striped car with the word Chaplain in large letters across the back window and yellow and red hazard stripes over the boot. It was warm inside, in the black leather passenger seat; next to the gearstick was a half-eaten packet of jelly babies.
‘Pretty village, Westlinke,’ said Father John as they drove through the rain, windscreen wipers whipping back and forth. ‘So, with that young lad, you steered into the skid?’
‘It’s a bit of a convoluted metaphor, but when you’re in a car and it’s skidding on ice towards a wall, your instinct is to try and steer out of the skid.
But if you do that, the momentum of the car keeps carrying it forward.
So you steer the car in the direction it’s already going, aligning the wheels in the direction you don’t want to go, and then you can steer out, because you’re going with the momentum, not against it.
It’s the same theory when you’re working with someone’s feelings.
They steer out because they sense you’re with them, that you’re going in the same direction.
So instead of yelling, “Stop, don’t do it!
” you ask how they might want to proceed, what their plan is, and then you slowly change course.
Rather than saying, “Don’t worry, the sun’s going to come out tomorrow”, you say, “That sounds bad.”’
Father John nodded. ‘Then they feel understood, heard. I wish I’d known that when I was talking to the girl in the car, though most of the time I think I do it naturally.’
‘The girl in the car wasn’t your fault,’ replied Pat immediately. ‘Honestly. You didn’t know how she was going to react to anything you said. Maybe she was scared of the police. Maybe she’d done something wrong and was fleeing from them.’
‘Very kind of you to say.’
They remained silent for the rest of the journey, both lost in their own thoughts.
‘Here?’ Father John asked, pulling up outside Ivy Cottage.
‘Thanks, yes,’ replied Pat, taking hold of the door handle. ‘Can I ask you a question?’
‘Of course.’
‘The people who jump, the ones you find on the beach, are their faces roughed up, smashed about? Or is that an indication of a prior struggle, do you think? Someone who was forced to jump, or who was in a fight and was pushed?’
‘To be honest, I try not look too closely – that’s the job of the police – but sometimes they hit the cliff on the way down and they can look very smashed up.’
‘Damn,’ said Pat.
‘Why do you say that?’ Father John turned in the driver’s seat.
‘Well, the young man who died here a week or so ago was one of my clients.’
‘Right.’
‘And I’m trying to find out who killed him. I can’t believe he was suicidal.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘I asked him.’
‘Maybe your patients don’t always want to share everything with you. Sometimes other people’s private thoughts are just that. Private.’
‘You’re right, and as my supervisor keeps telling me, just because we feel something doesn’t make it true. But I’m like a dog with a bone. I’m not letting go.’
‘We can’t always be right, we can’t save everyone, no matter how hard we try,’ said Father John.
‘You’re right again,’ said Pat; then, to herself, And yet …