Chapter Twenty-Eight #2
He could be having a nap but has perfected the art of looking thoughtful with his steepled fingers.
‘Bernard, what do you think?’ Rose asks.
‘Er …’
Bernard jerks into a more upright position.
He was dozing off.
Rose gives him a stern look but continues. ‘Now imagine the pebble every time you think of a person you somehow try to control or placate. Keera, you first?’
Keera needs to be jerked out of her scepticism.
‘Is there a person in your life who you try to keep happy? This is a type of control – controlling as much as you can with the aim of making a particular person love you or understand you.’
Keera keeps looking at the stone on the table and Rose waits.
Keera doesn’t answer but she’s thinking.
‘I don’t know …’ she says slowly.
Oh you do, but you don’t want to say it out loud yet, Rose thinks. Co-dependency.
They can move on.
There’s a magic about this part of the process.
Rose loves it.
It’s when people become aware that they are not able to control anything but themselves.
Rose decides the silence has gone on long enough.
‘Elephants have little passengers,’ she says.
‘A white bird called the egret. The egret sits on the elephant or flies behind it and eats the insects that the elephant stirs up when it walks. Can the elephant exist without the egret? Yes. Can the egret make the elephant do anything it wants the elephant to do? No.’
Pausing to see how everyone is taking this fable, Rose carries on.
‘Humans are not like egrets and elephants but when we try to make people feel a certain way, we are just like the egret on the elephant’s back. Powerless.’
She hands out six pieces of notebook paper and six pencils.
‘I want you each to write down who you try to control. It can be that you try to make them happy by doing exactly what they want. It could be that you try to adhere to their rules or control them to make your life easier. It could be that you enable their bad behaviour as a way to stop them leaving you. You don’t have to share these names – just list them for your own benefit. Be ruthlessly honest.’
She goes over to pour some water from the jug of iced lemon water on the buffet table and gives the participants some time.
So far, she knows that Dan feels responsible for Julia to the extent that they’re in a co-dependent relationship. He truly believes he can control whether she takes drugs, drinks or overdoses.
Keera’s mother lives her life vicariously through her daughter but now Keera has broken free. Going to rehab when her mother didn’t want her to was a huge first step.
Dianne needs to be prodded. Rose has an idea about Dianne’s anger but she needs some confirmation. Dianne’s anger is a barrier she hides behind.
‘Does anyone have any questions?’ Rose asks.
‘Why is this all so painful?’ asks Dan.
‘You have to go through the pain to get to the other side,’ offers Keera.
It’s dusk when the whole group slowly makes their way down to the beach for evening meditation. A light breeze floats in from the sea but the women are still bare-armed, with Grazia carrying a light wrap.
Dan, India and Keera are walking together when Keera’s phone rings and she looks at it doubtfully.
Dr Bobbi flashes on the call screen. For a brief second, Keera wonders why she’s never put Mom on the phone. Perhaps because her mother is Dr Bobbi, manager first and mother second.
‘Hi,’ says Keera hesitantly, holding back and gesturing to India and Dan to go on without her.
She should have left her phone in her room but having it with her is a habit. Keera’s tired of breaking habits.
‘Where the heck are you?’ shrieks her mother as soon as Keera answers. ‘I’ve been trying to get a hold of you for days!’
‘You can’t have tried very hard because this is the first time you’ve called me,’ Keera replies, feeling the familiar sting.
‘Rude!’ shrieks her mother. ‘I was trying to give you space. But you just vanished. So I asked Taniqua, then Luka, because you never tell me anything any more.’ Her mother’s outrage is plain.
‘I even rang that rehab place in case you’d gone back for some reason and nobody ever answers their cell there.
Goddamn idiots. When they do, nobody will tell me anything! ’
Dr Bobbi’s voice is getting more high pitched, a sure sign she’s heading for a full-blown shouting session.
Keera can feel her body reacting of its own accord: all her muscles tense, her shoulders tighten and her stomach clenches.
‘I didn’t tell Taniqua where I was going,’ says Keera, determined not to get her friend in trouble. ‘The rehab place can’t tell you because they don’t know and besides they are bound by confidentiality. Remember that?’
‘Confidentiality means nothing, not between you and me,’ says her mom dismissively. ‘Besides, I paid for that place—’
‘No, you didn’t!’ says Keera, shocked at the outright lie. ‘I paid for it.’
‘With money we earned together!’ shouts back her mother.
For a second, Keera stares at the path down to the beach. Everyone else has moved on.
She can see India up in front, tiptoeing across the toasty, warm sand, holding her flip-flops in her hand. Bernard and Grazia are moving at a much slower pace and Dan, lovely, gentlemanly Dan, is helping Dianne.
It’s unusual to see anyone touch Dianne because she’s the sort of person who doesn’t like physical contact. This morning, Keera had automatically reached to hug her and had seen Dianne actually wince.
‘You still there?’ shrieks Keera’s mom down the phone.
‘Yes.’
‘Where the hell are you?’
‘Are you in LA?’ asks Keera, not answering the question.
‘No, I’m in Vegas. It’s gone downhill, to hell in a handbasket,’ her mother says dismissively.
If Dr Bobbi was in Vegas, it was fine for Keera to say where she really was.
‘I’m in Greece.’
‘Greece where? Greece the country?’ Her mother sounds stunned.
‘Yes, Greece the country. The island of Corfu, in fact.’ Keera decides to give her mother a bit more information given that Dr Bobbi is both thousands of miles and nine hours away.
Plus, their credit cards are pretty much maxed out.
Some of her mother’s jewellery would have to be sold speedily to pay for any more flights, not that Keera would put it past her mother.
But Dr Bobbi does love her diamonds. The bigger the better.
Keera’s living on the money she stashed in her own private account, one Dr Bobbi doesn’t know about.
‘I’m on a retreat.’
‘What do you mean by retreat?’ her mother asks suspiciously. ‘A retreat where you rest your voice so you’re able to sing?’
It always comes back to work and, through work, to money, Keera realises. Her mother hasn’t asked her how she is or even why she felt the need to go to Greece.
She’s less like a mother and more like an employer checking up on a recalcitrant member of staff.
‘No,’ says Keera flatly.
‘Well, people are looking for you,’ Dr Bobbi informs her daughter.
‘You’re hotter than ever since you’ve vanished, although I don’t suppose you know that because you’ve apparently turned all your socials off,’ she adds crossly.
‘It’s real easy to get forgotten in this business, Keera, and don’t you forget it.
One minute you’re somebody and the next, you’re a nobody waiting tables in a dive telling people who you used to be.
I’ve worked too hard to let that happen, missy. ’
Keera isn’t sure whether Rose would approve or not but she can’t let this last jibe pass her.
‘You’ve worked too hard?’ Keera says, disbelief colouring her words.
‘What about all the work I’ve done? What about the hours I worked when I was a kid and I really should have been in school or playing with friends?
What about then? The problem with you, Mom, is that you still think that I’m your creation! ’
As the words fly out of her with passion, Keera realises that she’s wanted to say this for a very long time.
But it seems her mother hasn’t even heard her.
‘Honey, we’ve all worked very hard to get you where you are now,’ says Dr Bobbi, sighing, ‘but the time for holidays, retreats and all that crap is over. Remember that producer, Santi, he’s ready to work with you again.
He definitely didn’t like it when you were drinking too much and the whole thing with his ex-wife and her son and the coke – well, that didn’t look good.
It was trashy behaviour, Keera. But he’s on board now.
Honey, you have no idea the favours I had to wrangle to get this to happen. ’
There’s the pause.
The pause where Keera’s supposed to reply with how fabulous her mother is, how much she appreciates all the hard work, how she can’t thank her enough.
Keera’s been trained to say these things like a seal in the aquarium is trained to jump for fish.
Even in interviews when she was younger, she’d known enough to say: ‘Oh my mom is just the most amazing person in the world. I can’t imagine what I’d do without her.’
Keera knew without ever being told that this was part of the contract, this endlessly being grateful to her mother. She was never able to say that her own talent had had a part to play in her success. That would have been heresy.
The party line was that Dr Bobbi had created Keera like a miniature Frankenstein’s monster. Dr Bobbi was the person who turned on and off the electricity in the background.
Without her, Keera was nothing.
‘You still there?’ Bobbi says, as if she has to shout to make her voice heard in Europe.
Keera can see everyone settled on the beach now. The blankets are down and they’re all sitting in a circle in the sunset.
Dan appears to be trying to light a small fire and Keera hopes he’s receiving direction from Rose about this. The idea of lighting a fire in a tinder-dry country seems like a crazy one but then, they are beside the sea …?
The thought makes her smile. She has started to really like this gang, actually.
She wants to get to know India more, and Dan too.