‘It looks like they were making breakfast,’ Carol blurted, but managed to stop herself completing the thought out loud: when something happened.
‘But we’d had breakfast. We’d cleared up the breakfast stuff. And why are there three mugs and three bowls? Isla isn’t even on solids yet. And she doesn’t drink tea!’ He was staring at Carol now, as if she could help, as if she would have answers. ‘Someone else was here. Who else was here?’ And then his face collapsed, and she was reaching for him and he was shaking his head and backing off and oh, it was heart-breaking, watching him try to master himself, try to face this latest crisis in his short life.
‘We need to call the police,’ he choked. ‘I knew something like this was going to happen. I’ve been trying to tell Dad – ever since Maggie moved in, I’ve been trying to tell him . . . get him to see what she’s really like. But he wouldn’t listen. And now she’s killed them!’
‘Oh, Nick, no!’
Finally, he let Carol pull him into a hug as he wailed: ‘She has! She’s killed Dad and Isla!’
1
Lulu - May 2019
Lulu Clyde ignored the buzzing of her phone that heralded yet another text, got up from her chair and perched on the coffee table in front of her client. She needed to be close enough to perform the procedure but not so close as to invade his personal space. Her heart bumped as the familiar dread descended, but she spoke calmly and quietly. ‘I want you to think about that day.’ And as she saw his face change: ‘No, no, don’t worry. The second you feel uncomfortable, the second you want to stop, we’ll stop. Okay?’
After a beat: ‘I suppose.’
He was such an ordinary-looking man. Pushing forty, average height and build, mousy brown hair, pleasant, forgettable face. If you saw him in the street, walking along with his little dog, you would never guess that he carried a whole world of anger around inside him, day after day after day.
‘Do you trust me?’
This time, the answer was immediate: ‘Yes.’
‘I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. You’re safe here.’
He was safe.
She had to keep reminding herself of that.
Here wasn’t anywhere special: a small, rectangular, pale-green space with a really inspiring view of a brick wall. At the other end of the room were a desk and chair, and at this end, two comfy beige armchairs with a glass coffee table between them on which sat, in addition to Lulu herself, a jug of iced water and two glasses, a box of tissues from Tesco and a stunted maidenhair fern. On the wall behind the desk were her framed certificates, her Bachelor of Science from the University of Melbourne and her Master of Psychotherapy and Counselling from Western Sydney University.
Next to this room were a tiny kitchenette and a toilet.
And that was it.
Her office.
The place where miracles happened – although that made it sound like she had a God complex, and she wasn’t deluded enough to think that the miracles were down to her. It was the clients, her brave, brave clients, who made them happen.
She was only the catalyst.
‘I don’t want Milo here,’ he said suddenly, turning to look at the little dog who sat, so patiently, next to his chair.
Milo’s stubby tail swished the carpet as he looked up at his owner with trusting brown eyes. He was a Jack Russell crossed with something hairy, an ugly little thing really, she supposed, but Lulu found him very cute. He had been in the dog shelter for months, apparently, with no takers, until her client had given him a home. Now they were inseparable, and Lulu suspected that Milo was a much more effective therapist than she was.
‘Take him through to the kitchen,’ she suggested. ‘The bowl is in the cupboard under the sink if you want to give him some water.’
Several of her clients had emotional support dogs.
‘Come on then, buddy. Ooh, what has Dad got here?’ A grubby plastic object appeared from the bag at his feet. ‘It’s Piggy! It’s Piggy, Milo!’
Milo trotted off happily with his ‘dad’, who told him he wouldn’t be long and that Milo had to be a good boy and not chew anything but Piggy.
And then he was back, and there was no putting it off any longer.
Lulu took a deep breath. ‘Let yourself think about that day. The sights and smells, the sounds, what you’re doing, what’s around you. Let the memories come. Narrate what you’re experiencing, if you can. And as you’re doing that, I’m going to slowly move my finger in front of your right eye. I want you to focus on my finger as you’re remembering. Just go with the flow, and let’s see where it takes us.’
It took them, as she had known it would, to a dark place.
A place Lulu really, really didn’t want to go to. But she did. She went there with him, she grounded him in the present, and, as he relived the horror of that day, as his face contorted unrecognisably and the anger threatened to rise up and overwhelm him, Lulu calmly told him to notice this or that image, to notice the anger; to let it in, to make space for it, to give it its due. And all the while, she slowly moved her finger in front of his eye and concentrated on making the movement smooth, on not letting her hand shake, and watched him watching it, staying in the present with her while he processed and filed away the terrible thing that had happened all those years ago.
EMDR, it was called – eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. It involved moving your finger in front of the client’s eye like a cartoon hypnotist, which seemed silly, but it worked. It was all about examining the traumatic memories from a place of safety in the present and filing them in the past where they belonged, in the vault of memory, so they weren’t constantly accessible on a replay loop in the person’s head. So they weren’t constantly interfering with day-to-day life, reactivating negative emotions. It was about turning a constantly relived experience into something that had been terrible, yes, so terrible, but was over and done.
He was breathing fast.
Sweat was pouring from his hairline into his eyes.
You poor, poor man.
Lulu felt dizzy with the horror of it.