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Evie
My therapist, Veejay, works from her house in Nottingham, where she has an office overlooking a garden, which is always littered with toys, including a paddling pool and a swing set. In all my sessions, I have never seen her children. I once asked her what she’d done with them: ‘Have you buried them in the garden?’ Cocking her head, she studied me with her soft brown eyes and said, ‘Why do you ask?’
Her full name is Veera Jaffrey, but people call her by her initials, V.J. (Veejay), and she has a wonderfully deep voice, thick dark hair, and the faintest trace of a Pakistani accent. She doesn’t make me lie on a couch. Instead, she has an enormous armchair, which is so deep that my legs stick straight out.
This is an extra appointment. Veejay knows about what happened at Cleethorpes because Cyrus must have told her, which annoys me, because he promised to stay out of my life.
‘What’s the last thing you remember?’ she asks.
‘The bodies in the water.’
‘Did you feel anything?’
‘Dizzy, I guess.’
‘Did you smell anything?’
‘Why?’
‘Sometimes people detect a strange odour like burning hair or rotting food just before they pass out. It’s more a symptom than a trigger.’
‘I remember trying to run. Mentally, I was desperate to get away, but I couldn’t move. The danger was getting closer and closer and I was frozen.’
Veejay jots something down on her yellow notepad. I often wonder what she writes. Maybe she’s reminding herself to pick up a loaf of bread or to let the children out of the basement.
I don’t mention the MRI scan and the unwanted tumour growing in my temporal lobe. Cyrus has probably told her. I hate him sometimes. All the time. Never.
My tumour has become my ‘white bear’. Cyrus once told me about a famous thought-suppression experiment where a psychologist asked people not to think about a specific thing – a white bear. That was their only goal, but the harder they tried, the more they thought about a white bear. It’s a pretty stupid experiment, if you ask me, but I guess it explains why I’m fixated on my tumour and what lies ahead – the biopsy, the surgery, the chemotherapy or radiotherapy. I’m ugly enough without losing my hair.
Maybe they should leave it alone. They could spend their time and money on saving someone else. It’s not as though I’m very important or productive. I’m not going to cure cancer, or work with lepers, or break any world records.
Veejay has been talking to me. I haven’t been listening.
‘Any dreams?’ she asks.
‘Not really.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘I’ve been thinking a lot about when my father died.’
‘You haven’t talked about him.’
‘He was killed at work. They said it was an accident.’
‘Who said?’
‘The police.’
‘But you don’t believe that.’
‘No.’
I try to swallow a lump that is caught between my voice box and my upper chest. Veejay is waiting for me to go on. I want to ask if we can change the subject, but that would be like telling a moth to ignore the light or a salmon to stop swimming upstream.
Involuntary memories are the worst. They creep up on me unexpectedly and leave me gasping for breath. The happy ones are OK. I picture myself riding on Papa’s bicycle, tucked between his forearms as we coast down the hill towards the village, urging him to go faster. Or I’m sitting on his lap in Mr Berisha’s truck, changing the gears, while Papa works the pedals.
But happiness is like one side of a spinning coin. Eventually it lands on tails and the memories change.
