The Girl Before

—

It’s normal, Carol says, nodding. It’s perfectly normal. In fact, it’s a good sign.

Even now, in the calm of the sitting room where Carol does her therapy sessions, I’m shaking. Nearby, someone is mowing a lawn.

How’s it good? I say numbly.

Carol nods again. She does this a lot, whenever I say pretty much anything in fact, as if to indicate that she doesn’t usually answer her clients’ questions but is going to make an exception, just this once, for me. For someone who is doing such good work, making such excellent progress, perhaps even turning a corner, as she concludes at the end of every session. She was recommended by the police, so she must be good, but to be honest I’d rather they caught the bastards than dished out therapists’ cards.

Fantasizing you had a knife might be your subconscious indicating that it wants to take control of what happened, she goes.

Really? I say. I tuck my feet under me. Even without shoes I’m not sure this is strictly allowed, given the pristine state of Carol’s sofa, but I reckon I might as well get something for my fifty quid. I say, Is this the same subconscious that’s decided I mustn’t remember anything that happened after I handed over my phone? Couldn’t it just be telling me what a dick I was not to keep a knife by my bed in the first place?

That’s one interpretation, Emma, she says. But not a very helpful one, it seems to me. Survivors of assault often blame themselves rather than the attacker. But the attacker is the one who’s broken the law, not you.

Look, she adds, I’m not so much concerned about the actual circumstances of what happened to you as the process of recovery. Seen from that perspective, this is a significant step. In these latest flashbacks, you’re starting to fight back—blaming your assailants rather than yourself. Refusing to be defined as their victim.

Except I am their victim, I say. Nothing changes that.

Am? Carol says quietly. Or was?

After a long, significant pause—a “therapeutic space” as she sometimes calls it, a pretty stupid way of describing what is, after all, just silence—she prompts gently: And Simon? How are things with him?

Trying, I say.

I realize this could be taken two ways, so I add, I mean he’s trying his best. Endless cups of tea and sympathy. It’s like he feels responsible because he wasn’t there. He seems to think he could have beaten them both up and made a citizen’s arrest. When actually, they’d probably have stabbed him. Or tortured him for his PIN numbers.

Carol says mildly, Society has a kind of…construct of what masculinity is, Emma. When that’s undermined, it can leave any man feeling threatened and uncertain.

This time the silence drags on for a whole minute.

Are you managing to eat properly? she adds.

For some reason I’ve confided in Carol that I used to have an eating disorder. Well, used to is a relative term because as anyone who’s ever had one knows, it never really goes away and it’s when things get shaken up and out of control that it threatens to come back.

Si’s making me eat, I say. I’m fine.

I don’t tell her that sometimes I dirty a plate and put it in the sink so Simon thinks I’ve eaten when I haven’t, or that sometimes I make myself throw up after we’ve been out. Some parts of my life are off-limits. Actually it’s one of the things I used to like about Simon, the way he’d look after me when I was ill. The problem is, when I’m not ill, his being all attentive and caring drives me crazy.

I didn’t do anything, I say suddenly. When they broke in. That’s what I can’t understand. I was literally shaking with adrenaline. It’s meant to be fight-or-flight, isn’t it? But I didn’t do either. I did nothing.

For no particular reason, I’m crying now. I pick up one of Carol’s cushions and hold it against myself, hugging it to my chest, as if by squeezing it I can somehow squeeze the life out of the little shits.

You did do something, she says. You played possum. As an instinct, that’s perfectly valid. It’s like hares and rabbits—rabbits run, hares crouch. There’s no right or wrong response in these situations, no what-if. There’s just whatever happened.

She leans forward and edges a box of tissues closer to me across the coffee table. Emma, I want to try something, she says when I’ve finished blowing my nose.

What? I say dully. Not hypnosis. I’ve told you I won’t do that.

She shakes her head. This is something called EMDR, Eye Movement Desensitization and Retraining. It can seem a slightly strange process at first, but it’s actually very straightforward. I’m going to sit beside you and move my fingers from side to side across your field of vision. I want you to track them with your eyes while you relive the traumatic experience in your mind.