Page 32 of You Can't Hurt Me

“You know you can always talk to me about it, if you want.”

I close my eyes a moment, rattled. Down the chute of memory I slip and slide. The smell of burned toast in my father’s kitchen. The obscene scream of the smoke alarm, the electrical storm that followed. Tony’s face when I returned that night. The secret that binds us together. How much was down to Tony, how much was down to me?

The blankness in my father’s eyes is what stays with me. The sight of Tony smashing the smoke alarm with a broom until a tangle of wires spilled out. The noise stopped but it was all too late by then. Did it really happen? I have spent so many years perfecting the art of unremembering, unknowing what I really know. My mind flits back to the moment.

“Tony and I have talked about our parents many times,” I say, neutrally. “I don’t know why he’s telling you all this.”

I crave distance from her and yet she inches closer, close enough for me to see the fine dark hairs on her folded arms, how rapidly she’s breathing.

“Look, I’m seeing Tony again, and we’re happy.” Her eyelids flutter closed for a second, her words feel stiff and rehearsed. “I want it aboveboard and open. It’s important for both of us that you’re happy about it too?”

Why would they care what I think? All I really want to do is leave. “I’m so pleased for you, really.” I fold my features into the semblance of a smile. “For both of you. Welcome back to our fucked-up family.”

When she hugs me, I feel relief flow through her, her limbs melt, soft as liquid. Quite suddenly she is languid, washed out by all this drama. She sinks back onto the sofa while I wash up the last of the dishes. My fingertips feel their way to the bottom, over the rubble of glass stems and cutlery. I read recently the most common household accident is cutting yourself on an upturned blade below the bubbles. A simple act of negligence. Only yourself to blame.

Eva’s Self-Reflection Journal

25 February 2019

Me: “Can you tell me a little bit about what happened to you today?”

Patient X: “Well, I was in a cab coming home and I began to feel...strange.”

Me: “In what way strange?”

Patient X: “Terrified, I guess, without knowing why. I couldn’t get enough air into my lungs. All the muscles in my throat constricted and I struggled to swallow. Later that night I woke up gasping, lying in the darkness listening to my own breathing.”

Calm until now, Patient X appears agitated, arms wrapped across their chest, foot tapping the floor. Evidently, the experience is still making itself felt, a memory trapped physically.

Me: “It sounds to me like a panic attack. Sufferers are overwhelmed for no apparent reason with many of the symptoms you describe. But sometimes it comes from a deeper source. Why now? Can you tell me a bit more about what happened that evening, before you had your first one?”

Patient X: “I’d been seeing someone for a few months. We started fighting. They told me they wanted to end it. No warning. It was all over.”

Me: “Did they let you know why?”

Patient X: “Just being me, I guess. I wasn’t very—I mean, I struggle to be open, to be real with anyone, after everything I’ve been through.”

12

All About You

In classical myth, Poena is the personification of pain, deriving from the Greek wordποιυ?, meaningpenalty. Goddess of divine retribution, she is sent to punish mortals who angered the gods, and for centuries afterward physical suffering continued to be viewed as a penance for sin.

Ancient cultures placed their faith largely in magic and ritual, votive offerings, sacrificial animals and scapegoats sent off in the hope of driving pain out into the wilderness.

Early modern thinkers such as René Descartes, the seventeenth-century French philosopher, scientist and mathematician, were the first to consider pain in a different way. Descartes, in hisTreatise on Man, theorized that pain originated in the brain, a revolutionary idea that suggested physical suffering wasn’t inflicted by an omnipotent external force. This raised the radical possibility of individual agency, if pain was created internally, then surely it was within our own power to find a cure.

“So, I’m thinking we need a bit more of your early life in here,” I say. “Childhood memories, your mom and dad, recollections that make you relatable, that sort of thing?”

Nate stretches across the sofa, hands interlaced behind his neck, and I sit in the armchair opposite, tapping away on my laptop as he talks. Over the last three weeks, we have settled into a familiar routine. It’s an absorbing process, working out how best to navigate his moods. If my questions are too direct he can often withdraw, other times he is animated by our conversations, springing up to elaborate on a memory and pacing around the room.

Very quickly the memoir has become a kind of refuge for me, an excuse to avoid the heat of Tony and Amira’s rekindled romance, their smug couple status. In the evenings I escape to my room to transcribe and write. Tony’s possessions are scattered around the flat. His presence lingers, the smell of his aftershave in the bathroom, his moldy running shoes in the hallway next to mine.

When I enter a room, they spring apart like guilty teenagers. The nights are worse since Tony moved their bed away from the radiator. Now the headboard pushes up against my wall, a thin partition that divides the original room in two. Their lovemaking seeps into my unconscious. I wake frequently from variations of a recurring nightmare, the sound of plaster splitting and their faces pushing through cracks in the bedroom wall, fingers poking through the holes, clawing to get at me.

I try to avoid Tony in the mornings. I am a stranger in my own apartment, tiptoeing from bedroom to kitchen, a spook hazing at the margins of their life. Ironic, really, that I feel more visible here with Nate, where my role is to evaporate on the page.

“Well, let’s see,” says Nate, staring up at the ceiling for inspiration. “My dad was a maths lecturer, my mom a history academic. When I was around ten years old, she told me I was going to boarding school in Edinburgh.”

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