Page 63 of You Can't Hurt Me

Patient X leans forward, offers me a box of tissues. “I didn’t want to upset you.”

Me: “You haven’t at all. You expressed yourself and I was simply responding. It’s so moving to witness someone’s resilience, reliving such a traumatic memory... For a moment I felt as if I shared your pain, which is truly something I never thought I’d be able to do.”

Patient X: “You’re the first person I’ve told these things to. I wanted to say how much happier I’ve been feeling over the last few weeks, how different it is really talking to someone. You have no idea. I hope I haven’t made you uncomfortable?”

Me: “No. No, I was wondering if you felt it too.”

Patient X: “You know I do.”

I pause for a long moment. “You’ve heard of Freud’s work on transference. Love, yearning, anger, contempt. All these can come up in the safety of the consulting room, projected onto the therapist. Then, of course, there’s countertransference when the therapist has to work through difficult feelings too.”

Patient X: “So?”

Me: “Well, I worry what we’re feeling here is a form of emotional transference, which can be utterly destructive for both patient and therapist. There is no good outcome. I need to explain that. You have to know.”

Patient X isn’t really listening, their gray eyes fixed on mine. “Stop reciting from the textbooks. You know this is different, right?”

I try my best not to smile. Everything I’ve explained is erased, meaningless. Nothing else matters except being right here, our little theater of projections, safe from the outside world.

24

Him and her.

In the end, it made all the sense in the world that Tony was Patient X. Naively I had told him about my interview with Eva, and her offer of a free therapy session. But I never told him I had agreed to it, even though our chat barely constituted a session, at least not one she’d bother writing up. I was too reserved to tell her anything of interest and after forty minutes, I thanked her and left. That was the last time we ever spoke. The mystery is how he knew where I’d been that day—what led my brother to Eva?

I had examined those pages so carefully when I found her journal, the sacred line between patient and therapist disintegrating. It was all there, simmering in the spaces between the words, boundaries yielding, the potent sense that it was only a matter of time before their relationship would break out of the consulting room and into real life. And my secrets too revealed along with it.

I wake to daylight seeping through my eyelids. Replay, recalibrate, rewind. Cushions are scattered on the floor, his clothes and mine in a twisted trail, forming strange shapes in the morning light. I can still feel him, on top of me, inside me, the scent of us heavy in the room.

Up it floats, the hazy chronology of last night, the bathroom and, at some point, one of us had signaled a move elsewhere. How willingly I had followed him up here, walking ahead of him into his room. Lying on his bed, I remember how I had turned my head toward the soft beam of light from the bathroom, saw a glimpse of an open door that led to Eva’s bedroom. Somehow it unnerved me, and I got up from his bed to close it.

“I feel as if I’m being watched,” I had said and he’d laughed at the melodrama of it.

“It’s a little late for worrying about that,” he had quipped, lightly kissing my stomach, lowering me back down onto the bed.

Now I watch him ocean deep in sleep, his arms curled around a pillow. Sleep suits him, I decide, melting away the frown lines and the creases around his eyes, a smile teasing at the edge of his lips. Part of me knows I should get up and leave, creep away before it’s sabotaged. But I can’t bear to quite yet and I shift positions instead, feel his arm move across me, the exhale of his breath on the nape of my neck. I drift off.

When I wake again, the bed is empty. I hear him moving around in the bathroom, the thrum of the shower, the whirr of a shaver. I luxuriate in these sounds, the clicks and creaks of the heating coming on, a cleaner tidying up somewhere downstairs.

He walks back in, gets dressed. “I’ll be back in two hours, we’ll do something,” he says. “You always make a habit of running away, don’t do that again.”

“Sounds good,” I say, sleepily. I smile up at him and then he is gone.

The cushioned silence of the room presses in. I get up, nose around the bathroom, stare at my reflection. My body feels tender, aching. My hair is a mess, frizzy from the downpour last night, traces of last night’s makeup smeared beneath my eyes, my lips stained red. I am undone, but something radiates through me, a rawness, a hunger of a different kind.

I study myself for a moment. I seem as opaque to myself as I am to him. I turn to the bathroom door—her connecting door. Once again, I’m driven by the siren call of what lies behind.

My feet lead me through before my mind can object, drawn inexorably by her life and how it is melting into mine. I step into the walk-in closet; the mad extravagance of it, a glittering dressing-up box for grown-ups, for women who surely can’t exist beyond films or fantasy. Each section is meticulously arranged by color, print, dress type, even hem length. There is night and day wear; Grecian metallic dresses; velvet jackets, satin jumpsuits, sections for denim, sections for leopard print. There’s a lingerie drawer too, which I begin to slide open but something stops me and instead I pick up a black scarf with golden embroidered stars. Running the velvet fabric across the back of my neck, I inhale the scent of it, vanilla and old cigarettes still cling to its fibers.

My eye is caught by one of the silk slip dresses in eau de Nil and I pull it from its hanger, a slash of black lace at its edges. I feel giddy with the illicit thrill of it, caught between desire and fear he may return. I unwrap my towel and shimmy the dress over my head. Stepping into a pair of patent nude shoes with their trademark flash of scarlet sole, I sway down the short aisle between the rails.

The dress clings to my body, brushes my legs. I twirl and sashay, seduced by the film playing in my head. Except when I check myself out in the mirror, it’s not like that at all. The delicate silk that should fall into loose Grecian folds stretches cheaply across my breasts, its seams gape at my hips. I notice my pale skin pressing through the stitching and a wave of revulsion sweeps over me. Her superiority on so many levels, losing at a game I realize now I’ve been playing all along.

I slip the dress off awkwardly, my elbow knocks a row of handbags on the shelf above me. One of them falls to the floor and, as I stretch up to replace it, I see a bulky plastic Superdrug bag that looks out of place, take it out and look inside. There are Duracell batteries, Nurofen, emery boards and an almost-full bottle of sparkling water that long ago lost its fizz. Like a small time capsule. I wonder how long they’ve been lying here.

I’m about to replace them when I spot something else, a slim blue-and-white cardboard packet ripped open in a crevice of the bag that I missed, and behind it a receipt. I take them both out, turn it over in my hands.

Ninety-nine percent accurate, it says along the top in yellow. I glance at the itemized list and there it is right at the top:

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