Page 88 of Making a Killing

‘So what do you want to do? O’Grady’s offered to send a team round to see if there’s anyone in, talk to the neighbours –’

‘No,’ I say quickly, ‘I’d rather we did that ourselves. None of that’s so urgent it can’t wait a few hours. Clear it with O’Grady, then see if you can get us on a flight later today.’

***

MY SHADOW JOURNAL

Recognising emotional triggers

We talked before about the ways in which you can spot your Shadow in your waking life, as well as in your dreams. By identifying your patterns, exploring your past, understanding when you are projecting aspects of your Shadow on to other people, and by being conscious of your emotional triggers.

These are the situations, people, places – sometimes things as small as specific words or gestures – that provoke negative and unhelpful emotions. Like anger, shame, guilt, fear, sadness and regret.

‘How can I be substantial if I do not cast a shadow? I must have a dark side also, if I am to be whole’

Carl Jung

Today’s exercise

This exercise is about exploring any feeling you have of shame and regret. These emotions are often closely linked – we may feel shame about something we did, or failed to do, and regret that we did not act differently when we had the chance.

Think about something in your past that inspires these emotions. What would you do differently now? If your actions impacted someone else, what would you say to them?

So this is like the 12-step thing, right? ’Fessing up and making amends? OK, maybe not quite like that but I get the picture. Sandy’s big on that – the amends thing. Sandy’s my therapist. I found her online. Her website has all this stuff about ‘Helping Teens And Families Lead Happier Lives’ by ‘Addressing Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs)’ and ‘Achieving Positive Behaviors Through Solution-Centered Therapies’. She’s from the US, as if that wasn’t blindingly obvious. I mean, what is it with Americans and capital letters? I reckoned the nightmares I was having were a slam-dunk for an Adverse Childhood Experience, so I filled out the form and pressed Send. She got back to me the following day. It was 2022 but everything was still on Zoom, which it would have been anyway, given she was in Connecticut, but even without face-to-face meetings it cost a lot more than we could really afford. So I told K I’d get a Saturday job, and she said that would really help. But I knew the real reason she was so keen was because she’d be able to spend the whole day with Finn with me out of the way.

Finn as in the first Love Interest she’d had in all the time we’d been together. Podgy bloke with a loud laughand crap taste in pretty much everything from music to pizza (Hawaiian – is that even a food group?). He was a geography teacher, FFS. Enough said. I called him Finn Mc-Totally-Uncool, which she frowned at, saying wasn’t it cultural appropriation and I said like, duh, I’m supposed to be Irish.

She’d sat me down when she first started seeing him, saying she had something to tell me – as if I hadn’t known she’d been on Tinder for weeks, but I pretended to be surprised. She said it was just casual, that whatever happened he’d never come between us, that I was still the centre of her world, and I said fine, whatever, she deserved to be happy (and bloody well get laid too, though of course I didn’t say that). So every Saturday I’d go off into Belfast saying I was working in Lidl, knowing she’d never set foot in there, and then spent the whole time in the park or the museums or the library. As for where I was actually getting the money, well, that was something else she didn’t need to know.

It was useful, that library. She’d always drummed into me that there were Three Things I Could Never Do – 1)Anythingthat might get me arrested, even something crap like speeding or shoplifting, because if I did they’d get my DNA and that would be that. 2) Go on social media. And 3) Everevergoogle anything about my past. As if I hadn’t worked all that out long before. But the library – that was different. No one could trace what I was looking up there.

It started out just as curiosity. Nosing from afar. Turned out Nanxi was back in Boston doing math stuff and winning scholarships (zero surprises there). Portia, Megan and Millie were all at the Griffin (ditto), and Millie and Megan were doing the full girl-on-girl while Portia was filling her Instafeed with nail varnish and make-up and OOOHboys.She always was a fucking airhead. I had a look at that Adam Fawley too. He wasn’t on socials but I found him anyway. He seemed to be doing just peachy. Promotion, a swanky new job, and even a new baby. Looked like he had a thing for flower names, just like Sharon. Let’s just hope his poor bloody daughter is OK with that. But I guess she could always change it. I mean, I did.

It took longer to find Leo. I’d already guessed he might have changed his name back. I knew his real name was Gary because I’d snooped around and found the adoption papers in one of Barry’s drawers. I didn’t blame him for changing it, though – even before I left, that whole lion thing had turned into a complete nightmare – he’d probably have had a psychotic break just watching fucking David Attenborough. He wasn’t easy to find, though, even then. Turns out there are quite a few Garys his age in Oxford, but no Gary Masons. Which threw me for a bit because even after everything that happened back then I assumed he’d still be living with Barry. But turns out that wasn’t an option because Barry had been in prison.

Now that really did floor me – I mean, I knew everyone thought he’d been abusing me back then, and I’d wanted them to think that and that lie was on me, but I didn’t know about the kiddie porn on the phone. I really didn’t. I think now that K must have found out before we left but she never said anything to me and of course I never saw any news about any of them because I wasn’t allowed to look them up. But if I had known I still wouldn’t have believed it because it just didn’t make any sense. Barry was crap at any sort of tech, for a start. And like I said before, he wouldn’t be interested in kids in a million years. Porn, yes, obviously, butkids? No way.

I worked it out in the end, though – it just took me a lot longer than it should have.

It was Jamie, of course. Jamie must have set him up. He’d have known where to find vile shit like that, and he hated Barry enough to do it too. So the one thing Baz got punished for was the one thing he didn’t actually do. More karma in the fast lane.

Anyway, I knew Gary’s birthday and that he supported Chelsea and I eventually found him on Facebook. Though he didn’t do much on it, just liked football things and posted the odd pic of cars or his dog. It was a nice dog. It did a lot of grinning. So I set up a fake profile and found a photo of a smiley girl on the web who had the same sort of dog and wasn’t anything like me, and soon after that ‘Melanie’ started liking his stuff, and after a while, she sent him a Friend Request, and a few days later he said yes.

Meanwhile, three times a week, for an hour after schoolwork, I talked to Sandy. I knew she was somewhere on the coast, but she blurred her background, which made it look like she was hovering in ectoplasm. Though who am I to talk – I fudged my screen too. There was no way I was letting her see the crappy little back room I called home. I started with the Giant’s Causeway, mainly as a piss-take, but then started changing it every week just to see if she said anything. But of course she never did. Not even when it was Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

No one had ever treated me like an adult before, not the way she did. We didn’t even talk about the dreams, not at first. And definitely not the cutting. I didn’t tell her why I was there and she didn’t ask. She said she knew there must be a reason I was there but she trusted me to get to that when I was ready to tell her. And until then wewould talk about what I wanted out of life and how she could help me be the best version of myself, and I remember smirking a bit because it sounded so trite and West Coast and even a bit weirdly religious, but in a roundabout way that’s why I went looking for Leo. Because if we’re talking about shame and regret here, he’s the biggest I have. I felt bad for him when we were kids and I know I only made his life harder. I tell myself I didn’t know any better and I was only eight but I know that’s crap and it isn’t just hindsight. I knew it back then too. I knew there was something wrong, even if I didn’t know it was the cutting, and I didn’t tell anyone. I could have got him some help when he really needed it but I didn’t. I just made things worse, and it must have got a whole lot more shit after I left, and none of that was his fault. It was mine.

He was quite wary when ‘Melanie’ first messaged him. I don’t think anyone had actually tried to friend him before. I got the impression he hadn’t had a lot of experience with girls either. He’s quite good-looking now so that couldn’t be the reason, but he was always incredibly shy, and the bullying at school and all the health crap he went through certainly didn’t help. And when I looked at what he posted on Facebook he just came over as a bit lost. Which made me think – if Sandy’s stuff was helping me, maybe it could help him too. After all, unlike me, he had nothing to blame himself for, he just needed to take a bit more control of his life. Ha ha, listen to me, the teen wonder who has it all worked out.

But I think I did, actually. Help, I mean. I’m not just saying that because I want it to be true. Once he started to open up a bit I began to drop in the odd thing Sandy’d said to me and he seemed to take it all in. And then I ‘confided’ that I had a therapist I wastalking to about some bad stuff in my past, and she’d been really brilliant. And even though I knew he was trying to play it cool, I could tell he was interested because he asked, all casual, how she was doing that and I said we could try some of it, on Zoom, him and me, if he wanted, and he agreed straight away.

And that was weird, obvs. Seeing him. I’d seen his photo online, but it was different looking at the real him. The old Leo and the new Gary in the same body. A bit like seeing someone’s identical twin, I guess – the same person only different. He was more confident than he used to be, especially given he was basically talking to a blank screen, because I’d told him my laptop was a piece of shit (which it was) and the camera wasn’t working. His room was interesting. You can learn a lot about people from stuff like that if you can be bothered to look. There was a window with trees outside and a PlayStation and Vans gear on hangers. It looked like someone was looking after him. Though not quite enough to check out who he was talking to online. No, that’s not fair. Just my Shadow talking.

So we talked a bit and he opened up about how he’d had a bad time in his life a few years back that made him think he was rubbish and would never be good enough, and I asked what’d happened and he said the family he’d been with treated him badly, and one of them in particular, and it took a while to work out that he meant me. Not Barry or that fucking woman butme.

And it was just as well, then, that my camera was off because my face started burning up. I couldn’t speak for a minute but I don’t think he noticed, and then he asked how my therapist would deal with something like that. And I got a hold of myself and said that she’d ask him if he could remember the first time he had that feelingand he said the person who’d been mean to him had said he was adopted and that was why no one wanted him. Even at eight, I knew I shouldn’t have said that, but I had no idea just howpermanentit would be. It had stayed there, in his head, all those years. Talk about my fucking Shadow. I was ashamed. Like, really really ashamed.

But then I thought, I made this happen, I have to own it. So I told him Sandy would say that feeling you’re not good enough was not the same as it being true. That no one can make you feel bad about yourself unless you let them. If you feel that way it’s because you’vedecidedto – you’ve given those people power over you.

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