The nightmare of Helen's day started to be lived at this point.
"My life is just such a mess…I've got nothing to do, nothing to live for. It's over before it ever started…."
To Helen, the patient was frightening in his negativity. His voice was very soft, very slow and cracked. It sounded like a wind up clock that had run down almost to nothing. The merest layman could tell that he had actually come to the session, stoned out of his skull, oblivious of the paraphernalia of drugs testing and, worse, her disapproval. He was in the depths of depression and had slid downhill since the last session two weeks ago. At least his surly aggression of last time showed some spark of life and was reassuring in retrospect.
"But what about your friends?" Helen gently interposed.
"Them?" he almost whispered in faint contempt. "they just want to keep me strung out on the stuff. That's all they ever wanted. They're no friends of mine…"
His words petered out and came to a stop as his eyelids drooped down over his eyes. He was in danger of slumping forward over her desk as his back bowed forward in the slowest of slow motions. His left hand, which had lain on the desk, started to move sideways and dropped down limply. Helen said nothing but, in her mind was seriously alarmed at his behaviour. She might have to phone 999 and get the ambulance to screech its way, alarm ringing. Just at that point, he jerked himself upright and his eyes half opened.
"I'm sorry, what was I saying just now?"
"You were saying that the friends you keep are no friends of yours," Helen spoke in very precise tones. Jesus, every time she had seen him, he had kept up some sort of appearance to look drug free no matter how disordered his life was in between whiles.
"I said that? Must have been dreaming. They spend time with me or else I'd be alone. They need me and I need them….."
A thought spiked its way into Helen's thoughts. This was a million miles away from the way there was real friendship at Larkhall. She was part of it when she had spent as many days as she could with Yvonne, Karen, Roisin, Cassie and George. Any one of them would have helped her out unselfishly without any thought of self. This young man's idea of friendship was a million miles away from this.
"I could give it all up if I wanted to, knock everything on the head and clean up so that I don't have to suffer any more." Helen had heard this sort of talk before as sheer fantasy without an ounce of will behind it. She knew what strength of will was. There was not that determination such as Nikki had shown. She could remember those feelings of admiration for the spirit Nikki had shown in fighting for what she believed when she was way down in the pecking order. That was sheer courage of a high order. It was a shame that she couldn't paint this in pictures for him and even halfway inspire him. It was all a different world for him.
Nevertheless, it was the first time that he had ever uttered those words of his own volition, without being prompted. She had to put it to the test.
"Would you really want to live so that you won't have to worry about being ill if you don't take drugs? You would get your freedom."
"Yeah, that sounds good. I'd get some peace. I won't have to worry anymore……"
A faint smile spread over his slightly stubbly features and for the first time since he was her patient, she noticed his eyes looking at her. His eyes were blue, like his mother's.
"If you really want to give up, you wouldn't find it that easy but you would feel better about yourself, that you had done something yourself and for the good."
Helen's voice was soft but with a concealed intensity of expression but not enough to frighten him away and make him feel pathetically inadequate before this small, very powerful woman who had all the qualities that he lacked.
"Yeah, I know it sounds so tough but what you say sounds so good……"
His voice trailed away dreamily and worried Helen. His words sounded dangerously like those spoken in some drug fantasy. It was so easy of him to pretend to be the person who he wanted to be until it was put to the test and for him to shrink back into his cocoon of apathetic misery. At least it was a form of hell that he was familiar with.
"Your problem is that you are in some nameless street where the neighbours don't know and if anything bad ever happened to you, there is the danger that no one would know. Whereas if you decided to have inpatient care, everything would be taken care of for you. You would be in a specialist hospital ward where there would be nurses on hand, doctors on hand and I would be able to come in and monitor the help you needed on a regular basis."
"You mean to go in for detox?" For the first time, the patient's voice rose in tone, almost shouting. He was going into a blind panic. He had heard about places like this where he'd be shivering in his hospital bed and he'd be trapped. None of his friends would come anywhere near the place. It wouldn't be safe. That was what they'd always told him and they had all frightened each other with what it meant. It was as deeply engrained in that primal fear area as other people's fear of snakes or spiders. He couldn't do that, he just couldn't.
"I know what that means. I'd be in agony and throwing up and none of the nurses would help me out. They would never give me what I want……."
"Like your mother?" Helen interjected. She had heard him talk very negatively about his mother and if she wasn't able to stop him backing away from inpatient treatment, then he would be forced to deal with what his mother was really like and face himself. She had the nasty sinking feeling that she was running out of options with this man.
"Leave my mother out of it," He said in his former surly manner.
"For the moment." She deliberately paused to let her words sink in to tell him she wouldn't let him off the hook any more than his mother did.
"I wanted to say that hospital would be able to patch up your arm, Again I'm no medical doctor but even I can see that you're in serious danger of contracting an infection. If you don't care, then as a professional I do."
"Like my mother?" He sneered.
Jesus, only anger seems to be the only thing going but at least half of it is directed at himself or he wouldn't self-harm.
"No way, I'm not going into one of those places. I'm …I'm not ready for it. Perhaps in a month's time, I'll be more up for it. You have to give me time……."
Helen mentally gave up on the idea. With a sickening feeling, she concluded that three months meant never. He was going to stall and twist and back away every time she mentioned it. It was like a mother gently coaxing a child to swallow a nasty cough syrup on the promise that it would do him good. She grasped for her second strand of conversation.
"Perhaps you'd better spit it out properly about your mother. We've been going in circles round this a number of sessions."
"You won't like it. You'll only interrupt."
"I'll make a deal with you," Helen started to say before cringing at her unfortunate choice of words. However, she looked into his eyes and she was relieved that, on the surface, there was nothing amiss.
"You talk for as long as you wish and I'll shut up until you tell me you're done."
"I'll tell you what it was like," He started. He was visibly encouraged that this psychologist had agreed so easily to his refusal. Getting his own way in ducking cheered him up no end. It was tragic that he could summon up the most determination and force of will in ducking out of life's challenges rather than facing up to them, like leaving home for university but he could never see it. He embarked on a long rambling diatribe until,
"She was never around for me. I might get a phone call from work asking if I was happy. I said yeah."
"Couldn't you have told her the truth?" Helen probed gently.
The man fell silent. It was as if the thought had never occurred to him.
"Don't you think that, when she was on her own looking after you, she needed to go to work to feed you? I get the idea that you didn't go without materially."
"I got nice presents at Christmas. That wasn't real love," He muttered.
"I've talked to you about choices from the moment you first walked through this door," Helen said in a firm determined voice.
"Yeah, you've nagged me about them like…."
"Your mother?" Helen brightly asked and the patient's best adolescent sullen look answered her.
"I was going to talk about choices your mother had to make in life. Try to look at it like a book you will have read, that you'd got to the middle of it and which your mother had to write….."
Helen could see that her slowly delivered words had grabbed his interest, however insecurely, and the he felt less threatened. She drew a faint breath of relief that she might start to get somewhere.
"….She was alone with a child to bring up. She had a very young baby to bring up. She had a line of work which was the only thing that gave her security, that and her love for you. What should she do?"
"It doesn't matter. She did what she did."
"She could have given up her job and looked after you full-time. She could have claimed social security like a lot of mothers. Only she would he as short of money as you are, seeing bills not paid, not feeding you properly, looking at an empty pantry and a purse with nothing in it, only wishing that she could give you the things in life which she wanted to give, to take you out, not on fancy foreign holidays, but for a day at the zoo, out in the country , the sort of little things that need a car to take you there. She did all these things for you, for your future…"
"She did it for a career."
"And she wanted more than anything else for you to be strong, happy and for you to have a comfortable future. Is that such a crime?"
Helen's voice became more impassioned to try and put some sort of spirit into this man. This was not something she had read out of a women's magazine. This was something that she could see through the very loving eyes of Crystal and josh and their two adorable children. Their house was not posh and like something out of "Changing Rooms" but a home and, yes, something she wanted for her own life and Nikki's.
"It didn't stop her from pissing off to work at a drop of a hat when someone told her to. She didn't seem sorry to go."
"Perhaps you and your mother have one thing in common," Helen said softly. "You're not so good at expressing your feelings."
That brought the man up short. That had never occurred to him, so focussed in was he on his own feelings. It was hard to think how his mother felt. It made his headache.
"So can you consider the possibility that every time your mother stepped out the door, there was an ache in her heart that she was leaving you, that she blamed herself for being a 'part time mother' as if fathers should not have the same hang up? What's the difference, after all?"
The man shook his head. This determined woman was upsetting one of the few foundations he felt he had in his life, his resentment of his mother. He closed his eyes as if his head hurt. Helen, on the other hand, felt satisfaction that at least she had blown a fierce bracing blast of air through that drugged up catatonic state of mind. Getting him to half way listen was a hell of an achievement.
"Only if we talk about your self harming. It is that, isn't it, and not you falling down a flight of stairs."
"All right, so I took a knife and cut my arm. It was blunt or I'd have been in hospital.Typical me, can't even top myself properly."
"So why do you do it?" Helen asked very softly, the man's absolute self-hatred naked in its ugliness before her. She had to go easy on him
"Same reason I mess up in my life. At least cutting my arm is my decision, not something happening to me, something that's going bad on me."
"So you do it to give you self control?"
Again, those blue eyes opened wide as those astonishing words crept into his hearing mind. He just thought he did it because he was depressed and couldn't take it any more.
"It might be something like that. So what do I do about it?"
His eyes, for the first time, looked beseechingly at her. What could she do about it? She was subtly being asked to be his minder and that was breaking her fundamental rule. Only he could do it for himself and he needed the right setting. Detox could do that for him and, with inpatient care, everything would fall so beautifully into place, like a child's building blocks. She ran her tongue across her lips and glanced down to look at her desk for the first time this session. Then she looked up and the man read the answer in her mind before she spoke.
"It would fit in so well….if you had inpatient treatment. Everything would fit in so well. I promise I would give you all the help I can."
Instantly the shutters went up in his mind. In his mind, he ran away from this with all the agility of an antelope on the plains of Africa when a lion pounced on the herd. She could see the blind panic in his eyes however much he tried to hide it. She even knew that he was all the more angry as he knew that she could see into this mind, even this little snippet of knowledge.
"You're trying to trick me. You're just like my mother. I want to go now." He spat out the words.
Politely, she ran through the available dates in her book for the next appointment and let him leave. She had lost this battle.
A little while after seeing the next patient who was coming on well, she could not help thinking of his mother. She was getting seriously alarmed enough to wonder if she should break her professional confidence and tell her. The immense satisfaction that she got as a psychologist was that the "do's" and "don't" of this job was founded on well thought out psychological truths where the consequences of transgressing the rules would rebound so obviously on her. Life as a wing governor sometimes felt like observing the ancient rituals of a Masonic order when the old style reactionary ideas were barely being challenged. Any progress to subvert this was thanks to the hard slog of pioneers like herself, which had gone on to benefit Karen and, in its turn, Nikki. She could see so clearly the other side of the argument, of mixing her professional and personal life and clouding her judgement. She hadn't had a crisis of conscience up till now but this was definitely one. She needed to get advice on this one. At least life had taught her over the years not to be too proud to do this.