The Rabbit Girls(46)

Everyone introduces themselves, while Miriam snatches glimpses at Axel calmly sipping his coffee.

She also sees him on top of her, sweating, pulsing, pushing, searing, scrambling, chasing, catching, teasing, hurting, laughing, finishing, apologising, crying, holding; promising.

Her head is spinning and she cannot stop her heart from racing. It’s going to beat out of her chest, or she is going to collapse in the plastic chair.

The heat of his skin, clammy, wet, pressed against her mouth, his lips on hers. She tries to push against him, but he doesn’t move. His mouth working on hers, prising her lips open, pushing his tongue into her mouth.

Dr Baum draws her back into the room, and she looks at Axel, sitting still, smiling pleasantly. And, like vertigo, she plummets back to a time before, as well as being aware of what is happening now; as though both are happening at once.

She sees the charming, middle-aged man in front of her, but she also feels her husband move his hands up her skirt. Grabbing her bottom and digging his nails deep into her so that she rises to meet his body. She can feel it happening, as though Axel’s hands from the past are still groping and squeezing at her skin.

‘One second,’ Dr Baum says, holding up a hand. ‘I see we’ve fallen out of sync.’

Then everyone looks at her.

‘Miriam,’ Dr Baum continues, ‘do you understand, comprehend or indeed apprehend your role in this meeting, as such, although perhaps meeting is not its name . . .’

Miriam drifts off into a haze.

Dr Baum looks at Miriam, who is unsure if she needs to speak or if there was a question posed to her.

‘Miriam. I am clearly asking you, if you would be so kind, to explain your role in the room today.’

Miriam looks to Hilda for help, but none is offered.

‘I’m here to speak on behalf of Dad’s wishes,’ she tentatively says.

‘Yes, the wishes of your father as you see them.’

‘That’s right, his wishes.’

‘Well, technically, no. Not his wishes as his state is one in which his wishes are not easily identified or articulated. You are basing your assumption of his wishes on your own ideology and inference, I suppose?’

‘Based on knowing Dad.’ She feels defensive.

‘Ah, yes, but . . .’

‘She hadn’t spoken to her father for a decade,’ Axel says. Miriam glares at him and his face lights up in a smile.

Axel had written to her father, once, before her mother had died. Telling him that Miriam hated him, blamed him for her current difficulties, which he catalogued in detail. Axel wrote that Dad’s episodes (which she had disclosed to Axel privately) were a trauma that Miriam needed medication to overcome. Axel had written it out in a long letter, stipulating that Miriam was a bad wife because her Mum had been a ‘raven mother’, abandoning Miriam for her career. The letter was barbaric, it was hideous, it was lies. But it was lies that would hurt her parents the most. Miriam had watched Axel seal the letter and lock her in the house as he went out to post it. And there had been nothing she could do.

But every night while she watched Axel sleep, she waited for a noise, for the front door. For her parents to come for her, because she knew they wouldn’t believe the letter. That they would know she was in trouble. That she was stuck. They would come for her, and they would help her.

After a week she became frantic, checking the post like a maniac, walking down the street, lifting the receiver of the phone – waiting . . . wondering. After two weeks, she accidently cut herself while chopping carrots, the pain had shocked her. But it had shocked her out of the loop of why her parents hadn’t come for her.

Was Axel right? Did they not love her at all?

After a month and not one letter from her parents, not one phone call and no one to come to her door to rescue her, Axel had taken her to the doctor.

He had taken her to this doctor.

Dr Baum is talking and Miriam is trying to hear him through the clatter of pain that comes from the feeling of being abandoned, exactly when she thought she would be saved.

‘Thank you, Herr Voight. So, Miriam, I wonder how in fact you think that you know of your father’s wishes, or are able to adequately represent them in this room.’ Dr Baum raises his eyebrows.

‘His what?’

‘Why are you here? is what Dr Baum is asking, love,’ Axel’s cotton-soft voice.

‘Do you want me to leave?’ Miriam asks Dr Baum.

‘I think the question here is, do you want to leave?’ he counters.

Miriam is completely torn by this, more than ever she would love to run from the room, away from Axel watching her. But she thinks of her father, and she draws strength from the letters, what the rabbit girls went through, the operations and the doctors. If they can survive that, she can keep her head in a meeting. She shakes her head. ‘No.’

But, why did her father not come for her? When they must have received the letter – the letter that would have so hurt them.

Miriam knows it would have killed her mother, that her mother died thinking that Miriam hated her.

It wasn’t true.

The meeting continues and Miriam tries to breathe slowly. The woman who came into the room a little before Miriam is writing something, her pen scratching the paper furiously. A nurse with a plain, round face, named Sue, is eating biscuits noisily. Hilda is listening, Axel is listening and Dr Baum is talking . . . about hospice and hospital and her father leaving his home.