The Psychopath: A True Story(30)
Without pausing, he then said he would count down from five and I would have to decide whether or not to jump.
He counted, ‘5, 4, 3, 2, 1!’
I dived into the air 150 feet above the crystal-clear ocean and screamed all the way down.
He was right though. It did shatter the walls of my world and opened me up to facing my fears instead of running from them.
So now, whenever I feel I’m getting fearful again I try to do something that will smash those walls down before they can build up again. In 2010, I decided I needed to do something drastic. I was becoming physically confident with the taekwondo but I was not emotionally confident. Then a friend told me about a fire-walking weekend in the north of England, and I decided to go along. It was another extraordinary experience. The man running it was rather larger than life and the first day was a huge build-up to the fire walk that night. There was a lot of motivational speaking and exercises to make us confident enough to overcome our fear and step out in our bare feet onto the red-hot burning coals.
The trouble was that the chap running the course seemed rather familiar to me. He told us he had been an intelligence officer and served for nineteen years in the SAS as a specialist trainer in interrogation techniques. He told the group about his experiences in Northern Ireland and Iraq and had indeed written a couple of books about his experiences as well. The group were spell-bound listening to him, each one of them hanging on his every word – but it just reminded me of the way Will Jordan would talk about his experiences and I simply didn’t believe him. I told myself that it didn’t matter and that he wasn’t trying to get into our lives but only to fire us up enough that we could overcome our fears. I listened sceptically, which stopped me from becoming motivated, and so tried to gee myself up instead. We did various exercises and I managed to break a one-inch-thick piece of wood with the flat of my hand on the first try – my taekwondo training helped with that. Then it came time for us to build the fire.
We all helped to pile logs up and started the fire, and watched as it burned down and finally raked the red-hot embers into a circle about fifteen feet wide. Then we took our shoes and socks off and rolled our trousers up.
One by one my fellow attendees walked barefoot over the glowing red embers. I stood at the side and willed my feet to move but nothing happened. I was the last one left who had not done the walk – some of the others had now done it several times but I was still frozen to the spot. Finally two of my colleagues asked if they could do it with me, and side by side we took the walk. I only did it the once. It actually didn’t hurt much because although they were burning hot embers my feet were only in contact with each point for a fraction of a second before moving on to the next step. It felt rather like walking barefoot over gravel, and I had a couple of hot-spot burns but nothing major. At least I had done it and that was liberating.
The next morning we all gathered for breakfast and the speaker sat opposite me, talking again about his work in the intelligence service. I asked him how he was recruited, and he looked surprised and then answered very vaguely while I listened and asked more specific questions. My friend who was with me and knew my story listened with interest. I then commented that it sounded very much like how my husband was recruited and my friend looked shocked. Suddenly my friend looked at the speaker in a new light. She had taken everything he had said at face value and believed that he was who he said he was. Now, as I started to question him, she started to see the holes in his story.
As we drove back to Edinburgh we talked about him and she was shocked that she’d been so taken in – she hadn’t for a moment thought he might be lying. The point is that he could have been telling the truth about his career and experiences – after all, some people do do that kind of work, and they also talk about it once they are out of the service – but it’s surprising how readily people are willing to believe a story, especially when they don’t have a chance to question anything. It was interesting to watch the other eleven people in the group absorb what he was saying and believe him without question. This helped me understand slightly better how I myself had believed Will Jordan.
When I met the hypnotist I had felt the pull of attraction but managed to resist it. Now I seemed to be completely immune.
TOGETHERNESS
More fun things were happening with regards to my book and the opportunities it gave me. The Bigamist had been translated into Polish, Swedish, Czech and Flemish and was starting to sell internationally. Mainstream Publishing was taken over by Random House and my book took on a new lease of life as an e-book. (I had no idea how successful that was until I got an email from Jenny, my agent, stating the amount she had deposited in my account as my six-monthly royalties cheque for that period. I laughed and sent her a text saying she’d forgotten to include the decimal point. Then I had to sit down when she texted back with a smiley face saying that, no, she hadn’t!)
I was offered a European tour, doing interviews, articles and radio shows in various different countries. Robyn still had separation anxiety though, and when I was setting off for the airport, she held me tightly and said, ‘What if you don’t come home? What if the plane crashes?’ She was absolutely terrified of losing me. I would reassure her and call her at each stage of my journey to chat, and to let her know I was OK and that although out of sight she was never out of mind.
My friends Mandy and Carina were absolute godsends during this time. They would step in and help look after the children whenever I had to be away (and quite often when I just needed a break as well).