Don’t You Forget About Me(47)

I don’t have tons of funds, but I can put my dumb blonde hair in the big rollers, do a face mask, get a gel manicure at the salon two roads over, walk into town and purchase myself a Magnum Salted Caramel and a beautiful Penguin Classic edition of Wuthering Heights, which I’m going to re-read. See if it lands differently, now.

So I do.

I get Jammy some yellow bell pepper that he’s mad for, and go for a hot chocolate, sitting in a window so I can see the smoky-darkness of a winter evening fall, the street lamps switch on.

And, I decide, while spooning up the last of the foam, I’m going to revisit Fay. I need to tell her about seeing Lucas again. I want her to tell me that despite the fact it feels like my chest is being crushed in a vice, it is some sort of catharsis. You want to talk to her because you won’t tell anyone else. And why is that, exactly?

I wonder how counsellors feel when former clients reappear with their lives in as much a mess as ever. Is it like cutting someone’s unflattering ’do for years, getting them to grow out layers and stop harsh treatments, and then seeing them strutting round town with a backcombed, white straw pompadour, like a French Regency wig? Dispiriting?

I’ll have to ask Rav.

‘Can I speak to Fay Wycherley?’ I say, mobile to ear in the quiet kitchen when I get in, having ascertained Karen’s definitely out. Studying my glossy nails, the colour of blood. Aggressive hygge. Glamorous defiance.

‘I’m sorry, she doesn’t work here anymore.’

‘Oh … Do you know where she went?’

‘She went on to a practice in Hull, I think.’

‘Oh. Right. Thank you. Do you have the name? I’ll try her there.’

I won’t, because I can’t see myself travelling to Hull, but it seems a courteous farewell.

‘Hang on, do you mind waiting for a moment?’

The receptionist puts me on hold to Flautist Moods: Vol 7. Then there’s the noise of a phone being crashed back out of its cradle.

‘Hi. Are you a former client of Fay?’

‘Yes.’

‘I’m very sorry to tell you this but Fay passed away in 2015.’

I pause. ‘She’s dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘… How?’

‘A traffic accident, I believe.’

‘Oh. That’s so sad … Thank you for letting me know.’

I say bye and sit and stare at the washing up in the plastic rack. Poor Fay. She’d be what – mid-fifties? I call up images of her and try to process the fact she’s not here anymore. She was so reassuring. She kept my secrets, and she listened. And she’s gone. I wonder if she had children, and if they miss her the way I miss Dad.

I remember a Fay remark that was long lost in memory, until now: ‘No one else is going to fix you. The only person who can fix you, is you.’

So Coldplay lied.

Rav the counsellor you sorted me out with, Fay, she died?

Sorry yes did I not say at the time? She was a keen cyclist, came off under a lorry on the A6 in Buxton. Grim. She was from St Ives so they held the funeral there & I couldn’t get the time off. How did you find out?

Ah. I’d not thought I would be asked. I’ll mask it with a bad taste, black humour joke. It’s not like Rav is professionally trained and BACP certificated and will see right through it. I text:

Thought I’d make a ‘top-up’ sort of appointment with her and the centre told me. Rav I’m in no way making light of this or making it about me but my grief counsellor has died. That doesn’t seem like a thing that should be allowed to happen.

This is your tragedy, I see! Tell your next therapist to assess you for Narcissistic Personality Disorder (do you need another recommendation?) x

No, thanks. Wanted to catch up with Fay really x

Fay once caught me fagging it in the car park, after our session, and told me to quit.

‘Life is so short anyway, don’t make it shorter,’ she called, as she got into her racing-green Mini Cooper. ‘If I sound like your mother, that’s because I’m old enough to be your mother.’

I grinned and waved her off and ground the butt under my heel.

I’ll stop now, in her honour. I’m only a social smoker, really, I’ve stopped before and had no cravings.

And there’s something else I should do, too. Regarding another thing Fay said that resonated, long after our sessions had ended.

‘Sometimes because the people we wanted to care for us, didn’t care for us, we live with a deliberate lack of care for ourselves. A way of getting back at them, through self-neglect.’

I.e. treating yourself in exactly the way Clem says you shouldn’t.

‘You’re doing it as revenge?’ I’d asked.

‘Revenge, perhaps a buried desire to be rescued. And embracing a failure that you feel you’re marked for anyway.’

I’d had a creative idea, after the meal at Rajput, and I’d shelved it because I thought: what do I ever do that ever goes right?

I should stop living with a deliberate lack of care.

I’m going to enter that writing competition at the pub, and share my shame. AND, what’s more, I won’t go down without a fight with That’s Amore!

I’m going to email the event organiser first so I don’t have time to chicken out, then it’s on to Mr Keith, whose address I guess at from Ant’s reply.