The Stepson: A psychological thriller with a twist you won't see coming(3)

EMDR, it was called – eye movement desensitisation and reprocessing. It involved moving your finger in front of the client’s eye like a cartoon hypnotist, which seemed silly, but it worked. It was all about examining the traumatic memories from a place of safety in the present and filing them in the past where they belonged, in the vault of memory, so they weren’t constantly accessible on a replay loop in the person’s head. So they weren’t constantly interfering with day-to-day life, reactivating negative emotions. It was about turning a constantly relived experience into something that had been terrible, yes, so terrible, but was over and done.

He was breathing fast.

Sweat was pouring from his hairline into his eyes.

You poor, poor man.

Lulu felt dizzy with the horror of it.

How could he possibly ever get over this?

She handed him the box of tissues, but she knew better than to try to pour him a glass of water. It was as if, now that she had stopped the finger movement, her hands felt they had permission to start shaking.

Stop thinking about it.

Her mentor at uni, Professor Karla Szubanski, had once told her, ‘I have to teach a lot of my students how to empathise. But you’re at the other extreme – you’re going to have to learn to take a step back. Gain some objectivity.’

Easier said than done.

‘Let’s take a break,’ Lulu said, managing to keep her voice level. ‘I’ll just – I’ll just go and check on Milo.’

And she fled from the room. In the kitchen, Milo greeted her like a long-lost friend, and she sank to her knees and buried her face in his wiry coat.

‘Oh, Milo.’

She granted herself a few seconds of comfort from the little animal as Milo licked the tears from her cheeks, before giving him a final pat, splashing water on her face and towelling it dry. She threw Piggy for Milo to chase, and then she returned to the room.

Her client was sitting back in the chair, looking dazed. ‘That was – intense.’

She nodded.

‘But when I think about it now, what happened . . .’ His face suddenly cleared. ‘It’s not like I’m actually back there, you know? It’s like I’m thinking about what happened in a film I once watched.’ Tentatively, he smiled at her.

She felt a huge smile lifting her lips in response. ‘That’s great! It means you’re starting to consign it to the past. The memories will still be there, but that’s all they’ll be – memories.’ Oh, this was so great! And now tears were threatening again, but just at that moment there was another ping, giving her an excuse to turn away from him and go to her desk, pick up her phone and study the screen.

Damn. It was already past five o’clock.

She had six new texts from her husband.

They texted each other throughout the day, and when one of his messages pinged in after a harrowing session, often she felt like a drowning person grabbing a lifeline snaking through cyberspace. Even if it was just a silly description of his lunch or a colleague’s bad hair day, each text was a tiny, just-for-her reminder that Life is good, life is good, life is good.

But the last one was asking why she wasn’t replying to his messages.

Was she OK? Was she on her way?

She was supposed to be meeting him at the restaurant at 5:30 before going on to the National Theatre. They were seeing a play called Why Pigeons do Backflips, the ridiculousness appealing to both their weird senses of humour. It would take at least half an hour to get across town to the South Bank, even if she managed to snag a taxi straight away. But she couldn’t stop now, right in the middle of a breakthrough.

She fired off a quick text:

Won’t make the restaurant. You go ahead and I’ll meet you at the theatre. Sorry!!! xxx





Completing the session took another half hour. When it was over, Lulu went to the loo for another brief cry, grimacing at her puffy face in the mirror. She let down her long fall of blonde hair and tugged a brush through it a few times, and pinned her favourite enamel brooch to her dress, the one Mum and Dad had given her for her twenty-first. The bright pink and soft grey tones of the galah’s plumage worked well with the darker grey silk of the dress. She applied a little make-up to her eyes and lips. Then she collected her jacket and bag and ushered dog and client from the office.

As she was scrabbling in her bag for the key to lock the office door – she had a talent both for losing keys and for accumulating random ones in the bottom of her bag – he said, ‘It’s like it’s just hit me – Why? Why have I been so angry? I mean, Dad’s dead. And it wasn’t even his fault.’

This was fantastic.

She took a moment to think carefully about what to say. ‘PTSD isn’t logical. You’ve held on to the anger because you’ve been holding on to that angry child inside, all these years. You’ve been that angry child.’

‘Well, not any more.’ And as he looked at her, he started to smile, and it was like she could see inside his head, it was like she was there with him as the past started to fall away and his mind broke free of it, as he began to see the limitless possibilities of the present, of the rest of his life stretching ahead of him. ‘I’m going to get back in touch with Samantha,’ he whispered, as if this were too incredible a prospect to bear close scrutiny.

Oh my goodness!