‘What age?’ Josephine asked again. I was annoyed with myself because, by not answering straight away, I’d let my feelings show.
‘Three and a half,’ I said, lightly.
‘And you were the youngest until Anna came?’
‘Um.’
‘And were you jealous of Anna when she was born?’
‘No!’ How did she know? I’d forgotten she’d asked me the same about Helen, that her method was hit-and-miss rather than omniscience.
‘So you didn’t pinch Anna? Or try to make her cry?’
I stared at her, appalled. How on earth did she know? And why did she have to tell everyone in the room?
Everyone sat up. Even Mike had taken a break from trying to make eye-contact with my knickers.
‘I suppose you hated Anna for taking attention away from you?’ she suggested.
‘No, I didn’t.’
‘Yes, you did.’
I was hot and sweaty. Squirmy with embarrassment and anger. Raging at being pitched back into that frightening world where my actions had had catastrophic results. I’d nearly have preferred the questionnaire to this.
I did not want to remember.
Even though it was always kind of there, half-remembered.
‘Rachel, you were three years old, an age that child psychologists recognize as a very difficult one to cope with a new addition to the household. Your jealousy was natural.’ Josephine had gone all gentle on me.
‘What are you feeling?’ she asked.
And instead of telling her to get lost, my mouth opened and the words, ‘I’m ashamed,’ tearfully sidled out.
‘And why didn’t you tell your mother how you felt?’
‘I couldn’t,’ I said in surprise. New sisters were things I was supposed to get excited about, not resent.
‘Anyway,’ I added. ‘Mummy was gone funny.’
I could feel everyone’s interest move up a notch.
‘She stayed in bed crying a lot.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because I was mean to Anna,’ I said slowly. My spirit shrivelled as I forced myself to say it. I’d made my mother go to bed and cry for six months because I’d been bold.
‘So what did you do to Anna that was so terrible?’
I paused. How could I tell her and all the other people there how I’d pinched a tiny, defenceless baby, how I’d prayed for her to die, how I’d fantasized about throwing her in the bin.
‘OK,’ Josephine said, when it became clear I wasn’t going to answer. ‘Did you try to kill her?’
‘Noooo!’ I nearly laughed. ‘Of course I didn’t.’
‘Well, you can’t have been so bad, in that case.’
‘But I was,’ I insisted. ‘I made Daddy go away.’
‘To where?’
‘Manchester.’
‘Why did he go to Manchester?’
How could she ask? I wondered in shame and pain. Wasn’t it perfectly obvious ? That he’d gone away because of me.
‘It was all my fault,’ I blurted. ‘If I hadn’t hated Anna, Mummy wouldn’t have cried and gone to bed, and Daddy wouldn’t have got fed up with all of us and gone away.’ And with that I horrified myself completely by bursting into tears.
I only cried briefly before saying ‘Sorry,’ and straightening myself up.
‘Did it ever occur to you that your mother might have been suffering from post-natal depression?’ Josephine said.
‘Oh no, I don’t think so,’ I said, firmly. ‘It wasn’t anything like that, it was because of me.’
‘That’s very arrogant of you,’ Josephine said. ‘You were only a child, you couldn’t possibly have been that important.’
‘How dare you! I was important.’
‘Well, well,’ she murmured. ‘So you think you’re important?’
‘No, I don’t!’ I interrupted, furious. That hadn’t been what I’d meant at all. ‘I never feel better than anyone else.’
‘That’s certainly not the impression you gave when you arrived at the Cloisters,’ she said mildly.
‘But that’s because they’re farmers and alcoholics,’ I exploded, before I realized that I had said anything. I could have cut my vocal cords out with a potato-peeler. ‘I think you’ll grant me that point.’ She smiled graciously. ‘You have the over-developed sense of self-importance that a lot of addictive personalities seem to have, plus the massively low self-esteem.’
‘That’s stupid,’ I muttered. ‘It doesn’t make sense.’
‘But that’s the way it is. It’s a recognized fact that people who become addicts often have a very similar personality type.’
‘I see, so you’re born an addict?’ I said scornfully. ‘Well, what chance do people have in that case?’
‘That’s one school of thought. In the Cloisters we see it slightly differently. We think it’s a combination of the type of person you are and the life experiences you have. Take your case – you were less… robust, emotionally, shall we say, than others might have been. Not your fault, some people are born with, for example, bad eyesight, others are born with sensitive emotions. And you were traumatized by the arrival of a new sister at an age where you were easily damaged…’
‘I see, so everyone with a younger sister becomes a cocaine addict?’ I said angrily. ‘In fact, I have two younger sisters. What do you make of that? Shouldn’t I be a heroin addict as well as a cokehead? Good job I haven’t got three younger sisters, isn’t it?’
‘Rachel, you’re being facetious. But that’s just a defence mechanism…’
She came to a halt as I howled like a hungry prairie dog.
‘No more!’ I screamed. ‘I can’t bear it, it’s all such, such… CRAP!’
‘We’ve touched on a deep well of pain here, Rachel,’ she said calmly, as I nearly frothed at the mouth. ‘Try and stay with those feelings instead of running away from them as you’ve always done in the past.
‘We have a lot of work to do where you forgive the three-year-old Rachel.’
I moaned with despair. But at least she hadn’t said those terrible, cringe-inducing words, ‘inner child’.