Tragedy

My therapist said I would be OK if I never came back here. She said returning to this place would trigger the memories again. The ones that pushed me over the edge. The ones she had taught me to keep at bay. She said reawakening those experiences might set me back ten years. Back to the troubled times. Before I started my sessions with her. Before the attack. Before I became the mixed up mess I was, until my therapist straightened me out. She said, above all, I have to stay straightened out. That meant, I must never come back here. Never, under any circumstances. She started every session by reminding me. The alternative was, she said, that I would surely lose my mind. That I would not only have to face my demons, but I would have to live with them for the rest of my life. At least.

Yet, now I’m back here, and so are those demons. They were always here, waiting, endlessly patient, for this moment. Game over.

Now I know that Yvonne must have been intimately familiar with Poe’s Imp of the Perverse. The impulse to do the exact opposite of what we know is good for us. Thanks to her, that imp became my guide. Let me walk you back, while I still can. While it is all still fresh in my mind.

My first session. I thought the blanket was just because she was cold. It covered her shoulders and went all the way down to the floor. A thick, knitted, Native American weave with a stark pattern of diamonds and zigzags in red, white and black. It made her look bigger. Wider. She sat in the corner, the round, glass-topped coffee table between us. I could see her reflection in that table top. Upside down. Only her mouth moved. In the tabletop, she didn’t look human. Her mouth moved, above her eyes. That reflection looked menacing. That makes sense to me now. Back then, I couldn’t see her arms or hands, under the blanket. That first time, I didn’t know why.

She was kind. Considerate. She asked me how I was. She asked me what I remembered. I knew what she meant. She meant what had happened to me. In the attack. I realised she was probing, gently. Finding out how deep into my memory I was ready to go. I felt like it was OK to talk about it. So I did. It got easier as I went on. There were bits that weren’t so clear, though. Sometime, around five years into our sessions, she asked me what I saw as my biggest problem. I can remember what I said, as plainly as if it was this morning. My biggest problem was I had been attacked and subdued by a bunch of women. I’m not proud of that. I mean, women, men, we’re all human, right? It shouldn’t be about who’s physically stronger. I say physically, because I’ve always known she is mentally stronger than I am. She proved that, over the years, by teaching me to respect myself again, after what I remembered happening to me. Women are equal to men, except they still have segregated sports events. That’s only fair, because men have stronger muscles. I should be stronger. I believe I am. I know I am. Even though I know what happened, that night.

Over the months, then the years, I learned to deal with the actuality of their cruel and unwarranted mocking. I learned to come to terms with the physical degradation they subjected me to. OK, so I had made some remarks about them, that in this day and age might be classed as misogynistic or symptomatic of toxic masculinity. My therapist talked me through everything those three women did to me. She taught me to deal with it all. When she reminded me that I’d told her how they pinched their thumbs and forefingers around my biceps and laughed at how thin my arms were, my face flushed, but she quickly got me back on track. I had been admirably tolerant, she reassured me, by not rising to the bait; by keeping calm. She applauded me for doing the same when they pulled down my pants, and laughed out loud at my vital statistics. She told me I had shown remarkable restraint by not dealing with all three of them in the way most men would have. By not teaching them a stark lesson that would put them right back in their places, I had proved myself their moral and intellectual superior.

She got me properly into Shakespeare. I mean, I’d studied his plays at school - Julius Caesar for O level - but I’d never seen behind the words on the page in the way Yvonne taught me to, breaking up, as she did, my endless monologue about my own inward-looking woes with some good basic literary culture.. She opened my eyes to the powerful women he wove into his scripts. The witches in Macbeth are the obvious example. Did you know, those witches spoke in trochee - that’ s DUM-da, DUM-da etcetera. ‘Double, double, toil and trouble.’ Stress on the first syllable of every pair, as opposed to iambic da-DUMs like ‘The cause is in my will. I will not come.’ This from the mighty Caesar, after his wife, Calpurnia, changed his mind about going to the senate house in Act 2, Scene 2. Granted, Decius Brutus changed it back a few lines later, but look to Lady Macbeth, Portia, Queen Margaret and, of course, Cleopatra, if you want proof that Shakespeare’s world was always a matriarchy.

Yet now, back here in room 1001 of the Strand De Montfort St Gregory, I see Yvonne’s cruel plan laid bare. Each of those couch sessions was simply another rung up the ladder toward the precipice over which she had always planned to cast me. She knew that her every mention of that room intensified my compulsion to come back here, to face what I thought had been the scene of my temporal defeat. She played to my conviction that I could regain self-respect by facing up to my humiliation, on the very turf where I had tasted bitter failure.

But those were false memories. Once she had confirmed that I could remember nothing of what had really happened in that hotel suite, she set about the surprisingly straightforward task of implanting some recollections of her own making. It’s alarmingly easy to do that, especially for one trained and practised in all forms of perverse psychology. Artful questions, suggesting and recalling things that never happened, yet became real each time the newly implanted, imagined experiences were accessed and reviewed. The whole gig with my double-X-chromosomed tormentors was authored into what I thought was my memory by Yvonne.

In what I now recognise as a further notch on the guillotine blade’s upward ratchet, Yvonne directed me to read Elizabeth Loftus’ The Myth of Repressed Memory. I lapped up every word, marvelling at the experimental outcomes, student volunteers by the score describing fine details of experiences they never had; false memories implanted by Loftus and her team as part of their research. I was unaware that I was reading a commentary on what Yvonne was in the process of doing to me.

Standing here, the scent of the carpet and the room’s grand ambience jerking me back a decade, I have replayed the true events of that night like a YouTube video. There was no ordeal of humiliation by a trio of vengeful feminists. The fact is, Harry, Andy and I subjected Yvonne - that same, damaged woman who has for ten years been my therapist - to a night of every kind of physical degradation that a team of cowardly, over-privileged overgrown boy-brats could conceivably inflict upon a bound and gagged victim.

We tied her to the bedstead by her hair.

As the triple rape went on, her spine must have been over-stressed at the C4 vertebra and, by the end of it, she was a quadriplegic, paralysed from the neck down. When it was over, we laughed as we realised she couldn’t move any of her limbs. We used wet hotel towels to wipe the forensics evidence from her. We knew that police investigators had ways to lift fingerprints, and DNA, from her skin. We left them nothing to find. She couldn’t move, so she couldn’t stop us. We left her there and we made our escape. Andy was the one who called 999; just as well he had a backup burner phone for such emergencies.

I couldn’t resist following the press stuff. Harry and Andy had covered their tracks well when they booked the room so they never traced us. ‘WOMAN FOUND PARALYSED IN HOTEL ROOM AFTER BRUTAL ATTACK’, the headlines went. ‘The unnamed female victim was grievously injured at the hands of her attackers, and lost all power of movement below the neck. The search continues for the perpetrators. Contact police on the number below if you have information.’

Hence the blanket, that had covered her shoulders and everything below, throughout all those sessions when I had never once recognised her. The blanket hid the arms that we had rendered useless, her immobile, strengthless legs, and her powered wheelchair.

The worst thing is that I didn’t remember her face. I didn’t remember her face because, at the time, she has been less than nothing to me. None of us saw our victim as a human being at all. She simply didn’t matter to us, so she had no face.

It is game, set and match to Yvonne. For ten years, she has softened me, to sharpen the deadliness of the blow that was always her right to inflict. She has laid and enacted her plan, and I cannot deny her inalienable entitlement to do so.

I took away her living, lithe, future-enabled body. She convinced me of my non-existent virtue, then dashed me down onto the rocks of revealed truth. The hotel suite is on the twelfth floor. The window stands open, the night air fresh and inviting.

Now I am gone, and she is Queen Supreme.