The People Who Paid

Theo walked into the community centre’s hall, its bright, fluorescent lights as unforgiving as the bank statements he’d spent months avoiding. He wondered why these sessions were not conducted in some place a little more private, a little less intimidating. Now he understood why – the bright lights left no escape space, nowhere to hide. In here, you were as exposed as you could be.

There were already a couple of people waiting, sitting on bean bags arranged in a circle in the middle of the huge hall. An interesting choice of furniture, Theo thought, as he chose a round, navy blue one that looked like it could promise some comfort. He sank into it and the bean bag enveloped him like a cradle. This wasn’t so bad.

The clock said 7.55 p.m. Theo was five minutes early. He thought it might be a good idea to come in slightly earlier and get himself comfortable with being in this space, with even the idea of being here. That was the first step - that he acknowledged he needed help. At least, let’s start here first.

Two minutes later, a tall, bespectacled man who looked to be in his late fifties walked in. He had a kind face, the type that seems sincere and reassuring to people.

“I see we have a couple of new faces today,” he said, smiling at Theo and the gentleman sitting at Theo's two o’clock. “Let’s give it another couple of minutes, there are some regulars who need a little more time getting here.”

This man moved with a sense of confidence and fluidity, like he owned the space. He must be the facilitator. Theo thought that one day when he grew up he wanted to be like this man too. Being in his own skin so confidently, as if nothing in the world bothered him.

“I’m Simon, by the way. I’m not sure if there are other new people coming, but I don’t think so, so I’m just going to do a bit of self-introduction while waiting. I'm a recovered financial avoidant. Ten years solvent. I started facilitating here at Debt, Secrecy and Recovery Program or as we like to call it, DSR. The acronym makes us feel a little less ashamed and a little more like we’re a part of something cool,” Simon chuckled to himself.

Theo smiled, despite himself. Coming here could really be the right decision after all.

A few more people had trickled in and Simon had acknowledged them with a nod and a smile. The circle was full now with seven people, including Theo.

“How about a quick introduction?” Simon looked in Theo’s direction.

“Uh, my name is, uh, Theo,” he said hesitantly.

“Welcome, Theo,” Simon said warmly.

“Welcome, Theo,” the rest of the five echoed.

Simon nodded at the other gentleman, gently smiling, “And you?”

“Hi, I’m Gabriel. I’m a financial avoidant. No one knows that my bank account has only two digits. Well, now you all do,” Gabriel said, his voice resigned as he lowered his eyes.

“Welcome, Gabriel,” Simon said, and the rest followed too, including Theo.

“Just to orientate our newcomers. We’re a support group, people who have similar difficulties with money – borrowing, spending, being in debt – and find it difficult to talk to loved ones and friends about our situation. We do adopt a little bit of what people do in AA, but because this is not necessarily an addiction, we do take a slightly different approach. But the main aim is still the same, and that is to be there to support you as you navigate your own situation and eventually become financially debt free. Not everyone here is having issues with money, some of us could be here because of our loved ones who are in the situation and don’t know how to deal with it. It’s helpful to get different perspectives here too. And of course, everything that is said here stays here. You can’t retell any of the personal stories, because they are not yours to share. If you do gain a new insight from someone else’s personal story, let’s process it here instead of with someone outside of the circle,” Simon explained.

Theo realized he had been tensing his shoulders and released them now. He seemed to sink deeper into the bean bag. Maybe he would buy one of these for the home, he thought. Then he thought of Mia. He could have bought one for her home too. He felt another wave of sadness at the thought of Mia. The feelings came and went, came and went through the day. He wondered what she was doing at this moment. He guessed he would never know now.

“Alright, so, I actually wanted to follow up with Tze Wei’s story. I thought we might continue with what we were talking about last week – what did the secrecy protect? Tze Wei was telling us about how he was afraid of letting his parents know. Tze Wei, have you thought more about what you shared?” Simon asked.

A young man who looked to be in his mid-twenties cleared his throat.

“Well, yeah. I spent some sleepless nights thinking about what we discussed last week. I don’t know, obviously I thought this whole not telling them was just to protect my own pride. After all, I just started work about a couple of years ago and you are supposed to be saving money and all that. At least that was what they taught me growing up. But then now I wonder maybe I’m also protecting them from disappointment and heartache,” Tze Wei said, his voice cracking a little at the end.

“Thank you, Tze Wei,” Simon said gently.

“May I share too?”

Simon turned toward him. “Of course, Marcus, please do.”

Marcus looked older than most of them. His hair was greying at the temples, and there were lines etched in his forehead that made him look weary. While most of them had come from work, their attire was casual, mostly in jeans and T-shirts. Marcus was the only one in slightly formal business wear. His shirt sleeves were rolled up neatly to his elbows, and his hair was neatly kept in place with whatever product men like him used to look like they were not falling apart.

“I used to run a small design studio. There were six of us. I kept telling myself I didn’t tell the team because I didn’t want them to panic. There were salaries to pay, client accounts to manage, pitches still happening. I thought if they knew about my situation, they would quit and then I would really have to close the studio. I couldn’t bear to do that. It’s not just my livelihood but I think, my identity too. I don’t actually know who I would be without the studio.”

Theo looked up at Marcus, feeling a slight tightening in his chest. Something in him recognised himself.

Marcus carried on.

“So I tried to protect the business. I thought I was doing everything I could to not lose the studio. At least, that’s what I told myself. I realized last week that maybe I wasn’t protecting the business. I was really just pretending. I think I needed everything to carry on as usual so that maybe one day it would really be okay. But we weren’t winning the pitches, and clients’ budgets were shrinking year on year. It got to a point where I wasn’t even sure I could keep the electricity in the office on. I didn’t tell anyone what I was going through. Not my family, not my partner, not my staff. Felt like it was my own issue to manage and besides, what could they do?”

Theo shifted in the bean bag.

“So then one day, I couldn’t pay the landlord anymore. I had no choice but to shut the office. I told everyone that I was winding up the business. I think they knew what had been going on but I just couldn’t admit it. I made up some lame excuse, gave everyone notice, and vacated the office.”

Simon nodded slowly.

“What were you afraid of if you told them the truth?” he asked.

Marcus shook his head.

“I’m still trying to figure that one out. Maybe like I said, the studio was tied to my identity. So maybe it could sound like failure to them. Maybe I would lose their respect and that means a lot to me. I just didn’t think I could afford to lose it. Maybe they would jump ship and join my closest competitor. But of course, if it were true, then they had every right to. Everyone has the right to choose what’s best for them anyway,” he said.

Theo felt like crawling out of his skin.

Everyone has the right to choose what’s best for them.

Of course Marcus was talking about his ex-staff. And in everything that he had said, Theo felt as if someone was giving him the words to describe exactly how he had felt. But the last statement made him feel like someone had plunged a knife in him.

Theo’s phone vibrated. A new message. He took a quick peek and saw that Astrid had sent him a message.

Kept your dinner in the fridge. I’m heading out for drinks with the ladies, and will be home before 10p.m.. Love you.

Theo’s thumb hovered over the text bubble. Of course he should say thank you and love you too. But his insides were all tangled up. His thoughts went to Mia again.

“Thank you, Marcus,” said the group, which must have echoed after Simon. Theo brought his attention back.

Then Gabriel, who had been quiet since his introduction, raised his hand a little. It was a strange gesture, almost schoolboy-like.

“I don’t know if I can say something,” he said.

“You can say as much or as little as you want,” Simon replied.

Gabriel nodded. He rubbed his palms against his knees, then clasped them together.

“I have a girlfriend,” he said. “We’ve been talking about moving in together.”

Theo glanced at him now.

“She thinks I’m hesitating because of commitment issues.” Gabriel tried to smile. “Which is not untrue, I guess. But it’s also because I have nothing. I mean, really nothing. I’m thirty-two and I have less than a hundred dollars in my account until payday. Sometimes less than fifty. Sometimes I borrow from one bank to pay another bank. Nothing big, just a couple of thousands. Then I delete any evidence of borrowing so that she doesn’t see.”

He was speaking faster now, like he wanted to get to the end before shame could catch up with him.

“I keep telling myself I don’t want to burden her. That’s the phrase I use. I don’t want to burden her. She has her own stress. Her mother is sick. Work is difficult. I don’t want to add to it.”

Theo understood those statements. Not exactly those words, but the shape of them. The nobility of them. The clean feeling of making harm sounds considerate. He could picture Mia now, crying, her eyes swollen red, and accusing him of making excuses. But those weren’t excuses. They were the truth, at least to him.

“But actually,” Gabriel said, voice lowering, “I think I just don’t want her to know that I am not the man she thinks she is moving in with.”

Simon smiled gently at Gabriel.

“Thanks for sharing, Gabriel. How does it feel to be honest with yourself?” Simon asked.

Gabriel shrugged and sighed.

“But I don’t know how to be honest with her. I’m afraid she would choose to leave if she knew,” Gabriel said sadly. “A part of me also thinks not letting her know is a form of protection. But at the end of the day, I recognize it’s not.”

Simon nodded. “Thank you for sharing, Gabriel.”

Theo looked down at his hands. This was supposed to be a support group for people in similar financial situations. Why was it feeling a little different, and why was he getting more and more uncomfortable?

Astrid’s text was still unanswered. He wondered if Astrid was waiting for him to reply. But he knew his wife – Astrid was someone who kept on moving with life.

“I want to ask everyone here, is there one person you can be fully honest with? Someone with whom you can let this secret out so that it’s no longer a secret?” Simon asked.

Mia.

Not Astrid, who knew where he kept his passport, where the spare keys were, which account the utilities came from, what kind of coffee he drank in the morning, how he liked his shirts ironed. Not Astrid, who had stood beside him in all the legitimate parts of life.

Mia.

Mia, who knew the things he could not say at home. Mia, who knew about the panic attacks, the foreclosure letters, the business going under, the lawyer, the shame. Mia, who had seen him in the kind of emotional undressing that felt more intimate than sex. Mia, who did not ask him to be successful. Mia, who only wanted him to be honest.

And still, he had only given her the version of truth that would keep her close. He had made her his refuge, then asked her to wait outside the house and kept her there.

Across the circle, no one spoke for a while. It seemed everyone was thinking of someone. A mother. A husband. A sibling. A friend who had lent money and never asked for it back.

A woman spoke up, softly.

“Can I share, as someone from the other side?” she asked.

Simon nodded. “Please do, Elaine.”

Elaine sat up straight on the bean bag, and unlike Theo, she didn’t want the bean bag to swallow her. She wasn’t finding comfort from the bean bag. She was dressed simply, in a pale blouse and black trousers, her hair tied back in a low ponytail.

“My husband used to say I was the person he could tell everything to,” she began. “And I believed him. I really did. I thought we had a good marriage. Not perfect, but good. We had the usual problems. Work. Money. His parents. My parents. Whether to have children. Whether to move. But I always thought, at the very least, we were facing the same life.”

Elaine gave a small smile.

“Then I found out he had been hiding debt from me for almost three years. Credit cards, loans, money borrowed from friends. It had started small, apparently. Then it became unmanageable. By the time I knew, there was nothing left to discuss. Only things to settle. So I did what wives do, or what I thought wives were supposed to do. I helped. I sat through meetings with him. I called the banks. I redid our household budget. I cancelled things. I sold jewellery. I told myself, this is marriage. This is what it means when you say for better or worse.”

Theo’s shoulders tensed.

Astrid had done that too, in her own way. Not the jewellery. Not the banks, because he had kept most of that away from her. But everything else. She had absorbed the shape of his absence without knowing what it was. When he started the business, she had been the practical one. The stable one. The one who reminded him to eat, who paid first and asked later, who let him come home late and leave early. The one who did not complain when weekends became client meetings and dinners became takeaway eaten over his laptop.

Elaine continued.

“He was very grateful after that. Very sorry. He said all the right things. He said he didn’t know what he would have done without me.”

Elaine sighed.

“And then, not long after we had finally started to breathe again, he told me there was someone else.”

Suddenly, Theo regretted his decision to come to this support group.

“He said he didn’t mean for it to happen. He said she understood him during a very dark time. He said he loved me, but not in the same way anymore. He said he had been trying to protect me from more pain. That was when I understood the debt had not been the whole secret. It was just the first one that became impossible to hide.”

Theo’s mouth went dry.

“I think what broke me was not that he loved someone else,” she said. “I mean, of course that broke me. But that wasn’t the deepest part. The deepest part was realising that while I was helping him survive the consequences of one lie, he was already living inside another.”

Theo felt something in him collapsed.

Astrid had carried the hard things.

Starting the business. The late nights. The bills. His moods. The practical life. The life that needed servicing, repairing, continuing.

Mia had carried the hidden things.

His fear. His grief. His tenderness. His dreams of another self. The person he thought he really was beneath life’s obligations.

The hall was too bright again. The bean bag no longer felt like protection. It felt like something childish, something ridiculous, something that had held him while strangers said aloud the things he had spent years arranging his life not to hear.

He looked at Astrid’s message again.

Then he thought of Mia, who had sent him one long final message two weeks ago and disappeared.

He had always thought the tragedy was that he could not choose without hurting someone. But now, sitting under the unforgiving lights, Theo began to understand something.

He had already chosen. Every day he said nothing to Astrid, he chose this. And because he could not bear to break one heart cleanly, he had learned how to bruise two slowly.