Page 11 of The Beach Holiday

NOW

‘Are you sleeping?’ Dr Bhaduri asks.

I shrug. ‘I do and I don’t. Depends if I’m tired.’

He nods and writes something on his notepad.

I have an urge to lean forward and look.

I wonder if this is normal. I wonder if I am normal.

I wouldn’t be here now, sitting in a room with too much mahogany furniture and the stench of lily of the valley overstimulating my senses if there wasn’t a word for what I was now.

I scan the room for one of those triangle plastic containers with the slits in them and the sickly yellow gel in the middle.

My eyes fall upon the offensive object, expelling the scent on a shelf in the corner of the room.

I was sure it wasn’t there last week. Smells are our biggest memory evoker; that I know for sure.

I was sure this smell of lily of the valley was bringing with it images of an auntie.

Maybe a grandma. I couldn’t quite catch the memory; it came close and then seemed to disappear into nothing.

‘So sleeping is not too much of a problem,’ Dr Bhaduri asks again, and I suddenly wonder if I’d answered wrong, if I should have said I wasn’t sleeping at all.

Was that the response he was looking for?

Would that tick some boxes on their little forms?

Of course, there was the dream, the recurring nightmare.

But it wasn’t as often as it had been, and I would always wake at a reasonable hour in the morning.

He shifts in his seat. I wonder if he is bored of all this.

How many times have I been here now? Three, maybe four times.

Our conversations keep to the same lines of questioning and the same few problem-building skills to give me the tools I will need to deal with what has happened to me.

But that would only work when I knew what had happened surely?

And they are trying to enter my subconscious and find out what happened leading up to the day I was found floating in the South Pacific Ocean.

It’s all in my notes. I am retold the same story at the beginning of every session.

I knew there was more I needed to say, more I should be doing to help myself.

Then I wouldn’t need to be here, wasting all this money; wasting all this time.

Dr Bhaduri’s time. He looks as though he has a lovely wife at home who cooks him a delicious meal every night and irons those pristine white shirts he wears every day.

My body does an involuntary jolt, a side effect of not sleeping properly, never knowing if I am in a dream or fully awake.

‘Are you okay?’ he asks.

I nod. ‘Fine.’

But I can’t look at him; I need to look away for a few moments. I find a mark that looks like a scuff or a burn on the carpet and focus on that.

What will happen if I just come here each week and nothing changes? Was I then to be certified completely mad?

‘And any flashbacks, sudden memories, or images?’

I think of the pile of paper stuffed in my wardrobe with the scribbles on them. The images flash in front of my eyes like a film reel. I must have been quiet for too long because Dr Bhaduri speaks.

‘Sadie? Any flashbacks?’

How could I tell him what was on the paper, what I had drawn, what had come from my memory?

I think about what might happen if I talk about those things I drew, that I still draw like a woman possessed who can’t get them out of her head.

I imagine explaining that I have been drawing pictures of the things that haunt my dreams. That will open Dr Bhaduri’s eyes to something new. He will probably stop looking bored and uncross his legs, maybe lean forward, and say something like tell me more.

It intrigues me how such a thing can change everything in an instant. But I cannot find the words to explain it. So I shake my head.

‘No. Nothing.’

Dr Bhaduri knows we have barely scratched the surface. He knows there is so much more to explore and that it will come out eventually.

I wonder how much time I have left.