Into the Darklands (3 page)

The psychodramas started just after lunch on Saturday. By then the group was very different to the one that had started the weekend. Things were happening inside them; well, most of them. Things were certainly happening inside me.

‘We’re going to move on now,’ Tom said. ‘We’re going to move into something much deeper. It’s going to be hard for some of you, very hard, but it’s good that we do this work. It’s important.’

Jesus,
I remember thinking,
how much harder can it get?

During the morning each man had drawn a life-sized outline of one his victims and written inside the outline in the first person how they thought the victim had felt. Then each man had to get up in front of the group and kneel down holding the drawing in front of them. The group leaders took it in turns interviewing each man as if they were talking to the child. It was simple and very powerful, as this excerpt from my evaluation field notes at the time conveys:

This is bloody awful. Each man stands up and reads out his account of how he thinks his victim has been affected. They’re just drawings but each drawing represents a real person who lived through this stuff and still lives with this stuff. When I’ve finished writing this thesis and it sits on
some shelf gathering dust they will still be living with this stuff. After each man is finished he sticks his drawing up on the wall. They watch us, these paper children stuck up on the wall. It’s like a bizarre form of crucifixion. I just feel like grabbing them and shaking them and saying don’t you dare do this again!!! Don’t you dare do this again!!!

How much worse could it get? Plenty as it turned out.

‘So you need to be supporting each other,’ Tom continued. ‘You need to help each other through the rest of the work that we’ll be doing.’

‘What is it?’ one of the men interrupted, with mock concern that didn’t quite cover the real worry underneath.

‘We’re going to do something called psychodrama, which is kind of like a role-play. We’re giving you the chance to step into your victim’s shoes and imagine what it would be like to be them, to feel how they feel.’

‘I’m not good at role-plays,’ the same man chipped in again. Gordon, in his sixties, was here for molesting both his daughters and his granddaughters.

‘You don’t have to be good at it,’ Tom said. ‘You just have to let yourself participate in this as fully as you can. That’s going to be hard for some of you…’ He paused, letting the moment draw out. ‘Because this is going to hurt. It’s going to be really painful. You might feel things you’ve never felt before.’

In that moment I had no doubt at all that would be the case. It’s hard to convey here the finesse Tom used in his warm-up. He modulated his tone, volume and pace like a master violinist, slowly building an expectation that something really big was about to happen. Some heavy shit was coming and I remember feeling a little scared, even as an observer.

‘Who’s first?’ Tom asked.

The stillness was so intense you could almost hear hearts creaking as they strained not to beat.

Thank Christ I don’t have to do this,
I thought.

‘Robert, how about you?’

And everyone turned to look.

Robert was 40-something, self-employed, and had recently been charged with the repeated sexual violation of his 12-year-old stepdaughter over a period of several years. He looked like a nice guy, he talked like a nice guy, and in many ways he was. He was far too nice. He was polite to everyone, and said all the right things; he just didn’t seem to feel anything.

I was feeling pretty bloody ragged by that stage, as if someone had taken a wire brush to my emotions. Robert, on the other hand, simply sat there as if he was handling the whole thing.

If I wasn’t handling it, and I was just the observer, how the hell was he handling it so well? How come he wasn’t screaming on the floor?

Back then, I don’t think I really understood anything.

Imagine this: a massive earthen dam holding back a vast reservoir of shit, the stinking remains of years of poison. It’s a very old dam and great cracks thread across it like lines across skin. Nothing lasts forever; all things fail in the end. Especially the things we build for ourselves to hold back the truth.

Standing in front of this failing structure is a man, tiny against the backdrop. He stands at its base, facing away, his feet in the fluid seeping from the dam. He looks down and sees the little stream is flowing over the top of his shoes, staining the leather. His nose wrinkles at the stink.

Behind him the great wall creaks and groans, moving imperceptibly closer. All it would take is a single touch. If he were
to lean out and lay a single finger on the surface of that dam the precarious balance would be destroyed. Then it would all give way, sweeping him off into the darkness.

So he doesn’t move. He doesn’t breathe.

But he watches the flow of putrid water over his shoes slowly increase, and knows, even though he doesn’t want to admit it: soon.

‘Why don’t
you
come on out, Robert?’ Tom asked.

So there we all are, on a Saturday afternoon in the middle of suburbia, and Robert just gets up and moves out the front of the group. And behind him the great earthen wall moans at the sudden shift.

As he sat down on the chair next to Tom it felt as if all the heat bled from the room. Outside the sun was shining, I could hear lawnmowers off in the distance, but inside was all that mattered. The world became smaller.

Whatever it is,
I thought to myself,
it’s coming.

‘Why do you think I chose you?’ Tom asked, and Robert shrugs. ‘There’s a reason. What do you think it might be?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Have a guess.’

‘I don’t know,’ Robert repeats.

Silence.

‘I chose you because I think you’re really ready to do this. I think you really want to do this.’

Robert shrugged. ‘I feel pretty nervous.’

‘I know,’ says Tom, nodding. ‘But you need to know that I’m here to help you, and I’m going to look after you. It’s going to be painful, and difficult, but I’m going to look after you.’

I remember having two thoughts at that exact moment: the first was that I really believed what Tom was saying, that he was
going to look after Robert, and the second was wondering why Tom was being so nice instead of getting straight to the bit where he slammed the man.

Stop playing around and get the bastard,
I thought. Like I keep saying, I was young and pretty stupid then. There was a lot about how people work that I still had to learn.

The strength of my reaction was understandable in many ways. I’d listened the night before as Robert described going into his stepdaughter’s room, pulling back the sheets and raping her. A little girl, only 12. He’d held her down by the wrists as he did it. He said he had to stop because she was ‘yelling and crying too much’ and so he’d masturbated until he ejaculated on her instead. Then he wiped her down with a towel, told her he loved her and went back to bed. He said that after he left he heard her get up and take a shower. Andy had asked him if he’d ever thought how she was feeling as she stood in the shower, trying to make herself clean.

He’d looked puzzled, almost shocked. ‘No.’

So, yes, I wanted Tom to slam him.

They chatted for a while, and I missed the great majority of what Tom was doing. What looked like a casual chat to my untrained eye was a very skilfully done warm-up. Piece by piece Tom was laying the foundation for the work to come. He was establishing a relationship with Robert, and laying down some gentle suggestions of what was to come.

By the time they stood up the game was three-quarters done and I still didn’t think they’d even started.

‘Choose someone to be your father,’ said Tom.

One by one they laid out the people in Robert’s life. He used other group members as auxiliaries, playing the various roles. Tom had him speak to each one and then ‘reverse roles’ by stepping into the place of the person he was addressing, such as his father, while
the other person repeated back what he’d just said. Robert then got to respond as if he were his father answering the question. In this way Robert got to have conversations with people as if they were really there. I was amazed at how quickly it began to feel real, how quickly it stopped being a role-play and started becoming a real-play.

To make it easier to follow I’m just going to recount the dialogue here without the repetition of each role reversal. Imagine that each person is Robert speaking in the particular role. The dialogue and physical reactions are all his own as he steps physically and emotionally backwards and forwards into the other person’s shoes, becoming at various times his father, his victim, himself.

‘Say what you say to your dad,’ Tom directed Robert.

‘Hi, Dad,’ Robert said self-consciously.

‘Reverse roles,’ said Tom, and Robert dutifully stepped into the role of his father. I saw a stony man looking back at his son with something like disgust.

‘You’ve got nothing to say to your son?’ Tom asked him.

The old man shook his head, so staunch you could almost hear stone grinding over stone as he moved. ‘No.’

‘Is this what he’s like?’ Tom asks Robert. ‘Has he always been this way?’

Robert nods, and his eyes are red. ‘He’s a hard old bastard. Always has been.’

‘Tell him that,’ said Tom.

Robert is silent for a moment, as if saying this to his father would be too much. ‘You’re a hard bastard,’ he finally says, so quiet it’s almost a whisper.

‘Louder,’ said Tom.

‘You’re a hard bastard.’

‘Louder.’

‘You’re
a hard bastard.’

In the quiet of the room the noise is deafening. Robert’s eyes were glazed over now, he was somewhere else, not here. He was in some other place where sons go to face down their long-dead fathers. Surplus reality, the psychodramatists call it. The Darklands by any other name.

‘This man treated you cruelly, didn’t he?’ Tom asked, his voice very quiet.

Robert nodded, not breaking eye contact with his father.

‘Tell him what he did to you.’

Again the pause but this time it didn’t feel like fear. This time it felt like a great angry wave gathering speed and size as it sweeps towards land.

‘You beat me,’ Robert hissed. ‘You beat me for
fucking years.’

‘Reply to your son,’ Tom instructed the father.

The old man spoke like each word was a little piece of iron spit. ‘He deserved it.’

‘Did you?’ Tom asked Robert.

Robert shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Tell him.’

‘I didn’t deserve what you did to me. I was just a kid, for fuck’s sake.’

His father scoffed. ‘You were a little shit. I was just teaching you right from wrong.’

‘When I was nine you beat me with a piece of hose so bad I couldn’t walk for three days. The neighbours heard my screaming and called the cops and you put me in the bath to wash off the blood.’

Robert’s voice was shaking now, fat wet tears squeezed from his eyes. He blinked as if trying to stop them, but there was no holding this back. No way.

‘I was just a fucking kid,’
Robert screamed.
‘Why did you do that to me? Why?’

His father looked back at him impassively. ‘I had no choice.’

‘Choose someone to be you when you were nine,’ said Tom.

Robert didn’t even pause, picking one of the group and placing him beside his father. Robert at nine cowered, unable to look up.

‘What was that like?’ Tom asked the boy, his voice suddenly gentle as he spoke to this poor little kid. ‘What was it like for you being treated that way?’

For the longest time there was nothing. Little Robert simply stood there shaking, tears dripping down his face.

‘Tell him what it was like,’ Tom gently prompted. ‘He needs to hear this.’

‘I was so scared,’ little Robert moaned, his voice twisted in pain. ‘I was so scared. I didn’t know what I’d done. Why me? Why did you hurt me?
Why?’

Robert stood there, shaking, watching the terrified little boy.

‘Choose someone to be your victim,’ Tom said, quietly, but there was an edge in his voice, an urgency. Endgame.

Robert looked around the room. His eyes seemed to have trouble focusing, as if he’d been looking at some faraway place the whole time. ‘Nigel,’ he finally said, pointing at me.

My stomach dropped.

I knelt down before him on the floor, assuming the role of his victim.

‘Tell her what you did to her,’ Tom said.

Robert took a long shaking breath. ‘I raped you. I came into your room night after night and…and I raped you.’ He shuddered and tried to look away. ‘I can’t…’ he started to say. ‘I can’t do this…’

‘Yes you can,’ said Tom, compassionate but firm. ‘This is your work, no one else’s. Ask her how she felt.’

‘How…how did you feel?’

Then we reversed roles and I repeated back what he’d just said as if I was him. I tried to sound as cruel as I could. It wasn’t hard.

Tom knelt down. ‘What was that like?’ he asked Robert in the role of the little girl. ‘Tell him. Tell him what it was like being raped by your stepfather, having him hurt you night after night after night.’

Robert, kneeling in the role of his victim, rocked slowly back and forward, making small mewling sounds. Not words, just tiny awful noises.

Then Tom got him to reverse roles again so that Robert was standing as himself looking down at me in the role of his victim. ‘Pick up the role,’ Tom whispered in my ear.

I closed my eyes and imagined I was that girl, that I was 12 years old and he’d done these terrible things to me. It felt too important to do anything else. You couldn’t fake this stuff; even back then I knew that.

‘Stop it,’
I whispered.
‘Stop it, stop it, stop it…’

Over and over, letting it tumble out of me. As I was kneeling down I’d told myself to be careful, that this wasn’t me, that this wasn’t my life, it was just a game. Look after yourself, I chided. But that went out the window as soon as I knelt down and started to speak. I wasn’t important any more. All that mattered was that poor little girl, and I tried to lose myself in her.