Letters from Yelena (26 page)

He sat down, bringing my thick medical folder onto his lap. Then he looked up at me and, as if thinking better of it, he turned and slipped the folder onto the trolley behind him.

Suddenly I felt it. Bruna was with me again.

‘We only have to do this as much as you want to,’ he said. For a moment I wondered if he was going to take my hand. ‘It’s important that we take the first step towards
fixing this.’ I tried to draw comfort from his eyes.

Bruna moved behind me. Instinctively, I clasped my body, but the room still went cold.

He was whispering now. ‘I can see that whatever happened with your stepmother is very significant, Yelena. Talk to me, and then we can start to fix this.’

He can’t fix anything,
Bruna said. I closed my eyes, and bitterly wished I was anywhere else. I felt my body tighten, and the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.

Tell him, Yelena. Tell him whose fault it is that you are in this position.

‘We can’t fix anything,’ I said.

‘We can,’ he insisted. He leant in. ‘Are you okay?’

I took a deep breath. I wanted to tell him. I thought that would make her voice go away. But I was scared of provoking that horrible, sickening laughter.

And yet I also knew there was only one way to begin.

‘My stepmother,’ I started.

Don’t you even dare,
the voice said.

‘My stepmother used to… ’

‘What?’ His eyes met mine.

I felt very aware of the fact that I had never told anyone, and why I had never felt able to share it with anyone before. It was too big, too confusing. And I couldn’t do it now, not with
her here. I just had to get through the next few moments.

‘Yelena, you must tell me. You can’t keep it to yourself any longer.’

‘My stepmother. She used to… she used to… ’

Don’t you even dare,
she said, the voice growing louder.

I looked up. Ibarra’s eyes, filled with a concern. ‘She used to what?’

‘She used to touch me.’

He bowed his head. ‘Just you?’ he asked, reaching for his pen.

You really are disgusting.

‘My sister as well. My little sister.’ I sounded defiant, even to me.

He started to write. Each scratch of the pen was deafening, yet seemed so futile.

‘Have you ever told anyone about it before?’

You are sick, if you think that happened,
she said.

‘It did happen,’ I snapped. Ibarra looked startled.

‘I have no doubt that it did, Yelena,’ he said.

‘It happened for years.’ I could hear her breathing. ‘No, I’ve not – I’ve never told anyone before. She… she wouldn’t let me.’

‘She wouldn’t let you?’ He asked, his voice a kind mimic of mine.

‘Sometimes… sometimes I can hear her voice. I can hear her laughing.’

He stopped, his eyes interacting with mine, but with a new intensity in them that I had never seen before. ‘Yelena,’ he said. ‘Is she with you now?’

Slowly, trying to block out the breathing, I nodded.

‘Yelena,’ he  continued.  ‘You  must  tell  me.  What  has happened recently, this accident and what led up to it, I’m sure it’s
partly because you’ve never been able to deal with what happened to you as a little girl. Do you understand?’

I nodded.

‘I suspect that she is at the root of all this. Now, I’m afraid, Yelena I need you to tell me everything you can remember. I think you’ve kept this to yourself for a very long
time, and a secret like this can cause real damage. It can make you truly corrode from within. Now, you must allow me to help you. Do you understand?’

You are finished.

‘I don’t think I can,’ I answered.

Of course you can’t.

His eyes fixed on me, with that same intensity. ‘Yelena… can you hear her now?’

Go on,
she said.
Try and tell him.

Slowly, I nodded.

Ibarra exhaled. ‘Good. I think we’re starting to get somewhere.’

‘Please help me,’ I whispered.

‘I am going to help you.’

I felt my voice crack. ‘You’ve got to help me.’

‘She’s not there’ he said, leaning forward. ‘Yelena, it’s just you and me.’

I felt completely unable to move. ‘Are you sure?’

‘I’m absolutely sure.’

I was shivering. But then, as he placed his hand on mine, for a second I felt as though the breathing had stopped.

Through the course of those sessions, watching Ibarra’s pencil dance over sheaves of paper, I gradually realised how much you had already told him about me. I knew that you had told him
about the dinner with Hannah and Elizabeth, the recent changes in my manner, the circumstances leading up to my meeting with Cecilia. But it was my childhood that he kept coming back to, again and
again – the abuse, the self-harming, the voices during
Giselle
and now. He said it would take time, but he was sure I could begin to move on from them.

When your name was mentioned, I became less able to hide how desperate I was to see you. When Ibarra mentioned that you were managing the treatment I was receiving, I felt delighted. Even when
the caveat was that you were still being advised to refrain from visiting me.

‘I understand that your accident occurred at a most difficult moment in your relationship,’ Ibarra said, his eyes narrowing.

‘Have you considered how it might be important for Mr Stepanov to have time to digest what has recently happened as well?’

I wanted to argue with him, to appeal to his sense of humanity. But somehow I sensed it would be futile; I knew he had already decided that for now, the two of us needed to be kept apart. He
said it was in the interests of my welfare, in terms of triggers to psychological episodes. At times I wanted to tear those blessed papers from his hands and rip them into pieces, but over the
course of our sessions together, I felt myself being gently moulded by his words. My worldview began to gradually adjust and something told me not to resist his advice, however counter-intuitive it
might be.

Dr Ibarra gave me company in an intellectual sense, but the moment those sessions ended I inevitably felt very alone. I was gradually brought off the morphine, and that sense of quiet euphoria
gradually disappeared. I was suddenly acutely aware of how uncertain my life had now become. How would I make a living? Would it be possible for us to rekindle our relationship? How would I handle
life in a country that was so new to me? These questions gradually lowered onto me like a heavy curtain, which I began to feel pinned under. It was all too easy to focus upon the next concern
– the pain in my ankle, or the need to make a certain phone call. At times of stress they were poised, ready to overwhelm me. I knew the time would come when I would have to face them.

Erin and Eva came to visit me in the hospital, and although I was glad for their company, I felt oddly unable to open up and share what I was going through. They now felt like characters from
somebody else’s life. It was a life that I knew well in theory; I was well acquainted with its details. But it felt like Erin and Eva were speaking to a Yelena who no longer existed. In her
place was a broken, lost woman – a pale imitation. A person who had to pretend to be something she no longer was, in order to prevent making people feel socially awkward. I was starting to
grieve for my former life.

Erin would concern herself with making sure I was lying comfortably, and then we would sit in a companionable silence, or play cards. Eva felt only able to talk about ballet, and she constantly
reprimanded herself for sharing current experiences that I would perhaps no longer be able to have. Though I was grateful for their company, I felt that an invisible barrier had been created, and I
didn’t know how anyone could break through and reach me.

Sometimes, during the long hours I sat in the dayroom, I would watch when a boyfriend came to visit another woman on the ward. Often I’d turn the music off in my headphones, and close my
eyes and try to listen in on their conversations. Out of the corner of my eye I would try and take in the way the boyfriend reached out and touched her on the arm, or the precise way he leaned
closer to whisper. I’d subtly watch them have a quiet game of cards, during which I knew a smile drawn from her lips represented a significant breakthrough for them both. When the boyfriend
got up to leave, I’d close my eyes, and try to take in the final words he passed on as if they were for me. I imagined it was you craning over me, your fingers easing the hair over my ear,
telling me how much you missed me and that I would get better soon. But when they then stood up I would see exactly how different they were to you, and then I’d feel ridiculous for taking
refuge in my imagination. I’d try to settle back into the silence, torn between wanting another boyfriend to visit the dayroom and hoping the rest of the day would pass, flat and without
sentiment.

Even when I spoke on the phone with Inessa and my father, they too felt like characters from another life; unable to relate to my current circumstances with anything other than feverish
concern.

I thought of you, and desperately wanted to know what you were doing. I listened to the jazz CD that we used to play in your house. But despite these distractions, the nights remained very
difficult. And, with the same sticky, taunting quality they had had just before I met Elizabeth, the dreams started to return.

At first they were only vague, distant affairs that reverberated into my awareness and then drifted away, leaving me alone in the sheets with the scent of something that should have long been
forgotten still clinging to me. I was becoming my own worst enemy, because I wanted to explore those strange dreams further. In having the time to delve deeper into my memories and my fears I
started to give those vague sensations life and strength. At first they were only bloodless and fleeting, but I made them strong and potent.

I began by dreaming about you and Catherine. About the nights that she described in her letters, when she would pull on a tight black dress and the two of you would steal out of the city in a
taxi. As I lay immobile on the bed I felt as if I was a passenger in that taxi watching the two of you kiss, with haunting neon streetlights illuminating you every so often. In those dreams I was
always invisible, but on the nights I did try to interfere I was dumb. When I tried to stop you holding hands you both laughed me off, and you looked embarrassed to see that I was there.

In the nightclubs you went to dance at I would linger around the edge of the bar, and when I looked down on myself I had no body, no reflection in the tiled mirrors that adorned the walls. I was
a ghost, separated from the world around me by a screen I couldn’t break through. Just watching you clasp her shining body against you, watching you find dark corners together, and then,
finally, watching you leave together. I’d be unable to follow as you went into the night, to take a taxi back to one of your bedrooms.

As the nights in the hospital went on, the dreams heightened in intensity. My mind started to rake over the remnants of those letters that had lodged in my memory. It started to recreate, as
accurately as it could, the moments when the two of you were sexually intimate.

As if I had been forced to film it, my mind’s eye followed as Catherine pulled on stockings under your watchful gaze, as she buckled gold heels onto to her slim, elegant feet. It zoomed in
on the moments when, her eyes wide with fear and excitement, she laced up a corset while you lay helpless at her feet. The images whipped around me as your bodies closed, or as you forced her to
submit to your will. My mind would fixate upon the expression of pleasure on your face just as you found what you were looking for. Then I’d suddenly wake, my body covered in cold sweat.

I decided to fight back against my mind. If it was going to taunt me with details, then I decided I was going to overcome those details one by one. By the dim light of the car park, not daring
to turn on bedside lamps and rouse the nurses, I began to list every detail I could remember about the erotic encounters described in her letters. I actually made lists, in handwriting I hoped was
too small for Dr Ibarra to read. ‘Skin-tight corset’ might have been one entry on a list, ‘black ribbons’ perhaps another. And once I had made these lists, which I believed
covered every detail of your sexual history with her, I started to write letters to you. I would tick off every item from the list in the contents of the letters, translating the items into my own
words as I described what I intended to do with you. I tried to write the letters in a lovelorn, affectionate way, making the content gradually narrow to a sharp eroticism at the conclusion of each
letter. At the start I would be genuinely writing to express how much I was missing you, but as I began to incorporate each item the missives became more concerned with these ‘units of
eroticism’. Through them I hoped to match every potent moment Catherine had given you, and then add more, to weld myself more deeply to you than she ever had. But late at night I think the
mind labours for an objectivity it would quickly dismiss in daylight. I would wake the next morning, amongst the sterile light, having dreamt of more erotic detritus, more encounters I had to
match. After a while I was no longer able to tell which items were from her letters, and which were feverish delusions, whipped up by a mind railing against itself. I told myself that if I
couldn’t see you, couldn’t please you in person, then these letters would compensate.

In the cold light of day I never seriously considered sending them to you. It scared me to think what Dr Ibarra would make of them, and what, if they were ever analysed, they would reveal about
me. I recall those letters now only as detritus from a sick mind, products of a trapped brain feeding back on itself. Obsessing on delusions that were neither here nor there.

During those dead, endless nights, the starched sheets and the smell of the hospital became overwhelming; an insipid, muggy smell that seemed to consist of overcooked vegetables and bandages. I
could hear patients in other rooms, snoring and moaning and occasionally crying out in pain. I could hear the city outside. I would lie there and think of the times you had taken me to concerts
down by the river. When you had led me down into the city’s lights, where all the pleasures of the world danced on my face before you. I remember how it felt to have your proud eyes upon me
as we walked home, faintly woozy with wine and music. But the memory would break the instant I caught my reflection in the window across the room. I saw a haunted, gaunt woman staring back at me. I
tried to find within her the beautiful young woman who had walked with you down by the river, who had waited in the wings to perform as Giselle. As I did so, I felt tears well up in my eyes. I
desperately wanted her back. Why could I not reach her? What had I done to lead myself here, to the point where I needed such protection from my own mind? To the point where my body no longer
obeyed the simplest command, when it had once held audiences spellbound.