Resistance, page 1
About the Book
As a family therapist, Nina is the ultimate listener. Yet this is of little use with her latest clients, the Agostinos, who have been mandated to see her after stealing a car and disappearing into the outback.
For support with the case, Nina meets with a supervising therapist, Erin. What they unearth in their sessions goes beyond the Agostino story into confronting personal territory for Nina. Meanwhile, despite her efforts, the Agostinos remain unwilling to speak—so how can Nina be sure that the two children are safe with their parents?
In the tradition of Rachel Cusk’s Outline trilogy, Resistance is an elegant, hypnotic novel of stories within stories. Examining the unfathomable mysteries within our families, it also questions how we retell our history, both personal and collective.
Contents
COVER PAGE
ABOUT THE BOOK
TITLE PAGE
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
COPYRIGHT PAGE
Our lives are written for us at an early age. She’s the sporty one, he’s a dreamer, he’s an extrovert, she’s a perfectionist: such epitaphs are doled out, not for our gravestones but as a guiding light for our lives. We are summed up and made knowable, for to be otherwise is too uncomfortable. We see ourselves reflected in our parents’ eyes, and that image becomes our rudimentary skeleton, to be fleshed out and made solid by the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. There are stories that fortify the ones our parents told us, and to these we attribute weight and meaning. Other stories slip past us like shadows, stories that may offer alternative explanations and other ways of being; we let these pass, feeling their breath on the back of our necks but barely turning our heads to look. So much to pay attention to in this life, and our capacity to see and hear and understand is finite: we have to be selective. We might miss the bird in the tree in order to notice the lioness in the bushes. The lioness signals danger but how do we know that if we haven’t already felt her claws on our skin? That which gets our attention is that which we already believe to be true. How then can we ever step outside our experience?
1.
Nalini stood in the doorway. ‘Do you have a minute?’ she asked. She’d booked a new family to see me next Monday. The family were being mandated for therapy, she told me, tapping her index finger against the file she held to her chest. ‘You might have seen the media coverage, some weeks back. The family who went missing from their farm, and ended up being found in the outback?’
I said that as far as I could remember I hadn’t seen or heard anything about them. She nodded thoughtfully. ‘That’s right. You don’t watch much TV. You’ve mentioned that before.’
That wasn’t so much the reason, I told her. I usually read the news online but I’d been having a break from social media and news for the past few months. I had a lot more time on my hands, I said. Not just time, but space, too; a kind of mental spaciousness. It suited me, at least for the moment. ‘That’s good to hear,’ Nalini said, smiling kindly from the doorway.
I asked her to come in and take a seat. ‘It’s a strange tale, what I know of it.’ I presumed she was talking about the family. ‘No-one’s yet got to the bottom of it,’ she added, after she’d settled herself in the chair opposite mine. She placed the folder on the desk and kept her hand resting upon it, as if it might at any moment fly away. ‘I’ve only just put down the phone to the court social worker. The parents were quite hostile—her words—and the children subdued.’ The social worker had written comprehensive notes, Nalini said, and the file contained the police reports and the court transcript, should I care to wade through it. Nevertheless, she thought she should give me a quick verbal handover.
‘I’m aware,’ she said, looking hard at me, ‘that what I’m about to tell you isn’t the real story.’ No matter how well intentioned she might be, Nalini continued, this handover would amount to no more than a series of observations from people external to the family, observations arranged chronologically to take on the appearance of a coherent narrative. ‘Events will have taken place that we have no knowledge of—not yet, anyway,’ she said in a low voice, the file still trapped beneath her palm. ‘But who knows? Maybe time will tell.’ There would be context and circumstances that, once uncovered, would change the story entirely. What we now thought of as cause might become effect, Nalini said.
She knew this happened all the time in our work. The first phone call to our service oriented us only in the general direction of the family, and it might take several meetings before the problem that brought them to us was fleshed out and made multidimensional. Even then she sometimes felt that her appreciation of the family’s problem was artificially constructed, a neatly packaged object, existing only in the therapy room. Once the family piled out of their car and pushed open the front door of their house, the problem again came to life, shifting and pulsing and insinuating itself again into each corner of every room, and into each of them too, darker and more amorphous than the entity that she and they had so optimistically discussed in therapy.
I’d heard Nalini talk this way before in team supervision meetings but this time it seemed her words were weighted with extra meaning. The expression on her face was different, clouded where once it was bright, and there was a new slackness to the skin of her cheeks and jawline. I asked after her wellbeing, and she shook her head in response. ‘It’s my youngest,’ she said. ‘He’s so different from the other two.’ She sighed, but briefly, as if no more than a modicum of self-pity was permissible. There was a lot of lip service given to difference, she said, but as a parent you’d sometimes rather your children slipped under the radar by virtue of a spectacular ability to conform.
This morning had been particularly difficult, Nalini continued, crossing her legs and wrapping her arms around her knees. It was the day of the annual Book Week costume parade, and her eight-year-old son had planned to dress as a character from a fantasy series of which he was enamoured. ‘As you might have guessed,’ Nalini continued, ‘my son didn’t see any obstacles to dressing as a six-limbed creature covered with horns: that was what he wanted and that was what he’d get. He had me and my sewing machine, so what could possibly stand in his way?’ In his defence, Nalini added, he offered to make the papier-mâché horns, but after several attempts at moulding thorny shapes from soggy, friable paper, he lost his temper and threw a wad of the stuff at the family-room wall. ‘Just newspaper, flour and water,’ Nalini said, ‘but boy, does it stick. You could wreak a lot of havoc with papier mâché if you were so inclined.’
She’d finished the costume last night at eleven o’clock. All week her son had trailed behind her with his book open to the illustration of his chosen creature, so that she now knew every line of that drawing by heart. It must be a wonderful thing, Nalini said, for writers and artists to invent a character through words and pictures, in some ways just two-dimensional marks on a page, and later to discover, when they’re swamped with adoring, fanatical children at a book festival or school, how large and bright their creations live for their readers.
She shook her head. ‘I’m rambling,’ she said. Was she keeping me from something? I had some emails to answer and some calls to make, I replied, but that didn’t mean she had to leave straight away. Perhaps, she said, if she could quickly finish the story of the costume? She felt she needed to get it off her chest. Of course, I said. She settled back in the chair and exhaled.
To begin with, Nalini said, she ran up a simple garment to cover the torso, using a piece of marbled blue and green silk crepe de chine from her fabric collection. Collecting remnants of discontinued fabrics was a hobby of hers: you could pick up the most exquisite things for a song. She’d once thought she might become a costumier in a theatre, back in the days before she had a grip on reality.
To the crepe sheath she hand-tacked the paper horns, which, rather than painting with silver paint, she encased in a silver fabric so she could attach them securely with needle and thread. The two extra limbs were made from cut-off pantyhose stuffed with tissue paper and stiffened with picture wire. The day before she’d found, in the bottom of her sock drawer, a pair of paisley-patterned blue and green pantyhose she’d held on to from the nineties, long before she’d ever thought of having children. The blue and green of these pantyhose were uncannily similar in hue to that of the silk sheath. It was, she said, as if she’d been storing things away—small pieces of her own idiosyncratic connection to the world—knowing, if one wanted to put a Jungian spin on it, that at some point in her later life she’d unearth those remnants of her past and fashion them into a costume that would be a faithful representation of a picture in her son’s favourite book.
I told her I thought it generous of her to have cut into those pantyhose, which I envisaged as a memento of her youth and perhaps a reminder of her costumier ambitions, rather than something she’d saved only to sacrifice for her children.
Nalini nodded, considering this. There was a moment of hesitation, she said, but if she’d learned anything by having children, it was that giving brought her more happiness than anything else in life. She meant giving in an altruistic rather than a materialistic sense: reading that extra story at bedtime when a part of her was yearning to escape; and letting her children play with things she treasured, knowing that in the process those things might
As she’d expected, her son was outside her bedroom door at half past six this morning. ‘He was desperate to see his costume, which I’d hidden away in a cupboard in case he got to it before I did and damaged it in his excitement. You should have heard his shout of joy when he saw it! Of course, he wanted to wear it then and there, but I persuaded him to eat a bit of breakfast beforehand. I hung the costume on the pantry door and his eyes didn’t leave it once as he ate his cereal. Not once.’ Nalini’s eyes welled with tears. ‘He has a singularity of focus that continues to amaze me.’ She fell silent for a while. I asked her to go on. She wiped her eyes and cleared her throat.
By then the older of her two daughters was up, Nalini continued in a more resolute voice. Her daughter helped to keep her son still while Nalini manoeuvred his arms and legs through the costume and zipped him up. She was careful not to dislodge the horns, which looked incredible, Nalini said, glancing at me with contained pride. The three of them then stood in front of the hallway mirror, her son twisting and turning to see the costume from every angle while she adjusted the wire on his pantyhose limbs.
Her husband and their younger daughter soon after emerged from their respective bedrooms and there they all stood, her son in the centre and the four of them around him, admiring the costume, and all equally amused by her son’s complete and utter absorption in the experience of dressing up. ‘I regret now, very much, that I didn’t take photos then and there,’ Nalini said. She’d planned to do so when he was fully made up with face paint and the antennae that her younger daughter had made from ping-pong balls and wire, but the moment never eventuated. Those few minutes in the hallway, Nalini said sadly, were, in retrospect, the best of the whole costume saga, from its inception weeks ago right through to this impromptu dress rehearsal. They were the calm before the storm.
She shook her head in what appeared to be weary disbelief. ‘It seems ridiculous to be telling you all this. In some ways it was just a typical family scenario, the tantrum of a hot-headed child.’ I replied that she felt what she felt for a reason, and that her considerable experience as a parent was telling her that this episode was more significant than most.
‘It’s hard to know if it stands out on its own,’ Nalini said flatly, ‘or if it was the straw that broke the camel’s back.’
Feet, she exclaimed, pointing to her own. Her son had assumed she’d studied the creature’s feet in the illustration. Well, she hadn’t. She’d expected him to go to school in his runners. Her son had expected huge green feet with curling toes. In short, he’d expected too much. That was it, in essence: his expectations were unrealistic and his temper was bad. At Nalini’s mention of runners, perhaps tied with green or blue laces if she could find some, he’d fallen to his knees and bowed his head in his hands. At first she’d interpreted this as acute disappointment. Of course, she knew that disappointment was a substantial component of her son’s emotional mix. Anger often has its roots in sadness: we all know that, Nalini said, although it was hard for her, even now, to empathise. There he was, on his knees in the hallway, seemingly heartbroken. She leaned over to comfort him but he flinched at her touch. It was as if the physical contact electrified him: all at once he uncurled from the floor, threw his arms in the air and arched his back. His face was distorted in a grimace; his teeth were bared. A guttural groan emanated from deep inside his body, at first low and anguished, then rising steeply in pitch and volume. It was like the high-speed spin cycle in a washing machine, Nalini said, a fury of noise and vibration. And in that fury, before any one of them knew what was happening, he grabbed at one of his pantyhose limbs and ripped it away from the garment so that it hung by a few threads, drooping by his side. ‘For a moment the rest of us stood utterly still. I remember asking myself, how did this happen? Perhaps I said it aloud.’ Nalini looked at me blankly. ‘How could it be that we were a happy united family at one moment, and in chaos the next?
‘My husband was the first to act. He picked up our son and carried him, kicking and screaming, down the hallway towards the stairs, where the torn pantyhose limb caught on the end of the banister and pulled away completely. I cried out, as if in pain, but my husband didn’t break stride.’
At the threshold to the bedroom, as if through a pane of thick glass, she watched as her husband somehow extricated himself from the writhing, five-limbed body of their son and dropped him onto the bed. Dropped, Nalini repeated. Not placed. It was not from a great height, she said, but it seemed that her son took a long time to fall so that she half-expected him to flip his body in mid-air and fall on all fours like a cat. Before she could see how her son had landed, her husband sprinted across the room and closed the door behind him. He held it shut, his face grim and flushed with effort, and together they stood in silence while their son raged on the other side. They heard the springs of the bed squeaking plaintively then the furious thumping of their son’s fists on the door. As she watched her husband’s straining back and his hands clamped to the door handle, she felt as if she were waiting for something, though for what she couldn’t say. Her daughters had climbed the stairs and now stood on the landing. The younger one was crying softly while the older girl stood rigid, her arms crossed against her chest.
He should go to school without his costume, her husband said between gritted teeth. He needs to learn a lesson.
There’s something wrong with him, her older daughter said. You’re too soft on him.
‘She was looking at me as she spoke,’ Nalini said. Her husband, too, turned from his vigil at the door to glance at her, while their younger daughter’s eyes remained downcast as her sobbing continued. ‘I wondered about the way my daughter had expressed her opinions. Was the second statement meant to be an explanation for the first? I felt it deeply, the judgment of my older daughter and my husband, aligned in that moment.’ She sighed. ‘I’ve always thought the two of them are so alike.’ The thing about judgment, she went on, is that it’s dealt from a position of superiority. Think of a judge at her court bench, looking down on a defendant—literally, and probably figuratively, too—and taking it upon herself to decide the degree of culpability, the nature of punishment. She sometimes wondered how judges slept at night. But, of course, we did it all the time in our day-to-day lives, offering unsolicited opinions about those who were close to us, and even those of whom we had no real understanding at all. It was hurtful to be judged, Nalini said. It put us on the defensive, it isolated and shamed us. No wonder we tried very hard to avoid it here, in our work. Nalini paused, and her expression brightened. Yet even as she smarted from her older daughter’s words, she was comforted by her younger daughter’s refusal to join with her father and sister, a refusal she quickly interpreted as an alliance with her. ‘It was as if, in that instant, my family had split down the middle, two on each side, while my son stood alone somewhere else. We were fractured,’ Nalini said. ‘How quickly it can happen.’
How long did they stand there? Long enough for her son to wear himself out, Nalini continued. At some point the door ceased rattling in its frame, and a heavy silence descended on the house, as if an earth tremor had just subsided and they were waiting for a signal to come out from their hiding places. Her husband lifted his hands from the doorknob and shook out his wrists. Their son’s meltdown had taken its toll on him, too, but it was hard to empathise with him this morning, given her wounded state. She called out to her son through the closed door, and it opened slowly, as if of its own accord. He stood in the centre of his room, all the fight gone from him, still dressed in his costume, the papier-mâché horns dented and ripped from the sheath. See what you’ve done, she said to her son, her voice full of anger. You’ve ruined it. Nalini glanced at me with a guilty expression. What she meant was that he had trashed all her hard work, she said. He’d ruined the morning for all of them. And she thought again of the alliances that might have been set up between them now, alliances that might be difficult to dismantle. Nalini shook her head. If every behaviour was a communication, what was her son trying to communicate?
