Butterfly (7 page)

The door opens, and we glance
over at Lisa coming in.

‘You didn’t lock the door?’ Lisa
says. ‘Are we open already? I’m not late, am I?’

Grace blushes. I know she didn’t
lock it because she’s alone with me. It’s her only escape route,
and she doesn’t want to delay getting out by having to unlock it.
From what I’ve seen, she hasn’t told Lisa about what’s happened to
her, and Grace skilfully avoids her question. ‘No, you’re not
late.’

‘I was early,’ I say, so Grace
doesn’t have to explain.

‘Well, you’re keen!’ Lisa laughs
at me. ‘Glad to see you back.’

‘How did the scan go?’ Grace
gives her a hug.

She pats her belly with pride.
‘Fabulous. Great. Wonderful.’

A timer goes off in the kitchen.
‘I’ll get it,’ Lisa says. ‘You carry on and show Ben what to
do.’

The day whizzes by in a hive of
activity. The morning rush moves seamlessly into the lunchtime
rush, before the student rush later in the afternoon. In between
fills with pensioners, mums, and businesspeople working on their
laptops.

When we get a spare minute,
Grace says to me, ‘Oh, by the way the brake lights seem to be
working.’

I frown, completely lost for a
moment. ‘Brake lights?’

‘Yeah, you know, you said you
saw them and they weren’t working.’

‘Oh, yeah! Yeah, the brake
lights.’ I purse my lips. ‘Maybe it was an intermittent thing,
then. I can check the bulbs and wiring for you, if you like.’

‘OK.’

We leave Lisa in the shop and
head round the building to the car park. Grace gets in the car and
taps the brakes as I check them out.

‘No, they seem to be OK,’ I
say.

‘Good.’ She gets out of the car.
‘That’s one less thing to worry about.’

‘Let me just look at the wiring.
Some of it might have come loose.’ I lift up the boot and remove
the plastic casing covering the lights, making a show of checking
everything’s in order.

‘No, that all looks good.’ I
slam the boot back down, and Grace locks the car.

We head back in, and Lisa
disappears for an hour on her break, but it doesn’t give me any
time to chat with Grace. She offers for me to take my break at half
past one but I stay, claiming it’s my first day and I’m keen to get
everything right. But really, I don’t want to leave her there. It’s
obvious she works too hard as it is.

At half past five, Grace shows
me how to clean the machines, and I watch over her shoulder. She’s
standing closer to me than this morning, and I hope she’s grown
more comfortable with me being there.

Lisa turns the open sign to
closed. ‘I can’t believe it’s my last day tomorrow.’ Her mouth
turns down at the edges.

Grace looks up at her with
warmth, and I want her to look at me like that.

‘Me, too.’ Grace pouts, but it
looks cute on her. ‘I might have a surprise for you, though.’

‘Ooh, goody. I love surprises!’
Lisa winks. ‘Don’t forget to lock up after me.’ She waves and shuts
the door.

‘So, how was your first day?’
Grace packs up what’s left of the food under the counter. She
smiles, but it’s forced.

‘Yeah, good, thanks. You’re a
patient teacher.’ I take off my apron and fold it.

‘You were right. You are a quick
learner.’

‘What happens to the food?’

‘I take it to the homeless
shelter.’

‘I’m sure they appreciate
that.’

She shrugs as if it’s nothing.
‘Every little helps, right?’

I lean on the counter and watch
her work. Her movements are deliberate, smooth, like she’s in
control. Only the tiny tremor in her fingers gives her away.

‘Um…’ She puts the box of food
on the counter. She stares down at the floor for a second, as if
trying to build up to something.

‘Are you OK? Did you have
another panic attack?’

She looks up. Nods.

‘Did you do the breathing?’

‘Yes. It was good. I actually
had the best night’s sleep I’ve had in ages.’

‘Good. Glad I could help.’

She glances around the room, her
gaze stopping on the coffee machine to my right.

‘Do you want to talk about
them?’

She finally looks at me then.
‘How does counselling work?’ Her tone is interested but
cautious.

I think about this for a moment.
‘Counselling is a way to help someone heal by thinking and feeling
differently about their situation. It’s a way to create new
memories and new responses that don’t harm you anymore and make you
stronger.’

‘And how do you think
differently?’

‘By talking things out. By doing
exercises that can help people see things in a different way. There
are lots of things you can try.’

‘Does it always work?’

I wish I had a simple answer,
but it’s different for everyone. ‘No,’ I say, honestly. ‘It’s like
anything in life. You have to
want
it to work, and you have
to put a bit of effort in. But the first step is realizing you want
or need help. Asking for help doesn’t mean you’re weak or
worthless. It means you’ve got the courage to recognize you have a
problem that you can’t always fix on your own. People try to run
away from things without dealing with them, which leads to other
problems. And you can’t run away from what’s in your own head.’ I
give her what is hopefully a reassuring smile. ‘But I can promise
you that if you talk, it will help. If you don’t talk, it’s like a
toxic wound festering away inside you that never heals. What you
keep inside continues to hurt you.’

She chews her lower lip as
though she’s weighing up my words. An internal battle of emotions
rages over her face, as if she’s on the edge of a decision and
doesn’t know which way to go.

‘Do you think you need to talk
to a counsellor?’ I ask.

‘Yes,’ she whispers so quietly I
can barely hear it. Then she looks up at me with watery green eyes.
‘Would you be able to help me, because I think I’m going mad?’

It makes me want to slip my arms
round her and hold on tight. I fight the urge by resting my hands
on the counter. ‘You’re not going mad. Something traumatic happened
to you, and you’re trying to deal with it. That’s why you’re having
the panic attacks. It doesn’t make you mad, it makes you
human.’

She bites harder on her lip and
doesn’t meet my gaze. ‘So…um…would you be my counsellor?’

‘It may be a conflict of
interest,’ I say.

She exhales a deep breath. She’s
just taken the courage to ask for help, and she thinks I’ve turned
her down. It’s like a kick in the guts to me, so I quickly add,
‘With me working here, maybe it would be a conflict of interest to
act as your “counsellor”.’ I make quote marks in the air with my
fingers at the word. ‘But I could help you as a friend.’

‘A friend?’ She blinks away the
tears in her eyes and sniffs. ‘Yeah, I could probably do with one
of those, too.’

I want to get her to talk. This
is the first step, and I want to help her. I tell myself it’s
because of my job, because of who I am now, but it’s more than
that. She already feels special to me in a way I can’t understand,
let alone try to describe. I already know I don’t want to be her
counsellor or her friend, but for now, a friend is exactly what
I’ll be.

‘Even if I were to do this as a
friend, I’d still be bound by a code of ethics. Whatever you tell
me will be completely confidential.’ I push away from the counter
and sit at a table in front of it. ‘Maybe if I tell you a bit about
myself and why I became a counsellor, it will make things easier
for you to decide if you want to talk about things with me.’

I hope this will give her the
courage to talk and put her at ease. But it’s the first time I’ve
spoken about it in years and…fuck, maybe I need a counsellor, too.
No, I
know
I do.

And then I tell myself
this
is the reason I qualified for this job.
This
is
the reason I can help.

Her forehead pinches with
confusion.

I inhale a long breath. ‘Just
over five years ago, my sister, Mia, was raped. She didn’t report
it to the police. She didn’t tell anyone at first.’

‘Oh, my God, I’m so sorry.’ Her
hands fly to her cheeks, and her eyes widen.

‘Thank you. I was too busy
training for MMA fights at the time to notice what was going on
with her. I wasn’t at home much because I was going all over the
country competing, and I was doing a plumbing apprenticeship at the
time, too. I was too busy concentrating on my life to recognize
hers had fallen apart.’ I pause to take a deep breath. ‘She stopped
going out. She hardly spoke. She didn’t eat. She was withdrawn and
depressed.’ Guilt and anger swirl around in my stomach, churning my
guts like the ocean in a storm. ‘My parents thought she was on
drugs. She was studying at uni, and they thought she’d fallen in
with the wrong crowd. They were hard on her—having a go at her all
the time, but she didn’t tell them what had happened. She…she
thought it was her fault, as if it was something she’d done or
said. She took the full weight of the blame and the shame, and in
the end she couldn’t cope with it.’

Grace shakes her head, a vacant
look behind her eyes.

‘About six months after it
happened, Mia told me. She didn’t want me to tell our parents,
because she didn’t want them to blame her.’ I run a hand over my
hair. My eyes water, but I keep the tears in check. ‘I didn’t know
what to say or what to do to help her…’ I trail off as all the
memories come crashing back.

‘What happened?’ Grace’s voice
breaks into my thoughts.

I look up at the ceiling. ‘She
killed herself.’

Grace gasps and slaps a hand to
her mouth. ‘I’m so sorry.’

I’m sorry, too, because I
should’ve done something. Anything. I just didn’t know how to at
the time. But now I do know what to do and how to do it. ‘It was
hard to deal with, but the grief of losing her has got easier over
the years.’ I stop, because I can’t tell her the rest of the story.
It’s so messed up she’ll think I’m no better than the bastard who
did this to her. ‘Mia’s the reason I wanted to become a counsellor.
At the moment, as you know, I’m doing the grief counselling and
working with young offenders, but I want to specialize in rape
counselling. I don’t want to see someone else go through the same
thing. So, if I can help you in any way, Grace, please let me.
Whatever you went through, you went through alone. You don’t have
to be alone anymore.’

13

GRACE

I can’t believe what he’s just
said. My heart clenches with pain for him and his sister.

He looks up at me, his gaze
steady. ‘I’ve never told anyone before why Mia killed herself. Even
my parents still don’t know, because she made me promise not to
tell them. I’ve only told you this because it might help you to
talk to someone.’

I want to take away the pain
that’s in his eyes. And I know how crushed and broken he must feel,
because I feel it, too. Every day.

‘You can’t change the past,’ he
says. ‘But you can change what happens in the future. Healing
yourself doesn’t mean the damage never happened. It means the
damage no longer controls your life. You will be OK, Grace. It may
take a bit of time, but you will be OK.’

The way he says I’ll be OK—so
calm, so patient, so full of conviction—makes me believe I
can
be OK.

‘I want to talk.’ The words slip
out of my mouth before I can stop them. And just like that, my body
betrays me again, except this time I hope it’s for a good
reason.

Once I get it out there, though,
I can’t take it back. I can’t hide anymore. A part of me still
thinks I’m not ready. It’s as if I’m teetering on the edge of a
precipice. One wrong move and I might fall over the edge and never
be able to climb back up. But what he’s told me has given me the
courage to share this with him. I have to talk to someone before I
go completely insane. He’s already seen me in full panic mode, so
it’s not as if I can hide it, and somehow he intuitively knows
what’s happened to me anyway. Why would he have shared that story
with me otherwise? Somehow, this stranger knows exactly what I’m
going through. Maybe it’s because he’s seen a lot of people go
through the same thing with his job.

He patiently waits for me to say
something. I stare into his warm eyes, and somehow I know this is
the right thing to do.

The only thing I can do if I
want to move on.

It’s now or never. I know I’m
not getting better, and this is my one real chance.

I sit opposite him, not quite
believing I’m feeling OK being alone with him in here. I actually
feel comfortable with him. He’s shared his darkest moments with me,
and part of his strength has just seeped into me.

He looks down at the table as if
he’s trying to give me the time I need to start. The thing is, I
don’t know where to start.

The silence stretches out
between us. Footsteps sound in the street outside, commuters
rushing home. Cars drive past the shop. Horns blare. A siren wails
in the distance. And still he sits and waits.

‘I was attacked,’ I finally say
as my finger traces a line along the surface of the table. And now
the words are finally out there, they’ve got a force of their own
and keep coming. I have to get this poison out of me before it
totally destroys me. ‘He was my boyfriend. I was seeing him for two
years, and everything was great at first. At least, I thought so.
Looking back, it probably wasn’t, but…’ I trail off. Maybe I was so
desperate for love, I was trying to find it anywhere. ‘He came in
the shop one day. He was in his last year at uni studying to become
a lawyer. I was so surprised when he was interested in me. Shy,
quiet, naïve Grace, who was a bookworm and worked in a coffee shop.
He chased me from the moment I met him. I was flattered because he
was so confident, intelligent, and charming. He swept me off my
feet, and I fell under his spell, which obviously clouded my
judgement at the time. Before I began to see him for what he was,
it was too late. And maybe it was
because
I was shy, quiet
Grace that he picked me. I was someone he could dominate and
control, and I was just a stupid idiot looking for love and
affection, whose weakness he could take advantage of.