What Happens Now

By Emma McKeown

I heard something about therapists being like dates. You were supposed to get a bit casual with them when you first started up. You’re not allowed to give it all away up front because they might not be the one for you. And then you’ll have to go start all over again with the next therapist, and maybe you’re considered to be even more damaged goods than when you tried to get started with the first one. I read a blog article once about some girl when I was trying to figure out how to get therapy for myself and if it was worth it. She was complaining that she couldn’t keep hold of a boyfriend for more than six months and then she went on to say she’d been through four therapists in the past year, as if she wasn’t the problem.

If I was being honest, I had only ended up here because I got kicked out of university funded counselling. I’d called student support services sobbing, saying I wanted to kill myself, so they set me up with twenty-seven-year-old Stacey who zoom called me once a week to make sure I hadn’t gone through with it yet. Call me crazy, but she’d seemed mildly disappointed every time I’d answered. I couldn’t blame her, being linked to a student suicide would be a career defining moment for someone like her, I’m sure.

We’d done about six sessions of back and forth her asking ‘why do you feel that way’ and me saying ‘because I just fucking do Stacey’, until I decided I should stop pretending the reason I wanted to die was because of my upcoming second year Christmas exams. I’d gone ahead and dropped the bomb on her at 10am on a Wednesday morning, curled up in a damp dressing gown on a spinning chair, in my university managed accommodation. I sat there, knees tucked into my chest, spinning myself from side to side by pushing off the edge of the desk while she gaped at me and stuttered.

‘I want to tell you,’ She took a deep breath for dramatic effect, ‘how brave you are for telling me that. Thank you.’ She placed her hand to her chest and nodded slowly at me through the screen even though I had my camera turned off. It took everything in me not to tell her to fuck off and slam the laptop closed. Instead, I sat there awkwardly, nauseous from how violently I was beginning to swing myself back and forth. If that statement hadn’t pissed me off enough, she followed it up with a, ‘But I don’t want to pretend that I am qualified to help you with something like this when I’m not.’

‘Wait, are you fucking serious?’ The words fell out of my mouth. I didn’t mean to snap at her, but I couldn’t help it. I’d just wasted an hour a week warming to psychology’s biggest bimbo and now she was telling me she wasn’t qualified? I could’ve told her that the minute I met her.

‘Zara?’

I looked up. The receptionist looked like she’d be dry cleaned. Her highlights were in thick blonde chunks that began about an inch away from her scalp. She smiled, showing a too-perfect set of what I could only assume to be veneers. I lifted my hand up like I was answering to my name being called out in the attendance of a primary school class.

She stared at me until I stood up.

‘Come with me.’

She led me into a room just past the reception desk. I wondered how soundproof it was. I hadn’t heard anything while I’d been waiting in there and I’d made the effort to lean towards the door just to see what the vibe was for therapy with an actual therapist. I made a mental note to talk quietly just in case. The receptionist opened the door without walking through it, so I had to slide past her awkwardly to get in. For some reason I decided sliding past her face to face was less awkward than pressing my ass against her accidentally. My left boob brushed against her as I moved into the room. She looked at me blankly.

The walls and carpet were two different shades of purple. One sofa, one chair, one sympathetic looking woman.

‘Okay Dr Collins, I’ll leave you to get started’ She nodded to the woman on the chair and walked away, letting the door soft close behind her. Dr Collins looked at me like I was a wounded deer left for dead on the side of the road. I looked back at her. We stared at each other in silence before she flashed a tight-lipped smile just as the door clicked shut. She was pretty. For her age. I realised I wanted her to think that I was pretty. I regretted not wearing makeup. I made another mental note to do better for next time.

‘Would you like to take a seat Zara?’ I hovered by the door before nodding and walking towards her.

‘Should I lie down?’ I pointed to the sofa, raising an eyebrow. She didn’t react. I followed it up with a sharp laugh so she would know I was only joking. Still nothing.

‘Whatever way you feel most comfortable.’ Her face didn’t move. Had she had work done? I couldn’t tell.

‘So, why don’t we start with what it is that has brought you here today?’ She sat on a soft chair across from me that looked like it didn’t belong on wheels but somehow it just was.

She crossed her legs and leaned into me. The room smelled like she’d sprayed herself down with Febreze.

‘Oh wow,’ I hesitated, wringing my hands and shuffling on the sofa to get comfortable.

‘What’s not brought me here am I right?’ I laughed again.

She said nothing.

I cleared my throat and shifted about a bit more. It was one of those sofas that you couldn’t quite get comfortable on. The seat was too shallow and the back of it had no bounce so you ended up sitting at a 90-degree angle like a plastic toy. I tried curling my feet under me before deciding against it and just crossing one leg over the other, mirroring Dr Collins. She continued to look at me. I wondered if her patients ever drank before their sessions. I wondered if I should start.

‘Um, I guess you could say that I’m … that I’m having some issues with my sex life?’ I moved my eyes around her face, settling on her mouth.

‘Your sex life?’

‘Yes, my sex life’ She wrote something down. I’d already fucked it. I uncrossed my legs and recrossed them the opposite way.

‘Okay, do you want to tell me more about that?’

‘Um yes, I suppose the issue would be that I’m not actually having sex… per se.’ She looked up from her notepad and cocked her head slightly to the side, frowning slightly. I offered her a brief smile again. She didn’t return it.

‘So, do you suppose you mean your lack of sex life then?’

I blinked at her, clearing my throat. Bitch.

‘Yes, I suppose I do, thank you for putting it like that.’

The word ‘suppose’ sat in my mouth like a little piece of metal.

She nodded again, looking down and flattening her notebook out on her lap. When she finished scribbling, she looked up at me smiling. I angled my head slightly to try and get a look at what she wrote down, but she pulled the notebook in towards her chest.

‘Okay,’ She tapped her hand against the back of the book, and I noticed her rings. One in particular. An absolutely huge engagement ring. Gold band, solitaire oval shaped diamond. Whenever I passed jewellery shops, I always stopped and had a look at them. One time I’d even gone in and lied to the shop assistant, telling her that one of my guy friends was proposing to his girlfriend and he wanted me to help out just so I could try some of them on. I remember thinking I at least partially understood why all those 20-year-old Christ ians had started getting married already.  I considered trying to get Dr Collins talking about her’s so she’d leave me alone, but she was already on a roll.

‘Do you want to give me a bit more insight into why that’s troubling you?’

‘Yeah, sorry, of course.’ I licked my lips. My throat was dry, and I could taste my saliva. ‘So,

I think it’s like a thing where, the way it is, is that I actually don’t want to have sex.’

‘You don’t want to have sex?’ She maintained eye contact raised an eyebrow slightly. My gaze shifted away from her and back again. I wet my teeth with my tongue. The inside of my top lip was cold.

‘No.’

‘And you’re not having sex?’ eyebrow again.

I shook my head slowly. ‘No.’

I felt like she was waiting on me saying something else. I looked at her confused, leaning my head in a little bit like she was.

‘And that’s-’ she hesitated ‘-that’s the issue?’

‘Yes?’ I reached my nails up to the nape of my neck and stopped myself, scratching the top of my back, in between my shoulder blades instead.

She said nothing. She didn’t get it. She closed her notebook, using her forefinger as a bookmark.

‘Look, Zara. What I need to know really, the only thing that is truly important, is what you want from our time together. Why are you here with me? What is it you want to be different by the time you leave?’

‘I’m not sure.’ I said, ‘I guess I want to feel different than I do now.’ I hesitated again. ‘I want to feel like I did before.’

‘Before what, Zara?’ Her tone was delicate, like she was figure skating on top of my fragile-as-a-half-frozen-lake mental state.

‘I don’t know.’ She leaned back into her seat and left it at that. Maybe she was worried she’d fall through the ice. But I wasn’t lying. I had no idea what I wanted from therapy. If anything, that’s why I was in therapy. I assumed it was her job to tell me.

This is an extract from the working novel ‘What Happens Now’.

The novel is a dark comedy character study following a protagonist who attempts to heal her relationship with her partners, friends and herself after experiencing sexual violence.