Cally Phillips' Another World is Possible
Episode Fifteen – ANSWERS
Genre: Drama
Swearwords: None.
Description: 2004 Dublin
Swearwords: None.
Description: 2004 Dublin
I put down my pen. I didn’t know what to believe any more. I wanted to ask her so many questions, but I had finally come to the point of realising that for Mary, notions of truth and identity were so hopelessly confused that I would never get to either of them. I didn’t know what to do, what to think, and certainly I could not help her. At this point, I believe no one can help Mary, not even Mary herself.
I last saw Mary on nineteenth December 2004 which she variously claimed was her dead daughter’s birthday, the anniversary of the first time she met Che Guevara, and the date of her daughter’s funeral. We had undertaken four sessions before that date, during which time she told me the ‘story’ you have been reading so far. The telling of this story was the ‘therapy’ she undertook with me, a version of narrative psychology. Working with her formed part of my doctoral thesis.
The nature of narrative psychological therapy is such that the self as narrator not only recounts but justifies themselves through their account. Central to this is the understanding that people use words not just as abstract tools but to construct a sense of self in the world and to make things happen. Words form a vital part of the individual’s identity.
The experience of mental illness has been at least partially characterised by suggestions that it presents ‘an incoherent story’ and my aim was to see if this held true in Mary’s case. I could expect, therefore, that under therapy we would experience the breakdown of a coherent life story as part of the radical sense of disorientation in her life. It was not my job to build her up again, just to note down the story as she told me. The rest was to be left up to a fully qualified psychiatrist, should Mary agree to see one when she had finished with me.
The questions I wanted to ask Mary were: How much of this story is true? Did you ever meet Che Guevara? Who was Roisin’s father? Is Roisin alive or dead? Did you ever have a daughter?
But my job was to listen to her story, not to ask questions of her. And as the therapy, or the story progressed, I realised that my disbelief was so extensive that I was never going to resolve anything, or help her in any way. Clearly for Mary, everything she told me was linked and by being linked was real and therefore true in some way. But where the truth lies was becoming impossible for anyone outside Mary to fathom and I felt she was becoming a danger to herself.
I remember thinking that if Mary did not have a daughter, but was merging Roisin into herself, it was possible that she might actually be preparing to kill herself. I didn’t know what to do about that. My questions were: What are you trying to tell me? Did your daughter kill herself? Did you ever have a daughter? Why can’t I ask her these questions? How can I help her if I can’t ask her questions? Am I cut out for this?
At the end of four gruelling sessions I felt that Mary’s careful fabrication was in danger of becoming completely fractured. Only then did I get the truth (or another story). She looked me straight in the eye in a way she had previously avoided.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she said
‘It’s not about me believing you, Mary,’ I replied weakly.
‘But you don’t believe me? You think I’m telling you a story?’
‘Mary, you’ve told me a lot of things. I’m just having trouble processing some of them, but really, that’s not the point. My believing you isn’t what this is about.’
‘Where do we go from here?’ she asked, sceptically.
‘Where would you like to go from here?’ I replied in good psychiatrist fashion.
‘Don’t mess me around,’ she replied, ‘I’m not stupid and I’m not a liar.’
‘I haven’t called you a liar, Mary,’ I said, as gently as I was able.
‘You want proof? What proof do you want? What do you want me to tell you, to show you?’
There was a hint of the hysterical, ‘Why don’t you believe me?’ in her voice and I didn’t want to go there.
‘You don’t have to tell me any more, Mary. I think the sessions are over. The story is over now, isn’t it?’
‘Whose story?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’ I hadn’t expected that. But then Mary was full of surprises.
‘This would have been Roisin’s thirty ninth birthday,’ she said. ‘My daughter, Roisin. The one I’ve been telling you about for the last weeks. The one you don’t believe killed herself. But I’m telling you. There are some incredible links in life and Roisin killed herself on the ninth of October, when she was the same age that he was when he died. Che was killed on ninth of October, 1967. You ought to know that. Everyone knows that.’ Her tone was challenging, if not threatening.
‘Thirty seven years ago,’ I added. I admit I was trying to regain control of the situation.
‘That’s not important,’ she said. ‘That’s not the link. The link is thirty nine.’
‘So, can I be clear here, Mary, the significance you are telling me is that your daughter killed herself thirty nine years after you told her that you first met her father,’ I said, trying to draw her out further. ‘The father you told her was Che Guevara.’
Mary’s face told me that she didn’t like the ‘you told her’ construction. I felt I might be getting somewhere, so I continued. ‘Why did Roisin kill herself?’ This was a question I was sure Mary could not have the answer to. Unless Roisin was her construction. Of course, Mary had answers to everything, because it was Mary’s story all along. Getting Mary’s answers wouldn’t help with my questions but she was going to give me an answer nonetheless.
‘What kind of therapist are you, when you don’t believe me?’ she started but then didn’t give me time to defend myself. Because even then, even with my disbelief, Mary was making up the story and I was just a character like all the others.
‘I believe that everything in the world happens for a reason. That you just have to look for the links,’ she continued. ‘Roisin committed suicide because she couldn’t bear the way the world had become. She longed for her father, she wanted a father, she wanted to ‘be like Che’ and after her second trip to Cuba she realised she never would be. She couldn’t live up to his expectations. It was nothing to do with me. It was Che. Everything has been Che all along. Not me. I just fell in love with him. That was my downfall.’
‘No, Mary,’ I replied. ‘It’s not Che. It’s you. It’s all been you, all along. Your story.’
There was a long pause.
‘And you can change it if you want,’ I added. You can make another story, build another truth, and I can help you, but we have to work together and you have to tell me what really happened and what didn’t.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve told you…. It’s all…. It’s too hard….’ She was finally breaking. There was a chink in the armour. Maybe Mary herself was realising that she could neither go on keeping her story intact and she couldn’t live the fractured life that had become of it.
‘Will you come with me to the funeral?’ she asked.
‘What funeral?’ I was confused.
‘Roisin’s funeral. It’s today.’
‘But you said today was the anniversary….’ She had me totally confused, and not for the first time.
‘You don’t believe Roisin existed, so come with me to the funeral.’
And I went. Several things happened which surprised me. But they are really part of Mary’s story, a top and tail if you will. Framing. Re-positioning her life into an external reality. When I look back on it I am both surprised that she wanted me there, and then perhaps not so surprised. Mary used me as the testing ground from one possible identity to another. Perhaps I was the one who brought her back to the place she started from, gave her the strength to face up to that other reality, the one she had been running from all her life.
At Roisin’s funeral, because there was a Roisin – she had died and Mary was her mother – I met Mary’s own mother. She was an eighty odd year old, fairly frail woman who was both embarrassed and destroyed by the event she was part of. She wanted to forgive Mary but she didn’t understand her, and certainly she didn’t know how to reach her.
On speaking to the mother I found out that Mary had come back to Dublin just before I started seeing her, which was just after Roisin was found dead. The body was taken back to Dublin because Mary was determined Roisin should be buried there, but there was a delay while a post-mortem was carried out and certain ‘irregularities’ of Mary’s story were looked into. All this time, Mary was coming to me, telling me her story, her truth, her narrative. And in another, parallel world, Roisin’s life was being picked apart, pieced together and everyone else was trying to make sense of her death – suicidal as it seemed.
Mary’s mother told me that Mary had turned up on the family doorstep unannounced, dripping wet and in a terrible state. She had not seen them for nearly forty years but she was welcomed home without questioning. Mary’s father had passed away several years before but one of the boys still worked the farm and he and Mary’s mother dried Mary out and tried to work out what was wrong with her. They still hadn’t figured it out.
Piece by piece they got a story from Mary but I’m not sure if it’s the same one I got, because I haven’t had time to talk to Mary’s mother in any detail yet. I should do that, perhaps. Maybe not, though; after all, there’s client confidentiality and the point of narrative psychological therapy is not to find ‘the truth’ but to help the individual find their own truth within their own identity. And it’s not my story, after all.
I got a second surprise when Mary had been taken away by her mother after the burial. I was about to leave the graveside. An unprepossessing man in his early sixties came up to me and pulled me by the arm. There wasn’t anyone else left and I thought he was after directions or a lift.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ he asked.
‘Of course, but I don’t think I can help you,’ I answered.
‘Did you know my daughter?’ he asked, pleading in his voice.
‘Your daughter…?’
For a moment I thought he meant Mary, but then realised he had said ‘did you’ not ‘do you’ and finally understood he meant Roisin.
‘Your daughter?’
He looked me straight in the eye, pain filling his soul and replied, ‘Roisin. She was my daughter. But I never knew her. Did you know her? Can you tell me about her?’
Martin Brady had been seventeen when he met Mary Lynch. They had gone out several times and as with many young people they had not been able to restrain themselves. Their emotions ‘took control of them’ as he told me. She was beautiful. He was in love with her. He thought she was in love with him. He didn’t know she was pregnant till after she left for England. One of her brothers came round on the warpath. Martin explained to me, as he had to the brother, that he would have married her. He loved her. She didn’t have to leave. The shame would have passed in time. But with a voice cracking with emotion, Martin told me that Mary disappeared in the summer of 1965 and he never saw or heard from her again. He was only here today because her brother had phoned him and told him. He thought Martin had a right to know. Blood is blood, after all. He was stunned, shocked, trying to deal with the fact that he’d had a daughter all these years and he would never get to know her.
‘Why did she do it to me?’ he asked me. ‘Why did she leave me and never tell me?’
‘I don’t know Martin,’ I responded, but I felt he deserved more than that. I didn’t know what I could tell him, but I knew he deserved some kind of story to hold onto, something he could make into a truth to hold his own fragile identity together, so I said the only thing I could think of, ‘You might not have known her, but Mary brought Roisin up to love her father, Martin. She wanted nothing more in life than to know and love her father and be loved in return.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know that for a fact.’
Well, what is a fact, except a fiction we choose to believe?
I last saw Mary on nineteenth December 2004 which she variously claimed was her dead daughter’s birthday, the anniversary of the first time she met Che Guevara, and the date of her daughter’s funeral. We had undertaken four sessions before that date, during which time she told me the ‘story’ you have been reading so far. The telling of this story was the ‘therapy’ she undertook with me, a version of narrative psychology. Working with her formed part of my doctoral thesis.
The nature of narrative psychological therapy is such that the self as narrator not only recounts but justifies themselves through their account. Central to this is the understanding that people use words not just as abstract tools but to construct a sense of self in the world and to make things happen. Words form a vital part of the individual’s identity.
The experience of mental illness has been at least partially characterised by suggestions that it presents ‘an incoherent story’ and my aim was to see if this held true in Mary’s case. I could expect, therefore, that under therapy we would experience the breakdown of a coherent life story as part of the radical sense of disorientation in her life. It was not my job to build her up again, just to note down the story as she told me. The rest was to be left up to a fully qualified psychiatrist, should Mary agree to see one when she had finished with me.
The questions I wanted to ask Mary were: How much of this story is true? Did you ever meet Che Guevara? Who was Roisin’s father? Is Roisin alive or dead? Did you ever have a daughter?
But my job was to listen to her story, not to ask questions of her. And as the therapy, or the story progressed, I realised that my disbelief was so extensive that I was never going to resolve anything, or help her in any way. Clearly for Mary, everything she told me was linked and by being linked was real and therefore true in some way. But where the truth lies was becoming impossible for anyone outside Mary to fathom and I felt she was becoming a danger to herself.
I remember thinking that if Mary did not have a daughter, but was merging Roisin into herself, it was possible that she might actually be preparing to kill herself. I didn’t know what to do about that. My questions were: What are you trying to tell me? Did your daughter kill herself? Did you ever have a daughter? Why can’t I ask her these questions? How can I help her if I can’t ask her questions? Am I cut out for this?
At the end of four gruelling sessions I felt that Mary’s careful fabrication was in danger of becoming completely fractured. Only then did I get the truth (or another story). She looked me straight in the eye in a way she had previously avoided.
‘You don’t believe me?’ she said
‘It’s not about me believing you, Mary,’ I replied weakly.
‘But you don’t believe me? You think I’m telling you a story?’
‘Mary, you’ve told me a lot of things. I’m just having trouble processing some of them, but really, that’s not the point. My believing you isn’t what this is about.’
‘Where do we go from here?’ she asked, sceptically.
‘Where would you like to go from here?’ I replied in good psychiatrist fashion.
‘Don’t mess me around,’ she replied, ‘I’m not stupid and I’m not a liar.’
‘I haven’t called you a liar, Mary,’ I said, as gently as I was able.
‘You want proof? What proof do you want? What do you want me to tell you, to show you?’
There was a hint of the hysterical, ‘Why don’t you believe me?’ in her voice and I didn’t want to go there.
‘You don’t have to tell me any more, Mary. I think the sessions are over. The story is over now, isn’t it?’
‘Whose story?’ she asked.
‘Sorry?’ I hadn’t expected that. But then Mary was full of surprises.
‘This would have been Roisin’s thirty ninth birthday,’ she said. ‘My daughter, Roisin. The one I’ve been telling you about for the last weeks. The one you don’t believe killed herself. But I’m telling you. There are some incredible links in life and Roisin killed herself on the ninth of October, when she was the same age that he was when he died. Che was killed on ninth of October, 1967. You ought to know that. Everyone knows that.’ Her tone was challenging, if not threatening.
‘Thirty seven years ago,’ I added. I admit I was trying to regain control of the situation.
‘That’s not important,’ she said. ‘That’s not the link. The link is thirty nine.’
‘So, can I be clear here, Mary, the significance you are telling me is that your daughter killed herself thirty nine years after you told her that you first met her father,’ I said, trying to draw her out further. ‘The father you told her was Che Guevara.’
Mary’s face told me that she didn’t like the ‘you told her’ construction. I felt I might be getting somewhere, so I continued. ‘Why did Roisin kill herself?’ This was a question I was sure Mary could not have the answer to. Unless Roisin was her construction. Of course, Mary had answers to everything, because it was Mary’s story all along. Getting Mary’s answers wouldn’t help with my questions but she was going to give me an answer nonetheless.
‘What kind of therapist are you, when you don’t believe me?’ she started but then didn’t give me time to defend myself. Because even then, even with my disbelief, Mary was making up the story and I was just a character like all the others.
‘I believe that everything in the world happens for a reason. That you just have to look for the links,’ she continued. ‘Roisin committed suicide because she couldn’t bear the way the world had become. She longed for her father, she wanted a father, she wanted to ‘be like Che’ and after her second trip to Cuba she realised she never would be. She couldn’t live up to his expectations. It was nothing to do with me. It was Che. Everything has been Che all along. Not me. I just fell in love with him. That was my downfall.’
‘No, Mary,’ I replied. ‘It’s not Che. It’s you. It’s all been you, all along. Your story.’
There was a long pause.
‘And you can change it if you want,’ I added. You can make another story, build another truth, and I can help you, but we have to work together and you have to tell me what really happened and what didn’t.’
‘I don’t know. I’ve told you…. It’s all…. It’s too hard….’ She was finally breaking. There was a chink in the armour. Maybe Mary herself was realising that she could neither go on keeping her story intact and she couldn’t live the fractured life that had become of it.
‘Will you come with me to the funeral?’ she asked.
‘What funeral?’ I was confused.
‘Roisin’s funeral. It’s today.’
‘But you said today was the anniversary….’ She had me totally confused, and not for the first time.
‘You don’t believe Roisin existed, so come with me to the funeral.’
And I went. Several things happened which surprised me. But they are really part of Mary’s story, a top and tail if you will. Framing. Re-positioning her life into an external reality. When I look back on it I am both surprised that she wanted me there, and then perhaps not so surprised. Mary used me as the testing ground from one possible identity to another. Perhaps I was the one who brought her back to the place she started from, gave her the strength to face up to that other reality, the one she had been running from all her life.
At Roisin’s funeral, because there was a Roisin – she had died and Mary was her mother – I met Mary’s own mother. She was an eighty odd year old, fairly frail woman who was both embarrassed and destroyed by the event she was part of. She wanted to forgive Mary but she didn’t understand her, and certainly she didn’t know how to reach her.
On speaking to the mother I found out that Mary had come back to Dublin just before I started seeing her, which was just after Roisin was found dead. The body was taken back to Dublin because Mary was determined Roisin should be buried there, but there was a delay while a post-mortem was carried out and certain ‘irregularities’ of Mary’s story were looked into. All this time, Mary was coming to me, telling me her story, her truth, her narrative. And in another, parallel world, Roisin’s life was being picked apart, pieced together and everyone else was trying to make sense of her death – suicidal as it seemed.
Mary’s mother told me that Mary had turned up on the family doorstep unannounced, dripping wet and in a terrible state. She had not seen them for nearly forty years but she was welcomed home without questioning. Mary’s father had passed away several years before but one of the boys still worked the farm and he and Mary’s mother dried Mary out and tried to work out what was wrong with her. They still hadn’t figured it out.
Piece by piece they got a story from Mary but I’m not sure if it’s the same one I got, because I haven’t had time to talk to Mary’s mother in any detail yet. I should do that, perhaps. Maybe not, though; after all, there’s client confidentiality and the point of narrative psychological therapy is not to find ‘the truth’ but to help the individual find their own truth within their own identity. And it’s not my story, after all.
I got a second surprise when Mary had been taken away by her mother after the burial. I was about to leave the graveside. An unprepossessing man in his early sixties came up to me and pulled me by the arm. There wasn’t anyone else left and I thought he was after directions or a lift.
‘Can I have a word with you?’ he asked.
‘Of course, but I don’t think I can help you,’ I answered.
‘Did you know my daughter?’ he asked, pleading in his voice.
‘Your daughter…?’
For a moment I thought he meant Mary, but then realised he had said ‘did you’ not ‘do you’ and finally understood he meant Roisin.
‘Your daughter?’
He looked me straight in the eye, pain filling his soul and replied, ‘Roisin. She was my daughter. But I never knew her. Did you know her? Can you tell me about her?’
Martin Brady had been seventeen when he met Mary Lynch. They had gone out several times and as with many young people they had not been able to restrain themselves. Their emotions ‘took control of them’ as he told me. She was beautiful. He was in love with her. He thought she was in love with him. He didn’t know she was pregnant till after she left for England. One of her brothers came round on the warpath. Martin explained to me, as he had to the brother, that he would have married her. He loved her. She didn’t have to leave. The shame would have passed in time. But with a voice cracking with emotion, Martin told me that Mary disappeared in the summer of 1965 and he never saw or heard from her again. He was only here today because her brother had phoned him and told him. He thought Martin had a right to know. Blood is blood, after all. He was stunned, shocked, trying to deal with the fact that he’d had a daughter all these years and he would never get to know her.
‘Why did she do it to me?’ he asked me. ‘Why did she leave me and never tell me?’
‘I don’t know Martin,’ I responded, but I felt he deserved more than that. I didn’t know what I could tell him, but I knew he deserved some kind of story to hold onto, something he could make into a truth to hold his own fragile identity together, so I said the only thing I could think of, ‘You might not have known her, but Mary brought Roisin up to love her father, Martin. She wanted nothing more in life than to know and love her father and be loved in return.’
‘Do you know that for a fact?’
‘I know that for a fact.’
Well, what is a fact, except a fiction we choose to believe?
About the Author
Cally Phillips has written fiction and drama in English and Scots, much of which is published through HoAmPresst. She also currently works as editor for Ayton Publishing Limited and runs a number of online projects, including The Galloway Raiders, which is the online hub for Scots writer S. R. Crockett. Her latest project to hit the virtual shelves is the #tobelikeche serial, which started in October 2016.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.
For the archive of Cally’s fiction and drama, follow this link.