text: It was hard to see the therapist in the dark. The dim overhead light cast deep shadows over his face, barely illuminating the tops of his ears and bridge of a long nose. The rest was lost in darkness, swathed in the deep black of the silent room. I breathed out slowly, trying to focus myself. The session was taking me to difficult questions, making me focus on thoughts I would rather ignore, and it took effort. I felt like I was stumbling barefoot across jagged rocks, knowing that if I didn’t, eventually they would get too sharp to walk on and I’d be stuck on the other side forever. ‘I said I’d stay until Adrian was 18,’ I sighed, putting my head in my hands again and rubbing at my face, as though I could invigorate some decisiveness into my skin. ‘But he’s 16 now, and two years just seems like a lifetime. I don’t know if I could take it.’ ‘What is it that scares you about that?’ the therapist asked in his soft, considered voice. So non-judgmental. So understanding. I hated him, and wanted a drink very badly. I leaned back on my chair, resting my head on the cold hard shelf behind me. A bookshelf, I assumed. I couldn’t see it in the dark, but therapists always had bookshelves in movies. ‘At 16 he’s old enough to understand,’ the doctor continued, ‘so if you had to leave sooner you wouldn’t be letting him down -‘ ‘That’s not what I meant.’ I said flatly, perhaps rudely, cutting across him. ‘I mean that if I don’t go, I think I might do something I regret. I’m just so, angry. All the time. Everything she does makes me want to sneer and snarl, and it’s all I can do to restrain myself.’ ‘And how does she feel?’ asked the voice in the darkness. I rubbed at my throbbing temples. ‘I think she knows. I’m sure she’s been different recently. More waspish, more irritable. She marches around doing household chores like some indignant martyr, even though I do most of them now, since I lost my job, as though making an effort to highlight how much she’s doing for us. For me. And how little I’m doing. Like I’m nothing but a man-child in her way. A bum. An alcoh -‘ I cut myself off and sat silently in the dark, staring at the approximate spot where my feet should be. A few moments passed, the still air broken only by my slightly elevated breathing. ‘An alcoholic?’ the velvet voice almost whispered. I nodded, forgetting for a moment that the therapist couldn’t see me any more than I could see him. ‘Are you sure this anger is really about her?’ the unseen doctor asked, and I felt something within me twinge at the suggestion. Something defensive. Of course it was about her. She was being unreasonable. She was the one making a bad situation worse. She was the one who - Wasn’t having therapy. I gritted my teeth, biting back the sudden resentment I felt towards the therapist. On the heels of that feeling a thought crossed my mind. ‘Hey, why do you keep it so dark in here anyway?’ ‘You wanted it this way. And these kinds of sessions need to feel...private, wouldn’t you say?’ I nodded heavily again, trying to remember if I’d asked for the darkness. Perhaps it was because of the headache. Or the thirst. ‘How does Carla feel about your drinking?’ Asked the therapist, after a pause. I squinted up at the light, suddenly wishing I had a drink in my hand and hating myself for it. Carla hated it, of course. Hated it and blamed it for what had happened to me. But she had it backwards. I wasn’t a wreck before I lost my job, but I’d been trying to avoid becoming one ever since. ‘She says she’s being supportive,’ I muttered, not liking the catch in my throat or the feeling of tingling heat behind my eyes. ‘But every time she looks at me, every time I catch her shaking her head and staring out the window, every time I overhear her on the phone. I just...get worse. And she gets worse. She’s making me this way.’ I felt a hot blaze of rage building up inside me, and was grateful to have a replacement for the empty despair that had been filling my stomach before. ‘Making me into a drunk,’ I growled, and kicked out at the unseen room. My foot connected with something hard and I heard the tinkle of glass bouncing on a hard surface. I paused, confused. ‘Hey what was that?’ I asked, the hot rage receding and the unhappy thoughts returning. With them came the thirst. ‘You tell me,’ the therapist replied, ‘it’s your house.’ At that the mists cleared a bit and I remembered. A house call, of course. The thought seemed to float in front of me for a moment, as though wondering whether I would accept it or not. I wanted to, felt myself leaning toward it, only for it to flit away on insubstantial wings. Something wasn’t quite right. ‘Do you often do house calls?’ I asked, blinking at the dim light and trying to think my way through my muddled thoughts. ‘Very often,’ the soft voice replied. ‘I’m always available.’ ‘Even on Christmas,’ it added, with a single mirthless chuckle. ‘Tell me more about the relationship now,’ the therapist said from the chair in the deep shadows. ‘Tell me about this week.’ In my mind I saw Carla’s face, hard and unsmiling. Looking at me in that awful way, like she didn’t even know me anymore, and wouldn’t care to if she met me now for the first time. I felt the guilt, the failure, the anguish that arose in me at the sight of that face, and the cleansing anger that followed behind. The terrible rage that burned away those gut-wrenching feelings and replaced them with a light and heat that gave me structure, gave me dignity. Let me feel like I was the one wronged, like I was justified. ‘This week was the last straw,’ I said bitterly, realising as I said it that it was true. I’d made my mind up after all, it seemed. ‘I went to the job centre. This was on Monday. Got up early, really early, and took care not to wake her. I wanted to show her I could be responsible like I was before.’ ‘Admirable,’ the voice commented, but I barely registered the almost sardonic intonation. ‘I got there long before they opened, but so had hundreds of others. There was a line outside, stretching all the way through the parking lot. Even at five in the morning. So I stood there, behind this fat guy with a pillow in his hand. I didn’t think anything of it at first, but as time went on and he ended up lying on the ground with it tucked under his head, I started to envy him. The centre didn’t open until 9, so I had to stand there for four hours.’ ‘A considerable effort,’ the voice said soothingly. ‘It was! And then I spent all day waiting to be seen, only to be told that I was too under-qualified for anything on their books and I needed to come back the next day when they might have some unskilled roles. I told them I would do anything, literally anything, and they said no. I got angry, they got angry. And I ended up being thrown out. It made no sense.’ ‘Didn’t it?’ ‘No!’ ‘Were you drinking?’ ‘No! Not so you’d notice! I had a few swigs in the car park over the four hours I was standing there, but lots of people were doing that. I can’t have been the only one who had whiskey on his breath.’ ‘Is that what you told Carla?’ ‘Damn her!’ I shouted in a flash of vicious anger. ‘Yes that’s what I told her. But she’d already been on the phone with her friends. Some of their husbands had been in the line too - we’d all lost our jobs when the plant closed - and they’d heard what that job centre guy said. About me needing to clean myself up and come back the next day. Word had gone round that I’d been drunk.’ ‘But you hadn’t?’ ‘No! I’d had a drink. I wasn’t drunk. But she didn’t believe me. She believed them.’ ‘So what did you do?’ I smirked bitterly in the darkness. ‘I drank. I drank like crazy just to spite her. I drank everything in the fridge whilst she stood and shouted at me. I opened the cabinet and started on the whiskey as she screamed and cried in the kitchen. I was heading to the door to the garage to see what else I could find when I heard her on the phone. She’d called the police. The police! She had me arrested. I was in jail overnight.’ ‘I’m not surprised,’ the voice said flatly, a note of disgust creeping into its icy tone. I paused, blinking away the anger that had been rising up within me at the thought of that night. The police arriving, gripping me by the arms, dragging me to the car as I screamed and shouted at Carla. The neighbours staring. My dignity in tatters, my marriage on fire, my life in ruins. The awful way she’d treated me since that day. ‘I said I’m not surprised,’ the therapist continued, ‘what else should she have done? You’d become a bum. A nothing. A down-and-out drunkard not fit for human company.’ ‘What the hell...?’ I stammered, taken aback by the suddenly vicious voice, the snarling contempt of the therapist’s tone. ‘She could never love such a failure as you,’ it continued mercilessly, a deep chuckle reverberating behind the words, as though emanating from another throat. A hideous sinking feeling settled into my stomach, festering alongside the anger, stoking it further. Fear. ‘You’re worthless. Reviled. Less than nothing.’ ‘Shut up!’ I shrieked, my eyes frantically darting around the darkness of my basement, trying to locate the therapist and the dim light above his head. Only shadow swirled before me, the light extinguished. I tried to stumble to my feet, accidentally knocking the glass bottle I’d kicked before. I made a blind grab for it as it tinkled into the darkness. The realisation flashed through my mind as my fingers brushed the bottle; therapists don’t make house calls or conduct interviews in basements... My mind cleared as the chuckling unseen thing in the blackness broke into full blown laughter. My hand closed around the weighty bottle, and I raised it in a two handed grip as I faced where I thought the ‘therapist’ was. ‘You pathetic mess,’ it spat at me in a rasping voice like death itself, ‘you deserve everything you will get.’ I screamed and threw myself at the darkness, brandishing the bottle in an overhead swipe I hoped would smash over my unseen tormentor’s head. But then a light exploded into my eyes, a squeal of a basement door opening on a rusted hinge deafening me, and I stumbled at the dark figure silhouetted in the doorway. I fell bodily onto the figure, bringing down the bottle with as much force as I could muster. The body crumpled beneath me without a sound, and I landed awkwardly sprawled on it, my fall cushioned. I felt the crack of ribs beneath me and the warmth of blood on my hands, but it wasn’t until I sat back that I realised what I’d done. My vision swam in an alcoholic haze as I looked down on Carla’s ruined face amid the shards of the whiskey bottle, and from somewhere far away I heard a deep, cruel laughter echoing in my mind. I swear that’s how it happened.