I think for a second. ‘I thought I could feel it, but yes, I might have been over-empathising, what with her being so thin. And all I’d had since my tea was some chewing gum, which I suppose had set my gastric juices off, hadn’t it?’
Mouth twitch. I think that’s a good sign. ‘I think you’re probably right. But you mentioned your magazine quiz telling you that you were highly empathic, and if you’re too empathic, that can be a problem. You’re not differentiating sufficiently between yourself and others. You’re suffering on everyone else’s behalf, which can leave you exhausted, as you’ve described. So it could well be that the young girl’s thinness upset you, as a mother or as an empath, or both. Do you have experience of being hungry? Very hungry, I mean.’
I almost snort. ‘I tell you what, I’ve been on more diets than Gwyneth Paltrow’s had colonic irrigations. I’m always on some diet or other, starving myself, and of course by late afternoon I’m snatching chocolate bars from passing toddlers. So yes.’
She raises her eyebrows and presses her mouth tight, a slight nod: there you go, then – it was your association of the vivid experience of hunger after all. We read so much in the expressions of others, don’t we? Like that, just now, actual words in the simple realignment of a few facial muscles. It can be less, much less – the smallest twitch of the ears, an all-too-hasty nod, and you still understand, you still hear the words that were never said. Jo communicated her hunger to me in the high set of her shoulders, the way she held her arm across her belly, her hand a soft fist. It’s possible I smelled hunger on her breath along with the wine. That halitosis models get from starving themselves, I read about it in… oh, some magazine or other. What a world we live in. And there we were, Jo and I, stopped at the perimeter fence to the town hall.
‘My secret place is in there,’ I said, nodding towards the dark gardens.
‘Up there?’ Jo pointed to the trees that hide my special bench. Her sleeve fell back to reveal a criss-cross of thin pink scars. A cutter. Suicidal thoughts sometimes, I bet.
‘I go there when I’m stressed or angry or whatever. When I feel like the world doesn’t understand me.’ World doesn’t understand me? World doesn’t bloody see me, I thought. It has no interest in understanding me what-so-bloody-ever.
She peered into the darkness. She was thinking about how the world didn’t understand her either but that I did. There was a longing in her. You could feel it in the air. She was pining for connection too. She was so lonely inside the walls she’d built around herself. She needed a mother, but not the one she had. She needed a mother like me.
‘I can’t see anything,’ she said.
‘It’s up at the top of that grass verge,’ I said. ‘Behind the trees. You can’t see it from here.’
‘What is it?’
‘It’s just a bench beside a little pond. In the summer, it’s very pretty, and you can feed the ducks. I used to take our Polly and our Kie… vin there. But in the evenings no one ever goes there. Well, except me, of course. And the dog.’
She peered in again, her head craning forward. Something deep within her, some restless core, yearned to see the secluded place even though she knew she should be getting to her friend’s house.
‘I just climb over,’ I said. ‘Or you can go around. No one bothers. I climb over and walk up and sit on the bench. I call it my bench and I have a little smoke, sometimes a little cry if I’m upset, and I just step off the world for five minutes. I’d go now only I’ve left my ciggies at home.’
Ciggies my foot. I don’t smoke, as you know.
‘I’ve got some,’ she almost cried, her developing crush on me taking full flight. I was so much calmer, so much kinder than her own skinny, Lycra-clad, neurotic mother who wanted only academic success from her so she could bathe in that reflected glory and somehow make up for her own failed promise. I was soft and warm, my promise had never failed because it had never been made, and I didn’t give a monkey’s about her degree, only about her, what made her heart ache, her soul