Rachel's Holiday
Page 108

Sure enough, Josephine launched straight into me.
‘It wasn’t a pretty picture Luke and Brigit painted yesterday, of you and your life, was it?’ she began.
‘Luke Costello isn’t the person to give an objective picture of me,’ I said wearily. ‘You know how it is when romances end.’
‘It’s just as well Brigit came in that case,’ Josephine interjected smoothly. ‘You didn’t have a romance with her, did you?’
‘Brigit was talking crap as well.’ I irritably geared up for the story of Brigit’s ambition and promotion.
‘Shut up.’ Josephine silenced me with a glitteringly angry look.
‘I never said I didn’t take drugs.’ I changed tack.
‘Drugs aside,’ she said. ‘It still wasn’t a pretty picture.’
I wasn’t sure what she meant.
‘Your dishonesty, selfishness, disloyalty, shallowness and fickleness,’ she explained.
Oh, that.
‘Your drug use is just the tip of the iceberg, Rachel,’ she said. ‘I’m more interested in the person they described. You know – someone with no loyalty, who would ignore her boyfriend when people she wants to impress are present. A person so shallow she judges everyone on their outward appearance, with no regard to whether or not they’re decent human beings. So selfish that she steals without any thought as to how it affects the person she steals from. Who lets down her co-workers and employers at a moment’s notice. A person with a distorted, warped value system. With so little sense of who she is that she affects a different accent with different people…’
On and on she went. Every time she finished a sentence, I thought she’d come to the end of her speech, but no.
I tried to stop listening.
‘That’s you, Rachel,’ she finally wrapped it up. ‘You are that amorphous, shapeless human being. No loyalty, no integrity, nothing.’
I shrugged. For some reason she hadn’t got to me. I felt a throb of triumph.
Josephine looked at me scornfully. ‘I know you’re pouring all your energy into not cracking in front of me.’
How does she know? I wondered, gripped with anxiety.
‘But I’m not your enemy, Rachel,’ she continued. ‘Your real enemy is yourself and that’s not going to go away. You’ll walk out of this room today thinking you’re great for not having opened up to me. But that’s not a victory, it’s a failure.’
Suddenly I felt terribly tired.
‘I’ll tell you why you’re such a horrible person, shall I?’ she asked.
‘Shall I?’ she asked again, when I didn’t answer.
‘Yes.’ The word was dragged out of me.
‘You have cripplingly low self-esteem,’ she said. ‘You count for nothing in your own estimation. And you don’t like feeling worthless, who does? So you seek endorsement from people you admire. Like this Helenka that Brigit told us about. Isn’t that right?’
I nodded feebly. After all, Helenka was worthy, I agreed with that bit.
‘But it’s very uncomfortable,’ she pressed on, ‘when you’ve no belief in yourself. You just float, waiting for someone else to anchor you.’
Whatever you say.
‘Which is why you couldn’t trust your decision to be with Luke,’ she confided. ‘Torn between wanting him but feeling you shouldn’t, because the only person telling you he was OK was you. And you wouldn’t believe you. What an exhausting way to live!’
It had been exhausting, I realized with a flash of memory. There were times when I felt I was losing my mind as I tried to juggle everyone’s approval versus Luke’s company.
I remembered going to a party with Luke, safe in the knowledge that no one I knew would be there. But, to my horror, the first person I saw was Chloë, one of Helenka’s acolytes. In a rush of mad panic, I’d turned on my heel and left the room, while Luke went after me in bewilderment. ‘What’s wrong, babe?’ he asked worriedly. ‘Nothing,’ I muttered. I forced myself to go back in, but I spent the night teetering on a knife edge, trying to hide in corners, not standing too close to Luke in case anyone (Chloë) realized I was with him, furious anytime he put his arm around me or tried to snog me, then feeling totally wretched at the hurt look in his eyes when I pushed him away. Eventually, I got really out of it because I felt I’d go bonkers otherwise.
‘Wouldn’t it have been far nicer to stand up straight and act proud to be with Luke?’ Josephine’s voice jolted me out of that nightmare. ‘Here I am, folks, like it or lump it.’
‘But… oh you haven’t got a clue!’ I was so frustrated. ‘You’d have to live in New York to understand, these people are important.’
‘They’re not important to me.’ Josephine smiled broadly. ‘They’re not important to Misty over there.’
Misty vigorously shook her head. But of course she would, the bitch.
‘There are millions of people the world over who are perfectly content without Helenka’s approval.’
‘Would you mind telling me,’ I said scornfully, ‘what any of this has to do with drugs?’
‘Plenty,’ she said, with an ominous glint. ‘You’ll see.’
After lunch Josephine started into me again. I would have given anything for it to stop. I was very, very tired.
‘You wanted to know what your low self-esteem has to do with your taking drugs,’ she said. ‘In its most basic form,’ she went on, ‘if you had self-respect, you wouldn’t fill your body full of harmful substances, to the point where you make yourself ill.’
I stared at the ceiling, no idea what she was talking about.
‘I’m talking to you, Rachel,’ she barked, making me jump. ‘Look at how sick you were when you arrived here. Your first morning on breakfasts you almost passed out from withdrawal symptoms from your beloved Valium!
‘We found the empty bottle in your bedside locker,’ she said, looking me straight in the eye. I turned away, dying with shame, raging that I hadn’t disposed of it properly. But before I had a chance to cobble together some feeble excuse – ‘It wasn’t mine’ or ‘My mother gave it to me, it had holy water in it’ – she started expounding again.