Kind of Cruel Read Online Free Page A

drifting down into calm, and into relaxation. So, moving down one step – calm and relaxed. And moving down another step, taking another step towards peace and towards relaxation . . .’
    How can she be going too fast while speaking soporifically slowly?
    What about stone? That’s also traditional, and grander than wood, but possibly a bit cold. Though with a runner . . .
    Ginny’s ahead of me but I don’t care. My plan is to take all the time I need to get my staircase designed – if I cut corners at this crucial stage, I’m bound to regret it later – and then leap down to the bottom all in one go. As long as I get there when she does, what difference does it make?
    ‘And now you’re taking the last step, and you’ve arrived at a place of total calm, total peace. You are completely relaxed. And so I’d like you to think back to when you were a very small child, and the world was new. I’d like you to remember a moment when you felt joy, such intense joy that you thought you might explode.’
    This throws me. What’s happened to the staircase? Was it just a device, to get me to the calm, relaxed place? I have already missed my chance to produce a joyful memory; Ginny has moved on, and is now ordering me – if a demand made so drowsily can be considered an order – to remember feeling desperately sad, as if my heart was breaking. Sad, sad, I think, worried about having dropped behind. She moves on again, to angry – incandescent, burning with rage – and I can’t think of a single thing. I’m about to miss my third deadline. Might as well give up .
    As she progresses from fear (‘your heart pounding as the ground seems to fall away beneath your feet’) to loneliness (‘like a cold vacuum all around you and inside you, separating you from every single other human being’), I wonder how many times Ginny has recited this spiel. Her descriptions are pretty powerful – perhaps a little too powerful. My childhood wasn’t especially dramatic; there’s nothing in it, or in my memory of it, to match the kind of extreme states she’s describing. I was a happy child: loved, secure. I was heartbroken when my parents died within two years of one another, but I was in my early twenties by then. Should I ask Ginny if a memory from adulthood will do as a substitute? She specified early childhood, but surely a more recent memory would be better than nothing.
    ‘And now I’d like you to imagine that you’re drowning. Everywhere you turn, there’s water, touching every part of you, flooding into your nose and mouth. You can’t breathe. What memory springs to mind in connection with that? Anything?’
    My philtrum would be getting soaked. Sorry, that’s all I’ve got . What’s Ginny aiming to uncover here? I’m not thinking about feelings any more, I’m thinking about submarine disaster movies.
    When she tells me to imagine myself in a burning house, trapped by flames, I feel sick in the pit of my stomach. This is so seriously lacking in feelgood factor that I’m praying I’ll be handed an evaluation form at the end of all this so that I can make my objection official.
    I don’t want to do this any more.
    ‘Okay, that’s great,’ Ginny says. ‘You’re doing great.’ I hear a slight sharpening in her tone, and I know the moment has come: audience participation time. ‘Now I’d like you to let a memory come into your mind, and tell me about it. Any memory, from any time in your life. Don’t analyse it. It doesn’t have to be significant. What are you remembering, right now?’
    Sharon . I can’t say that. Unless I’ve misunderstood, Ginny wants something new from me now, not leftovers from the last exercise.
    ‘Don’t try to select something good,’ she says in her regular voice. ‘Anything will do.’
    Right. Nice to know how little all this matters.
    Not Sharon and her burning house. Not unless you want to leave here in pieces .
    Little Orchard, then. The story of my disappearing relatives.