Doctor
Now
After I read, ‘I was 14, he was 30#MeToo’, that anonymous tweet, that collision of hashtag and the fact, I sank into a depression. I was a ship cut loose, quietly unmoored, all bearings lost. I kept reading the stories, more and more every day, more actresses coming forward, more confessions of hundreds of women without status, without followers. How can the internet bear the weight of all their stories? They were like waves crashing on a beach, no end, no relief. I’d fall asleep reading another headline, find my phone in the morning, the battery dead.
At first, the doctor was like so many others, another predator taking advantage of his status, another complicit industry. That he pretended the abuse was medical, that he conducted his ‘treatments’ on girls while their parents were in the room, no longer shocked me. Nor did his victims – Olympians with their crystal-studded leotards, the outstretched musculature of their arms. They were like the actresses. Another category of women brought low.
Still, I followed the story when it broke in the UK, more out of habit than anything else, doggedly tracking back to the original story in the local American paper and then following the developments in the federal and state cases. It was the start of a new year; the first snow was falling heavily outside my office window when I read something startling. As part of the doctor’s plea bargain, he’d agreed to let each survivor speak to him in court.
I called in sick. I hid it from Kit. Usually, in the mornings, we’d get on the train to Cannon Street together, get some wedding admin done (he’d proposed a few months earlier). But every day that week and into the next, when he walked to Moorgate, I headed a few streets over as if I was going to work, before circling home. In our bedroom, under a cave of covers, I watched the televised trial. At the start of the week, the numbers of survivors due to speak numbered eighty-eight. By the end, the number bloomed to a hundred and fifty-six.
I cried as they described the shame and the nightmares, the eating disorders and the ways they’d tried to kill themselves. But it was smaller things that destroyed me – how gentle he was when he taped up their shins, how they needed him to put them back together, how they believed if anyone could fix them, it was him – because they mapped so faithfully onto how I felt about Daniel. And then their thoughts, which were my own, started to make sense. How in a meeting, I’d suddenly think,I’m not real. How when Kit talked to me about wedding venues, dinner options, a drinks reception, I’d feel a plunging terror. How twice a day, when a train pulled into the station, there was a split second when I found the chatter of the tracks utterly captivating.Onestep, they promised,one step and this will be over. These were not shameful, disconnected incidents. They were burning stars in the constellation of my trauma.
The girls smashed me up, broke me apart. But carved open, something I’d never felt before remained: rage. The girls simmered hate, spitting out words through peach-glossed lips, the ends of their hair flashing like knife blades.My hate towards you is uncontrollable, they said.Little girls don’t stay little forever. They return to destroy your world. I hope you burn.
A father asked the judge to grant him five minutes in a locked room with the doctor. The judge declined. The dad launched himself across the courtroom. He was fast for a man of that size, that bulk, a heavy six foot three, he was nearly at the doctor before he was tackled by three guards. ‘Let me have him, I want that son of a bitch, I want that fucker!’ he shouted as he bear-reared against them, they had to twist his neck into a lock and force him to the ground. When they finally pulled him off the ground in handcuffs, he looked at the guards, bewildered. ‘What if this happened to you?’ he asked. He had three daughters, all victims. One was called Lauren. My heart almost burst.
‘I’m not a hero,’ he said at a press conference.
You are.
‘I lost control.’
Someone should.
‘I cannot condone vigilantism,’ said the judge.
Can’t you?
I watched the doctor carefully. I’d seen mugshots of him but hadn’t seen him live, shuffling into the courtroom, unshaven in his faded navy jumpsuit and gold-framed glasses. His facialexpression didn’t vary as the girls spoke. Usually, he sat with his head in his hands or stared into the middle distance, sometimes, he’d shake his head, as if this whole thing was a mistake and he was astonished things had got this far. The girls would ask him question after question and he wouldn’t react, wouldn’t even look up.
Until day four.
He broke down as soon as she stepped to the podium, he had to pull his glasses off to wipe away the onslaught of tears. Sobs convulsed through his body before she even spoke. Her first five words seemed to unravel him completely. ‘Wow,’ she said. ‘What have you done?’ I watched him weep and a thought slithered through me: if Daniel was in that box instead of the doctor, would I be the girl he wept for?Of course you would, he killed for youand then I hated myself, twisted thoughts, twisted heart, hated that I had consumed this terrible mass of suffering when, ultimately, it didn’t really matter. Because it hadn’t touched my innermost self, it hadn’t changed the sick, simple fact that I was, and probably always would be, proud that he loved me.
She said she’d known him nearly all of her life, before he was even a doctor – he was a family friend. He treated her in his apartment, she remembered the light in the kitchen, the egg timer on the toilet, the bathtub. She said they loved him like family. She thought he loved them back.
She told him that based on the time frame that she knew him, her specific injuries and frequency with which she saw him, it was estimated she’d been abused about eight hundred times. My mind reeled from the mathematics of it, the axioms of trauma, the calculations of damage. She thought she was lucky. She thought his wife was lucky. She wished she’d find a man like him.
She was tender to him, she called him ‘my old friend’, but her questions were appalling, to listen to her was to hear the hideousness of my own thoughts:Was I the first? Is that when you went wrong? Or was it always wrong?
She stole glances at him after she’d finished, willing him to answer. But he never did.How can this be the end?I thought.How is this justice?I wanted to march into that courtroom, right up to the movie producer/the doctor/Daniel, drag them into a car and drive away, let it be just us, a gun in my bag, nowhere and anywhere to go.
The thought, when it came, was piercingly clear:I will have this for myself.No judges. No jury. I will take him on a trip. I will draw out the truth from its dark, coiled places, I will extract every terrible detail until my haunting ceases, until there are no more questions, everything is answered. Then, I will tell him my truth. All that’s happened. All I’ve done. All I’m going to do.
When Kit came home that evening, he thought something was wrong because I hadn’t messaged him for a few hours; even at work, we’d send each other regular one-liners: ‘Bruce just walked in with a Kim Jong Un haircut’; ‘My trainee just cried on a call’; ‘Am I a David Brent-esque middle manager?’ But when I wasn’t in our bedroom, he’d flicked on all the lights, searched every level of The Wedge. He found me outside, in the January cold of the garden, relief breaking through the worry of his voice: ‘I’ve looked everywhere for you. I thought something had happened.’
Something has happened.
‘What are you doing?’ he asked, glancing at the snow I’d shovelled away, the overgrown thicket exposed beneath.
‘Just some gardening.’
‘Gardening?’ There was a second when he came close to asking me more, when I almost told him, but then he left it, lifted the hair from my shoulder, made a joke into my neck. ‘Do you have green fingers?’
I kissed his cheek.I have green fingers. I can make all things grow.
From: Kit McDermott