‘I was having trouble.’
‘Trouble in college?’
‘It was just headaches, in the beginning. When I woke up in the morning, the headache would just be there, waiting for me. But then I started to feel nauseous in lectures. I thought I was sick, or something. I thought maybe I had a tumour. In my brain.’ Alexis laughed; a tight, unnatural chuckle.
‘But you didn’t have a tumour?’
‘No, but I didn’t know that, did I? I just thought, there must be something physical wrong. My roommate, Beth, said I should get checked out so I went to the health centre, and I saw the doctor, and they sent me for all these tests. Blood tests. All that. Even sent me for an MRI. But everything was normal. And then I started to... you know...’ Alexis gestured towards her chest and started to breathe in an exaggerated rasp.
‘You started to hyperventilate?’ Judith took notes. She didn’t need them, not with the sound equipment running, but some witnesses did better when her attention was one step removed.
‘Exactly. In lectures. I’ve never been claustrophobic but it felt just like how they describe. Like the walls were closing in. Like I couldn’t get out. So I stopped going to lectures completely, and my friend Beth said I needed to see someone. Like, a shrink kind of someone. So I went back to the health centre. They sent me to a psychologist.’
Judith’s pen stilled.
‘Which psychologist?’
‘Robert Walker.’
The name washed over Judith like cold water over feverish skin. Her mouth was suddenly dry. She reached out and took a sip from her horrible coffee. Alexis must have caught the change in mood. For the first time in the interview, she looked straight at Judith. She took in Judith’s face and frowned.
‘What happened to you?’
Judith shook her head and took another steadying sip of coffee. The flavour was toxic but grounding. ‘It’s nothing for you to worry about. You said were referred to Doctor Walker?’
‘He’s not a doctor. He’s a clinical psychologist. Which means he had to do a degree, sure, but he’s not a medical doctor.’
‘Did you tell anyone that you’d made an appointment with Mr Walker?’
‘You think I wanted all of my friends to know that I was losing it? You think I want the people I care about to think I can’t handle my own shit? Of course I didn’t tell anyone.’
‘Except Beth.’
‘What?’
‘You must have told Beth. She was the one who said you should see someone. About your panic attacks.’
‘Right. I told Beth. She thought it was great that I was seeing someone. She thought it would help.’
‘Okay. I’m sorry, Alexis. I know this must be hard to talk about. But can you walk me through everything that happened at Robert Walker’s office?’
‘He calls them his rooms. Not his offices. And I’m fine to talk about it. His rooms are on Haines Street. My appointment was on Friday. I got there at a quarter past nine because his receptionist said I should come in ten minutes early, and then it was raining so I got the bus.’
‘Did the receptionist let you in?’
‘Yeah. She asked me to sit in the waiting room. After a while he came out with another patient. Client. And he asked me to go in and take a seat.’
‘He introduced himself?’
‘Yeah. All of that. He gave his name, I gave mine. Whatever. Did you think I had mixed him up? You think I came here to make a complaint about the wrong guy?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
Alexis had been at a slow simmer when Judith had come into the room. Now she was more agitated, shifting in her seat, worrying at her sleeves, almost twitching with pent-up energy as her speech came faster and faster. Was she on something? It was a possibility. There was something a little manic about her.
‘He introduced himself. Okay? And we went inside his room, and he closed the door and he sat in a seat in the far corner of the room, and he had his notebook, and I sat on the other chair, and he asked me questions. It was all completely normal in the beginning. He asked all the stuff that you’d expect. What I’d been feeling. What I’d been thinking about before I started to panic, all the usual shit. The worst part of it is that I actually liked him. He had a sense of humour. He made a couple of jokes. I’m not saying he was like, hysterical, or anything. I didn’t really laugh, but it seemed like he was a normal guy. Down to earth. He didn’t seem like he looked down on me.’
Memory is a strange thing. There are memories that you strive so hard to hold on to and the tighter you hold on, the faster they fade. And others you try again and again to bury and they stay as they always have been, painfully clear. For a moment, Judith experienced a profound sense of déjà vu. Alexis was still there, still in the room, but she was overlaid onto another girl who had sat in front of Judith in a room just like this one, ten years before. Judith knew exactly what Alexis was going to say. Every word of it.