Free All in the Mind by Campbell Alastair

place she visited once a year, each time feeling less of a desire to go back to settle, as she used to imagine she would.
    Once she was a rape victim herself, she thought of little else but the consequences of it. She was tormented by questions. Had Besa suffered lasting damage as a result of what happened, or would she be able to forget, provided the reminders were taken away? What was her husband really feeling beneath the attempts to sympathise and support her? Did he feel at fault in not having been there to protect her? Was there a part of him that felt she should have been able to fight off her attacker, cry for help, take greater risks than she had to alert neighbours and passers-by on the walkway outside their front door? Would he ever be able to make love to her again without thinking that someone else had been there and hurt the only woman he had ever truly loved? Would she? And finally, the question that took her to Professor Sturrock’s brown leather armchair on the sixth floor of the Le Gassick wing at the Prince Regent Hospital: would she ever be able to sleep again, without the rapist intruding night after night into her dreams?
    As she sat on the bus, desperately trying to recollect details from the dreams of the last week, she calculated that the rapist had entered her subconscious on every night but one. He had raped her twice, once on Sunday, in a muddy field in pouring rain, with Arta feeling she was sinking into the ground, and she wanted the sun to come out and bake the mud into a coffin shape and take her to her death; and the second time on Tuesday, when he raped her in the hallway, watched by his accomplice, Besa and Lirim. Yet she was just as scared by his presence in the dreams where he didn’t rape her, where he just looked and smirked and insulted her.
    Professor Sturrock had told her his task was to help her to accept what had happened, to help her to believe her life could be good again, persuade her that, with time, the memory and the pain could fade. But no matter how many times he told her there was no shame attached to what had happened, she felt it.
    They talked about the kind of dreams she’d had before the rape. She struggled to recall any in detail. In so far as she had a recurring dream, it was of their journey to England, where they were carrying all their possessions in canvas bags, climbing a long, stony hill, reaching the summit only to find that it wasn’t the summit at all but a short plateau before the hill stretched upwards again, ahead of them a single file of humanity fleeing fear and persecution, their certain knowledge of the reality of both sufficient to keep their feet shuffling forward. Alban was thirsty but she had no milk or water to give him.
    ‘Did you ever reach England?’ Professor Sturrock asked.
    ‘Not in the dreams,’ she said. ‘Only in real life.’
    ‘So life can be better than our dreams,’ he suggested.
    Arta knew that her homework this week was not as good as either of them would want it to be. She preferred to type it up and email it to him, but today was still scribbling in her large handwriting as the bus ground its way into the centre of town. She was always nervous on the bus, especially the first part of the journey from the Elephant, worried that some of her friends might see her. They knew what had happened to her, and had been as supportive as they could be, but there was a limit to what friends could do. In any event, she didn’t like to talk to them about it, especially now that a little time had passed, and she didn’t want anyone but Lirim and her GP to know that she had weekly sessions with a psychiatrist. Should she bump into anyone she knew, they would ask her where she was going, just to be polite, and she would feel she had to say something truthful. She thought that ‘into town’ would be OK, but then they might ask ‘what to do?’ and she’d feel obliged to say she was going for a medical appointment, taking the