What Goes Around: A chilling psychological thriller by Julie Corbin

to see him hurt. He’s going through a process of change, and change inevitably brings disruption. He’s never wanted to go to therapy before but now that he’s going, I’m well aware of what that could mean. I went to therapy myself as part of my training. It was a prerequisite for my qualification – seek to know yourself before you seek to guide others, see how it feels to be in therapy. Dig, dig deeper. My therapist was, and still is, Maurice van Burren, a patient, intuitive man who encouraged me to see beyond my own carefully constructed self-deception.
    When Maurice and I first met, he was most interested in exploring my childhood, the formative years, not so called for nothing.
    ‘Tell me about your mother,’ he said.
    ‘My mother.’ I pictured her lying in her bed, greasy-haired, hunched under multiple blankets like a woman three times her age, believing she was ill, unloved, abandoned. I pictured her shouting at Mal, flecks of spit landing on his cheek; he was a man lacking in ambition but otherwise perfectly adequate. She was the problem, not him.
    ‘She was weak,’ I told Maurice. ‘She believed her own self-serving delusions. She had no fight. No sense of herself and what she could achieve. She thought she was owed love from those around her. She expected attention and support but she rarely gave anything back. She was one of life’s passengers.’
    Silence. My words hang in the air. Harsh-sounding and judgemental. And as an adult I stand by them because it’s not for me to understand my mother.
    ‘Was that what you saw and felt as a child?’ Maurice said.
    ‘No. As a child I thought she was …’ I paused to travel back in time and find the little girl. I felt myself shrink as I re-inhabited her body, her small hands dexterous enough to make tea and change nappies. Her legs that could only run so fast – sixty-five seconds to the corner shop, and baby David left alone in his crib while she counted out the change. Then running back home, plastic bag banging against her legs, breathless with anxiety in case baby David had choked to death or somehow found his way out of his cot and ended up in the fire.
    But although my body felt smaller, my heart felt larger, stretching like an ever-expanding balloon. ‘I thought my mother was beautiful,’ I told Maurice. ‘When she smiled, my ribcage would swell. When she was sad, I thought it was my fault.’
    Maurice inclined his head. ‘You felt it was your job to make her happy?’
    ‘When she was happy, I was happy. How could I not have seen it as my job?’
    It was a few weeks later that we progressed to talking about siblings.
    ‘One sibling,’ I told him. ‘David. He was born when I was six.’
    More silence … an essential component of therapy. Allow the words to hover in the air to be considered and reconsidered. ‘He saved my life,’ I said. ‘I was never jealous of him.’ I smiled. ‘He gave me purpose.’
    ‘How so?’ Maurice asked me.
    ‘I thought about him constantly. What would I give him for tea? Did he need to see the doctor for his cough? Was it time to toilet-train him? And as he grew older, I listened to him read, practise his tables, learn the world’s capitals. I was the goalie to his striker. I was the giver of treats and the taker of his pain.’
    ‘All of this a parent’s responsibility, surely?’
    ‘David was always on my mind. And that was a good thing because when Gareth came along—’ I shifted in my seat ‘—I needed to keep my thoughts busy elsewhere.’
    ‘Elsewhere?’
    ‘Gareth moved in when I was eight. He took over the house.’ I stared past Maurice and out into his back garden, where one of his granddaughters sat on a blanket on the grass while his wife hung up washing. ‘I didn’t want him occupying my head too.’
    It was almost a year before I allowed Maurice to return to the subject of Gareth. I poured the truth out over four sessions and knew I’d never revisit it again. It informed my