The girls at work soon picked up on the fact that something had gone terribly wrong between Mark and I; the first and most obvious thing they noted was that he no longer came to see me; after two years of almost daily visiting me for lunch, and collecting me at day’s end, suddenly he was conspicuous by his absence; also, a couple of times one of the girls had come into my office unexpectedly and found me crying, so they knew that we’d broken up, but nothing else. I had taken to closing my office door firmly, I wanted to be left alone to work, I was in no mood to discuss something so personal, and they knew me better than to ask.
Eventually, it was Doreen, of all people, who worked up the nerve to confront me about my misery, to try and get me to talk about it with a sympathetic ear, and try and get me out of my depression.
One afternoon, about a month after it had all gone so horribly wrong, there was a soft knock at my door, and before I could say anything, Doreen had slipped inside and shut the door behind her.
“Jules, we need to talk” she said, before I could say a word. I just looked at her, unable to think of anything I wanted to discuss with anyone that wasn’t work-related.
“Doreen, I’m very busy, is this about work? Because I’m not really interested…” I began, but she cut me off.
“Jules, what happened with you and Mark? You lock yourself in here, you walk around like a zombie, you don’t talk to anyone, and we don’t see him anymore; plus, I know you’ve changed addresses, and we’ve all seen and heard you crying in here. Whatever happened, you can’t keep it all bottled up, and you can’t keep us locked out; we’re your friends, and we’re worried.”
I tried to tell her to mind her own business, and instead the tears started again. Doreen led me away from my desk and sat with me on the little couch in my office, letting me cry while she hugged me and waited for the tears to ease-off.
When I stopped crying, she looked me in the eye. “All right, Jules, now talk to me!” she commanded, and I did, telling her everything, except the one searing fact at the core of the whole story, the thing I knew would disgust her; that Mark was my brother, that I’d slept with him, done things with him that I never dreamed of doing with any man, and he’d abandoned me. Doreen picked up on that gaping hole in my story, and tried to make sense of it from my disjointed account of what had happened, and the more I told her, the more confused and muddled my story became, as I tried to gloss over what had really happened.
“Jules, none of this makes sense, you tell me your mother kicked you out over Mark, and that he left you, why? What did your mother have to do with Mark, and why… Oh!”
I looked at her fearfully, realising she’d just made the connection.
She looked at me quizzically. ” I suppose I should have guessed, I mean, in hindsight, it was right out there in the open; from some angles you even looked a little alike, I just never bothered to look at the two of you; I was too busy looking at him!” she grinned. “You have to admit, he was worth looking at! So what happened, your mother found out, and blew a gasket, yes?”
I nodded miserably, unable to look her in the eye.
“So why didn’t he just give her the finger and take you away? I mean, he was into you in a big way, everyone could see that, it made us all very jealous!”
I started crying again.
“Dor, I don’t know, one minute he’s telling me he loves me, that I’m the one for him, that we’ll always be together, a few minutes later he’s looking through me while she’s screaming at me that she should have got rid of me with a coat hanger, and throwing me out the door, at the same time praising him for being a good boy and apologising to her! I was so scared, and he never even batted an eyelid! The fucker used me, screwed me every way he could, and watched me leave without even a twitch of his fucking eyebrow!”
Doreen was shocked. “Your own mother said that? About the coat hanger… Oh my God, what a thing to say! Oh Jules, why didn’t you say something, anything, I would have been there for you! At least your friend was there for you when it happened.”
I tried explaining how ashamed I was of what I’d done, of sleeping with my own brother, that I felt used and abandoned, and lost and frightened, I didn’t want anyone to know, it was such a disgusting thing, that I was horrified with myself for ever letting myself get sucked in so deep… and that I still loved him, even though he’d treated me like a cheap whore.
I was in tears again, and once again Doreen was there to give me a real shoulder to cry on. Eventually I got myself under control, and I asked her what she was going to tell the others.
She looked at me sideways. “Me? Nothing, unless you want me to. It’s not your fault you fell in love with him, but he deserves to burn for taking advantage of you and your feelings like that. Telling you he loves you to get in your pants is an old trick, all guys do it at some point, and you fell for it, because it usually works, but the fault lies with him, not you; you were his little sister, for God’s sake! He knew exactly what he was doing, and he’s going to burn for it; one day he’ll find out what it costs to do things like this to people like you!” she finished fiercely, eyes blazing, and I could tell just how angry she was.
She visibly calmed herself, and grinned at me. “You’re coming with me, to a place I know not far from here, they do the best cure for what ails you right now — shots, lots of them, followed by more shots! Come on, Jules, get your face on, we’re getting shit-faced! Who knows, we might even find a karaoke Bar and make complete arses of ourselves!”
I didn’t really feel like drinking, but she seemed eager to get me into a bar, and it would be nice to do something other than going back to my place and crying, which was my usual evening pastime these days.