Glittering Gallows

Chapter 43

267 C Chapter 43 eidi Gaynor woke up at noon very exhausted. She kept yawning and stretching her arms as she lay in bed. It wasn’t typical of her to wake up at that hour whether she had gone to bed early or late. Her boss would be angry with her, she thought. But she was vaguely conscious of an abnormality on her. What was amiss? She felt herself under the blankets, lifted them briefly and, aghast, looked at her body. She was completely naked, she realised, shuddering. How could she wake up naked when she had gone to bed in her panties and a T-shirt? Or was she making a mistake? Could she have removed her clothes when she was in a state of absentmindedness? She sat up, propping up her knees under the blankets. Unconsciously, she massaged the middle toe of her right foot as she fruitlessly tried to reconstruct from memory the moment she removed the T-shirt and the under garment. She remembered removing the stilettos, a risqué pencil-skirt and a sleeveless top that displayed the cleavage in her bosom, pent hose suspension stockings and a brassiere, and thinking that Hon. Moagi Makgunda was a gentleman unmindful of her clothing tastes. Then she had slipped into a white T-shirt and quickly got into bed afraid her addiction to self-abuse might tempt her to pleasure herself with the accessories in her bag. She had fallen asleep almost immediately, her custom. Heidi had no recollection of removing the T-shirt and the panties. However, she took solace from the fact that no one else could’ve undressed her except herself. But how could she be certain? Was the door still locked? She left the bed for the door, but staggered and became aware of a throbbing ache in her groin. Looking back, she hadn’t engaged in self-abuse the previous night. She tried the door handle. The door was locked. She was perplexed. H 268 If she removed the clothes, where did she put them? There weren’t on the chair as was the attire she had worn throughout the day yesterday. Her eyes roamed the bed and the floor; nothing. She staggered to the closet and pulled a door open. The T-shirt and the pair of panties were neatly folded and stacked aside on a shelf. She had no memory of folding and stacking them. And it was very much unlike her to fold and neatly stow away a worn inner garment. What was happening to her? Why was she tired and wobbly? Was she becoming a dissociative? A disbelieving pearl of laughter escaped from her lips. If indeed she had undressed herself, as was likely since the door was locked and nothing proved otherwise, it frightened her that she was developing memory lapses. Was her sad and undomesticated upbringing catching up with her? Thinking in circles, she fixed her eyes on the wall. As a victim of sexual abuse afraid of consequences, she had read snippets of material she found on early childhood trauma. Psychiatrists and clinical psychologist wrote articles in newspapers and magazines explaining two psychological manoeuvres rampart in chronically abused children. About MPD, multiple personality disorder, and outof -body experiences or split-personality disorder, she had read. Now what she gleaned on the subject was coming to a head within her. She feared that as a reaction to the abusive scars in her, another personality was beginning to rise within her, subdue her true self and do things which she couldn’t explain when she became herself. The second manoeuvre coming to the fore was the subtle automatic creation of an amnesia screen that protected a victim from remembering the trauma. Heidi feared she was possibly suffering from any one of the two protective manoeuvres; hence the memory lapse. But she wasn’t a psychologist and, from what she read, other psychological schools of thought doubted the existence of MPD as unethical psychology for the production of blockbuster movies. At the end of two months, now that she was gainfully employed and money had begun to accrue in her purse, she would consult a clinical psychologist in Johannesburg or Pretoria for a conclusive diagnosis. 269 From experts, she hoped to find help or none at all. To be healed inside didn’t mean she would become the person she would’ve developed into if the...