An Encounter Group

An Extract from 'Orange' Cherry Coombe 2010

An Encounter Group

(from 'Orange' by Cherry Coombe, 2010: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Orange-Cherry-Coombe/dp/1466358025)

The leader, Brian, 31, Americanised-Glaswegian, scrawny, balding and pony tailed, wore faded Levis and a matching shirt.  He came with: a Zippo lighter; 60 Players Navy Cut and Mark and Miah his ‘trainees’.  Miah ticked off deposits and collected the rest while Mark checked addresses for mail-shots and took £2-75 extra for vegetarian food to be provided by Tim who we’d only see in the breaks.

At midnight, twenty of us sat in a circle.  Cushions on stained green Axminster.  The room, knocked through to extend from front to back of the North London terrace, was hot, sticky and tawdry.  Buckets stood in four corners, the only other furniture a blackboard and two boxes of tissues.  Inner hardboard window-shutters bowed against foam sandwiched between them and the glass.   

            Miah rang a bell. 

            “Midnight. Time. Quiet.” It was already very quiet.

“I’m Miah and I’ll read the rules.  I’d like anyone who feels they can’t respect the rules to raise their hand. And, not now, thank you.”

A fat man in dungarees interrupted.

            “It says in the brochure”

Brian was on his feet, flanked by Miah and Mark who were frowning and nodding.

            “Shut the fuck-up, motherfucker,” roared Brian. “Didn’t your mummy ever tell you, you can’t just have what the fuck you want whenever the fuck you wan it? Huh?  Ring some bells does it, fat boy?  Si-down and wait your turn like the rest of these fucked-up neurotics here.  Miah.”

Brian sat down.  The fat man put a fruit pastille in his mouth and Miah carried on.

            “Hands up for those with questions. The rules are: no eating, except when we send you for a food meditation; no leaving the room except when we tell you; if you need to pee, shit or throw up at any other time, use the buckets; no violence; no sex, drugs or alcohol and no leaving before the end of the experience. OK?”

A woman in pink fluff with ironed jeans and full make up had her hand up.

            “Yes,” said Miah. “Your question?”

            “I don’t think there’s any need for Brian to swear and to be insolent to someone he’s never met before.  Do you?”

Miah wasn’t having anything of it.

            “Listen, lady.  I invited questions regarding the rules and I’m not interested in your hostile invitation for me to collude with your neurosis and deny you an experience of a new way of life here with Brian.” She was starting to shout now. 

Mark was pacing the ring on the outside. Miah went on,

“Do you have a problem with the rules?”

“No.  It’s just that”

Mark had just reached her space and yelled in her left ear,

            “You can take your ‘just that’ and shove it up your arse.  Have you got that?”

The woman, who looked as if she already had enough up her arse, piped down and Miah nodded.  Fat man stuck another fruit pastille in his mouth but not much got past Miah,

“I said no eating.  Do you get that?”

She held out a bucket in front of his cushion.  He put his fruit pastilles in the bucket and the mousy man next to him pulled a small bottle of vodka out of his pocket and slipped that in too. Brian got up.

            “Right. OK Miah, Mark.  Thanks.  Now.  My name’s Brian.  I’m the group leader, an ex addict, trained to run encounter groups with Veeresh at The Second Chance Foundation. I know what’s going on.  You don’t.  Nobody challenges me.  We’re here to look at your dirty arses not mine.  I don’t give a fuck about what you think. I’m only interested in your feelings. By the way, I’m the only person that’s going to be smoking in here.  If you don’t like it, you know what you can do. If you want to maintain your stuck position and resist me you can waste your £25 and break the rules.  Do that and you leave.  No refunds. If you want to go, go now.”

There was a pause. Terry, across from me and to Brian’s right, snarled.  I put my finger across my mouth, terrified he was going to get a bollocking. Brian stared at me and said scathingly,

“What’s the matter, Daddy’s little girl?  Past your bedtime is it?  Wanna go home?”

“No, I”

“Yeah right. Hang it on the wall. You may all now go for a pee break.  The group reconvenes at half past twelve, ten minutes from now. Leave your watches outside.  We don’t need any control freaks, right? There’s a clock in the piss-house. Be ready to start, on time and no fucking around. Oh, yeah, and no talking on the break. OK?”      

There was a mad scramble for two toilets in a shrinking terraced house even though we’d only been there half an hour.  I squeezed Terry’s hand on the stairs but he didn’t smile and I started to cry.  The place stank of farting and Barley Cup.  Nothing would flush and it felt like being in a war.

            ‘Structures’ divided the hours.  At first we shared ‘hidden agendas’ and Mark used the blackboard to illustrate a ‘Jo-Hari’ window which proved that if you told other people what you really thought and didn’t avoid swearing they would be blessed with a glimpse of the x-factor which dominated their lives. Miah drew pictures of The Accepter, an oral and thus a fat personality that would dash across the road of life without thinking of the consequences.  The Rejecter looked like Brian, I thought, and was anally retentive and so missed out on crossing the road at all.  We were all there, I assumed, to learn the green cross code.

            There was plenty of shouting and screaming and we all had image names.  Mine stuck at ‘Daddy’s Little Girl’, which hurt a lot since I thought I was a grown-up who’d been acting, not being, Snow White.  Fatty was ‘Angel Delight’ and Mrs Pink was ‘Syrup on Shit’.  Terry was ‘Jail Bird’ which I thought was cool but he hated it because his mother was in prison. He and I became best friends with ‘Donkey Dick’ and ‘Cling-on’ after an eating meditation we did with them which meant feeding each other Tim’s bananary yoghurty datey crunchy pudding while blindfolded. 

There were male/female role reversals and master and slave games and times when we had to run round the room in circles screaming “get out of my way you cunt” at the person in front of us.  It was lucky I’d spent the summer in Wales learning not to be middle-class.  Only one person, a Brazilian woman called “Wannabe”, ahead of her time with pierced nipples, pissed in the bucket.  She got it in the neck from Syrup on Shit who thought she should learn some decorum who in turn got a rollicking from Donkey Dick who thought that Syrup should get over her fear of fellatio, right there and then. Luckily Angel Delight remembered the ‘no sex’ rule so Miah and Mark organised a synchronised ‘trust your orgasm’ exercise which involved getting Syrup to jump from the top of a tall step-ladder into the arms of the group. I heard she later got-off with a man who specialised in ladders for Travis Perkins, West Hampstead.

            Two days and no sleep later we spent the last two hours of the group in a synanon encounter circle, a technique derived from Phoenix House Therapeutic Community for the heroin-addicted-personality, New York, and adapted to the needs of the Normal Healthy Neurotic owner-of-a-cheque-book, Hampstead.  Naked, we made two firm fists and eye contact and when Mark said “go” we started screaming abuse at the person we faced. The racket ricocheted back into the room from the hardboard foam as we moved from face to face, encouraged by Mark and Brian who prodded us from outside the circle with two foam batons (used earlier by a woman to thrash a cushion, representing her mother, to death).

“Get to everybody,” encouraged Mark. “Don’t sell yourself short.”

“Really take a risk.  All you’ve got to lose is your image,” screamed Brian.

Miah, a junior trainee, had to join in but she said it was a privilege and a perk of the job.  She told me I was a hostile, ice-cream-puke of a puppy-fatted, spotty child and I told her that her tits made me sick. Terry, spitting fire, told me I was a middle-class twat and I told him he was thick and crap in bed, only one of which I knew for sure.

Sweat ran down the walls. Mark rang the bell, dimmed the lights and put Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On? on the cassette player (which Tim had left in the kitchen with a note to tell us that it had been very special cooking for twenty people in a kitchen the size of a Fiat 124).  Brian transformed into kindness itself and crooned,

“You are loveable for who you are.  Tell the person in front of you what you need.”

Someone who’d been before said,

“I need love” and all at once and in the arms of strangers we realised that everyone, even Syrup on Shit, is loveable for who they are and not for what they do.