Page 33 of (Not So) Mad About You

Bea’s heart cracked a little bit. If Charles’s story was true, he really didn’t need to be here.

“That’s a shit deal,” Marcus said. The others agreed with him.

Bea eyed his tattoos and bulky arms before deciding she might as well jump in at the deep end now that she’d got her feet wet. “How about you, Marcus? What brings you here?”

He squinted as though trying to remember something, then said: “I was in a fight in a pub and my parole officer recommended the program to make a good impression on the judge.”

Bea considered following up the parole officer issue but then rethought things as Julia and Izzy both slid their chairs discreetly further from Marcus’s. “Okay, thank you for sharing. Julia?”

The older woman smiled brightly. “Oh, thank you for asking, dear. Let’s see. Right. I got into an altercation with someone at bingo.” Her expression darkened slightly. “Not that I normally play bingo, it was a one off, you understand.”

For a moment, Bea paused, thinking that perhaps there was more to the story, but apparently not, since Julia just sat there beaming. Bea found it hard to picture Julia in any kind of altercation, though to be fair it was a lot easier to picture her in a bingo hall. As far as Bea had seen, Julia was kind and gentle, and had been a patient teacher when the group was baking biscuits.

“Right,” she said finally. “Okay. Izzy?”

Izzy went red. “I don’t want to say.”

“You don’t have to,” Bea said immediately. “But it might makeyou feel a bit better.”

“We all had to say,” Marcus grumbled.

“Yeah, it’s only fair,” put in Charles.

“Fine,” Izzy said. She took a deep breath. “I get angry with my children and my husband and I thought it best that I complete a program before anything gets out of hand.” She sounded like she was talking through gritted teeth.

“That sounds…” Bea really wanted to say that it actually sounded like a lie. Izzy talked incessantly about her kids, and in a way that made it obvious that she was crazy about them. But then, Bea wasn’t a therapist. What did she know? “That sounds like a very considerate plan,” she went with in the end.

She turned to Leslie, the quietest member of the group. So quiet that Bea often found her eyes glided over the woman like she wasn’t there. “How about you?” she asked gently.

Leslie shrugged. “Get angry,” was all she said. Which was fair enough, really. Bea decided not to dig any further into that one.

Which left just one.

“Alli?”

“What?” Alli said, glancing up but very much avoiding eye contact.

“Would you like to share with the group why you’re here?”

“By mistake, obviously,” Alli said.

All eyes were on her and Bea found herself feeling bad for Alli. “Could you maybe tell us what kind of mistake?”

Alli sighed and rolled her eyes. “Obviously, I get angry, but I have to. It’s a part of my job. If I didn’t get angry, people would just walk all over me, and no one wants that, do they? So I really shouldn’t be here. I don’t need to stop being angry. It’s… productive anger.”

“Ah.” Bea didn’t quite know what to say about that. She decided to turn things over to the group. “Can anger be productive, do we think?”

Surprisingly, the others calmly conducted a discussion about when anger was and wasn’t appropriate, and what benefits it could have. Alli included. Bea sat back in her chair and listened.There were some fair points being made about repressing feelings being bad for your health, and about the repercussions of losing your temper and how that might be different from just feeling anger.

“You can’t just never get angry,” Alli said. “That’s impossible.”

“But you could never lose your temper,” Marcus countered. “Like it’s alright to be angry, but you shouldn’t take it out on someone that doesn’t deserve it.”

“I tell my kids that all the time,” Izzy said.

“What if someone does deserve it, though?” Alli asked.

“Like a serial killer or something,” Charles said.

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