by Helene Flood
“Grandpa?”
In the end, I was the one to find him; he lay there with his face on the map. His skin was grey and rugged, dry as leather and just as lifeless, and mottled with haematomas in the way that long-dead human bodies often are. It’s an image I wish I could unsee. The yellow nails that looked as if they might drop off; the vertebrae of the neck about to pierce the dead, parchment-like skin. The heavy, stifling smell of decomposing flesh. I’ve hardly been in the command centre since. Perhaps the distressing circumstances of his death were in part what made Margrethe decide to give us the house.
We wanted to renovate the property as soon as possible; peel the old man off the walls, empty the house of him and make it our own. Sigurd created drawings; I drew up a budget. Our new-found financial freedom gave us opportunities. Some of Sigurd’s former student friends wanted to open their own architectural firm, and had invited Sigurd to join them. We no longer had a mortgage or service charge to pay, and the sale of our apartment provided the sum Sigurd needed to buy himself into the firm. I was unhappy in my job in the health service, working with young people suffering from mental illness; we now had enough space to create an office for me at home. The house was the start of something new for us. Four days before we moved in we went down to the courthouse in Oslo and got married, eating cake at the local bakery afterwards with my sister and Sigurd’s two best friends and their partners. It didn’t change anything – we’d still be us – but we wanted to have the paperwork in order. On our first night in the house we slept on an air mattress in the living room. We toasted ourselves with glasses of prosecco, and told each other, “The rest of our lives starts now.”
But Old Torp would prove harder to get rid of than we’d imagined. The renovations took time, as did getting started at our new respective workplaces. Sigurd was working a lot of overtime, and our plan to redecorate primarily required him – his expertise, his practical hands. We had set out overenthusiastic and full of energy, ripping off the wallpaper in strips, tearing up the tiles in the bathroom. We managed to get some things done, such as fitting a new kitchen and creating a home office for me above the garage. Then we started to lose momentum. Sigurd took on more clients, worked longer days, sat bent over his drawing board. Winter came, the days becoming colder and darker, draining us of energy. When we got home from work we could no longer be bothered to paint; to go to Maxbo to look at showerheads or taps or to find tiles. We failed to mix any filler, failed to pull off the last strips of wallpaper, instead dropping onto the old sofa we had brought with us from Torshov and watching T.V. Sigurd often didn’t get home until late in the evening, stooped and tired, with the document tube dangling from his shoulder.
“In the summer,” we said. “We’ll spend the summer holidays doing up the house.” That’s around three months away, and the fact that I’ve lost faith worries me. Something else is bound to happen, and then we’ll say “in the autumn”, and then the weather will turn cold and we’ll have yet another long winter in which I tiptoe around barefoot, my feet stiff and heavy as frozen clubs on the pallets on the bathroom floor.
I run my practice from the floor above the garage, where I have a tiny waiting room containing a shoe rack, a straight-backed chair and a minuscule table with magazines, and then a door that leads into my office. Vera is sitting on the straight-backed chair, a magazine open in her lap, but I suspect she isn’t reading it. She looks up as I enter.
“Hello, Doctor,” she says. She looks refreshed, and is sporting a new haircut.
“Hello,” I say. “Just a moment, and then I’ll . . . I’ll come out and call you.”
“Alright,” she says obligingly, one eyebrow arched in the ex-pression I most often see her wearing – it complements the touch of sarcasm she adds to most of her remarks.
I go into my office and close the door behind me to prevent Vera’s gaze from following me, from tainting everything I do.
Sigurd has done a great job with the office. It isn’t very big, and the sloping ceiling made the optimal use of space the main concern. He knocked out one of the shorter walls, the one facing the driveway, and replaced it with glass. My two chairs are set there – two fine Arne Jacobsen armchairs, with a small table between them. When we sit there, my patients and I, we sit in the brightest part of the room. In the ceiling above us, Sigurd has installed a Velux window, so that natural light can enter through the ceiling, too. A couple of lamps make the nook cosy and welcoming, regardless of the autumn storms and freezer-box winters. Against the other short wall, the one that separates my office from the waiting room, Sigurd has placed my little white desk, and hung shelves along the walls all the way up to the ceiling on either side of the door to create plenty of space for my books and ring binders. The short wall and floor are panelled in pale, warm wood; the two taller walls are painted white, and the overall effect is so modern, so friendly. I’ve positioned a couple of plants where the sloped ceiling nears the floor, and although it’s admittedly difficult to keep them alive – it gets cold in here when I turn off the electric heater for the day – they provide a certain atmosphere. “You can breathe in here,” the room says. “In here, you can be yourself. Nothing you say in this room will be judged, repeated or ridiculed.” That’s what I had wanted – an office that would invite my patients in. And that’s exactly what Sigurd gave me. I have to give him that.
But now Vera is sitting out there waiting for me and a tiredness starts to squeeze around the base of my throat. I don’t want to invite her into my office. I sit down at my desk, turn on the computer – I’ll read my notes from her last visit, although strictly speaking I don’t need to, I remember what we talked about during the session. I’m playing for time – want to delay the moment at which I have to go out and tell her she can come in. Why am I doing this? I’m not sure – or perhaps I don’t want to think about it. Therapists care about their patients, and I care about Vera, but there’s no escaping the fact that our con-versations are hard work.
Difficulties with parents, say my notes from our last session. Difficulties with boyfriend. Vera’s problems are relational. She started coming to see me just after Christmas for help with a depressive reaction. She’s of well above average intelligence – perhaps even gifted – so everything bores her. “I’m just so tired of everything,” Vera said in our first session when I asked her to tell me why she had come to see me, “it just seems as if nothing matters or means anything anymore.” Her boyfriend, it turns out, is a married man. Her parents are researchers who are trying to solve a mathematical theorem only a handful of people in the world are familiar with – they’re always at work and often away. Her siblings are grown-up and have long since left home, and Vera, eighteen and wise beyond her years, says that the family was already complete when she arrived. Her parents had not wanted more children. She was an accident.
There’s a lot to unpack here – there is real pain in Vera’s life. But it’s such tough material to work with.
I check my e-mails, killing time before I let her in. Mostly advertising, nothing personal. For the briefest moment I want to call Sigurd, but that’s silly, it’s five to nine, he’ll still be in the car with his friends. I take a deep breath. Three patients, and then it will be the weekend. The entire evening alone. Lunch with my sister on Sunday, otherwise no plans. Except to go to the gym, perhaps.
“Ready, Doctor?” Vera asks when I go out to tell her she can come in.
This calling me “Doctor” is something Vera started doing in our second session. She asked me about the difference between a psychologist and a psychiatrist, and I told her that I’m a psychologist, not a doctor – that I specialise in how the whole person functions, not just the pathology – but she got hung up on this and said, “So you’re not a real doctor, then?” Irritatingly, I let this bother me, let the remark prod at an inferiority complex I didn’t think I had, because I answered – a little defensively – that I knew as much as any doctor abo
ut what goes on in people’s heads, at which she laughed, and said, “That’s O.K., I’ll call you ‘Doctor’.” I feel a stab of discomfort every time she says it: a prickling feeling at the back of my throat that tells me I’ve revealed too much. Sometimes I ask myself whether she understands that it bothers me – whether it’s a passive-aggressive move on her part – but she seems genuine enough. Just playful.
I let her into the room ahead of me. Vera is a little taller than average, slim, with straight hips. Her hands are quite large, hanging there like pendulums at her sides, and I look at her and ask myself – as women always do when they meet other women – is she pretty? Yes, averagely sweet. Young. But there’s also something peculiar about her; her round little face, her long body.
“Well,” Vera says as she takes a seat. “I’ve had a fight with Mamma and Pappa. And argued with Lars.”
“I see,” I say, settling into my chair. “Tell me what happened.”
The waking sun is visible in the Velux window as Vera speaks, illuminating her hair and making it halo-like, all the hundreds of curly, flyaway hairs that have broken free from her otherwise slicked-back hairstyle. All girls have these kinds of unruly, flyaway hairs, I think. I have plenty of them myself – more than Vera has.
The pattern in what she’s telling me is straightforward: Vera feels rejected by her parents, who have so many important things to do that they don’t have time for her. Since she’s unable to tell them how upset she is, nothing is more satisfying than a confrontation with them – afterwards, feeling even more rejected, Vera calls her boyfriend and starts another argument. The married boyfriend goes home to his wife after they hang up regardless of what happens, so in the unprovoked argument there’s no doubt that Vera will be rejected – this is how Vera takes the intolerable feeling of not being prioritised by her parents and reframes it within more tolerable limits with her boyfriend. Half an hour into our session I share this observation with her.
“I don’t know,” Vera says, wrinkling her nose. “Isn’t that a bit easy? Like, a bit Freudian or something?”
“So is it correct to say that you don’t think that’s the case?”
She looks over at my bookcase, as if trying out my interpret-ation. Her fingers pluck at the bracelet on her wrist, a thin silver bracelet with a single pearl dangling from it. She rolls the pearl around between her index finger and thumb. The piece of jewellery is too grown-up for her, I think. The girls who come to see me often wear jewellery bearing letters; they adorn themselves with words like love or trust or eternity. This bracelet might belong to a middle-aged woman.
“I don’t know. I hope not. I really don’t think I called Lars just because I wanted to feel bad. I think I did feel bad, and wanted to feel better.”
“I understand,” I say. “And so you ended up feeling even worse than you already did.”
“Yeah,” she says, and sighs deeply. “So it wasn’t such a good strategy, you might say.”
“What might have been a good strategy, do you think?”
“To help me feel better? I don’t know. I only ever come up with bad strategies.”
“Such as?”
“Self-harm,” she says. “Isn’t that the classic one? There’s a girl in my class who does it. She blogs about it, too – takes pictures of her wounds and posts them online, it’s crazy. But that’s not my style. Unless you count Lars as self-harming, I suppose.”
This last reflection is an invitation, but I let it lie. She wants to talk about her boyfriend, needs to discuss the relationship with someone and has nobody else in whom she can confide. But he is not the cause of her pain. As I see it, the boyfriend is a symptom, while the cause of Vera’s depression lies deeper, in the things she doesn’t want to talk about. Those are the things we have to explore. My body still feels sleepy; I fight the urge to stretch in my chair. Through the window behind Vera I can see that the mist is lifting – it’s going to be a nice day.
“You were upset after the fight with your parents,” I say. “You wanted to feel better, so instead of self-harming or doing something similarly stupid, you chose to do something that could have been effective – you reached out for support from someone. The problem is that you chose someone you knew would reject you. So what I’m wondering is, what if you’d tried to reach out to someone else?”
“Like who?”
“I don’t know. Someone you can trust. A friend, for example.”
“A friend,” Vera says, her voice heavy.
“Do you have any friends, Vera?”
She looks at me – is she weighing me up? A kind of challenge suddenly flashes in her eyes.
“I have lots of friends. God, I’ve got tons of them – more than I need. But do you know what the problem is?”
“No,” I say. “What is the problem?”
“They’re idiots. Every last one of them.”
“I see,” I say, thinking for a moment, reflecting this back. “Then they don’t sound like very good friends.”
She inhales, her face softening.
“O.K., maybe not idiots, exactly. But they just don’t understand. The girls in my class – you have no idea. They read beauty blogs and plan end-of-year parties and think the world’s most important skill is to be able to pluck your eyebrows just so. Y’know? If you ask them about love they start going on about that one guy in the other class they messed around with at a party. What kind of help would I get from them?”
“It sounds as if, although you have plenty of people around you, you don’t have very many you can turn to for support,” I say.
“I have Lars.”
“Yes. But Lars is something other than a friend. It sounds a little lonely, in a way?”
She doesn’t like this perspective, I can tell. Vera wants Lars to be enough. She feels that she’s above her classmates, but doesn’t want me to pity her for it.
“But do we all have to get so fucking personal with each other all the time?” she says.
“I think everyone needs someone they can have a personal conversation with.”
She doesn’t like this, either.
“Well, do you have friends you can talk to?” she asks, and now there’s something mean, something caustic in her tone, a stinging slap, and I feel it in my stomach, the discomfort at being subjected to an attack. “Do you even have any friends at all?”
She raises an eyebrow again. So many of the girls who come to me tell me about this fight for survival in the schoolyard, the brutal strategies used to claw one’s way up the pecking order of this dog-eat-dog world. Vera considers me like this – in the way that the queen of the class looks down her nose at the quietest girl in the back row.
“Yes, I do,” I say, perhaps too quickly. “Not that we talk about deep, personal things all the time, but I have people I can confide in. I think everyone needs that.”
We look at one another, sizing each other up, and I’m already sensing that my tactics have failed.
“And you can work to build those kinds of relationships,” I say, trying to steer the conversation in a more constructive direction.
There’s an element of something I can’t decipher in her eyes – she’s assessing me. But then it’s as if she loses interest.
“Yeah, well,” she says, glancing down at the pearl she’s fiddling with on her bracelet. “Maybe you need it, but it’s not like that for me.”
That was the wrong approach, I realise. She got angry. Threw her anger at me, as young people do. I didn’t quite manage to steer it, didn’t give her what she needed. Ended up defending myself instead. Vera runs her hands through her hair, a tired, grown-up gesture. But when she lets her hands fall and looks over at me again, she seems younger than her eighteen years.
“I don’t need anyone to confide in,” she says. “All I need is love.”
Her tone is that of an obstinate child – I
almost want to cup her cheek with my hand. This is Vera’s blind spot. She’s convinced that she’s so clever, so much older and wiser than her friends, that she has no idea of the extent of all she has yet to experience. Maybe it’s my job to help her understand this. But I’m tired. It’s Friday – and anyway, the session is almost over.
I glance at the clock, and Vera sees me do it.
“Time to give up, Doctor?” she asks.
I scribble down some quick keywords for my notes, which I’ll write up later. Argument with parents, I write, argument with boyfriend. Feels rejected by her parents, provokes argument with boyfriend. I read over the words. Cross out “provokes”. Write: starts an argument with boyfriend. Assessment, I write, and consider – how should I assess Vera? Fear of rejection; topic of loneliness is a sore point. Intervention: interpretation, attempt to increase reflection around own reactions. Follow up feeling of not having anything in common with those around her.”
Outside I see Christoffer’s mother’s B.M.W. already parked at the side of the road. I set a full stop at the end of my notes and stretch and twist my body in the chair, in preparation.
When I emerge from my office Christoffer is sitting in the waiting room, confident and with his legs spread.
“Hi, Sara, how’s it going?” he asks as he gets up and enters the room, sauntering across to his chosen chair without hesitation. This is a litmus test for a patient’s first session, and I use the same routine with all my new patients. I let them into the room first. Most young adults wait for me to ask them to sit down – wait for me to signal that one of the chairs is for them. This is natural – the room is mine, they are guests. Some ask me, “Where should I sit?” Some, like Christoffer, pick one. In our first session he stopped for a moment and considered the two chairs, then decided on the one on the left, dropped into it, slung one leg over the other, and looked as if he owned the place.
