Fifty-Minute Hour
Page 5
Silence, shocking silence. I’ve pressed the buzzer twice now, but he hasn’t said ‘Come up.’ I freeze, burn, faint, choke, expire. He’s dead and buried – I knew it all along. My fingers shake and tremble as I lean them on the bell-push, then the entry-phone suddenly replies.
‘Yes?’ it says, in that steel-and-truffle voice of his, which registers displeasure while it oozes charm and breeding.
‘It’s Nial,’ I stammer out.
‘Come up, Nial,’ he answers, as if he hasn’t died at all, caused me all that anguish, made me a near-wreck. He had trouble with my name at first. A lot of people do. Nial is a boy’s name, a fifth-century Irish king’s name, which my father chose before I’d quite materialised. Nial comes from ‘Niadh’, which means ‘champion’, and I suppose my poor unlucky father was into wish-fulfilment and could see me with an athletics blue or crowned with laurel wreaths. He wouldn’t change it anyway, though my mother added ‘Maureen’, to show I was a girl. Second names are hopeless, unless you’re an author, or American. No one even knows them – just louses up your first one. Nobody can spell Nial, or pronounce it. You say ‘ni’ like ‘nice’, and not like ‘knee’. John-Paul told me once that he thought my name might actually have contributed to my sense of unreality, since it’s the stressed and central syllable of the word annihilation.
I suppose I should be grateful he uses my name at all. Classical psychoanalysts often avoid all names on principle, because they interfere with their famous blank-screen image, and may distort the transference (which is a sort of buzz-word with them, and feeds their self-importance, since it means you see them as your father, mother, brother, sister, lover, teacher, God). I had a client just last spring, who’d been in Freudian analysis for over twenty years, and the shrink never once used his name in three thousand five hundred and eighty-seven sessions – except on his endless bills, of course. That poor (anonymous) sod, who didn’t know his own name by the time he quit at the age of sixty-five, was one of the main reasons I started analytic therapy myself. He made it sound so painful and frustrating, any natural masochist couldn’t fail to be enchanted.
I start dragging up the endless stairs, up and round, up and round, with a sudden view of toytown streets from one deep-embrasured window and the echo of my footsteps rising to John-Paul; then pause outside his rooms – one private where he naps or wanks, and the dim-lit round consulting room which I suppose is meant to represent the womb. Actually, the first time that I saw it I felt something close to awe. It did look like a womb, dark and claustrophobic, with all the curtains tightly drawn, so there seemed to be no windows, and that deep-hush carpet the colour of old blood, and the curving shielding walls. I seemed to recognise it, felt I’d been there long before, floated there nine months, in fact, lolling, dozing, sprouting hands and feet.
The door (or cervix?) is open, but I knock, to be polite. John-Paul never greets you, never says ‘Hallo,’ like any normal person would; let alone ‘How are you?’ It’s all so damn impersonal – no friendly smile or hand-shake, no cosy little chat before you start the session, about the weekend or the weather, or what you did last night. It’s part of their whole system, which I’ve started mugging up; dipping into Freud, or reading books on psychoanalysis, where before I read Nabokov and Paul Auster. Their aim is to be ‘neutral’– neutral personalities, neutral in their attitudes – though you might translate the term as meaning aloof and uninvolved. They even have this so-called Rule of Abstinence, which is all to do with frustrating your deep longings for basic human contact, refusing to gratify your hunger for comfort or support. (They love words like ‘gratification’ – so long as they’re withholding it.) They’re basically just cold machines which give interpretations – no heart or hands – all head. Forget sympathy or friendship or even fellow feeling. I doubt you’d wrest a word of reassurance from them if your entire extended family had been wiped out in a nuclear attack.
I stand in rigid silence, eyes fixed on the floor. If I can’t bring myself to raise my head, I’ve no proof he’s there at all. That buzzer could be just a trick, a recording of his voice. I do look up, in fact. I’ve had enough bad scares already and it’s the only glimpse I’ll get of him the whole damn fifty minutes. I hold his gaze for one heart-stopping second; check his hair, his glasses, his suit, his shirt, his shoes. Yes, all complete, all there – even the pearl tiepin and the half-smoked cigarette. No heart, no warmth, no word, but then I’m used to that by now. Funny, though, it’s still a shock every time I see him. It’s as if it’s never really him, not the him I’ve loathed or worshipped all those hours and hours, nor the one who gets entangled in my dreams, nor even the one I saw last week – or just the day before.
I hand him both his presents, try not to see his ring. It makes me mad, that ring. Oh, I know it’s only sham, but you’d think he’d trust us, wouldn’t you? I mean, all his female patients are hardly going to leap on him just because he’s single. It’s actually deceitful to pretend you’re married when you’re not, not to mention hypocritical, when you’re a fully trained professional who’s always stressing the importance of the whole and naked truth. One rule for the patients, another for the shrinks. He knows absolutely everything about us – our infatuations, fantasies, our dreams, our sexual oddities, our eating and excreting habits (even at the breast), our toilet-training, hobbies, hates and crimes – and we know almost nothing about him. Is he gay or straight or celibate, a solitary masturbator, or a wild polygamist? Does he vote Conservative, or sign petitions for the Greens? Is he constipated, anxious, scared of heights or moths? Does he do the washing up, or kick cats and dogs in private? Does he love his mother? Does he sail or jog or swim?
I snatch a quick glance at his tie. Ties are phallic symbols, so it’s like examining his prick. The tie looks limp and drab, and has little squiggles on it which remind me of dead sperm. I kick off my wet shoes, He down on the couch, and suddenly he’s gone again, sitting right behind me, but removed now from my view. It never fails to screw me up, that strange and frightening moment when his face and body disappear, but his voice and mind and presence swoop dangerously nearer, seem huge and overwhelming, so that I myself shrink to just a pinprick – a flea, a mite, a speck, a dot, an ant. I’m a creature with no backbone, a mollusc with no shell, just a dab of limp pink protoplasm smeared across his couch. All the things I’d planned to say ooze and leak away. I haven’t got a larynx, let alone a tongue.
I suppose I should talk molluscs if I were following the rule – their famous Fundamental Rule, which means you undertake to tell your shrink whatever comes into your head, without any reservation or exception, including murderous thoughts, sheer drivel, or outrageous sexual fantasies. It’s a crazy sort of system, and would cause sheer bloody mayhem if you used it in your ordinary daily life – lose you all your friends in half a day. Actually, I often just ignore it, or sometimes deliberately confuse the issue by breaking it on purpose. I mean, if I’m lying on his couch thinking, say, about some client’s testicles – Howard’s, for example, whose right one hangs much lower than the left – I may actually start talking about a black cat I owned (or didn’t own) called Persil, who was run over by a car, but never mention bollocks. I suppose I’ve always had an urge to break the rules, and this is one you can break and get away with, since John-Paul’s none the wiser.
If I were following it now, I’d be talking about not following it (if you understand my meaning), but instead I keep my silence. The minutes tick-tick by: three separate whispered naggings. I’ll strangle those damn clocks one day; smash their smug glass faces. Trust him to have three – and all exactly right, so I can’t even steal a second’s extra time. John-Paul’s obsessed with time. First he splits his day up into different-shaped segments from other normal people’s (which helps to make him richer, since you can cram in far more patients over twenty years or so, if you slice ten minutes off each hour, but still insist on calling it an hour, and still charge a hefty fee for it). Then he examines all our deep un
conscious reasons for being early, late, or even merely punctual, and if we feel a mite aggrieved at being rationed or short-changed, he’ll go groping back to infancy again and interpret that as grievance with our mother for depriving us of a satisfying breast.
‘Bull!’ I say to no one, as I outstare the largest clock. If you add his watch and mine and the church clock down the road, which chimes each and every quarter (and still often makes me jump), that’s six separate time-machines, all fuelling his obsession, making me more tense. Suddenly it strikes, booming from the street outside, as if I’ve given it its cue. ‘Ssh,’ I tell it irritably, as its reverberations shudder through my skull. Quarter past. I’ve been lying here three minutes and it feels like two whole decades.
John-Paul doesn’t speak. That’s not his job; it’s mine. I usually burst out with something, just through desperation – if not cats or testicles, then mortuaries or wives. Not today. I stare up at the ceiling – dingy white and cracked – then round at the dark walls which are hung with several pictures: tortured writhing abstracts which look as if they’ve been finger-painted by the most violent of his patients. There’s not much in the room except the couch, his chair, three telephones, another chair (for patients who have hang-ups about lying down, or rape), and a sort of antique bureau thing with a bronze bust standing on it of a small man with a beard – maybe Freud, or even Christ. I asked him who it was, once, and he said I was avoiding the issue of my prenatal regression with inconsequential questions.
He hates me asking questions, rarely answers anyway, or only with another question like why am I asking such and such, and by the time I’ve tried to answer that, and he’s both questioned my reply and revealed the contradictions in the question and the answer, I’m so thoroughly confused I’ve forgotten where we started. You can I see why analytic treatment takes so long. It’s one step forward, four steps back, and instead of being satisfied with just the normal human problems like jobs and sex and money, or even infancy and childhood, he goes back further still, adds a whole lot more, like constriction in the womb because your mother wore tight corsets (which could give you headaches as an adult and a sense of claustrophobia), or even problems at conception. I suppose it secures him a good income, keeps his patients clocking in decade after decade, as they work slowly back from babyhood to their aggression as mere egg-cells or their sense of inferiority as unfertilised gametes.
I keep gazing round the room, which contains absolutely nothing you might describe as personal – no books except his textbooks and the medical Who’s Who, no photographs of families (not even borrowed ones), no ornaments or trinkets, not even a small plant. I suppose he’s scared a plant might die on him, like so many of his patients. He’s got quite a reputation for successful suicides. Well, at least the poor sods showed resolve. John-Paul told me once it was better to make a decision, even an unwise one, than to keep dithering and fretting. I can hear a siren now, as an ambulance screams by – another of his patients being speeded to the stomach-pump too late.
I clear my throat, to prove I’m there. No answering cough or rustle. He may have nodded off, though it’s difficult to sleep, in fact, with all the constant traffic noise roaring down below. The traffic makes me sad. More rivals, faceless strangers, potential suicides, filling in the void by driving fast from A to B, or back from B to A.
‘A,’ I whisper suddenly, which I suppose must be significant since it’s the beginning of the alphabet, the highest grade in marking, the indefinite article, a note in music, a blood group and a bomb. All that rich material and he doesn’t say a word. I’m not sure he even heard. Another siren started the second that I spoke, which seems significant itself. Analytic therapy is so damned complicated. Everything’s significant, especially things you’d think were not, like non sequiturs or throat-clearings.
I daren’t say ‘B’, in case he thinks I’m fooling, though ‘B’ is probably even more significant than ‘A’ (‘To be or not to be …’), so I continue with the silence and even shut my eyes, to kid him I’m relaxed. It’s really just a test of nerves. Will he crack first, or me? I can’t hear a single sound from him, which really is unusual. I’m just beginning to wonder if he’s actually left the room, backed away on tiptoe to down a double Scotch, when I catch a furtive rustle. The chocolates. He’s unwrapping one. I knew he couldn’t last that long without a puff or nibble. I listen to fat hazelnuts crunching in his teeth.
‘Pig!’ I say, though silently. The trouble with silence is that the longer it goes on the more unnerving it becomes. You know you’re wasting money – at least a pound a minute – and that eventually he’ll use words like ‘resistance’, or suggest you’re quiet because you’re angry with him. Everything goes back to him. He’s the Centre of the Universe; likes nothing better than have you talk about him, dream about him, fixate on him or flatter him – then charge you for the privilege. The small-guy syndrome once again. I suppose they have to get power somehow. I dreamed about a woman once, who was ten foot tall with mammoth breasts, and he still claimed it was him; said the dream contained a reversal of the sexes, so that he was disguised in it as my all-powerful nurturing mother.
He’s nurturing himself now; so busy with those fucking ritzy chocolates, he’s forgotten I exist. I can hear the steady munching, which is deafening in my ear. Although I can’t see him, he’s sitting really close, his armchair almost touching the head-end of the couch, so that every sound is magnified (and hazelnuts are lethal).
‘You didn’t thank me,’ I suddenly burst out.
‘For what, Nial?’ His voice is very gentle. That’s just more provocation, a rotten subtle creepy sort.
‘You never do, do you? If I bought you the whole sweet-shop, you still wouldn’t say a word.’
‘Why d’ you think you need my thanks?’
I kick out at the leather couch, hope I’ve left a bruise on it. ‘And how about offering me a chocolate? I’m real, you know, not just stuffed or bronze or something. I’ve got a mouth and stomach. And actually …’ I swallow. ‘I’m very fond of sweets.’
There’s a sort of pregnant pause, then he speaks all soft and suave again. ‘It seems your orality is such, you have rather a low tolerance of anyone enjoying oral gratification which you can’t share yourself.’
‘Oh, bugger off.’
More silence – which is broken by the spluttering of a match. I’ve obviously annoyed him. He’s got to smoke, to calm himself, stop himself from shouting. He probably kicked the habit just last night, made a resolution that he’d never smoke again, threw away his lighter in some big symbolic gesture. I’ve spoilt his good intentions, maybe even killed him, indirectly. The risk of lung cancer for smokers is at least twenty times the rate of that for non-smokers. (I know – I stopped myself – and not that long ago. It wasn’t lungs, but bowels. They suspected I had a tumour on the colon, and though I didn’t mind the death bit, or even the two x-rays, I just couldn’t bear the thought of dying from something so totally unromantic – John-Paul sitting in that hospice by my bedside, holding not my hand, but my colostomy bag.)
I begin to feel new terror as I switch roles in the hospice – John-Paul as the patient now, coughing up his lungs. His death would kill me outright. (So would just his anger.) I long to make atonement, to crouch down at his feet and feed him chocolates on my knees; masticate them first so he won’t spoil his small sharp teeth, swap chocolate-flavoured kisses. No – kisses aren’t atonement, kisses are sheer greed. He’s telling me I’m greedy. I hate him, I detest him.
I can see his tiny wife, her tiny pretty shoes, her cloud of golden curls, her flirty cloudless eyes. He’s pulling off her wrapper, biting into her. She’s strawberry cream inside, or pink and white marshmallow, all soft and sweet and pastel. He wouldn’t unwrap me, or he’d regret it if he did. I’d be hard unyielding nougat, or dark and gristly toffee. He’s sucking out her cream, the last swirls and coils of mallow melting on his tongue, its tip probing her soft shell, lapping round and round it.
‘So a part of you would like to kill my wife.’ His voice all corny low still; a crackle of gold paper.
‘I’ve killed her, don’t you worry. And it was a pretty nasty death.’
‘That doesn’t seem to accord too well with your repeated claims to be peaceable and gentle.’
‘I’m only violent with your wife – wives.’
‘But you say I haven’t got a wife.’
‘Well, have you?’
He dodges the question, as he’s done a dozen times; asks me why I’m giving motility to my feelings, instead of verbalising. God – their language! All he means in plain no-nonsense English is why the hell I’m raving round his room instead of lying still and talking. I drag back to the couch, flop down on the pillow. You’re not allowed to work off your frustration on the carpet or the walls, but have to just lie quietly and yak about the breast, or womb, or last night’s footling dream. I shake back all my hair, start twisting one long strand of it. ‘My mother didn’t have breasts, if you really want to know.’
Here we go again. It’s so tedious, so boring, though maybe not for him. All his favourite subjects – maternal deprivation, ambivalence about the breast, dependence on it, rage at it, insatiability, orality. They’re all his own problems, that’s quite obvious. Why else all that sucking? (I can hear more rustles now, smell peppermints – those fierce ones.) It’s just another subtle way of talking about himself, using me as his ventriloquist. But if I slam out now (as I did in fact last week), there’ll be still more aching minutes to tot up, and I’ll only have to face an inquisition at ten past two tomorrow. I close my eyes, swap my mother for his own, make her mean and scrawny, thin and stern and cold; make sure she looks like him – dark hairs on her thumbs, non-existent eyes.