Therapy

by David Lodge

  Wednesday 3rd March, late. I met the squatter in the entryway tonight. This is how it happened.

  Amy and I went to see An Inspector Calls at the National. Brilliant production on a stunning surrealist set, played without a break, like a perfectly remembered dream. I never rated Priestley before, but tonight he seemed as good as bloody Sophocles. Even Amy was swept away – she didn’t attempt to recast the play once over supper. We ate in Ovations, a selection of starters – they’re always better than the main courses. Amy had two and I had three. And a bottle of Sancerre between us. We had a lot to talk about besides the play: my trouble with Heartland and Amy’s latest crisis over Zelda. Amy found a pill in Zelda’s school blouse pocket when she was doing the laundry, and she was afraid it was either Ecstasy or a contraceptive. She couldn’t decide which would be worse, but she didn’t dare to ask the girl about it for fear of being accused of spying on her. She fished the pill, sealed inside an airmail envelope, out of her great swollen bladder of a handbag, and tipped it on to my side-plate for inspection. I said it looked like an Amplex tablet to me, and offered to suck it and see. I did, and it was. Amy was hugely relieved at first. Then she said, with a frown, “Why is she worried about bad breath? She must be kissing boys.” I said, “Weren’t you at her age?” She said, “Yes, but not with our tongues down each other’s throats like they do now.” “We used to,” I said, “it was called French kissing.” “Well, you can get AIDS from it nowadays,” said Amy. I said I didn’t think you could, though I don’t really know.

  Then I told her about clause fourteen. She said it was outrageous and I should sack Jake and get the Writers’ Guild to challenge the contract. I said that changing my agent wouldn’t solve the problem and that Jake’s lawyer had already checked the contract and it was impregnable. Amy said, “Merde.” We kicked around various ideas for writing Priscilla out of the series, which became more and more facetious as the level of the wine fell in the bottle: Priscilla is reclaimed by a former husband whom she supposed to be dead, and whom she omitted to mention to Edward when they married; Priscilla has a sex-change operation; Priscilla is kidnapped by aliens from outer space … I still think the best solution is for Priscilla to die in the last episode of the present series, but Amy wasn’t surprised that Ollie and Hal gave it the thumbs-down. “Not death, darling, anything but death.” I said that was a rather strong reaction. “Oh God, you sound just like Karl,” she said.

  The remark gave me a rare glimpse of what passes between Amy and her analyst. She’s usually rather secretive about their relationship. All I know is that she goes to his office every weekday morning at nine sharp, and he comes into the waiting room and says good morning, and she precedes him into the consulting room and lies down on the couch and he sits behind her and she talks for fifty minutes. You’re not supposed to come with a prepared topic, but to say whatever comes into your head. I asked Amy once what happened if nothing worth saying came into your head, and she said you would be silent. Apparently she could in theory be completely silent for the whole fifty minutes and Karl would still collect his fee; though Amy being Amy, this has never actually happened.

  It was about eleven when we came out of the theatre. I put Amy in a cab, and walked home to exercise the old knee joint. Roland says I should walk at least half an hour every day. I always enjoy crossing Waterloo Bridge, especially at night, with the buildings all floodlit: Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament to the west, the dome of St Paul’s and the knife-sharp spires of other Wren churches to the east, with the red light on top of Canary Wharf winking on the horizon. London still feels like a great city, seen from Waterloo Bridge. Disillusionment sets in when you turn into the Strand and find that all the shop doorways have their quilted occupants, like mummies in a museum.

  It didn’t occur to me that my own chap would be in residence, perhaps because I’d only ever seen him from inside the flat, on the video screen, well after midnight. He was sitting against the wall of the entryway, with his legs and lower trunk inside his sleeping-bag, smoking a roll-up. I said, “Hey, out of it, you can’t sleep here.” He looked up at me, brushing a long forelock of lank ginger hair from his eyes. I should say he’s about seventeen. Hard to tell. He had a faint smear of gingery bristle on his chin. “I wasn’t asleep,” he said.

  “I’ve seen you sleeping here before,” I said. “Hop it.”

  “Why?” he said. “I’m not doin’ any harm.” He drew his knees up inside the sleeping-bag, as if to let me pass without stepping over him.

  “It’s private property,” I said.

  “Property is theft,” he said, with a sly sort of grin, as if he was trying me out.

  “Oh ho,” I said, covering my surprise with sarcasm, “a Marxist vagrant. What next?”

  “It weren’t Marx,” he said, “it was proud one.” Or that’s what it sounded like.

  “What proud one?” I said.

  His eyes seemed to go out of focus momentarily, and he shook his head in a dogged sort of way. “I dunno, but it weren’t Marx. I looked it up once.”

  “Anything wrong, sir?”

  I turned round. Blow me if there weren’t a couple of coppers standing there. They’d materialized as if in answer to an unspoken prayer. Except that I didn’t want them now. Or not yet. Not at that precise moment. I surprised in myself a strange reluctance to hand the youth over to the power of the law. I don’t suppose they would have done anything worse than move him on, but I didn’t have time to work that out. It was a split-second decision. “It’s alright, officer,” I said, to the one who had spoken to me. “I know this young man.” The young man himself had meanwhile scrambled to his feet and was busily rolling up his sleeping-bag.

  “You live here, do you, sir?” said the policeman. I produced my keys in an over-eager demonstration of ownership. The two-way cell radio clipped to the chest of the other policeman began to squawk and crackle with some message about a burglar alarm in Lisle Street, and after a few more words with me the two of them walked away in step.

  “Thanks,” said the youth.

  I looked at him, already regretting my decision. (“If you shop him you will regret it, if you don’t shop him you will regret it, shop him or don’t shop him, you will regret both …”) I was strongly tempted to tell him to bugger off, sharpish, but, glancing up the street, I saw the two coppers eyeing me from the next corner. “I suppose you’d better come in for a few minutes,” I said.

  He looked at me suspiciously from under his hank of hair. “Yer not queer, are yer?” he said.

  “Good God, no,” I said. As we silently ascended in the lift, I realized why I hadn’t taken advantage of the miraculous appearance of the two policemen to get rid of him. It was that little phrase, “I looked it up,” that had thrown me momentarily off balance, and on to his side. Another looker-upper. It was as if I had encountered on my doorstep a younger, less privileged image of myself.

  “Nice,” he said approvingly, as I let him into the flat and switched on the lights. He went over to the window and looked down into the street. “Cor,” he said. “You can hardly hear the traffic.”

  “It’s double-glazed,” I said. “Look, I only invited you here to stop the police hassling you. I’ll give you a cup of tea, if you like –”

  “Ta,” he said, sitting down promptly on the sofa.

  “– I’ll give you a cup of tea, but that’s it, understand? Then you’re on your way, and I don’t want to see you here again, ever. All right?” He nodded, rather less emphatically than I could have wished, and took a tin of rolling tobacco out of his pocket. “And I’d rather you didn’t smoke, if you don’t mind,” I said.

  He sighed, and shrugged, and put the tin back in the pocket of his anorak. He was wearing the regulation kit of the young West End vagrant: quilted anorak, blue jeans, Doc Martens, plus a grubby fawn knitted scarf so long it dangled to his ankles. “Mind if I take this off?” he said, shrugging off the anorak without waiting for my permission. “It’s a bit warmer tha
n I’m used to.” Without the artificial padding of the anorak, he looked thin and frail in a threadbare jersey out at the elbows. “Don’t use this place much, do yer?” he said. “Wherejer live the rest of the week?” I told him. “Oh, yeah, up north, ennit?” he said vaguely. “Wodjer need two places for?”

  His inquisitiveness made me uneasy. To stem the flow of questions, I asked him some myself. His name is Grahame – with an “e”, he informed me, as if this mute suffix was a rare and aristocratic distinction. He comes from Dagenham, and has the kind of background you might expect: broken home, absentee father, mother a boozer, truancy from school, in trouble with the law when he was twelve, taken into care, placed with foster parents, ran away, was put in a home, ran away from that, came Up West, as he calls the West End, drawn by the bright lights. Lives by begging, and the occasional casual job, handing out fliers in Leicester Square, washing cars in a Soho garage. I asked him why he didn’t try and get a regular job, and he said solemnly, “I value my freedom.” He’s a queer mixture of naivety and streetwise sophistication, only half-educated, but with some surprising nuggets of information buried in that half. He saw a copy of Kierkegaard’s Repetition that I bought second-hand in Charing Cross Road today, and picked it up, frowning at the spine. “Kierkegaard,” he said, “the first existentialist.” I laughed aloud in sheer astonishment. “What d’you know about existentialism?” I said. “Existence precedes essence,” he said, as if reciting the beginning of a nursery rhyme. He wasn’t reading from the dust jacket, because the book didn’t have one. I think he’s one of these people with a photographic memory. He’d seen the phrases somewhere and memorized them without having a clue what they mean. But it was astonishing that his eye had fallen on them in the first place. I asked him where he’d come across Kierkegaard’s name before, and he said, in the Library. “I noticed it,” he said, “’cos of the funny spelling. The two ‘a’s’. Like ‘Aarghhh!’ in a comic.” He spends a lot of time in the Westminster Reference Library, just off Leicester Square, browsing through encyclopaedias. “If you just go in for the warm, they chuck you out after a while,” he said. “But they can’t if you’re reading the books.”

  The longer the conversation went on, the more difficult it became to bring it to a close and turn him out into the cold street again. “Where will you sleep tonight?” I asked him. “I dunno,” he said. “Can’t I sleep downstairs?” “No,” I said firmly. He sighed. “Pity, it’s a nice little porch. Clean. No draughts to speak of. I ’spect I’ll find somewhere.”

  “How much does the cheapest bed cost round here?” I asked.

  He gave me a quick appraising glance. “Fifteen quid.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “I’m not talking doss-houses,” he said, with a certain indignation, “I’m not talking Sally Army. I’d rather sleep on the pavement than in one of them places, filthy old men coughing and farting all night and interfering with you in the toilets.”

  In the end I gave him the fifteen pounds, and escorted him out of the building. In the porch he thanked me nonchalantly, turned up his collar, and sloped off in the direction of Trafalgar Square. I very much doubt whether he will blow his windfall on a room for the night – it would keep him in food and tobacco for two or three days – but my conscience is salved. Or is it?

  As I was going to bed, it occurred to me to try and solve the mystery of “proud one” by consulting the dictionary I keep in the flat. It has names of famous people in it, as well as words, and sure enough, there he was, though I’d never heard of him before: “Proudhon, Pierre Joseph. 1809–65, French socialist, whose pamphlet What is Property? (1840) declared that property is theft.” How about that?

  QUAINT TALES OF BRITISH RAIL NO. 167

  (By “Intercitizen”)

  For some months past the escalator between the taxi drop underneath Euston station and the main concourse has been out of action. Before that, it was intermittently under repair. Large plywood screens were erected round it for weeks at a time, and passengers, or “customers” as British Rail calls us nowadays, struggling up the emergency staircase with our luggage, babies, pushchairs, elderly and infirm relatives etc., would hear from behind this barricade the banging and clattering of fitters wrestling with the machine’s constipated intestines. Then the screen would be removed, the moving staircase would move again for a few days, and then it would break down again. Lately it has been left in this state, stricken in mid-cycle, no apparent effort being made to repair it. With typical British stoicism passengers have got accustomed to using it as if it were an ordinary solid staircase, though the steps are uncomfortably high for this purpose. There is a lift somewhere, but to use it you have to have a porter, and there are no porters to be found at the taxi drop.

  Recently a printed notice appeared at the foot of this paralysed machine:

  WELCOME NEWS

  A New Escalator for Euston

  We are sorry this escalator is out of use. It is life expired [sic]. An order has been placed for the manufacture and installation of a new escalator. It will be finished and ready for use by August 1993.

  Intercity Retail Manager

  Thursday evening, 4th March.

  I had lunch with Jake today, at Groucho’s. We saw off two bottles of Beaujolais Villages between us, which I enjoyed at the time but regretted later. I went straight to Euston by taxi and, having some time in hand, copied out the notice at the bottom of the broken escalator, swaying slightly on my feet and giggling to myself, attracting curious glances from passengers as they hurried past and hurled themselves at the steel assault course. “It is life expired.” I like it. It could be a new slogan for British Rail as privatization approaches, instead of “We’re Getting There.”

  I fell asleep in the train and woke feeling like shit just as it was pulling out of Rummidge Expo station. I could pick out the Richmobile in the car park, its pearly paintwork blanched by the arc-lights. I had to wait half an hour at Rummidge Central for a train back, and mooched about for a while in the shopping precinct above the station. Most of the plateglass windows were plastered with SALE notices, or exposed bare and dusty interiors, the shells of liquidated businesses. I bought an evening newspaper. “MAJOR TAKES SWING AT DOOM-MONGERS,” said one headline. “900,000 WHITE-COLLAR WORKERS UNEMPLOYED,” said another. Muzak piped soothingly from hidden speakers.

  I descend to the subterranean gloom of the platforms to catch my train. It is reported running late. Waiting passengers sit hunched with hands in pockets on the wooden benches, their breath condensing in the chill damp air, gazing wistfully along the track to the mouth of a tunnel where a red signal light glows. An adenoidal voice apologizes for the delay, “which is due to operating difficulties.” It is life expired.

  Jake saw Samantha on Tuesday. “Smart kid,” he said. “Thanks for pointing her in my direction.” “I didn’t,” I said. “I only warned her about your deplorable morals.” He laughed. “Don’t worry, my boy, she’s not my type. She has no ankles, have you noticed?” “Can’t say I have,” I said. “I never got that far down.” “Legs are very important to me,” Jake said. “Take the lovely Linda, for example.” He was eloquent for some minutes on the subject of his new secretary’s legs, hissing and flashing like scissor-blades in black nylon tights under her hanky-sized skirt as she walks in and out of his office. “I’ve got to have her,” he said. “It’s only a matter of time.” We were well into the second bottle at this stage. I asked him if he didn’t sometimes feel a qualm of guilt about his philandering.

  JAKE: But of course. That’s the point. That’s the attraction. The attraction of the forbidden. Listen, I’ll tell you a story, (JAKE refills TUBBY’S glass and then his own.) It happened last summer. I was sitting in the garden one Sunday afternoon browsing through the papers – Rhoda was indoors doing something in the kitchen – and the kids next door were playing in their garden in one of those inflatable paddling pools. It was a hot day. They had some friends or relatives visiting, so th
ere were two boys and two girls of about the same age, four to six years old, I suppose. I couldn’t see because of the hedge, but I could hear them alright. You know how water seems to excite kids – makes them even noisier than usual. There was a lot of shouting and shrieking and splashing from next door. I got a bit peeved about it, actually. We didn’t have many weekends last summer when it was warm enough to sit out in the garden, and here was my precious sabbath being ruined. So I levered myself off the lounger and went over to the hedge intending to ask if they could lower the volume a bit. As I approached, I heard one of the little girls say, obviously to one of the little boys, “You’re not allowed to pull our knickers down.” She spoke in a very clear, posh voice, like a juvenile Samantha describing a rule in croquet. “You’re not allowed to pull our knickers down.” Well, I just curled up. I had to stuff a knuckle in my mouth to stop myself laughing aloud. The kid’s remark was completely innocent of sexual meaning, of course. But for me it summed up the whole business. The world is full of desirable women and you’re not allowed to pull their knickers down – unless you’re married to them, and then there’s no fun in it. But sometimes we get lucky and they let us. It’s always the same, under the knickers, of course. The same old hole, I mean. But it’s always different, too, because of the knickers. “You’re not allowed to pull our knickers down.” Says it all. (JAKE drains glass.)

  Friday evening 5th March. To the Wellbeing this afternoon for acupuncture. (Sings, to the opening bars of “Jealousy”: “Therapy! Nothing but therapy! It’s never-ending, Not to mention what I’m spending …”) Actually I feel more positive this evening than I have lately, but I don’t know whether this is because of the acupuncture or because I haven’t had anything to drink. Miss Wu did her stuff with heat today instead of the usual needles. She puts little granules of what looks like incense on my skin at the pressure points, and applies a lighted taper to them, one at a time. They glow red-hot like cinders, and give off wisps of faintly perfumed smoke. I feel like a human joss-stick. The idea is that as the granules burn down, the heat increases and produces an effect like the stimulus of a needle, but she has to whip them off with a pair of tweezers before they actually burn me. I have to tell her precisely when the sensation of heat becomes painful, otherwise the smell of singed flesh mingles with the smell of incense. It’s quite exciting.