The Mirror World of Melody Black
Page 4
Then, at approximately quarter to four in the morning, I started writing the companion piece.
‘Simon’s flat was a mirror of ours . . .’
My mind was as clear and keen as a shard of glass.
4
GONZO
To: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk
From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 6:48 AM
Subject: MF Interview
Jess, hi
First, let me apologize. The death I spoke of was my neighbour’s: he was close to me geographically, but not in any other sense. I’m afraid I misled you with a half-truth because I was in a bit of a flap about the Miranda Frost interview, which did not go at all as planned. You’ll understand when you read the attached article.
Also attached is a companion piece, which I felt compelled to write. It follows on directly from the ‘interview’; please read them in turn, as this is the only way they make sense.
I realize, of course, that I haven’t delivered the piece I promised, and I’m sure these articles are a million miles away from what you were expecting. But I hope you can find a home for them, nevertheless.
What do you think? Are they printable?
Let me know; and, again, please forgive me for my small deception.
Abby
* * *
To: j.b.caborn@ox.ac.uk
From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 7:01 AM
Subject: Lunch?
Dear Professor Caborn
My name is Abigail Williams and I’m a freelance journalist.
For reasons slightly strange – too strange to explain here – I recently stumbled on your work regarding socio-cognitive limitations in primates. I’d very much like to meet up to talk about ‘Caborn’s number’, with a view to writing an article on the subject.
If you could spare an hour, I’d love to come to Oxford to ask you some questions. Perhaps I could buy you lunch?
Yours expectantly
Abby Williams
* * *
To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
From: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 12:03 PM
Subject: RE: MF Interview
Hi Abby
Yes, this is printable (my God is it printable; by the end of the first paragraph, I couldn’t put it down!). But are you sure you want me to print it? I’m saying this as a friend, you understand, not as an editor. It’s very provocative stuff.
A couple of questions to settle my mind:
1) Is it all true? It has the ring of truth, but I need to know for certain – especially with the Miranda Frost interview. It’s not exactly flattering; I need to be sure there’s nothing libellous there! You say it’s a transcript: is this literally the case? (It’s not some weird gonzo experiment?)
2) I don’t want to sound like a broken record, but have you thought this through? Some of the details, in both pieces, are extremely intimate. Presumably this is going to upset a few people. (Your father? Your boyfriend? Will they be okay with this?) Uncompromising honesty makes great reading, but I doubt it’s going to make you very popular. Are you sure there’s nothing you want to change?
Think carefully about these things before you ask me to proceed.
Jess
* * *
To: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk
From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 1:15 PM
Subject: RE: RE: MF Interview
Jess
1) Attached is the mp3. As you’ll hear, I haven’t changed a word. Everything else – ‘she makes a lousy cup of coffee’, etc. – is just my opinion/interpretation, obviously. There’s nothing libellous there.
2) Thank you for your concern, but either it all goes in or none of it does. I’ve given a completely honest account of Miranda Frost, so I can’t very well cut the bits that are unflattering to me. The intimacy is what makes the articles work, as I’m sure you’ll agree. It has to be 100% candid. Beck will forgive me (there’s nothing that terrible there), and my father doesn’t even pretend to read my articles any more.
Please proceed!
Abby
* * *
To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
From: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 4:22 PM
Subject: RE: RE: RE: MF Interview
Abby
I can get you the £500 previously agreed for the MF interview, plus another £500 for the additional piece. We would print both in the magazine – MF next week and ‘Simon’ the following. You can probably see the reason for the time lapse: they’re too long to print side by side, and the MF piece ends on such a natural cliff-hanger.
Let me know if this is all okay with you.
Jess
* * *
To: jessica.pearle@observer.co.uk
From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
Date: Fri, 10 May 2013, 4:42 PM
Subject: RE: RE: RE: RE: MF Interview
Brilliant – if all my work was this well remunerated, I’d finally be earning a wage that didn’t fill my father with shame.
A
* * *
To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
From: j.b.caborn@ox.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013, 11:08 AM
Subject: RE: Lunch?
Dear Abigail
While I must admit to being intrigued by your ‘slightly strange’ story, I’m afraid I must decline. I’m exceptionally busy with my research at the moment, and will be for the foreseeable future. I gave several interviews about my work a few years back, and found that it rather ate away at my time.
I’m sorry that I’m unable to help you with this.
Yours (apologetically)
Joseph Caborn
* * *
To: j.b.caborn@ox.ac.uk
From: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013, 11:59 AM
Subject: The offer includes pudding
Dear Professor Caborn
I can appreciate that you have a busy and demanding job. But scientists, surely, have to eat? One hour is all I’m asking for. Please consider it!
Yours beseechingly
Abby Williams
* * *
To: abbywilliams1847@hotmail.co.uk
From: j.b.caborn@ox.ac.uk
Date: Mon, 13 May 2013, 1:44 PM
Subject: There’s no such thing as a free lunch
Dear Abby
I admire your persistence, but my answer remains the same. I may be doing you a terrible disservice, but in my experience, a journalist’s ‘hour’ is rarely the same as a scientist’s.
Yours intransigently
Joseph Caborn
5
DR BARBARA
‘. . . and at that point I wake up. It’s always at that point – when the interviewer asks me if I wouldn’t be more comfortable without my jacket. I don’t know if he realizes I’m naked underneath, and he’s toying with me, or whether it’s genuine concern, since it’s such a hot day. But I guess that doesn’t matter; I never have time to work it out. The dream always ends at that exact moment. I wake up and the bedroom’s hot and stuffy, and I’m wide awake and need to pee. Generally that’s around four in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep. I just get up and read. Although sometimes it happens the other way round: I can’t fall asleep until the early hours, so I don’t even try. I read or write until I’m exhausted, then manage maybe three or four hours’ sleep – at a push . . . On the plus side, I’m getting through a lot of books. I managed to read Bleak House in two and a half nights.’
Dr Barbara nodded thoughtfully. ‘The sleeplessness is definitely something we should keep an eye on.’
‘Right. And what about the dream?’
‘The dream tells me there’s nothing wrong with your imagination.’
‘Freud would say it’s a classic anxiety
dream.’
Dr Barbara smiled and shook her head in a small but resolute motion. As always, she had no interest in playing the dream interpretation game. She was happy enough to listen – to whatever I wanted to tell her – but she wouldn’t indulge me past a certain point.
‘There aren’t any constraints on what we talk about,’ she once told me, not long after our first session. ‘We’ll talk about anything you deem important – anything at all. But this is a dialogue, not a monologue. Sometimes we’ll talk about what you want to talk about, and sometimes we’ll talk about what I want to talk about. There has to be some give and take, as with any worthwhile conversation.’
Freud was one of the subjects Dr Barbara did not want to talk about. She told me that for most psychologists or psychiatrists, those with an ounce of common sense, he was a historical curiosity but little more. There was no point wasting time (her time) and money (my father’s money) talking about Freud.
But today I was feeling stubborn. ‘You haven’t even read him,’ I pointed out. ‘You can’t dismiss something you’ve never tried.’
‘Of course you can!’ Dr Barbara countered. ‘Astrology, chakras, numerology. I know enough to know these subjects have no basis in reality, just as I know that Freud has no relevance in this room.’
‘I think you’re missing the point,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if Freud is correct. He’s interesting and he writes well. That’s good enough for me. I’d rather read well-written bunkum than poorly written fact. Wouldn’t you?’
Dr Barbara was still wearing the same narrow smile. ‘Okay. Let me ask you a question. What do you think your dream means?’
‘It’s obvious,’ I replied. ‘It’s painfully obvious. I’m worried that sooner or later I’ll have to grow up and get a serious, secure job that I despise – like my sister. I mean things haven’t been so bad recently, but most of the time I’m just treading water. Without Beck’s salary, we’d have no security at all, and I hate feeling . . . dependent. But, then, I think I’d feel like a fraud if I did something I hated, just for the money. I’m not even sure there’s any regular job I’d be competent in. That’s why I don’t have any clothes on beneath my sister’s trouser suit.’
Dr Barbara waited patiently until I’d finished, then nodded again. ‘Okay. And if you know all this anyway, then what’s the point of analyzing the dream?’
‘Yes, fair enough. There is no point. It’s just a more interesting way of looking at the same problems.’
‘It’s a more opaque way of looking at the same problems. If you’re feeling anxious, we should talk about that. But there’s no need to muddy the waters by bringing in dreams and so forth. Why circle the issues when you can confront them head-on?’
I didn’t know if this was an open question or something more pointed, with implications. Probably both. Whatever the case, Dr Barbara was right. There was no reason to complicate matters by introducing Freud into the picture.
My second therapist had been a card-carrying Freudian (literally; his card read: Dr Bryce: Freudian Analyst). I found him advertised at the back of the London Review of Books, and he had been an unmitigated disaster. He was patronizing and arrogant, and far less intelligent than he assumed he was. He reminded me of a medical student I went out with in the first year of university, a pompous idiot who read only the Lancet and genuinely believed that George Eliot was a man. That relationship had lasted three weeks; I walked out on my psychoanalyst after less than an hour.
The therapist before that, my first therapist, had not fared much better. She was an NHS counsellor, a woman in her early forties who worked three days a week in the local surgery. Her office was an awful pastel blue, and littered with the drawings her children had presented to her at the various stages of their artistic incompetence. For five weeks, I found her to be merely ineffectual. Then, on the sixth week, she started expounding with increasing insistence on the value of medication ‘as well’. Not necessarily lithium, given how it had made me feel the first time round – fat, flat and stupid – but perhaps one of the newer line in mood stabilizers, which might present fewer side effects. At this point, I realized that she was in league with my GP and left.
Compared with these earlier experiences, Dr Barbara was a godsend. She was neither patronizing nor wishy-washy, and she had no hidden agendas. She might have agreed with my ineffectual counsellor when it came to medication; a mood stabilizer, she once said, probably would be of some benefit to me in the sense that it would do precisely what it was meant to do: it would stabilize my mood. But that was not the point. If I found the cure worse than the disease, she respected my right to refuse it. One day, the balance might change, but that was something I would have to evaluate.
Dr Barbara was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued woman a couple of years younger than my mother. She had steel-grey hair and a tastefully bookish office in South Kensington. There were no children’s pictures papering her wall; Dr Barbara had known from the age of fifteen that she didn’t want to have children, and this, too, was something I respected. Her desk was a rich mahogany, and upon it sat a dragon tree and a Newton’s cradle – its playfulness counterbalanced by the framed Ph.D. certificate affixed to the wall behind it. It was rare, however, to find Dr Barbara sitting at her desk. She preferred to conduct her sessions in the two leather armchairs, which faced each other against the backdrop of one of the several oak bookcases.
All in all, there was a pleasant weightiness to the furnishings in Dr Barbara’s office. I liked being there. There was something comforting about the routine of it all: the armchairs, the unrushed journey through affluent central London, the black coffee from the Caffè Nero across the road. After seven months of fortnightly appointments, even the fact that I had to rely on my father to foot the bill had stopped rankling. Because, really, this was money he owed me. It didn’t feel like the guilt money he had tried to throw at me in the past; this felt more like compensation I’d been awarded by a benign, sagacious judge in a small claims court. I felt I deserved it, and I knew that Freud would have agreed.
‘I read your article,’ Dr Barbara told me. ‘The interview.’ Only the interview had been printed at this point. Simon was due the following Sunday.
‘What did you think?’ I asked.
‘It was very compelling. And well written, of course. But you don’t need me to tell you that.’
‘Thank you.’
‘You found a body?’
‘Yes. My neighbour’s.’
‘Do you want to tell me about it?’
I didn’t take long to think about this. ‘Actually, Barbara, I’d rather not. I’d rather you read about it next Sunday. Is that okay?’
‘Yes. It’s your choice, of course. But . . .’ Dr Barbara laced her fingers and probed the top-left corner of her mouth with her tongue, the way she always did when taking some care over her next sentence. ‘But I’d like you to tell me a couple of things, concerning both articles.’
‘Fire away.’
Dr Barbara sipped her coffee. ‘I’d like to know why you’d rather I read about what happened, instead of just talking. It seems a convoluted way of doing things.’
This first question was easy to answer. ‘It’s not about being convoluted,’ I said. ‘It’s about being clear. What I’ve written expresses exactly what I wanted to say. It’s as perfect as I could get it. Anything I told you now wouldn’t be as accurate. It wouldn’t be as truthful.’
‘Okay. I think I can accept that argument. But it also leads on to my second point. I’m all for honesty – it’s indispensable within these four walls – but you’ve chosen a very public forum to talk about some rather private issues.’
‘My father?’
‘Your father, your thoughts, your feelings. Is this the best outlet?’
‘My father doesn’t read what I write. And as for my thoughts and feelings, well, I didn’t really plan to write about myself. It just turned out that way. With the interview, it was pretty much thrust upon me.’
<
br /> ‘You have a choice about what you put into the public domain.’
‘Yes, granted. But I suppose it felt like quite a liberating thing to do. It felt nice to tell the truth, and not have to dilute it. If I’d tried to write up the interview in any other way, it would have had no basis in reality. I don’t see the point in writing something dishonest.’
‘There’s a difference between being honest and writing without self-censorship. Everyone self-censors, all the time.’
I shrugged. ‘As I said, it felt liberating not to. Besides, I don’t think Miranda Frost self-censors, or not very much. So the format of the interview made a certain amount of sense.’
‘And what about the follow-up? Does it make sense to go on offering up your life for public scrutiny?’
‘You sound like Beck. Except he said that I was dramatizing my life.’
‘How do you feel about that?’
‘I think he’s being a bit unfair. I’m not dramatizing my life. I’m writing about something dramatic that occurred in my life. There’s a difference.’
‘A subtle difference, some would argue.’
‘It’s a big difference! I mean, with the Miranda Frost interview, it’s mostly just transcription. It’s objective journalism in its purest sense.’
‘And the follow-up?’
‘Well, no – that’s a personal account. It has to be subjective; that’s what makes it interesting. But that doesn’t mean I’m dramatizing. I mean, yes, there may be a dramatic element to the language and structure, but that’s because I wanted to capture the feeling of the experience. I wanted to be emotionally truthful.’
Dr Barbara weighed this argument in several seconds of silence.
I obviously hadn’t made myself entirely clear, so I tried again. ‘Put it this way: we all use one or two dramatic tricks when we’re talking about our lives. Say you were late for work – you missed the bus or got stuck in traffic or something. It’s very difficult to tell that story straight, without emphasizing certain details: the frustration, the watch-checking, the idiot in front of you who was on his mobile and didn’t realize that the lights had changed. You want to convey the experience as it felt at the time. It’s normal, and it’s not dramatizing as such. It’s just drawing out what’s inherently dramatic in the situation.’