(1998) Denial (30 page)

She touched her own body, checking it out, finding reassurance that she was still solid, still flesh. She pushed her fingers through her hair. Not dead. Definitely not dead.

She had filmed once in a ward full of stroke victims. Some people could be trapped, deaf, dumb and blind, inside their bodies, with their consciousness still functioning normally.

Me?

If I could find my handbag. Cigarette lighter in there
.

The need to urinate was starting to dominate her thoughts. She could fight it off, but every few minutes it came back, worse than before. Now another rush came and this time the pain of fighting it was so bad that a tear rolled down her cheek. She stood, hunched against a wall, legs crossed, shaking, perspiring, her insides twisting as if someone was winding a tourniquet in there.

Then, finally, the wave passed. She was OK again, for a few minutes.

If I was in a hospital, paralysed, blind, I would have a catheter
.

She called out again for help. But the mere effort of shouting brought another rush from her bladder, and now, again, she put all other thoughts out of her head.

Loo. Jesus. There must be a loo.

Find a loo and then – and then think straight.

Her left hand was hurting like hell from the last time she had fallen over. With her right hand, she began to feel the walls. Methodical.
Must be methodical
. One inch at a time, top to bottom. She reached down to the floor, then up, as far as she could stretch. Cold smooth stone.

I got in here somehow, so there must be a way out
.

Wild thoughts flashing in her head now. Did Michael
Tennent have something to do with this? Brian? Who was the man who had come down the stairs and shaken her hand?

She stumbled, lost the wall, tried to find it. Her arms flailed, she let out a frightened yelp as she fell again, crashing hard on the stone floor, her face finding the mattress, the dank, musty, old-smelling mattress. She swept the floor with her arms, every inch of the floor, looking for her handbag. It wasn’t there.

‘Oh, God, please someone help me!’

On her knees again. Upright. Calming. Deep breath. Steady, balancing now, taking it easy, one step at a time, over to the wall. Start again.

Her hands moving again across smooth stone. She tried to tell herself that this was one of those really bad dreams of being trapped, running on the spot while the train bears down on you, or the murderer is coming towards you and your legs won’t work.

But the pressure of her bladder told her she wasn’t dreaming. She was awake. She was pressing against the wall again, legs crossed, swearing now, anger leaching out through her gritted teeth.

I am not going to wet my knickers. I am not going to piss on this floor
.

Sweet Jesus, I am not
.

‘Do you know about the bower-bird, Dr Tennent? Are you interested in ornithology?’

The lawnmower was at it again outside in the garden of the clinic. The heavy traffic, all the way back from Hampstead, had done nothing for Michael’s frayed nerves, and now Dr Terence Goel, sitting relaxed on his sofa, in a cream linen suit and moccasin loafers, was doing nothing for his nerves either.

Each time Michael asked him a question he answered with a question. Michael had removed his jacket, but sweat was still running off him. The air in this office was oppressively hot; it had been mitigated a little by the scent of cut grass, but now it was heavy with the pungent cologne that Dr Goel was wearing.

‘The bower-bird? I don’t, no. Is ornithology one of your interests?’

The drone of the mower was getting louder still. Michael sipped some water, glanced down at the American’s file.

‘How do you define an
interest
, Dr Tennent? At what point does
knowledge
become
interest?
’

‘When do you think it does?’ Michael asked.

Goel placed his palms flat on the cushion either side of him, leaned back and stared with a worried look at the ceiling. ‘
Ptilonorhynchus violaceous
.’ He looked at Michael and, in response to the psychiatrist’s blank expression, added, ‘The satin bower-bird. Have you heard of the
satin
bower-bird?’

‘I’m afraid not.’

‘It mixes pigment from berries and charcoal. It builds a bower like a thatched house, nine feet high, with rooms. It
manicures the lawn beneath each day and decorates it with insect skeletons and fresh flowers. Then it constructs an avenue of sticks leading up to its home, fabricates a paintbrush out of fibrous plant material, then decorates this avenue with the pigments it has mixed. It is the only animal in the world other than humans that makes tools and decorates its home. You have to admire that, don’t you, Dr Tennent?’

‘Yes,’ Michael said, guardedly, as before with Goel, not knowing where this was leading. He waited for his patient to continue.

Dr Goel stared back at the ceiling. Michael glanced at his notes from their previous session. Goel had talked to him then about prisms, he had explained why stars twinkled. He appeared to like imparting seemingly irrelevant facts. Michael was having to make a supreme effort to keep up his concentration. Amanda, he kept thinking. Amanda, my love, where are you?
Where are you?

‘Are you knowledgeable about ornithology, Dr Tennent?’

‘You just asked me that. No, I’m afraid not.’

‘I don’t think I asked you,’ he said.

Michael made a note in the file. Terence Goel seemed to forget things. A defence mechanism.

Thomas Lamark watched Dr Tennent.
You are not having a good day today, are you, Dr Michael Tennent? You think I’m a screwed-up psychotic who forgets things he has just said. You can’t wait for this session to end. You are worried sick about your bit of fluff, Amanda Capstick. You have good reason to be worried about her. You should be desperately worried. You should be even more worried than you are
.

And you will be
.

‘Did you know that many bird species mate for life?’ Dr Goel said.

Michael paused before responding, hoping to encourage Goel to continue speaking. But Goel was waiting for him.

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘If they lose their mate they just pine and die.’ Now he fixed his eyes firmly on Michael.

Breaking contact and looking discreetly down at his
notes, Michael remembered now that, at the last consultation, Goel had brought up the subject of car crashes. He recalled wondering then whether the man knew about Katy. Now he wondered again. No, he concluded, probably not; almost certainly not. He was just making this connection himself.

‘Do you think, Dr Tennent, there would be a difference in the way the male bower-bird would mourn its mate depending on how the mate died?’

Remembering Goel’s Achilles heel, his parents, Michael replied, ‘I don’t think I’m qualified to make that judgement. Let’s talk a little bit about you. You’re coming to see me because you’re suffering from depression. We didn’t get very far last time. I’d like to know a little more about you. Perhaps you could give me a brief life history.’

‘I’d like to ask you something first, Dr Tennent. Something that is bothering me.’

‘Go ahead.’

‘I read an article which said that too many people of the video generation are convinced they have what it takes to kill in cold blood. I’m a child of this video generation, but it seems to me that civilisation is a thin veneer over basic human nature, and basic human nature has no problem with killing at all. Would you agree with that?’

Michael was determined to make his patient talk more. He turned the question back to him. ‘Do you?’

Goel closed his eyes. ‘I’d like to consider the bower-bird a little further. There are all kinds of hazards that face a bird. Imagine a bower-bird is flying free, and she does not see power lines stretched across her path. She flies into these power lines and is killed by the impact. She falls to the ground.’

He opened his eyes, stared at the psychiatrist, then continued, ‘Now imagine this bower-bird is flying free, and she lands in a trap that is set by a hunter who is collecting birds to sell to zoos. He has a specific commission to capture a bower-bird. Her mate, the male bower-bird, is out elsewhere, gathering food. Which would be the most traumatic, do you think, Dr Tennent? To see the
corpse of his mate? Or for his mate simply not to return home?’

Michael squirmed in his chair. The man’s eyes were fixed on him. Jesus, if only this man knew how close to the knuckle he was. He wasn’t in any kind of a state to answer this question right now, that was the truth. It felt like his patient had tipped over a barrow inside his head.

Amanda. Amanda darling. Call! Call me, tell me you are OK, oh God, Amanda, call me
.

Under the guise of looking at the man’s file, Michael glanced at his watch. Twenty minutes still to go. He wanted to call Amanda’s secretary, Lulu, just to hear her voice, to feel some kind of proximity to Amanda.

And Thomas Lamark was finding it hard to keep his face straight. This was perfection! He had liked as a child to capture insects – flies were good, big ones, bluebottles were best – and then to stick a pin through one wing and press the point into a table top, and to watch the fly struggling, to feel the insect’s confusion as it went through all the motions of flying, but could not.

‘Let’s . . .’ Michael said, but he had lost the thread. He tried to regain his equilibrium. ‘Which – ah – which do
you
think would be the most traumatic?’

Terence Goel slipped his hand into his jacket pocket, then pulled out a coin. He tossed it, then trapped it on the back of his hand. ‘Call,’ he said. ‘Heads or tails?’

Michael was not sure whether to go along with this. Then curiosity got the better of him. ‘OK,’ he said. ‘Heads.’

Terence Goel lifted his other hand. ‘Good call.’

‘And tails would have been a bad call?’

Goel smiled. ‘No, that would have been a good call too. One’s good for you and one’s good for me.’

‘Is that a gold coin?’ Michael asked.

‘An heirloom.’ Goel slipped it back into his pocket.

‘Do you use it to make decisions?’

‘How do you make decisions, Dr Tennent?’

The session was fast heading out of control. Before they had begun, Michael had studied his notes from the previous week. At the last session Goel had produced
an endless string of
non sequiturs
, and they’d achieved nothing. He was doing the same again now. Evading the real issue. Blocking it out. Talking about anything but.

Maybe this was his problem? Goel clearly had an obsession with death, and another with loss. And he definitely had a slanted handle on reality. Where did the roots of all this lie? Had he lost someone he loved?

Almost certainly.

‘I’d like to know something about your childhood, Terence,’ he said, deliberately switching to his first name. ‘Let’s talk about your family life when you were a child.’

The effect was like turning a switch off. Goel seemed to shrink in on himself. He sat motionless on the sofa, frozen like a wax tableau in an art gallery labelled
MAN ON COUCH.

Nothing that Michael said could snap him out of it, or elicit a response. Not until he said, finally, ‘Our time is up now.’

Then Goel rose and, without speaking to him, without looking at him, walked towards the door.

‘If you see my secretary on the way out, she’ll arrange your next appointment,’ Michael said, secretly hoping that Dr Goel wouldn’t bother.

Thomas Lamark wrote the next appointment down in his black leather diary. He was pleased, it had been a good session.

Perfect.

He played it back in his head as he drove Dr Goel’s blue Ford Mondeo back towards Holland Park, looking forward to getting back to his bower. He drove gently, not wanting to shake around the box he had collected from Cheltenham that was still in the boot.

Looking forward to opening it.

Michael continued to think about Dr Goel during the rest of the morning. Something did not add up about the man. His doctor had referred him because he had diagnosed that he might be suffering clinical depression. Yet Goel did not act as if he was depressed.

With depression, people’s self-esteem sank. They failed to take care of their appearance. They lost their social skills.

Dr Goel seemed to have a very high self-esteem. His body language was that of a confident man. He took immaculate care with his appearance. No way was this man depressed.

There was something very wrong with him for sure. A deep darkness. Psychotic, perhaps. A sociopath?

Not depression.

The need to urinate was now a critical mass of pain inside Amanda. She was not going to be able to hold out much longer.

Then her hands found an opening in the wall. A door!

How the hell did I miss this before?

It was impossible that she could have missed it: she was certain she had been all the way around, many times.

Who had opened it?

Jesus. Was someone else in here with her?

Knees knocking hard together, thighs gripping, pain shooting up through her kidneys, spiking right into her chest, she stepped into the gap. The open doorway. Stepped forward in small, agonising steps.

The smell was even more horrendous as she entered this new area of darkness. It was stinging her eyes, stripping her throat, hurting her lungs. But she could sense something in here.

A human presence.

She called out, in a voice so distant and choked that she barely recognised it as her own, ‘Hallo?’

Loud black silence greeted her.

She kept inching forward, beyond the doorway now, feeling her way along another smooth wall. Then, suddenly, in spite of her cautious pace, her feet struck something solid that caught them out, her hands lost contact with the wall, she stumbled, windmilling her arms in the darkness, then fell forward, crashing down on a hard, lumpy object.

‘Sorry,’ Amanda said. ‘Sorry. I’m –’

No movement from this rocky unyielding mass beneath
her. Her hand was touching something soft. Soft, yet coarse at the same time.