All in the Mind (23 page)

‘What happened? What happened to you?’ she said, fighting back tears.

‘He’d been having a go at me the whole game. Asylum seeker this, asylum seeker that, go home, foreigner –’

‘You should have ignored it and played on.’

‘Would Dad have ignored it?’

The game had resumed. The coach said to Arta it might be an idea to take Alban home to avoid any further flare-up at the end.

She could feel his agony as he sat staring out of the bus window.

‘Sorry,’ he said.

‘It’s not me you should be saying sorry to, but the boy you hurt.’

‘No way,’ he said.

‘Let’s see what Dad says.’

‘Do we have to tell him?’

‘Don’t be ridiculous, Alban. Of course we do.’

They told Lirim when he got home from the car wash. Arta was surprised by how lenient he was. Usually he came down hard on any bad behaviour from Alban, but this time she felt he was just going through the motions, pretending to be cross, giving his son a friendly
cuff
around the ear. He seemed more interested in knowing whether he would be suspended from future matches than what it said about Alban’s character. Perhaps he was tired, she thought, or overexcited about the new Sunday opening. She suspected, though, that part of him was secretly proud of Alban for standing up for himself.

As she washed the dishes after dinner, she heard Alban asking Lirim whether he could stay up to watch
Match of the Day
.

‘Of course you can,’ said Lirim. ‘Glad to see today hasn’t put you off football.’

Arta was furious with both of them. It was bad enough to be violent, as Alban had been, but she found Lirim’s virtual condoning of the violence even worse. It disgusted her. As she heard the two of them chatting away about the match they were watching next door, she tossed aside the dishcloth, went into her bedroom and gathered up a pillow and a blanket. Then she went into the children’s room and lay down on the floor next to the bed in which Besa was sleeping soundly.

Ten minutes later, Lirim came in.

‘Arta, what are you doing?’ he whispered.

‘What does it look like? Sleeping here. Alban can share the bed with you since you’re both so pleased with yourselves.’

It pained her to see Lirim looking so crestfallen, but she felt too angry to change her mind, and too proud to back down.

‘What on earth is the matter?’ he said.

‘I don’t want to talk about it. Just let me sleep.’

‘But you’ll be uncomfortable.’

‘I’ll move on to Alban’s bed. Now go please. I’m tired. We’ll talk about it in the morning.’

Lirim gave her a final, beseeching look and then tiptoed out of the room, closing the door quietly behind him. For hours Arta lay in the dark, listening to her daughter’s soft breathing and fearing the arrival of sleep which would take her back to her nightmares.

SUNDAY

21

The light on David Temple’s digital alarm clock showed it was 3.12 a.m. He’d been lying awake for over three hours, and he knew the void inside was growing. He watched the little electronic dot between the 3 and the 12, which flickered silently on and off to record every passing second, and with each flicker, he felt his mind filling with a familiar painful emptiness. How can emptiness be painful? If there is nothing there, where does the hurt come from? How can a void be full of emptiness? And if it is already full, how come it feels that with every new second it is getting fuller? And why ask these questions, he said to himself, when I know I don’t know the answers, and at times like this, I know I never will?

Then the void started to fill, as his mind was taken over by what he called his water torture. Every flicker on the clock was a tiny drop of water trickling through a slightly open sluice gate into his mind. One drop was next to nothing. But a minute delivered sixty drops, an hour 3,600, and if he stayed awake all night, that would be going on for 30,000 drops of water, an unstoppable force, drowning his mind. He didn’t want to drown. He wanted to sleep.

He craved the oblivion that sleep delivered, and the possibility that, on waking, he’d find himself on an upturn from the downward curve of the rhythm. He couldn’t recall an upturn following a bad night’s sleep, but perhaps he was thinking so negatively about everything that no positive memories were being allowed in.

All evening he’d tried to dredge up positive thoughts without success. He and his mother had eaten dinner in silence, he picking at the enormous plate of minced beef, carrots and mashed potato she’d
dished
up for him. He’d watched her mouth, chewing and chewing. Open, shut, chew, chew, chew, chew, open, shut, chew. On and on … It seemed like it might never stop. Afterwards she’d watched TV for a while and he had watched her watching, a book on his lap. He had no intention of reading the book. It was his device to stop her from talking to him. Occasionally he looked down and turned the page but somehow the book always fell back open on page 166.

He knew it was wrong to feel the way he did about his mother. His rational mind said she had done more for him than anyone could expect, but his inner voice kept saying harsh things. His rational mind knew it should be his father he blamed for the way he was, but he couldn’t help thinking his mother must have done something to drive his dad away.

But look at her. She was kind, she was thoughtful, she would never harm anyone. So it must have been me, he thought. I was the change in their life that he couldn’t handle. That must have been the reason he left.

Over the years, he’d considered tracking down his father, and trying to punish him. But where would he start? His dad had left almost thirty years ago. He could be anywhere in the world. He could be dead. The thought of hunting him down never stayed long.

His mother had made them both a cup of tea just before eleven. She took hers to bed, her last words, as on so many nights before, ‘Don’t stay up too long.’ He’d sat for an hour in the living room with the lights off, and then dragged himself to bed. He wondered why he’d bothered. What difference did it make to be awake and alone with his thoughts here in bed, in the dark, or awake and alone with his thoughts downstairs in the dark?

He thought about getting up, had a conversation in his head about whether to stay where he was, or to walk around the room. Staying was easier. He wondered what Professor Sturrock would advise. He would probably tell him he needed to sleep, but if he really couldn’t, then perhaps he should get up for a while, and look over recent dreams, or review what he had done of his homework so far, something that would allow him to think in a more structured way of the
issues
that were clearly keeping him awake. He would almost certainly advise against looking endlessly at a little flashing dot between the hour and the minute on a digital bedside clock.

David wished he was in the comfortable armchair in Professor Sturrock’s consulting room right now, talking about his dreams, listening to the doctor’s gentle voice telling him that eventually he would be able to sleep again, eventually the emptiness would go and everything would be all right.

When he first started visiting Professor Sturrock, he hadn’t seen the point of all the dreams analysis. Sturrock had told him how we dream all the time, and our conscious and subconscious minds help each other sift out what matters and what doesn’t. He’d said that, if you worked hard at it, you could start to see patterns in your dreams and try to make sense of them. It had amused David to call the psychiatrist’s bluff. In addition to what he actually dreamed, he would sometimes invent detail too, just to see whether Professor Sturrock would invest the invented detail with any significance. Once, David had told him about a dream he’d had where he was locked in a gas chamber with his mother. Many of the details were true – the chamber, the pipes, the colourless gas that starting hissing into the room. But he’d invented a drawing of a church on one of the walls, close to where the gas pipes entered the chamber. He’d said that out of the church was filing a crowd of people lined up behind a bride and groom. Apart from the church, his account of the dream was pretty faithful. As the pipes began pumping gas into the room, his mother had screamed for help. David told Professor Sturrock how, in the dream, he’d felt strangely calm. He was upset for his mother who was shouting, ‘God, what did I do? Take me but do not take my son,’ but he did not believe they were in danger. And he remembered thinking that, even if they were in danger, it wouldn’t matter.

Sure enough, the Professor had skipped over the gas chamber element of the dream, dwelt a little on the contrast between his mother’s panic and David’s calm – a familiar theme – but then lingered at length on the drawing of the church and even more so on the bride and groom coming out of it. Could David make out who they were?
Were
they happy? Did one seem happier than the other? David said he couldn’t remember. It was just a sketch on the wall. He knew that Professor Sturrock wanted this to be a subconscious sighting of David’s parents so that he could ask how David had felt on seeing his father in the picture. He pressed and pressed, until David confessed to making up the picture of the church and the wedding. He thought Professor Sturrock would be angry with him. Far from it. Apparently, even inventions, especially when they might concern his parents, gave Professor Sturrock something to work with.

From then on, David had taken the whole thing more seriously, writing copious notes for Professor Sturrock each week. Sometimes he would fill pages. But tonight he felt so dead inside he couldn’t imagine having the energy even to pick up a pen. In any event, he couldn’t sleep, so he would have nothing to record.

He wondered what Professor Sturrock was dreaming about tonight. Did he analyse his dreams? Did he wake up and immediately obsess over a minor element of his reverie – why the walls kept changing colour from red to blue to green to yellow, why the man at the back was carrying a cross, why the radio announcer was speaking Portuguese? These elements had all been in David’s dreams recently, and Professor Sturrock had spent a few minutes on each. What details of his own dreams would the psychiatrist analyse, if he did? Or did he get someone else to analyse his dreams? Who did psychiatrists see when they were feeling shaky up top?

David worried that, once again, he was allowing his mind to fill with questions he couldn’t answer. Maybe Professor Sturrock didn’t worry about his own dreams. Perhaps he was a heavy sleeper and when he woke, he was immediately busy, rushing to get up, to prepare himself for a day trying to analyse others. It couldn’t be much of a life, David thought, having to sort out everyone’s problems. What did he think when David left the room each week? God, what a loser?

He wondered what kind of house Professor Sturrock lived in. It was probably big. Were psychiatrists well paid? No idea. Did he sleep in a big bedroom with paintings on the wall and little statuettes that
he
and Mrs Sturrock picked up on their summer holidays? Maybe Mrs Sturrock was dead. He was a widower. Or he was divorced and now on the second Mrs Sturrock, and he had a complicated family set-up, kids from his first marriage, kids from hers, kids they shared between them. What would it be like to have a father who took you on holiday?

How can I be sure he has kids? David thought to himself. I bet he does, but how many? Two? Three? No, five. I bet he’s a good father. Were they grown up now? Must be. How old is he? Sixty? Bit younger, bit older, round there I would reckon, so his kids, what will they be? Thirties, maybe forties, twenties if he started late. I bet he’s a grandad too. I bet he has a picture of his grandchildren in his wallet and when he has no patients around, he gets it out and puts it on his desk, and it cheers him up to think he’s taking them to the park at the weekend.

David wondered if he would ever have grandchildren. He doubted it. You needed children first and to have children you needed a woman, and you had to have sex with the woman and she had to get pregnant. Amanda’s sudden return to his thoughts was like a punch to the chest, and he rolled over, pulling a pillow against his head. How could he have imagined Amanda would have gone out with him, let alone had sex with him? No chance. Why couldn’t he have seen that before he made such a fool of himself ? Maybe he should have stayed with the fantasy, not listened when his inner voice was telling him to try to make it real. But fantasies don’t make love, they don’t make children. They’re sterile, ultimately they’re dead.

He wondered what Professor Sturrock made of his story about Amanda. Had he spent any time, even a minute, even a few seconds, thinking about it over the weekend?

He was suddenly confronted, and frightened, by the thought that one day, maybe soon, Professor Sturrock would retire. Perhaps he was nearer sixty-five than sixty. Maybe he won’t retire, he thought. Maybe he’ll stay on for a few of his really tough cases and I’ll be one of them. I can tell he likes me. I don’t believe he puts as much thought into everyone else’s problems as he puts into mine. Look at all the
homework
I do for him, and he has always read it, digested it, printed out my emails and put little circles around points he wants to discuss at greater length. Sometimes I can tell he’s gone back over some of the homework from months earlier, checking for the rhythms and the patterns. I bet he doesn’t do that for everyone. How could he? He wouldn’t have the time, for heaven’s sake. So what do I do if he goes? What if I get transferred to someone else and have to go through all the same old same old, the weeks and weeks of talking we did before I felt he was on my planet, somewhere inside my head? And what happens if I don’t like the new one? What do you do if you just can’t bear to be in the same room? Do you walk? Do you ask for a different one? But what will they say? You’ve just had a new one, you can’t have another one so soon after. Even if Sturrock does keep me on after retirement, it can’t last forever, can it? He could grow old and senile. What havoc a gaga shrink could wreak. But maybe by then it would be like with Mum, I will know the Professor so well that I’ll be able to predict his reactions, and maybe get guidance that way, even without actually seeing him.