All in the Mind (3 page)

‘Perhaps not now, maybe later, I could do you a nice little Welsh rarebit.’

In his mother’s world, food was always ‘nice’ and ‘little’, unless it was a roast, a bowl of pasta or a fry-up, in which case it would be ‘nice’ and ‘big’. When he was fine, he was OK with her fussing around and feeding him. When he was down, it became unbearable.

Normally, his depressions were worst in the mornings, and got slightly better as the day wore on. But on the day of the incident, he’d felt the knot in his stomach tightening, and the void growing, and he was worried he was getting close to saying or doing something that would hurt his mother. He decided he had to get out, maybe go for a walk in the little park three streets away. But he knew she would be upset if he just walked out without saying anything, so he sat for a while, trying to summon up the energy to announce his departure. He ran the words around his mind. ‘Just popping out for a breath of fresh air.’ Or should it be ‘Just going out for a walk’? ‘Just going out for a little walk’? He wondered whether to try to add in an offer of service. ‘Just popping out for a little walk, Mum – need anything from the shops?’

But even as he was rehearsing the best approach, he could see no way that she wouldn’t engage, forcing him to feel the pressure to speak again, and he just didn’t have the will for it. If he really dug deep now, he might get one sentence out, probably the short version saying he was popping out for a walk. But she was familiar with his rhythms, and she would be worried and the worries would come out
in
questions that would require a response. Questions like ‘Where?’ or ‘Why?’ or ‘When will you be back?’ He didn’t know the answers to any of them.

‘Where?’ Probably the park. Possibly the canal. Or he might just go out and wander, street by street, until he felt a little better, or tired enough to sleep.

As to ‘why?’ he wouldn’t be able to tell her the truth, which was that he was on the downward curve and when that happened, everything she said pushed him further towards the floor.

He loved his mother. She was in many ways his only true friend. He liked to think that the reason it was she who plunged him downwards when the rhythm kicked in was because she was the only person there, that if he was in different company, the words and motions of others would have the same dire effect. But he couldn’t be sure. When the downward rhythm began, he avoided anywhere but home, any company but his own or his mother’s. So how could he know? Perhaps she was the cause of the spiral and he grew more and more desperate because he wanted her to be the cure to its repetitive agonies.

He must have eaten up fifteen minutes running the various options around his mind. His inner voice told him unequivocally that he was not going to be able to articulate the simple concept that he intended to go out for a stroll. But he felt he owed it to his mother to try. She was not a bad person. She was a good person, and she had a lot to put up with, never knowing whether he was going to be up or down. Mostly she knew he was going to be down but she never stopped trying to jolly him along. He tried to say, ‘Just popping out for some air,’ but as the ‘p’ at the start of ‘popping’ formed on his lips, he pulled back.

‘Did you say something, love?’ she’d asked.

‘No,’ he’d said. He was fine with ‘No’, ‘OK’, ‘Fine’ and ‘Yeah’. Beyond that, words were locked away until the rhythm turned upward, and he never knew when that would be.

Go on, he said to himself, one last try, really try, it won’t hurt, it won’t harm, just say it. But no. It was impossible because she wouldn’t be able to let go, she’d be straight in there asking, ‘Where, love, why,
love
, what time you going to be back, love, do you fancy a nice little chicken salad when you come home?’ And then he’d be back to square one, but one notch lower, one ring wider in the emptiness bowl, swamping the odd shapes of emptiness that first surrounded the knot in the centre of the stomach. So now he was just playing a waiting game, pretending to read the newspaper he had placed on his lap, but just longing for his mum to leave the room, preferably to head upstairs, so he could slip out.

After what seemed like hours she said the words he wanted to hear.

‘Just going up for a wee, love. You OK?’

‘Fine,’ he said.

As he heard her reach the landing he fetched his coat, picked up his key from the table by the front door, and fled.

The noises of cars passing or children laughing and shouting were less grating than the voice of his mother trying to persuade him to eat food he didn’t want. The kids’ noises were just noise, they had nothing to do with him. The cars came and went. There was a consolation in the dark. If nobody could see him, nobody could speak to him. Dark also heralded the time when he would be ready to sleep. Sleep at least removed several hours of the day, and meant he would be a few hours closer to the next upward curve of the rhythm, sometimes with dreams along the way that made him feel warmer and less anxious than he did in his waking hours.

He was rarely violent, but as he arrived in the park, he stumbled over a discarded petrol can, which unleashed in him such rage that he kicked the can, kicked it again, then stamped on it four times before picking it up, whirling it hammer-thrower-style round and round above his head, then letting it go flying into the night.

He had neither seen nor heard the two cyclists pedalling side by side along the bus lane which bordered the park. As the petrol can bounced towards the road, it clipped the front wheel of the bike closest to the verge. The cyclist jerked his handlebars to the right, so violently that the wheel touched the left foot of the second cyclist, who in turn pulled away, tried to click his feet out from the cleats on his pedals,
but
failed to maintain his balance and fell into the road, his friend falling on top of him a few nanoseconds later. The second cyclist was not wearing a helmet and his head hit the tarmac hard as he fell.

David looked around to see if anyone had witnessed what the Clerkenwell magistrate would subsequently call ‘this mindless act’. A part of his mind was telling him to turn and run. Instead he walked over to the two men, started to help them up, and once he had done so, confessed he had thrown the can which had been responsible for their fall. ‘I’m really very sorry. Here, let me help you.’

The helmeted cyclist appeared not to be hurt at all, though he was rubbing his hip and moving his neck and shoulder to check for strains. The second man had a large graze across the side of his head through which blood was beginning to seep. There was real hurt and anger in his voice as he railed at David. ‘What on earth were you thinking of? You could have killed us. Imagine if a car or a bus had been overtaking us as we fell into the road. Bang, dead.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said David. ‘I really am.’

‘Is that it? Is that all you can say?’

‘The problem is that I’m quite ill.’

It was the first time he had ever said it in those terms and they knew immediately what he meant.

‘Care-in-the-community job, are we?’ said the helmeted man in a tone that was surprisingly friendly. Even his angry, bleeding companion seemed to soften just a little. They were clearly disarmed by David’s confession, his apology, and now this statement about his mental health.

‘Hadn’t you better call an ambulance for your friend?’ asked David. ‘Or the police?’

His lawyer would later cite this as a set of circumstances amounting to a ‘cry for help’, which would lead to David escaping with a small fine provided he agreed to undergo psychiatric treatment. And so Professor Sturrock entered his life. He didn’t feel substantially better. But he felt a little better, some of the time, and he was sure this was in large part down to the Professor. It made him even more determined to make his appointment today.

David spooned the tea bag from his fourth mug of tea, squeezed out the last drops and placed it carefully on the saucer. He had another half-hour before he was due up there on the sixth floor. ‘You can do it,’ he whispered to himself. Professor Sturrock had such faith in him – he owed it to him. As he stirred the sugar into his tea, he remembered the scribbled note the Professor had put on his homework just before Christmas last year – ‘
Low self-esteem is not the same as humility. You may think that you are less important than others, but what I think you are is humble. And humility is a fine quality
.’ He was pretty sure he was going to turn up now.

3

Matthew Noble QC had taken Friday morning off work in preparation for the ordeal of his first ever encounter with a psychiatrist, but the time was dragging. As he sat in the kitchen nursing his cup of coffee, his wife Celia insisted on reading out the latest piece of research on sex addiction she had found on the Internet. He thought the whole thing ridiculous, but Celia had been adamant he should get help, and he didn’t feel he was in a position to argue. She had caught him out cheating on her, twice in fairly rapid succession. He knew he had left her feeling hurt and humiliated on both occasions, but she was clear that, despite everything, she didn’t want to lose her marriage. They had recently celebrated their silver wedding, and whatever it was that had led him into his infidelities, he still felt something for her. She knew everything there was to know about him: what he liked to eat, what clothes he liked to wear, his little routines. The idea of living without her horrified him. Partly, he acknowledged, it was a question of self-image. There was something a bit sad and loserish about colleagues he knew whose marriages had ended because they had run off with younger women. But also he knew he depended on his wife. Who would book the holidays for a start? Who would run the house? And they still sometimes laughed together, not always at each other. So he was grateful that Celia was making such an effort to keep things from falling apart. He found it quite touching that once the initial shock at his infidelity had subsided, she changed her attitude, deciding to think of him as victim not sinner. He found it irritating, however, to be labelled a sex addict.

The days after Celia’s discovery of his second affair had been
torture
. They skirted round each other in the house, avoiding any kind of conversation. Then, one night, after they had been lying stiffly side by side for hours, both wide awake, Celia had gone into the study and switched on the computer. By the time dawn broke, she was convinced that the Internet had explained her husband’s betrayal. And she said that the volume of material on sex addiction – more than six million items on Google – meant it was likely to be straightforward finding someone to help him. She refused to countenance even the faintest protest from Matthew. All the evidence pointed in the same direction. For example, though their sex life might not have transported them to heavenly pastures too frequently in recent years, her research showed they had sex more often than the most regularly quoted average for their age group, only marginally, it was true, but he could not claim theirs was a sexless marriage. Yet he had twice put in peril a relationship that they, their children, their friends and Matthew’s colleagues at the Bar all rationally analysed as a strong one. And the most common definition of a sex addict appeared to be someone who felt compelled to seek out new sexual experiences regardless of the risk to personal, family or professional life. ‘That would seem to be you in a nutshell,’ she’d said over breakfast the next morning, as she took him through printouts from the Web. ‘Look at the facts,’ she’d said. Though he didn’t particularly want to, he had to accept that when she first caught him red-handed, professing love down the phone to Madeleine, a divorced solicitor, his reaction had been to go off immediately in search of another even bigger fix with Angela. Celia had articles on how the addict spent a great deal of time and energy planning the next sexual encounter, often making the arrangements more and more complicated as a way of heightening the eventual thrill, which in turn would lead to the need for greater complexity in future to maintain the thrill level. When he thought about the layers of subterfuge in his relationship with Angela, and the lies he told Celia about conferences that never happened, in countries he had never been to, he could see she had a point.

He’d sat and listened as she itemised all the chemical changes that
take
place in people’s minds and bodies during and after sex. ‘Your sexual wiring is different to most people’s, Matthew,’ she’d said. ‘For you, the chemical reactions are more intense so you need one sexual sensation to be followed by another once the effect of the first one has worn off.’ Apparently, he was among the 3 to 7 per cent of the population suffering some form of sex addiction.

Amid the relief at her apparent forgiveness, Matthew felt humiliated that he was going to see a psychiatrist. He paced up and down the length of their kitchen as he waited for the taxi he’d booked to come at 10.45, in good time to get him from upmarket suburban Totteridge to central London. From the moment he’d woken up, he’d felt mildly nauseous. If people who knew him were asked to write down one word to sum him up, ‘robust’ would feature high up the list, as well as ‘strong-willed, independent, pragmatic, solid’. Mad, insane, loopy, deranged, depressed – the words normally associated with the need to see a psychiatrist – would not figure. ‘Sex addict’ would be even less likely. Yet here he was, about to visit the Prince Regent Hospital for a session with one of the country’s top shrinks.

As Celia had wittered on at him over the last few days, he had developed his own picture of a sex addict. A man who woke up to a giant erection every morning, which he would immediately masturbate into submission before being able to face the day. Someone who lived in a hovel surrounded by old porn magazines and crumpled tissues. Who viewed every even vaguely attractive woman as quarry to be leered at, followed and hunted down. Who, when free sex could not be found, would purchase it without regard to the sordidness of the venue or the disgustingness of the body his penis would enter. Who would spend hours on the Internet flicking from one porn image to another before finding a video clip that could hold his attention and interest long enough to inspire and then exhaust the next erection. The sex addict was a sad, lonely, depraved individual of low income and low social standing, with bad teeth and greasy hair that left an oily residue on the collar of his anorak. So how on earth had he, a highly educated, married father of two, a respected barrister, a
long
-time top-rate taxpayer, likely one day to be treasurer or even captain of the South Herts golf club, been engineered by his wife into accepting that he had joined the ranks of the waxy anoraks? He who had lost his virginity later than all his close friends; who could count on one hand the sexual partners he’d had before he married Celia; who had only ever watched porn in hotels if they allowed a few minutes of free viewing and wasn’t overly bothered if they didn’t; and who had never once felt tempted to pay for sex or trawl the Internet for sexual contact or pleasure? He just could not imagine what sort of person would buy sex.