Fifty-Minute Hour (6 page)

Now they're into Protest, waylay you with their outstretched hands, their broken scraps of life-story crayoned on strips of cardboard. ‘Mick from County Cork. Homeless, hungry, penniless. Two kids back in Ireland. God bless you for your help.'

I toss him two pound coins, though I doubt if God will bless me. If He cared enough to bless people, He'd have put a stop to homelessness before it got this bad, and then reversed the Marriage Feast of Cana thing and turned the alcoholics' hard stuff into water.

There's water water everywhere, swirling in the gutters, sneaking down my neck. I wait at traffic lights to cross a huge main road. Lorries pant and rumble past – more splashes on my skirt – a bus disgorges passengers; a cyclist in a yellow cape weaves in and out of cars. Who are all these strangers – fellow human creatures, co-travellers on the Road of Life? Balls! They're rivals. Rivals for the living-space, the oxygen, resources. Rivals for the miracles, the lucky breaks, the love. Rivals for John-Paul.

I'm just three streets away now. The fear is near unbearable. I've already passed two accidents, assumed each one was him. He won't be there, I know it. I'll collapse. They'll cart me off, confine me in a straitjacket. I won't even be able to die, or join him in a burial plot. You can't swallow all your sleeping pills with your arms strapped round your body.

I try to calm myself by walking round in circles. I'm far too early anyway. It's only one o'clock and still his lunchtime. I presume he breaks for lunch. I often hang about and watch the other patients coming in and out, but at one-ten on a Monday, things are pretty quiet. He can't be very hungry if he's been sucking sweets all morning and suppressing any last frail shred of appetite with nicotine. Perhaps he does his filing then, or puts money on a horse. He must be pretty rich by now. All those fat three-figure cheques just for sucking sweets.

I slip into the College of Technology, which has the perfect combination of a near-moron at reception and a loo on the ground floor. I use the loo eight times each week – before, to do my hair and face, and after, to throw up. No one seems to notice, or asks me to enrol. Even now, the moron's more concerned with picking out the chutney from her cheese and chutney sandwiches than with ousting an intruder. I dive into the ladies, dry my hair on yards and yards of toilet paper, scour my shoes and legs, then collapse onto a toilet seat for a good half-hour or so, listening to the voices, as folk come in and out. I've heard a lot of secrets in that toilet: adulteries, divorces, abortions, even shrinks.

At last, it's time to leave, though I'm so keyed up I can barely move at all now, and feeling almost feverish by the time I turn the corner to the tower. I never tell a soul I see John-Paul, but if I did confide, then went on to mention that he practised in a church tower without the adjoining church, they'd assume I was unhinged, but that's the honest truth. The tower is genuine Gothic, complete with pointed arches, buttresses, finials and turrets, even grinning gargoyles with chipped teeth and snaky hair. I take my usual minute to admire its sheer dimensions, its soaring upward thrust; crick my neck to gaze up at the steeple, which seems to rip right through the low and timid clouds, its triumphant cross pointing straight to God. I'm back in the late twelve hundreds, when God was still alive and all creation owned Him and His rules; when cool monastic refectories gave sustenance to travellers, in place of stifling Wimpy Bars, and the only serious traffic noise was the clack of hoofs on cobblestones, not Kawasakis tearing up the tarmac.

I let my eyes creep lower, wince, as always, at those incongruous modern office blocks with their glass and concrete facings, which squeeze the tower both sides, though are nothing like as dramatic or as high. The tower looks short of breathing-space, beleaguered and castrated without its nave and chancel, as if it's been captured by a smaller race and left a silent prisoner in the barbaric twentieth century, which doesn't speak the language of faith or aspiration, and where the only gods are dwarf ones like John-Paul. I imagine there were yew trees once, symbols of eternal life, and moss-encrusted gravestones, to guard the bodies of immortal souls returning Home to Father; now only litter-bins. I haven't yet discovered what happened to the rest of it. If somebody destroyed a church to make more room for offices, then why not its tower, as well, and how the hell did John-Paul lay his hands on it? Can you buy towers, just like houses, or rent them by the hour, and do they count as consecrated ground?

I'm sure John-Paul's not religious (which disappoints me, actually), so it's probably just a hang-up on his part – a phallic one, quite clearly, though a tower is so damned obvious I'd have thought he'd have the savvy to avoid it. Or maybe it's a power thing. I know he's very short, but all the same it seems a bit extreme to add two hundred feet to your stature by working in a tower. Unless it's simple swank. Other shrinks are content with rooms in Harley Street, or a snazzy Hampstead mansion in Freud's own NW3. Trust John-Paul to have to be unique. I suppose it also helps to keep away the boring geriatrics, the old or weak or crippled, who couldn't cope with all the stairs. Actually, his rooms are less than halfway up, but the stairs are steep and spiral and sometimes I can hardly cope myself. I take a minute's breather while I'm still safely on ground-level, then press the buzzer on the high-arched Gothic door, which opens straight on to the street with no path or fence or garden, not even any notice warning ‘Church' or ‘Shrink', ‘Beware!'

Silence, shocking silence. I've pressed the buzzer twice now, but he hasn't said ‘Come up.' I freeze, burn, faint, choke, expire. He's dead and buried – I knew it all along. My fingers shake and tremble as I lean them on the bell-push, then the entry-phone suddenly replies.

‘
Yes
?' it says, in that steel-and-truffle voice of his, which registers displeasure while it oozes charm and breeding.

‘It's Nial,' I stammer out.

‘Come up, Nial,' he answers, as if he hasn't died at all, caused me all that anguish, made me a near-wreck. He had trouble with my name at first. A lot of people do. Nial is a boy's name, a fifth-century Irish king's name, which my father chose before I'd quite materialised. Nial comes from ‘Niadh', which means ‘champion', and I suppose my poor unlucky father was into wish-fulfilment and could see me with an athletics blue or crowned with laurel wreaths. He wouldn't change it anyway, though my mother added ‘Maureen', to show I was a girl. Second names are hopeless, unless you're an author, or American. No one even knows them – just louses up your first one. Nobody can spell Nial, or pronounce it. You say ‘ni' like ‘nice', and not like ‘knee'. John-Paul told me once that he thought my name might actually have contributed to my sense of unreality, since it's the stressed and central syllable of the word annihilation.

I suppose I should be grateful he uses my name at all. Classical psychoanalysts often avoid all names on principle, because they interfere with their famous blank-screen image, and may distort the transference (which is a sort of buzz-word with them, and feeds their self-importance, since it means you see them as your father, mother, brother, sister, lover, teacher, God). I had a client just last spring, who'd been in Freudian analysis for over twenty years, and the shrink never once used his name in three thousand five hundred and eighty-seven sessions – except on his endless bills, of course. That poor (anonymous) sod, who didn't know his own name by the time he quit at the age of sixty-five, was one of the main reasons I started analytic therapy myself. He made it sound so painful and frustrating, any natural masochist couldn't fail to be enchanted.

I start dragging up the endless stairs, up and round, up and round, with a sudden view of toytown streets from one deep-embrasured window and the echo of my footsteps rising to John-Paul; then pause outside his rooms – one private where he naps or wanks, and the dim-lit round consulting room which I suppose is meant to represent the womb. Actually, the first time that I saw it I felt something close to awe. It
did
look like a womb, dark and claustrophobic, with all the curtains tightly drawn, so there seemed to be no windows, and that deep-hush carpet the colour of old blood, and the curving shielding walls. I seemed to recognise it, felt I'd been there long before, floated there nine months, in fact, lolling, dozing, sprouting hands and feet.

The door (or cervix?) is open, but I knock, to be polite. John-Paul never greets you, never says ‘Hallo,' like any normal person would; let alone ‘How are you?' It's all so damn impersonal – no friendly smile or hand-shake, no cosy little chat before you start the session, about the weekend or the weather, or what you did last night. It's part of their whole system, which I've started mugging up; dipping into Freud, or reading books on psychoanalysis, where before I read Nabokov and Paul Auster. Their aim is to be ‘neutral'– neutral personalities, neutral in their attitudes – though you might translate the term as meaning aloof and uninvolved. They even have this so-called Rule of Abstinence, which is all to do with frustrating your deep longings for basic human contact, refusing to gratify your hunger for comfort or support. (They love words like ‘gratification' – so long as they're withholding it.) They're basically just cold machines which give interpretations – no heart or hands – all head. Forget sympathy or friendship or even fellow feeling. I doubt you'd wrest a word of reassurance from them if your entire extended family had been wiped out in a nuclear attack.

I stand in rigid silence, eyes fixed on the floor. If I can't bring myself to raise my head, I've no proof he's there at all. That buzzer could be just a trick, a recording of his voice. I do look up, in fact. I've had enough bad scares already and it's the only glimpse I'll get of him the whole damn fifty minutes. I hold his gaze for one heart-stopping second; check his hair, his glasses, his suit, his shirt, his shoes. Yes, all complete, all there – even the pearl tiepin and the half-smoked cigarette. No heart, no warmth, no word, but then I'm used to that by now. Funny, though, it's still a shock every time I see him. It's as if it's never really him, not the him I've loathed or worshipped all those hours and hours, nor the one who gets entangled in my dreams, nor even the one I saw last week – or just the day before.

I hand him both his presents, try not to see his ring. It makes me mad, that ring. Oh, I know it's only sham, but you'd think he'd trust us, wouldn't you? I mean, all his female patients are hardly going to leap on him just because he's single. It's actually deceitful to pretend you're married when you're not, not to mention hypocritical, when you're a fully trained professional who's always stressing the importance of the whole and naked truth. One rule for the patients, another for the shrinks. He knows absolutely everything about us – our infatuations, fantasies, our dreams, our sexual oddities, our eating and excreting habits (even at the breast), our toilet-training, hobbies, hates and crimes – and we know almost nothing about him. Is he gay or straight or celibate, a solitary masturbator, or a wild polygamist? Does he vote Conservative, or sign petitions for the Greens? Is he constipated, anxious, scared of heights or moths? Does he do the washing up, or kick cats and dogs in private? Does he love his mother? Does he sail or jog or swim?

I snatch a quick glance at his tie. Ties are phallic symbols, so it's like examining his prick. The tie looks limp and drab, and has little squiggles on it which remind me of dead sperm. I kick off my wet shoes, He down on the couch, and suddenly he's gone again, sitting right behind me, but removed now from my view. It never fails to screw me up, that strange and frightening moment when his face and body disappear, but his voice and mind and presence swoop dangerously nearer, seem huge and overwhelming, so that I myself shrink to just a pinprick – a flea, a mite, a speck, a dot, an ant. I'm a creature with no backbone, a mollusc with no shell, just a dab of limp pink protoplasm smeared across his couch. All the things I'd planned to say ooze and leak away. I haven't got a larynx, let alone a tongue.

I suppose I should talk molluscs if I were following the rule – their famous Fundamental Rule, which means you undertake to tell your shrink whatever comes into your head, without any reservation or exception, including murderous thoughts, sheer drivel, or outrageous sexual fantasies. It's a crazy sort of system, and would cause sheer bloody mayhem if you used it in your ordinary daily life – lose you all your friends in half a day. Actually, I often just ignore it, or sometimes deliberately confuse the issue by breaking it on purpose. I mean, if I'm lying on his couch thinking, say, about some client's testicles – Howard's, for example, whose right one hangs much lower than the left – I may actually start talking about a black cat I owned (or didn't own) called Persil, who was run over by a car, but never mention bollocks. I suppose I've always had an urge to break the rules, and this is one you can break and get away with, since John-Paul's none the wiser.

If I were following it now, I'd be talking about not following it (if you understand my meaning), but instead I keep my silence. The minutes tick-tick by: three separate whispered naggings. I'll strangle those damn clocks one day; smash their smug glass faces. Trust him to have three – and all exactly right, so I can't even steal a second's extra time. John-Paul's obsessed with time. First he splits his day up into different-shaped segments from other normal people's (which helps to make him richer, since you can cram in far more patients over twenty years or so, if you slice ten minutes off each hour, but still insist on calling it an hour, and still charge a hefty fee for it). Then he examines all our deep unconscious reasons for being early, late, or even merely punctual, and if we feel a mite aggrieved at being rationed or short-changed, he'll go groping back to infancy again and interpret that as grievance with our mother for depriving us of a satisfying breast.