The Hypnotist's Love Story (18 page)

This afternoon I went into one of those surf shops, and I don’t know what came over me, but I somehow walked out carrying a wet suit and a boogie board.

I guess I’m going to have to learn how to ride it now. Or surf it. Or whatever the right terminology is. I’m quite chuffed about it.

Ellen woke on Monday morning feeling drained and wrung out, and was horrified when she opened her appointment book to find her day filled with back-to-back appointments without even five minutes for a lunch break.

She could vaguely remember thinking blithely to herself, “Oh, I’ll manage!” when she’d scheduled so many appointments. Now she thought longingly of her bed and how truly, amazingly glorious it would be to slide back under the blankets and sleep the day away. If only she felt properly, contagiously ill, with actual symptoms, then she could get on the phone and cancel all her appointments. But she knew she was just worn out. There had been too much eating and drinking and nervous socializing on the weekend. Too much heightened emotion. Too little sleep and too much sex. She suspected she was coming down with a bad case of cystitis.

She was also out of milk, which for a few moments as she stood at the open fridge seemed like the end of the world. She actually stamped her foot. She
needed
the crunch of cereal contrasting with the coolness of milk.

She put stale bread in the toaster with fast, sulky movements, as if the person responsible for the lack of milk was watching and feeling guilty. She went and picked up the newspaper from the front yard, where the delivery person had considerately thrown it straight in the middle of her front hedge so that she had to rustle through unpleasantly damp, dewy leaves to retrieve it.

Then, to top it all off, as she was eating her toast (which tasted weirdly acidic) and reading the paper (which was full of bad news: murders, fatalities, wars and suicide bombs—the world was adrift on a sea of tears) she came upon an article under the heading “A-List Turns Out for Society Wedding.”

And there was a picture of her client Rosie. It had been about two months since Ellen had last seen her, and during that time she’d lost a lot of weight. All her curves were gone. Her shoulders were bony and hunched in a strapless wedding dress, and she was surrounded by four tall, skinny bridesmaids in floor-length gowns. So she’d gone ahead with the wedding. Her revelation under Ellen’s supposedly skillful hypnosis that the reason she wasn’t having any luck giving up smoking was because she didn’t really like her fiancé had meant nothing at all. Either she’d decided that she didn’t really feel that way, or she was marrying him anyway, maybe for the money or the prestige or because she didn’t have the courage to cancel the wedding after all the invitations had gone out to the “A-list.”

Either way, it left Ellen feeling even more depressed. It made her feel pointless and incompetent.

The phone rang and Ellen quickly answered it, hoping for a cancellation, ideally of the morning’s first appointment so she could go back to bed.

“Good morning,” she said briskly. “This is Ellen.”

“It doesn’t sound like you’re having a very good morning at all!”

It was Harriet, her ex-boyfriend’s younger sister. They had stayed friends after Ellen and Jon broke up.

Harriet was a tiny, brittle, bossy woman, and very occasionally her
somewhat malicious conversation was exactly what Ellen felt like, in the same way that she sometimes found herself oddly craving the bitter taste of black licorice.

But right now, the sound of Harriet’s slightly nasal voice shredded Ellen’s nerves like a cheese grater.

She took a deep bracing breath as though she was about to run up a steep hill and said, “How are you, Harriet?”

“Fine, fine, just thought I’d call for a chat. It’s been months.”

Only Harriet would think that seven-thirty on a Monday morning was a good time for a chat.

“Yes, yes, too long,” said Ellen, and let her eyes briefly close. She felt an absurd desire to scream.

Whenever she spoke to Harriet, Jon suddenly jumped to the front of her consciousness. She could hear his voice in the similar speech patterns of Harriet’s voice. She could see his heavy-lidded half smile, half sneer. Harriet reminded her that Jon still existed.

She preferred to be bright and bubbly and moving full steam ahead with her life when she talked to Harriet so that the appropriate messages would get back to Jon. (She knew that Harriet would make sure she mentioned every conversation to Jon. That’s what she did: collected information and then shared it around, little pellets of power.) Ideally, Ellen should mention Patrick right now (
Have you heard? Ellen has a new boyfriend)
, but she didn’t have the energy to give him the enthusiasm he deserved.

“How’s Jon?” she said instead. Let’s bring him out on center stage, instead of letting him lurk about in the corners of this conversation.

“Funny you should mention him. You’re not going to believe this, but my eternal bachelor of a brother is getting married. We’re all in a state of shock. Can you believe it?”

“No,” said Ellen. She cleared her throat. “Goodness.”

She had lived with Jon for four years and the word “marriage” had never been mentioned. It had been her understanding that he didn’t believe in
the institution, and it never seemed to occur to him to ask how Ellen felt about it. In fact, he just didn’t believe in marriage to
her.

Her feelings were quite badly hurt. She actually felt them break, like a row of fragile porcelain cups that had exploded all at once. There were shards of pain flooding her body; tiny ones prickling her sinuses, a huge sharp one lodged in her chest.
Oh, for heaven’s sake, you don’t care! You’re in love with another man! You’re properly in love for the first time! You don’t care, you don’t care, you don’t care.
Except she did.

“He’s only known this girl for a few months,” continued Harriet. “She’s a dental hygienist.”

A few months. After just a few months. Maybe Jon was properly in love for the first time. And it was fine that Ellen had never properly loved Jon (as she now realized), but it was not fine that Jon had never properly loved her. Why? Because she was the
nice one
!

“Anyway, we’re sure it won’t last,” said Harriet. Her voice faltered a little, as if she was pulling back now that the damage was done.

Had she deliberately called first thing on a Monday, when any normal person’s defenses are down, to pass on this information just to hurt her? She must have known it wasn’t going to be welcome news, and yet Ellen knew that Harriet was genuinely fond of her.

“Oh, well, I hope for their sake that it does.” Ellen was impressed with the cool, detached tone of her voice. “Listen, Harriet, can I call you back another time? I’m having one of those mornings. I’m out of milk, and I woke up in such a bad mood.”

“Touch of PMT?” said Harriet. She’d always been one of those women far too happy to talk about her menstrual cycle.

“Just got out of the wrong side of the bed,” said Ellen.

She put down the phone and cried. Harsh, jagged, angry sobs. It was ridiculous. It was way out of proportion.

“This is your ego,” she said out loud. Her voice sounded loud, childish and broken in the kitchen. “This is just your ego.”

She could think of nothing worse than to be married to Jon. She did not miss him. It had taken a long time for her to reinstall her personality after he’d systematically taken it apart, making her doubt her every thought.

He was a selfish, pompous, egocentric, nasty man. She did not want to be married to him, but she did not want him to marry someone else. She did not want him, but she wanted him to want her.

It was stupid and immature and yet there it was, she couldn’t seem to wrestle control of her feelings. She cried and cried. It was an orgy of outlandish sobbing and wailing. She wanted to pick up the phone and call him. She wanted to scream, “What was wrong with
me
?” She wanted to see this girl. She wanted to watch them together. She wanted to listen in on their conversations.

Oh, Saskia
.
I understand. I know. I get it.

Finally, after much heaving of the shoulders, loud snotty sniffs and sudden fresh flurries of tears, it was over, and she felt remarkably cleansed, exhausted, shaky and pale but fine, like she’d just vomited up the last of a rancid meal.

Good Lord. How peculiar. Maybe Harriet was right and she really did have PMT, although her hormones were normally well behaved and didn’t cause such dramatic waves of feeling.

She picked up her diary to check when her period was due.

She flicked back and forth through the pages, slowly at first and then faster and faster. It wasn’t possible, was it?

Finally she put the diary back down and stared out the window of the kitchen at the sea.

I’m going to stop. I’m over it. I’m done.

Ironically, those were the actual thoughts going through my head when I went for my appointment at the hypnotist’s today.

She didn’t look that great when she opened the door to me. Her skin
looked blotchy, and her hair seemed sort of lank, and there was a greasy food mark on her top. I felt quite cheered by the sight of her.

And then, before we had our session, when she asked if I needed to use her bathroom, as she always did, I said yes, because I actually really did.

Out of habit, I automatically opened the mirrored cabinet above her sink. I wasn’t really that interested. I knew exactly what I’d see: the supermarket brand moisturizer, the contact lens solution, the deodorant and razors, the handful of lipsticks and the little bottles of essential oils.

I nearly missed it. I was about to close the cupboard door when something different caught my eye: a long, flat rectangular box.

I picked it up without much interest, and then I felt something snag in my chest, like a sharp hook dragging and tearing at my heart.

It was a pregnancy test. I recognized it because I’d used this same brand myself. Many times.

The box was open.

I opened it and pulled out two long white plastic sticks. She’d already done both tests, wanting to double-check the result.

The little window on both tests showed the same symbol. The symbol I had longed for but never, ever seen.

The hypnotist is pregnant.

S
he kept forgetting for minutes at a time and then remembering.

It was only seven hours since she’d done the test. After putting down her diary and staring out the window for at least ten minutes, she had suddenly gone into a frenzy, as if someone else had taken over her body. She’d thrown on dirty clothes, driven into the village and double-parked in front of the local chemist, which was only just opening. The chatty gray-haired lady who normally sold Ellen hay fever medication had kept her face politely uninterested when Ellen asked her for a pregnancy test and double-sealed the top of the white paper bag while talking about the funny weather for this time of year.

Her first appointment of the day had knocked on the door while Ellen was still sitting on the edge of her grandmother’s bathtub, holding both undeniably positive pregnancy tests in her limp hand.

The morning passed in a blur. She had no idea whether her work had been abysmal or brilliant. She had chatted and listened and induced trances
and written out receipts while an amazed voice in the back of her head chanted over and over:
I’m pregnant, I’m pregnant, I’m actually pregnant.

It was much too soon. Only three months! Their relationship was far too new for the words “I’m pregnant.” It felt tasteless and tacky. Like something that happened to a teenage couple on a soapie.

Also, it was too medical.
My period is late as a result of your sperm accidentally colliding with my egg through something faulty or slippery or otherwise relating to our condom usage, and I did a test that confirmed the level of pregnancy hormones in my urine and there you have it.