There were days when he felt like throwing the tray over
her and screaming,
Let me be free!
– but this was not one of them.
He checked his watch, waited for the second hand to complete the sweep on its circuit. At precisely ten thirty, he entered his mother’s bedroom.
Thomas had been awake throughout the night in front of his computer; a cybertraveller of the world, he rested but seldom slept. Nights passed in games of chess with a man called Jurgen Jurgens in Clearwater Springs, Florida, or in speculation on extra-terrestrial life with a chat-line group in San Francisco, or in discussing recent gruesome deaths with a contributor to the
Fortean Times
. He checked e-mail from several medical newsgroups to which he subscribed, traded recipes with a woman in Chesapeake bay, and monitored the movements of stock markets around the world, charting the progress of the shares in his mother’s portfolio and studying the websites of the companies behind them. Each morning he fed her stockbroker with fresh information.
He had an IQ of 178.
Walking in silent footfalls across the carpet, unable to take his eyes from his mother’s face, his heart filled with adoration – and another, conflicting emotion with which he had struggled all his life, he placed the tray on the table at the foot of the two-poster canopied bed, opened the white lace and damask curtains by pulling their cords, then secured them with tasselled ropes. The room smelt of Chanel perfume and his mother’s clothes. The smells of his childhood. The smells of his life.
Aroused, he stared at her.
Her blonde hair, which had tumbled across the pillow, glowed as if the rays of sunshine were a theatrical spotlight. He knew that she was not going to open her eyes or move until he had kissed her, although she was awake now, for sure. This was her tease.
And these precious seconds each morning, when she lay looking so gentle, so sweet, so pretty, as he stood adoring her in silence, these moments were the pearls of his life.
He was rapt. She was beautiful, sixty-nine years old, an
angelic vision. Her face was white, it was always white in the morning, but today it seemed even whiter, her beauty even purer. She was beyond perfection; she was the state of grace to which his existence was rooted.
‘Good morning, Mummy,’ he said, and walked over to kiss her. She never opened her eyes until that kiss. This morning her eyes stayed shut.
He noticed now, for the first time, the popped blister packs of capsules littering the floor beside the bed. The empty tumbler.
There was a tightening inside him. Even as he bent, he knew something had changed in this room. She had come home in distress yesterday. She’d had a headache and gone to bed early.
Her cheek was cold against his lips. It felt inert. Like soft putty, it yielded but did not spring back.
‘Mummy?’ His voice came out sounding all wrong.
A bottle sat on the floor beside the bed: the cap was off, the contents had gone.
‘Mummy?’
Panic blurred his vision; the floor rose, the room shifted as if it was being rocked by an ocean swell. He threw his arms around her, tried to move her, to lift her up, but she was rigid, like a slab of meat from the freezer.
He screamed out to her, grabbed an empty blister pack from the floor, tried to read the label but he couldn’t focus. He seized the bottle but could not read its label either. Then he lunged for the phone, stumbled, grabbed the receiver and dialled 999.
‘Ambulance,’ he blurted, then the address and phone number, and then in deep, sobbing gulps the words, ‘Please, my mother, Gloria Lamark, the actress! Gloria Lamark!
Gloria Lamark!
Please, please come. She’s taken an overdose.’
He dropped the receiver. It bounced on the carpet then dangled.
The operator talked back to him calmly. ‘The ambulance is on its way. Please stay on the line, sir. Can you feel a pulse? Is she breathing normally? Do you know what she
has taken? How long ago she took them? Is she on her back? If so, please lay her on her side. Do you know if the tablets were taken with alcohol? All the time I’m speaking to you an ambulance is on the way. Could you please get together the tablets that you think she’s taken to show the paramedics, sir? Please ensure her airways are clear.’
He had his arms around his mother’s neck and was hugging her to him, choking on his sobs, haemorrhaging tears. She had no pulse, she wasn’t breathing, she was hours past that. He heard the ambulance-service operator’s voice, a distant tinny echo, and in fury he snatched up the phone. ‘I went to fucking medical school, you stupid bitch!’
He threw the phone down and clutched his mother to him again. ‘Mummy, don’t do this to me. Don’t leave me! You promised you’d never leave me. Come back, please come back, you
must
come back!’
He pressed his lips to her mouth, tried to open it, but it stayed shut, tight shut. Locked.
She had thrown away the key.
She was smiling at Michael through the wide rectangle of soundproofed glass that separated the cramped radio studio from the cramped control room.
Her name was Amanda Capstick. She worked as a producer for an independent television company that was making a documentary on psychiatrists. Twenty-nine, blonde hair that touched her shoulders and a smile that touched his heart; a smile as cheeky as her face was pretty.
She was the first woman Michael Tennent had looked at twice in the three years since his wife, Katy, had died.
And he knew why: it was because in some way she reminded him of Katy, although she was really quite different. At five foot nine, Katy had been a slender, classical beauty. Amanda was a good six inches shorter and had more of a tomboy figure. And yet when she had called and asked for half an hour of his time, and the following day had walked into his office, just three weeks ago, she had reignited a spark in him that he had thought was dead.
She made him smile. And Katy had made him smile – once, at any rate; the Katy he wanted to remember. He tried to ignore Amanda Capstick, concentrate on his caller, but he couldn’t. Normally he did his weekly one-hour radio show for the benefit of his callers, but tonight he was aware that he was doing it for the benefit of Amanda Capstick, sitting behind that glass window in her denim suit and her white T-shirt with her classy wristwatch.
She
was his audience. She had been inside his head for the past three weeks, although this was the first time he had seen her since that first brief meeting. And it was only her
presence, and nothing else today, that had enabled him to forget, if only for a short while, the nightmare that had begun when he had received the phone call from the City of Westminster Coroner’s officer.
Amanda Capstick watched the psychiatrist hunched over the console, oversized headphones clamped to his ears, his face partially obscured by the bulb of grey foam rubber that encased the mike, deep in concentration, and serious, soooo seeeeerious. He was interesting-looking, a mixture of maturity and wisdom coupled with distinct flashes of a little boy lost. And at forty, he was on that attractive cusp between youth and middle age.
He dressed on the cusp, too: a quiet navy suit, but with a fashionably high-cut collar, and a bold tie. His dark brown hair was gelled back, and he wore small oval tortoiseshell glasses that on some people would merely have been a fashion statement, but which gave him the air of an intellectual, and something beyond that. She felt she was looking at an adventurer.
You’d be good in my documentary, she thought. He had a natural air of authority, of commitment. But what she liked most about him was his openness, his lack of arrogance. So many medics, particularly psychiatrists, seemed to have become jaded by their profession. They had lost their inquisitiveness, seemed to have reached a point at which they were satisfied with what they understood.
This guy was different. And there was a touching sadness about him. When he smiled, it seemed he was struggling against some inner conflict that forbade him to smile. She knew, from her research, that he had lost his wife three years ago in a car smash – maybe he was still grieving.
She knew also that he did this programme every Wednesday between seven and eight p.m. for Talk Radio. He wrote a weekly column for the
Daily Mail
on psychiatry. He had a special interest in obsessive compulsive disorder and body dysmorphic disorder – the official name for what the media called ‘imagined ugliness syndrome’ – and he appeared
regularly in the press or on television, either giving opinions or as an expert witness in criminal proceedings.
Three days a week he saw mostly private patients at the Sheen Park Hospital, near Putney, and a further two days a week saw research patients at the Princess Royal Hospital Medical School, where he was honorary senior lecturer. He had a reputation as a philanthropist, giving donations to establish new self-help organisations for phobia sufferers and for those with his speciality disorders, and he was always prepared to waive his charges if a patient had a problem getting either the National Health Service or private insurance to pay.
Michael had never found the secret of getting comfortable in this studio. It smelt of stale air. It was either so hot that he ran with perspiration, or there was such a cold blast that his eyes watered. The cans were clumsy and always slipping down over his ears. The coffee seemed to get weaker and the flavour of the Styrofoam cup stronger each week. And he always had to be careful: he must resist the temptation to slide one of the control knobs up or down, avoid being distracted by the swinging arms on the level dials or touching the mike or the battery of switches with handwritten notices that said
DO NOT SWITCH OFF!
Normally he never suffered from nerves on this show, he just relaxed, got on with it and did his best to help distressed people who did not know where else to turn for help. But tonight he had the distraction of Amanda. And he had that news on his mind. That terrible, terrible news that one of his patients, an actress, had committed suicide, and that he was to blame. He usually found that the hour flew by, but tonight it had crawled. He’d had difficult callers, and in trying to play to Amanda – his gallery – he’d lost the spontaneity and warmth that normally came out of the intimacy of his one-to-ones with his callers.
Now it was nearly over, thank God. And on the end of the line for the past ten minutes he had had Marj, from Essex. Right now he could have cheerfully strangled her. She was talking to him in the same tone she might have used to a
supermarket checkout girl who’d overcharged her for an avocado.
Doing his best to remain calm, he said, ‘I think you ought to read that book on Freud again, Marj. It was Carl Jung who believed in the collective unconscious, not Sigmund Freud.’
‘I don’t think so, Dr Tennent. And you still haven’t explained my dream,’ she said petulantly. ‘My teeth falling out. What does that mean?’
Through the cans, the producer said, ‘Wind it up, Michael, news in sixty.’
Michael glanced up at the clock above Amanda Capstick’s face. Its hands were closing on seven p.m.
‘It’s a very common dream, Marj. I explained it in detail to a caller a couple of weeks back. There are two periods in life when your teeth fall out: the loss of milk teeth, which means all the problems relating to maturing, in particular that of taking on responsibility. And the other period,’ he said, with perhaps more malice than he had intended, ‘is where you are now, from the sound of your voice. Fear of old age, and all the baggage that comes with it, becoming undesirable, ineffectual, impotent.
Toothless
, effectively.’
‘But that’s what
Freud
said,’ the woman retorted.
The producer’s voice in his ear said, ‘Ten seconds!’
‘We have to end it there, I’m afraid, Marj,’ Michael said. ‘I hope I’ve helped you a little.’ He clicked the switch, tugged off his cans and felt a trickle of sweat scurry down the back of his neck. Amanda Capstick smiled at him again from behind the window and gave him a thumbs-up.
He grimaced back at her and shrugged, then sipped the last tepid half-inch of his coffee. The studio door opened, and the producer, Chris Beamish, six foot tall, bearded, eyes wary and birdlike, came in, nodding solemnly.
‘How was it?’ Michael asked the same question every week.
And Beamish gave him the same reply each week, ‘Good, good programme, I think they liked it.’
‘I was off-key,’ Michael said. ‘I was toast.’
‘No, they liked it,’ Beamish repeated, speaking by some
kind of proxy on behalf of the show’s alleged 382,000 listeners.
‘You’re very good,’ Amanda told Michael, a few minutes later, as they walked past the security guard in the deserted lobby. ‘You have a very comfortable way with the callers.’
He smiled. ‘Thanks, but I wasn’t on the ball tonight.’
‘I’d like to use a segment of your show in my programme.’
‘Sure.’
‘We could try to do it live and get that spontaneity.’ She paused and then said, ‘Ever thought of having your own television show? Something like Anthony Clare’s
In The Psychiatrist’s Chair?
’
‘I’m not convinced that media psychiatry is the right thing for people,’ he said. ‘I’m having a lot of doubts about this. Ten minutes isn’t enough. Nor is half an hour. I’m beginning to think I might be doing more harm than good. Doing this without being able to see faces, body language, is difficult. I thought originally it might encourage people to see the benefits of psychiatry. Now I’m not sure.’
They reached the doors. Michael smelt her perfume: it was subtle, a faint muskiness, and he liked it. In a moment she would be gone and he’d be heading home to another evening on his own, defrosting something from Marks and Spencer, then scanning the television guides or trying to get stuck into a book, or catching up on some paperwork, or –
– writing the report the Coroner’s officer had requested.
He wanted desperately to stop her from disappearing. But it had been so long since he had chatted up a woman that whatever apology for a technique he’d once had was now long gone. Also he had no idea whether she was single or married, and glanced surreptitiously down at her hands.