Fifty-Minute Hour (15 page)

‘They're a bit like John-Paul's pictures – you know, the ones all round his room.'

Seton nods. ‘They
are
John-Paul's. I bought a couple from him. I suppose you know he paints?'

‘Er . . no, I didn't, actually.'

‘Yeah, it's quite a passion. He's got hundreds more, just like these. He can't seem to move on. A lot of artists change their style, or at least the colours of their palette, but John-Paul still seems happiest smearing his own shit around.'

I take a swig of bourbon, feel really threatened now. ‘But I … I thought he was a doctor, not an artist.'

‘He's neither.'

‘What d'you mean?'

‘Well, he never went to art school, or studied art at all, though he does have shows occasionally. God knows why the galleries should bother with his stuff, except I guess he's pretty good at pulling strings. As for medicine, forget it.
I'm
more a medical man than he is, and that's not saying much. He never even trained as a lay analyst, or analytic therapist, or whatever he likes to call himself. The situation's crazy in this country. Anyone can set up as a psychotherapist or analyst, without even one day's training. The profession's always bleating for some sort of national register, with laws to make it bite, but nothing's come of it so far, so …' He shrugs. ‘You get phoneys like John-Paul.'

‘But surely … ?' I'm too staggered to go on. I've always taken it for granted that John-Paul was not just trained, but so utterly professional he had every last word worked out for its significance, its pith; timed even every silence with hair's-breadth skill, precision. I slam back on the bunk. How dare he grab our money, tamper with our psyches, when he's nothing but a quack. Or waste time painting shitscapes when he's meant to put his patients first; always gives the impression that nothing else exists. I accept another cigarette, try to calm my churning mind while I inhale the smoke deep down. ‘But he
is
a doctor, Seton. I've seen his name written out, several times, in fact – you know, Dr …'

‘Yeah, Doctor of Philosophy, and from a second-rate foreign university, which probably means it's worthless. Oh, I grant you he's quite bright, probably knows Winnicott from Guntrip, or Wittgenstein from Heidegger, but he's still a con-man, pure and simple. And a jumped-up one, at that. His family are dirt.'

‘Dirt?'

‘Well, his father was a plumber. Whom I suppose we're meant to worship as the new aristocracy, judging by the cash they earn. But as far as breeding is concerned, or culture, or refinement …' Seton shrugs, refills his empty tumbler. ‘More for you?' he asks.

I don't reply, just spring at him, start lashing out with fists and feet. How dare he decimate John-Paul, slander him, destroy him? It's obviously all lies. He's just a rotten snob, and with a grudge against John-Paul – I've seen that for myself. He grabs my wrists, holds them in a vice. I try to bite his hands, but he's far too strong for me, tips me on his bunk, then lies full length across me. I thresh and squirm with fury, but I'm basically quite powerless.

‘So you want to bite?' he asks, his face very close to mine, so I can see the pricks of stubble, the dark hairs in his nose.

‘
No
!' My shout's aborted. His mouth is already clamped on mine and he's biting, kissing, hurting – biting lips and tongue. I can taste blood in my mouth, swallow it and struggle; realise I can't fight him, so I bite him back, instead – the most violent savage kiss I've ever given or received. I never kiss my clients or let them use their mouths; limit any contact to below the waist; remove my mind, my spirit, salvage what I can; outlaw words like intimacy or union. But the whole of me is rallied now, the whole of me involved, as teeth grind teeth, mouths lacerate. Oh yes, this kiss is intimate all right. I can taste his blood and my blood, taste his bourbon breath; feel the shape and pressure of his teeth, the rough, furred, cat-like darting of his tongue. I'm smoking his last cigarette, sucking out the relics of his lunch, the scraps of last night's dinner; I'm chewing on his past, his personality; scrunching up his cruelty, his rage.

My own mouth feels sore, misshapen, so I'm almost glad when he starts dragging off my blouse, turning his attention to my breasts. He doesn't know what buttonholes are for, but he does know how to bite. I'm not wearing a bra – often leave it off the days I see John-Paul – so his teeth have found my nipples, can calculate exactly that fine red line between excitement and real pain. He oversteps the line, hears me draw my breath in, gasp with pain – bites harder. I'm almost powerless still, can only gnaw his shoulder through the tough wool of his sweater, claw my nails up and down his back. Everything feels rough and somehow angry – his stubble on my face, the prickly rug we're lying on, his coarse and curly hair, the texture of his hands – a labourer's hands, despite that haughty face. He removes his mouth, but only for a moment while he fumbles with my skirt. It's wet still from the rain, tight and too confining, I fight him every inch, fight him harder still as he starts pulling down my tights. There isn't room to fight – the cabin's far too cramped. I've already knocked my head, banged my knees and elbows on the wall, yet there's some strange exhilaration in wrestling with this man, even knowing that I'll lose.

I'm naked. He looks at me, eyes tracking very slowly down my body. I don't know what he thinks – he doesn't say. He's still got all his clothes on, wet thick hurting clothes. The sweater smells of petrol; the jeans feel stiff and calloused beneath my naked legs. I've hardly seen his body, just glimpses of it, tastes of it – his bony wrists, his navel, the whorl of springy body-hair which plunges down his neck, the sourish gamy flavour of his skin. He won't let me touch his jeans, removes my hand, yanks down the zip himself. The jeans are cruelly tight and his prick springs out, impatient and inflamed, as if mad at being caged so long. It's tall and thin, like he is, with the same coarse and over-long black hair, and engorged blue veins running to the tip, which is moist and red and swollen like a plum. He isn't circumcised, and the foreskin is well back, looking slack and almost shrivelled against the taut vigour of the piston.

He forces in. I don't object, just use my teeth again. If he wants to fuck me, fine, but I shan't make it very pleasant for him. No submissive passive Nial slumped there like a dummy while her clients grunt and sweat, feeling nothing, doing less; refusing to yield so much as one small bead of sweat, or one stray pubic hair. I'll shed my blood for Seton, lose my life, if necessary, just so long as he experiences my anger, my contempt.

I buck and twist beneath him, trying to jerk him out. He apes my every movement, ramming in still deeper, following where I lead, as if we're locked together in some new and violent dance. He can scratch as well as bite and thrust, and all at the same time. But so can I – and harder. All I need are images to fuel me. I'm seeing him again in John-Paul's room, hurling insults, breaking up my session, breaking up my life. Okay, Seton, so you want to kill John-Paul, but I love the man, I need him, so I'm going to have to stop you – stop you killing, stop you bloody fucking me.

I use every last muscle in my body, call up every scrap and shred of strength, pummelling him, and threshing, lashing with my fists. He's furious himself now, furious with me for being in the tower when he wanted John-Paul on his own and to himself. Our two rages meet and kindle; our two breaths rasping, searing; our two rhythms syncopated. My hair is trapped beneath his arm. He's pulling it, and hurting – hurting everywhere, though I hardly feel the pain now. I'm too involved, too angry; taunting him with insults, the very ones he shouted at John-Paul. Once he leaves my mouth free and is snicking at my neck, I yell them out aloud. ‘You stupid lying bastard! I'll …'

He
did
lie, didn't he? Called himself a doctor, pretended he was trained, charged me all that money for his expertise, his skills. And then pretending he's so busy when he's really painting pictures – no, not even painting, smearing shit around. I slump back for a moment as I try to take it in John-Paul a fraud, a nothing. The hurt feels like a madness. All those endless minutes that I counted every day, totting up to pain and disillusion; all that infinite circling round a crumbling cardboard tower. I stare up at the porthole, see nothing but dull grey; no grass, no sky, no water, just a dead and blinded window. The lamp is hissing still, sounds weary, disillusioned. Nervous shadows fidget. I'm lying in a shadow, feel dark and half-extinguished.

Seton takes advantage of the pause, heaves me off the bunk and to my knees, rams in again the back way. I don't care. I've got more scope to move now, and I'm no longer slumped and passive, but mad with rage, rage against John-Paul, his cowardice, his treachery, his greed, his greasy lies. The cabin floor is wooden – old and splintered – tears my knees and hands. Seton's hurting, really hacking into me, yet we're bonded now, at last. His anger's changed, like mine, is directed at John-Paul, and not at me. We turn on him together – he's there in person, we brought him in the van – drag him to the floor.

‘I know,' I shout. ‘I understand. Of course you had to kill John-Paul. We'll kill him
now
, together. We'll …'

My shouting drives him wild. I can feel him gathering speed, his nails digging in my flesh as he grips my waist to steady him, slams in from behind.

‘Don't come!' I shout. ‘Don't come yet.' Too late – he's coming – a scorching maddened brutal come, as if he's pumping me with bullets, not with sperm. I pull away before he's even finished, feel him leaking out. He doesn't say a word, though his breathing's very rackety, shuddering and dangerous, as if something's loose or broken in his chest. He falls back on the bunk, shuts his eyes as if to snuff me out. I understand. Bodies aren't too pretty after sex. Mine is marked and reddened, filmed with sweat, knees grazed and bruised, top lip split and bloody. He still has all his clothes on, which saves him, in a way – just his grubby jeans unzipped. I watch his prick deflate. It looks wizened now and shrivelled, as if it's grown old in just a minute, can no longer stand up on its own, needs help, needs sympathy. I lean across and touch it, pity in my fingertips. Seton twitches irritably. ‘
Don't
!' he snaps, eyes shut still.

I sag back on the floor, watch his semen oozing down my thigh. It seems too thin, too pallid, too meagre altogether for our murderous double rage. Shouldn't it be scarlet, not that wan and sickly white; Niagara, not a dribble? I scoop it up, suck it from my fingers. It tastes slimy, slightly salty, like the marsh might taste, outside. Seton hasn't moved. I'm glad he isn't stroking me, or asking ‘Did you come?'

I don't need to come. I'm sated.

‘But you always said your mother was so tidy. “Neat to a fault” was the phrase you used, I think.'

‘Yes, she
is
, of course she is.' Bryan felt a rush of shame. How could neatness be a fault, especially in a world where there was no order, regularity? John-Paul had simply failed to understand. He wasn't talking about chaos in his house or cupboard drawers, disorder in his Mother's fridge or larder, but chaos in the sub-atomic world. The problem was he didn't have the words for it. The books had made it hard enough, especially the huge new one he'd been working through all week, but there was still no avoiding its main theme: the universe was essentially chaotic, at least on the atomic level, and the total amount of chaos was going up and up. According to the author (and the second law of thermodynamics, which he remembered only vaguely from his schooldays), chaos was far easier to achieve than order and therefore far more likely. In fact, chaos was the norm. Mountains eroded, stars burnt out, buildings crumbled, people grew old, clocks ran down, the universe itself ran down.

Bryan closed his eyes a moment, listened to John-Paul's clocks. He could hear their ticking growing weaker, weaker; feel the tall and solid tower slowly tottering. He'd always loved the tower, had looked up its history in the library (a snug and cosy refuge until he'd found the science section) – amazed to find it dated from 1280, and had lost its nave and chancel only in the 1940 Blitz. The site had remained a ruin until the later 1960s, white with pigeon droppings, lush with tangled weeds. Then the bulldozers moved in, cleared the rubble for a block of monster office blocks. The tower was spared as an ancient monument, had been declared a listed building, its one remaining gravestone girdled with a preservation order. Ten years later, it had been legally deconsecrated, leased for secular use by the London Diocesan Fund, but still sacrosanct in one way, since there were extremely strict conditions about who could or couldn't lease it and exactly what they could or couldn't do there.

Sacrosanct! Bryan clenched his hands, shifted on the couch. What use were preservation orders when everything was doomed? You couldn't slap one on the universe, or tack one to each atom. As far as he could gather, atoms weren't quite there at all, weren't
things
with an identity which you could pin down or define. In fact, the author had concluded that matter was in a suspended state of almost-schizophrenia and suffering from an identity crisis. Which-called for a psychiatrist – except how could one be found, when even John-Paul, with all his experience and training, hadn't seemed to grasp the point at all?

Bryan glanced up at the window. The morning light looked dirty and half-hearted. It would soon be dark at seven in the morning, clammy-cold as well. If he could only stop his therapy, he could stay in bed a whole hour longer three days every week, have time to chew his breakfast. (He could feel a piece of toast still whole, one sharp corner digging in his ribs.) How
could
he stop it, though? John-Paul had said he needed at least five or six more years (yes, on top of the first four), and now he'd discovered all these horrors in the subatomic world, it might well take even longer.