Fifty-Minute Hour (3 page)

‘GOLD STARS', he wrote, in his neatish faintish writing, drew a line beneath it with his pen. He couldn't think of many stars at all. He'd bought a coloured shirt, but hadn't dared to wear it. He'd stood up to his Mother on the matter of the mushrooms, but spent all next day apologising. He'd plucked up courage to say hallo to Avril in the office, but his voice came out so softish, she hadn't even noticed, let alone replied.

‘BLACK MARKS', he wrote, but didn't underline it, just covered two whole pages, and was still writing very swiftly when he arrived at Fenchurch Street. Thank God he lived in Upminster, rather than Ponders End or Cheshunt, which would mean arriving at King's Cross. People said the bodies were still down there – bits of bodies, charred and twisted limbs.

He'd started a Disaster Scrapbook since 1987. Zeebrugge, then Hungerford, the Enniskillen massacre, the King's Cross fire just ten days later. His Mother believed in an English God who punished Jews and foreigners. But these were God's own people, normal decent British, shopping in a Berkshire town, or stocking up on duty-free on the Coffin of Free Enterprise. Or commuters like himself, merely earning livings, travelling up and down towards their pensions. And even the weather had been weird and overwrought that year – the coldest January since 1940, the wildest storm since 1703. Statistics helped a little. Fifteen million trees destroyed seemed somehow much more bearable than his one ripped-up Cox's Pippin.

But the horrors had continued – through '88 and '89, and into 1990: Lockerbie and Hillsborough, the Clapham Junction train smash, the British Midland air crash, the
Marchioness
disaster, kidnappings and hijacks, fatal gas explosions, avalanches, mud-slides, constant rapes and muggings. And then the ozone layer. He'd forgotten the statistics, but the hole was getting bigger all the time. He'd thrown away his aerosols, never bought anything in polystyrene cartons, but other people did, despite the scares and warnings – irresponsible people who still lit up in tube trains despite the ban on smoking, or bought guns without a licence, or made love without a Durex. He'd never made love, ever, not in thirty-one long years. Nobody had asked him, and he'd probably never get a Durex to stay on. He'd watched a commercial on TV where they gave a demonstration, using a banana. Bananas weren't quite fair. Who'd ever seen a limp one?

He checked his watch, relieved he'd bought a digital. It made time more precise. He could see the tiny figure two changing into three. 6.33. Exactly. He walked swiftly down the escalator, which not only saved more minutes, but prevented him from lingering on the underwear advertisements, especially the graffitied ones which turned women into men, jumbled all his boundaries. He found underwear upsetting, even on a man.

The station smelt of heat and urine, overlaid with damp. Last night's litter huddled into corners, or clung round grimy bench legs, as if desperate for shelter or support. There was no one else around, save one old dosser sleeping on his coat, a disaster in himself. Bryan walked the other way, towards the black hole of the tunnel, heard angry muffled roarings, glimpsed sudden sparks and flashes, but no actual solid train. Not the time for suicide. You could decide to jump and wait so long you'd change your mind again. Decisions weren't his forte. He could write out ‘PROS' and ‘CONS', underline them both, divide the page right down the middle with a thick-ruled vertical line, so that nothing overlapped, and still be left completely paralysed. He imagined a decision would look like a banana, if he ever got that close to one to check. Something firm and solid, which stood up on its own; something healthy and exotic, yet commonplace for some.

A train roared in, at last. He moved closer to the edge, was tempted just to jump, forget decisions, pros and cons, simply act, for once, become part of all that speed and force, spend his next life welded to a tube train. Too late. The doors were opening and he stepped in, still alive. No one in the carriage.

‘Hallo,' he said. ‘Just practising.' Nice to speak to someone; ask the time, even though he knew it; comment on the weather, as people had when he'd lived much further out. It wasn't safe to speak in London. A guard might be a gunman, a tramp a terrorist. A girl had asked his name once, a total stranger on the eighteen-twenty-two.

‘Bryan,' he'd told her. ‘Bryan Payne.'

‘
Pain
?' she'd said, half-mocking. He'd known she wouldn't like it. People never did.

‘Yes.'

‘Pain like hurting?'

‘No. Payne with y, n, e.'

‘Those funeral directors are called Payne.'

‘Yes.' He knew, resented it. ‘It's a different spelling, though.' End of conversation. Women never lasted. One was getting in now, thighs straining through her flimsy scarlet skirt. Open provocation – that flesh, that curvy red. He put away his notebook, didn't want her snooping, reading his black marks. She was sitting far too close to him, which seemed suspicious, anyway, with all those empty seats. He sat on both his hands, prayed she'd get out first. The fear was building, building; always did as the time moved close to seven. He couldn't even run through what he'd say. You weren't allowed to practise, had to be spontaneous, which was often even harder than decisions. ‘Free association', it was called – which meant you said what sprang into your mind, without censorship or straining. John-Paul had told him once that Freud's own phrase –
freier Einfall
– was far better than its inexact translation. He didn't speak German, spoke no languages at all except Mother-soothe and English and a phrase or two of Welsh, but he suspected that word ‘
Einfall
.' It contained the idea of ‘eruption', John-Paul had pointed out, those sudden extemporaneous thoughts which burst into your head.

‘Eruption' sounded frightening. There were enough eruptions in the universe, things exploding, breaking up. And he'd spent years and years fighting to suppress all personal eruptions, physical as well as simply verbal. Belches, farts, or rumblings were all abhorrent to his Mother. His body was so quiet now, it might as well be dead. It was John-Paul who made the noises – suckings, shiftings, sudden flares of matches, long deep exhalations, hoarse unhealthy coughs. He worried sometimes that he'd die of cancer from all that passive smoking: hours and hours each month inhaling John-Paul's Chesterfields.

The sessions always ended with his Mother, where they invariably began. He saw it as a Circle Line – no progress, endless loops. Even his dreams hardly varied in their content. He was always wrapping up his Mother in a parcel, sending her off to Benares or Peking. Before he woke, the parcel thudded back again, landed on his doormat, marked ‘Return to Sender', and often half-undone. He'd tried changing the addresses, chosen far-flung islands with corrupt or useless postal systems which wouldn't send things back. Except they always did, even tiny foolish islands such as Ponape or Tuitula, which he hadn't known existed until he found them on the map. John-Paul said they couldn't stop the sessions until the parcel was delivered as addressed. It was costing him a fortune, in stamps, in John-Paul's bills.

He'd been going four whole years now, four years of so-called therapy, which had made him worse, not better; adding new oppressive guilts about the bills – alarming, never-ending bills which got higher every year and which meant giving up all luxuries, even cutting back on basics. He didn't mind the privations for himself – no holidays, no clothes, no car, no treats or trips or outings, but his Mother had the same restraints without the actual bonus of John-Paul. Could he call it ‘bonus' – the shameful sodden Kleenex, his amputated mornings, the need for endless lies?

‘Why are things so tight, dear? I thought you'd had a rise?'

‘No. They … changed their minds.'

He invented crises, pay cuts, money lost in corporate frauds, his wallet stolen – yes,
again
– impending mergers, friends who borrowed money and then fled. Or he told her he was saving – saving for her funeral, so he could do things with some style; saving for a Ford Granada to drive her down to Eastbourne at weekends. Weekends he made his lists, in his other bigger notebook, which had an index at the back and a page in front headed ‘Personal/Financial', nicely ruled and subdivided into Business, Bank, Medical and Accident, Insurance, Car and Notes. A shame about the car – all those unfilled spaces – its registration number, his driving licence number, his car insurance number, his AA/ RAC number. But he'd filled in all the rest, reread it each weekend to make sure he hadn't changed: his name, address and telephone number; his national insurance number, the name of his GP, his next of kin, his blood group. ‘In case of accident, please notify …' He'd left that blank, deliberately, didn't want his Mother poking his remains, criticising the way he'd been run over, telling him he should have done it
her
way, or at least warned her in advance. Meals didn't cook themselves and she could have saved the time, not wasted best rump steak.

Not that they ate steak – not now – not since the last increase in John-Paul's hefty fees. (He upped the fee each January – the worst time of the year, when everybody's finances were already wrecked by Christmas.) He couldn't eat much anyway, with the constant pain, the heartburn. He avoided his GP, feared a diagnosis. He'd seen an ulcer once, on
Your Life In Their Hands
, writhing in full colour on the lining of a stomach. The television surgeon had pierced it with his scalpel and its red lips seemed to scream.

The girl got out at the stop before his own. He could see her thighs still gaping on the seat – a different seat – the one right opposite. Her red and writhing lips were opening wider, wider, as he peered up her thin skirt, pierced it with his scalpel. He fought to change the images before he arrived at John-Paul's rooms. Safer to talk Mothers, over-sixty-fives.

He stood ready at the doors as the train shuddered to a stop. Seven and a half minutes and he'd be lying on the couch, breaking into fragments. The terror hadn't lessened, not in four long years. John-Paul was his surgeon, made the diagnoses. ‘You see me as your feared and hated father.'

He'd never had a father. His Mother's husband had been unreasonable enough to die before his birth,
and
without insurance. He'd spent much of his brief childhood trying to draw fathers: pin-men, matchstick men, squiggles with no substance and no eyes. There'd been no males at all – no grandfathers, no uncles, no brothers or best friends. Yet now, his world was full of males – cloned and cut-out males, sharing the vast office, or jostling in the gents, stamped from the same stiff grey polystyrene as the desks, the plants, the chairs. He hated BRB – a twenty-storey tower-block firm with eyes instead of windows, swivelling up and down the whole of Greater London, tracking workers' movements. Their spies were everywhere, pretending to be traffic wardens, or guards on trains, or tourists. He could see one now – Fletcher from Accounts, doubling as the ticket collector, the man who worked the lift. The lifts were automatic, and anyway he wasn't due at work yet. Two hours to go – free time. Except time was never free, always tied to Mother, Mother or John-Paul.

He backed away, dared not risk the lift. Fletcher might report him, guess where he was going. He'd spent four years avoiding people, skulking to and fro, not even crossing John-Paul's road until he'd checked on all the roadsweepers, the loiterers at bus stops. It had often made him late. ‘You must be well aware, Bryan, how much time you're losing in your therapy by arriving late like this, and how in a sense it's burning money, which at other times you often seem to grudge.' John-Paul's voice was low – accusing low, sarcastic low. Did all fathers speak like that?

He edged crabwise down the passage towards the ancient spiral staircase, labelled ‘Emergency Exit Only – Ninety-Seven Steps.' You could die of steps: be struck down with a heart attack or overstrain your lungs. ‘In case of accident, please notify …' He should have put John-Paul. John-Paul would pick his corpse up, arrange it on the couch, start explaining why he'd done it, why he'd chosen to collapse. There were no accidents with John-Paul. Everything was chosen – illnesses and nightmares, even fear or farts. Everything had reasons. Which was partly why he went.

It had all started with a
Reader's Digest
in the dentist's waiting-room – a quiz entitled ‘How Neurotic Are You?', which he'd filled in, twice, while waiting for his annual scale and polish. The highest you could score was fifty. He'd scored sixty-three, then sixty-five. Two days later, he was in another waiting-room (the doctor's, with an abscess) and reading
Woman's Realm
– ‘Do You Suffer From Panic Attacks?' He'd had one on the spot, rushed sweating, shaking, stuttering, into his GP's consulting-room, emerged with Ampicillin and a referral to a psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist was young and keen, believed in psychotherapy, not drugs; offered to refer him to a private psychotherapist, which was where his problems started. He'd simply never realised how many brands of therapy existed: Reichian, Rogerian, behavioural and cognitive, feminist and primal, rebirthing, hypnotherapy, and several dozen more – not to mention psychoanalysis – Freudian or Kleinian, Jungian, Lacanian – transactional analysis, psychosynthesis, bioenergetics and Gestalt. It had been impossible to choose, or even grasp the differences. The indecision got so bad he could neither eat nor sleep, staggered back to the psychiatrist, who cut through all his dithering, phoned a colleague there and then, to fix up an appointment. The colleague was John-Paul, who was what was called a psychoanalytical psychotherapist, which sounded most alarming with those two ‘psychos' tagged in front. In fact, he never would have gone at all if he'd known what it entailed, known what lay ahead; realised just how wrong he'd been in his simple expectations.