Fifty-Minute Hour (7 page)

‘Bull!' I say to no one, as I outstare the largest clock. If you add his watch and mine and the church clock down the road, which chimes each and every quarter (and still often makes me jump), that's six separate time-machines, all fuelling his obsession, making me more tense. Suddenly it strikes, booming from the street outside, as if I've given it its cue. ‘Ssh,' I tell it irritably, as its reverberations shudder through my skull. Quarter past. I've been lying here three minutes and it feels like two whole decades.

John-Paul doesn't speak. That's not his job; it's mine. I usually burst out with something, just through desperation – if not cats or testicles, then mortuaries or wives. Not today. I stare up at the ceiling – dingy white and cracked – then round at the dark walls which are hung with several pictures: tortured writhing abstracts which look as if they've been finger-painted by the most violent of his patients. There's not much in the room except the couch, his chair, three telephones, another chair (for patients who have hang-ups about lying down, or rape), and a sort of antique bureau thing with a bronze bust standing on it of a small man with a beard – maybe Freud, or even Christ. I asked him who it was, once, and he said I was avoiding the issue of my prenatal regression with inconsequential questions.

He hates me asking questions, rarely answers anyway, or only with another question like why am I asking such and such, and by the time I've tried to answer
that
, and he's both questioned my reply and revealed the contradictions in the question and the answer, I'm so thoroughly confused I've forgotten where we started. You can I see why analytic treatment takes so long. It's one step forward, four steps back, and instead of being satisfied with just the normal human problems like jobs and sex and money, or even infancy and childhood, he goes back further still, adds a whole lot more, like constriction in the womb because your mother wore tight corsets (which could give you headaches as an adult and a sense of claustrophobia), or even problems at conception. I suppose it secures him a good income, keeps his patients clocking in decade after decade, as they work slowly back from babyhood to their aggression as mere egg-cells or their sense of inferiority as unfertilised gametes.

I keep gazing round the room, which contains absolutely nothing you might describe as personal – no books except his textbooks and the medical
Who's Who
, no photographs of families (not even borrowed ones), no ornaments or trinkets, not even a small plant. I suppose he's scared a plant might die on him, like so many of his patients. He's got quite a reputation for successful suicides. Well, at least the poor sods showed resolve. John-Paul told me once it was better to make a decision, even an unwise one, than to keep dithering and fretting. I can hear a siren now, as an ambulance screams by – another of his patients being speeded to the stomach-pump too late.

I clear my throat, to prove I'm there. No answering cough or rustle. He may have nodded off, though it's difficult to sleep, in fact, with all the constant traffic noise roaring down below. The traffic makes me sad. More rivals, faceless strangers, potential suicides, filling in the void by driving fast from A to B, or back from B to A.

‘A,' I whisper suddenly, which I suppose must be significant since it's the beginning of the alphabet, the highest grade in marking, the indefinite article, a note in music, a blood group and a bomb. All that rich material and he doesn't say a word. I'm not sure he even heard. Another siren started the second that I spoke, which seems significant itself. Analytic therapy is so damned complicated. Everything's significant, especially things you'd think were not, like non sequiturs or throat-clearings.

I daren't say ‘B', in case he thinks I'm fooling, though ‘B' is probably even more significant than ‘A' (‘To be or not to be …'), so I continue with the silence and even shut my eyes, to kid him I'm relaxed. It's really just a test of nerves. Will he crack first, or me? I can't hear a single sound from him, which really is unusual. I'm just beginning to wonder if he's actually left the room, backed away on tiptoe to down a double Scotch, when I catch a furtive rustle. The chocolates. He's unwrapping one. I knew he couldn't last that long without a puff or nibble. I listen to fat hazelnuts crunching in his teeth.

‘Pig!' I say, though silently. The trouble with silence is that the longer it goes on the more unnerving it becomes. You know you're wasting money – at least a pound a minute – and that eventually he'll use words like ‘resistance', or suggest you're quiet because you're angry with him. Everything goes back to
him.
He's the Centre of the Universe; likes nothing better than have you talk about him, dream about him, fixate on him or flatter him – then charge you for the privilege. The small-guy syndrome once again. I suppose they have to get power somehow. I dreamed about a woman once, who was ten foot tall with mammoth breasts, and he still claimed it was him; said the dream contained a reversal of the sexes, so that he was disguised in it as my all-powerful nurturing mother.

He's nurturing him
self
now; so busy with those fucking ritzy chocolates, he's forgotten I exist. I can hear the steady munching, which is deafening in my ear. Although I can't see him, he's sitting really close, his armchair almost touching the head-end of the couch, so that every sound is magnified (and hazelnuts are lethal).

‘You didn't thank me,' I suddenly burst out.

‘For what, Nial?' His voice is very gentle. That's just more provocation, a rotten subtle creepy sort.

‘You never do, do you? If I bought you the whole sweet-shop, you still wouldn't say a word.'

‘Why d' you think you need my thanks?'

I kick out at the leather couch, hope I've left a bruise on it. ‘And how about offering
me
a chocolate? I'm real, you know, not just stuffed or bronze or something. I've got a mouth and stomach. And actually …' I swallow. ‘I'm very fond of sweets.'

There's a sort of pregnant pause, then he speaks all soft and suave again. ‘It seems your orality is such, you have rather a low tolerance of anyone enjoying oral gratification which you can't share yourself.'

‘Oh, bugger off.'

More silence – which is broken by the spluttering of a match. I've obviously annoyed him. He's got to smoke, to calm himself, stop himself from shouting. He probably kicked the habit just last night, made a resolution that he'd never smoke again, threw away his lighter in some big symbolic gesture. I've spoilt his good intentions, maybe even killed him, indirectly. The risk of lung cancer for smokers is at least twenty times the rate of that for non-smokers. (I know – I stopped myself – and not that long ago. It wasn't lungs, but bowels. They suspected I had a tumour on the colon, and though I didn't mind the death bit, or even the two x-rays, I just couldn't bear the thought of dying from something so totally unromantic – John-Paul sitting in that hospice by my bedside, holding not my hand, but my colostomy bag.)

I begin to feel new terror as I switch roles in the hospice – John-Paul as the patient now, coughing up his lungs. His death would kill me outright. (So would just his anger.) I long to make atonement, to crouch down at his feet and feed him chocolates on my knees; masticate them first so he won't spoil his small sharp teeth, swap chocolate-flavoured kisses. No – kisses aren't atonement, kisses are sheer greed. He's telling me I'm greedy. I hate him, I detest him.

I can see his tiny wife, her tiny pretty shoes, her cloud of golden curls, her flirty cloudless eyes. He's pulling off her wrapper, biting into her. She's strawberry cream inside, or pink and white marshmallow, all soft and sweet and pastel. He wouldn't unwrap
me
, or he'd regret it if he did. I'd be hard unyielding nougat, or dark and gristly toffee. He's sucking out her cream, the last swirls and coils of mallow melting on his tongue, its tip probing her soft shell, lapping round and round it.

I leap up from the couch, pace up and down the room. Of
course
he didn't give up smoking – he hasn't got the willpower. He was smoking when I first came in. He probably smokes in bed, lights his wife, inhales her, sucks her right right in. I jab my foot against the skirting, speak to the brown wall. ‘And why do you wear that fucking stupid ring, when you know damn well you haven't got a wife?'

‘So a part of you would like to kill my wife.' His voice all corny low still; a crackle of gold paper.

‘I've killed her, don't you worry. And it was a pretty nasty death.'

‘That doesn't seem to accord too well with your repeated claims to be peaceable and gentle.'

‘I'm only violent with your wife – wives.'

‘But you say I haven't got a wife.'

‘Well,
have
you?'

He dodges the question, as he's done a dozen times; asks me why I'm giving motility to my feelings, instead of verbalising. God – their language! All he means in plain no-nonsense English is why the hell I'm raving round his room instead of lying still and talking. I drag back to the couch, flop down on the pillow. You're not allowed to work off your frustration on the carpet or the walls, but have to just lie quietly and yak about the breast, or womb, or last night's footling dream. I shake back all my hair, start twisting one long strand of it. ‘My mother didn't
have
breasts, if you really want to know.'

Here we go again. It's so tedious, so boring, though maybe not for him. All his favourite subjects – maternal deprivation, ambivalence about the breast, dependence on it, rage at it, insatiability, orality. They're all his own problems, that's quite obvious. Why else all that sucking? (I can hear more rustles now, smell peppermints – those fierce ones.) It's just another subtle way of talking about himself, using me as his ventriloquist. But if I slam out now (as I did in fact last week), there'll be still more aching minutes to tot up, and I'll only have to face an inquisition at ten past two tomorrow. I close my eyes, swap my mother for his own, make her mean and scrawny, thin and stern and cold; make sure she looks like him – dark hairs on her thumbs, non-existent eyes.

‘She just had nipples,' I explain, though he knows it all himself, must have bored his own analyst with the pathetic endless details. ‘But even they were covered with these transparent Perspex shields, so you could see the teat, but never actually touch it with your mouth, let alone suck milk from it. There wasn't any milk, only water, or white vinegar, and her womb was made of scarlet steel, so every time you moved position or tried to kick or float, you bruised your tiny growing limbs or banged your still-soft head or …'

I smile. I'm in my stride now. He's sucking quite contentedly, the clocks are ticking slower, their three voices like a lullaby. I'm feeding him, I'm filling him, I've made him almost happy, and there hasn't even been a siren for five blessed peaceful minutes.

Dear Mummy,

I'd like to come back home. You could fetch me on Fryday
when everyones at games. I don't play games. I hurt my leg.
It bled a lot but your not allowed to cry here.

Thank you for the sweets. Fraser knocked me down and
stole them. I saved two dirty ones.

Love, Jonathan.

‘Have you considered, Mary, that your apparent concern about your son may be an identification with the child-part of yourself – that small shy child who was also sent away to boarding school at a very early age and missed its home and mother?'

Mary wiped her eyes. Friday was Weeping Day, as well as John-Paul Day. The two went hand in hand. She hadn't had a session yet in which she hadn't cried. She brought her own Kleenex now, a large box of the man-size. John-Paul had those small ones called ‘Boutique', which were chic and very pretty, but tended to disintegrate.

‘I
liked
my school,' she sobbed.

John-Paul stroked his chin, moved one foot a fraction. ‘In insisting that you liked your school, you appear to be questioning what I've said.'

She frowned and chewed her Kleenex. Of course she questioned it – questioned most things now. John-Paul had made her thoroughly bewildered. Things she'd known for twenty years kept unravelling and crumbling – solid things like love or God or marriage. She tried to think about herself, instead of Jonathan. He'd gone down with tonsillitis and a temperature, yet still they wouldn't allow him to come home. She'd chosen a get-well card with a nice green frog on it, and packed him up some throat sweets and a new pair of pyjamas with a warm ribbed polo neck. She'd have liked to send his bear, as well, but …

‘Since both your parents were abroad and therefore unavailable, it seems you invested your emotions in the only possible substitute – your school.'

She looked up swiftly, guiltily; had almost forgotten where she was. ‘It wasn't their fault, honestly. They were posted to Dakar, Doctor, when I was only seven. And it was an extremely good school, anyway. They chose it very carefully.'

‘Good?'

‘Yes, very good. The nuns were a French Order who really … Well, you know the sort of thing – high standards and no slacking and a nice smart uniform.'

‘But that did mean good for
you
, Mary?'

‘I did very well at school, Doctor – not in my exams. I made a mess of those, but I was a Child of Mary and captain of lacrosse …'

‘And cried every night in bed for two whole years.'

She blushed. ‘I'm afraid I cry quite easily. I'm sorry.'

‘Are you apologising to me, or to your mother?'

‘My
mother
?' He made things so confusing. Her mother had been dead for fifteen years. Died in harness, people said. Charlotte Alice Delahaye had always been so busy, so devoted – devoted to the Africans, the natives – banishing illiteracy, disease. She often wished she had her mother's skills: her brain, her strength, her courage in adversity, the way she really lived her Catholic faith. John-Paul was right – she'd been a disappointment – a shy and clinging child who had kept crying to come home (though she wasn't sure where ‘home' was, since her parents moved a lot, not just from house to house, but from continent to continent); then an awkward bashful teenager who'd been prone to eczema and flunked all her exams, and finally a tame suburban housewife. No degrees in anthropology, or doctorates in political science, no high ideals, no desire to save the world or serve her God. What had happened to her parents' genes, she often wondered, guiltily? Her mother had been a saint, a pioneer; her father a philanthropist, reformer.