Fifty-Minute Hour (9 page)

‘You don't have to undress; just remove your shoes.'

‘I'm sorry, Doctor. I thought I …' She could hardly speak for sheer confusion. If she lay down at the surgery, it always meant clothes off. Though there was invariably a nurse there, a female chaperone, and some point to lying down – some pain or cyst or polyp which could be checked in just two minutes. If she lay down on this couch, she had a rather frightening feeling that she might never stagger up again till several years had passed. She'd avoided analysis on principle, as long-drawn-out, and foreign, and probably highly dangerous (not to mention ‘ruinous' – James's word when he'd received the first month's bill). All she needed really was a little simple counselling, something short and basic, and strictly to please James, who'd first picked up the idea of sexual therapy from a new late-night series on Channel Four, which he watched avidly, voraciously, then condemned as porn.

She'd been astonished he'd suggested it all. It seemed so out of character – except he was clearly getting desperate about what he saw as her inadequacies in bed. He'd actually phoned the programme to request their ‘fact-sheet' and ‘resource guide', but when he'd finally made contact with some real-life sexual therapists, they all expected
him
to come, as well. One had even offered to act as surrogate partner for his wife, if he were having ‘difficulties' himself. He'd been so scandalised, affronted, he'd reacted with extreme relief to the suggestion of a different sort of therapist, who would take a less intrusive line, approach the body via the mind – to start with, anyway – leave him safely out of it, and not expect to bed down with his wife. All the same, she herself had still felt most uneasy.
Any
sort of therapy suggested you were not ‘all there', and if the neighbours ever twigged to it, they might label her a mental case and stop inviting her for coffee. There was also the pressing problem of the Church. Her parish priest would strongly disapprove of the shocking things they'd mentioned on that programme; the casual, even eager, way they'd tossed off words she'd never dared to whisper in her life – and broadcast to an audience of millions. But at least they'd all sat upright in nice no-nonsense chairs, whereas John-Paul was changing tack now, switching from the vertical to the threatening horizontal.

She still felt completely paralysed, had no idea how to lie down on a couch. Did one put a knee up, then swivel round and back, or just perch in the centre and swing one's legs up last? She couldn't see John-Paul now, but she could almost hear his feet tapping, his slim impatient fingers drumming on the chair-arm.

She half-fell onto the couch, clutching at her skirt so it wouldn't show her stocking tops, wincing as her fingers touched her burn scars. She'd hardly felt her wounds at all until this very moment, had totally forgotten her spiritual bouquet, despite the talk of convents, her excitement all the week. She'd forgotten the important things, the penances, the pain. But now she was all pain. The simple act of lying on a couch seemed to have plunged her back in time, cancelled out her entire thirty-five years of life, so she was a tiny naked infant weighing under forty ounces; tubes stuck through her body, lights dazzling her weak eyes. The doctor's voice was booming nearer, nearer – terrifying, thundering – six masked faces framing his each side. She could see his blinding long white coat, his gigantic hands swooping pouncing lower, until they were clamped against her limbs. Towers of steel and plastic reared up all around her screens flickering, dials flashing, the pant and gulp of life-machines assaulting her dead body; her stomach pumped with fluids, her lungs jacked up with air. They couldn't know she'd died.

She was lying in a coffin, a coffin made of glass. Nobody could touch her, except that doctor for a moment, and even he had vanished. They had shut her in alone, left her corpse to putrefy. She tried to scream – impossible – too much in her mouth. It was crammed with tubes and rubber, foul with blood and slime. She couldn't even cry. She'd been born without tears, born without a lot of things, including skills and strength. She tried tugging at the wires, which were trailing from her stomach, hurting in her nose, but she could hardly close her fists around them, let alone dislodge them. She heard a tiny bone snap, somewhere in her body; a chilling wind gusting through her ribs. They had already cut her open, slipped odd bits and pieces in, taken things away. She was scarred and stitched and bruised now, purple mottlings livid on both legs, streaks of blood caked around the stitches, her small head bald and shaven. That's why no one wanted her – she was ugly and disfigured – a runt, an obvious reject they'd left naked and uncovered. She wasn't cold, just horribly ashamed; her private parts exposed, a pool of liquid excrement oozing from her bottom.

They had given her a teddy, a blue plush-velvet rabbit. She'd rather have had her mother, the pink plush-velvet mother whom she'd met for just a second before the Monsters in the Masks had snatched her up and trapped her in the cage, rammed her gag in, snapped her handcuffs shut. She hadn't seen her mother since, though she'd been calling her and calling her, through gags and tubes and muzzles, calling silently but desperately, for hours and days and weeks now. Had her mother died, as well, or rushed straight back to Delhi to feed her other babies, the black ones, the beloved ones, who deserved her love, were worthy of her presence?

She listened for a moment. Beyond the bleeps and boomings, she could hear someone clearly sobbing, a deep and desperate sobbing. Could it be her father, weeping for her death? Or someone else's father mourning someone else's death? People died a lot here – faces disappearing, doctors dashing in. She peered at her own hand. It was shrivelling already, heavy bands of sticking plaster pinioning both wrists. It was hard to move at all. She was lying on her back, her legs hunched up, her arms pinned back, eyes smarting from the glare.

Somebody was coming. Footsteps crashing closer, huge hands hot and heavy on her flesh. She must be still alive. They didn't touch the dead ones, just flung them into dustbin-bags, then burnt them in an oven. Life meant hope – she'd heard the midwife murmur that, the first second of her life, that thrilling searing second when she'd touched her mother's belly, groped wildly for the nipple – until the gloved hands hauled her back. Of course she must keep hoping, keep screaming for her mother till some tiny sound emerged, and her mother picked the sound up in Delhi or Dakar and came rushing home, arms open. She tried to spit the gag out, make the doctors understand. The tall one had returned now. She could smell his sweat, his powerful acrid male smell, hear his brutal cocksure voice drilling through her skull.

‘No, we won't do a tracheotomy. She'll be dead within the hour.'

She made one last racking effort – thrashing, wrestling, fighting cage and gag – her tiny muscles tearing as she summoned strengths she knew she didn't have. Another voice was thrumming now, right behind her head; another hateful doctor only waiting to destroy her.

‘What's the matter, Mary? If the sun's too bright, you only have to say, you know, and I can simply draw that curtain.'

SHOPPING LIST

olive oil
alarm clock
candles
cigarettes
feather pillows (real)
multi-vitamins (check C)
apples
pears
blackcurrants
peaches

nectarines
broom handle
rubber gloves
crucifix
strong chain

Bryan trailed along the corridor, shuffled back again. He really must go in now. If he left it any later, he'd have to squeeze past rows of legs to find an empty place, might tread on feet, knock knees. It was bad enough starting four weeks late. The others would all know each other, know about the subject. At least he'd got the reading-list, ploughed through over half of it, though actually it had made him feel far worse.

He glanced in through the door, almost turned and fled. Faces, faces, faces; closed and grim-lipped faces. They all looked brainy, highbrow – probably physicists, astronomers, who understood that tide of books he'd been struggling with all week. A few dreary Older Women in lace-up shoes and cardigans, with impressive-looking clipboards already open on their laps, and two terrifying punk girls – the sort who wore one earring and hated men on principle, especially men in suits. He should have brought his slacks and blazer into work, changed clothes in the gents. But there just hadn't been the time. The class began at six-fifteen and he'd been working till ten to. He'd dared not skive off early when he'd been away for eight whole days.

Asian 'flu, the sick-note said. It had started as a lie which he'd invented for John-Paul to explain his six missed sessions, though it was difficult explaining things to a suspicious answerphone.

‘Hallo. This is 246 2321. John-Paul is not available at present, but …'

He'd been so panicky the first time, he'd simply put the phone down. The second time he'd only got as far as his colleague in the office who'd remarked how pale he was, and how that very afternoon he'd started feeling … when the machine just cut him off. The third time he spoke faster, stuttered out the symptoms he'd discovered in the
Reader's Digest Medical Companion
which belonged to his Mother and was full of slips of paper saying ‘Ring Desmond' and ‘Feed cat' (which unsettled him still further, since they didn't know a Desmond and had never owned a cat). The machine was not impressed. He could hear its heavy breathing in the background – its long accusing silence, sudden sneering click of disbelief. When, at last, John-Paul rang him back, he
had
developed 'flu, perhaps from guilt or desperation; now had every symptom in the
Medical Companion
, plus several more unlisted. Yet John-Paul still seemed suspicious, displayed no scrap of sympathy for his pounding head and weak-as-water legs. If you dared to miss a session, he accused you of ‘resistance'. ‘Resistance' was a broken leg, pneumonia, angina. It was also very expensive, since he still charged you for the time. Those six nonexistent sessions would figure all too solidly on his next steep monthly bill.

He'd finally slunk back, still weak and pale and aching and hardly able to climb the spiral stairs. John-Paul had quite alarmed him, made his 'flu so complicated he was amazed he had survived it. It was also clearly his own fault. Words like ‘conversion hysteria', ‘regression' and ‘denial' left him feeling guilty and ashamed – even when he didn't understand them. He'd already had a grilling from his Mother, though of a rather different kind. Had he gone out in the wet without his raincoat, or been sitting next to people who had germs?

He wondered where to sit now. Germs were all invisible, so he might catch something else, however carefully he tried to choose his neighbours. Being ill had always been a worry – letting people down at work; being subject to his Mother and her ‘nursing' (which included cod liver oil and senna pods, whatever his complaint); failing his next life-insurance medical – but since he'd been going to John-Paul it had become still more alarming. Sore throats, indigestion, even common toothache, were never simple ailments caused by germs or faulty diet, but deep-seated neuroses expressing (or repressing?) hostility, or fear of sex, or even parsimoniousness, in the case of constipation. He'd been constipated for years, but mainly because his Mother would stand outside the lavatory reminding him to wash his hands and not to splash the lino when he did so. John-Paul often mentioned potty-training, but he'd never had a potty. His Mother disapproved of them, had perched him on the toilet-seat from the age of eleven months; held him very stiffly with her face screwed up and her mouth a narrow line – or so he recalled her in his later vivid images.

Strange how bowels kept cropping up in therapy – bowels and breasts and wombs. Even this evening-class was connected with the womb. He hadn't fully followed John-Paul's line of reasoning (had felt too drained and shivery to listen with his usual mix of fear and concentration); just got the general message that he must stand up to his Mother and insist on one night out. That was doubly worrying, since John-Paul almost never gave advice; seemed to be acting out of character, as if he were becoming so frustrated with his patient's lack of progress, he was trying to force the pace, suggesting a new project and procedure – not reading-lists or science books, but an exercise in lessening his dependency, weaning him from the breast he loved to hate.

It had taken courage – worse, required decisions – a whole tangled snarl and pother of decisions: where he'd go and when; which class, which night, which institute? He'd lain awake at night comparing The English Country House with Industrial Archaeology or Karate for Beginners; the City Literary Institute with Ruxley Hill Community Centre and Greycoat Lower School. And suppose the class were full? Enrolment had been weeks ago, with queues at all the centres. He'd barge in as a new boy, ignorant, superfluous; be turned away in public. Still, a disco would be worse, or amateur dramatics, or a ballroom-dancing class, all of which he had considered as alternatives. He shuddered at the thought of the slow foxtrot, or playing the vicar or the cuckold in some vulgar Brian Rix farce. At least night-school was anonymous, without your name in lights.

In the end, he'd chosen (chosen?) the Winston Churchill Centre, simply because it was the nearest to John-Paul's, which made him feel a little safer, slightly less alone. If the fears got unendurable, he could always sprint back to the shelter of the tower, stand outside it, leaning on the stone. (Old stone was strong and solid, which he'd never be himself.) And he'd finally plumped for Friday, though only after wrestling with the pros and cons of each and every evening, setting them out in different combinations on twenty separate lists. Friday was his worst night, since it was stitched to the weekend, so by arriving home at ten instead of seven, he could dock it (and his Mother) by three hours.