The Skeleton Cupboard (13 page)

I took my coffee and smiled at Henrietta. A few seconds later Daisy entered, all designer bag and whippet-thin fluster.

We introduced ourselves.

Daisy explained, “I have to get off to Great Ormond Street Hospital to run a charity round table, but I was so happy when Dr. Abrahams told me I could have a session with you.”

She gave me her background, speaking at a hundred miles an hour.

“My daughter, Jocasta, is extremely bright.”

“So how can I help you?”

“The thing is, she is too bright, and I don't know how to handle her. My husband is getting very cross with me because I don't know how to deal with her.”

“What is it that Jocasta does? Why does your husband get angry?”

“Jocasta is almost seven and knows she should sleep in her own bed.”

I nodded. “At her age, she should be sleeping in her own bed.”

“My husband and I can't sleep together in the same bed anymore because Jocasta won't let us.”

That's one powerful child
.

“Daisy, why won't Jocasta let you sleep in the bed together?”

“Because she insists on sleeping in the same bed as me. I have no idea how to deal with it. She won't let me put her in her own bed.”

“She won't let you? But she's almost seven years old!”

“Do you have children?”

“No.”

Daisy laughed in a “well, what would you know, then?” kind of way.

I plowed on. “Tell me what you try to do to get her into her own bed.”

Daisy laughed again. “What have I tried to do? You mean, what haven't I tried to do!” She looked at her watch. “But I have my Great Ormond Street charity meeting in half an hour, so could you just tell me what to do?”

“Daisy, what I need to do is get a baseline.”

“A baseline?”

“Yes, a picture of the current situation to measure against. I will give you a simple diary sheet so you can keep some brief information for me over the next week. That will help me understand the problems you're having settling Jocasta into her bed.”

“You don't need a baseline. She simply refuses.”

“I still need to understand Jocasta's sleep cues and work out how your behavior might be reinforcing the problem.”

I was standing on the safe ground of behaviorism. I was sure about this, but Daisy was having none of it.

“There is no pattern. Each night she simply refuses to get into her bed.”

We were playing slightly tense verbal ping-pong. I needed another approach.

“OK. So what do you do?”

Daisy sighed. “She refuses. I try to get her into her bed, but she just screams, and so I have to put her into my bed and lie next her until she falls asleep. I get out, go downstairs, have a bit of an evening. Two hours later I have to come back to my bed and sleep with her, because otherwise she will be up all night screaming at me. That is your baseline.”

Daisy glanced at her glittering watch and smiled brightly. “Well, we now have twenty-five minutes for you to tell me what to do. I just want to be a good mother, you know. My daughter really does need to sleep in her own bed.”

“Daisy, I still need to understand the nuances of Jocasta's behavior. You've given me a summary. The devil is in the details!”

“There are no nuances. Like her father, Jocasta does not do nuances. Jocasta does what she wants to do and she will not go to bed.” She paused and took a breath. “Please just tell me how to make her go to her bed and sleep in it all night.”

The atmosphere in the room altered and her eyes began to glisten.

I pushed a box of tissues across the desk to her. She furrowed her brow and shook her head.

“Daisy, how much do you want Jocasta to sleep in her own bed?”

“Very much.”

“Then it would really help this process if you could just keep a baseline diary for me for one week of all the ways in which you try to get Jocasta into bed. When and how she wakes, what you do then, including all the times you try to get her back to bed—once I understand all the ways in which you and your husband behave around bedtime in your household, I can then help you.”

Daisy closed her eyes. “My husband? My husband has nothing to do with bedtime, except when he shouts at me for being a poor mother.” Daisy opened her eyes and sniffed.

OK
.

“Daisy, do you think this could be part of the problem?”

Daisy grabbed the diary sheet and stuffed it into her bag. “I'm sure it is, but that's not what I'm here for. So I'll keep your baseline and make an appointment to see you next week on my way out. I really do have to go now.”

Hold on!

“Wait! Daisy, we still have time to talk. I am concerned that there are other issues underlying the problem. Bigger issues, perhaps concerning how you and your husband parent Jocasta.”

Daisy stood up. “Yes, there are. That's why I'm doing this on the bloody NHS. I don't want him to know that I am here. He'd find out if I saw someone privately. So, look, I have to go. I'll see you next week.” Daisy extended her hand and gave me a smile. “Thank you for your time. Sorry to leave early, but charity calls!”

And she was off.

I banged my head on my desk slowly.

“Are you all right, Dr. T?”

Mrs. C was standing over me.

I sat up. “I'm fine. Daisy had to leave for another appointment.”

Mrs. C smiled. “My advice, Dr. T, is that they take that child into her bed and hold her there until she doesn't leave. She'll learn that her parents are in charge!”

Henrietta popped her head around the door. “Coffee?”

“No! Dr. T doesn't want a coffee.” Mrs. C turned to me. “Your next patient is here already.”

I looked at my watch; Martin and Elise were early.

“They're early.”

“No,” said Mrs. C. “Not they. He's here already.” She laughed. “Don't tell me. He's a premature ejaculator. They always arrive early for their appointments.”

*   *   *

An hour later, after I had finished my appointment with Martin and Elise, Mrs. C told me that Chris had called and left a message canceling our appointment, our first meeting since I “fired” her. Chris said she would see me at work the following morning. No sorry. No explanation.

Great
.

As I walked to the Tube, I felt odd; I just wasn't feeling comfortable in my own skin. This placement should have been easy—I was located in a busy, colorful part of London where the local population was diverse in every way, and being based in a GP practice brought nothing too difficult for me to treat. The cases were good. This was “proper” clinical psychology—much more straightforward than Imogen's case had been.

Mrs. C and Henrietta were very sweet, even if they were a bit pushy in their own ways. The GPs were great; referrals were coming thick and fast. But something didn't feel right.

The idea of squeezing into a packed Tube was making me anxious, so I stopped to watch the market traders pack up their stalls. It was an early evening in September. The light was fading, and the thickening cold air seemed to amplify noises.

I listened to the sharp, separate sounds around me: the scraping of metal bars as the awning frames were dismantled, the shriek and scratch of bristle brushes scrubbing at the pavement, the slosh of water around the fishmonger's stall. Voices were calling out to each other; crates were being jammed into the backs of small vans; distinct colors within the overall hum of a busy market street canvas ending its day of hustle and bustle.

Everyone was working hard, and the chat was low and friendly. Cups of steaming tea were being handed around. This was a community.

A few people were picking away at the leftover goods scattered on the curbside. I was sure I recognized the elderly lady searching through the old, unsalable, half-rotten fruit with her mittened hands. She was my friend with the Battenberg cake. But then she stood up, gently holding a bruised orange and an avocado half split out of its soft skin, and I realized I was wrong, I had never seen that face before.

I felt sad looking at her with her scavenged goods. Who was she? Where had she come from? Was she happy having to finding her next meal among the discarded leftovers? Was she an eco warrior or a woman reduced by poverty to searching for her food among waste? I felt desperate to know her story.

As I looked around, I noticed many other shadowy figures poking through the curbside detritus before the waste collectors came to remove the bounty. I wondered about them all.

When I was a child, my mother would constantly exclaim, “Darling, it's rude to stare!” I didn't understand that, because with the magical thinking of a child, I didn't think the people I'd been staring at had noticed me watching them; I was invisible.

It was getting cold, but I couldn't face the Tube yet. I felt both mesmerized and comforted by what was going on around me: a community, a network, a series of relationships united by a common goal. Each stall out to make its own profits but working with others to create the market atmosphere, to keep the tradition going. Stalls being run by the children, and grandchildren, of the original stall holders.

All so connected, and then further within the network, almost disguised and unseen but so very present, there were those tolerated as they scavenged, those who were linked to the community but were units separate and alone.

And then it all came together. I suddenly realized what I was feeling.

I was lonely.

My skin tingled. I thought about the three cases that were really challenging me.

Martin and Elise, so in love and happy in every way. “We like to do things well,” she'd said, but his behavior suggested it was more complicated than that. Here was a lovely, clever woman wanting to do and be the best in a relationship with a man who was just too angry and passionate to accept “nice.” She protected him from his performance anxiety and, in the attempt, dried up. He wanted anything but nice. He wanted raw emotion, passion and realism. That was sex, but it lived too far away from their baseline relationship and the anodyne world of “doing things well.”

Daisy's baseline was her perceived failure at getting her daughter, Jocasta, to sleep in her own bed. Her husband had told her she was a poor mother, so the last thing she wanted to do was keep a diary in order to confirm this—especially when she would have to show it to me. The marriage seemed fractious. Maybe fractured? “Please tell me how to make her go to her bed,” she had begged.

She wanted me to help her perform in the way her husband expected of her, as the mother at home, but she was a bright woman; she knew what to do. It wasn't rocket science, so why couldn't she get her child out of her bed?

Because the answer, I realized, was that she didn't want Jocasta out of her bed.

Why?

“I just want to be a good mother.”

And then lovely Marion—she didn't want a mother: “I never missed having a mother until I found out that I had one. Now I really don't like how it makes me feel.”

All of them, in different ways, lonely.

A couple that connected intellectually but intimately were poles apart.

A mother who didn't want to share a bed with the father of her child and so, in order to feel some kind of human connection, was allowing her daughter to share it with her instead. The little girl both comforted her mother and also functioned as a relationship contraceptive for both her parents.

A motherless woman who had created her own family, had always felt loved and valued and then whose life was blown apart by the notion of having her own mother.

All of these stories were about loneliness.

It was beginning to get dark, and the stalls had been packed away.

My parents lived hundreds of miles away in Yorkshire; my sister was doing her university year abroad; Rosie, Ali and Megan were all scattered far away; Chris and I were estranged, and she was playing hard to get.

Life felt very lonely.

*   *   *

The next morning I was drinking coffee in my office with Chris. I was nervous and felt I needed to address the issue of me “firing” her.

“Chris, before we start, can I just say—”

She cut me off abruptly: “No, you can't.”

“OK. It's just that I want to say—”

Chris looked around. “Any brown sugar?”

“I'll buzz and get you some.”

I couldn't read her. Was she angry with me or just her usual blunt, cut-and-dried self? I desperately wanted to acknowledge our disagreement, but my instinct was not to push it.

“Don't bother—I've got my own sugar. So, who are we discussing?”

So I told her about Martin's chat with me before Elise joined the session the previous day.

“He was remorseful. He apologized for shouting.”

Chris was rummaging in one of her large, messy bags. I wished she had just let me buzz for the sugar. “And?”

“He told me it wasn't easy to talk when his fiancée was in the room, and Elise had agreed for him to have some time with me before she joined the session.”

Chris pulled a packet of sugar out of her bag. “And?”

“Well, it was awkward. He opened up about their relationship while she wasn't there. I felt like I was betraying her by listening to him.”

Chris was trying to rip the sugar sachet with her teeth and failing. I opened my desk drawer and found some scissors.

“Here, let me do it.”

Chris grabbed the scissors. “Carry on.”

I told her that Martin seemed to genuinely regret his aggression. He told me that he found the whole sex therapy thing really hard, and he meant it. He described his fiancée as a woman he loved deeply but for whom perfection was the required standard. Martin wanted “naughty and dirty,” whereas Elise struggled with spontaneous unpredictability, and so her perfectionism caused him performance anxiety, leaving them both feeling as if they had “failed”—an impossible place to be for high-achieving Oxbridge graduates.