Blue Monday

Chapter Six

Lately, Reuben McGill had started to find fifty minutes a long time to go without a cigarette. He finished one in his office and put an extra-strong mint lozenge into his mouth. He knew it was useless. People could smell cigarettes on you now whatever you did. It had been different twenty years ago, when everything in the world had smelt very slightly of cigarette smoke. Still, what did it matter? Why was he even sucking a mint to cover it up? It wasn’t as if it was illegal.

He stepped into the waiting room to find Alan Dekker waiting there, ready for his first session. He led him through to one of the three session rooms they had in the clinic. Alan looked around. ‘I thought there’d be a couch,’ he said. ‘Like you see in films.’

‘You don’t want to believe everything you see in films. I think it’s better just to face each other. Like normal people.’

He gestured Alan into a grey upright armchair, stiff at the back so that it would make him sit straight and face forward. Reuben sat opposite. They were about six feet apart. Not so close that the proximity was oppressive. Not so far that anybody needed to raise their voice.

‘So what do you want me to say?’ said Alan. ‘I’m not used to this.’

‘Just talk,’ said Reuben. ‘We’ve got plenty of time.’

It had been only three minutes, maybe four, since Reuben had finished his cigarette. He had extinguished it on the railing out on the fire escape, though it was only a little more than half smoked, and dropped it into the concrete area below. He wanted a cigarette again. Or, at least, he couldn’t stop himself thinking about a cigarette. It wasn’t just about smoking it. It was a way of measuring out the time, and it was something to hold. Suddenly he didn’t know where to put his hands. On the arms of the chair felt too formal. On his lap felt too bunched up, as if he were trying to hide something. He moved between one and the other.

When Reuben had created the clinic in 1977, he was only thirty-one years old and one of the most famous analysts in the country. In fact, it had been more like a group or a movement than a clinic. He had developed a version of therapy that was more eclectic and less rule-bound than the traditional therapies at the time. It was going to transform the whole discipline. His picture appeared in magazines. He was interviewed in newspapers. He presented TV documentaries. He wrote books with mysterious, slightly erotic-sounding titles (Desire and Learned Helplessness, The Playfulness of Love). He had started out in the living room of his Victorian terraced house in Primrose Hill, and even when the clinic became an NHS-funded institution and moved up to Swiss Cottage, it had kept a Bohemian feel. The Warehouse had been designed by a modernist architect, who retained the steel girders and rough brick walls of the original building, then threw in lots of glass and stainless steel. Yet gradually something had been lost. What Reuben found hard to admit to himself was that there had never really been a new version of therapy. Reuben McGill had been a handsome and charismatic figure, and he had attracted colleagues and patients the way a religious leader attracted followers. Gradually the handsomeness and the charisma had faded. His therapeutic methods had proved hard to replicate, and the range of conditions for which they were deemed suitable had gradually narrowed and narrowed. The Warehouse was a success and well respected. It changed some people’s lives, but it wasn’t going to change the world.

He remained a gifted analyst, but in recent years something had happened. He had read somewhere that airline pilots, after decades of flawless service, could develop a fear of flying. He had heard of old actors who had suddenly experienced stage fright so debilitating that they could no longer perform in the theatre. He had heard of an equivalent fear of analysts, which was the dread that they weren’t real doctors, that they couldn’t offer the kinds of cure that other branches of the profession could, that it was all just talk, smoke and mirrors. Reuben had never experienced that. What was a cure, really, after all? He knew he was some kind of a healer. He knew he could do something for the people who came to him, wounded in ways they couldn’t express.

It was simpler than that, more embarrassing. Suddenly – or was it gradually? – he had started to find his patients boring. That was the real difference between analysis and other forms of medicine. In the latter, the patient presented and you examined his arm or scanned her breast or looked under the tongue. But if you were an analyst, you had to hear the symptoms over and over again, going on and on, hour after hour. In the early years, it hadn’t been like that. Sometimes Reuben had felt he was listening to a particularly pure form of literature, an oral literature, that needed interpreting, decoding. Gradually he had come to think it was a terrible kind of literature, clichéd and repetitive and predictable, and later that it was no kind of literature at all, just an outpouring of unformed, unreflective verbiage, and he had started to let it flow past him, like a river, like traffic, like when you stand on a motorway bridge and watch cars and lorries rush under you, people you know nothing about and care nothing about. They would talk and sometimes cry, and he would nod and think about other things and wait for the cigarette that was coming at exactly nine minutes before the hour.

‘These thoughts were like a cancer,’ said Alan. ‘You know what I mean?’

There was a pause.

‘I’m sorry?’ said Reuben.

‘I said: “Do you know what I mean?” ’

‘In what way?’

‘Were you listening to what I was saying?’

There was another pause. Reuben sneaked a look at his watch. They were twenty-five minutes into the session. He had no memory of anything that had been said. He tried to think of something to ask. ‘Do you feel you’re not being listened to?’ he said. ‘Can we talk about that?’

‘Don’t give me that,’ said Alan. ‘You haven’t been paying attention.’

‘Why do you say that?’

‘Tell me one thing I’ve said. Just one thing. Anything.’

‘I’m sorry, Mr … erm …’

‘Do you even remember my name? It’s James.’

‘I’m sorry, James …’

‘It’s not James! It’s Alan. Alan Dekker. And I’m leaving and I’m going to complain about you. You’re not getting away with this. You’re not someone who should be seeing patients.’

‘Alan, we need to –’

Both of them stood up and for a moment they confronted each other. Reuben reached forward to catch hold of Alan’s sleeve, but then hesitated and raised his hands, letting him go.

‘I can’t believe this,’ said Alan. ‘I said it wouldn’t do any good. They said you’ve got to give it a chance. It’ll help. Just co-operate.’

‘I’m sorry,’ said Reuben, in a whisper, but Alan was no longer there to hear it.