Blue Monday

Chapter Twenty-six

‘So what do you think?’ said Frieda.

Jack pulled a face. ‘It’s a classic fantasy,’ he said.

They were sitting in Number 9, their habitual meeting place now for Jack’s mentoring sessions, which had become less formal and more frequent. Jack was nursing his second cappuccino. He liked it here: Kerry fussed over him, a mixture of motherly and flirtatious; Marcus sometimes came out of the kitchen and insisted that he try his latest creation (today a marmalade Bakewell tart that Jack ate, though he didn’t really like almonds or marmalade) and Katya sometimes came and sat on Frieda’s lap. Jack thought Katya liked Frieda the way cats like people who don’t fuss over them. Frieda would ignore her or, sometimes, simply lift her off and deposit her on the floor.

‘In what way?’

‘For men, anyway. A sexually provocative woman approaches, pulls you out of your boring everyday life into a weird, more exciting existence.’

‘So what does this woman represent?’

‘It might be you,’ said Jack, and took a hasty gulp of his coffee.

‘Me?’ said Frieda. ‘Large-breasted, orange jacket, tight short skirt and blonde-red hair?’

Jack went red and looked around the café to see if anybody had overheard. ‘It’s a sexualized version of you,’ he said. ‘It’s a classic example of transference. You’re the woman who is stepping into his ordinary life. He can talk to you in ways that he can’t talk to his own partner. But he still needs to disguise it by expressing it in terms of this exaggeratedly sexual female figure.’

‘Interesting,’ said Frieda. ‘A bit like a textbook, but interesting. Any other theory?’

Jack thought for a moment. ‘I’m interested in this story he keeps telling of his anonymity, that he keeps feeling he’s being mistaken for other people. This may be an example of solipsism syndrome. You know, it’s the dissociative mental state where people feel that they’re the only person who is real and everybody else is an actor or has been replaced by a robot or something like that.’

‘In which case he would need an MRI scan.’

‘It’s just a theory,’ said Jack. ‘I wouldn’t recommend that unless there were other symptoms of cognitive impairment.’

‘Any other possibilities?’

‘I was taught to listen to the patient. I suppose there is a possibility that a woman simply mistook him for someone else and that the whole thing doesn’t mean much at all.’

‘Could you imagine going up to a girl and actually kissing her by mistake?’

Jack thought of mentioning a couple of examples where it would be all too easy and then thought better of it. ‘He must have looked pretty similar to the person she thought he was,’ he said. ‘If it really happened. But if I’ve learned anything from you it’s that what we’re here to do is to deal with what’s inside the patient’s head. In a way, the truth of what happened isn’t relevant. What we need to concentrate on is the meaning that Alan gave to the event and what he meant by telling you about it.’

Frieda gave a frown. It felt strange to hear her own words being parroted back at her like that. They sounded both dogmatic and unconvincing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s a huge difference between someone who is mistaken for other people, for whatever reason, and someone who believes that he is mistaken for other people. Don’t you think it would be interesting if we could find out whether that encounter really happened?’

‘It might be interesting,’ said Jack, ‘but it’s just totally impractical. You’d have to wander round Victoria Park on the off-chance of seeing someone who was in the neighbourhood two days ago – and whom you wouldn’t recognize anyway because you don’t know what she looks like.’

‘I was hoping you might have a go,’ said Frieda.

‘Oh,’ said Jack.

Jack was tempted to say several things: that it had nothing to do with his training and that it was unprofessional of her to ask him; that the chances of finding this woman were zero, and that even if he found her it wouldn’t be worth the trouble. He even wondered if there might be some rule about checking up on patients without their permission. But he didn’t say any of those things. Really, he was quite pleased that Frieda had asked him. In a curious way he was even more pleased that she had asked him to do something out of the ordinary. If it had been some straightforward extra work, that would have been a chore. But this was just slightly inappropriate and there was a certain kind of intimacy about that. Or was he kidding himself?

‘All right,’ he said.

‘Good.’

‘Frieda!’

The voice came from behind him, and before he saw whose it was, he noticed how Frieda’s face darkened.

‘What are you doing here?’

Jack twisted round and saw a woman with long legs, dirty blonde hair and a face that looked very young and unformed under its dramatic makeup.

‘I’ve come for my lesson. You said we should meet here for a change.’ She glanced at Jack and he felt himself blush.

‘You’re early.’

‘You should be pleased.’ She sat down at their table and pulled off her gloves. Her fingernails were bitten and painted dark purple. ‘It’s so cold out there. I need something to warm me up. Aren’t you going to introduce us?’

‘Jack’s just going,’ said Frieda, shortly.

‘I’m Chloë Klein.’ She held out a hand and he took it. ‘Her niece.’

‘Jack Dargan,’ he said.

‘How do you two know each other, then?’

‘Never mind that,’ said Frieda, hastily. ‘Chemistry.’ She nodded at Jack. ‘Thanks for your help.’

It was a clear dismissal. He got to his feet.

‘Nice meeting you,’ said Chloë. She seemed very pleased with herself.

Jack emerged from Hackney Wick station and looked at his street map. He made his way over to the junction where the Grand Union Canal branched off to the east from the river Lea. He was wearing a sweatshirt, a sweater, a cagoule, cycling gloves and a woolly hat with earmuffs but he was still shivering with the cold. The surface of the canal was gritty with a slush that hadn’t quite hardened into ice. He walked along the towpath until he saw the gates to the park on his right. He looked at the notes he had taken from Frieda. He could see the playground ahead. There was an icy wind that stung his cheeks so he couldn’t tell whether they were cold or hot. Nevertheless, he could see buggies and muffled, bundled-up little figures in the playground. There were even two track-suited figures on the tennis court. Jack stopped and pressed his face against the wire. They were two grizzled old men, hitting the ball back and forwards hard and low. Jack was impressed. One of them charged the net and the other lobbed him. The player chased back. The ball landed just inside the line.

‘Out!’ the player shouted loudly. ‘Bad luck!’

Jack felt his fingers freezing inside his gloves. As he walked away from the court, he took his right hand out of the glove and pushed it inside his shirt against his chest to try to bring some feeling back into his fingers. He turned left on to the main path. On his right he could see the bowling green and then, as he walked along, the bandstand and the fountain. He looked around. There was almost no one. Dotted about were people with their dogs. Far away to one side there was a group of teenagers, joshing, pushing each other. This wasn’t the weather for anyone with anywhere sensible to go. He thought of Alan Dekker walking here to clear his mind, if he really had been here at all. In fact, now that Jack was here, he was starting to believe that Alan must have been telling some version of the truth. The details about the canal, the playground and the bandstand were too precise. Why bother with that if it was all a dream? As he walked, Jack felt as if he was clearing his mind as well, in the fierce northerly wind. He’d been feeling discontented with the whole idea of therapy. Was it really so important to talk about things? Was talking about things just another way of getting tangled up with your patient, when what you really should be doing was making them better? Maybe that was another reason why he had agreed to do this for Frieda. It felt good to be going out in the world and seeing if Alan had been telling the truth or not. But, then, what were the chances of finding anything out?

Jack came out of the southern corner of the park, crossed the road and walked along the row of shops. They were just the way Alan had described them. When he got to the hardware shop, he actually stepped inside. It was the sort of place that he hadn’t thought existed any more and it seemed to contain virtually everything he ought to have got for the house he shared, but had never quite got around to buying: washing-up bowls, step-ladders, screwdrivers, torches. He should come back here with his friend’s car and load up. A few more steps took him to the second-hand shop with the stuffed owl in the window. It was scruffy and losing feathers, and it seemed to be staring back at him with its large doll’s eyes. Jack tried to imagine shooting an owl and stuffing it. It had no price tag. It probably wasn’t for sale.

He looked around. This was where Alan had met the woman. If he’d met her. He had said that the street had been empty and that he had suddenly seen her coming towards him. Could she live somewhere here? Jack stepped back and looked above the shops. There did indeed seem to be flats above them and there were entrances along the road between the shop fronts, some of which were boarded up, with ‘For Sale’ signs above them. But he couldn’t just start ringing doorbells at random and seeing if a large-breasted woman answered. The next shop along was a launderette with a cracked window. Alan hadn’t mentioned that she was carrying washing, but he hadn’t said that she was empty-handed either. Jack stepped inside, inhaling the warm steam gratefully. There was a woman right at the back folding some washing. When she saw Jack she stepped towards him. She was black-haired with a mole above her lip.

‘You here for a service wash?’ she said.

‘Someone I know may have been in here a couple of days ago,’ said Jack. ‘A woman dressed in a bright orange jacket.’

‘Never seen her.’

Jack thought he should say something, decided not to and then changed his mind. ‘I’m a doctor, by the way. You might want to get that mole looked at.’

‘What?’

Jack touched his own face just above his mouth. ‘It might need checking.’

‘Mind your own fucking business,’ said the woman.

‘Yes, right, sorry,’ said Jack, and eased out of the shop.

Next door was a café, a real old-style greasy spoon. He stepped inside. It was empty except for a toothless old man in the corner, sucking noisily at his tea. He looked at Jack with his watery eyes. Jack looked at his phone: twenty past one. He sat at a table and a woman in a blue nylon apron came over; she was wearing slippers that shuffled along the not-very-clean floor. Jack looked up at the blackboard and ordered fried eggs, bacon, sausage, grilled tomato and chips and a cup of tea.

‘Anything else?’ said the woman.

‘There’s a woman, dresses in a bright orange jacket, blonde hair, lots of jewellery, does she come in here?’

‘What you want?’ said the woman, in a strong accent. She was looking at him suspiciously.

‘I wondered if she came in here.’

‘You say you meet her here?’

‘Meet her?’

‘Not here.’

There were several more exchanges of questions at the end of which Jack didn’t know whether the waitress knew the woman or even whether she had understood his questions at all. The food arrived and Jack felt strangely happy. It felt like the sort of meal that he could only eat alone, in an unfamiliar place, among strangers. He was just dipping his chips into the remains of the egg yolk and planning what to do next, when he saw her. Or, rather, he saw a woman in a bright orange jacket over tight black leggings, wearing high heels, her hair long and blonde, walking past the window. For a moment, he sat transfixed. Was it a hallucination, or had he really just seen her? And if so, what to do? He couldn’t let her go. This was real life. He had to approach her. But what could he possibly say? He jumped up, spilling tea over the greasy remains of his meal, and scrabbled in his pocket for change. He threw far too many coins down on the table. Several spun off and fell to the floor. He raced out of the door, ignoring the calls of the waitress. She was still visible, her jacket a vivid flare among the greys and browns of the other people on the street.

He ran towards her, feeling immediately out of breath. For someone in high heels, she walked surprisingly fast. Her hips rolled. As he got nearer he saw that her feet were bare and swollen in the sandals, which looked a size too small. He drew level and put a hand on her forearm. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.

When the woman turned her head, he felt a tremor of shock running through him. He’d been expecting someone young and beautiful, sexy at least – that was what Alan’s story had implied. But this woman wasn’t young. Her breasts sagged. Her face was lined and creviced, and under the thickly applied makeup, the skin was pasty. He saw a rash of red spots on her forehead. Her eyes, circled with dark liner and fringed with heavily mascaraed lashes, were flecked with red. She looked bleary and ill and wretched. He saw her draw her features into an approximation of a smile. ‘What can I do for you, darling?’

‘Sorry to disturb you. I just wanted to ask you something.’

‘I’m Heidi.’

‘Well – Heidi – I – it’s difficult to explain but –’

‘You’re a shy one, aren’t you? Thirty quid for a blow-job.’

‘I wanted to talk to you.’

‘Talk?’ He could feel her indifferent glance and his face flamed. ‘We can talk, if that’s what you want. It’ll still cost you thirty quid.’

‘It’s just about –’

‘Thirty quid.’

‘I’m not sure if I’ve got that much on me.’

‘Stopped me on a whim, did you? There’s a cash machine up the road.’ She pointed. ‘And then you can come and see me if you still want to talk. I live at forty-one B. Top bell.’

‘But I don’t think you understand.’

She shrugged. ‘Thirty quid and then I’ll understand as much as you want.’

Jack watched her as she crossed the road. For a moment he thought of simply going home, as fast as he could. He felt obscurely ashamed of himself. But he couldn’t go, now that he’d found her. He went to the cash machine and took out forty pounds, then made his way to 41B. It was above a shop that had once been a halal butcher’s, according to the sign, but was now closed down. There was graffiti all over its metal shutters. Jack took a deep breath. He felt that everyone who passed must be looking at him, grinning to themselves, as he pressed the top bell. Heidi buzzed him up.

She was wearing a low-cut, lime green top. Alan had said she smelt of yeast, but now she had clearly sprayed herself with perfume. She had applied fresh lipstick and brushed her hair.

‘Come in, then.’

Jack stepped over the threshold into a small sitting room that was dimly lit and oppressively hot. Thin purple curtains were pulled across the window. On the wall opposite, above the large low sofa, was a reproduction of the Mona Lisa. There were china ornaments on every spare surface.

‘I should tell you at once that I’m not what you think.’ His voice came out too loudly. ‘I’m a doctor.’

‘That’s all right.’

‘I want to ask you something.’

Her smile disappeared. Her eyes were watchful and suspicious. ‘You’re not a punter?’

‘No.’

‘A doctor? I’m clean, if that’s what you’re thinking.’

Jack felt slightly desperate. ‘You know this man,’ he said. ‘With grey hair, stocky.’

Heidi let herself down on to the sofa. Jack saw how tired she was. She picked up a bottle of sweet Dubonnet that was at her feet and filled a small glass to the brim, tipped it down her throat in one swallow that made her throat work. A small thick dribble worked its way down her chin. Then she took a cigarette from the packet on the table, put it in her mouth, lit it and inhaled hungrily. The smoke hung in the heavy air.

‘You kissed him the other day.’

‘You don’t say.’

Jack was forcing himself to speak. An acute physical discomfort was making him squirm in his seat. He saw himself the way that this woman, Heidi, must be seeing him: prurient, puritanical, smutty, an awkward young man who had not grown out of his adolescent anxieties about women in spite of his age and his profession. He could feel the sweat on his brows. His clothes itched on him.

‘I mean, you came up to him in the street and kissed him. Just near the café and the shop with the owl in the window.’

‘Is this your idea of a sick joke?’

‘No.’

‘Who’s set you up to it?’

‘No, honestly, you’ve got me wrong – but my friend, he was surprised, and I just wanted to find out if –’

‘Dirty dog.’

‘Sorry?’

‘Your friend. Strange company you keep, I must say. At least he pays, though. He likes paying. It gives him the right to treat us as dirty as he wants.’

‘Alan?’

‘What’s that?’

‘He’s called Alan.’

‘No, he isn’t.’

‘What’s his name with you?’

Heidi poured herself another brimming glass of Dubonnet and drank it down.

‘Please,’ he said.

He took the money from his back pocket, removed a ten-pound note, and passed the rest over.

‘Dean Reeve. And if you tell him I told you, I’ll make you sorry. I swear.’

‘I won’t tell. Do you happen to know where he lives?’

‘I’ve been there once, when his wife was away.’

Jack rummaged in his pocket and found a pen and an old receipt. He handed them across and she wrote on the back of it and returned them.

‘What’s he done?’

‘I’m not sure,’ said Jack.

As he left he handed over the last ten-pound note. He wanted to apologize, though he didn’t know what for.

Jack sat opposite a man with a bald head and a waxed moustache who was reading a magazine about guns. When he had told Frieda he had actually found Alan’s mystery woman, she had insisted on meeting him at his place. Jack had feebly protested: he didn’t want her to see where he lived, particularly not in the state it had been in when he’d left this morning. He worried about which of his housemates would be there and what they might say. To make matters worse, the train back got delayed in a tunnel – passenger under a train, the announcement said. He was fumbling with his key in the lock when he saw her coming up the road. It was getting dark and she was wrapped up against the cold, but he would have recognized her anywhere, just from the way she walked, swift and upright. She was so purposeful, he thought, and a wave of exultation passed through him, because he had been successful and had something to give her.

She reached him as he was pushing open the door. The hall was full of junk mail and shoes; there was a bicycle leaning against the wall that they had to squeeze past. Loud music was coming from upstairs.

‘It might be a bit messy,’ he said.

‘That’s all right.’

‘I don’t know if there’s any milk.’

‘I don’t need milk.’

‘The boiler’s not completely working.’

‘I’m wearing warm clothes.’

‘It’s warm in the kitchen.’ But when he saw it, he backed out of it rapidly. ‘I think the living room might be more comfortable,’ he said. ‘I’ll plug in the radiator.’

‘It’s fine, Jack,’ said Frieda. ‘I just want to hear exactly what happened.’

‘It was unbelievable,’ said Jack.

The living room was nearly as bad as the kitchen. He saw it through Frieda’s eyes: the sofa was a horrible leather affair that someone’s parents had given them when they moved in; it had a wide rip along one arm that was disgorging white fluff. The walls were painted a vile green; there were bottles and mugs and plates and strange items of clothing everywhere. Some dead flowers stood on the windowsill. His squash bag was open in front of them, a dirty shirt and a balled pair of socks on the top of it. The anatomically correct skeleton he had had since his first term at university stood in the centre of the room hung with flashing Christmas lights, several hats piled up on its skull and some lacy knickers hanging off its long fingers. He swept the magazines off the table and covered them with a coat that was lying on the sofa. If he was in a session with Frieda, he could have told her about the chaos he lived in and how it made him feel slightly out of control of his own life as well. If it was him who read those magazines (which it wasn’t, though he had glanced surreptitiously at them every so often), he could have told her about that as well. He could have explained that he felt he was living in a limbo state, between his old university life and the world of adulthood, which always seemed to belong to other people and not to him. He could describe the mess of his soul. He just didn’t want her to see it for herself.

‘Have a seat. Sorry, let me move that.’ He took the laptop and the ketchup bottle from the chair. ‘It’s just temporary,’ he said. ‘Some of my housemates are a bit disorganized.’

‘I’ve been a student,’ Frieda said.

‘We’re not students, though,’ said Jack. ‘I’m a doctor, kind of. Greta’s an accountant, though you wouldn’t believe it.’

‘You found her.’

‘Yes,’ said Jack, brightening. ‘Can you believe it? I’d just about given up, and then suddenly there she was. It was a bit disturbing, though. It doesn’t make sense, really – and she was both the woman Alan told you about and … well, she wasn’t. Not really.’

‘From the beginning,’ Frieda commanded.

Under her concentrated gaze, Jack told her everything that had happened. He repeated the conversation with the woman word for word, as near as he could manage. At the end, there was a silence.

‘Well?’ he said.

The door opened and a face peered in. It saw Frieda and leered expressively, then withdrew. Jack flushed to the roots of his hair.

‘Dirty dog?’

‘That’s what she called Alan, except she said his name was Dean.’

‘Everything Alan said was true.’ Frieda seemed to be talking to herself. ‘All the things we thought might be inside his head were in the outside world all the time. He wasn’t making it up. But the woman – the one he said he’d never seen before – knew him.’

‘Knew this Dean Reeve,’ corrected Jack. ‘At least, that’s what she said.’

‘Why would she lie?’

‘I don’t think she was lying.’

‘She described everything the way he did, except she says it happened to someone else.’

‘Yes.’

‘Is he lying to us? If he is, what’s it about?’

‘She wasn’t the glamorous woman I’d been expecting,’ said Jack. He felt awkward talking about Heidi, but he wanted to tell Frieda how he’d felt, standing in the hot, sickly-sweet room, trying not to think about all the men who had trudged up the narrow stairs. He remembered her red-flecked eyes and felt slightly sick, as though it was his fault.

‘I’ve had colleagues who look after sex workers,’ said Frieda. She was looking at him as though she could see his thoughts. ‘Mainly they’re addicted, abused and poor. There’s not much that’s glamorous about it.’

‘So Alan goes to prostitutes under the name of Dean. And then he can’t bring himself to actually confess it straight out, but has to wrap it up in this strange story of his, which takes away his responsibility for it and makes her less damaged. Is that what you think?’

‘There’s one way to find out.’

‘We could go there together.’

‘I think it would be better if it was just me,’ said Frieda. ‘You did really well, Jack. I appreciate it and I’m very grateful to you. Thank you.’

He mumbled something incomprehensible. She couldn’t tell whether he was pleased by her praise or disappointed at being left behind.