The Mirror World of Melody Black

5

DR BARBARA

‘. . . and at that point I wake up. It’s always at that point – when the interviewer asks me if I wouldn’t be more comfortable without my jacket. I don’t know if he realizes I’m naked underneath, and he’s toying with me, or whether it’s genuine concern, since it’s such a hot day. But I guess that doesn’t matter; I never have time to work it out. The dream always ends at that exact moment. I wake up and the bedroom’s hot and stuffy, and I’m wide awake and need to pee. Generally that’s around four in the morning, and I can’t get back to sleep. I just get up and read. Although sometimes it happens the other way round: I can’t fall asleep until the early hours, so I don’t even try. I read or write until I’m exhausted, then manage maybe three or four hours’ sleep – at a push . . . On the plus side, I’m getting through a lot of books. I managed to read Bleak House in two and a half nights.’

Dr Barbara nodded thoughtfully. ‘The sleeplessness is definitely something we should keep an eye on.’

‘Right. And what about the dream?’

‘The dream tells me there’s nothing wrong with your imagination.’

‘Freud would say it’s a classic anxiety dream.’

Dr Barbara smiled and shook her head in a small but resolute motion. As always, she had no interest in playing the dream interpretation game. She was happy enough to listen – to whatever I wanted to tell her – but she wouldn’t indulge me past a certain point.

‘There aren’t any constraints on what we talk about,’ she once told me, not long after our first session. ‘We’ll talk about anything you deem important – anything at all. But this is a dialogue, not a monologue. Sometimes we’ll talk about what you want to talk about, and sometimes we’ll talk about what I want to talk about. There has to be some give and take, as with any worthwhile conversation.’

Freud was one of the subjects Dr Barbara did not want to talk about. She told me that for most psychologists or psychiatrists, those with an ounce of common sense, he was a historical curiosity but little more. There was no point wasting time (her time) and money (my father’s money) talking about Freud.

But today I was feeling stubborn. ‘You haven’t even read him,’ I pointed out. ‘You can’t dismiss something you’ve never tried.’

‘Of course you can!’ Dr Barbara countered. ‘Astrology, chakras, numerology. I know enough to know these subjects have no basis in reality, just as I know that Freud has no relevance in this room.’

‘I think you’re missing the point,’ I said. ‘I don’t care if Freud is correct. He’s interesting and he writes well. That’s good enough for me. I’d rather read well-written bunkum than poorly written fact. Wouldn’t you?’

Dr Barbara was still wearing the same narrow smile. ‘Okay. Let me ask you a question. What do you think your dream means?’

‘It’s obvious,’ I replied. ‘It’s painfully obvious. I’m worried that sooner or later I’ll have to grow up and get a serious, secure job that I despise – like my sister. I mean things haven’t been so bad recently, but most of the time I’m just treading water. Without Beck’s salary, we’d have no security at all, and I hate feeling . . . dependent. But, then, I think I’d feel like a fraud if I did something I hated, just for the money. I’m not even sure there’s any regular job I’d be competent in. That’s why I don’t have any clothes on beneath my sister’s trouser suit.’

Dr Barbara waited patiently until I’d finished, then nodded again. ‘Okay. And if you know all this anyway, then what’s the point of analyzing the dream?’

‘Yes, fair enough. There is no point. It’s just a more interesting way of looking at the same problems.’

‘It’s a more opaque way of looking at the same problems. If you’re feeling anxious, we should talk about that. But there’s no need to muddy the waters by bringing in dreams and so forth. Why circle the issues when you can confront them head-on?’

I didn’t know if this was an open question or something more pointed, with implications. Probably both. Whatever the case, Dr Barbara was right. There was no reason to complicate matters by introducing Freud into the picture.

My second therapist had been a card-carrying Freudian (literally; his card read: Dr Bryce: Freudian Analyst). I found him advertised at the back of the London Review of Books, and he had been an unmitigated disaster. He was patronizing and arrogant, and far less intelligent than he assumed he was. He reminded me of a medical student I went out with in the first year of university, a pompous idiot who read only the Lancet and genuinely believed that George Eliot was a man. That relationship had lasted three weeks; I walked out on my psychoanalyst after less than an hour.

The therapist before that, my first therapist, had not fared much better. She was an NHS counsellor, a woman in her early forties who worked three days a week in the local surgery. Her office was an awful pastel blue, and littered with the drawings her children had presented to her at the various stages of their artistic incompetence. For five weeks, I found her to be merely ineffectual. Then, on the sixth week, she started expounding with increasing insistence on the value of medication ‘as well’. Not necessarily lithium, given how it had made me feel the first time round – fat, flat and stupid – but perhaps one of the newer line in mood stabilizers, which might present fewer side effects. At this point, I realized that she was in league with my GP and left.

Compared with these earlier experiences, Dr Barbara was a godsend. She was neither patronizing nor wishy-washy, and she had no hidden agendas. She might have agreed with my ineffectual counsellor when it came to medication; a mood stabilizer, she once said, probably would be of some benefit to me in the sense that it would do precisely what it was meant to do: it would stabilize my mood. But that was not the point. If I found the cure worse than the disease, she respected my right to refuse it. One day, the balance might change, but that was something I would have to evaluate.

Dr Barbara was a sharp-eyed, sharp-tongued woman a couple of years younger than my mother. She had steel-grey hair and a tastefully bookish office in South Kensington. There were no children’s pictures papering her wall; Dr Barbara had known from the age of fifteen that she didn’t want to have children, and this, too, was something I respected. Her desk was a rich mahogany, and upon it sat a dragon tree and a Newton’s cradle – its playfulness counterbalanced by the framed Ph.D. certificate affixed to the wall behind it. It was rare, however, to find Dr Barbara sitting at her desk. She preferred to conduct her sessions in the two leather armchairs, which faced each other against the backdrop of one of the several oak bookcases.

All in all, there was a pleasant weightiness to the furnishings in Dr Barbara’s office. I liked being there. There was something comforting about the routine of it all: the armchairs, the unrushed journey through affluent central London, the black coffee from the Caffè Nero across the road. After seven months of fortnightly appointments, even the fact that I had to rely on my father to foot the bill had stopped rankling. Because, really, this was money he owed me. It didn’t feel like the guilt money he had tried to throw at me in the past; this felt more like compensation I’d been awarded by a benign, sagacious judge in a small claims court. I felt I deserved it, and I knew that Freud would have agreed.

‘I read your article,’ Dr Barbara told me. ‘The interview.’ Only the interview had been printed at this point. Simon was due the following Sunday.

‘What did you think?’ I asked.

‘It was very compelling. And well written, of course. But you don’t need me to tell you that.’

‘Thank you.’

‘You found a body?’

‘Yes. My neighbour’s.’

‘Do you want to tell me about it?’

I didn’t take long to think about this. ‘Actually, Barbara, I’d rather not. I’d rather you read about it next Sunday. Is that okay?’

‘Yes. It’s your choice, of course. But . . .’ Dr Barbara laced her fingers and probed the top-left corner of her mouth with her tongue, the way she always did when taking some care over her next sentence. ‘But I’d like you to tell me a couple of things, concerning both articles.’

‘Fire away.’

Dr Barbara sipped her coffee. ‘I’d like to know why you’d rather I read about what happened, instead of just talking. It seems a convoluted way of doing things.’

This first question was easy to answer. ‘It’s not about being convoluted,’ I said. ‘It’s about being clear. What I’ve written expresses exactly what I wanted to say. It’s as perfect as I could get it. Anything I told you now wouldn’t be as accurate. It wouldn’t be as truthful.’

‘Okay. I think I can accept that argument. But it also leads on to my second point. I’m all for honesty – it’s indispensable within these four walls – but you’ve chosen a very public forum to talk about some rather private issues.’

‘My father?’

‘Your father, your thoughts, your feelings. Is this the best outlet?’

‘My father doesn’t read what I write. And as for my thoughts and feelings, well, I didn’t really plan to write about myself. It just turned out that way. With the interview, it was pretty much thrust upon me.’

‘You have a choice about what you put into the public domain.’

‘Yes, granted. But I suppose it felt like quite a liberating thing to do. It felt nice to tell the truth, and not have to dilute it. If I’d tried to write up the interview in any other way, it would have had no basis in reality. I don’t see the point in writing something dishonest.’

‘There’s a difference between being honest and writing without self-censorship. Everyone self-censors, all the time.’

I shrugged. ‘As I said, it felt liberating not to. Besides, I don’t think Miranda Frost self-censors, or not very much. So the format of the interview made a certain amount of sense.’

‘And what about the follow-up? Does it make sense to go on offering up your life for public scrutiny?’

‘You sound like Beck. Except he said that I was dramatizing my life.’

‘How do you feel about that?’

‘I think he’s being a bit unfair. I’m not dramatizing my life. I’m writing about something dramatic that occurred in my life. There’s a difference.’

‘A subtle difference, some would argue.’

‘It’s a big difference! I mean, with the Miranda Frost interview, it’s mostly just transcription. It’s objective journalism in its purest sense.’

‘And the follow-up?’

‘Well, no – that’s a personal account. It has to be subjective; that’s what makes it interesting. But that doesn’t mean I’m dramatizing. I mean, yes, there may be a dramatic element to the language and structure, but that’s because I wanted to capture the feeling of the experience. I wanted to be emotionally truthful.’

Dr Barbara weighed this argument in several seconds of silence.

I obviously hadn’t made myself entirely clear, so I tried again. ‘Put it this way: we all use one or two dramatic tricks when we’re talking about our lives. Say you were late for work – you missed the bus or got stuck in traffic or something. It’s very difficult to tell that story straight, without emphasizing certain details: the frustration, the watch-checking, the idiot in front of you who was on his mobile and didn’t realize that the lights had changed. You want to convey the experience as it felt at the time. It’s normal, and it’s not dramatizing as such. It’s just drawing out what’s inherently dramatic in the situation.’

These were arguments I’d already rehearsed for when Beck read the follow-up; I was making him wait, too. Yet based on this trial run, I thought my explanation could do with some fine-tuning. Dr Barbara still looked sceptical.

‘I’ll reserve judgement until I’ve read the article,’ she said.

Outside, the sky was starting to darken. There had been only a little high cloud when I’d entered Dr Barbara’s office, fifty minutes ago, but now it was dim enough that she had to switch on both of the floor lamps. As she did, I thought idly about how the session had not quite met my expectations. True, I was used to Dr Barbara challenging my thinking, on most topics, but today there was something else. I’d been left feeling defensive and a little misunderstood, as if my words weren’t having the effect I intended for them. It was in this mindset that I decided to mention that my libido seemed to be coming back. I wanted to give her some unequivocal good news, proof that despite everything – despite the arguments with Beck and the anxiety dream and Simon’s corpse – I was feeling generally better. But even here, Dr Barbara’s reaction was guarded.

‘I think that’s something else we need to keep an eye on,’ she told me.

‘It’s a good thing,’ I assured her. ‘I mean, I actually want sex again. I’m enjoying it – really enjoying it – for the first time in months. I’ve had three orgasms in the past fortnight. I think it’s a pretty clear sign that my mood’s improving.’

Dr Barbara frowned a bit as she settled herself back in her chair, but she didn’t blush. It was impossible to make Dr Barbara blush, as I’d discovered months ago. She knew, of course, that my sex drive was the first thing to go when I was getting depressed. I’d told her that before Christmas; it was as predictable as the tides. Her response was that I should focus less on the physical side of things and more on the emotional closeness that making love could bring. This almost made me blush; it certainly made me cringe, which caused Dr Barbara to posit that I might have ‘intimacy issues’. (Paradoxically, she also thought I had an unhealthy dependency on romantic relationships, since I hadn’t been out of one for more than a fortnight since I was about fifteen.) But the only issue for me was Dr Barbara’s choice of vocabulary. I didn’t think a doctor should be using a phrase like making love. In all honesty, I didn’t think it was a phrase that had any place outside pre-1950s literature, where the meaning was different and less cloyingly euphemistic.

Contrarily, I assumed it was my diligent logging of orgasms, this focus on the physical, that was now causing Dr Barbara to frown like that; though, in truth, her frown was difficult to read. It was also possible that she had more general concerns about my sudden uplift in mood. This was understandable, of course, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. It was frustrating to feel reined in like this, to have every emotion – even the positive ones – viewed as a potential symptom.

‘Is there anything else you’d like to talk about before we finish?’ Dr Barbara asked.

I was feeling slightly petulant at this juncture, but at the same time I still wanted to win back Dr Barbara’s approval before we ended the session. This is why I started to tell her about the speed – how there’d been a couple of instances in the past fortnight when I’d wanted to take it, but both times I’d resisted. It was an achievement of sorts, though I realized, halfway through my story, that it was unlikely to be met with any great approbation. Dr Barbara’s frown deepened, losing all traces of its previous ambiguity. In retrospect, it was stupid of me to expect anything else. When it came to drugs, Dr Barbara and I were never going to agree; we couldn’t even agree on terminology. I talked about recreational use and blowing off some steam; she talked about ad hoc self-medication and comorbidity.

When I had finished my exposition, she sat for a moment in stony-faced silence, then said, ‘Okay, that’s something we really need to keep an eye on.’

So that was three eyes now: sex and drugs and insomnia. We were fast running out.

‘I think you’re missing the point,’ I told her, after waiting calmly for a few seconds. ‘I decided not to take it, despite being exhausted and stressed out of my mind. A few months back, I wouldn’t have given it a second thought. But on this occasion, I decided that given the time of day and general circumstances it would be better – in the long run – not to. That’s progress, don’t you think?’

This last was said jokingly, to try to force a wobble in Dr Barbara’s anxious pout. But it wasn’t a joke. I wanted to make her see that things were getting better, for her to give some indication that she agreed with me, even in a very limited sense.

She didn’t.

‘Abby, this is lunacy. As I’ve told you again and again, I’m not going to be happy until you’ve stopped entirely. The amphetamines, the MDMA – all of it. It sets you back a long, long way every time you take it.’

‘Which I didn’t,’ I noted, since this emphasis was getting rather lost.

‘Wonderful. So why not go one step further and just get rid of it? Take away the temptation.’

‘I’ve told you. It keeps me on an even keel. Sometimes it’s the only thing that does. Besides, it’s much better for me than too much drink. I know that from experience.’ I pointed to the scar in the centre of my right palm, a perfectly circular white disc, about the size of an ibuprofen. ‘I’ve never wanted to do anything like that on speed, and certainly not on ecstasy.’

Dr Barbara acknowledged this fact with a curt nod. But I don’t think she was any closer to accepting the broader picture I was trying to paint.

I left feeling vaguely dissatisfied.