All in the Mind (15 page)

There was no doubt Ralph’s drink problem was worsening, but Sturrock felt completely unable to see a way forward. Another patient consultation, another sensation of being blocked. He was surprised Ralph’s colleagues had not noticed the beginnings of physical change. There were some unpleasant-looking red lines on his nose. His face was puffier, yet his body weight was, if anything, down. His trousers looked a little too big for him. Perhaps Ralph’s fellow MPs
had
noticed, and Ralph didn’t realise.

Had this been a standard patient, one without a public profile and position, Sturrock would have gone for shock tactics, confronted patient and family with the reality, got him into a drying-out clinic, and then monitored him through the standard Alcoholics Anonymous
twelve-step
programme. But that wasn’t possible with Ralph. Instead, he’d have to try to manage the situation, stay vaguely on top of this until the summer recess, and hope that somehow the circumstances would emerge that allowed him to get Ralph onto a proper addiction programme, starting with total abstinence and withdrawal. Perhaps he could stretch out the treatment a bit by going into the marriage and career issues more deeply, to establish whether they were the problems Hall was trying to block out. He also intended to do the full emotional background, from childhood on, to see whether the reasons for his drinking stretched further back. But it was really a patch-and-mend situation. He felt a little weighed down by the enormity of the secret. A newspaper billboard across from the cafe advertised the news that a junior defence minister had once owned shares in an arms company. A nothing story compared with the Health Secretary being secretly treated for alcoholism, he thought.

He decided that, the next time they met, he would urge Ralph to confide fully in his wife. The way Ralph talked about her, Sandie came over as a pretty solid citizen, a woman who would stand by her husband. It made him think of Stella, the conversation they had just had, the life they lived together, and it made him sink even deeper into the tiredness he was feeling. He felt a little guilty too, for even as he’d told Stella about the budget meetings, he’d known he was lying. He had no intention of going back to the hospital.

The staff inside the cafe appeared to have realised he was simply resting for a few moments, for nobody came to serve him as they prepared to close up. He called Phyllis.

‘I’m not going to make it back in time for the budget meetings,’ he said. ‘Could you go, give my apologies, and just take a note for me?’

‘OK,’ she said. ‘What reason shall I give?’

‘I got held up on a very tricky OTO.’

The rain was getting a little heavier as he stood up and began to walk towards Soho. He stopped at a cashpoint just beyond the National Portrait Gallery, and took out £140, his body as close as he could get it to the keypad, so he could shield his transaction from the Italian couple in the queue behind him. He was very rarely in this part of town at this time of day, and he could scarcely believe how busy it was. There
was
a steady flow of people pouring in and out of Leicester Square tube station, locals, tourists, people clearly rushing to work, meeting friends, going to the cinema, going to get something to eat before the theatre, whatever, but what he knew was that every single one of them was going somewhere to do something or see somebody, and all of them had a story behind them that stretched way back to the day they were born, then back again to those who went before them, and the bustle they created was making him feel a little queasy. He stopped to catch his breath, resting his hand against a bollard.

A young woman was emerging from the Underground now, and he watched her for a while, putting up a tiny pink umbrella, crossing the road, clutching her handbag tight against her waist, her ponytail swinging from side to side as she ran the last steps to avoid a black cab coming towards her, then skipped up onto the pavement. She must have been twenty-five, maybe twenty-eight. He would probably never see her again. Yet her life was just as important as his, he told himself. Her family history was every bit as rich. Like everyone, she would have issues to deal with, problems that kept her awake at night. He would never know what they were. Perhaps ‘never’ overstated it, but the odds on him ever knowing must be in the billions-to-one area. She looked grounded. She had a thin smile on her face that said to him she was fairly comfortable in her own skin. But he couldn’t be sure of that. She could have just been released from prison and be on her way to meet her old mates for a night on the town. She could be a schizophrenic dependent on regular medication. She could be a teacher, doctor, student, painter, actress, call girl, anything at all. She stopped by a newspaper kiosk outside a packed coffee house, and was greeted by a young man who kissed her, twice on the lips, once on the forehead, then took her hand and they headed towards the Square. Sturrock smiled, pleased that she appeared to be loved. Though what did he know?

He felt a little re-energised at having been able to focus on one individual amid this mass of humanity that appeared to grow and grow, becoming noisier and more boisterous as he continued up towards Soho, hoping that he would be able to have the same woman as last time.

Sturrock had first paid for sex forty-two years ago, aged nineteen, when he was in his first year studying medicine at university. It was a fellow medic who told him that the anonymous-looking grey building at the end of Hopton Street was a place where sex could be bought, with a discount for students. And so, one Tuesday afternoon, he went in, paid up front, told the prostitute he had never had sex before and could she show him what to do. It was a lie that he’d never had sex before. In fact, he had lost his virginity two years earlier with Rosalie Curtis, and his visit to Hopton Street was probably an attempt to put behind him the awful memory of that first sexual experience.

Rosalie was the daughter of a family friend and near neighbour. He had known her since primary school and had always thought her a little stuck-up. Yet one autumn evening they met, as she was walking home from a choir rehearsal, and he was walking home from a school trip to a local museum. The clocks had just gone back, and as they walked together, kicking leaves and laughing, talking about mutual friends and acquaintances, and sharing thoughts about what hopes they had for the future, something clicked in a way that neither had expected. When they reached Rosalie’s house, they paused for a moment, then carried on walking. They must have walked for more than an hour. As darkness fell, they reached a little park where, side by side on a bench, they kissed and tore at each other’s clothes until, at the time he was normally sitting down for his dinner, he had her knickers in his right hand, while she had his penis in hers.

His knowledge of sex was at that time limited to what he had learned in biology lessons, what he had seen in films, what he had read in magazines, and what he had picked up listening to his more streetwise friends. He had hoped his father might explain a thing or two to him, and when he was fourteen had asked him straight out, his stomach churning as he did so, whether he would tell him about sex.

‘Don’t trouble your mind with all that, son,’ his father had said. George Sturrock must have mentioned something to his wife, because a few days later, his mother gave him a booklet to read which had pictures of organs, and explained where body hair came from, and what a condom was. It was all very interesting, but didn’t
exactly
answer all the questions his body and mind had been asking of him.

So now here he was, in the cold autumn air, and stuck-up Rosalie from Lavender Park Avenue was yanking her hand up and down his penis, he was clutching her knickers, and all he really knew was that he had to get his penis to where the knickers had been and hope for the best. It was too cold, and possibly even a bit damp, to get down on the ground, but he had never seen a film in which the love scene took place on an oddly shaped park bench with intricate metalwork at either end. He stuffed Rosalie’s knickers into his pocket, and while her right hand continued to play with his penis, his moved down to pubic hair which felt very different to his, crinkly rather than soft. He worried she might resist as he started to push his hand hard between her legs, but she was making little purring noises that made him think he was doing fine. He levered himself up, pushed her skirt up and tried to roll his chest onto hers, trailing his legs behind him.

‘Ow,’ she said, as her back dug into the bench, and her arm brushed the metalwork.

‘Oh, sorry. Are you OK?’

She wriggled her back into a more comfortable position, pulled his head towards her and as they kissed, he manoeuvred his body into what he assumed to be the right place. He wasn’t sure where his penis was in relation to where he wanted it to be, but when her hand curled round it once more, and she pulled him towards her, it felt right. Then as her hand joined the other on his neck and she started making more purring noises, now with little squeals punctuating them, he was pretty sure that he was losing his virginity. He didn’t know, technically, whether loss of virginity related to penetration only, or whether it required a climax. Either way, one appeared to be completed and the other was not far away. It was then that his problems started. He climaxed, trying not to make too much noise for fear of passers-by seeing them, and as he finished, Rosalie began to punch his back, then his chest, shouting ‘off, off, off’, and he was deeply confused. He had had his first orgasm inside a woman, who until a moment ago appeared to be a consenting partner in this but
now
, immediately post-orgasm, was trying to banish him. He felt this would be one of those moments that would stay with him for some time, even qualify as one of the final thoughts flashing through his mind on his deathbed. He pulled away from her, at which point she stood up, brushed herself down and ran away, leaving him alone with his rapidly softening penis, her knickers in his pocket, and a worry about what he had done wrong, and how he was going to explain being late home for dinner. He dumped the knickers in a builders’ skip two streets from home.

One evening, as his father was gardening, he decided to tell him about what had happened – not in full detail, but sufficient to explain that he didn’t really know what he should have done differently. But as he walked towards him, his father looked up, and though he smiled, it was not a smile that welcomed him in. He stood for a while, looking for a more positive signal.

‘What is it?’

‘Oh, nothing, just wondered what you were doing.’

‘Spot of gardening. Tell your mother I’ll be in in a minute.’

And he wondered whether ‘in in a minute’ was some sexual code known only to people who have graduated in the basics of sex. Perhaps he should have told Rosalie that he was going to be ‘in in a minute’. He didn’t like the thought that he would have no further relationship with the girl who took his virginity. He wondered how many women his father slept with before he met his mother, and indeed how many since. It was a question he never asked, not even when he was trying to make up for lost time, talking to his father on his deathbed many years later.

He was confident that when he got to university, he would not want for sexual partners. But it didn’t really happen. And that was what had led him to Hopton Street, which became a regular haunt until, in his third year, he met Stella, fell in love and, for the first time in his life, learned what it was to enjoy sex. For years, it never crossed his mind to visit a prostitute. But recently he’d become an increasingly frequent customer.

The worst thing about going to a whorehouse was the moment
of
entry. Once he was in a private room, with the girl who had been allocated to him, he felt safe. But walking through the main door off the street was a moment of high risk, and high pressure. It was usually pretty obvious what kind of establishment he was entering. And who knows how many of the people walking past might have met him – as colleagues, students, patients or friends? The anxiety would linger, even once he had crossed the threshold, for though he could no longer be seen, how was he to know he hadn’t been seen already? Then there was always a bit of hanging around in an inevitably decrepit reception area, where he felt the soles of his shoes sticking to the carpet, as he waited to be told where to go.

He had only been once before to this particular place, with its ‘Girls, Girls, Girls’ red lights flashing above the doorway, and though it was pricey, they were quick and efficient. He saw one other customer, who looked and sounded like a tourist.

He wondered whether, if he was seen by someone he knew, he could say he was seeing a prostitute as a patient. On the surface, it was implausible that he would do OTOs at a brothel, but perhaps their customers more than anyone would understand why prostitutes had serious psychological issues. Like Hafsatu. Of all his patients, she was the one who most challenged his own self-worth and sense of his personal morality. But it didn’t stop these visits, nor his fantasies about arriving in a brothel and finding Hafsatu was there waiting for him. How could he listen to Arta talk about being raped, and Hafsatu describe her experience as a prostitute as ‘being raped for a living’, and then come to a place like this and do what he did? But he could, and he did.

He asked if the same girl he saw the last time was available, but the woman at the desk couldn’t remember him, so obviously couldn’t remember the girl. He tried to describe her, but after a while gave up. ‘It sounds like Carina,’ she said. ‘She’s not on till later. You can have Angharad. Room 4. Go in and get undressed and she’ll give you a nice rub-down. She won’t be long.’

It was less a room than a booth, with a large massage table in the centre. There was a TV screen on each wall, playing a fast-moving compilation of pornographic images. He undressed, hanging his coat
and
jacket on the two hangers behind the door, then the rest of his clothes over a small red chair in the corner, next to a sink. He kept on his underpants and slowly climbed onto the table.