Kind of Cruel (2 page)

Still, maybe I should be more trusting. Plenty of people have money and choose not to use it to improve their situations. Some fools I know hand over their hard-earned cash to quacks and ask to be mesmerised, hoping they’ll come round to find that all their problems have disappeared.

Ginny Saxon’s address, like her brand of therapy, is a con. She doesn’t live in Great Holling. I have driven all the way out here on false pretences – even more false pretences than a silly placebo treatment, I mean. I should have looked more carefully at the address and realised that the double helping of the village’s name within it – 77 Great Holling Road, Great Holling, Silsford – was protesting too much. I am not in Great Holling, but on an A-road on the way to it. There are houses on one side, including Ginny Saxon’s, and brown and grey sludgy-looking fields on the other. This is agricultural land masquerading as countryside. In one of the fields there’s a building with a corrugated metal roof. It’s the sort of landscape that makes me think of sewage, even if I’m being unfair and can’t actually smell any.

You are being unfair. What’s the harm in having an open mind? It might work.

Inwardly, I groan. The disappointment, when this charade I’m about to participate in leaves me exactly as it found me, is going to hurt – probably worse than after all the other stuff I’ve tried that hasn’t worked. Hypnotherapy is the thing everybody does as a last resort. After it, there’s nothing left to try.

I look at the time on my car clock. 3 p.m. on the dot; I am supposed to be arriving now. But it’s warm in my Renault Clio, with the heater on, and freezing outside. No snow here, not even the kind that doesn’t settle, but every night snow is forecast with a little more glee on the part of the local news weather lady. The whole of the Culver Valley is in the grip of that peculiarly English weather condition – inspired as much by schadenfreude as by sub-zero temperatures – known as ‘Don’t think the snow won’t come just because it hasn’t yet’.

‘On the count of three,’ I imagine saying to myself in my best deep hypnotic voice, ‘you will get out of your car, go into that house across the road and pretend to be in a trance for an hour. You will then write a cheque for seventy quid to a charlatan. It’ll be ace.’ I pull my written instructions out of my coat pocket: Ginny’s address. I check it, put it back – a delaying tactic that establishes nothing I didn’t already know. I’m in the right place.

Or the wrong one.

Here goes.

As I walk towards the house, I see that the car parked in the driveway is not empty. There’s a woman in it, wearing a black coat with a furry collar, a red scarf and bright red lipstick. There’s a notebook open on her lap and a pen in her hand. She’s smoking a cigarette and has opened her window, despite the temperature. Her ungloved hands are mottled from the cold. Smoking and writing are obviously more important to her than comfort, I think, seeing a pair of woolly gloves lying next to the Marlboro Lights packet on the passenger seat. She looks up and smiles at me, says hi.

I decide she can’t be Ginny Saxon, whose website lists giving up smoking as one of the things she can help with. Sitting in her car outside her house with a fag in her gob would be an odd form for that help to take, unless it’s a carefully thought-out double bluff. Then I notice something I couldn’t see from the road: a small free-standing wooden building in the back garden with a sign on it saying ‘Great Holling Hypnotherapy Clinic – Ginny Saxon MA PGCE Dip Couns Adv Dip Hyp’.

‘That’s where it all happens,’ says the smoker, with more than a trace of bitterness in her voice. ‘In her garden shed. Inspires confidence, doesn’t it?’

‘It’s more attractive than the house,’ I say, slipping easily into nasty-girl-at-the-back-of-the-school-bus mode, praying that Ginny Saxon won’t pop up behind me and catch me slagging off her home. Why do I care about ingratiating myself with this chippy stranger? ‘At least it hasn’t got UPVC windows,’ I add, aware of the absurdity of my behaviour but powerless to do anything about it.

The woman grins, then turns away as if she’s had second thoughts about talking to me. She looks down at her notebook. I know how she feels; it would have been better if we’d pretended not to notice one another. We can be as sarcastic as we like, but we’re both here because we’ve got problems we can’t sort out on our own, and we know it – about ourselves and about each other.

‘She’s running an hour late. My appointment was for two o’clock.’

I try to look as if this doesn’t bother me; I’m not sure I succeed. That’ll mean . . . Ginny Saxon won’t be able to see me until four, and at ten past I’ll have to leave if I’m going to be home in time to meet Dinah and Nonie off the school bus.

‘Don’t worry, you can have my slot,’ says my new friend, tossing her cigarette end out of the window. If Dinah were here, she would say, ‘Go and pick up your litter, right now, and put it in a bin.’ It wouldn’t occur to her that she’s only eight, and not in a position to give orders to a stranger more than five times her age. I make a mental note to retrieve the cigarette stub and put it in the nearest wheelie bin if I get the chance, if I can do it without the woman seeing me and taking it as a criticism.

‘Don’t you mind?’ I ask.

‘I wouldn’t have offered if I minded,’ she says, sounding noticeably jollier. Because she’s off the hook? ‘Either I’ll come back at four, or . . .’ – she shrugs – ‘. . . or I won’t.’

She closes her car window and starts to reverse out of the driveway, waving at me in a way that makes me feel I’ve been conned – a mixture of flippant and superior, a wave that seems to say, ‘You’re on your own, sucker’.

‘Do come in out of the cold,’ says a voice behind me. I turn and see a plump woman with a round pretty face and blonde hair in a ponytail so limp and casual that most of the hair has fallen out of it. She’s wearing an olive green corduroy skirt, black ankle boots with black tights and a cream polo-neck top that clings around her waist, drawing attention to the extra weight she’s carrying. I guess that she’s between forty and fifty, closer to forty.

I follow her into the wooden building, which is not and has clearly never been a shed. The wood, both inside and out, looks too new – there are no marks to suggest that a muddy trowel or an oily lawnmower has ever lived here. One wall is covered from top to bottom with framed botanical prints, and there are curvaceous sky-blue vases filled with flowers in three of the room’s four corners. A white rug with a thick blue border takes up most of the wooden floor. On one side of it, there’s a maroon leather swivel recliner chair and matching footstool, and on the other, a brown distressed leather sofa next to a small table piled high with books and magazines about hypnotherapy.

This last detail irks me, just as it annoys me when I go to the hairdresser and find piles of magazines about hair and nothing else. The symbolism is too crass; it smacks of a desperation to ram home one’s professional message, and always makes me think, ‘Yes, I know what you do for a living. That’s why I’m here.’ Do I really need to immerse myself in exclusively hairy thoughts while I wait for a suet-faced teenager to ram my head into a basin and pour boiling water over it? What if I’d like to read about the stock market, or modern ballet? I wouldn’t, as it happens, but the point is still valid.

Hypnotherapy is, admittedly, marginally more interesting than split ends (though, in fairness, at least my quarterly visits to Salon 32 leave me in no doubt that an actual service has been performed).

‘You’re welcome to have a look at the books and magazines,’ Ginny Saxon says, more enthusiastically than is warranted. Her accent is what I think of as ‘media’ – it doesn’t belong to anywhere, and tells me nothing about where she’s from. Not the Culver Valley would be my guess. ‘Borrow as many as you like, as long as you bring them back.’ Either she’s putting a lot of effort into her act or she’s a nice person. I hope she’s nice – nice enough that she’ll still want to help me even when she realises I’m not.

Pretending to be a better person than I am is exhausting; having to make a constant effort to produce behaviour that doesn’t match my mental state.

Ginny holds out a magazine called
Hypnotherapy Monthly
. I can’t not take it. It falls open at the centrefold, home to an article called ‘Hypnotherapeutic Olfactory Conditioning Examined’. What was I expecting: a full frontal shot of a swinging stopwatch?

‘Have a seat,’ says Ginny, indicating the swivel recliner and footstool. ‘Sorry to keep you waiting an hour.’

‘You haven’t,’ I tell her. ‘I’m Amber Hewerdine. My appointment’s for now. The other woman said I could have her slot, and she’ll come back later.’

Ginny smiles. ‘And then she said?’

Oh, God, please don’t let her have heard our entire conversation. How thick are these wooden walls? How loud were we?

‘I didn’t hear anything, don’t worry. But from what little I know of her, I’m guessing she said more than what you’ve told me.’

Don’t worry?
What the hell is that supposed to mean? Last night I asked Luke if he thought a person would only train to be a hypnotherapist if they enjoyed messing with people’s minds, and he laughed at me. ‘God help anyone who tries to tangle with yours,’ he said. He didn’t know how right he was.

‘She said, “Either I’ll come back at four, or I won’t”,’ I tell Ginny.

‘Made you feel like an idiot for sticking around, did she? Relax. She’s the idiot. I don’t think she’ll come back. She chickened out last week as well – booked an initial consultation, didn’t turn up for it. She hadn’t given me any notice of cancellation, so I billed her for the full amount.’

Should she be saying these things to me? Isn’t it unprofessional? Will she bitch about me to her next client?

‘Why don’t you tell me why you’re here?’ Ginny unzips her ankle boots, kicks them off, curls herself into a ball on the leather sofa. Is that supposed to make me feel less inhibited? It doesn’t; it irritates me. I’ve only just met her. She’s supposed to be a professional. How does she dress for a second appointment – camisole and knickers?

It doesn’t matter; there isn’t going to be a second appointment.

‘I’m an insomniac,’ I tell her. ‘A proper one.’

‘Which forces me to ask: what’s an improper insomniac?’

‘Someone who has difficulty falling asleep, but when they do, they sleep for eight hours solid. Or someone who falls asleep straight away, but wakes up too early – four a.m. instead of seven. All the people who say, “Oh, I never sleep properly” and it turns out they mean they wake up twice or three times a night to go to the loo – that’s not a sleep problem, that’s a bladder problem.’

‘People who use “insomniac” to mean “light sleeper”?’ Ginny suggests. ‘Any little noise wakes them? Or who can only fall asleep if they’ve got earphones piping music into their ears, or with the radio on?’

I nod, trying not to be impressed that she appears to know all the people I hate. ‘They’re the most infuriating of pretend insomniacs. Anyone who says, “I can only get to sleep
if
” and then names a requirement – that’s not insomnia. They satisfy the “if” and they get to sleep.’

‘Do you resent people who sleep well?’ Ginny asks.

‘Not if they admit it.’ I might be too exhausted to be nice, but I like to think I’m still reasonable. ‘What I object to is people who don’t have a problem pretending that they do.’

‘So people who say, “I sleep like a log, me – nothing wakes me” – they’re okay?’

Is she trying to catch me out? I’m tempted to lie, but what would be the point of that? This woman doesn’t have to like me. She’s obliged to try to help me whether she likes me or not. That’s what I’m paying for. ‘No, they’re smug beyond belief,’ I say.

‘And yet if it’s true – if they
do
sleep like logs – what should they say?’

If she mentions logs again, I’m leaving. ‘There are ways and ways of telling people you’re a good sleeper,’ I say, perilously close to tears. ‘They could say, “No, I don’t have a problem sleeping”, and then quickly point out that they have plenty of other problems. Everyone has problems, right?’

‘Absolutely,’ says Ginny, looking as if she has never worried about a single thing in her entire life. I stare past her, out of the two large windows behind the leather sofa. Her back garden is a long, skinny strip of green. At the far end, I can see a small brown patch of wooden fence, and fields beyond it that look greener and more promising than the ones I saw on the other side of the road. If I lived here, I would worry about a developer buying up the land and cramming it full of as many houses as he could squash in.

‘Tell me about your sleeping problem,’ Ginny says. ‘After that build-up, I’m expecting a horror story. There’s a wooden lever under the arm of your chair, if you want to lie back.’

I don’t want to, but I do it anyway, putting my feet up on the footstool so that I’m almost horizontal. It’s easier if I can’t see her face; I can pretend I’m talking to a recorded voice.

‘So. Are you the world’s worst-afflicted insomniac?’

Is she mocking me? I can’t help noticing I’m not in any kind of trance yet. When’s she going to get started? We’ve got less than an hour.

‘No,’ I say stiffly. ‘I’m better off than people who never sleep. I sleep for stretches of fifteen, twenty minutes at a time, on and off throughout the night. And always in front of the TV in the evening. That’s the best chunk of sleep I get, usually, between eight thirty and nine thirty – a whole hour, if I’m lucky.’