Kind of Cruel (3 page)

‘Anyone who never slept would die,’ says Ginny. This throws me, until I realise she must be talking about the insomniacs I mentioned in passing, those less fortunate than me.

‘People do die,’ I tell her. ‘People with FFI.’

I sense she’s waiting for me to continue.

‘Fatal Familial Insomnia. It’s a hereditary condition. As diseases go, it’s not much fun. Total sleeplessness, panic attacks, phobias, hallucinations, dementia, death.’

‘Go on.’

Is this woman a moron? ‘That’s it,’ I say. ‘Death’s the last item on the agenda. Not much tends to happen to them after that. Which would be a relief, if only they weren’t too dead to appreciate it.’ When she doesn’t laugh, I decide to take it darker. ‘Course, for some people, FFI would have the added bonus that all their family die too.’ I listen for her reaction. One small chuckle would make me feel so much more confident about her. Is she secure enough in herself and her abilities to let that one pass, to let my joke be a joke? Only a desperate therapist would pounce on such an obviously frivolous comment at this early stage.

‘Do you want your family to die?’

Predictably disappointing. Disappointingly predictable.

‘No. That’s not what I said.’

‘Have you always had trouble sleeping?’

I’m not comfortable with how quickly and smoothly she’s changed the subject. ‘No.’

‘When did it start?’

‘A year and a half ago.’ I could give her an exact date.

‘Do you know
why
it started? Why you can’t sleep?’

‘Stress. At work and at home.’ I put it in the broadest possible terms, hoping she won’t ask for more detail.

‘And if a fairy godmother were to wave her wand and remove the sources of that stress – what do you think would happen then, sleep-wise?’

Is it a trick question? ‘I’d sleep fine,’ I say. ‘I always used to sleep well.’

‘That’s good. The causes of your insomnia are external rather than internal. It isn’t that
you
, Amber Hewerdine, can’t sleep because of something
in you
. You can’t sleep because your current life situation is putting you under unbearable pressure. Anyone in your predicament would be finding it difficult, right?’

‘I think so.’

‘That’s better. That’s the kind of insomnia you want.’ I can hear her beaming at me. How is that possible? ‘There’s nothing wrong with
you
. Your responses are absolutely normal and understandable. Can you change your life situation to eliminate the sources of stress?’

‘No. Look, I’m not being funny but . . . don’t you think that might have occurred to me? All those nights I’ve lain awake, dwelling on everything that’s wrong . . .’
Don’t get emotional. Think of this as a business meeting – you’re a dissatisfied customer
. ‘I can’t eliminate the causes of stress from my life. They
are
my life. I was hoping that hypnotherapy might be able to . . .’ I can’t say what I was going to say. It would sound too ridiculous if I put it into words.

‘You’re hoping I can deceive your brain,’ Ginny summarises. ‘You know, and it knows, that it has reason to be anxious, but you’re hoping hypnosis might hoodwink it into believing everything’s fine.’ Now she’s mocking me for sure.

‘If you think that’s such a ridiculous proposition, why did you choose this line of work?’ I say curtly.

She says something that sounds like, ‘Let’s try the Tree Shaker.’

‘What?’

I must have sounded alarmed. ‘Trust me,’ Ginny says. ‘It’s just an exercise.’

She’ll have to settle for my acquiescing without further argument. Trust is too precious a commodity to demand from a stranger.

‘You’ll probably want to close your eyes – it might make it easier.’

I wouldn’t bet on it.

‘You might be relieved to hear that you won’t have to speak hardly at all. For most of the time, you’ll just be listening and letting memories come to mind.’

That sounds easy enough. Though ‘hardly at all’ suggests that I’m going to have to say something at some point. What? I’d like to be able to prepare for it.

When Ginny next speaks, I nearly burst out laughing. Her voice is slower, deeper, more trance-like, similar to the joke-hypnotist voice I had in my head:
You are falling into a deep, deep sleep
. That’s not quite what Ginny’s saying but it’s not too far off. ‘And so I’d like you to focus on your breathing,’ she intones, ‘and the very top of your head. And just . . . let it . . . relax.’

Why is she doing this? She must know that she sounds like a cliché. Wouldn’t she be better off talking normally?

‘And then your forehead . . . let it relax. And moving down to your nose . . . breathing slowly and deeply, calmly and quietly, just let your nose relax. And then your mouth, your lips . . . let them relax.’

What about the bit between my nose and my lips, whatever its name is? What if that part’s rigid with tension? She missed it out.

This is hopeless. I’m rubbish at being hypnotised. I knew I would be.

Ginny has reached my shoulders. ‘Feel them drop and relax, all the pressure melting away. Breathing slowly and deeply, calmly and quietly, letting go of all stress and tension. And then moving down to your chest, your lungs – let
them
relax. There’s no such thing as a hypnotised feeling, only a feeling of total calm and total relaxation.’

Really? Then why am I paying seventy quid? If all I have to do is relax, I could do that at home on my own.

No, I correct myself. I couldn’t. Can’t.

‘Total calm . . . and total relaxation. And moving down to your stomach . . . let it relax.’

Septum. No, that’s the bit between your nostrils. I used to know the name of that indentation between the nose and top lip. What do people mean when they talk about someone’s elevens being up? No, that’s the groove at the back of the neck. It looks more like the number 11 the closer a person is to death. I’m almost certain the same isn’t true of the . . . philtrum, that’s what it’s called. Now that the name’s come back to me, I have a clear picture of Luke announcing it triumphantly.
A pub quiz. The kind of question he always gets right, the kind I’m useless at
.

I force myself to pay attention to Ginny’s droning voice. Has she got to my toes yet? I haven’t been listening. She could save time by grouping all the parts together and instructing the whole body to relax. I try to breathe evenly and keep my impatience at bay.

‘Some people feel incredibly light, as if they might float away,’ she’s saying. ‘And some people feel a heaviness in their limbs, like they couldn’t move even if they wanted to.’

She sounds like a children’s TV presenter, doing ‘light’ and ‘heavy’ voices to match her words. Has she ever experimented with a more deadpan delivery? It’s something I’ve often wondered about actors on Radio 4: why doesn’t anyone tell them the phony voices really don’t help?

‘And some people feel a tingling in their fingers. But everybody feels lovely and calm, nice and relaxed.’

My fingers are tingling quite a lot. They were even before she said it. Does that mean I’m hypnotised? I don’t feel relaxed, though I suppose I’m more aware of the buzzing neuroses in my mind than I was before, more intently focused on them. It’s as if they and I are trapped together in a dark box, one that’s drifted away from the rest of the world. Is that a good thing? Hard to see how it can be.

‘And now, breathing slowly and deeply, calmly and quietly, I’d like you to imagine the most beautiful staircase in the world.’

What?
She’s springing this on me with no warning? A dozen desirable staircase images crowd into my mind and start scrapping with each other. Spiral, with wrought-iron fretwork? Or those open, slatty steps that look as if they’re floating on air, with a glass or stainless steel balustrade – nice and modern, clean lines. On the other hand, a bit soulless, too much like an office building.

‘Your perfect staircase has ten steps,’ Ginny goes on. ‘I’m now going to take you down those steps, one by one . . .’

Hang on a second. I’m not ready to move anywhere yet. I still haven’t got my staircase sorted out. Traditional’s the safest bet: dark wood, with a runner. I’m seeing something stripy . . .

‘As you descend, I want you to see yourself drifting down into calm, and into relaxation. So, moving down one step – calm and relaxed. And moving down another step, taking another step towards peace and towards relaxation . . .’

How can she be going too fast while speaking soporifically slowly?

What about stone? That’s also traditional, and grander than wood, but possibly a bit cold. Though with a runner . . .

Ginny’s ahead of me but I don’t care. My plan is to take all the time I need to get my staircase designed – if I cut corners at this crucial stage, I’m bound to regret it later – and then leap down to the bottom all in one go. As long as I get there when she does, what difference does it make?

‘And now you’re taking the last step, and you’ve arrived at a place of total calm, total peace. You are completely relaxed. And so I’d like you to think back to when you were a very small child, and the world was new. I’d like you to remember a moment when you felt joy, such intense joy that you thought you might explode.’

This throws me. What’s happened to the staircase? Was it just a device, to get me to the calm, relaxed place? I have already missed my chance to produce a joyful memory; Ginny has moved on, and is now ordering me – if a demand made so drowsily can be considered an order – to remember feeling desperately sad, as if my heart was breaking. Sad, sad, I think, worried about having dropped behind. She moves on again, to angry – incandescent, burning with rage – and I can’t think of a single thing. I’m about to miss my third deadline.
Might as well give up
.

As she progresses from fear (‘your heart pounding as the ground seems to fall away beneath your feet’) to loneliness (‘like a cold vacuum all around you and inside you, separating you from every single other human being’), I wonder how many times Ginny has recited this spiel. Her descriptions are pretty powerful – perhaps a little too powerful. My childhood wasn’t especially dramatic; there’s nothing in it, or in my memory of it, to match the kind of extreme states she’s describing. I was a happy child: loved, secure. I was heartbroken when my parents died within two years of one another, but I was in my early twenties by then. Should I ask Ginny if a memory from adulthood will do as a substitute? She specified early childhood, but surely a more recent memory would be better than nothing.

‘And now I’d like you to imagine that you’re drowning. Everywhere you turn, there’s water, touching every part of you, flooding into your nose and mouth. You can’t breathe. What memory springs to mind in connection with that? Anything?’

My philtrum would be getting soaked. Sorry, that’s all I’ve got
. What’s Ginny aiming to uncover here? I’m not thinking about feelings any more, I’m thinking about submarine disaster movies.

When she tells me to imagine myself in a burning house, trapped by flames, I feel sick in the pit of my stomach. This is so seriously lacking in feelgood factor that I’m praying I’ll be handed an evaluation form at the end of all this so that I can make my objection official.

I don’t want to do this any more.

‘Okay, that’s great,’ Ginny says. ‘You’re doing great.’ I hear a slight sharpening in her tone, and I know the moment has come: audience participation time. ‘Now I’d like you to let a memory come into your mind, and tell me about it. Any memory, from any time in your life. Don’t analyse it. It doesn’t have to be significant. What are you remembering, right now?’

Sharon
. I can’t say that. Unless I’ve misunderstood, Ginny wants something new from me now, not leftovers from the last exercise.

‘Don’t try to select something good,’ she says in her regular voice. ‘Anything will do.’

Right. Nice to know how little all this matters.

Not Sharon and her burning house. Not unless you want to leave here in pieces
.

Little Orchard, then. The story of my disappearing relatives. No death, no tragedy, only a never-to-be-solved mystery. I open my mouth, then remember that Ginny told me not to pick something good. Little Orchard is too showy and attention-seeking. She won’t believe it genuinely ‘came up’, and she’ll be right. It’s permanently ‘up’ in my mind; I wonder about it constantly, even now, after so many years. It gives me something to do, when I’m lying awake at night and I’ve already worried about every aspect of my life that can be worried about.

‘What are you remembering?’ Ginny asks. ‘Right now.’

Oh, God, this is a nightmare. What should I say? Anything, anything.

‘Kind. Cruel. Kind of Cruel.’

What does that mean?

‘Can you repeat that?’ says Ginny.

This is really strange. What just happened? Ginny said something odd, but why would she ask me to repeat it? I wasn’t paying attention; my mind must have drifted off for a second, back to Little Orchard, or to Sharon . . .

‘Can you repeat those words?’