Leith, William (30 page)

I'd had trouble with hypochondria, on and off, for years. The next time I saw Naomi, I brought the subject up.

`I think I'm better now, though. It still flares up. But it's more or less totally under control, I'd say. Just occasionally, I have to, you know, keep it in check.'

`Does it happen at any particular time?'

`Well, yes. That's interesting. Uh, I'd say it happens in two quite different situations. One is when I'm anxious about

something.'

`What sort of thing?'

`When I'm under pressure. You know. Deadlines. Work. But it's not as bad now. I mean, it's just little things, and I get them under control pretty quickly.'

`How do you mean?'

`Well, it's nothing like it was. These days, it's just, say, if I switch on the radio, like I did the other day, and the first thing I heard, the first word, was "cancer". And then the word just keeps jumping out at me. I'll see it everywhere. In stations. On

posters. Sometimes you open a magazine, and there's a picture of someone, and lust a simple caption, "I have cancer". You just see the stark words. And that begins to haunt me.'

`I see.'

`But I must be getting better. Because there was a time when

I wouldn't have been able to say the words, "I have cancer".' `Uh-huh.'

`Which I don't.'

`Right.'

`I mean, I don't have cancer.'

`You said there were two different situations when you felt your hypochondria coming on.'

`Right, yes.'

`One is when you're anxious. And the other one?'

`Oddly, when I'm not anxious.'

I went on in this vein for a while. I told Naomi about my hypochondria its details, its quirks. I told her about how, usually, I focused my anxiety on one disease, and how, when my hypochondria was at its worst, I had hung around the medical sections of bookshops, reading about diseases I was not frightened of.

`Why?'

if I could displace the main disease with

`It's interesting that you keep talking about

keep telling me how you impose these traps

Little Pieces

Over the next few weeks, a pattern began to emerge. I would arrive, late, take my coat off, sit on the not-quite comfortable chair, and proclaim myself to be 'fine, absolutely fine'. Then I would tell Naomi something trivial something I had noticed about the weather, or the traffic. Naomi would smile politely. Mostly, therapists don't comment on anything at all. For months, the only solitary fact I gleaned from Naomi was that she preferred to travel to hot places in the off-season, when

the weather was not too hot she liked Greece in September, for instance.

I kept talking about the same few things my tendency to binge, my fears, my lateness, the fact that I tended to hold on to clutter, rather than throwing it away. For a while, it seemed that I knew exactly what my problem was, and yet, simultaneously, that I knew nothing. I'd thought about it a million times, and made sense of it, and later, when I thought about it again, it made no sense at all.

One day, quite early on, Naomi said, 'Tell me about your childhood.'

`Well, you know. We moved around.'

I described the moves. As I went through the place-names, I became very uncomfortable filled, not with sadness or misery, but guilt. I kept expecting Naomi to challenge me,

or at least to change the subject. When I had finished listing the places, I felt terrible.

`And did your difficulties with eating have anything to do With that, do you think?'

, Well, I always think they did. I was fine until I was eight,

`Well, to see another disease.

Naomi said, being trapped.'

`Yes?'

`And yet you on yourself.'

when we moved to Canada for a year, and then I got fat. I was exposed to a lot of fast food. Before that I'd had a pretty

controlled diet. In Canada it was burgers, fries, lots of ice cream, popcorn, and all that stuff. And I just fell for it. I

remember this particular ice cream, sort of very soft white ice cream between chocolatey wafers, which I had at school every break-time, it was a sort of reward '

`Rewarding yourself?'

`Yes. I hated that school. It was a Catholic school, very

religious, very strict.'

`Were your parents unhappy?'

`My mother, I think, hated being there. My father had

wanted to go.'

`So there was tension between your parents?'

`No. Not ... well, I don't know. If there was, they played it

down.'

I paused. This was making, me uncomfortable. I didn't

mind talking about myself, about my own problems, my own unhappiness, my bingeing, drug-taking, procrastination, untidiness but my parents! How could my parents be unhappy? They were my parents. They were fine.

`Do you remember anything about being told the family

was going to move.

`Well, I must have been seven. I remember coming home from school, and saying something like, I'm going to be in

Mrs Phillips' class next term, and my mother saying, no you're not, because we're going to Canada.'

`Right.'

`And I said, how long for? And my mum said, for a year.

And this sounded weird, but not too bad. And I said, so doesthat mean I'll be in Mrs Phillips' class the year after, or will I

go straight into the next class? And my mum said that, well, no, I wouldn't

`Yes?'

`And ... I didn't understand. That was when she told me that, after we came back from Canada, we wouldn't be

coming back home. We'd be going somewhere else.' `And how did you feel about that?'

`It was the way the information came out in little pieces. That was the killer.'

And ... here it was! I sat there for a moment, wanting to explore this emotion, not wanting to explore this emotion. Here was something I'd been repressing! At last a beginning. Of course, you shouldn't expect too much from therapy as Freud said, the best you could expect was an experience,

over time, of 'transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness'.

I had hoped to find two things. The first was: what is my real problem? The second: if I find out what my real problem is, how will this help?

And this thing I'd just seen, or rather felt, this thing I'd been repressing, was, I felt, related to my real problem.

I said, 'That was the killer. The way the information came out in little pieces.'

I Hadn't Even Noticed It

Sometimes I talked about my dreams. I kept having two recurring dreams. In one, I would wake up in a cell, on the

day of my execution. Then I would wake up in my bed, and still think I was in the cell. In the other, I would have a visit from an old teacher, often my Latin teacher. He would produce documents, incontrovertibly proving that I had to go back to school. In the dream, there was always a period of wrangling about uniform issues. In one version I would have to wear shorts.

One day I said to Naomi, 'At the age of nine I had this sort of breakdown. This was after we came back from Canada.' `Breakdown?'

`Well, I've never called it that. I would never call it that in front of my parents. But I was completely out of control. I stopped being able to write. I started eating my pens and pencils, and drinking ink. I used to put ink cartridges in my mouth and chew them. I mean, something weird, really weird, was happening.'

This was interesting. It was definitely true that something very peculiar had happened to me. It started with a compulsion to press too hard with the nib of my fountain pen, rendering my handwriting scratchy and illegible. I broke one nib after another. I could not understand how other boys could have a pen and not be overwhelmed by the urge to destroy it. Soon, nearly everything I touched would break. At the time I wore glasses, and my glasses kept falling off and smashing. I began to chew, and then to eat, the contents of my pencil case. But this was the first time, the very first time, I had described this period in my life with any accuracy. It amazed me. Over the years, these events had been diminished, watered down, forgotten;

`And how was this resolved?'

`One day, after it had been going on for a while, we were in a Latin class, and the Latin teacher, who was the headmaster of the school, asked me to go to the staff room to get some chalk. So I did. And later, some of the other kids surrounded me, and started saying, "Crying, were you? Crying? Well, I'm going to make you cry!"'

`What was that about?'

`Well, years later, I became friends with one of these kids who beat me up, and he told me that when I went to get the chalk, the headmaster had said something like, "I had a call from this boy's mother last night. And she says he comes home crying every day. Now, why would this be?" And this kid said, "That really got us going. I mean, we knew you were pretty weird. But crying? Crying to your mummy? That made us want to hammer you." '

`So you were very vulnerable at this point.'

`Right. Absolutely. But things did get better.'

`Because there was more stability at home?'

`Oh, no. Not at all. There was less stability. Less and less.' `So how did things get better?'

`I began to adopt a sort of gallows humour. The next thing was, about a year after I started getting beaten up, in fact around the time people stopped beating me up, my mother gave me another piece of news. We were going to Germany! We were all going to Germany for the Easter holidays. But get this. My parents and my brother were going to stay in Germany. I had to go to boarding

school.'

`How did you feel?'

`Well) come on. I mean, part of me must have felt really

frightened. And, you know, who would do this to a kid who's just recovered from a breakdown?'

`How do you feel now?'

`Well, you know, if I allow myself to feel anything, it comes out like pure rage. I am furious. I'm feeling furious now.' `Is that a difficult feeling to live with?'

`God, yes. I never allow myself to feel it. Well, I try not to. Not for any length of time.'

`Who are you angry with?'

`My parents. The world in general.'

`Think about it a bit more.'

I did. After a while, I had another insight. I was furious with my mother. I'd known this all along. Or rather, I'd known it, but not known it. How could I be furious with my mother? I loved my mother. My anger, it seemed, was not about what had happened, but about what happened when I tried to talk about it.

`When I try to talk about it, when I've tried to tell her how I felt, she tells me it wasn't so bad.'

`Tell me about that.'

`I feel like I want to talk to her about the whole thing, but I can't. Over the years I've tried.'

`Yes?'

`But every time, I blow it. It just comes out all wrong. Whenever I've tried to explain how I felt, it was as if this incredibly strong force was working against me. I get flustered. It's as if I'm in court, and I've forgotten my notes, and the judge, my mother, is losing patience.'

`Go on.'

`My position is always that I've never really told her how I

feel, how full of rage I am, and her position is that I'm always talking about it.'

`And what about your father?'

`What's funny is that I don't feel any anger towards him whatever. I saw less and less of him. After Germany, he came back to England for a while, and then he moved to Holland. I was back at day school at this point. And then came another bit of news, the thing I'd dreaded and half expected, really. When I was 14, my parents decided to move back to Canada. I would have to go to boarding school again. I hadn't realized it, but our time of living together as a family had come and gone, and I hadn't even noticed it.'

Just Facts

Naomi said, 'You said you were trying to defend yourself from certain feelings.'

`I think I probably do it all the time.' `What sort of feelings?'

`I can't be sure, because I stop myself from feeling them. But it's about being abandoned.'

`Tell me about that.'

So I told her horror stories about being at boarding school. I said, 'I really didn't want to be there.'

And, 'I wanted to be with my family, at home.' And, 'But my family had moved.'

And, 'I didn't really know where my home was.'

In therapy, I became self-pitying, but, I fancied, admirably stoical. I told bitter stories full of humiliation and pathos.

These were stories that could not fail to bring tears to the eyes of any listener any listener, that is, other than me or my therapist. I told stories about cruelty, violence, and my grit and determination in the face of this cruelty and violence. I had learned the art of not being bullied. I stabbed somebody with a screwdriver. I watched one boy being tortured, night after night, in the dormitory. His tormentor, a handsome, curly-haired boy, ordered the poor soul to explain, in painful detail, the litany of perverted things he wanted to do to his sister.

`Do you like your sister?'

`Yes.'

`Do you want to fuck your sister?'

`No.

`Liar!'

`NoV

J know you're lying. And you know what the punishment is if you l
ie.
I get two people to hold you down, and I get another to twist your foot. Until I can hear a crack. So you have to be quiet, so I can hear the crack, otherwise goodness knows what might happen to your foot.'

`Oh,' said Naomi.

`So the guy is tortured for not telling us pornographic stuff about his sister. So he tells us pornographic stuff about his sister. Then he's tortured for being a pervert.'

`I see.'

There were more stories, endless stories. I drank. I took drugs. I fought. I underwent ritualistic torture. I overate and vomited, sometimes in front of others. I became an accomplished overeater and vomiter. I replaced being fat with being disgusting.`How do you feel about this?'

Fine.'

`Fine?'

,well, it's hard for me to have feelings about it.' `How do you mean?'

`Well, to me, it's just facts.' Talking to Naomi, I felt fine about the facts. When I was a kid, I was unsettled, displaced. Nasty things happened. These were the facts. What was worse, much worse, was the feelings beyond the facts. They were about my parents.