The Skeleton Cupboard (15 page)

Marion lit another cigarette. “It's all been very nice.”

“You've built a lovely life.”

“Yes, I have. In my time you accepted what you had and never wanted any more. Nowadays everybody is chasing what they don't have. The past is the past. No one can have it all. I am happy with what I have and accept what I didn't have. That's why I don't want her in my life.”

Marion's statement shook me. I'd been so sure that, ultimately, she would want to know her mother. I was clearly from the generation that wanted it all.

“Do you want me to tell you about my meeting with June and Frank?”

Marion shook her head.

“Well, if it would help you, I could tell you what her caregivers think about you and her meeting up.”

“No, I don't want to know. Thanks.”

I drank my tea. “OK. Why did you agree to see me, then?”

“It wasn't for your psychology. I just wanted to apologize for wasting your time.”

“Marion, that's not necessary.”

Marion went to top up my tea.

“Actually, I'd better go.”

She looked up at me. “I've never had a mother, and I don't need one now.”

“That's okay, Marion.”

“Is it? Shouldn't I want to know her?”

“Only if it feels like the right thing for you and for June.”

“Would it be the right thing for her?”

“I'm not sure. I think perhaps she feels the same way as you do.”

Marion looked relieved.

A gust of wind blew against the small kitchen windowpane and made it rattle.

“Will you be all right getting home? It's bitter out there.”

“I'll be fine. Thank you. And thanks for the tea.”

We walked to the front door of the warm tiny flat.

“One more thing before you go. I was just wondering … are they looking after her OK?”

“Yes. June is well looked after.”

Marion nodded. “Is she happy?”

“Yes, I felt she was.”

“She'll never just appear out of the blue one day—you know, knock on this door or something?”

“No, I don't think June will.”

“Good.”

I turned to leave.

“Here. This is for you.”

I was handed a large brown bag stuffed full of fruit and vegetables.

“No, really, Marion, that's not necessary.”

“Please. I insist. It's the least I can do after all you've done for me.”

As the door shut behind me, I pulled my jacket together and walked into the wind, having just no idea whether I had done anything at all for Marion or June.

As I sat on the Tube going home, I thought about my stupid assumption that they would want to be reunited. I was the one who was lonely. I wanted to fix that by bringing them together.

God, I felt drained by not getting any of this right. I had helped Daisy and Jocasta, but this whole placement felt so disjointed and odd. I'd had a year of drama and I think I had come to this placement believing it would be a rest, nothing too dramatic, perhaps less important, less relevant.

What an idiot.

I needed a break, but I still had to sign off with Martin and Elise, who, as it happened, were going great guns.

*   *   *

Just before starting the placement, I had visited Rosie, who had just finished the second year of her second degree and had got a summer job running a theater at the Edinburgh Festival, managing the season and all of its star acts. I stayed in her overcrowded flat and met a nice bloke who was good at sex; it had been a fun few days.

The main attraction at Rosie's venue was the one-woman show by a well-known dame who had run an English “party house” in the seventies and eighties where sex was on the menu. Rosie told us that this woman was warm and funny, small and frumpy, but hated having anyone putting her body microphone on her: She couldn't bear to be touched. A body-phobic madam, she told me when she met me that with my height and cheekbones, I'd make a great sex worker.

When Martin and Elise appeared in my office, life had started imitating art.

While the earlier sessions with Martin and Elise were deeply embarrassing for them, the later ones—the ones where they took pleasure in reporting back their progress through the sensate focus stages—were more difficult for me. I struggled to manage my embarrassment at their frank disclosures.

After the big session with Martin and then the split chat, they both went off and decided to swap roles. Martin encouraged Elise to be naughty, while she relied on her fiancé to protect her. We then worked on vocabulary and had a hilarious session brainstorming all the words for Mickey and Minnie. After Martin managed to say the word “cunt,” we all looked back at our two lists and marveled at how few words there were for “vagina” and how many there were for “penis.”

“Do you know,” said Martin, “that Hamlet spoke about Cunt-ry matters?!”

Elise laughed and flushed. I felt like a gooseberry.

The systematic desensitization program, though, worked a treat.

Take something that makes you anxious and what do you do? You avoid it and reinforce your belief that you can't deal with it. So you try to deal with it and then, literally, push too hard and too early and fail.

So, take a psychological deep breath. Step back, think and plan. Identify your long-term goal and then break it down into smaller stages.

“Imagine,” I said to Martin and Elise, “that you are climbing a mountain. Don't look at the peak, because if you do, you will fall over. Let's plan each staged base camp until we get to the top.”

And so we did. Martin, Elise and I built a hierarchy of steps that enabled her to loosen control and get naughty, while he let her lead and took his focus off “the act.”

Eventually they got to the climax of the mountain. Thankfully well before their wedding day.

*   *   *

Chris and I met in the Market Street café for our final session of the placement.

“So, what have you learned?”

I smiled. “Well, I've learned that I can't do without you.”

“OK.”

Not the response I wanted. I wished I hadn't been so sentimental.

“And I've learned that I've got a lot to learn,” I added.

“Such as?”

I handed Chris the sugar bowl. “Such as don't discard the people whose problems seem less dramatic.”

Chris threw three brown cubes into her coffee. “You did well with Imogen.”

What?

“Yes, you did. Well done. But here's the thing—Imogens don't appear in our clinical lives every day.”

She was right. I nodded.

“I think you felt alone this time,” she said.

I swallowed hard. “Yeah, I did.”

“So did your patients. That's life.”

Not the response I wanted.

“Lack of drama doesn't mean lack of importance,” she counseled. “Don't get compassion fatigue. If you do, then this isn't the job for you.”

As I left the café, a small, mittened elderly lady winked at me. I couldn't be certain, but I was pretty sure she'd been the one who had offered me cake a few months earlier. I thought of June and Frank, the dignified Marion and the newly assertive Daisy. And Martin and Elise? I had to push my thoughts of them out of my mind: They were now in a private space where I didn't belong.

I got onto the Tube, and looking up at an animal sanctuary poster, I began to tear up wondering about Harlow's baby monkeys pining for their mother and choosing to die of starvation in wire arms covered with soft terry cloth.

 

Four

HAROLD AND THE NAZIS

I'd hated Sundays since I was a small child. Before the days of video games, American-style bowling alleys and shopping malls that stuck it to any Christian notion of a day of rest and reflection, Sundays were bloody boring.

My Sundays were often spent wandering aimlessly around the house. My grandmother would be watching wrestling—not that she was a particular fan, but there were only three channels in those days. At some point Mum would tell me to tidy my room or help with the gardening or write in my diary.

My mother was a stickler for a daily diary entry—a reflection on the day: what we had learned, what we could improve on—and every entry had to be finished with the phrase “Tomorrow I must try harder.”

Boredom was the Sunday curse of the 1970s childhood. It was elevated into despair by the realization that the next morning meant the end of the weekend and school would resume for another five days.

Having left the GP practice, I was about, yet again, to change gears and was preparing for my next six-month training placement. I spent the Sunday before my next placement wandering around my flat, bored and agitated. And pissed off, actually: The placement was to be with the elderly—geriatrics, or, in PC terms, older adults—a population I had no clinical interest in whatsoever. I flicked through TV channels. Nothing at all to watch, not even wrestling.

Viktor Frankl defined “Sunday neurosis.” A brilliant psychiatrist who survived the Holocaust, the camps and the loss of his wife, Tilly, Frankl pinned it down perfectly. He described an emptiness, a void, and the misery that comes from boredom. He described a feeling of apathy, and by God, Viktor was right: “Sunday neurosis, that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”

I just wasn't fired up about this new placement, not the way I'd been about the other three. Discontent defined the Sunday neurosis. I was experiencing the Frankl effect.

I told myself that tomorrow I must try harder.

*   *   *

I applied my mascara on the Tube, but I was still really bloody late; also I was totally ill prepared.

With my head bent, I attempted to speed-walk down the long drive toward the large mock-Tudor building where the care home for the elderly was housed. I had been delayed by an early-morning telephone conversation with Rosie, who was now in the final year of her second degree and trying to decide whether to apply to do another degree or join the world of work.

I glanced up to see Chris grinding a cigarette into the ground. She didn't look happy.

“Where have you been? You're late.”

“Hey, Chris. How are you?”

“You are bloody late.”

Hot, pissed off and out of breath, I swallowed back my impulse to point out the hypocrisy of Chris's complaint.

Really, perpetually late lady? You of the world-famous disappearing act. You chastise me?

“Sorry. Problems on the Northern Line.”

Chris wasn't impressed. “And why the ambling? This is work time! Come on, head down, on time.”

“I'm sorry. It was a girlfriend thing—you know how they can be.”

“Actually, no, I don't.” Chris snapped herself around and strode through the large wooden door.

I scampered behind.

Chris was looking really well, despite her abruptness and rudeness. She was attractive, tall and slim, and today seemed even more carefully dressed than usual. I was still trying to work her out, and I guessed that she was probably in her mid-forties. She intrigued me—she'd never mentioned a relationship of any kind, and as there were no rings on her fingers, I assumed she wasn't married. But getting to know her personally wasn't something I felt that I had any kind of permission to do.

Since her time off “for personal reasons,” Chris had remained changed for the better—her skin brighter and her green eyes less puffy; even her shoulder-length dark blond hair seemed alive and bouncy. Something else was different, but I couldn't put my finger on it—she was crackling that morning with a sort of restless energy, and not just because she was annoyed with my tardiness.

A few minutes later I was still sweating as I sat down on the chair in the airless doctor's office opposite Dr. Anne Gee, who didn't even look at me.

“Chris, you can probably guess what my schedule is like today—I just don't appreciate being kept waiting.”

“Anne, chill out,” Chris responded. “What can I say? I was late—bloody Northern Line.” Before I could intervene, Chris went on, “And there was no way I was letting her near you until I got here.”

The room was tense. I began to feel trapped in a surreal world where two alpha females were rearing up against each other. They continued their quick-fire banter, each trying to establish seniority. They were sparking off each other and they seemed to love it. Being the onlooker made me feel uncomfortable.

The only other time I'd met Dr. Anne Gee, a psychoanalytically trained psychiatrist, had been early in the last term in the support group set up for my clinical training year group. These groups were a nightmare for me. I could barely contain my frustration at sitting and pontificating when I could be doing the same thing far more productively in a clinical setting, with my patients. Against my will, I was expected to “openly share the experiences, the concerns and emotional challenges of training” with my cohorts.

I wasn't the only one who felt that way. For everyone sitting in the circle of chairs, this was hell. It was all self-conscious silences and endless analysis of one another's footwear, while desperately trying to avoid the glacial gaze of Dr. Gee.

Dr. Gee had a reputation for being cold and analytical. She was neat and precisely dressed with a short dark bob and minimalist makeup. She was an attractive woman, very much in control and impenetrable. So the gossamer white shirt revealing her lacy bra underneath was a bit of a distraction.

She was as hard as nails and as boundaried as hell if anyone came even only a couple of minutes late for the support group. I remember her once saying to me, “So, this is how you would treat your patient? You'd turn up late? You'd make them feel like you didn't want to be there with them? Their distress not worth your punctuality? While ordinarily I'd not permit you to join this group because you are late, my instinct is in fact that you do need to be here.” Dr. Gee had turned to the rest of the group. “So how many others of you don't want to be here but are too afraid to show it?”