Trouble (20 page)
‘You could try contacting your friends on the telephone,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘I’m no therapist, but shouldn’t you be sticking to the point? I’m a busy man.’
‘Just give me another tape,’ said Annette. ‘You are under no obligation to listen. Indeed, I hope you won’t. I don’t want to speak to my friends. I can’t be sure who they are, not even Gilda. And I don’t feel like saying “I’m just fine.” Not yet. But it’s true that from spending so much time on the phone I have become accustomed to understanding my own life through my ears: so I need the tape. Call it aural predilection if you like, and it may well have to do with overhearing the rows between my mother and my father as a child: listening through doors: working out patterns. I used the patterns in
Lucifette Fallen,
a novel I wrote, Dr McGregor. A stupid and pretentious title for a rather neat, too controlled, short novel. But you are obviously too busy to listen to all that.’
‘The girl from Oprah Winfrey was furious when she heard I was in hospital,’ observed Annette to her tape recorder, ‘and had lost the baby. “Now what am I going to do?” she said. “Annette Horrocks was to be the centre of the show. And I’ve had to come all the way into town for nothing.” Ernie Gromback wrote to tell me about it: Ernie seems to be the only person left in the world able and willing to write a letter. I’ve had no visitors. It’s not their fault, I know, but it doesn’t stop me feeling deserted. If I have visitors, if anyone from the outside world comes near, my blood-pressure zooms up. Dr McGregor’s getting it under control, Staff Nurse says: they drip various drugs plus antibiotics into my arm. As well as toxaemia I had septicaemia, its source of origin, where the skin had broken beneath one of the bracelets. The nurses bring me three-times-daily messages from Spicer: of the I’m-thinking-of-you,-darling, get-better-soon kind, but they somehow lack conviction. I can’t quite feel Spicer’s real, though I send loving messages out again. Poor Spicer: his baby too, his idea becoming my flesh. It’s just hard to feel and think “poor Spicer”.’
‘I had a Bereavement Counselling session: a young woman called Anya told me the sense that Spicer wasn’t real could only be a function of the drugs I was being given. Such medicines poisoned the mind, she said: she disapproved of them. She described herself as an holistic healer. When the drugs stopped, she told me, I’d bring Spicer to life again, and have proper sympathy with him. She made me visualise a flight of white marble stairs and at the top a place where I had been happy. She held my hand and persuaded me to climb, in my mind, a step at a time towards this goal. I obliged, though I felt embarrassed. It was unfortunate that the place at the top was a McDonald’s: Anya thought I was mocking her when I said so: I wasn’t. I just remembered taking Susan and Jason out to the cinema one day, and we ended up at McDonald’s, and we were all, for some reason, pleasantly and simply content, stealing each other’s French Fries. In my “visualisation”, as she called it, the man behind the counter was large, strong and surrounded by a brilliant white light: he had a face which looked as if it had been hewn out of a piece of wood. I imagined I was seeing Jesus, but I didn’t tell Anya that: I didn’t know her well, but enough to tell she wouldn’t want Jesus described as a fast-food counter-hand. It was my vision not hers, anyway, and the paramedics being under instruction not to excite me, when I mentioned McDonald’s she smiled stiffly and brought the session to a rather sudden end, which I’m sure she wasn’t meant to. She left me with instructions to visualise a mandala; which I gathered looks rather like a pie-chart with four divisions in different colours, representing intuition, intellect, sensation and emotion. The trick is, apparently, to get the colours evenly-balanced in your mind, and hold them there for two minutes. Then you become less “stressed”. I did try. Really. I don’t want to be a mocker. Spicer hates mockers. Cynicism, he once told me, is sneering at your own soul. I don’t want to do that.’
‘If you don’t mind,’ said Dr McGregor, ‘since we are under instruction to work with non-orthodox healers when practicable, to save the cost of expensive drugs, we’ll give hypnotherapy a go. A pleasant young man has just joined the team. His name is Peter. I will send him along to you.’
‘Hypnotism!’ said Annette, and the bleepers on her blood-pressure monitor began to sound. He switched them off.
‘Well?’ asked Dr McGregor on his rounds the next day. ‘What happened? It didn’t go too well, I hear.’
‘Listen to it on the tape,’ said Annette, turning her head into the pillow, ‘if you’re really interested and not just being polite. It’s all there.’
Dr McGregor took the tape away.
‘This Peter, this person from the fringes, was slight and sweet and had soft thick wavy hair, nut-brown, and a baby face. It was, as I feared, Peter, Peter Pan, Pan the Goat God. Rhea had got into my head. So I expected him to bring out a pipe and start playing it to me, and found myself looking down to see if he had cloven hooves. He didn’t: he had brown shoes, rather worn but much polished. So perhaps he was a Peter Pan after all. He told me that if I would allow myself to be put in a light hypnotic trance he would locate the psychological trauma which, according to him, was sending the blood pounding so through my veins and keeping my blood-pressure high. This account of my condition seemed to me to beg many questions: I asked him if he had any medical training and he said no: but he’d studied psychology at college and found he “had a knack for hypnotism.” Even the most orthodox practitioners had begun to view many forms of illness as internalised behavioural problems—which had always been obvious so far as facial tics, stammers, addictions and so forth were concerned—and hypnotherapy was proving a useful, inexpensive, effective and non-toxic form of treatment in many cases: in particular the lowering of blood-pressure. I then asked him what he would do with the psychological trauma once he located it in me, and he said if appropriate he would re-lay the memory so it ceased to be traumatic’
‘“Tell me more, Peter,” I said, “tell me more,” thinking of the way Spicer now recalled the matter of the bacon sandwiches, and he replied that actually, though the re-laying of memory was considered okay in the States, it was still seen as unethical in Europe. I was fortunate that the hospital I was in had a management team imported from the US, and so long as a treatment worked, didn’t bother too much with the detail of how or why it worked. How, I asked, did he do this locating?’
‘“A traumatic memory,” Peter said, “could be located by regressing the patient—a victim of, say, child abuse—to the period of its occurrence, recalling the episode in its fresh form and re-tuning it, as it were, persuading the child/adult that the fear, self-loathing and sense of guilt experienced was inappropriate and by bolstering accompanying feelings of affection, response and gratitude, even creating them if necessary. The memory, dusted down and polished up, would then be re-laid in the adult mind as something that could be coped with—still unpleasant, perhaps, but no longer traumatic. A whole range of behavioural problems could quickly and cheaply be dispersed by Re-lay Hypnotherapy.”’
‘I only report what Peter Pan told me, though I can’t quite believe it. An isolated instance perhaps, but you surely couldn’t wipe away an entire childhood’s wretchedness by simply persuading the victim to forget it? Surely memory would re-emerge through its coating of forgetfulness? Old stains beneath new wallpaper? I asked him if you could re-lay pleasant memories with nasty ones, turn a pleasant seaside outing into a horrid one, a good sexual experience into something oppressive and smothering: by restructuring a past, turn a wife against a husband, a husband against a wife, and he said oh yes, he assumed so, but who would bother?’
‘“Does this apply to everyone?” I asked. “Can everyone be hypnotised?” and he said one in a hundred perhaps not, and so you could get any woman into bed with you, bar the one in a hundred, by persuading her that you were the most attractive man in the world, and Peter Pan said, well yes, most women, eighty in a hundred. But he, though he admitted he had been tempted, would never do anything like that. Common wisdom held that you couldn’t get anyone to do anything under hypnosis that went against their conscience, because they would snap out of the trance at once. But with a little ingenuity any hypnotist could alter the perspective in which that conscience worked—the mildest person would take an axe to a door if told a child was dying behind it, the most honest would rob a bank if persuaded a nation would perish otherwise. A truly loyal wife could find herself in a situation in which disloyalty was the only appropriate answer: if the hypnotherapist is the Chief of Police say, and the husband about to be put to torture, then what can the wife do but oblige the Chief of Police to keep the husband safe?
‘“I think,” I said, “I’m the one in a hundred,” and he asked me to fasten my hands together above my head and told me I couldn’t separate them, but I could and did, and he laughed and said I was indeed the one in a hundred, but he’d enjoyed our chat. The blood-pressure machine began to put out warning bleeps; Nurse McKenzie, who has red hair and freckles, and reminds me of Wendy, asked him to leave. Nurse McKenzie sat beside me for a while and told me of a newly-married friend of hers who went to a hypnotherapist to be cured of over-eating and ended up having sex on the sofa with him and being charged double, which post-hypnotic suggestion made her pay without argument. On the other hand, her friend had lost weight and didn’t regret any of it. Whatever knock-out drops they’ve added to my drip are beginning to take effect. I’m drifting off again.’
‘Well, hypnotherapy didn’t work,’ said Dr McGregor, visiting Annette in the Special Care Unit to which she had been moved. ‘I had a quick listen to the tape. I don’t think Peter will stay on the team for long. Obviously the sleazy end of alternative medicine.’
‘How can you have a quick listen to a tape?’ asked Annette. ‘You either listen or you don’t. I have another one here for you to ignore.’ Dr McGregor took it away.
‘I try not to think about Dr Rhea or Dr Herman Marks because my blood-pressure goes sky-high if I do. Thieves, murderers, perverts, devourers of babies! Destroyers of true love. Lilith and Saturn. In mythology Rhea is Saturn’s wife. In Spicer’s book on Theotherapy—Spicer sent it to me here in hospital, unasked: what can this mean? The title page with Rhea’s dedication written in was missing, but a few more passages had been marked. These were the ones relating to the goddess Rhea. If I keep an eye on the blood-pressure monitor I can sometimes direct my will and organise my mind—I can’t describe it in any other way—to keep the level steady. But I can’t, alas, focus in this way and read at the same time. Perhaps that’s the reason I read so little? I risk glances at the pages from time to time.’
‘“Over-eagerness to promulgate divine mysteries”, I read, “of the goddess Rhea. Shamanism, the grandmotherly guardian of much secret love: the woman who smothers those around her with an excess of love. The less love she gets the more she gives. Her problems are severest around mid-winter.” Good. We’re moving into the cold, dark months. “Before Hellenic masculinisation—by which we mean the imposition of the Greek Gods upon the earlier pagan ones—Rhea was the Universal Great Mother Goddess and ruled supreme, needing no protective consort.” She can manage well enough without Saturn, in other words. Just my luck to fall foul of the Great Mother Goddess Cow. Other people’s husbands end up with ordinary therapists. Perhaps what Spicer was doing to me with the tree and the cleft hill business was nothing other than Hellenic masculinisation? The rendering male of the female. Eleanor Watts wouldn’t want to move into Bella Crescent if she understood how the archetypes roared up and down it, sucking us all in, whirling us around with their almighty backdraught.’
‘Still my blood-pressure won’t go down. It’s been worse since Peter’s visit. I might die of a stroke, they carefully don’t say. I’ve been moved into a SC Unit, Special Care, but not yet IC, Intensive Care.’
‘Gilda has had her baby, in the maternity ward below this one. A healthy baby boy, both are doing fine. Gilda came to stand in the ward doorway this morning and wave at me. She was wearing a bright blue wrap which, together with her red hair, by virtue of some reflected halo effect made her shimmer within a mauve aura. Blue and red make mauve, or is it purple? Gilda didn’t have her baby with her. I was sorry not to have a glimpse of him. Gilda was being tactful. But really she didn’t need to be. Her baby was a little bit mine, as mine had been a little bit hers, and I was proud for her. So it’s okay. Really. There was never a friend as good as Gilda in the whole history of the world, and if anyone’s to have a baby when I don’t, it had better be her.’
‘I think Mrs Horrocks can be moved to Light Care,’ said Dr McGregor. ‘She seems to be much improved. Now how do we account for that?’
‘I’ll leave you a tape to explain it,’ said Annette, ‘though you won’t believe it.’
‘This afternoon I got really tired of the drips and tubes and being wired up and couldn’t stand the business of screens and bedpans for a single minute longer, and when the nurses were elsewhere I plucked off terminals, cuffs, leads and unhooked drips and got out of bed and went to the ward bathroom: I was very weak, and almost sorry for my poor little feet—they were quite translucent against the white tiled floor. I remembered my feet as having been firm, strong and solid. Well, everything changes. I stood beneath the shower and let the water run over my hair, my face, my shoulders, breasts, and too-flat stomach, the thin loins. There wasn’t a towel so I had to go back to my bed still dripping. Nurses McKenzie and Smiley dried me down—their instructions not to excite me warring with their natural desire to kick my ankles hard—and got me back into bed and re-wired me. The blood-pressure cuff round my forearm went into its automatic tightening phase: the diagnostic readouts settled at pulse-rate 70, and BP 120 over 80. Perfect. Nurse McKenzie dealt the screen a sharp blow with a ruler: the numbers quivered but stayed steady. Nurse Smiley switched off the whole machine and switched it on again, which sometimes did the trick. The cuff took another reading. Pulse 75, BP 125 over 85. The extra fives were no doubt the product of my reaction to what I could only describe as McKenzie’s and Smiley’s condition of doubt. Staff Nurse came to admire; then Sister: it was twelve hours before the Registrar turned up, but hospitals are so full of bad news there’s not much time for the good. In a couple of days I can go home.’
