Y looks at his watch. We need to stop now, he says.
I go with Z to the cinema and when we come out I say something about the film that he doesn’t understand. I say it again, then I say it in a different way, but he still can’t see it, can’t grasp my meaning. I feel, suddenly, that I’ve lost my power of communication. The loss feels as tangible as if I’d boarded an aeroplane and flown to a country whose people didn’t speak my language, nor I theirs.
Z lives alone. His flat is simple and of modest size. In my own house I am never still; I charge from top floor to bottom and back again, from room to room, like a dynamo revolved and revolved by some elemental feeling of dread. I’m trying to keep the house alive. I worry that if I stop I’ll forget, that I’ll look up again to find that it has become a ruin. Sometimes it feels as though I inhabit a mirage, a projection; that the real house has gone but the children don’t know, don’t realise that I’m behind the curtain like the Wizard of Oz, frantically turning knobs and adjusting microphones to keep the illusion going. In Z’s flat I don’t move. I can’t: there’s nowhere to go. I watch the light moving and changing through the rooms. I listen to the dim sounds from outside. I become aware of myself, too close, like a stranger sitting down right next to me in a train carriage full of empty seats.
Z waits for the cloud of the cinema trip to pass over, waits for the clamour to die down. He cooks, runs a bath, gives me a book to read. He is as sensitive to events as the bulrushes are to the stroking wind. His flat is quiet. Nothing ever changes there: when I visit, I find everything exactly where it was the time before. He says, sometimes you say things before you’ve understood them yourself. For you the saying is a kind of working out, he says, like doing a sum on a bit of paper. You can’t always expect people to grasp it. But I want you to know what I mean, I say. So do I, he says. I want to know what you mean.
It’s late at night, too late to run away from something whose nature I can’t in any case discern. It’s just a shape in the darkness, understanding or its opposite, I can’t tell.
Y says that my relationship with him — Y — is helpful because it can’t ever become sexual. He claims that I find this relieving. He says this is why, with him, I feel safe.
I talk a lot with Y about X but increasingly I find I am reluctant to mention Z. In the neutrality of Y’s consulting room the whole bloodstained past has been unravelled, the war with X, its causes and key battles, its moments of drama and shame, but of Z very little is said. I find that I am protective of the silence around Z. The old war can be turned into words, but a living silence ought not to be disturbed. Things might be growing there, like seeds under newly ploughed earth. Week after week Y and I sit like Odysseus in his cave, processing the violent past in reams of talk. The present is a talking present; but of the future what can be said?
The apple tree outside has shed its leaves. It has started to rain, after the long dry clanging days of summer. The drive to Y’s house is slow, the windows wet with condensation, the lorries sending up sprays of muddy water, the sky overhead sagging with iron-grey clouds. When I walk up the cul-de-sac the wind buffets and whirls among the trees and houses. Sometimes I wonder why I come here when the coming is so iterative, so forced. Having to come here sometimes feels like the biggest problem I have. I feel like a lonely man visiting a brothel, the money changing hands, paying for understanding as some people pay for love. And just as that is not love, so this cannot be understanding. What, then, is it?
I am certain Y will say that my feelings of rebellion against psychoanalysis are predictable and meaningful; that my rebellion can be encompassed by that against which I am rebelling. Occasionally we have discussed the ways in which a therapy might be brought to an end, but it always sounds to me rather like dying, long and drawn-out, a matter not of choice but of some greater law of genesis and cessation of which we are, apparently, at the mercy.
I don’t say these things aloud: perhaps unwittingly, Y has alluded from his web of talk to the existence of the nonverbal universe, and I intend to go and live there.
Love, Z says. Do you want to use that word?
Make me something, I say. Give me something. Bring me something. Not love, or at least, not only love.
Z sighs, shakes his head, reminds me to pay my speeding fine. I lean against him. His skin is always so hot. When I get close enough, it feels like sitting next to a fire. Yet when I am further away he is a purely reflective surface, like the sea in certain moods. I watch him, watch the light move across him, watch the rippling surface. The clocks go back; the days get darker, but the sea retains its light. I buy a coat, because it’s winter now.
TRAINS
In the town she came from it always felt like there were more people in the cemeteries than walking around the place on their own legs. The cemeteries were bigger than the parks in that town. High-speed trains crossed the flat countryside nearby in great bounds, Paris to Antwerp, Zurich to Brussels, but she never felt the trains contained living people either. They passed behind the lines of headstones, a blur of velocity, moving so fast it almost looked like they too were standing still.
But then one day she got on a train herself, and now it was the town that seemed to move. She sat next to her suitcase and stared out of the carriage window as it all moved away from her, the grey houses and rain-darkened streets, the concrete factory yards, the cemetery under the same low furrowed sky; moved away from her like a stranger who has passed her on the pavement and walked on, without recognition or regret.
She is scared. She thought in the new place she would feel free but she doesn’t. She feels tied by long tethers. When she makes the slightest movement, she feels it all along the length of her bonds.
The man collected her from the station. Welcome to England, he said, and then his talk ran away from her like a cataract going over a cliff. He wore young people’s clothes, a leather jacket, red sneakers on his feet. On the car journey she understood almost nothing of what he said. She sat rigid, frozen beside him. It was as if the car was full of noise, the sound of mad crashing and banging and shrieking, but he couldn’t hear it. She sat in her seat, frozen, glancing at him sometimes while he talked.
Out of the window she saw tilting streets of white houses, every street crowded with parked cars, and big birds picking at litter on the pavements. When she got out of the car she looked up. The sky was much further away than it was at home, and full of chasing clouds. She followed the man up the steps to the front door of a house and waited while he searched his pockets for his keys. The woman was standing in the hall. Sonia couldn’t see what she looked like because she instantly came forward, startling her, and kissed her on both cheeks. She took Sonia’s bag, the little handbag with the chain of square gold links, and put it on the hall table. She asked questions, tea, did Sonia want a cup of tea, and Sonia shook her head. Then she turned and went up the stairs, still talking. Sonia followed her. She opened the door to a room with a bed in it, a wardrobe, a desk, and Sonia went in. Then she said something and closed the door and went away.