‘Better?’
‘A bit. Sorry.’
‘You’ve got to do something about it.’
‘It’ll be all right.’
‘It won’t. It’s getting worse. Do you think I don’t hear you in the night? And it’s affecting your work. You’ve got to go to Dr Foley.’
‘I’ve been to him. He just gives me those sleeping pills that knock me out and give me a hangover.’
‘You’ve to go again.’
‘I’ve had all the tests. I saw it in his eyes. I’m no different from half the people who go to their doctor. I’m just tired.’
‘This isn’t normal. Promise me you’ll go, Alan?’
‘If you say so.’
Chapter Three
From where she sat in her red armchair in the middle of the room, Frieda could see the wrecking ball swinging into the buildings on the site across the road. Entire walls shivered and then crumbled to the ground; inside walls suddenly became outside walls and she could see patterned wallpaper, an old poster, a bit of a shelf or a mantelpiece; hidden lives suddenly exposed. All morning she had watched it. Her first patient, a woman whose husband had died suddenly two years ago and whose grief and shock had never abated, sat bowed over and sobbing before her, her pretty face pink and sore from weeping. Without her attention slackening, Frieda saw it from the corner of her eye. When her second patient, referred to her for his escalating obsessive-compulsive disorder, fidgeted in his chair, stood up and then sat down again, raised his voice in anger, Frieda saw the ball smashing into the block of apartments. How could something that had taken so long to build up collapse so quickly? Chimneys folded, windows shattered, floors disappeared, walkways were obliterated. By the end of the week, everything would be rubble and dust, and men in hard hats would walk across the razed ground, stepping over children’s toys and sticks of furniture. In a year’s time, new buildings would stand on the ruins of the old.
She told the men and women who made their way to her room that she could offer them a bounded space where they could explore their darkest fears, their most inadmissible desires. Her room was cool, clean and orderly. There was a drawing on one wall, two chairs facing each other with a low table in between, a lamp casting a soft light in winter, a pot plant on the windowsill. Outside, an entire street of houses was being cleared away, but in here, they were safe from the world, just for a while.
Alan knew that Dr Foley was irritated by him. He probably talked about him to his partners at the practice: ‘That bloody Alan Dekker again, moaning about not sleeping, not coping. Can’t he just pull himself together?’ He had tried to pull himself together. He had taken the sleeping pills, cut down on the alcohol, done more exercise. He had lain awake at night with his heart racing, so fast that it was impossible to believe it wouldn’t burn itself up, and sweat pouring off him. He had sat rigid at his desk at work, his hands clenched, staring at the papers in front of him, waiting for the physical dread to pass, hoping his colleagues wouldn’t notice. Because it was humiliating to lose control like this. It scared him. Carrie talked about a mid-life crisis. He was forty-two, after all. This was just the age when men went off the rails, drank and bought motorbikes and had affairs, trying to be young again. But he didn’t want a motorbike and he didn’t want an affair. He didn’t want to be young again. All that awkwardness and pain, that sense of being in the wrong life. Now he was in the right life, with Carrie, in the small house they’d saved for, and would be paying for for another thirteen years. There were things he dreamed of having, but surely everyone had dreams and hopes for themselves, and they didn’t collapse in the park or wake up crying. And sometimes he had these nightmares – he didn’t even want to think about them. It wasn’t normal. Surely it wasn’t normal. He just wanted them to go away. He didn’t want to be the kind of person who had such things in his head.
‘The pills you gave me aren’t working,’ he said to Dr Foley. He had to stop himself apologizing for being there again and for wasting the doctor’s time, when the surgery was full of patients with real illnesses, real pain.
‘Still having trouble sleeping?’ Dr Foley wasn’t looking at him. He was looking at his computer screen and tapping something into it, frowning.
‘It’s not just that.’ He tried to keep his voice steady. His face felt rubbery, as though it belonged to someone else. ‘I get these horrible feelings.’
‘You mean pain?’
‘My heart feels like it’s being pumped up and there’s a metallic taste in my mouth. I don’t know.’ He struggled for words but couldn’t find them. All he could say was: ‘I don’t feel myself.’ It was a phrase he kept using, and each time he did so, it felt as though he was digging a hole inside himself. Once he had cried out to Carrie, ‘I can’t feel myself,’ and even at the time he had recognized how odd that sounded.
Dr Foley turned his chair and faced him. ‘Has anything been troubling you lately?’
Alan didn’t like him staring at his computer but he preferred that to being looked at like this: as if the doctor was looking inside him at things Alan didn’t want to know about. What could he see?
‘I had it when I was much younger, this feeling of panic. It was a feeling of loneliness, like in a nightmare, of being completely alone in the universe. Of wanting something, but I didn’t know what. After a few months, it went away. Now it’s back.’ He waited, but Dr Foley didn’t react: he didn’t seem to have heard him. ‘It was when I was at college. I thought it was the sort of problem people got at that age. Now I think I’m having a mid-life crisis. It’s stupid, I know.’
‘The drugs obviously aren’t helping. I’d like you to go and see someone.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Someone you can talk to. About your feelings.’
‘You think it’s all in my mind?’ He had a vision of himself as mad, his face contorted and savage, the horrible feelings he was trying to keep tamped down inside himself suddenly liberated and possessing him entirely.
‘It can be very helpful.’
‘I don’t need to see a psychiatrist.’
‘Try it,’ said Dr Foley. ‘If it doesn’t work, you won’t have lost anything.’
‘I can’t afford to pay.’
Dr Foley started to tap on his keyboard. ‘This is a GP referral. You won’t have to pay. It’ll be a bit of a journey, but these people are good. They’ll contact you with a date for an assessment. And we’ll take it from there.’
It sounded so grave. Alan had just wanted Dr Foley to give him different medicine, to make it all go away, like a stain that could be wiped clean, leaving no trace. He put his hand against his heart, feeling its painful bump. He just wanted to be an ordinary man with an ordinary life.
There is a place where you can see and not be seen, an eye pressed to a small hole in the fence. It’s playtime and they spill out from their classrooms and run across the yard. Boys and girls, all shapes and sizes. Black and brown and pink, with blond hair and dark hair and the shades in between. Some are almost full-grown, spotty boys with clumsy feet and girls with breasts just budding under their thick winter clothes, and they won’t do at all. But some are tiny; they hardly look big enough to be away from their mothers, with their stringy legs and baby voices. They’re the ones to watch.
It’s drizzling in the schoolyard and there are puddles on the ground. Just a few feet away, a little boy with a buzz-cut jumps into one violently, and a grin splits his face at the splashing. A girl with straw hair in high pigtails and thick glasses that are misted over stands in the corner and watches the crowd. She puts her thumb in her mouth. Two miniature Asian girls hold hands. A squat white boy kicks a skinny black boy and runs away. A group of girls whisper nasty things to each other, snigger, look sideways out of their dangerous eyes.