She was the kind of girl who leaves no footprints when she comes into a room, but makes a big impression, you know what I mean? She was small and delicate, looked about sixteen years old. Wore one of those little girl dresses, bare legs, short-sleeved cardigan. And big Bambi eyes, like one of those little urchin paintings the tabloids always say are cursed. Burn your house down the second you go out. Maybe they’re right. Her medical records said she was thirty-five and married.
“Would it help if I sat in on a session?” Now and again I’d take Dino along — mostly when I was treating children. They seemed to relax around him. Opened up more. The microwave dinged. The cardboard box was wet and steaming. Smelled disgusting. I tore it off and put the plastic tray back in the oven. Dino was right about the food.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see.”
“I’ll tell you what I see: a lump in your trousers.” Damn if the little fucker wasn’t right again. “Takes wood to know wood. And what I know I see is a man who wants this little girl all to himself.”
When Dino got excited his voice became unbearably camp. Now he was chanting in a high, sour voice, “Doc has got a stiffie, Doc has got a stiffie.”
“Right, that’s it.” I strode across the kitchen and put my hand around his throat, lifting him clean out of the chair. I carried him like that into the living room, and hurled him against the wall. Legs splayed, bow tie skewed, his jaw hinged open like a snake getting ready to swallow a rabbit, the dummy lay propped up against the TV set, staring at space.
For the first half hour of the second session she didn’t say a word. Just chewed the hangnail at the side of her thumb and looked up and sideways at me through her eyelashes. That little-girl-lost look. It was like she was waiting for me to tell her what to do. I found myself reaching across the desk to comfort her, make it all right. Fortunately I stopped myself in time; that was all I needed, another incident. If it wasn’t for my old friends at the practice — or more to the point, if it wasn’t for what I had on my old friends at the practice — I would have been out on the street. Which is where Kate and her fucking lawyer wanted me. At the last minute, I pretended to swat an imaginary bug off the Kleenex box on her side of the desk.
Since she wouldn’t talk, I did. I told her not to worry. That she’d come to the right place. Phobias, I said, like American T-shirts, came in all different colors but just one size, extra-large. There’s no such thing as being a little bit phobic. It’s like being pregnant, you either are or you aren’t. As I said that, in reflex, her knees pressed together tight. They were pink and rosy, like a little girl left out in the playground too long, but there was nothing at all childlike about the rest of those legs. They ended in a pair of expensive, black, strappy stilettos, with a half-moon cut out of the end of each one where her red lacquered toenails peeped through.
I found myself, and I don’t know why, talking about myself, telling her about my automatonophobia. Fear of ventriloquist dummies. When she didn’t seem that impressed, I admitted that it wasn’t, of course, as socially debilitating as being finger phobic, since you’re likely to run into more fingers on a daily basis than ventriloquist dummies. But the effects, I said — the panic, the terror, that black-ice, deep-gut nausea — they were exactly the same. A few years ago, I told her, I was in the Oxfam shop buying coffee when I saw an old wooden dummy staring down at me from the shelf behind the till. In the past I would have frozen in fear. But I was so over my phobia that I bought it and took it home. Since then we’d become something of a double act, at least in medical circles, me and Dino. Kate of course would have put it differently, but Kate wasn’t here. Kate was fucking her lawyer, when she was colder to me than a Marks & Spencer microfuckingwave meal.
I assured her that she too could feel the same way about fingers.
“It’s not all fingers I hate,” she said. “Just my hus-band’s.”
Her husband’s? We were getting somewhere. If I’d only known where, I’d have run straight out of that door, down to Kentish Town station, and jumped on the first train going anywhere else.
My other half is a bitch. Did I tell you that? I’m sorry. I’ve been obsessing a lot lately, going over and over the notes. These are from our third session — the one where I looked across the desk at her and fell uselessly, impossibly, in love. It was raining like a dog that day. A typical black, filthy London day, I remember. Sunny when I left home at 7.30, though, or I would have taken the car. But I walked down the street and into a climate change. You’d think I’d be used to that trick by now, wouldn’t you? The one God plays on the English almost every single fucking day: an hour of sun first thing in the morning to wake you up and get you off to work, then pissing on you mightily. I’m a slow learner, I guess.
It’s a short walk to the surgery but not a pretty one. It gets uglier still the closer you get to Kentish Town Road. Shabby, shapeless old buildings, oddly bent, like they’re about to collapse, though no one seems to notice or care. And those garish shop signs. The whole street looks like an old tart with osteoporosis. London’s full of shabby old buildings, but you can look at them and see that once in their lives they looked grand. On Kentish Town Road, they look like they were built to look that shabby. And the people on the street have grown to look just like the buildings, the way people start to look like their dogs. It’s no wonder half of Camden is on SSRIs; the other half are just too fucking depressed to go and fill their prescriptions.
It was still raining hard when she arrived at 3 that afternoon. Her bare legs were so badly splashed by passing cars they looked like Rorschach tests. Her short skirt was soaked right through. It stuck to her so tight you could see she wore no underwear. When she sat down, she tried pulling the thin fabric over her thighs, but realized it was hopeless. She covered her lap with her bag and gave me the sweetest, saddest smile. Then she furrowed her brow. I didn’t have to say a word. She started talking right away.
“Doc,” she said, “I’m telling you this because I think you’re the only person who would understand. I feel like a stranger in my own life.”
I’d heard this before, of course, or a thousand different variations, but coming from her, it shot through me like electricity. She told me she’d been married for eight years — I felt another stab, jealousy, envy, loss? — to, well, let’s just say a famous rock musician. Or as famous as bass players are likely to get. Bass players are the overlooked band members. I’ve had a few of them sitting in that same seat in the past, trying to deal with not getting enough attention, not getting enough love. With nothing ever being quite big enough.
“Have you ever looked at a bass player’s hands?” she asked. I couldn’t say I had. She was looking at my hands now, so intimately it felt like a touch. “You have elegant fingers. Artistic. I’m sure a lot of people have told you that. Bass players’ fingers are repulsive. They don’t have joints like regular fingers. They bend at the knuckle and that’s it. When they play the bass they just kind of throw themselves at the strings and bounce off — thwack. Like pork sausages on a grill. Like pigs throwing themselves at an electric fence.” She illustrated it with an air — bass guitar solo. It made me smile, which made her frown again. “I hate his fingers,” she said.
The rest of him, apparently, was all right. He was ten years older than she was, but that wasn’t a problem. He had money and was happy to let her spend it. He spent most of his time in the studio he had near King’s Cross. Their sex life had always been good, though it had tapered off in the past six months. She thought the reason for that was her bringing up the idea of children, but really she didn’t care either way. Kate didn’t want children — my children anyway. Though I got hold of her medical notes through one of my contacts and, what do you know, she’s four months gone. Did she and her thieving-cunt lawyer think I was dumb enough to just sign it all over to them? She said the only reason she’d mentioned babies was because for a while she thought she might be pregnant. She would throw up every morning, usually when he tried to touch her. It had got to the point where all she could think of were the pigs. His fingers even smelled porky. They revolted her, to the point where she could barely eat... nor sleep, worrying about the morning coming and the fingers. That’s why she needed the temazepam. It wasn’t so bad if she took a couple of those.