The desk clock chimed. I couldn’t believe fifty minutes had gone so fast. I didn’t want to send her out into the rain and ugliness of Kentish Town. I wanted to make things all right for her. Somehow it felt like this was my one last chance to make things right for anybody — me in particular. That night I told Dino I felt there was a voice that wasn’t mine inside me that kept on saying, Drop it. Send her back to her GP. Give her the number of the divorce lawyer. It’s not too late. Stop now. I expected Dino to say something sarcastic about how he knew he had a voice inside him that wasn’t his. But he felt how serious I was and didn’t say a word.
I’ll tell you what it was like. Like I’d dreamed about this so often that I wasn’t sure what to make of the reality. One thing’s for certain, it wasn’t so real. Surreal, certainly, especially after our fifth session — but I’m getting ahead of myself.
It was session four when she came in, picked up her chair, and carried it around to my side of the desk. She sat down next to me, close enough that the smell of her shoulder made me light-headed. She opened up a large school satchel and said, “I’ve got something I want you to see.”
It was a folder containing several sheets of A4 paper. Pictures printed from a computer. The first was a photograph of her husband. She looked at me expectantly, seeing if I recognized him. I didn’t. Like I said, he was a bass player. Good-looking though. Tall, thin, angular, unkempt in a studied sort of way. A lot of hair for a man in his mid-forties. Very English face, upper-class; it had that distracted, vaguely inbred look. He stood by the front door of a house — theirs, I imagine — with his hands in his pockets, smiling. In the second picture he was onstage. The third was the same photograph zoomed in on his fingers, playing the bass guitar. She was right. They were ugly. Thick, pink, and rigid, like a glove-puppet’s. The last picture was the most disturbing. It was another close-up, but this time so close-up and so fuzzy as to be almost impossible to make it out. It appeared to be his fingers, or the bottom half of them anyway. The top half had disappeared into something white and mottled like cottage cheese and at the same time dark and fleshy like meat.
“He’s cheating,” she said, and then she started to cry, loudly, like someone was gutting her. So loudly one of the practice nurses came in and put an arm around her. For the rest of the session I sat there helplessly, watching her sob. When I got home, Dino asked me if I’d seen the package under the front doormat. I hadn’t, though I must have stepped on it coming in. It was an envelope, which I opened right up. Inside was a DVD. I poured a glass of wine while my laptop booted up. We spent the whole night, me and Dino, watching that DVD over and over on the computer screen. And again, not a single word of sarcasm. Not even about the cigarettes.
She turned up for session five in a pair of black jeans and an oversized Red Hot Chili Peppers T-shirt — mine, I recognized the bloodstain on the front, but that’s another story. This one’s about fingers. It was funny how boyish she looked. Beautiful though. Especially when she blushed, which she did when I told her that Dino had watched the DVD with me. Dino sat in this time. She told me she wanted to meet him. I asked her if it was shot in her husband’s studio. She said she supposed so but she’d never been inside. If he wasn’t on the road or with the band, he went there at 2 every afternoon, returning home at 8. He told her he was working on a “solo project” and didn’t want to be disturbed.
In the film, the place had the look of a well-appointed office. A wood-paneled front room was hung with gold and platinum albums. There was a large, leather-top desk, an upright bass, three or four electric bass guitars on stands. A trestle table, almost as wide as the room, was packed with an assortment of computer and recording equipment. There must have been webcams everywhere, since you could pretty much see every corner. He selected one of the electric basses, and with that in one hand and a carrier bag in the other, he walked along a corridor that led to another room at the end.
This room was even larger. Most of the space was taken up by an enormous mattress stacked on two, maybe three divans. It was very high for a bed. Lying on top was an old woman. She must have been seventy years old if she was a day. It takes more than sixty-nine years to get that ugly. She was stark naked. And the fattest woman I had ever seen in my life.
He put the carrier bag on the bed and sat beside her. Out of the bag he took a cardboard box which was stuffed with cakes, the sort they sell in cheap bakeries, yellow sponge, bright pink icing. Tenderly he slotted a whole cake into her mouth. As soon as she finished one, he fed her another, until the box was empty. Every time a piece fell from her lips he would guide it back in with one of those broad fingers. When she was all done, he kissed her mouth, which was puffy and purple, hemorrhoidal. Then he tried moving her — with difficulty, but not unkindly — to the foot of the bed. One hundred and ninety kilos of human being, shifted centimeter by centimeter. He got her upright somehow and propped her against a mountain of cushions. She looked like a melting Buddha blancmange. He kissed her face, her breasts — the folds on her body made every part of her look like breasts — then eased her thighs apart. He aimed a remote control at the doorway. Recording equipment clicked on. Facing a camera, he began to speak. I was wrong about him being upper-class English, he was American.
“The music of the spheres. We’ve all heard that expression. Some of us — the true artists — have spent our lives trying to capture the mysterious, terrifying beauty of that siren sound, only to be dashed on the rocks. It was the scientists that discovered its source. It’s the sound waves made when a black hole sucks in and swallows a star.” At these words the old woman licked her lips and grinned. He thrust his right hand between her legs.
“There is no gain without pain. Nothing survives the black hole other than this hum, which is the deepest note ever recorded — a B-flat, oscillating to a B, but six hundred octaves deeper than anything my bass guitar can play.” He pulled his hand out abruptly, grabbed his guitar, and started to play, wet fingers slapping the thick strings. The look on his face was ecstatic.
So. Her husband was a feeder. And a gerontophile. Married to a tiny woman who looked like a child, and whose face, on our sixth and last session, I had touched with my own finger, tracing the thin bones and the delicate chin, down her neck and across her beautifully corrugated sternum, all the while whispering that I was going to help her. The question, as I asked Dino when we got in the car was, who was going to help me?
“A bass solo? And that sniffing business? Yee-uk! This dude,” Dino stretched the word out to a good six seconds long, “doesn’t make snuff films. He makes sniff films. Snuffing them would have been kinder than a bass solo.” Dino’s eyes swung wildly from side to side. “What is wrong with Americans? Do you remember that couple Kate brought here for dinner who said they didn’t think the statue on Nelson’s column looked much like Nelson Mandela at all? And that creature — when he has a princess at home. It’s Charles and Camilla, all over again.” He rolled his eyes back in his head.