'But is it the rudest, rudest?'
'Yes, it's the rudest, rudest. You must never, ever say codswollop.'
A moment's thought as Eyran compared with what he'd heard in the school playground. 'Is it ruder than fuck?'
Jeremy had burst out laughing when Stuart told him, finding Stuart's vain attempt to preserve his son's already tainted innocence particularly amusing; yet another dinner party anecdote. Eyran too had been let in on the joke later when he was old enough. But relating the story to Eyran, hearing only the echo of his own voice, Stuart found it unsettling. Like a comedian on stage with no audience.
And so half an hour later when his one man dialogue ran out of steam — he turned to the CDs he'd brought from Eyran's room and let Janet Jackson take over. Familiar voices, familiar music. Torrens had arranged for a player.
But now listening to the muted mumbling beyond Lambourne's door, he recalled with clarity the feeling that had crept over him in that instant. Dreading the moment — if and when his tearful wishes of Eyran awaking were fulfilled — that he would have to tell Eyran his parents were dead.
And when that moment did finally come, the haunted, lost look in Eyran's eyes — still lingering days and even weeks later. He should have guessed then that a part of Eyran would always cling on, refuse to accept.
David Lambourne flicked back through Torrens' report. So, what did he know after the first session? The first aim had been to judge Eyran's responsiveness.
Made just four days after Eyran had revived from his coma, the report showed ten to fifteen percent impairment on conventional thought and speech response. If anything, there had been improvement since then; Eyran's response had been slow on very few questions. Though perhaps when he entered the more complex and problematical areas of Eyran's dreams, responsiveness would drop. The barriers would go back up.
Thirty eight percent below average on IQ puzzles. Lambourne couldn't help much there: the best indicators would come from maths results at his new school. Or perhaps he could get some standard tests from St Barts for the Capels to do at home.
But the main problem was Eyran's increasingly violent dreams, and the key question: were they a by-product of the accident and the coma, some chemical imbalance causing dementia; or a defence mechanism of Eyran's subconscious, unwilling to accept that his parents were dead?
With the first, Lambourne realized he'd have limited control, swept along on the changing tide of the condition, leaving him little range within which to wield influence. Damage limitation. But if it was the latter, he'd have far more control, and at first glance the analysis was straightforward: Eyran couldn't accept that his parents were dead, so his subconscious had manifested various scenarios, played out through his dreams, where he could find them alive. Text book Freud denial/ mourning/object attachment.
Though Lambourne had conducted his main studies in the Freudian school, he liked to think that he'd kept an open mind on later theories and papers — some of them contradictory to Freud's principals. Jung, Winnicott, Adler, Eysenck, and then the later radicals Lacan, Laing and Rollo May. Twenty-two years in practice, seventeen of them at St Barts, Lambourne prided himself on keeping up to date with his papers and readings, felt that he was better equipped than most to pick and choose at the smorgasbord of psychoanalysis, return with the plate most suited to his patient.
Lambourne looked around his office. The furniture had hardly changed since St Barts. The same old floral pattern sofa, his upright padded seat chair, a rolled top walnut desk, the dark oak coffee table with a few magazines strategically scattered. Stuffy, country cottage atmosphere which he felt put patients at ease.
Or perhaps it was all just a replica, a home away from home modelled on the Buckinghamshire country house he'd left his wife in their divorce settlement six years previous. Now he was just a weekend father to their two daughters. He'd learnt more about object loss during the divorce than through the years of study and practice; for the first time he'd actually felt what his patients fought to describe in bland monotones. He could help solve their problems, but not his own.
He'd left St Barts a year after the divorce and decided to combine costs by living in. He loved the theatre, and the main theatre areas and Covent Garden were a short stroll away, past old book, stamp and curio shops, and one in particular he'd discovered specializing in old theatre posters.
He never used the armchair, always the straight backed chair. The armchair made him appear too relaxed, distant from his patients; while in the hard back chair, he invariably ended up leaning forward. He looked more interested in them. Throughout the first fourteen years of his practice, he'd smoked a pipe, but with the more responsible age of doctors taking the lead with non-smoking, had given up. He immediately found his pipe hand, his left, at a complete loss, and so sucked at an empty pipe during sessions for another three years, felt that chewing on the mouthpiece helped him concentrate — until one woman patient had been bold enough to question what he was doing. As he'd explained, her puzzled look had made it clear just who of the two of them should be on the couch. So now there was no more pipe, just one orphaned hand.
Jojo? Eyran's imaginary dream friend who always promised he could find Eyran's parents. A simple invention to support non-acceptance of their death, or a possibly threatening secondary personality? Lambourne wondered.
One of the key factors was going to be separation from reality, if any illusions in the dreams started crossing over into Eyran's thoughts while awake. And if they did, to what extent might Eyran accept or adopt them? At present, they were at arm's length. But Jojo trampling through Eyran's conscious thoughts could be disastrous.
There was also the maze of object attachments to fight through: not just Eyran's loss of his parents, but attachments and memories with the house in San Diego, their previous house in England and old play areas — which perhaps due to their closeness to his uncle's house were resurging strongly.
Finding his way through was not going to be easy. He would need to follow the threads carefully in order to draw out Eyran's perception of Jojo in the right way, then press hard to break Eyran away from Jojo's subconscious influence. Yet too hard and all trust and patient transference would be lost.
It was going to be a delicate tightrope, and Eyran would probably resist him all the way. No child wanted to face that their parents were dead, and the dreams and Jojo were probably the only sanctuary Eyran had left.
NINE
The courtyard was in Moorish style, in the Panier quarter of Marseille. Two sides framing the courtyard were the house itself on three floors, the third the blank wall of the adjacent building. The fourth, and the entrance to the courtyard, were large solid wood double gates studded with black iron, with a small door with buzzer inset one side: the brothel's main entrance and all that was visible from the narrow street. Emile Vacheret's establishment was discreet, its facade anonymous, as its many regulars preferred.
The centrepiece of the courtyard was a small fountain edged with blue and white mosaic tiling, and window sills throughout the building had the same pattern edging. Some white doves played and strutted in and around the fountain. While he waited, Alain Duclos looked out through the ground floor french windows towards the fountain and courtyard.
Prostitution was legal, so the anonymity of the building was for the benefit of clients and for the small side attractions offered clients which weren't so legal. The room's cleaners, servants and waiters in the bar were all young boys, mostly from Morocco and Algeria, between the ages of twelve and nineteen — though the youngest age on any identity card was sixteen, in the event of a police raid. Vacheret paid heavily to the local precinct each month. The boys' functions as waiters and room cleaners were mostly a cover; they were also there for the client's pleasure, if so required. For heterosexual clients, which was indeed seventy percent of Vacheret's trade, a choice of girls would be paraded in, and the boys just served drinks and made the beds afterwards.