“What?”
“He shows me the tickets he’s got for the Rolling Stones.”
“Did he say whether he got me one?”
“What is Dad doing-regressing to another adolescence? She has stolen him. He missed my childhood, having better people to be with. But in the past two years we were lunching once a week. Now he doesn’t see me, doesn’t need my advice. When I do get him to lunch, that woman’s there! He apologises, sees what I’m saying. He agrees to meet me. But he talks about her again, her arthritic hands, her agony. He says this awful thing: ‘But Miriam has liberated me from my horrible bourgeois upbringing. Almost everything I believed was stupid, wrong, sterile!’”
“There’s no room for you?”
“I tell him, if you don’t sort this out I’m going to do something!”
“Here,” I said, as she gathered her things to leave. “Take this number. This therapist is a friend who writes well.”
She looked at the piece of paper, folded it and put it in her pocket. “You have remarkable faith in these people.”
I said, “The early analysts really thought about the structure of the human mind, about what it is to be a child, to be sexual, to be with others-to live in society, or civilisation, as a gendered animal, and to have to die. They knew that every hour of the past, as Proust puts it, is inscribed on the body, indeed, makes the body. There’s nothing more important or absorbing, is there?”
I picked up biographies of Melanie Klein and Anna Freud, and gave them to her. “They are fascinating women, pioneers. Radical intellectuals.”
“Thank you,” she said. “It’s been a long time since anyone’s given me direction. My parents just expected me to be successful.”
She went on: “Before our ‘clients’ see me, they visit their doctors, who prescribe medication which the patient may take for years.”
I said, “Someone splits up with their girlfriend and they’re given a pharmacological concoction, as though pain were unnatural.”
She said, “Doctors haven’t got time to take a history. They are with each patient for ten minutes. So I listen, but I am there all morning. Then I get into trouble for being slow.”
I said, “Freud’s revolution was in the fact he didn’t drug people, hypnotise them or give them advice, which would have infantilised them. He listened. He wrote down their stories.”
The next time I saw Henry I told him that Lisa had been to see me.
“Don’t you think I love to see Lisa too?” he said, worriedly. “Now she calls me a deluded bastard. I am only a fool because I want them all to get along. I am, I know, ignoring basic human nature.”
We both wanted to talk of other things, and we did, but that was not the end of it. I didn’t believe Lisa would see the therapist I’d recommended, but she was in a worse state than I’d thought.
The day after, Rafi and I went to visit Miriam. When Rafi was downloading ringtones with the other kids, I looked over at Miriam-sitting at the table-and could see her hands were shaking.
“Who’s bothering you, my love?”
“Lisa came over. She is a very naughty girl, that one. As she’s Henry’s daughter, I took it easy with her.”
“How easy?” I said, uneasily.
I wanted to eat and to relax, but Miriam was giving me a mephitic vibe. At least she poured me a drink.
I said, “Where is Lisa now?”
“In Casualty. I expect her parents are flapping around her.”
“How did she get there-Casualty?”
“How d’you think?” said Miriam. I got up to leave. She grabbed me. “Please stay, Brother. You know I need you tonight.”
After visiting me the second time, Lisa had rung Miriam and asked to see her. While Miriam was thinking over whether this was a good idea, as well as wondering whether she should talk to Henry first, Lisa walked in. She must have been on her bicycle in the street.
She came right into Miriam’s kitchen and sat down. “In my fucking face-right there!” Looking at Bushy and indicating the door, Lisa said the two of them needed to talk alone. So Bushy shuffled out to mess around with his car, but he was not far away, having an instinct.
Lisa started off by apologising for intruding and so on. But it wasn’t long before she told Miriam to lay off her father. She begged. She wept. She mentioned the heart attack. Then she made her first serious mistake, offering Miriam money. She offered her two grand not to see him again.
Miriam asked why Lisa thought she needed her money.
Lisa-who visited the poor and dispossessed every day-looked around at the falling-down house, bursting with animals and children, with some disdain, as her mother might have done. I knew what Miriam meant. Hearing this, even I got an electric jolt of very bad karma, and the taste of vomit on my tongue.
Lisa was, by now, testing Miriam’s patience, never a good idea. According to Miriam, Lisa was sweaty, hairy and probably dirty between her toes. “I should have asked her to weed the garden.”
Certainly, Lisa was making a mistake with Miriam, thinking she was a pushover. Lisa went further: she said that Miriam was only interested in her father’s fame and money. If Henry were nobody, Miriam would have no interest in him. She was implying that Miriam was a kind of groupie, a whore even.
Miriam was getting hot inside her head. But she loved Henry, she’d never adored a man so much. She didn’t want things to get too mad; after all, Lisa was his flesh and blood, and this fight would tear him apart. Just get the bitch out of here, she thought, that’s all I have to do.
She ordered Lisa to leave the house. She said this in a loud voice, giving her one minute to get out, with the rider that she would set the dogs on her. They were barking outside already, but Lisa tried to continue the conversation. However, Miriam isn’t one of those middle-class talky bitches who’ll go on and on until everyone’s paralysed. Inside her broiling head, a limit had been reached.
Her fingers were creeping towards one of her numerous mobiles and before she knew it, it was airbound. She had flung it at Lisa’s face, a lucky hit, which cracked her lover’s daughter’s cheekbone. Then Miriam threw other things-pill bottles, videos, books on astrology-which smacked Lisa in different places about the head.
Lisa turned round and came back at her. She’s strong: she rows, practises women’s boxing. The kids were screaming. Miriam had lost it. Lisa was going mad, taking up postures, her fists flashing. Bushy jammed himself in there, stopping a catfight, throwing his body between them before the knives were out.
He hustled Lisa out before anything worse happened-threw her out into the street in the direction of her bicycle, which, it being a bad neighbourhood, now had no wheels or saddle, was the skeleton of a bicycle. Bushy then took hold of a piece of wood and held it up, defending the house! Behind him, Miriam had come out with a knife and was threatening to rip up Lisa’s smug, middle-class face, reckoning she would look better with some ventilation!
I was twitching with agony over this when my mobile rang. It was Henry, whose calls I hadn’t had time to take that day. I could hardly make out what he was saying. He was stressed out, stoned on dope and trancs, and on top of this, somehow he’d mislaid his tickets for the Stones. He’d turned the flat upside down and didn’t know what to do. Lisa had been ringing him, screaming that she was at the hospital and then at the police station making a statement. She was trying to get Miriam arrested for abuse, assault and attempted murder, and Henry was trying to get her to lay off.
I did work out that Lisa had said to Henry, “You’re killing me!”
“I am killing you?”
“Yes!” And she added, “You wouldn’t like it if you found me strung up by the neck one night!”
During the day Miriam had been telling Henry that it was too much for her too. She loved Henry but would not see him until he chilled the daughter out. She was sorry that Henry had got caught between two women, but she felt at the moment that she wanted to separate. She couldn’t have that madwoman coming round her house scaring the children and animals.