When he came to thinking about it much later, he saw the tint of his boyhood dreams had not been so much amber as sepia. Memories of his grandfather and grandmother, perhaps, of their faintly exotic ways, the ivory cigarette lighter and camphor-scented cigarette boxes, the polished wooden floors and rugs long before such furnishings became fashionable. Of his mother, who was so nearly born abroad. It used to impress him, how close she came to being foreign, as he thought of it. His pregnant grandmother stepping off the boat home in the runup to war. His boyhood adventures took place not in the future, but in some fictional landscape of the past that could equally have been prompted by Tintin, Rider Haggard or any of the adventure books boys his age consumed. Adventures undertaken and survived, which would somehow solve all the things that had been puzzling him, and after which a quieter life began.
Sometime around Adrian’s fifteenth year the imaginings faded, to be replaced by an anxiety, creeping and insidious. Life inside the house slowed and became suffused with a muted quality as his father’s illness progressed. Adrian’s mother’s hopes gathered like clouds above her son’s head. University followed exams. Adrian chose to study close to home to be on hand to help his mother. By the time he began his second year, those of his friends who had taken a year out returned coppery and newly confident, only to depart again to take up their places in university towns far from home.
When he left for Bristol to pursue his clinical training he did so alone in the knowledge of the post he had been offered and had declined at the hospital in a nearby town. At the railway station he turned and watched his mother’s cloth coat disappear into the crowd, back to the closed walls of life with his father. His mother, who was nearly born in a foreign land.
The bird has been hovering for what seems to Adrian a remarkable length of time. With his brush he applies the paint straight on to the paper, sheet after sheet covered in images of the bird. Somebody — Adrian forgets who — once told him that if humans were to fly they would require chest muscles six feet deep to raise their own weight. He wonders now if this could possibly be right. Or if it is one of those beliefs of which there are so many small and large, carried from childhood to adulthood without question. He did know the birds expended such energy in flight they needed to drink twice their body weight in nectar each day. Such effort invested in the mere fact of existence. Sometimes nature’s ways did not bear scrutiny, only the result: a beauty that burst the banks of logic.
Nine o’clock. He swirls his brush into the water, on to his palette, daubs the paper. At the end of the corridor his office awaits. Adrian paints on. The bird’s feathers, now in full sun, appear black, though they are in fact the deepest purple with a metallic sheen he knows he lacks the expertise to capture.
Once his life was guided by train timetables, fifty-minute appointments that ended regardless of whether the timing was good or bad for his client (they were ‘clients’ now, ‘patients’ no longer). An hour for lunch, usually curtailed by staff matters. Two trains home. Twenty minutes and seven minutes, respectively. Perhaps an evening engagement, the hours in which hospitality would be dispensed neatly printed out in black-and-white and posted six weeks in advance. None of that here. In the months before his arrival, in those same hazy visions of his youth, he had imagined lines of patients — patients, not clients — and in responding to his patients’ needs his workload would create itself and he would end each day gratifyingly exhausted. So he had thought. But they have stopped coming now, more or less entirely. And, he suspects, his colleagues have stopped bothering to make referrals. These are the thoughts that swirl in the back of his mind, like the colours of the paint in the water. He came here to help and he is not helping. He is not helping.
He glances at the clock on the wall above the shelf. Standing at the end of the uneven row of paperbacks is a neat group of thicker volumes: Surviving Trauma, the Post-traumatic Stress Disorder Handbook, the World Health Organisation’s Mental Health of Refugees, ICD-10 Classification of Mental and Behavioural Disorders, The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders.
He begins to mix crimson paint and water, adds quantities of Prussian blue.
During his clinical years, Adrian had found himself drawn to the study of stress disorders. As a boy of twelve, around the same time as his adventurous imaginings began, he’d gone through a phase of reading books about the First World War. The stories he read and reread with morbid fascination were those of shell-shocked soldiers being forced back to face the guns or else being shot for cowardice. Once he’d recounted some of those stories for his mother. He remembered it distinctly, she standing making butterscotch pudding at the kitchen counter. In turn, she had recounted her own memories of the Second World War.
Once, Adrian’s mother told him, when her mother was out and she was being minded by a neighbour, the air-raid sirens had sounded. The neighbour, a woman in her forties already yellowed with age and Capstan cigarettes, led her to the air-raid shelter. His mother remembered sitting huddled next to her neighbour upon the cold floor of the shelter, feeling the cold replaced by a flow of warmth, thinking she had wet herself until she realised the urine belonged not to her, but to the neighbour. The pool of liquid slowly turned chill. Sitting in the warm kitchen Adrian could smell the acrid tang of urine, the brick dust and stale air. Later, Adrian read how teams of psychiatrists had accompanied the men to the front during the Second World War. But none for the civilians back home, he thought. Nobody provided psychiatrists for them.
In the last month of Adrian’s third year of clinical studies, a gas leak on an oil rig one hundred and twenty miles off the coast of Aberdeen caused an explosion late one night. The force of the explosion wrenched the platform in two, a torrent of flame rushed upwards into the northern skies. The men trapped on the rig escaped the flames by sliding down the support poles or jumping hundreds of feet into freezing seas overlaid with a slick of burning oil. One hundred and sixty men died. The survivors, who were few in number, struggled to return to their lives. They visited their doctors complaining of nightmares and flashbacks, of sleeplessness, panic attacks, of moods that swung from fear to fury. Several took to drink, one would not be touched by water, stopped washing and hid in his house behind locked doors, another saw his wife and children wearing the faces of his dead colleagues, a third soiled himself at the sight of the sea.
Adrian wrote a paper arguing for a more proactive response from mental health professionals after major disasters and had it accepted for publication. At the time many among his colleagues still described traumatised patients as suffering from nervous shock. The paper won Adrian modest acclaim when it was cited by lawyers preparing a case for compensation against the rig’s owners. What previously had not existed as a classified mental disease eight years earlier suddenly drew the attention of others in his field. Adrian knew he should feel pleased. Instead he felt cold and anxious, as though he had foolishly revealed the whereabouts of something precious.
The years ticked by. Adrian built up a steady private practice alongside his position as a senior clinical psychologist at a London hospital. In his mother’s regard, he had outdone himself. Adrian, though, felt his career oscillate just short of its tipping point.