“It’s going to fall down.”
“Why would it fall down?”
“I don’t know.”
“What is the bridge made of?”
“Steel and rivets and concrete.”
“How long has it been there?”
“Years and years.”
“Has it ever fallen down?”
“No.”
Each session lasts fifty minutes and I have ten minutes to write up my notes before my next patient arrives. Meena, my secretary, is like an atomic clock, accurate to the last second.
“A minute lost is a minute gone forever,” she says, tapping the watch pinned to her breast.
Anglo-Indian, but more English than strawberries and cream, she dresses in knee-length skirts, sensible shoes and cardigans. And she reminds me of the girls I knew at school who were addicted to Jane Austen novels and always daydreaming about meeting their Mr. Darcy.
She’s been with me since I left the Royal Marsden and started in private practice, but I’m losing her soon. She and her cats are off to open a bed-and-breakfast in Bath. I can just imagine the place— lace doilies under every vase, cat figurines and the toast soldiers in neat ranks beside every three-minute egg.
Meena is organizing the interviews for a new secretary. She has narrowed them down to a short list, but I know I’ll have trouble deciding. I keep hoping that she’ll change her mind. If only I could purr.
At three o’clock I glance around the waiting room.
“Where’s Bobby?”
“He hasn’t arrived.”
“Did he call?”
“No.” She tries not to meet my eyes.
“Can you try to find him? It’s been two weeks.”
I know she doesn’t want to make the call. She doesn’t like Bobby. At first I thought it was because he didn’t turn up for appointments, but it’s more than that. He makes her nervous. Maybe it’s his size or the bad haircut or the chip on his shoulder. She doesn’t really know him. Then again, who does?
Almost on cue, he appears in the doorway, with his odd-legged shuffle and an anxious expression. Tall and overweight, with flax-brown hair and metal-framed glasses, his great pudding of a body is trying to burst out of a long overcoat made shapeless by its bulging pockets.
“Sorry I’m late. Something came up.” He glances around the waiting room, still unsure whether to step inside.
“Something came up for two weeks?”
He makes eye contact with me and then turns his face away.
I’m used to Bobby being defensive and enclosed, but this is different. Instead of keeping secrets he’s telling lies. It’s like closing the shutters in front of someone and then trying to deny they exist.
I take a quick inventory— his shoes are polished and his hair is combed. He shaved this morning, but the dark shadow has returned. His cheeks are red from the cold, but at the same time he’s perspiring. I wonder how long he spent outside, trying to get up the courage to come and see me.
He walks into my office and stands in front of my bookshelves, perusing the titles. Most of them are reference books on psychology and animal behavior. Eventually he stops and taps the spine of a book, The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud.
“I thought Freud’s views had been pretty much discredited these days.” He has the faintest hint of a northern accent. “He couldn’t tell the difference between hysteria and epilepsy.”
“It wasn’t one of his best calls. Where have you been Bobby?”
“I got scared.”
“Why?”
He shrugs. “I had to get away.”
“Where did you go?”
“Nowhere.”
I don’t bother pointing out the contradiction. He’s full of them. Restless hands look for somewhere to hide and escape into his pockets, pushing them out of shape.
“Do you want to take off your coat?”
“It’s OK.”
“Well at least sit down.”
He looks at the chair suspiciously and then folds himself down into it, with his knees facing sideways toward the door.
Apart from my own notes, there is very little paperwork in Bobby’s file. There is a letter from a GP in north London who first picked up the case after Bobby complained of “disturbing nightmares” and a sense of being “out of control.” He was then sent to Jock Owen, one of London’s finest neurologists and my oldest friend. Jock did all the scans and could find nothing wrong, so he referred Bobby to me.
His exact words to me were: “Don’t worry, he’s insured. You might actually get paid.”
The notes tell me that he’s twenty-two years of age, with no history of mental illness or habitual drug use. He has above average intelligence, is in good health and lives in a long-term relationship with Arky, his fiancée. Apart from that I have a basic history— born in London, educated at government schools, O levels, night classes, odd jobs as a delivery driver and clerk. He and Arky live in a tower block in Hackney. She has a little boy and works at the candy bar in the local cinema. Apparently it was Arky who convinced him to seek help. Bobby’s nightmares were getting worse. He woke screaming in the night, hurtling out of bed and crashing into walls, as he tried to escape his dreams.
Before the summer we seemed to be getting somewhere. Then Bobby disappeared for three months and I thought he was gone for good. He turned up five weeks ago, with no appointment or explanation. He seemed happier. He was sleeping better. The nightmares were less severe.
Now something is wrong. He sits motionless, but his flicking eyes don’t miss a thing.
“What’s happened?”
“Nothing.”
“Is something wrong at home?”
He blinks. “No.”
“What then?”
I let the silence work for me. Bobby fidgets, scratching at his hands as though something has irritated his skin. Minutes pass and he grows more and more agitated.
I give him a direct question to get him started.
“How is Arky?”
“She reads too many magazines.”
“Why do you say that?”
“She wants the modern fairy tale. You know all that bullshit they write in women’s magazines— telling them how to have multiple orgasms, hold down a career and be a perfect mother. It’s all crap. Real women don’t look like fashion models. Real men can’t be cut out of magazines. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be— a new age man or a man’s man. You tell me! Am I supposed to get drunk with the boys or cry at sad movies? Do I talk about sports cars or this season’s colors? Women think they want a man but instead they want a reflection of themselves.”
“How does that make you feel?”
“Frustrated.”
“Who with?”
“Take your pick.” His shoulders hunch and his coat collar brushes his ears. His hands are in his lap now, folding and unfolding a piece of paper, which has worn through along the creases.
“What have you written?”
“A number.”
“What number?”
“Twenty-one.”
“Can I see it?”
He blinks rapidly and slowly unfolds the page, pressing it flat against his thigh and running his fingers over the surface. The number “21” has been written hundreds of times, in tiny block figures, fanning out from the center to form the blades of a windmill.
“Do you know that a dry square piece of paper cannot be folded in half more than seven times,” he says, trying to change the subject.
“No.”
“It’s true.”
“What else are you carrying in your pockets?”
“My lists.”
“What sort of lists?”
“Things to do. Things I’d like to change. People I like.”
“And people you don’t like?”
“That too.”
Some people don’t match their voices and Bobby is one of them. Although a big man, he seems smaller because his voice isn’t particularly deep and his shoulders shrink when he leans forward.