Part One
I.
Martin
IT’S NOT THAT I HATE MY THERAPIST. Not exactly. If I’m honest with you (which doesn’t come naturally), she doesn’t inspire such extremes of emotion. ‘I find her fatally tedious’ would be more accurate. A jolly little dumpling of a woman: round face, round body and cheeks like a hamster on a particularly nutritious seed binge. I always thought therapists were meant to be removed and emotionally detached. But Mrs Buster (‘Please call me Joanne,’ she tells me repeatedly. ‘Mrs Buster makes me feel so old!’) is quite the opposite. She laughs easily, bosom wobbling. Her eyes go glassy when I say something she finds moving.
‘That’s very moving, Martin,’ she says, in case I haven’t noticed how moved she is.
Every week, she opens the door and greets me with such enthusiasm I don’t know how to respond. No one has ever been this delighted to see me, not even my own mother. Certainly not her.
If you’re new around here, you might not remember my mother. Lord knows, I try my hardest to forget. The late Sylvia Gilmour disapproved of any uncontrolled expression of joy. My mother taught me early on that life was meant to be endured and, if possible, mocked. To revel in any part of one’s shuffle through this mortal coil was to get ideas above one’s station. The fact that my father died before I was born – slipping in the icy street one night in December, triggering a fatal haemorrhage – was proof that she was right. She told me frequently how inconvenient it was to be abandoned in this way and howmuch she had sacrificed to ensure I was fed and clothed and educated. Life was not fun for Sylvia. Life was simply to be got through.
Joanne Buster, by contrast, is naively optimistic about the world. She wears bright jumpers and patterned skirts and has an all-season penchant for a wedge espadrille – the kind with ankle ribbons that dig into her flushed skin. Her therapy room is – like her personality – light and bland, the walls painted magnolia. The pictures on the wall are indeterminate seascapes, designed to be inoffensive and appeal to as many uncritical eyes as possible. The books, too, have been carefully chosen to give an impression of both professional competence and personal approachability. The colour-coded pastel spines reveal such engrossing titles asWhy You Should Never Give Up,Who Am I, Really?,33 Rules for a Life Well LivedandLove Is Not Always Enough.
‘You have to stay in the present, Martin,’ she will say, earrings jingle-jangling. She tends to talk in italics. ‘You have to be kind to yourself. It’s not the destination that counts, it’s the journey. Self-love is everything. The antidote to shame is sharing. Vulnerability is strength, Martin.’
I don’t tell her that every time she says ‘self-love’, I think of masturbation. Come on, it crossed your mind too, didn’t it? Or that when she slings one of these banal aphorisms in my general direction, my intestines shrivel with cringe. No, I keep the real stuff hidden. That’s what I’m writing this for. And what, you might reasonably ask, is ‘this’, exactly? A testimonial? A memoir written in the present? A diary? A clever literary device? I don’t really know, but whatever happens, please, for the love of all that is sacred, let it not be a journal. We have, as my students might say, reached ‘peak journal’. Every time I wander into Ryman I trip over a faux-leather-bound gratitude notebook marketed by a wellness millionaire. But Joanne loves a journal. She says noting down one’s indulgent non sequiturs at the end of every day is ‘good for your mental health’. She is clammy with enthusiasm at the thought of my writing this and, as our sessions are ending soon, I thought I might as well throw her a bone. So here we are.
I don’t know how Joanne would cope if I told her to her face that I’m fundamentally repellent. Unlovable even by my own shoddy standardsand incapable of loving others. I had a lot of affection for Lucy, my ex-wife, but to say it was ever anything stronger than that would be pushing it. The only friend I ever possessed betrayed me and, for years, I wished for nothing so assiduously as Ben Fitzmaurice’s downfall.
No.
I don’t tell her this.
I don’t tell her that I find her silly or that she frequently enrages me with her inability to grasp even the slenderest filaments of what might be described as ‘the point’. I don’t let on that her appearance fills me with mild disgust or that I could get most of what she says from Pinterest. Because at the same time as I hold her in the deepest contempt, I also … well, how can I say this? I quite … like her? It’s bizarre. Her cheerful nature is so dementedly simple. There’s no other side to her. Unlike me. I am all sides. A hall of mirrors in human form.
‘You’re like smoke, LS,’ Ben had said to me once, walking through Cambridge Market Square, arm slung across my shoulders. He called me Little Shadow. LS for short. Because I was always there, but unobtrusively so. ‘You take many forms, don’t you, mate?’ He slapped my chest with his free hand. I flinched, then smiled to disguise the flinching. I remember he was wearing my favourite of his rugby shirts, the collar turned up.
‘You can get everywhere – under doors, through window cracks – and then you just slip away – poof! The magical mystery man.’
He meant it as a compliment. At least, that’s how I heard it back then. Now, I’m not so sure.
The truth is, I wouldn’t be here with call-me-Joanne if I hadn’t been forced to come. But the university is insistent I do twelve sessions in order to tackle what they obliquely term my ‘cultural sensitivity issues’, and so, here I find myself, every Wednesday afternoon at two-thirty, staring into Joanne Buster’s irrepressibly jovial face and trying as hard as I possibly can not to lose my temper.
‘So, Martin, what do you want to talk about today?’
Joanne is perched on the edge of her armchair, which is upholstered in a roseate velvet beloved of women who believe feminism hassuccessfully reclaimed the colour pink. On Saturday, Joanne posted a photo on Instagram of a bottle of Prosecco cooling in an ice bucket in her back garden, captioned: ‘Bubbles & babes: getting ready for an evening with #thegirls’. The girls in question were not pictured, but I can imagine them: blonde highlights covering the perimenopausal greys. Chunky statement necklaces and pashminas purchased from museum gift shops. She doesn’t know I’ve found her private Instagram account. All it took was a bit of searching, then I set up a fake profile of my own, pretending to be a female therapist in her early forties, and she readily accepted my follow request.
‘Martin?’ She tries again. I realise I haven’t yet uttered a word.
‘Yes?’
‘Anything on your mind this week?’
‘Many, many things,’ I say.
Joanne laughs.
‘Great. What shall we start with?’
I exhale. My leg, involuntarily, begins to jiggle.
‘I suppose we might as well discuss the incident.’
Joanne nods.
‘Good. I’m glad you’re ready to go there.’
