Joanne Buster once told me I didn’t process emotions like other people. She accused me of an absence of feeling. She didn’t put it quite like that, of course. She did the usual therapist’s thing of asking questions, scattering the breadcrumbs of a diagnosis to lead me down a trail of self-discovery.
‘Might I make an observation, Martin?’ she said, head cocked, beaded earrings dangling.
I nodded, bracing myself for whatever onslaught of stupidity Joanne was about to unleash.
‘I’ve noticed that whenever I ask how an event has made you feel – and sometimes it’s a very traumatic event – you don’t reply with an emotional response but rather with a thought response. It comes from your intellect. Not your heart.’ She paused. ‘How does that land?’
It lands like the least subtle Boeing 737 flown by the world’s most stupid pilot, Joanne, is what I didn’t say.
‘I’m not sure I understand the distinction,’ is what I did.
She went on to tell me that when I spoke about my father dying, or the times my mother had beaten me or the bullying I had experienced at school, I didn’t ever talk about sadness. Instead I spoke ‘very matter-of-factly’ about the events and then moved on to what I had done next.
‘Often, what you did next was revenge-based,’ she said. ‘As if you did feel something but didn’t want to admit it. You struggled to process the emotion, on some level. You pushed it down. Like the bird.’
I’d been expelled from primary school after I had killed an injured bird with a rock. I had done it because the other children, with their fawning but entirely ineffectual concern, had irritated me. The birdwas in pain and I had ended its suffering. At the time, it seemed perfectly logical to me.
‘But, you know, it strikes me now that perhaps you weren’t just angry that your classmates cared about the bird,’ Joanne carried on. ‘Perhaps you were annoyed that no one cared about you and this was your way of saying that?’
I remembered killing the bird because I wanted to. Couldn’t we just leave it at that?
‘It’s OK, Martin,’ she said. ‘I can see I’ve touched a nerve.’
The studied calmness in her voice made me even more irritated.
‘Not everyone experiences emotion in the same way. In fact, some very successful people find that being able to make decisions exclusively from the head rather than the heart’ – at this point, she actually signalled to both her head and her heart, as if I needed help understanding the difference – ‘is a real advantage. But with you, I don’t think it’s that you don’t have the emotions. I think it’s that your defence mechanism refuses to allow you to feel them. And that’s why your responses can sometimes be … well …’ She gave a nauseatingly sympathetic smile. ‘Unexpected. Because, deep down, I think there’s part of you that’s scared of what you feel, of the vulnerability of it. And that’s really what we’re talking about here, isn’t it?’
She let the question float between us.
‘What’s that?’ I asked.
‘Shame,’ she said, staring straight at me.
In the Tipworth kitchen, the eldest child is still folded up on the sofa, a mass of angles and unbrushed hair. Her black jeans have rips across the knees and the flesh beneath is as pale as moonlight. She looks up as I enter.
‘Hi,’ she says, immediately returning to her book.
‘Hello.’
I start opening cupboards, trying to find a glass to pour myself some water. The first cupboard contains plates and a pasta-maker; the second a crowded assortment of espresso cups.
‘On the right above the sink,’ Cosima says.
‘Thanks.’
I locate the glass and fill it from the tap.
‘We’ve got sparkling if you want,’ says the voice from the sofa.
‘No, that’s fine.’
I stand at the sink as I drink, trying to settle my thoughts. There is a vase of sweet peas on the small windowsill and a lumpen piece of purple clay that looks like a toddler’s attempt at an ashtray. It has ‘Tipworth’ painted across the rim in splodgy capital letters. What must it be like, I wonder, to grow up here and to know it all belongs to you?
‘So why aren’t you in there with all the other, y’know, grown-ups?’
She inflects the final word with effortless scorn. I turn towards her. Cosima has now put aside her copy ofThe Communist Manifesto.
‘Is Andrew Jarvis still being as cringe as ever?’ she asks.
