Something to Tell You

  Lisa was sitting on the edge of my analytic couch, waiting for these banalities to pass before she went into her rehearsed rap.

  “We know better than anyone how to take care of him, while your family has been negligent.” She seemed to hesitate there but I knew she’d hardly started. “But why would you worry about our little problems? I know you spend a lot of time thinking about the dreadful dilemmas of film stars and celebrities. Didn’t they call you, in a newspaper, therapist to the stars?”

  I said, “You know it’s not like that, though I have to admit that I’ve used my work to be with people who interest me. Just this morning I was wondering whether Kate Moss might like to see me. How could anyone not envy me that? Anyhow, I didn’t see the thing in the newspaper. Did you?”

  “Of course not.”

  Over the years several sportsmen had approached me. Having gone to the trouble to learn about their bodies, they assumed their minds could also be trained to obedience. It was when this didn’t work—when, as it were, they became curious about the mind-body relation—that they asked for help.

  The incident Lisa was referring to involved a footballer I saw a few times. He had been followed to my place; photographs of him at my door, with half of Maria’s head behind him, had appeared in the papers. His unhappiness was mocked all over. He was called mad.

  She said, “The little difficulties of the famous must be hell. But my father has stopped seeing his old friends. They bored him for years, apparently. These people are famous and high up in their field. But they are not pierced. He has resigned from two boards. As for those places he and Miriam go to together—”

  “Places?”

  “Fetish clubs. They are squalid and the people there riddled with disease. You think the women who go there want to be doing that? It’s rape, their husbands forcing them to have sex with dozens of people.”

  Which of Lear’s daughters was she? I wondered how long I’d be able to resist the pleasure of giving her a little verbal slap.

  “You’re worrying about your father,” I said. “He’s changed a little. Everything will calm down.”

  “Fuck that patronising analyst quackery.”

  Her mother’s tongue had been passed on like an heirloom.

  I said, “Quackery?”

  She was looking at the postcard of Freud I kept on my desk, sent to me by an enthusiastic patient. “Freud’s been discredited over and over. Patient envy—” She stopped. “Penis envy, I mean. Jesus.”

  Despite herself, she laughed.

  “What a lot of fallacious cock, you mean?” I said, laughing too.

  “Jamal, my father loves you. He even listens to you. Valerie too. But my father is not in a good way, and you must take some responsibility.”

  That word. Responsibility. When I watched Miriam on her TV “agonies,” it was the most used word, apart from I. Owning your acts. Seeing yourself as an actor rather than a victim. I am all for responsibility; who wouldn’t be? We are all responsible for ourselves. But what are our selves? Where do they begin and how far do they extend?

  “Yes,” I said. “He is responsible for what he does. Not me. Certainly not you. Him. Just him. You and I,” I said, getting up and moving towards the door, “are irrelevant here. We must be happy for them both and for the joy they give one another. Let’s hope they marry—or at least live together.”

  “Marry? Live together! Are you insane? Those two? Where did you get such an idea from? Is it likely?!”

  I was being mischievous. She irritated me; I could only inflame her.

  I said, “I like to see others contented.”

  She was already gathering her things. She asked me if I minded her taking something home. It was the teabag I’d used earlier, which she wanted to put in her “compost” box. She squeezed it out before dropping it in a pocket of her rucksack.

  At the door she said, “I will not let my father be destroyed.”

  There was mud on the floor from her boots. She also “forgot” one of her rucksacks. My patients often left umbrellas and coats, as well as change, lighters, condoms, Tampaxes and other stuff which dropped out of their pockets onto my couch. It was a form of payment as well as of relationship. I knew Lisa would be back.

  She returned two days later.

  “Thank you for putting up with me,” she said, as though I’d had a choice. She sat on the couch, dragging her skirt up over her boots, another colourful thing, ethnic, like me. She was watching me looking at her legs and smiled. “Did you know Valerie’s got an Ingres drawing on her bedroom wall? It’s lost in a mess of other stuff, some valuable things, family photographs and so on, but it’s there. That’s insouciance for you. You have any idea what it’s worth?” I said nothing as she looked at me. “Valerie says you’re a sphinx without a secret. Aren’t you the one who is ‘supposed to know’?” She paused. “You nodded then, but tell me, how do you sustain that stillness, Jamal? The way you’re just there. Did you learn it?”

  “I don’t think I ever did.”

  “You never fidget, your hands don’t fuss, your brown eyes are steady. They’re soft but merciless. And that little Gioconda smile of yours, which seems to know everything as you hear everything…It’s enough to convince a girl you could hear her soul murmuring. I bet all your patients want to be like you.” She was smiling at me. “I could sit with you for a long time, surrounded by books, CDs and these lovely pictures.”

  “They’re all by friends.”

  “The sketches?”

  “My wife, Josephine.”

  “And your son’s work too. So many photographs of him! Unlike my mother’s friends, you’re not showing off your wealth or power.” Silence. “You’re not supposed to give advice,” she said. “You shamans don’t even like to admit you can cure—if indeed you can.”

  I said, “The difference between therapy and analysis is that in therapy the therapist thinks he knows what’s good for you. In analysis you discover that for yourself.”

  “What would you say if you had a patient who was destroying himself?”

  “I would warn him.”

  She said, “Jamal, please, will you see me? As a patient, I mean.”

  I told her there were good analysts I could recommend, but I couldn’t see her. I would phone her with suggestions. If she was in a hurry, I could find a couple of phone numbers right now.

  She said, “Why are you refusing to help me? I took your two books from Mother’s house and read them. I’ve studied your essays on the Internet. Like all good artists, you make me believe you are writing for only me.” She went on: “Will you answer this? What happens when you feel that the conversations you have are the wrong conversations with the wrong people?”

  I noticed that, while I was looking through my address book, finding a pen and paper, she had put her feet up on the couch and lain down.

  “Lisa.”

  “But I have to tell you what happened.”

  “What happened when?”

  “When I called Henry and we agreed to have dinner at that place near Riverside Studios. She was there when I arrived.”

  “Who?”

  “Your beloved sister. She’s uninvited, but never mind, she starts to talk. Capricorn rising, or was it falling? Wizards she has known. Belly-dancing lessons. Posh Spice as a goldfish. Botox and how to get it cheap. Big Brother. On and on. A talking tabloid. He listens to every word. I think: How does he know what Big Brother is? She records it for him. How sweet! Then you know what he does?”

  “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 tal
ks 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.

  She knew, too, that she was ugly and stupid and rank and worthless, and no man could get his head around her, but she couldn’t stomach any more rejection and she must not be insulted by Lisa again. After feeling loved for the first time in her life, she wasn’t strong enough to survive Lisa’s hatred.

  At the other end of the phone, Henry didn’t know where he was, but he knew what he wanted, which was for her not to be hurt and for them to be
together, continuing the life they had started. He started to weep and beg but he couldn’t make himself clear and the phone line went dead.

  A little later I was watching the Champions League on TV, as well as taking some of this in, while waiting for Rafi to find his shoes and re-prepare his hair, when Henry came in, looking wild, as though he’d got caught in a storm.

  He was in Miriam’s arms right away, and they were sobbing, apologising, squeezing each other’s buttocks and Henry wailing, “But I will never reject you, never! You know that! You are my sweet, my soul, my sausage! For you I would become an outlaw from everyone—from my entire family! How could you think I would let you down when I want us to marry!”

  “You’re just trying to cheer me up—”

  “No, no—”

  Rafi came in and looked at them, amazed.

  It wasn’t long before the two of them were making phone calls, working out where they’d go that night to “play.”

  “By the way,” said Henry to me, patting his pockets as I was leaving, “I found the tickets for the Stones. We’re definitely going!”

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Despite my sympathy for Henry’s suffering, I had to say, “What could be more gratifying to a man than to have two women fighting over him? It would be worse if they got along!”

  He was shocked. “No pleasure without a price willingly paid? I hate to admit that you are right, but maybe you have a point,” he said, with some relief. “And at my age! All Lotharios cause chaos. None of them make a smoother world! These are the knock-ons of desire! As long as the women don’t go too far, how can I complain? Most people are far too well behaved,” he said confidently. “They go to their graves wondering whether they should have caused more harm to others, knowing they should. Jamal, thank you for your support! I’m sorry I brought such chaos to your sister’s life.”