She had turned up late to the philosophy lecture where I met her because although she was reading law, she needed another “module” to complete her course. She didn’t love philosophy, as I’d hoped she would. She didn’t see the point of it, though she was amused by my attempts to explain it to her.
“Isn’t it about the wisdom of living, and about what is right and wrong?” she’d say.
“If only,” I’d reply. “I guess you’ll have to go to the psychology department for that, though you can’t change courses now. For me philosophy is to do with Aristotle’s idea that the desire for pleasure is at the centre of the human situation. But philosophy as it’s taught is, I am afraid, about concepts. About how we know the world, for instance. Or about what knowing is—how we know what we know. Or about what we can say about knowing that makes sense.” Having nearly exhausted myself earning her bafflement, I went personal. “I want to know you. Everything about you. But how will I ever know that I know everything about you?”
“You wouldn’t want to know me inside out,” she said abruptly.
“Why’s that?”
“It would put you off me.”
“How do you know?”
“It just would, I’m telling you.”
“You have secrets?” I said.
“Don’t ask.”
“Now I have to ask. I’m bursting, Ajita.”
She was smiling at me. “Curiosity killed the cat, didn’t it?”
“But cats just have to know, don’t they? It’s their nature. If they don’t shove their faces in that bag, they will go crazy.”
“But it isn’t being good for them, sweetie.”
I said, “The good isn’t always something you can decide in advance.”
“In this case it definitely is. Now stop it!”
I was looking at her hard, surprised by how defiant she was. She was almost always soft with me, kissing and caressing me as we spoke. We had this conversation behind her garage, where, unseen from the house, there was a little garden, which no one used, with a decent patch of grass. When spring came and it got warm, we made it the secret place where we’d lie out listening to Radio 1 before driving to London for lunch.
Though we were dark-skinned enough to be regularly insulted around the neighbourhood, often from passing cars, we started to enjoy sun-bathing naked, close to everything we needed—music, drinks, her aunt’s food. Often Ajita would bring a bag of clothes out into the garden. Love through my eyes: she was teaching me the erotics of looking. She liked her own body then, and liked to show it, posing with her clothes pulled down or open, or with her ankles, throat or wrists lightly tied.
To me, the time we spent outside was a celebration. We’d survived the hard work of our childhood—parents, school, continuous obedience, terror—and this was our holiday before embarking on adulthood. We were still kids who behaved like kids. We’d chase and tickle one another, and pull each other’s hair. We’d watch each other pee, have spaghetti-eating competitions and egg-and-spoon races with our underwear around our ankles. Then we’d collapse laughing, and make love again. We had come through our childhood. Or had we?
Had Ajita’s aunt been looking—and I often wondered whether she was; someone seemed to be watching us—she’d have seen Ajita lying there with her eyes closed and me on my knees, kissing her up and down her body, her lips parting in approval. All day I played in her skin, until I believed that, blindfolded, I would know her flesh from that of a hundred women.
I did often wonder about Ajita’s aunt, and the way she crept invisibly about the house with her head covered. I guess she’d have communicated with me in some way, had I been younger. As a child, when my Indian aunts had visited London, they’d pored over me, kissing and pulling me perpetually, certainly more than my mother did. Who, though, did the aunt talk to properly? Certainly not Ajita or her brother. She washed and cooked for them, but didn’t eat with them. Mostly she was alone in her room, more of a servant than a member of the family. I guess I believed, even then, in the necessity of conversation; believed, in fact, that she suffered for having no one to talk to.
There seemed to be no one else around. The neighbourhood appeared to be deserted, kids at school, adults at work. We’d have the radio on low, and occasionally we’d even glance at our college books. Otherwise all there was to look at was the sky and the house opposite. I observed that house and the couple who lived there for days without really seeing it, until it occurred to me that if my life in crime was to start—and I thought it should; with Wolf and Valentin I kept thinking I had to prove myself, to become tough like them—it could begin there.
Then I started to ask Ajita more questions. The things I wanted to know were the things she didn’t want me to know. Where she had warned me off, I needed to go.
It was around this time, after we had been together a couple of months, that things began to get even stranger, and I began to feel I was in the middle of something I would never be able to understand.
Everyone has their heart torn apart, sometime.
CHAPTER FIVE
“A call for you, Dr. Khan,” said Maria.
She was my sentry, and never normally called me to the phone at this time unless it was a potential suicide—every analyst’s fear, and something many have had to deal with.
I would say that an analyst without a maid is no good to anyone; nor is an analyst without a shabby room. On the one occasion that he went to visit Freud, in 1921, André Breton, after circling Freud’s building for days, was determinedly disappointed by the great man: by his building, by his antiquities, his office, his size. (Breton’s colleague Tristan Tzara called Freud’s profession “psychobanalysis.”) Jacques Lacan’s circumstances—the worn carpet, and the phallic driftwood on his waiting room table—were often similarly disappointing to visitors. One expects to find a magician or magus and finds merely a man. Analysis is at least an exercise in disillusionment.
We were having lunch: cold salmon, salad, bread and wine, a week after Rafi and I had been to Miriam’s place. Henry had come over for talk and distraction.
Now Maria was holding out the telephone. “Mr. Bushy is outside.”
“I see. Thank you.” When I put the phone down, I said to Henry, “It’s for you. Bushy’s brought you the supplies you asked for.”
“Ah. Supplies. At last. What does Baudelaire call it? ‘The longing for the infinite…’ Bring it on!”
There was considerable jangling in the hall, like someone pouring a bag full of coins down a metal chute. That wouldn’t be Bushy. As an ex-burglar, he was a quiet man. It was Miriam herself, clearly wearing all her jewellery at once, and up on both legs, too, without the sticks she sometimes used. In she came, removing her black crushed-velvet cloak and handing it to Maria, who gave her the respect she’d have accorded any queen I admired, male or female.
Miriam was wrapped in layers of flashing semi-psychedelic clothing along with a black, Goth, spiderweb top. Her wild hair was freshly streaked with red and blue, her face studs sparkling, a renovation which must have caused her considerable trouble.
“I was in a cage with the black wolf this morning,” she said as she swept in. “Close to his spirit. He was looking away, to the east, worrying about those being blown up in the war. He said I should come here. Connections needed to be made. I had to bring this myself.”
“Right,” said Henry, looking at her eagerly. I have to say it surprised me to see Miriam come in by herself. Like any other celebrity, she didn’t like to be seen alone, and because she was infirm she usually had a smaller person on each side of her, upon whom she could rest.
Henry seemed impressed. “Absolutely.”
We leaned towards it. The “infinite” was in the exquisite wooden box she held out in front of her. I recognised it. Our mother, with her passion for markets and antiques, had collected anything “Eastern” and held on to it. “It was only the husband who got away” was my response to her incessant dusting of various items of chinois
erie.
She gave him the box. “Here, Henry.”
“Miriam, darling, you are a good person!”
“I am, I am—but only you appreciate it!”
You should have seen it—the two of them suddenly in each other’s arms, long lost.
Miriam sat beside Henry, opened the box and unwrapped some grass. She offered it to his nose—a nose which had travelled the length and breadth of France in search of wine, with actor pals resilient enough to enjoy his monologues.
“Against death and authoritarianism there is only one thing,” he said once. “Love?” I suggested. “Culture, I was going to say,” he said. “Far more important. Any clown can fall in love or have sex. But to write a play, paint a Rothko or discover the unconscious—aren’t these extraordinary feats of imagination, the only negation of the human desire to murder?”
Now he swooned and his chins wobbled over the simplest thing.
“What d’you feel?” Miriam asked.
“Oh, Miriam, it’s your fingers I am admiring.”
“I know.”
“Where did you get the black nail varnish?”
“Wait, wait,” urged Miriam. “Here.”
Henry leaned forward, her anxiety drawing him. “What is it?”
Maria and I watched her place both hands on Henry’s head. She shook her own head sorrowfully: Henry’s discontent was vibrating in her fingertips.
“What is it?” said Henry. “Genius? Cancer? A jinn?”
“What sign are you?” she asked. This was not a good question to ask Henry, but she went on quickly, “Have you seen a ghost recently?”
“A ghost?” he said. “Of course!”
“How many?”
“You really want to know?”
“I can say you are definitely inhabited!” she said firmly.
“I always knew it,” he said. “But only you recognise it!”
“But not possessed.”
“No? Not possessed?”
I could see that Maria, listening from the door, was about to panic. I took a last mouthful of food, glanced at my watch and said, “I must go for my walk.”
Outside, Bushy was standing across the road leaning against his car, smoking. I waved and called out. Seeing me, he gathered himself together; his mouth began to work, no doubt a dream emerging from it.
“Want a lift?” he shouted. He was coming over, but I kept moving. He was beside me. “’Ere,” he said. “You know all about it—I’m having more sex now than I’ve ever had! A man without his dick up someone is no good to no one.”
“I’m glad to hear it, Bushy,” I said, scuttling away.
When I returned from my walk, just before my first patient of the afternoon arrived, Henry and my sister had gone. Maria was clearing up. She said that Bushy had driven them down to the river at Hammersmith, where there was a pub, the Dove, that Henry knew. “No doubt,” she said with some disapproval, “they’ll be spending the afternoon there.”
“Good,” I said, going into my room. “Can you show the patient in, please?”
CHAPTER SIX
A man goes to an analyst and says, “Please, sir, I am desperate, if you cure me I will give you my fortune!” The analyst replies, “I don’t want your fortune, just fifty pounds a session.” The man says, “Why so much?” To which the analyst answers, “At least you know the price.”
My patients are businessmen, hookers, artists, teenagers, magazine editors, actors, PR people, a woman of eighty, a psychiatrist, a car mechanic, a footballer, and three children, amongst others. When I greet a patient at the door and follow them into my room, waiting while they prepare to either sit or lie on the couch—I prefer them to lie down; as Freud said: “I don’t like to be stared at for eight hours a day”—I am eager to hear what they have to say, and keen for it to go well between us.
As a therapist, what sort of knowledge do I have? What I do is old-fashioned, almost quaint, compared to the technological and scientific medicine now available. Though I do no examination and offer no drugs, I am like a traditional doctor in that I treat the whole person rather than only the illness. Indeed, I am the drug, and part of the cure. Not that most people want to be cured. Their illnesses provide them with more satisfaction than they can bear. Patients are unconscious artists of their own misery, and what they call their symptom is, in fact, their life, and they’d better love it!
Some people would rather be shot than speak. All I can do is let the subjects speak for a long time; both of us taking their words seriously, knowing that even when they are speaking the truth they are lying, and that when they speak of someone else they are speaking of themselves.
I ask questions about the family, right back to the grandparents. Where can suffering people turn now for the disorders of desire?
In the end, what qualifies someone for analysis? Ultimately it is the most human thing, the recognition of inexplicable pain and some curiosity about one’s inner life. How could analysis not be difficult? To have lived in a particular way for years, decades even, and then to try to undo it through talking is significant labour. Not that it always works; there is no guarantee, nor should there be. There is always risk.
Alas, to the surprise of many, psychoanalysis doesn’t make people behave better, nor does it make them morally good. It may well make them more of a nuisance, more argumentative, more demanding, more aware of their desire and less likely to accept the dominion of others. In that sense it is subversive and emancipatory. But then there are few people who, when they are old, wish they’d lived a more virtuous life. From what I hear in my room, most people wish they’d sinned more. They also wish they’d taken better care of their teeth.
A smart, well-off, intelligent woman had asked to see me. She sat back neatly on the couch rather than on the edge, as other, more anxious patients tend to, and addressed me as though interviewing me for a job. She told me a little about her situation before saying she had come because her husband was “having difficulties” with his work. Many people see analysts because of work-related problems; it is only later they reveal their emotional and sexual difficulties. However, she did not believe she had contributed anything to her husband’s plight but wanted to “talk it over.” She was, she kept insisting, “normal” or “not abnormal at all.”
Later, on my walk, I wondered why I felt I had to be suspicious of “normality.” The striking thing about the normal is that there is nothing normal about it: normality is the gentrification of ordinary madness—ask any Surrealist. In analysis “the normal child” is often synonymous with the obedient good child, the one who only wants to please the parents and develops what Winnicott called “a false self.” According to Henry, obedience is one of the problems of the world, not the solution, as so many have thought. But couldn’t there be a definition of the normal which didn’t equate it with the ordinary or uninspiring? Or which wasn’t coercive or ridiculously prim?
It was, of course, in the nature of my work to spend time with “nutters,” as Miriam put it, just as medical doctors work with sick bodies. But, as Freud said, and as experience had taught me, my patients were not in a separate category to everyone else. It was those who didn’t seek help who were most likely to be mad or dangerous. I was reminded of a story about Proust at the end of his life, wildly looking through the pages of Remembrance of Things Past in despair as he saw how eccentric, if not abnormal, all his characters were. As though one could make a novel, or indeed a society, out of the dull and merely conventional.
My work with the “normal” woman would be to help turn her into a poet: she’d see what was puzzling but also fascinating in the experience she wanted to dismiss as “normal,” even as she attempted to convince both of us that the “normal” was beyond inquiry.
Unlike the “normal” woman, I have never stopped being amazed by the nature and variety of human pleasure, the most difficult problem of all. I am visited by a foot fetishist and compulsive masturbator who was about to lose his job, so much time did
he spend in the toilet; a couple of men who dress as women; a powerful businessman who risked everything in order to secretly watch women through windows; a girl terrified of cats; a patient who had a breakdown on being informed for the first time, at the age of thirty, that her mother had always had a glass eye; the promiscuous, the frigid, the panicked, the vertiginous; abusers and the abused, cutters, starvers, vomiters, the trapped and the too free, the exhausted and the overactive and those committed for life to their own foolishness. I hear from all of them. I am an autobiographer’s assistant, midwife to my patients’ fantasies, reopening their wounds, setting free their voices, making an erotics of speaking, unmasking their truths as illusions. Analysis makes the familiar strange, and makes us wonder where dreams end and reality begins, if, indeed, reality ever does begin.
I saw my first analyst, a Pakistani called Tahir Hussein, a few months after I’d left university and things had gone more than just weird with Ajita. I have to say—I was in great need.
Ajita and I had gone our separate ways without considering that we would never see each other again. We hadn’t fallen out; our love had never become exhausted but had been violently interrupted.
How I missed her adoration of me, her kisses, praise and encouragement, and the way she said “thank you, thank you” when she came. Of all my women, she was the most memorably tender, vulnerable and uninhibited, like a Goya-esque Spanish beauty, her dark hair covering her face as she worked on my penis. She called me her pretty boy and said she loved my voice, loved what she called the “timber” of it.
For months I had waited for her, thinking one day she’d turn up. I’d see her on the street, in departing trains, in dreams and in nightmares; I’d walk into a bar and there she’d be, waiting. I heard her calling me, her sweet Indian lilt in my ear, from when I woke up until bedtime.
At last, however, I got the real message, which was, after all, clear enough: she wasn’t interested. She’d told me she loved me, but, in the end, she didn’t want me. Her father was dead, the relationship was dead. Ajita was gone. I didn’t want to get over it, but I would have to. By now she’d be with another man, married perhaps. I was already her history and, I supposed, was more or less forgotten.