After sessions he’d watch me looking at his catalogues, at his poetry books. “Take them,” he’d say. “Take anything you need.” He knew I wanted to extend my mind, having by now a thirst for intellectual matters. When I said I wanted to understand Freud and analysis, he encouraged me to read Proust, Marx, Emerson, Keats, Dostoevsky, Whitman and Blake.
He said that in most of Shakespeare’s plays there was at least one mad person, and in their madness they not only told you who they were, but they spoke important truths. He said that analysis was part of literary culture, but that literature was bigger than psychoanalysis, and swallowed it as a whale devoured a minnow. What great artist hasn’t been aware of the unconscious, which was not discovered by Freud but only mapped by him?
Also, he’d say: My profession is not, and should not be considered, a straight science. It was impossible for Freud to say that he cured people by poetry. Yet observe the important figures and see how like poets they are, with their speculative jumps and metaphors: Jung, Ferenczi, Klein, Balint, Lacan, each singing his own developmental story, particular passion and aesthetic. Their differing views don’t cancel each other out but exist side by side, like the works of Titian and Rembrandt.
Of course, at the beginning of the analysis, there was something we both had to overcome, something sombre I had to talk about. But I wanted to know him a little, to know I could trust him, and myself, before I laid what I called my “son of night” murder story on him.
His virtue, I discovered, was that he could speak deeply to me, that he seemed to understand me. He talked to the part of me that was like a baby. It was like being addressed by a kind father who could see all your fears and fantasies, and was entirely committed to your welfare. How did he have such knowledge of me? Where did it come from? I wanted to be like him, to have such an impressive effect on another human being. I still do.
I always thought of myself as a speedy person, uptight, impatient, getting anxious easily. With him I could let myself relax. What was I in love with? The quality of the silence between us. Sometimes fear makes no sound, I thought, as we sat there, combing through it all, Mother, Father, Sister, Ajita, Mustaq, Wolf, Valentin. Him leaning towards me, with just a side light on, during those dismal, wet London mornings, as people rushed to work. But this was a good, loving silence, minutes long, supporting peace between people, not the sort of silence that made you unruly with anxiety.
“Was it a noisy house you grew up in?” he asked. “But yes,” I said. When I did turn and look at him, he inevitably had a look of amusement on his face. Not that he found human suffering entertaining, even when it was self-inflicted, as he knew it mostly was. He was showing me he knew it went on. “Illness is lack of inspiration,” he’d say.
Before I began analysis, I’d had a dream which had disturbed me for days. It was like a Surrealist painting. I was standing alone in an empty room with my arms by my sides and scores of wasps in my hair, making a tremendous noise. Although I was standing by a door, a man with a head full of wasps cannot either move or much consider his emotional geography.
The “wasps,” of course, were White Anglo-Saxon Protestants, among other things, and once we began to discuss it, the image opened up numerous possibilities. Analysis didn’t “cure” my mind, then, of its furies and darkness, but it brought these effects into play, making them real questions for me, worth bothering with and part of my lived life, rather than something I hoped would just go away. For Tahir, the wasps represented something. If I could find meaning there, I could increase my engagement with myself, and with the world. The wasps were asking useful questions, ones worth pursuing. Despite the tremendous grief of depression, Tahir spoke of the “value” and “opportunity” of the illness.
So it was, I found, that analysis creates interest, and makes life. I never left a session with nothing to think about. I’d sit in a café and make pages of notes, continuing to free-associate and work on my dreams.
I had already studied The Interpretation of Dreams and Civilisation and Its Discontents, but now I began to read up on how Freud first began to listen to the words and stories of the mentally distressed, something that had never been done before. He found that if he concentrated on their self-accounts, the trail inevitably led back to their pleasure.
For Freud, as for any other poet, words, the patient’s spoken words and those of the analyst, were magic; they brought about change. I was gripped. Fortunately, working in the museum, I had access to all the books I wanted. If a reader requested a particular volume I was working on, I could say it had been lost. I’d sit on the floor in a faraway tunnel in the library and read; then I’d conceal the book until I returned. I reread Freud’s “book of dreams” as a guide to the night, making going to bed the day’s most worthwhile experience.
I adored the practice of two intelligent people sitting together for hours, days, weeks, maybe years, sifting through the minutiae of experience for significant dross, peering into the furthest corner of a dream for a coded truth. The concentration, the intensity: analysis was not a moment too soon for me. What compelled me was the depth of the everyday, how much there was in the most meaningless gesture or word. It was where a person’s history met the common world. Like a novelist, this way I could make meaning and take interest from the mundane, from the stories I liked to hear.
It seemed to me that Tahir and I had both been talking a lot, working on a deep excavation. Miriam’s understandable hatred of me as a child; her howling, psychotic violence and her attempt to keep Mother away from me, for herself; the feeling I had of being alone, having been abandoned by both parents, Kafka’s wounded beetle hiding under the bed.
But one day, after a long silence, Tahir said, “Do you have something to tell me?”
That was it! I believed he was implying that he knew I was leaving out the most important thing.
I had lost my capacity for happiness. The truth was I had murdered a man. Not in fantasy, as so many have, but in reality, and not long ago. In the end I could only measure Tahir Hussein in terms of that: whether I could trust him, or whether I would go to jail. I had told no one my secret, though often I was tempted, in one of the putrid pubs I went to most nights after work, to unburden myself to some soak who’d forget my story by morning. But I was smart enough to know it wouldn’t help me with my loss.
The murdered man wouldn’t let me go that easily. He clung to me, his fingernails in my flesh. I would wake up staring into the flickering fright of his doomed eyes. The past rode on my back like a devil, poking me, covering my eyes and ears for its sport as I puffed along, continuously reminding me of its existence. The world is as it is: it’s our fantasies which terrify; they are the Thing.
My mind had begun to feel like an alien object within my skull: I wanted to pluck it out and throw it from a bridge. Books couldn’t help me; nor could drugs or alcohol. I couldn’t free my mind by working on my mind with my mind. I thought: light the touch paper and see. Will it blow up my life or ignite a depth charge in my frozen history? Could I rely on another person?
Finally, I was forced to do the right thing. I would throw myself on his mercy and take the consequences. One morning, after making up my mind, I told Tahir Hussein the truth. How would the analysis ever work if I repressed such a momentous event? So Tahir heard about the physical symptoms, the shaking and paranoia. He heard about the dreams of the dying eyes staring at me. He heard about Wolf, Valentin, Ajita. He heard about the death.
“What do you think?” I asked.
He said, simply, straightaway, that some people deserve a whack on the head. I’d done the world a service, offing this pig who was bad beyond belief. It didn’t stop me being a human being. It was only a “little” murder. He didn’t seem to think I was going to make a habit of it, or go professional.
What a relief it was to have my secret safely hidden in the open! Tahir was worried about my temptation to confess and then be caught, my need to be punished, as well as the temptation to have eve
ryone know me. To conceal is to reveal. Most murderers, he said, actively lead the police to the scene of the crime, so preoccupied are they with their victims. Raskolnikov not only returns to the crime scene, but wishes to rent a room in the “house of murder.”
Tahir was the only person I told. I was desperate at the time, and now Tahir is dead, along with the secret which will never be uncovered, the secret which had been turning my soul septic, until I couldn’t proceed alone. After Tahir, with my two other analysts, I kept it to myself. It wouldn’t reflect well on my career prospects.
I had said to Tahir, a year after I’d started seeing him, that his profession was one I fancied for myself. How come? I was aware, from an early age, when I met people on the street with Mother, that I wanted to hear their gossip. This was the route, I saw later, to the deepest things about them. Not necessarily to their secrets, though this was part of it, but to what had formed and haunted them within the organisation of the family.
Soon, however, the everyday conversations that characterised life in the suburbs were not enough. I wanted the serious stuff, the “depths.” I’d come to Nietzsche and Freud through Schopenhauer, whose two-volume The World as Will and Idea had so entertained me at university. There I copied out the following passage: “The sexual passion is the kernel of the will to live. Indeed, one might say man is concrete sexual desire; for his origin is an act of copulation and his wish of wishes is an act of copulation, and this tendency alone perpetuates and holds together his whole phenomenal existence. Sexual passion is the most perfect manifestation of the will to live.”
I had seen myself as someone who was always about to become an artist, a writer, movie director, photographer, or even (fallback position) an academic. I had written books, songs, poetry, but they never seemed to be the meaning I sought. Not that you could make a living writing haikus. I had always been impressed by people who knew a lot. The one thing Mother and I did do together was watch quiz shows on TV. University Challenge was our favourite, and she’d say, “You should know all this. These people aren’t as bright as you, and look at their clothes!”
None of the careers I’d considered excited me. Yet, unconsciously, something had been stirring within. Being with Dad in Pakistan, catastrophic and depressing as it had been in many ways, had instilled something like a public-school ethos in me. The sense of the family, of its history and achievement—my uncles had been journalists, sportsmen, army generals, doctors—along with the expectation of effortless success had, I was discovering now, been both exhilarating and intimidating. I wasn’t only a “Paki.” Suddenly, unlike Miriam, I had a name and a place, as well as the responsibility which went with it.
I began to see that not only was I intelligent, but that I had to find a way to use my mind. This was something to do with “family honour,” an idea which formerly I’d have found absurd. It was Tahir who brought everything together for me. It took me a long time to bring it up with him; I was afraid he’d think I wanted to take his place.
But at last I did. “What do you think?” I said. “Could I do it?”
“You’ll be as excellent as any of us,” he said.
During the first year of my work with Tahir, I saw little of Mother and Miriam. I went to some trouble to avoid them. Both their arguments and their intimacy, without a father, I saw now, to desire them both in different ways, and to keep them apart, made me overwrought.
But when Miriam said we should go there for Christmas lunch, I wasn’t able to disagree. Anyway, I wanted to see Miriam’s first child, a cute baby provided by a cabdriver whose fare, one night, she’d been unable to afford. By now she was living at the top of a council block with the child and another on the way, her only adult company being a violent man. She was stoned most of the time, with interludes on a psychiatric ward. Later she moved to the outskirts of London, arguing that she couldn’t be high up, as the voices yelled “Jump, jump!” “But never quite loudly enough,” Mum remarked.
Over dessert they asked me if I was intending to remain at the library, perhaps becoming an exhibit. I said “not indefinitely”; I knew now what I wanted to do. I would become an analyst, a shrink, a head doctor. I floated this with as much seriousness as I could gather, but I had to bat away numerous irritating remarks. “He needs a head doctor,” Miriam muttered. Mother: “You’re the one who needs it.” Miriam: “Actually, Mother, if you bothered to look within, you’d see it was you.” Mother: “You look inside yourself, dear.” Miriam: “After all, you made us…” On and on.
When this tailed off, I continued. While the Devil’s Dictionary definition of a doctor is “One upon whom we set our hopes when ill and our dogs when well,” the word doctor, as Josephine could have told you, inevitably went down well with most people. As I spoke, explaining the training, the theory, the practice, the income, the interest, the words, to my surprise, did seem to have authority. They were surprised, I guessed, partly by my determination and engagement. I knew they thought of me—I thought it myself—as passive and repressed, without much will or desire.
But now, rather than feeling only partly present, as I did before—my life as an interruption to them—I seemed to have some weight. I was able to be their equal and, to my dismay, it seemed to diminish them, render them a little pathetic even, as though I had been reducing my own stature all my life, to keep Mum and Miriam big. Unlike either of them, I seemed to know what I was about, where I was going. My crime was my spur. I would spend my life paying off that early debt. I was happy to do it.
“You will be doing good then?” Miriam said.
“Maybe a little.”
“That’s nice.” She wasn’t being sarcastic. Her other selves were almost always hidden beneath her aggression, her general stroppiness, which was a good, accurate word to describe her. “You can help me, then, can’t you?”
They were looking at me almost pleadingly. “You both know,” I said, “no doctor can treat a member of his own family.”
A year into my training, when I was beginning to work with juveniles, we heard that Father had died. After leaving Pakistan, Miriam and I didn’t see him again. Did we mourn him? I’d have wanted him to know I’d found a vocation. Whether he’d have appreciated it, I doubted. However, I was strong enough by then to have ridden his disapproval. I was on my own, but I knew, at last, what I was doing.
That night, after I left the house, walking the familiar streets from which I thought I’d never escape, a boy semi-defeated by something he didn’t understand, I was in a hurry to get back to my complete edition of Freud, the patients I would start seeing, the conferences I’d attend, the books I’d write. I wanted to be useful, to have done something.
Even then, at a moment of such hope, when the future was something I wanted, I would hear the dead man’s words echoing in my ears: “What do you want of me?”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Straight out I said to Miriam, “You know I’m a gossip trollop and must have it immediately.”
“You and Henry sound so similar to one another,” she said. “But he’s like Tigger, and you were never so outgoing. Or have you changed?”
I said, “Now it’s you who is beginning to sound like him.”
“Oh God, we’re all dissolving into one another!” she said.
Evening, and Miriam was in her kitchen when I arrived. Kids on bikes doing wheelies in the front yard. Other boys and girls distributed around the house with their friends; a teenage boy in front of the television at the other end of the room, one hand in a minger’s chest, the other on the TV remote. Bushy perched barefoot on a chair, stuffing money into his socks before putting them on again. Then he threw his keys in the air, caught them, and went off to pick up a paying customer.
At her place, Miriam seemed distracted or preoccupied, as she had been as a young woman, wishing she were elsewhere, wondering where the pleasure was. However, I noticed she was looking at me as I fiddled in her kitchen, preparing pasta for myself.
“So?” I said. “How
much did you enjoy seeing Henry? Did you stay long at my place?”
“Here it is,” she said. She had on her most serious, if not tragic face, which disconcerted me. But it was too late now. “Did you set this up on purpose?”
“Henry asked me to get some dope from you. That’s all I did.”
“Don’t come in!” she screamed into the rest of the house, before shutting the kitchen door and jamming a chair under the handle, a rare cry for privacy. “What happened? Henry wanted the dope, but he doesn’t even know how to make his own joints. While I was rolling a few, teaching him, he said, ‘It’s the most useful thing I’ve learned for years.’ You know how he talks, for England and for his own benefit, as if he expects to be listened to. Even I had to shut up. That’s authority for you. I get hot just thinking of it.”
“What did he say?”
“I was telling him from the off I was poor. I said I’ve never had nothing, not for want of trying. I’m no good at anything but the small stuff, so don’t think I’m a catch, but I might inherit a bit.
“He said he lived with his wife, Valerie, in luxury, for ten years. There were houses, cars, parties, holidays. They were friends with famous artists, politicians, actors who stayed in their houses, drank their champagne, swam in their pools. When she needed more money, she’d sell a painting.”
“Henry did some excellent work during those years.”
“Without making much money, he claims. It was she who supported him. His nose was in her trough. Well, as he talked about it, he became more and more upset, calling it ‘an untrue life.’ I didn’t know what to do. In his mind he’s a crazy man. You spend the day with such people.”