All in the Mind (7 page)

‘So what did you do?’

‘I listened to the second voice. So I’m standing there and it’s just silence, till eventually she gives me a little smile and she says, “Any time you want to talk, you just say.”’

Sturrock asked him how that made him feel.

‘Good. I thought that was just so nice, so incredibly nice. And when I’m walking home that night, I’m thinking there’s something happening here. She can have her pick of all the blokes at work, but I’m the one she seems to really like.’

‘Do men find her attractive?’

‘Oh yeah. She’s not what you call a classic beauty, but she’s got such a strong character and a strong face and a great body, and she’s got these really toned shoulders and big breasts that the guys are always ogling because she wears tight lacy bras and the uniform for
the
women is these pretty thin polyester blouses, so yeah, most of the blokes fancy her rotten. She’s got long curly red hair and she’s always fiddling with the curls, and I was convinced she fiddled with her hair more when she was talking to me. I was sure of it. Sure of it.’ He stopped, and Sturrock could sense that, as he told the story, David’s mind was already moving to the moment of rejection.

David had only ever had one serious girlfriend, Catherine, twelve years ago. He had told Sturrock about her in his very first piece of homework, when he had to write out his whole life story as he saw it, all the good things and the bad things that had happened to him. Sex for the first time with Catherine went down on the bad side.

‘I guess I saw Amanda as the one really, the one I could finally make some kind of relationship with, and her saying what she said made me feel even more like that. It seemed such a lovely thing to say: “Any time you want to talk, you just say.” It showed how well she got me, because sometimes I can’t talk because I’m on a downward curve, but sometimes I really do want someone to talk to. But I didn’t know how I would let her know that I was in talking mood. “I want to talk” sounds too stark. “Amanda, you know you said just say any time I wanted to talk, well, how about now?” I’m thinking that sounds a bit clumsy. I thought maybe I would just start chatting to her, like we’d been doing, and then let it develop. I had this idea that I’d take her out for a meal, ask her to suggest somewhere. I thought about it all weekend. I just couldn’t stop thinking about it – while I was helping Mum sort out the washing, while we were eating, while I was cleaning my face, brushing my teeth. I got to bed and I’m lying there just thinking about her and it makes me … you know. And it’s not just sex either. It’s like in my head, I’m making these plans, thinking one day I’ll be leaving home and living with Amanda instead.’ He stopped, and shook his head.

‘So Monday comes,’ said Sturrock.

‘Yeah, and I was sure I was going to ask her out, but when it came to it, I bottled out. I needed more time to think how to do it. But
then
, yesterday, we were chatting and I got the feeling she was playing with her hair even more than usual. She does this thing where she twiddles her finger in her hair then pulls it away from her head, lets go and the hair falls back in a little curl, then she starts all over again. I love it when she does that.

‘She was smiling a lot, and then she tells me this silly story about a package that went missing yesterday, and later turned up in the finance director’s office, and she lets out this really lovely laugh. So it felt like the moment to make the move and I couldn’t believe how fast my heart was pumping. For a second or two I was worried I was going to faint. But I held it together, I looked her right in the eye and I went for it.’

David’s face fell again.

‘What did you say?’ Sturrock prompted.

‘I said, “You know you said ‘any time you want to talk, you just say’?” and she goes, “Yeah,” and I go, “Well, I can’t tell you what that meant to me, Amanda. It was one of the best moments of my life,” and she goes like, “Wow, that good?” and I say, “Yeah, yeah it was, and there’s something else I want to say, Amanda, which is that I think you’re a really good person, I mean like the nicest person I think I’ve ever met, and you’ve made me feel happy by the way you talk to me and the way you are with me.”’

‘How was she reacting?’

‘You know, I was concentrating so hard on what I was saying I can’t say I noticed. It was like, I’d rehearsed these words hour after hour in the mirror at home and I was just desperate to say what I planned to say and get my words right, so maybe I wasn’t paying attention to how she was reacting. And it must have been weird for her, I guess, because normally she would drive the conversation, it would be thirty words her and ten words me, but this time was the other way round, I’m doing the talking and she just throws in the odd word.

‘So I’m steaming on now, just full-on going for it, like I’ve practised and I go, “What I’ve been thinking in the last few days, maybe, I dunno, I hope maybe you’ve been thinking something of the same
thing
, is that, maybe, we could carry on our talking away from work, maybe go out together somewhere, just the two of us, away from here, carry on talking like we do here, and if it feels OK, maybe be more like boyfriend and girlfriend, not just working together.”’

He stopped again, stared down at the hands on his lap, then looked up at Sturrock.

‘And then?’ Sturrock asked gently.

‘And then, well, she had this look on her face, and part of me is trying to tell myself it’s just shock that I’ve come out with this stuff, but deep down I know it’s disgust. All of a sudden her eyes look mean, and her lip is curling up a bit. But I’m hoping maybe it’s just shock, so I ask her what she thinks and she says she doesn’t know what to think and how she has never really thought of us in that way, and I go, “Well, can’t you try?” and she says she doesn’t think so, so I go, “Why not?” and she says because it just isn’t like that, and it wouldn’t work. So I say, “Why not?” again and she says, “David, honestly, it wouldn’t work, let’s just not go there,” and I say, “But I want to know why,” and maybe I should have turned and walked away right then but I keep at her and eventually she says there is no point talking about it and I say, “Why?” again and of course she tells me the truth.’

‘Which is?’

‘She says I’ve read too much into things. She’s nice to me because she feels sorry for me. She feels sorry for me because her dad was ill like I get ill and she knows how hard it can be and she thought if she could help me a bit like she was never able to help her dad, that’d be great. But going out together? Boyfriend and girlfriend? “No, David,” she says. “I really don’t think so.”’

Seeing his favourite patient collapse back in his chair, Sturrock felt the full force of Amanda’s rejection himself. For a few moments he didn’t know what to say. In the end, he resorted to his favourite question.

‘So how did that make you feel?’

‘Shit. Like shit. Like I will never get anything right. Like why did I even think she might be interested? And you know how sometimes the downward rhythm creeps up slowly, takes you bit by bit?’

Sturrock nodded.

‘Well, this time it came all at once, an instant hit. Straight in the guts. Bang. Empty. Sick. The big void. Do you know what I’m saying?’

‘I do, David. I’m sorry.’

‘I remember thinking that at least I’d have something to talk to you about. That’s about the only thing to be said for it, I guess.’

‘Well, I’m glad you did. Thank you.’

Sturrock looked at his watch. There wasn’t much time left. He had Arta Mehmeti next who was always on time, and he did not want to keep her waiting. But he worried about David heading into a weekend with the feeling of rejection so strong in his mind.

‘Do you wish you hadn’t asked her out?’

‘Yeah.’

‘You shouldn’t. You should be proud you felt the courage to ask her.’

David looked unimpressed.

‘And just remember that however bad you felt, it will pass. You know that from so much of your experience, that these feelings can pass. OK?’

‘I guess.’

‘Look forward to when the storm is over, David, and not a blade of grass has moved.’ He paused, and smiled. ‘You said that.’

David didn’t smile back.

Sturrock noticed a book on his shelf – one that he had been intending to give David in the next week or so. Perhaps now was the moment. He took it down.

‘Have a look at this, David,’ he said, ‘and try to do the exercise in chapter three. I think it might help.’

David looked dubious, and Sturrock couldn’t deny that he, too, felt on shaky ground.

6

While Professor Sturrock and David were talking, his next two patients were making their way through dense London traffic, Arta Mehmeti on the 148 bus from Elephant and Castle, Matthew and Celia Noble in a taxi from Totteridge. Though coming from opposite ends of London, their routes briefly converged around Marble Arch where the Nobles’ taxi cut in front of Arta’s bus, forcing it to brake hard. Arta stumbled, dropping the notebook she was holding on to the floor.

For the whole journey, Arta had been fretting about her homework. She was normally punctilious about getting it to Professor Sturrock the afternoon before her appointment, but the last few days had been busy, mainly because her husband Lirim was having to work so hard. He was expanding his small car-wash business and didn’t have so much time to help out with their two children, Alban and Besa. Last week Professor Sturrock had asked her to be more detailed when she recorded her dreams, and also to keep a separate record of what she would like to dream about if she had the ability to control her night-time thoughts. This request for more homework, and his demand for detail, had further upset her daily routine. She found it hard to write down her dreams at the best of times. She always slept badly and woke up feeling tired. And there was always too little time to get the family up and running, Lirim off to work, Alban off to school. This week, instead of writing more about her dreams as requested, she found she had written even less.

Arta was a Kosovar Albanian who had come to Britain with her family when President Milosevic was engaged in his policy of ethnic
cleansing
, purging Kosovo of all but the Serbs. The journey had been long and at times they had thought they wouldn’t all make it alive. The process of settling had been even harder than she had expected, but Lirim’s little car-wash business was now bringing in a steady income, and she had a part-time job in a launderette. They had a perfectly good flat and Alban had settled well in school, where the teachers and most of the other children made him feel welcome.

The attack had taken place on a Tuesday morning when she opened the door to two men, who forced her back into the narrow hallway. As they came through, they put on balaclavas, making it impossible for Arta to give anything but the vaguest of descriptions of them, beyond their thick south London accents, and the rapist’s dulled blue eyes, when the police interviewed her later. The bigger of the two men dragged her three-year-old daughter Besa into the kitchen while his partner pushed Arta into the sitting room. He forced a gag into her mouth, silencing the scream she had let out as Besa was taken from her. ‘Shut it, or the little girl gets hurt,’ he said. ‘My friend has a knife and if I shout to him to “cut”’ – he lowered his voice to a whisper to say the word ‘cut’ – ‘he will cut her. Do you understand?’ Though she nodded, he kept the gag in her mouth throughout, occasionally making her retch. ‘And if you annoy me, my friend will come through to watch, and bring your little girl with him. OK, you got that?’ She nodded again. He had a knife in his hand. He put it to the side of her neck, said, ‘Just do as you’re told,’ then tossed the knife to the floor while he started to undo his trousers.

She had heard so much about rape during the onslaught of the Milosevic forces. Twenty thousand was the figure most commonly used of Kosovar Albanian women raped by Serb soldiers. Enough to fill the national stadium in Priština. There remained such a feeling of shame attached to rape that the actual figure was almost certainly far higher. Arta had friends who had been gang-raped by Serbs, including one who had been killed afterwards. Stories of suicide were common. Less so the stories of women who became pregnant through rape and kept their sons and daughters. Rape, particularly in the Balkan region, appeared to be a fact of war. But Arta and Lirim had fled the war with
their
newborn son, Alban. He now spoke with a London accent and wanted an Arsenal shirt for his birthday, and of course Besa, born in England, had no memory of Kosovo at all. They lived in civilised London in a nice flat provided by the local authority which one day they hoped to buy. She had Sky TV and a discount card for the local superstore. She had English friends and Kosovan friends and her son was getting fantastic reports in school, and her daughter about to go to the nursery.

She had been cleaning the kitchen floor, listening to the pop-music station favoured by Alban, and thinking about taking Besa out for a walk to the car wash, where she would deliver a packed lunch for Lirim and his four staff as a little surprise. As she was forced on to the sofa, she felt physically and psychologically powerless. She believed the man when he said his friend would harm her daughter who even now she could hear crying out for her. She felt she had to submit, that the quicker he entered her, the quicker he would be done, and the sooner she could call for help. She tried desperately to think of other things to block out the smell of the man, the noise of his grunting, the feel of his penis first jabbing against her thigh, then inside where till then only her husband had been. She now knew why it was called making love. She and Lirim made love. This was hatred, not of her as an individual, but of women, or of humanity, possibly a deep self-hatred inside the man who was doing this to her. She was gorging on the gag, trying not to let him see her tears, wondering whether once he was done, he would swap roles with his friend, wondering what her husband would say and do, whether he would feel as powerless and helpless as she did. She wanted to shout out Lirim’s name and say she loved him, but was scared her attacker would see it as an act of defiance. As he raised the volume of his grunting and pumped his semen into her, she tried to summon up the faces of her children, of her mother and father. ‘Sorry,’ she whispered beneath the gag. ‘Sorry.’