The Wisdom of Crocodiles

by Paul Hoffman

  There were nods of agreement.

  ‘It certainly wasn’t the case this time,’ continued Trish. ‘We’re entitled to use that evidence. We’ll see whether the judge agrees on Monday.’

  ‘Right then. Next item on the agenda,’ said Brett briskly. She looked over at Gribben. ‘This is your area, Boyd. Perhaps you’d like to take us through it. Quickly.’

  Gribben’s expression barely changed as he strained to look at McKinnon’s agenda. McKinnon casually allowed his hand to fall over the page.

  ‘Ah . . . um . . . well, obviously it’s a difficult area.’

  ‘Really?’ said Brett, puzzled.

  ‘Well . . . not difficult exactly.’ He looked at his colleagues who were enjoying his increasing panic like connoisseurs of encounters between Christians and lions. ‘What’s the word I’m looking for?’

  ‘Easy?’ suggested McKinnon helpfully.

  Brett’s face darkened. ‘Perhaps, David, you’d like to give Boyd a temporary loan of your agenda.’

  Gribben took the proffered piece of paper.

  ‘Given the complexity involved,’ said Brett sourly, ‘perhaps you’d like to postpone the question of whether we lease these cold-water dispensers until next week?’

  ‘One – two – three.’ Eddy Haynes nodded that Winnicott was under and Hendrix shifted the pause button on the tape recorder.

  ‘The last time we talked you claimed to be from Mars.’

  She laughed. ‘I’m sorry. I was joking, of course.’

  ‘Of course,’ said Hendrix, looking at Haynes.

  ‘I come from a planet much further away.’

  There was a brief pause and a further exchange of looks.

  ‘And this planet is?’

  ‘I told you, much further away.’

  ‘Still, it would be helpful if you could be exact.’

  ‘I can’t imagine why. There isn’t any way in which you could verify any claim I made, however specific I was.’

  ‘Tell me about your name.’

  ‘Jean Smith is an alias.’

  ‘I thought perhaps it might be. Will you tell me your real name?’

  ‘No, I don’t think so – and for the same reason. What are you writing, Eddy?’

  ‘Just making notes.’

  ‘Are you recording our conversations?’

  ‘Yes. Is that a problem?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What are you doing here?’

  ‘I’m an observer, if you like.’

  ‘Observing what?’

  ‘Money. I’m an economist.’

  ‘I see. Where does George Winnicott fit into this?’

  There was a laugh, again charming, and mocking. ‘Everyone needs somewhere to live.’

  ‘So,’ said Hendrix, ‘this is an Invasion of the Body Snatchers we’re talking about?’

  ‘Not really. I haven’t taken over control of his mind or anything. I’m occupying part of his nervous system. Sharing it, if you like.’

  ‘Like a parasite?’

  There was a short silence and when she spoke again her voice was apprehensive. ‘As it turns out, I’m afraid that’s more accurate than I would wish it to be. The theory is that my presence should be completely . . . neutral. I would share Winnicott’s perceptions but not in any way affect him. He would not be aware of me.’

  Haynes was writing furiously. ‘And . . . what you’re saying is that you are affecting him.’

  ‘I think so – I’m not certain.’

  ‘Can you explain?’

  ‘I have no way of knowing for sure. I don’t know if Mr Winnicott’s collapses are caused by my presence or if they are the result of a breakdown in his health which has driven me, as it were, to the surface. It ought not to be possible for me to speak to him. But it became possible during the brief periods in which he was recovering from his state of unconsciousness.’

  ‘So, you have no explanation for these events?’

  ‘I told you, I’m not sure.’

  ‘This is difficult to accept.’

  ‘Yes, I imagine it would be.’

  ‘I’d like to ask you more about why you’re here. You say you’re an economist?’

  ‘Yes.’ She smiled. ‘The ultimate visiting fellowship.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because this is the most interesting place in the universe.’

  ‘Really?’ said Hendrix. ‘That’s very flattering.’

  ‘That depends on how you look at it.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s going to be difficult to explain.’

  ‘I see. Is that because we have a lower intelligence than you?’

  She laughed. ‘No, of course not. It will be difficult to explain because a considerable degree of effort has gone into ensuring that I should not explain.’

  ‘This is the secret you’ve been talking to Winnicott about?’

  There was a long pause, and when she finally replied the voice was deeply troubled, even afraid.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But you won’t tell us what this secret is?’

  ‘I can’t tell you. What I know about you . . .’ another troubled pause, ‘makes it very difficult to decide the right thing to do. The view has always been that you should never be told and that everything possible should be done to prevent you knowing. That’s why I’ve been given a post-hypnotic treatment that prevents me telling you anything directly.’

  Haynes was taking notes furiously.

  ‘So,’ said Hendrix finally, ‘you’re an alien economist who possesses a secret so terrible about human existence that it can never be told.’

  There was a short silence. When she spoke, her voice was cold and angry. ‘Your summary does you credit, Mr Hendrix.’

  ‘Why have you made yourself known at this time?’

  ‘What? What?’ Winnicott sat upright, calling out in panic.

  Haynes spent a few minutes talking to Winnicott checking that he had emerged completely from the hypnosis. Flustered at first after emerging so suddenly from the trance, he seemed to have benefited from the experience of being hypnotised. There was more colour in his face. He was only mildly curious about what they had discovered and seemed happy to accept that while they had begun to get somewhere with the hypnosis it had been inconclusive so far. Hendrix gave him no details of what had been said. After Winnicott had left Hendrix returned to find that Haynes was relaxing in the recliner.

  ‘You never had much of a way with the ladies, did you, David? Now we may never discover the meaning of life.’

  ‘What do you make of all that, Eddy?’

  Haynes sniffed dismissively. ‘Well, I’ve come across a delusion like it once before.’ He smiled slyly. ‘That was when I still thought that studying multiple personalities wasn’t a complete waste of fucking time. Anyway, this patient was a minor clerk at the DSS, but he also had an alter ego who was called – what was it? – Rogor, Destroyer of the Universe. He was biding his time until it was the right moment to unleash his power on an unsuspecting world which would then learn the true nature of his awesome might. He actually spoke like that as well.’

  ‘And your diagnosis was?’

  ‘A classic example of personality inflation. This was a young, ineffectual and unsuccessful man with a history of mental breakdowns, relatively mild, which suggested the possibility that he might develop full-blown schizophrenia. Rogor was an attempt by his unconscious to compensate for his crippling sense of inferiority in the real world by regressing to a primitive fantasy of apocalyptic power.’

  Hendrix grunted dismissively. ‘I don’t see the similarities, frankly. Winnicott is in his early forties and has had a considerable amount of success. Head of the Anti-Terrorist Squad, director of . . . what’s it called? . . . the Fraud whatever. High-powered stuff. He may be deeply repressed but then so are three-quarters of British males.’

  ‘I know all that, but this is just how it looks from the outside. He might feel completely powerless, he might th
ink he’s not up to the job – I mean he may not be conscious of this necessarily. But we’ve both had any number of apparently successful patients who think they’re frauds and that one day the world is going to find them out and see them as they really are. This new job of Winnicott’s sounds like a recipe for psychological disaster for someone who secretly thinks like that. Look at all the flak there was over that bloke Bris. I’ve read your notes – my guess is that you’re dealing with a personality with an unusually strong ego that’s held back all the other stuff for years. I’ve seen it before, many times, and so have you – that’s what most mid-life crises are, after all, the cracks appearing in a personality that can’t take the strain of keeping up a front.’

  ‘I think you’re being a bit smug. Do you want a drink?’

  ‘Whisky.’ Hendrix got up and went over to a drawer and took out a bottle of Tesco’s own brand. ‘Haven’t you got any single malt?’

  ‘No. I don’t drink whisky. I keep this for visitors.’ He poured the whisky into a tumbler then poured a brandy for himself. ‘Cheers.’

  They both drank silently for a moment.

  ‘I grant that this is more complex than I’ve made out—’

  ‘Of course it is,’ interrupted Hendrix. ‘This voice isn’t the voice of a regression into a primitive fantasy of absolute power.’

  ‘Isn’t it? The voice is telling you that it’s in possession of an enormous secret of fundamental significance. It’s still a fantasy of absolute power.’

  ‘No, it isn’t. The voice makes it clear that her powers are limited – someone else has control over her and she can’t reveal what she knows.’

  ‘OK, I don’t mind admitting this is more complex. I’m not disagreeing. I’m talking about the underlying meaning here. The fantasy has to be plausible to maintain itself. Rogor the Destroyer was always able to act, according to itself, whenever it wanted. When I asked it why it didn’t just destroy the world it would laugh and say that it was waiting until the time was right, that there were reasons of which I knew nothing. It pretty simple-minded stuff, as excuses go, but it was good enough for the patient. Winnicott’s unconscious has created a character who knows an immense secret. Information is power here. It’s obviously acceptable to his unconscious state that there are limits on his other powers and this is a way of protecting itself from actually having to deliver on its claim. Rogor doesn’t want to attempt to destroy the world because he will obviously fail and so reveal his true inadequacy – and in a more complex way Smith knows The Great Secret but has found a reason why she – or he – can never reveal it. If it was revealed it would show that there was no great secret. It would only demonstrate that in reality Winnicott finds aspects of his life incomprehensible.’ He put down the empty glass on the floor. ‘Must dash.’ He stood up and went to the door. ‘By the way, I heard a good one the other day. An English teacher goes to a Freudian for analysis and he lies down on the couch. So for the next hour he pours out his heart and all the time the analyst says nothing. Then the hour’s up and the English teacher stops. There’s a pause as the analyst looks at his notes and then he leans over to the patient and says, “I wonder if I could ask your advice.” The patient is a bit surprised about this but says that he’ll do whatever he can. So the analyst says, “To be honest, grammar has never been my strong point. Do you spell fruit cake with a hyphen?” ’ Haynes burst into laughter. He looked at Hendrix who was staring at him unmoved. ‘Well, I thought it was funny.’

  Hendrix considered this for a moment. ‘Perhaps it’s the way you tell them.’

  Haynes grimaced.

  ‘I’ve made another appointment with Winnicott for Friday at six. Can you come?’

  ‘I’m supposed to be at a meeting – but I can shift it. I’ll be honest with you . . . could be an interesting case. As delusions go, this could be worth following.’

  ‘He’s a human being, not an interesting delusion,’ said Hendrix mildly.

  Haynes groaned. ‘God, David, you can be so pious sometimes.’

  Hendrix looked at him, his eyes filled with a parody of gentle hurt. ‘Eddy, I forgive you for that.’

  ‘Why do you think it’s a woman’s voice? I have to admit when I heard it first I was spooked a bit.’

  Hendrix acknowledged that he had felt the same. ‘It was strange, wasn’t it? It’s hard to resist your basic instincts sometimes – to think of ghosts and possession. But that it’s a woman’s voice, it doesn’t surprise me all that much. This is someone who’s repressed his feminine side, if you like, to an extreme degree. The world for Winnicott is a place where you can only think your way through to an answer. Life is to be ordered and planned and controlled. He’s uncomfortable with emotions and intuitions.’

  ‘We’re English. Aren’t we all?’

  ‘But I suspect that at heart Winnicott is an unusually emotional and intuitive person, perhaps to an extreme degree. That’s why he’s over-compensated by repressing this aspect of himself so deeply.’

  ‘Why an economist?’ he laughed. ‘You never think of things like that, do you? That if there’s life out in the stars they’ll have to have boring jobs as well.’

  ‘I suppose it depends on whether or not you see economics as boring.’

  ‘Sorry, but I’m just not that interested.’

  ‘If someone said the same thing about novels or classical music you’d think they were just plain ignorant, wouldn’t you? Perhaps you should get interested.’

  Haynes looked at him with friendly malice. ‘How’s it going with E13?’

  Howard Cornish sat at his desk miserably re-reading a report from the chairman of the international committee in charge of supervising the engineering work on the Leaning Tower of Pisa. Professor Barton, it was clear, had been sidelined, despite all the reassurances he had been given. There had been a significant majority on the committee who’d refused to accept his plan. It was clear there was much politics involved, and many professional rivalries. These were all hidden in plausible objections. Without unambiguous scientific evidence that would stand up in court there was no way in which Cornish could intervene without paying a substantial penalty for withdrawing cover. Since the moment he had signed the agreement, the feeling had been growing that deciding to support the underwriting of the project had been the biggest mistake of his professional life. Now the unease had begun to solidify into a hard lump in his stomach. If the tower fell, he would fall with it.

  Georgina Beatty of the Relationship Guidance Council looked across her desk at the petite forty-year-old woman sitting miserably opposite her. ‘So, Mrs Nancarrow, if I can sum up, your husband is attentive to you, you find it easy to talk to one another, and he doesn’t want you to be on a diet.’

  ‘That’s right,’ she said nervously.

  ‘Do you think he resents the cost?’ asked Georgina, desperate for any clue, anything that might persuade the woman to open up. ‘All those low-calorie frozen meals, they can be quite expensive.’

  Tessa thought carefully about this. ‘No,’ she said at last. ‘I don’t think so.’

  ‘What seems to be the problem, then?’ said the woman, with rather more irritation in her voice than her relationships management supervisor would care to have heard. Tessa sat in uncomfortable silence.

  ‘If you don’t tell us what the problem is, Mrs Nancarrow,’ said the woman softly, suddenly aware of the woman’s misery, ‘how can we help you?’

  ‘I can’t say,’ said Tessa, quietly. ‘I don’t know how to tell you.’

  ‘You needn’t be embarrassed with me. I’m trained in these matters. There’s very little I haven’t heard.’

  Tessa looked up, her eyes without hope. For three weeks they had been treading the same ground. Then the woman thought of something. ‘Look, Mrs Nancarrow, could you come back next week at the same time? I might be able to help. I can’t promise anything but it might be worth a try.’

  Tessa was cheered by her optimistic tone and agreed.

  When
she left, the counsellor reached for her diary, found a number, dialled and waited. After three trills there was an answer. ‘Machine Intelligence Ltd. How can I help you?’

  ‘Can I speak to Anne Levels, please?’

  When she got home later that night, Anne sat down and reviewed the phone call with mixed feelings. The Relationship Guidance Council was an organisation with problems and its new director had been brought in to do something about a succession of humiliating scandals. These improprieties ranged from one of its counsellors being imprisoned for writing poison-pen letters to her lover’s wife, to a probationary sentence for a senior executive who had molested a teenage girl who had come to the centre he managed for advice. Although these discrepant punishments seemed to reflect as badly on the judicial system as they did on the moral culture of the Council, these events, and others like them, had severely damaged its reputation with the public and threatened its funding from the government.

  The DSS was extremely interested in NEMO and putting heavy pressure on the Council to cooperate with Anne as she began the first trials. After years of ruinously expensive debugging, the DSS’s own computers could now survey how much it was costing the Treasury to support the increasing price of people’s inability to put up with whatever it was they used to put up with before the simplification and destigmatisation of divorce. There was nothing short of fiscal horror that such a humane and apparently straightforward reform of the law should ease the tax-payer into funding an ever-increasing pool of layabout teenage boys and family-deserting, middle-aged men. Hands were being wrung at the opportunity costs involved: an incalculable loss of investment in jobs, schools and hospitals; funds diverted from avant-garde theatrical productions and British films that no one wanted to see. There was the extra expenditure on police to combat the alarming growth in delinquent youths free of fatherly restraint; the rising cost of drugs and beds for adults pining for their long-lost dads or crippled by a sour relationship with their deserted mums.

  Given that the most recent figures provided by the DSS to the Treasury suggested that the annual cost to the public purse of marital breakdown was five billion pounds, they now took the view that irrespective of its repressions, hatreds and Oedipal yearnings the nuclear family was wonderfully cheap to run. Married love besmirched was costing the British taxpayer £416,066,667 every month or – to put it another way – people not being able to get on was costing £13,698,630 every day; that’s £570,776.20 every hour of the day and night. That’s 68.4 pence per day for each working person, or £249.66 per year. If you are married, both working, and likely to continue putting up with whatever the others are not putting up with for another year, over the next twelve months your household will pay £499.32. This is the price of love gone sour. Everything can be turned into money, every given or ungiven kiss. Currency conversion is always taking place and one day some accountant of commitment will look at figures in a book and tell us how much misery or happiness there is. Legal. Tender.