by Toni Jordan
Against the bookcase my couch poses like a piece of installation art. That couch cost an absolute fortune. I bought it when I moved into this office more than ten years ago, when I was planning to do a PhD. Counsellors don’t even use couches. I could have spent that money on a holiday. While I sit here on a Tuesday afternoon, listening to her, I could be recalling two weeks of sun-kissed splendour in the Maldives, where I would have drunk mojitos while a bronzed half-naked Maldivian called Omar massaged my feet. I was trying to do the right thing. Some clients would want to use a couch, I thought. Even if only ironically.
‘Dreams are important,’ Violet says, all innocent, like she hasn’t just put me in my place. ‘They’re like my brain thinking while I’m asleep.’
‘I can’t argue with that.’ I jot down her words, ready for the day I write my pseudonymous book about the things people say in counselling, the one that will make me a fortune so I can move to the Maldives and shack up with Omar. If the airlines ever get back to normal, if anyone ever flies again, if I haven’t missed my chance forever. Outside it’s a beautiful spring. The pink magnolias on the street outside are blushing to life. We should be cursing our hayfever and praying for Essendon to fight off the northern invaders at the MCG on Saturday, not wondering if the world will ever recover.
I blink a few times. Come on, Stanzi. Focus on why she’s here, why she’s paying me good money. ‘Have you seen your father this week?’
‘He took me to lunch yesterday.’ Her individually articulated toes twitch like she’s playing a tiny invisible piano, a sight I find creepy but mesmerising. Lunch with her father is like a date: she worries about her clothes, fusses over her hair, what to order, what he’ll think of her. So much palaver just to eat.
‘What were your thoughts about that?’
‘He’s too thin. Cheryl’s not looking after him. My previous stepmother, Michelle—she was a better cook. Italian. All that pasta. At the time I thought she was making him fat.’
She thinks he’s too thin? What is he, a Chupa Chup? Still, she’s the one who brought up food. Encouraging this discussion is not a bad idea. ‘What kind of pasta did she make?’
She stares at me like I’ve asked her the calorific value of snot. ‘Do I look like Nigella Lawson? I don’t know. Pasta. Different little shapes. With sauce on it.’
Right. ‘And what did you and your father talk about over lunch?’
‘This and that.’ She swings her legs down and sits upright. For a moment she looks very small, a tiny girl nestled in giant furniture. ‘We talked about father stuff, mainly. What’s your father like?’
‘Mine?’ She has taken me by surprise, something that rarely happens. I wouldn’t have thought she was the type to be interested in anyone else’s life. It’s sweet, kind of. She may be realising there are other people in the world besides herself. Maybe that’s why I answer.
‘Funny. My dad’s funny.’ This is the short version, the keeping communication channels open in both directions answer. The long version would be this: my dad is a photographer, a great one. Art and commercial. He loves taking photos. And he’s really smart. Mind you, he needs to be. He’s one man alone in a femocracy. My mother, my sister and me: we throw our weight around.
‘Funny huh,’ she says, in a dull voice that tells me she couldn’t care less if my father was the headline act at the Comedy Festival. Then she stands, bare toes wriggling into my thick-pile rug, and stretches her arms over her head like she’s just woken up. ‘Anyway. I spent Saturday morning shopping in Chapel Street. I’ve been picking up things again.’
This may not be the setback it seems. Sometimes problems can become worse for a while. Taking steps towards giving up a behaviour we define as part of ourselves can sometimes make us cling to it all the tighter. It’s futile to fight your difficulties head-on. The only way to beat your unconscious is to sneak up on it. I’m reminded that even the very thought of dieting invariably leads to weight gain. Why? Say you make the decision mid-week, a Wednesday. When will the hypothetical diet begin? Monday morning. But that’s four long days. Since we’re starting on Monday, we might as well live it up today. One little bit of cake, a tiny slice of cheese, make the most of it. Regardless of what happens on Monday morning, the conscious decision never wins.
And besides, the way the world is lately. The tensions—it’s enough to make cracks appear in anyone. The trick is discovering her personal pattern, her specific trigger.
‘I’m wondering if there’s something about that particular shop. Or something in it.’
‘I doubt it. Nice things, of course. They’re all idiots. They never catch me.’ She smiles angelically and bats her eyelashes. ‘They’re looking for disaffected yoofs from the western suburbs. Losers. Not people like me.’ She walks to the long window and looks out over the park. ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘when I see a tower in the distance, I half expect to see a plane fly into it.’
From my office here in Hawthorn I can see the city, its skyscrapers huddled together like a slightly freaked-out forest. I know what she means. When I shut my eyes, I can see it also: over and over, from a variety of angles. Last week I saw a client who was planning a business trip to Sydney and mentioned it at dinner with her family. Her six-year-old became hysterical, crying and screaming and throwing things, clinging to her legs. When she calmed him down, she realised he thought every replay, every angle, was a separate plane spearing into a separate skyscraper. He thought all these hundreds of planes were crashing into buildings everywhere and his mother’s Qantas flight from Tullamarine to Mascot would do the same.
‘It’s been a stressful couple of weeks for everyone, that’s for sure,’ I say. I speak slowly, make open hand gestures so she feels safe to jump in, to tell me how she feels. ‘The way we see the world has changed for good. It’s frightening. Lots of my clients are reporting an increase in their anxiety levels. Trouble sleeping, things like that.’
She rolls her eyes. ‘They’re wimps then, aren’t they.’ She abandons her shoes and walks the length of the room, pointing her toes like she’s in Swan Lake and running her fingertips along my bookcase. She leaves flattened footprints in a silvery trail against the nap of the rug. ‘I mean, it was stressful for the people who were actually there. We’re on the other side of the world. Anyone who lives here and feels anxious is just a hysteric.’
‘It’s interesting that your shoplifting is increasing at the very time people are talking about a new war. A war in the Middle East. What are your thoughts about that?’
At the end of the bookcase, she rests her hand against the shelf while she does a plié. Her feet look alive, alert, like they’re on her side. Then she shifts her weight and balances perfectly on just one. My feet are not on my side. My feet hate me. They ache to an extent I find impossible to describe, in every little bone and every cell of skin. They’re uppity, my feet. They believe carrying me around all day is beneath them. Thanks to their bad attitudes, I have a cupboard full of shoes I can’t wear and I even limp in these nanna-ish Mary Janes.
‘That’s just stupid,’ Violet says. ‘The Americans won’t invade. It’s the twenty-first century. Humans are no longer fodder for the military—industrial complex. We’re evolved. We are,’ she pliés again, ‘enlightened.’
‘If there was a new war, would that concern you?’ She was a teenager during the Gulf War. Me, I remember it clearly enough: sitting up all night, unable to believe this terrifying technicolour history unfolding on the screen.
She rolls her eyes. ‘If they do invade, it’ll take them six weeks max to fix up the whole Middle East. They’re not the leaders of the free world for nothing. They’re rolling in money and they’re not stupid. I’m sure Bush has a plaque on his desk that says: First rule of being commander-in-chief: do not fight a ground war in Asia. If they go, they’ll send the airforce to sort things out and be back in the officers’ club for drinks at five. Everyone knows that.’ She sounds so unlike her usual self I realise she’s answered my ques
tion about what she and her father discussed at lunch. So now I say nothing. Silence encourages clients to fill the gap.
And she does. ‘If there’s anything we should worry about, it’s SARS and people sending anthrax through the mail. That’s what’ll get us.’
‘Is that a cause of concern for you? Opening things that come in the mail?’
‘Of course.’ She rubs her hands up and down her arms, like she’s cold. She’s not cold. If she was, she’d tell me to turn the heat up, pronto. ‘You’d be an idiot not to be afraid of stuff like that. We’re so fragile. We’re like balloons filled with blood. The slightest injury, the smallest bug. Sometimes I feel we should walk around with our own invisible force field. Anything could do us in. There’s malice everywhere. Don’t you watch the news?’
The anonymous death, the one among thousands, the symbolic, representative, impersonal killings: she fears this not at all. She fears the deliberate, the targeted. Someone would need to aim for her. This is not a logical understanding of the risks, although I can see her point. If someone’s trying to kill you, at least it should be about you.
She stops her circumnavigation in front of my desk. ‘What’s this?’
I know what she’s asking right away. My desk is usually bare like every surface in my office, bare like every tabletop in my room. I like things sparse, lean, minimalist. Clutter makes my eyes ache. Charlotte and the kids, the mess drives me crazy.
Sometimes I put my foot down. When we moved in, Mum gave us a set of white lace doilies as a housewarming present. Doilies. They were wrapped in a striped linen tea towel with a wooden spoon holding the ribbon in place. So I can see where Charlotte gets it from. Our parents’ place—God, it’s a shrine to bric-a-brac shops the world over. It’s where paintings of dogs playing poker go to die, every surface covered in shepherdess figurines and crystal koalas and miniature cars. And photos, of course. Newer ones of the kids and older ones of the three of us. Never Dad, because he’s always taking the picture. It looks like my sister and I were brought up by a single mother with a time-delay camera. And there’s no satisfaction in appealing to Dad. Despite his world-famous aesthetic sense and natural good taste, he won’t say a word to Mum. He lets her do whatever she wants, he always has.
But today my desk is not bare. Today there is an old coin on it, a shilling. I should have put it in the drawer with my handbag when I first came in. I don’t know why I didn’t. My theory of practice allows for some self-disclosure. An unguarded response can sometimes make clients feel safe, especially since it’s Violet’s relationship with her father that seems to be at the core of her troubles.
‘It’s my father’s. One of his most prized possessions. Mum smuggled it out of his study. I’m getting it framed, as a get-well present from me and my sister.’
‘Funny prized possession.’
‘He says it reminds him of silver linings.’
‘Money? That’s a silver lining all right. I couldn’t agree more.’
She couldn’t be more wrong. It’s just that he’s attached to this coin. It’d be the first thing he’d grab if the house was burning down. He’d leave the art, Mum’s jewellery, even his first editions.
‘I’m wondering what your prized possessions are,’ I say.
She doesn’t answer. For the rest of the session, I try to bring her back to her father, her husband, her boyfriend, her habit of dropping things into pockets and open handbags. Instead she talks about a new nail bar that’s opened in her neighbourhood, about trying to set her brother up with one of her friends, about someone she knew who left the window open while on holiday on the Peninsula and a duck flew in and shat on her friend’s luggage, the bloody duck didn’t care it was Louis Vuitton, so that night at dinner they all ordered the duck as revenge.
I don’t know why she’s telling me these things. I don’t know why she’s here. More worrying is that I don’t know why I’m here.
Eventually our time is up and I feel like I’ve felt for months now: like a child listening to the teacher drone on, then hearing the bell ring and knowing I can finally go home. My heart leaps; I can actually feel it, giving a little hop in its cage. This may be a tell-tale sign that all is not well on the career-satisfaction index.
Violet slips her shoes on and makes her appointment for next week. As we say goodbye she says, as she always does, I feel better after our talk, Stanzi. I wave as the lift doors close then hobble back to my office.
It’s best to write up my notes now. I make a coffee in the communal kitchen amid the dirty mugs from the dental practice next door. I need some sugar to concentrate so I have a few biscuits from the packet in my desk drawer. Seeing Violet always makes me hungry. I’ve been in the game long enough to understand the power of suggestion.
Word association: Violet.
Crumble.
Where have all those biscuits gone? I went to the trouble yesterday to buy the ones with the cream filling, the revolting ones that taste like sweetened parmesan, in order to slow down their consumption and what has that achieved? I have struggled through an entire packet of cream biscuits I didn’t like when I could have had cake. Sacrifice, without any reason or benefit. Life is too short for cream biscuits. I could be trapped in a collapsing skyscraper tomorrow and it would have all been a tragic waste of calories.
Today I have been productive. I’ve seen my usual assortment of middle-class, white, usually-but-not-always women with a giddying assortment of suburban problems that usually boil down to this one thing: I’ve always been a good girl but the world has not kept its side of the bargain. When I was younger, I thought it’d be different. I thought something would happen. I would be richer, or prettier, or more famous, or more powerful. Or (and this one seems exclusive to women), I’m angry. I feel this rage come out of me and I’m so fucking angry I could break my fist through a wall. It can’t be my family that makes me this furious. I love them. I live for them. But I don’t know who else I could be angry at, or for what.
They cannot keep the anger in, these women: they drink too much, they shoplift, they sleep with their doubles partners, they scream at their children, they pay someone to take a knife to their eyes or breasts or stomach. They turn the anger inward and develop a depression so deep they cannot get out of bed. The women come to my office and talk to me for a while and they feel better. And when they’re talking to their friends and to their husbands they can say my counsellor says, so everyone knows it’s not just them, it’s not just some need to talk about me me me. It’s a real problem and they have a real counsellor to prove it.
It’s only later, when I ease my feet out of my Mary Janes and into my sneakers for the hike to the car, check my appointments for tomorrow and pack my handbag, that I notice my father’s coin is missing.
As soon as I’m in the car, I dial Charlotte, quickly, before she leaves the shop and I have to wait until she cycles home to Rowena Parade. She refuses to carry a mobile in case the radiation kills off her brain cells. I suspect that ship has already sailed.
Some hippy answers the phone and, as usual, I wait, because in hippyland, as Einstein said, time is relative: Charlotte and I may have been born six minutes apart, but sometimes it feels like six years. She is with a customer or sweeping the floor with a broom made from free-range straw that died of natural causes or singing Kumbaya to the wheatgrass so it is karmically aligned. Finally, she’s on the phone and, as carefully as I can manage, I ask her.
‘You want to know what?’
I sigh. ‘The year of the shilling. What was it?’
‘Why do you want to know?’
‘I’m considering doing a PhD on the random distribution of pre-war shillings in Melbourne suburbs.’ The traffic is nightmarish. I dart around a car turning right and nearly sideswipe a truck. Times like these, I need a siren.
‘Isn’t it back from the framer’s yet? They said they’d only take a week.’
‘Yes. That’s why I’m calling. Because it’s back. It’s in front of me.
They’ve done a beautiful job. Polished wood trim, set in green velvet. Just like we discussed.’
‘You haven’t even taken it yet. Have you.’
At the lights, I look over to a bovine woman in the next car. She is staring straight ahead, chewing her cud, hair a colour unknown in nature. She doesn’t notice me. When the lights change, she pulls in front of me with the oblivious insouciance of the entitled. ‘Not as such,’ I say.
In the background I can hear shop noises: the soft voices of calm people speaking, a knocking sound, metal sliding against metal. ‘I told you I’d do it. I told you I’d cycle over in my lunch hour and pick it up and then ride over to the framer’s.’
‘And I told you it’s easier if I did it. I have a fossil-fuelburning vehicle and no regard for the level of pollution I generate.’
‘If you haven’t taken it to the framer’s yet, you can just read the year on the shilling.’
There’s nothing for it. I explain, almost accurately, about my difficult client and her predilection for nicking stuff and the trials of my life in general.
‘I see,’ she says, and I’ve known her my entire life so I know exactly what I see means. ‘It’s obvious what needs to be done.’
‘What?’ I pull over into a side street off Glenferrie Road, take the phone out of the clasp and press it to my ear. I brace myself.
‘Violet is a troubled name. Bad feng shui. It’s too close to “violent”. She should change it. Maybe Viv, Viv’s a nice name. Vivian. Sounds like vivacious. Then she can keep her initials. Except if her last name ends with an oh en. Vivian Morrison. Vivian Davidson. That wouldn’t work. Vanessa would be OK. Another fun name. Risqué. Vanessa the undresser.’