MAs cost money, as does therapy, even at the heavily subsidized rates I was paying.21 I needed to return to paid work to save up enough for my course. Once that was finished, I reasoned, I would find some funding for a PhD, start work on the PhD, and from that moment on I would never have to suffer the indignity of another proper job. To that end, I spent a couple of months crying in the kitchen of a market research company where I worked as a telephone interviewer, after which I managed one week trying to work out how to research advertising leads for a magazine publisher in Kensington before they figured out their mistake and fired me, went back to cry at the market research company for a few weeks, and, finally, got a temporary job researching a directory of euromarket borrowers for a financial publisher in the City.
It was a horrible commute but it paid well. The money I earned there, along with a big overdraft guaranteed by my parents, would cover my first year back in academe. So I phoned, faxed and photocopied my way through the late spring and early summer. I even managed a bit of banter with my temporary colleagues, laughing at pictures of orange Eurotrash in Hello! and eating chocolate cake when the afternoons were quiet. In August, the university accommodation office sent me a list of rooms for rent in the Canterbury area, and I made arrangements to view. I picked up another list from the Poetry Library, and looked for writers’ groups in the same area. I was planning ahead for the autumn, so I knew I didn’t really want to kill myself.
My best friend was also in a long-term therapeutic relationship. Together we would chew over our more difficult therapy sessions the way other girls might dissect their arguments with their boyfriends. It was a big joke with us that Eliot had got it totally wrong: August, not April, was ‘the cruellest month’. August is the month when, in accordance with long tradition, analysts and therapists shut up shop and go off to diagnose each other at conferences. The four-walled, fifty-minute frames in which their patients have grown accustomed to being contained are temporarily withdrawn, leaving the patients and their neuroses to spill all over the place like basketloads of soiled laundry.
So you could say my feeling suicidal that August was just a matter of transferential routine. Perhaps it was. I don’t have any diary entries from this time, only a couple of unpublished poems that suggest I wasn’t enjoying the London summer very much.
With Ice
No, I don’t need a brown beverage
To steam open my pores today,
Not when the air rises in front of me,
And the streets are grinding
corridors of noise, when
Men and women strain towards
Charing Cross, in reeking nylon,
When the river heaves, thick with dirt,
And when the train rasps across the bridge,
Groaning in chains.
I took that poem to Donaghy’s workshop in July. ‘Well, it’s a perfectly good poem about a hot day,’ he said. ‘That last line seems to hint at something else, but whether it is about anything more, I couldn’t say . . .’ Neither could I. I wrote another poem, which I didn’t take to the class.
The Third One This Week
On his way down from the roof, Charles passed,
Behind the sheerness of tinted glass:
Ganglia of writing cable,
Faxes weeping ribbons,
Blinking switchboard,
Quivering screen,
Coffee – the dregs,
Gritty dregs,
Swinging
Receiver
Chiming,
‘Please
Hold,
Please
Hold,
Please
I think I was anxious lest, despite the third person, the flippant tone, the formal experimentation, the syllable-counting and the general studenty showing off, I might still have failed not to communicate.
I felt trapped inside myself. I couldn’t get hold of my friends on the phone: they were all out, drinking and having sex and going to raves and doing all the things I was too scared to do. I was sick of my family. I was sure that they must be sick of me, no matter what they said; my friends must be sick of me; she wouldn’t say but no doubt my therapist was sick of me too. And if the people who were stuck with me already were sick of me, what chance was there of getting anyone else to love me? Surely the rational thing to do would be to call it quits before I sickened us all further. A line from a Practical Criticism paper I’d done in school kept hissing into my mind:
Take her away; for she hath liv’d too long,
To fill the world with vicious qualities.
And wasn’t the world quite vicious enough without my making it even worse? The City was vilely hot, the trains groaned, the people reeked, nobody cared about anything except selling and profit, everything and everyone belonged to banks and insurance companies and here I was selling my time and labour to another project meant to make rich people richer. There were earthquakes in Japan, hurricanes over the Gulf of Mexico, and one of my colleagues was driving me mad. She sat behind me. Her efficiency was relentless; she could shriek down the phone in three languages. When she wasn’t working offensively hard or forcing us to eavesdrop on her life she was performing it to us: ‘I’ve been up ALL NIGHT with CONSTIPATION,’ she’d bellow. ‘I’ve got a FOUR-DAY BLOCKAGE!’ One day I happened to be walking past her desk just as she had finished a phone conversation with her friend Françoise – FRANÇOISE! – and I saw that she was wiping her eyes and sniffing. I felt guilty suddenly for finding her so annoying, and asked her what the matter was.
‘Françoise was on at me about my biological clock again. She said, “You’re not getting any younger, you know.” I know that, but – most of the time I just sweep things under the carpet, but every now and then, you know . . .’
I thought I knew. She was thirty-four, and her boyfriend hadn’t proposed yet. The people closest to her were still her parents. Behind all that desperate play-acting, I imagined she had to be in despair, like me. She was trapped inside herself, like me, and like me, she had never found a safe place to be away from her family and perhaps she never would. She made no secret of the fact that she thought the world a dreadful and dangerous place: people had no manners, people had no morals, they swore, they littered, women went out in short skirts without any tights on. She would start the working day by searching the Daily Mail for corroborative evidence, reading the headlines aloud, and cutting the juiciest stories out to put in a sort of horror scrapbook she kept at home. One day she read out a story about the escalating violence of the battle of the sexes among young people in America. Atrocities were piling up on both sides. In one terrible example, a gang of boys had set upon a smaller group of girls, beaten them, raped them, and finally, stamped on their necks just to make sure that they were dead.
Along with my ‘vicious qualities’, I now had the picture and the sound of cracking neck bones to add to my argument for suicide. How could any young woman with any sensitivity stand to exist in a world where some boy somewhere was crushing some girl’s vertebrae under his foot, and laughing – probably – while he did it? It was a clinching argument.
For a few weeks, I really tried, in spirit if not in body, to peel myself away from the world. I suggested to Jane in one of our phone calls that nobody would miss me if I were gone. She begged to differ – well, of course she would: it proved nothing. When I arrived home from work, I would stamp straight up the stairs, without a word to my mother, who noticed a sinister difference in me and phoned her friends about it. Then I borrowed my best friend’s copy of Alvarez’s cultural history of suicide, The Savage God, and, as I read it, I realized I didn’t want to die. I was too terrified of death, of non-being, and even though I might pretend to think otherwise, I knew that my suicide would hurt other people. It wasn’t for me to decide whether I was fit to be loved or not – my family were going to carry on loving me (idiots) no matter how questionable I found their taste. And it wasn’t for me to judge, at twenty-three, that my life was going to am
ount to nothing – how could such a judgement be rational? So I stopped trying to think my way into suicide and thought my way out of it instead. I chose, quite consciously, not to die, and it’s often been a comfort to remember that I did.
To a psychoanalyst, there are no such things as meaningless thoughts or pointless behaviours. Habits, mannerisms, neurotic and psychotic symptoms, dreams, slips of the tongue, accidents – all can be read and interpreted. Take, for example, the mistake I’ve been making again and again for the last few pages, where I’ve been running 1992 into 1993, and mixing up my ages of twenty-two and twenty-three. This suggests to me that I don’t really want to talk about this part of my life, that at some stage I must have folded these years up very small and then archived them on the Ecclesiastical History shelves of my memory, hoping that I would never have cause to retrieve them again. I want not to have spent those years in that kind of therapy; I want to have chosen one of the other MAs. I’m not sure it’s good for anyone – outside of clinical practice or literary theory – to learn as much about psychoanalysis as I did. Especially if you’re the sort of person who is perfectly capable of reading too much into things without any help from Freud, Klein, Jung, Lacan and the rest. I studied them all, and I took psychoanalytic theories every bit as personally as I had taken feminist polemic.
For the first two terms, we attended weekly lectures given by a prominent Kleinian analyst. He taught us about the Kleinian psyche, red in tooth and claw. We learned about the ‘primitive processes’ of splitting, projection and introjection; the paranoid and depressive positions; the internalized good and bad mothers; good breasts and bad breasts; penises; vaginas; shit, blood, spit and tears. Like any natural preacher, he had the gift of using anything and everything to help him communicate his understanding of human nature. One week he read to us from a detailed eyewitness account of the gory exploits of the Spanish Conquistadors, to show us what the world looked like when our innate human capacity for cruelty was given full rein; another week, he encouraged us to see Alien 3, which, he said, would give us the most accurate picture of ‘life in the anus’. Every week, he brought us numerous examples of neurosis and perversity from his own psyche and those of his patients.
One Friday afternoon in spring he was talking about evil, and how he had encountered it in his consulting room. He had once had a patient, a man of great outward respectability, who had spoken at length of his sexual habits and fantasies. This patient was a sadist, a ‘spanker’, who could only become fully aroused by spanking his female partners. Hard. The Kleinian told us how he had been sitting in his analyst’s chair listening to this man explaining how he had to hit the woman hard enough to leave a mark, and became aware of the presence of evil in his consulting room, on the couch, emanating from this man. He went on to talk about another patient. She was quite different from the first, but listening to her had given him that same pungent sense of evil in the room. This patient was a young woman, bright, but something of a drifter. One day, she had told him, calmly, almost cheerfully, that she was wasting her life, and he had seen the evil in her at that very instant. At this point in the story, he paused for a moment or two, just to let his message sink in, and I was sure in that moment that he was looking straight at me. It was as if he had been trying to pinpoint a source of evil right there in the lecture room, and had just that second located it.
This shook me so much that I let myself cry to Dr B about it. It had already been a tough enough session, with my sadistic superego swooping at me from all four corners of the room like a harpy in a synagogue hat. I had gone off on one of my feminist rants, about how I avoided sex and relationships, because I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life with my arms in the sink doing the washing-up for some man. Dr B interrupted me. That might be so, she said, but in the meantime I seemed happy enough to treat my mother as a servant. She said that stuff I’d been coming out with sounded like a standard piece of seventies polemic – in fact, it sounded like BALONEY!
That winded me completely, but I couldn’t let Dr B see that, so I gave her the tale of Kleinian evil, and then I cried.
She had moved consulting rooms by then, to a second-floor flat in Primrose Hill, a tower instead of a dungeon. Things were arranged differently here. She still had her chair in the corner, but in a different corner, directly opposite the door as one came in. The room was much larger than the old one, so the patient’s chair had no wall at its back, but floated all by itself in the middle of the floor, with the couch lining the wall on its left and a huge window a few feet behind. One week I told Dr B that I felt adrift in that chair, uncontained; when I arrived for my next session, there was a huge pot plant standing right next to it, providing green shelter. We did communicate, in our own way.
Dr B moved in February. Like August, it’s a jinxed month for me. By the time August comes, I’ve already had too much of the heat and the long days. In February, I’m suffering from a surfeit of greyness, cold and rain; my sinuses are blocked and my ears are aching; the world is struggling to wake up from the winter and maybe this time it won’t make it – there will come a time when none of us will make it . . . Shit happens in February. February was the month when the male sex made a collective decision and sent their messenger to tell me to FUCK OFF! Five years later, my therapist moved my symbolic container from Camden to Primrose Hill. Some of my demons escaped in transit, burrowed underground and then came up through the floor of a basement flat in Canterbury.
Actually, it was a beautiful flat. The woman who lived in and owned it, herself a graduate of the psychoanalytic MA, needed to keep up with the mortgage payments while she studied for her second Master’s, so she was renting out every room but the hall, the kitchen, the two bathrooms and the box room where she slept herself. I had a long room at the back, with its own sink, a desk and chair, a wardrobe and a single bed. It would have made a sizeable living or dining room, and my stereo, my portable TV, my books, tapes and CDs barely filled a tenth of it. I’d never had so much pacing room in my life.
The landlady and I were quick to make friends: we shared a compulsive openness about ourselves and our lives; we both loved art, psychoanalytic theory, and cats. She had a little black-and-white Manx who liked to sit on my desk while I worked. My room was her favourite, and when I lifted her up to move her out of it at night she would hiss, turn her head and make as if to bite me. I loved the cat but I was scared of her too, and spent more and more time dreading the hissing moment. I got in the habit of knocking on my landlady’s door, or our flatmate Scott’s door, and asking one of them to take her out for me. At school, I’d always asked my science partner to light the Bunsen burner – it was the same kind of manoeuvre.
At Cambridge I had avoided the communal kitchens, mostly because it meant having to light the gas hob with a match, so I had sometimes resorted to heating tinned soup by pouring boiling water into it from the kettle, which I don’t recommend. This time round, I had to cook for myself, so I did, if only sporadically, and on two gas rings. I did my own laundry too, as I had done at Cambridge. My usual garb at this time was a pair of leggings with a baggy jumper on top. Some of my baggies were handwash only, and could not be tumble-dried, so I would wash them as best I could in the tiny sink in my bedroom, wring them out and then hang them over the radiators to dry.
One afternoon the landlady knocked on my door. ‘Come out here for a moment,’ she said.
She pointed to a long, baggy blue jumper hanging on the radiator in the hall, and then to the puddle below it.
‘Your jumper has created a flood.’ Nobody had told me – and I had never figured out – that after you handwash a garment you need to roll it up in a towel to get rid of the water before you hang it up.
I was trying to be better, I really was. I was cooking – a little – and taking care of my own diet – sort of. I was working more consistently than I had for years, reading what needed to be read, and handing in what had to be handed in, and even if the work wasn’t as brilliant as
I’d wanted it to be, handing it in at all was enough of a victory for the time being. I was commuting faithfully to London every Monday to play headgames with Dr B. When she moved, and my demons fell out, it was almost too much to bear. It was all I could do to hold myself together. On top of that, I was still smarting from coming back from the Christmas holidays to find that my stereo had been left on for the whole holidays, and had a burned-out sound stage. I had said that anyone still in the flat was welcome to use it, and this was how I was repaid. My landlady swore that no one else had used it, that I must have forgotten to switch it off myself before I left. Perhaps I had, but I wasn’t buying it. I didn’t like our newest flatmate either, but everyone else loved him, so I kept my mouth shut. And my door. I would try to keep myself and my bad mood in quarantine until it left me and I was fit for human consumption again.
I had been in the habit of sitting and talking with my flatmates in the kitchen, but the kitchen had become quite unpleasant to be in. There was too much washing-up in the sink. Every time I needed a plate, I had to take one out of the sink and wash it. I remember muttering about that too.
One day the landlady told me that she needed a word. The problem was that I – and only I – had been leaving my washing-up in the sink, and she for one felt shat upon. The new flatmate especially had been getting really upset, and had asked her to speak to me about it. I said it can’t have just been me. She said maybe I’d disavowed it, maybe I’d split it, but it really had only been me. I felt cornered, so I cried. I cried about how hard I found it just to get up in the morning, how I felt that everyone was judging me. She said nobody else was, but that I judged myself very harshly, and I really shouldn’t; I was beautiful and talented and I would come good in the end. In the meantime, she would clean up the mess I’d left in the kitchen, and then we would all start again. I ran into my new flatmate in the kitchen after it had been cleaned and he said, ‘I see there is a new deal in the kitchen. Good.’ I found him patronizing and a little bit creepy to boot. But I couldn’t say so.
Woman Who Thought too Much, The Page 12