Beryl knocked on the door and opened it. Her eyes were shining brightly. Obviously she was hoping I’d throw her some little gossipy tit-bit.
‘Forget it,’ I told her before she could even come in.
‘She is beautiful, though, isn’t she?’ she said, coming in and perching on one corner of my desk.
I sighed. ‘Yes.’
‘Did you have any success at all?’ she tried again.
‘Beryl,’ I said warningly.
She clasped her hands to her chest. ‘It’s me. Beryl. I’m not about to run off and sell the story to one of the tabloids.’
‘No,’ I said firmly.
‘You don’t have to say anything. Just nod or shake your head.’
I looked at her blankly.
‘All right. Be like that then,’ she said sulkily and flounced out of the room. She popped her head around the door again wearing her apologetic face. ‘Oops, it appears in all the excitement I forgot to mention that your cleaning lady called. She couldn’t make it today. An emergency of some kind. She has to go up and see her sister in Brighton. She’ll be around tomorrow.’
‘Right. Thanks.’
‘Well, I’m off then. See you tomorrow.’
‘Yeah, see you tomorrow.’
I heard the front door shut and the place took on the waiting silence of abandoned houses. I poured myself three fingers of whiskey, and took a large swallow. Soon everything would become mellow. I leaned back in my chair and swiveled it around to face the window. People were hunched into their coats and hurrying home. Sitting here alone, I had watched this scene so many times. Until the streets emptied¸ and then I would pack up and go out for a solitary meal. Usually the Italian around the corner. They knew me there. Il Americano—the American—they called me.
I always had the same. Penne arrabiata to start and then Franco would bring out the day’s special, whatever it was, fish, rabbit, pig’s trotters, sweetbreads.
After a few meals Franco had said, ‘Always you eat alone. Big, beautiful man like you. Why?’
‘Nobody wants me,’ I joked.
He had jerked his head back with exaggerated violence as if recoiling from a striking snake. ‘Nooooo,’ he cried. It was the longest, most horrified no I’d ever heard. ‘Big, beautiful man like you. Not possibile.’ He pulled a chair out and sat beside me and with a conspiratorial nod said, ‘I have beautiful girl for you.’
‘Just the penne arrabiata tonight, I think.’
He moved away toward the kitchen with a wounded air. It was a few weeks before he forgave me and I became il Americano again. But I like Italians. Everything is so dramatic. They behave as if they are in an open air opera. Everything can be solved with a passionate declaration of love.
On the days I did not go to Franco’s I would go to the gym and work out for two hours then end up somewhere more glamorous.
But one thing never changed. I always dined alone. I always went home alone.
Tonight my dick felt heavy and turgid. I was not in the mood for food. I phoned Jenny. That’s not her real name by the way. Her birth name was unpronounceable.
‘Marlow,’ she answered immediately, her voice husky and full of promise. It never failed to strike me, every time I heard it at the end of a phone, how deceiving it was. In truth she was a simple, uncomplicated girl to whom life had been horribly cruel.
‘Can I come around?’ I asked.
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘Can you come in…say, one hour?’
‘See you in an hour.’
I placed the phone on the table and watched the pedestrians go by while I worked my way down the whiskey bottle. This was me unwinding after an awful day at the office. The whole time I kept my mind obstinately blank. I never allowed myself to think of her.
When the telephone rang I was already half a bottle deep and starting to feel a little sloshed so I ignored it. The answer machine clicked on. A woman left a message. She wanted to make an appointment to see the resident hypnotist. ‘That’ll be me, darlin’,’ I slurred to the empty office. She left her number and her name.
Twenty minutes before my appointment with Jenny I slipped into my coat, and moving through the shadows of my office walked down the stairs and out into the corridor I shared with the other practitioners in the building. It was as silent as a morgue. Everyone—the dentist on the first floor, the jiu jitsu master masseur and the chiropractor, along with their staff—had gone home. I locked my office and walked the short distance to the thick, black main door. I stepped outside and a cold blast of wind hit me in the face. I smiled. Just what I needed.
I left my car in the underground car park and took the Tube to Paddington.
Jenny opened the door wearing a tight, V-necked, deep pink blouse and a pair of white shorts with frayed hems. ‘Hello, stranger,’ she drawled, leaning seductively by the doorframe.
I offered up a smile.
‘Come in,’ she invited, opening the door wider.
I walked in and took my shoes off in the hallway. It was an Asian thing. Everybody had to take their shoes off before they could enter her apartment.
‘You haven’t been to see me for a long time. Have you been away?’
‘No. Just been busy, you know?’
‘I’ve missed you,’ she said.
Ah, Jenny. Poor you. I walked in my socks through her scrupulously clean home to the room where she conducted her business. It had a bed, a dresser, a well-used armchair and a basin and paper towel dispenser attached to the wall.
‘Is it still the same price?’ I asked.
‘You don’t have to pay,’ she replied.
‘Jenny,’ I said tiredly.
‘It’s still the same,’ she said quickly.
I took out my wallet, counted out fifty pounds, and put the notes on her dresser. Then I took off my coat, my jacket, my pants, my socks, and my boxers, and went to sit on the armchair. I laid my head against the backrest and closed my eyes. I felt a tight sensation in my body and my brain was wired. I needed to blow off steam.
‘How have you been, Marlow?’
‘Good,’ I said briefly. ‘And you?’
‘I’ve been well.’
There was a pause. Her apartment was warm and the armchair was comfortable. I wanted to relax.
‘Something about you is different today,’ she observed.
My eyes fluttered open. ‘Yeah?’
‘Yes,’ she said sadly and went out of the room. She came back in with a basin of water with a few drops of perfume. Flower petals were floating on the surface. She put it on the floor and I slipped my feet into the warm, slippery water. The sensation was heaven. After she had washed my feet she massaged them with warm oil. She did not try to make conversation again.
Then she pushed the basin away and her clever mouth closed around the head of my cock. Expertly she rubbed her lips up and down my shaft.
I didn’t want to.
I really didn’t want to think of Olivia, but she slipped into my head, forbidden and intensely alive and naked, but for a pair of shiny black stiletto boots. It was her wedged between my legs, her plump, red mouth stretched wide to receive the thickness of my cock.
She looked up at me with her mercury eyes, not innocent and troubled as she had been in my office, but full of raw sexual knowledge.
In my fantasy I called to her as surely as if I had tugged her nipple clamps. Her face slid up and down my shaft. I ejaculated so quickly Jenny made a small sound of surprise.
6
Olivia
It is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important.
—Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, The Little Prince
It was only when we had almost reached Dr. Kane’s offices that I saw the hole—as big as a five pence piece—in my tights. Scowling I stared at the tear running along my leg trying to remember where I could have snagged it when I was suddenly hurled into the middle of a full-blown panic attack.
My throat constricted. As if a ball was
stuck in it. I started to choke, my breathing becoming shallow and fast. My skin started to tingle warningly: lack of oxygen. That instantly upped the fright factor: I was going to die in the back seat of this car. My heart began to race, surely fast enough to burst.
Utter terror took over.
The urgency and intense fear that flooded into my being had no basis in reality. Nothing had happened, and yet it was so real it was causing my body to shut down right before my eyes. It would be hard to explain to someone who had never experienced such an attack what it felt like. Perhaps they would understand if they imagined being trapped in a corner of a burning room with no escape and watching the fire licking closer and closer.
The sensation was clear: RUN! NOW!
But of course I was totally frozen. Unable to move a single muscle! Soon I knew I would start sweating like a horse or I might even start hyperventilating and throw up. That would mean canceling my appointment and going home.
NO!
I didn’t want that. More than anything in the world I wanted to go for my appointment. The back of the chauffeur’s head was doing a dolly zoom in my head, but, ignoring it, I started to practice what Dr. Greenhalgh taught me to do. The first thing you had to do was fight off the cascade of irrational emotions that swamped you. The first line of defense was to slow down—thoughts, breathing, feelings.
Deliberately, I started a totally different internal dialog. Slow breaths. This is not a trigger. So what if you have a hole in your tights?
I took another deep breath.
No one is going to see it. It is nothing. It is absolutely nothing. Everything is going well.
I coughed hard and it felt as if that ball in my throat was expelled. Silently I repeated All is well, all is well like a mantra until the terror slunk away and my muscles slowly unlocked.
Breathing deeply I looked out of the window. The world outside me was unchanged. We were less than ten minutes away. I opened my purse and took my compact out and looked at my face. My pupils were still dilated and I looked a bit pale, but otherwise I was normal. See? Everything is fine. I closed the compact and slipped it back into my purse.
These attacks were coming more and more frequently and for less and less important things. The last time was yesterday in the shower as soon as the water hit my face. I couldn’t breathe.
I looked down at the hole in my tights. It was still there. I ran my hand along the snagged material. I shook my head. Silly, silly Olivia. Then I twisted the material around my thigh so it would be at the side of my leg. Far less obvious. Perhaps I would keep my coat on. Not that anyone would notice anyway. Beryl was too star-struck. Anyone would think I had done something important or invented something hugely clever, and Dr. Kane was of course too professional and aloof. His eyes never strayed below my modest necklines.
The thought of the detached Dr. Kane was like a loving caress in my brain. Though I recognized that he was becoming something of an obsession with me, I could not stop thinking about him. He drew me like a moth to a flame. And a flame he was. Beautiful and bright but not to be touched.
Our first meeting was a shock to my system. Perhaps if I had not been so dreading the session, or if the reception area of his offices had not been quite so plain and ordinary, or if Beryl hadn’t been so terribly impressed by my title, it wouldn’t have been as startling when she opened a door and revealed him.
Backlit by the window he stood beside his desk, hands by his sides, the jacket of his navy suit open, a charcoal shirt showing underneath. No tie. His shoulders were broad and powerful and his legs planted shoulder-width apart. I had never seen a man look so rugged and powerfully masculine in a suit.
His hair, straight and so black it was almost blue, touched his collar and his eyebrows were thick and straight. Though it was impossible to make out the color of his eyes, they were harsh and urgent and, teamed with the tenseness of his stance, for a split second I had the impression of a gun-slinger, readying himself for a draw.
My skin had prickled at the threat, but he came forward, his manner cool and put together, and the impression became a fleeting trick of the light.
Wiped of all expression, his eyes were exact and penetrating. Like looking into a one-way glass. You couldn’t see who was on the other side, but you knew someone was watching and assessing. As he came closer I saw his eyes were, in fact, whiskey with gold flecks glittering in them, and his nose, lips and jaw were so perfectly chiseled, they were as if cut from glass. He was an extraordinarily stunning specimen of the male species.
I had felt a thrill run through me. It was insane to be so affected by a man who had not even touched you, but God! I wanted him. I felt myself blush. Since coming out of hospital I could not remember ever feeling such an instantaneous and powerful attraction for anyone. My life was already a complicated mess, though. I most definitely did not need to fall headlong into a crush on my hypnotist.
He came forward as if to shake my hand, but he did not. Instead he waved me toward a seat. As I started walking toward it I became hyper-aware of my own body, the way it moved, instinctively, sensuous as a snake, totally unlike me.
But he was professional, precise and detached, and after a while my body stopped trembling with a strange craving for the feel of his skin, his mouth, his teeth. Just once when I had come out of the hypnosis he had looked at me, and desire had hummed between us. It was as if his body was talking to me. I felt it like a tingling between my legs.
Again it was he who coldly terminated the exchange. And after that there were no more such occurrences. He held his distance and made it plain that there was to be nothing between us except the sterile politeness of a professional relationship. We were to be two people who had nothing in common and didn’t particularly like each other.
And yet I felt as if he was the only person in the world I could truly trust. He was my bridge to the past. The only one who could make the memories come alive again. When other people spoke of things that happened I felt no connection to it. Almost as if they were playing a trick on me. Remember when you and your brother put horse shit in a handbag and left it in the street for people to find?
No. I don’t remember. Not at all.
I went to Dr. Kane and told him to make me remember the dung in the handbag incident. He put me under and the whole episode became alive. I remembered all the details in full color. The hay tickling my leg, the smell of the poo, the irrepressible giggles, the trip to the roadside, hiding in the bushes, shhh…shh…the sense of being so naughty, the way we had laughed, rolling on the ground at their disgusted expressions. And then running like the devil. So fast, my ribs hurt and my breath came out in huge gasps. Finally standing in front of Ivana, and her eyes twinkling as she pretended to chastise us.
He gave me back other memories, too. Scenes with my dog, Freya. I saw her running in the sunshine, her shining, and I felt again the deep love I had for her. When I was brought out of my hypnotic state I was shocked that I could have forgotten such a great love.
On another occasion I relived the time I hid behind a sofa and heard my mother tell my father that she was dying. The matter-of-fact way she said it. And Daddy was so shocked he let out a grunt of pain. I remembered being so stunned I could not move.
And I remembered the first day Ivana came to be interviewed for the job of Mummy’s nurse. I was five years old. She was dressed in very dowdy clothes, but her beauty shone through. I thought she was a movie star. We met in the hallway. She was on her way out. I stared up at her.
‘Oh my, wow! What a pretty girl you are,’ she exclaimed.
I became cripplingly shy and dropped my gaze down to my shoes.
She went down on her haunches and told me she had a little boy a little younger than me. He was two years old. ‘Some day I’ll bring him to meet you,’ she said. And then she brought out a box of gobstoppers from her handbag and offered them to me. Her eyes were kind.
I guess she must have pitied me even then. And when I lay in hospital all tho
se months in a body suit because my ribs were so badly crushed, it was Ivana who visited me every day. Every day without fail she came. Always smiling, always encouraging.
Watson, our driver, stopped the car. We were outside Dr. Kane’s practice.
‘Thank you. I’ll text you when I’m ready,’ I said, and got out.
I stood on the pavement for a second and men and women alike turned to look at me as they passed me by. Wealth. It always drew the eye. I rang the bell and Beryl buzzed me in. I walked up the wooden stairs and entered Beryl’s domain.
She smiled and got immediately to her feet. ‘Good afternoon, Lady Olivia.’
I smiled. The first time we met I swear I thought she was going to drop into a curtsey. ‘Good afternoon, Beryl.’
Her voice dropped to a whisper. ‘There’s still someone in there.’ She made a face. ‘She came late so her hour has run into yours. I hope you don’t mind waiting a few minutes.’
I smiled. ‘That’s fine.’
She came around her desk. ‘Let me take your coat.’
‘I’ll keep it for a bit.’
She stopped and hovered uncertainly. ‘It is frosty out there today.’
I smiled politely.
She shifted her weight from one foot to the other. ‘My sister made a fruitcake. Fancy a slice? It’s very good.’
‘Oh yes. Thank you.’
She grinned hugely. ‘And a cup of tea to go with it?’
‘That would be lovely, Beryl.’
She disappeared into the back and I stared at the framed painting on the wall that read:
Let not your past define you.
Let it refine you.
The first time I saw it I stared at it with a peculiar sense of weightlessness. I felt empty and sad. Like a ghost. The real me died some time ago. I had nothing to define or refine me. There was a curtain separating me from my memory. Sometimes the curtain looked so thin it was almost a veil. All I had to do was push the veil back a little. But then I became frightened of what lay behind the veil.
7
Marlow
Hypnotized Page 4