Leith, William

by The Hungry Years

  I was not sure what would happen next. I wanted to find out what my problems were. That was all. I was not unduly alarmed. I reminded Naomi about my 'issues', which we'd briefly discussed on the phone. The eating. The drinking.

  `So eating and drinking. Anything else?'

  I thought for a moment. I felt a sense of vertigo, as if standing on the edge of a crevasse.

  `Well, obviously, procrastination.'

  `Procrastination?'

  `Yes. I'm always ... putting things off.'

  `That's interesting. Tell me about that.'

  `I always seem to leave things to the last moment. I'm always late. I don't like being late. In fact, I hate being late. But I can't bring myself to be on time. Something, a sort of malign force, always takes me over.'

  She asked me if I could think of any instances, and I told her stories of nearly missing trains, nearly missing planes, actually missing trains and planes. I told her that, if I was ever early for something, I felt uneasy, gripped by anxiety.

  `And has this caused you problems?'

  `Oh, yes. Everybody hates it.'

  `Can you tell me about a specific time?'

  `I was once on holiday, in Italy, with a girlfriend and her family. One day we went somewhere on this train. And we all got on the train. It was a tiny station. We were sitting there. The train was leaving in about five minutes. And I looked across the platform, and there was this lovely sort of coffee place, a tiny little coffee bar. And all I could think of was that I really wanted a coffee. I mean .

  `Go on.'

  `I mean, I really wanted a coffee. And I said, does anybody want a coffee? And my girlfriend just hissed at me. She said, You can't be serious. I said, look, we have, like, six minutes. How long do you think it will take me? And she gave me this look, just this mean look, as if to say, if you do this I will hate You, And I sat there for a while, and just when she thought I was definitely not going to do it, I got out of the train, walked

  across the tracks, got my coffee, and made it back, about a full minute before the whistle.'

  `And what happened?'

  `She wouldn't speak to me.'

  `And how did you feel?'

  `Well, great. For a moment. And the coffee was not bad,

  actually.'

  `But this wasn't about the coffee.'

  `Right.'

  `So what was it about?'

  I don't know. With me it's probably all about boarding

  school.'

  `What's the connection?'

  `Well . . .'

  And so began the procrastination phase of my therapy, the hours when I talked about certain things, in order to avoid talking about other things. Of course, this is not necessarily a bad approach. As Freud pointed out, therapy is not something that should be brought to a swift conclusion. On the contrary, therapy should be long, drawn-out, painful and, of course, expensive. 'Cruel though it may sound,' Freud wrote in Lines of Advance in Psychoanalytic Therapy, 'we must see to it that the patient's suffering, to a degree that is in some way or other effective, does not come to an end

  prematurely.'

  `Were you happy at boarding school?'

  `I was fine.'

  `Fine?'

  `I just felt very ... restricted.'

  Boarding school, although I hadn't liked it, was somethingI felt relatively comfortable talking about; if my troubled psyche was a crevasse, the subject of boarding school seemed like a visible ledge. I lowered myself down on to the ledge. At boarding school, I explained, I felt 'trapped'. I hated the rules. I hated the fact that you had to wear a strict uniform. I hated the fact that, for a day every week, you had to dress up, not

  I uniform, but in army uniform, that you had to polish just in uni

  your boots and belt, actually polish your belt with boot polish, making it shine, as if it was itself a pair of boots. And why, in any case, do boots need to be polished? Boots that need to be polished, I said, made me sick. They made me think of old women scrubbing the pavement outside their terraced houses.

  `So, you know, I think I'm always trying to escape, trying to kick against that stuff. Hence the procrastination.' `That's interesting.'

  `Once, I remember, I was walking along a corridor, and this master just grabbed me, and slammed me against the wall and just ... sort of strangled me with my tie, because it wasn't done up properly. That's the kind of place it was, my school.,

  `And where were your parents while this was happening?' `Oh. They were ... they moved around a lot.'

  `Yes?'

  `MY father was an academic. He worked at all sorts of different universities. He went to conferences all the time. Where were my parents? They were abroad.'

  `We're going to have to stop in a couple of minutes. We can talk about this more next time. But how did you feel about Your parents being abroad?'

  `Oh, fine.'

  `OK then.'

  `No, really. I was fine about it. Because . .

  `I'm sorry about this, but we've run out of time.'

  Only Nuts

  When I walked out, thinking about my parents, about where my family had been when I was a kid, I went into a bar and drank a glass of red wine, trying to drink it slowly, but drinking it in two gulps, and quickly ordering another, and drinking that one in about four gulps, and I sat at the bar for a while, feeling woozy and reading a tabloid story about a survey claiming that six out of every ten women were unhappy with their bodies. One woman interviewed said she'd had liposuction, and was 'delighted with the results'. But she was still not completely satisfied with herself. 'The shape of my nose has started to bother me,' she said.

  I walked out of the bar and tried to imagine doing something other than snorting some cocaine and getting hammered, absolutely hammered, and I wandered around for a while, went home, watched TV, tried to calm down. I was

  fine, I told myself. There was nothing wrong. I went to the

  deli across the road, and bought a packet of macadamia nuts. Standing there, in the street, I ripped the packet open, swallowed some nuts, went home, and put the rest of the nuts in the cupboard. I closed the cupboard door. I tried to breathe deeply. I was fine. It was only nuts. I opened the cupboard door. I looked at the nuts, thought about them.

  Did I want the nuts? No, I did not.

  I closed the cupboard door. It was only nuts. I was fine.

  That's how I felt the rest of the week. Fine. Well, that's not quite true. I lay on my bed and read books, more or less Compulsively, about addiction and therapy. I sat at my laptop, scribbling notes on pieces of paper, on the dog-eared documents that formed a mound on my desk restaurant bills, bar bills, electricity and phone bills, reminders, final demands, summonses. The words I kept writing were 'compulsive' and `eating' and 'food' and 'alcohol' and 'childhood' and 'mother' and 'father' and 'procrastination' and 'hypochondriaI .

  I'd had trouble with hypochondria, on and off, for years. The next time I saw Naomi, I brought the subject up.

  `I think I'm better now, though. It still flares up. But it's more or less totally under control, I'd say. Just occasionally, I have to, you know, keep it in check.'

  `Does it happen at any particular time?'

  `Well, yes. That's interesting. Uh, I'd say it happens in two quite different situations. One is when I'm anxious about

  something.'

  `What sort of thing?'

  `When I'm under pressure. You know. Deadlines. Work. But it's not as bad now. I mean, it's just little things, and I get them under control pretty quickly.'

  `How do you mean?'

  `Well, it's nothing like it was. These days, it's just, say, if I switch on the radio, like I did the other day, and the first thing I heard, the first word, was "cancer". And then the word just keeps jumping out at me. I'll see it everywhere. In stations. On

  posters. Sometimes you open a magazine, and there's a picture of someone, and lust a simple caption, "I have cancer". You just see the stark words. And that begins to haunt me.'
>
  `I see.'

  `But I must be getting better. Because there was a time when

  I wouldn't have been able to say the words, "I have cancer".' `Uh-huh.'

  `Which I don't.'

  `Right.'

  `I mean, I don't have cancer.'

  `You said there were two different situations when you felt your hypochondria coming on.'

  `Right, yes.'

  `One is when you're anxious. And the other one?'

  `Oddly, when I'm not anxious.'

  I went on in this vein for a while. I told Naomi about my hypochondria its details, its quirks. I told her about how, usually, I focused my anxiety on one disease, and how, when my hypochondria was at its worst, I had hung around the medical sections of bookshops, reading about diseases I was not frightened of.

  `Why?'

  if I could displace the main disease with

  `It's interesting that you keep talking about

  keep telling me how you impose these traps

  Little Pieces

  Over the next few weeks, a pattern began to emerge. I would arrive, late, take my coat off, sit on the not-quite comfortable chair, and proclaim myself to be 'fine, absolutely fine'. Then I would tell Naomi something trivial something I had noticed about the weather, or the traffic. Naomi would smile politely. Mostly, therapists don't comment on anything at all. For months, the only solitary fact I gleaned from Naomi was that she preferred to travel to hot places in the off-season, when

  the weather was not too hot she liked Greece in September, for instance.

  I kept talking about the same few things my tendency to binge, my fears, my lateness, the fact that I tended to hold on to clutter, rather than throwing it away. For a while, it seemed that I knew exactly what my problem was, and yet, simultaneously, that I knew nothing. I'd thought about it a million times, and made sense of it, and later, when I thought about it again, it made no sense at all.

  One day, quite early on, Naomi said, 'Tell me about your childhood.'

  `Well, you know. We moved around.'

  I described the moves. As I went through the place-names, I became very uncomfortable filled, not with sadness or misery, but guilt. I kept expecting Naomi to challenge me,

  or at least to change the subject. When I had finished listing the places, I felt terrible.

  `And did your difficulties with eating have anything to do With that, do you think?'

  , Well, I always think they did. I was fine until I was eight,

  `Well, to see another disease.

  Naomi said, being trapped.'

  `Yes?'

  `And yet you on yourself.'

  when we moved to Canada for a year, and then I got fat. I was exposed to a lot of fast food. Before that I'd had a pretty

  controlled diet. In Canada it was burgers, fries, lots of ice cream, popcorn, and all that stuff. And I just fell for it. I

  remember this particular ice cream, sort of very soft white ice cream between chocolatey wafers, which I had at school every break-time, it was a sort of reward '

  `Rewarding yourself?'

  `Yes. I hated that school. It was a Catholic school, very

  religious, very strict.'

  `Were your parents unhappy?'

  `My mother, I think, hated being there. My father had

  wanted to go.'

  `So there was tension between your parents?'

  `No. Not ... well, I don't know. If there was, they played it

  down.'

  I paused. This was making, me uncomfortable. I didn't

  mind talking about myself, about my own problems, my own unhappiness, my bingeing, drug-taking, procrastination, untidiness but my parents! How could my parents be unhappy? They were my parents. They were fine.

  `Do you remember anything about being told the family

  was going to move.

  `Well, I must have been seven. I remember coming home from school, and saying something like, I'm going to be in

  Mrs Phillips' class next term, and my mother saying, no you're not, because we're going to Canada.'

  `Right.'

  `And I said, how long for? And my mum said, for a year.

  And this sounded weird, but not too bad. And I said, so doesthat mean I'll be in Mrs Phillips' class the year after, or will I

  go straight into the next class? And my mum said that, well, no, I wouldn't

  `Yes?'

  `And ... I didn't understand. That was when she told me that, after we came back from Canada, we wouldn't be

  coming back home. We'd be going somewhere else.' `And how did you feel about that?'

  `It was the way the information came out in little pieces. That was the killer.'

  And ... here it was! I sat there for a moment, wanting to explore this emotion, not wanting to explore this emotion. Here was something I'd been repressing! At last a beginning. Of course, you shouldn't expect too much from therapy as Freud said, the best you could expect was an experience,

  over time, of 'transforming your hysterical misery into common unhappiness'.

  I had hoped to find two things. The first was: what is my real problem? The second: if I find out what my real problem is, how will this help?

  And this thing I'd just seen, or rather felt, this thing I'd been repressing, was, I felt, related to my real problem.

  I said, 'That was the killer. The way the information came out in little pieces.'

  I Hadn't Even Noticed It

  Sometimes I talked about my dreams. I kept having two recurring dreams. In one, I would wake up in a cell, on the

  day of my execution. Then I would wake up in my bed, and still think I was in the cell. In the other, I would have a visit from an old teacher, often my Latin teacher. He would produce documents, incontrovertibly proving that I had to go back to school. In the dream, there was always a period of wrangling about uniform issues. In one version I would have to wear shorts.

  One day I said to Naomi, 'At the age of nine I had this sort of breakdown. This was after we came back from Canada.' `Breakdown?'

  `Well, I've never called it that. I would never call it that in front of my parents. But I was completely out of control. I stopped being able to write. I started eating my pens and pencils, and drinking ink. I used to put ink cartridges in my mouth and chew them. I mean, something weird, really weird, was happening.'

  This was interesting. It was definitely true that something very peculiar had happened to me. It started with a compulsion to press too hard with the nib of my fountain pen, rendering my handwriting scratchy and illegible. I broke one nib after another. I could not understand how other boys could have a pen and not be overwhelmed by the urge to destroy it. Soon, nearly everything I touched would break. At the time I wore glasses, and my glasses kept falling off and smashing. I began to chew, and then to eat, the contents of my pencil case. But this was the first time, the very first time, I had described this period in my life with any accuracy. It amazed me. Over the years, these events had been diminished, watered down, forgotten;

  `And how was this resolved?'

  `One day, after it had been going on for a while, we were in a Latin class, and the Latin teacher, who was the headmaster of the school, asked me to go to the staff room to get some chalk. So I did. And later, some of the other kids surrounded me, and started saying, "Crying, were you? Crying? Well, I'm going to make you cry!"'

  `What was that about?'

  `Well, years later, I became friends with one of these kids who beat me up, and he told me that when I went to get the chalk, the headmaster had said something like, "I had a call from this boy's mother last night. And she says he comes home crying every day. Now, why would this be?" And this kid said, "That really got us going. I mean, we knew you were pretty weird. But crying? Crying to your mummy? That made us want to hammer you." '

  `So you were very vulnerable at this point.'

  `Right. Absolutely. But things did get better.'

  `Because there was more stability at
home?'

  `Oh, no. Not at all. There was less stability. Less and less.' `So how did things get better?'

  `I began to adopt a sort of gallows humour. The next thing was, about a year after I started getting beaten up, in fact around the time people stopped beating me up, my mother gave me another piece of news. We were going to Germany! We were all going to Germany for the Easter holidays. But get this. My parents and my brother were going to stay in Germany. I had to go to boarding

  school.'

  `How did you feel?'

  `Well) come on. I mean, part of me must have felt really

  frightened. And, you know, who would do this to a kid who's just recovered from a breakdown?'

  `How do you feel now?'

  `Well, you know, if I allow myself to feel anything, it comes out like pure rage. I am furious. I'm feeling furious now.' `Is that a difficult feeling to live with?'

  `God, yes. I never allow myself to feel it. Well, I try not to. Not for any length of time.'

  `Who are you angry with?'

  `My parents. The world in general.'

  `Think about it a bit more.'

  I did. After a while, I had another insight. I was furious with my mother. I'd known this all along. Or rather, I'd known it, but not known it. How could I be furious with my mother? I loved my mother. My anger, it seemed, was not about what had happened, but about what happened when I tried to talk about it.

  `When I try to talk about it, when I've tried to tell her how I felt, she tells me it wasn't so bad.'

  `Tell me about that.'

  `I feel like I want to talk to her about the whole thing, but I can't. Over the years I've tried.'

  `Yes?'

  `But every time, I blow it. It just comes out all wrong. Whenever I've tried to explain how I felt, it was as if this incredibly strong force was working against me. I get flustered. It's as if I'm in court, and I've forgotten my notes, and the judge, my mother, is losing patience.'