Therapy

by David Lodge

  They wrapped the programme at five past nine, after more retakes than I could ever remember. Billy hypocritically thanked the audience for their support, and we all dispersed. The actors scurried from the set, giving me tired little waves and wan smiles of farewell. They’re always in a hurry to get off on Sunday nights, to drive or catch the last train to London, and there was no temptation to linger tonight. I would have been glad to slope off home myself, if I hadn’t had the confab with Ollie and Hal pending. I went to the control room, where Hal was running both hands through his birds’ nest of wiry hair. “Jesus Christ, Tubby, who were those zombies out there tonight?” I shrugged my bafflement. “Maybe it was the script,” I said miserably. Ollie came steaming into the room in time to hear this. “It wouldn’t have made any difference if you were Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and Groucho Marx rolled into one,” he said, “those fuckers would have killed anybody’s script. Where did we get them from – the local morgue?” Suzie the PA said she thought the largest contingent was a local factory’s social club. “Well, the first thing I’m going to do tomorrow morning is find out who the hell they were and who invited them, and make sure they never come to a recording again. Let’s go and have a drink. We need it.”

  Ollie is notoriously tight-fisted, and always wriggles out of standing his round if he possibly can. He’s always the last to say, “Anybody for another one?” – by which time anyone who’s driving has switched to fruit juice or stopped drinking altogether. When we go to the bar with him, Hal and I usually have a bit of fun trying to trick him into buying the first round – for instance, Hal will pretend to remember he’s left something in the control room, and double back, shouting his order over his shoulder, and I’ll suddenly veer into the Gents, doing the same. But yesterday evening neither of us had the heart for it, and Hal bought the first round without putting up any kind of fight. “Cheers,” he said gloomily. We drank and sat in silence for a moment. “I’ve put Hal in the picture about Debbie,” Ollie said. Hal nodded gravely. “It’s a bitch,” he said. But I knew I couldn’t count on any real support from him. When push came to shove, he would side with Ollie. “Jake told you what we’re suggesting, Tubby?” Ollie said.

  At this moment Suzie came into the bar, and looked around until she spotted us. “Not a word about the Debbie thing,” Ollie warned in a low voice, as she approached our table. I offered her a seat, but she shook her head. “I won’t stop, thanks,” she said. “I went outside and mingled with the audience while they were waiting for their buses. Most of them are from an electrical component factory in West Wallsbury. They heard on Friday that it’s going to shut down at the end of next month. They all got redundancy notices with their payslips.” We looked at each other. “Well, that explains a lot,” I said. “Just our luck,” said Hal. “Sodding management might have waited till tomorrow,” said Ollie.

  I was sorry for the workers, but the explanation couldn’t have come at a better time as far as I was concerned. I’d been so demoralized by the way that evening’s show had bombed that I would probably have agreed to anything Ollie and Hal proposed. Now, I no longer blamed myself. I was a bloody good scriptwriter after all – always had been and always would be. I was ready to do battle for my principles. “Jake gave me a rough idea of what you have in mind,” I said to Ollie. “You want me to write Priscilla out of the story, is that it?” “What we have in mind,” said Ollie, “is an amicable separation which removes Priscilla from the scene at the end of the current series, and sets up a new female interest in Edward’s life for the next one.” “Amicable?” I exploded. “They would be completely traumatized.” “There would be a certain amount of pain, of course,” said Ollie, “but Edward and Priscilla are mature modern people. They know that one in three marriages ends in divorce. So does our audience. You’re always saying sitcom should deal with the serious things in life occasionally, Tubby.” “As long as it’s consistent with character,” I said. “Why should Priscilla want to leave Edward?”

  They had various bizarre suggestions: e.g., Priscilla decides she’s a lesbian and goes off with a girlfriend; she gets oriental religion and goes off to an ashram to learn meditation; she is offered a wonderful job in California; or she just falls for a handsome foreigner. I asked them if they seriously thought any of these developments were (a) credible or (b) manageable in just one episode. “You might have to rewrite the last two or three, to prepare the ground,” Ollie conceded, avoiding the first question. “I have an idea for the final episode,” said Hal. “Let me run it by you.” “This is a great idea, Tubby,” Ollie assured me. Hal leaned forward. “After Priscilla walks out, Edward advertises for a housekeeper, and this stunning bird arrives at the door for an interview. Edward suddenly sees there may be a silver lining to his troubles. It’s the very last shot of the series. Leaves the punters feeling better about the split, and interested in what will happen in the next series. What do you think?” “I think it stinks,” I said. “Naturally you’d be paid handsomely for the extra work,” said Ollie. “To be frank, you and Jake have us over a barrel on this one.” He glanced slyly at me from under his hooded eyelids to see if he had awakened my greed by this admission. I said it wasn’t money I was concerned about, but character and motivation. Hal asked me if I had any better ideas. I said: “The only plausible way to remove Priscilla from the show is to kill her.” Ollie and Hal exchanged startled looks. “You mean, like have her murdered?” Hal faltered. I said, of course not, maybe a car crash or a swift fatal disease. Or a minor operation that goes wrong. “Tubby, I don’t believe I’m hearing this,” said Ollie. “We’re talking sitcom here, not soap. You can’t have one of your principal characters die. It’s a no-no.” I said there was always a first time. “That’s what you said about tonight’s episode,” said Ollie, “and look what happened.” “That was the audience’s fault,” I protested, “you said so yourself.” “The best audience in the world is going to be stymied if they turn up expecting a comedy show and find that it’s all about the mother of a family dying in the prime of life,” said Ollie, and Hal sagely nodded his agreement. Then Ollie said something that really made me angry. “We appreciate how hard this is for you, Tubby. Perhaps we should think about getting another writer to work on it.” “No way, José,” I said. “It’s commonplace in America,” Ollie said. “They have whole teams of writers working on shows like ours.” I know,” I said, “that’s why the shows sound like a string of gags written by a committee. I’ll tell you another thing about America. In New York they have street signs saying, ‘DON’T even think of parking here.’ That’s how I feel about The People Next Door.” I glowered at Ollie. “It’s been a long day,” said Hal nervously. “We’re all tired.” “Yeah, we’ll talk again,” said Ollie. “Not about other writers,” I said. “I’d rather scuttle the ship than hand it over to somebody else.” It seemed a good exit line, so I got to my feet and bade them both goodnight.

  I just opened the dictionary to check the spelling of “glowered”, and as I flipped the pages the headword “Dover’s Powder” caught my eye. The definition said: “a preparation of opium and ipecac, formerly used to relieve pain and check spasms. Named after Thomas Dover (1660–1742) English physician.” I wonder if you can still get it. Might be good for my knee.

  It’s amazing what you can learn from dictionaries by accident. That’s one reason why I never use the Spellchecker on my computer. The other reason is that it has such a pathetically small vocabulary. If it doesn’t recognize a word it suggests another one it thinks you might have meant to write. This can be quite funny sometimes. Like once I wrote “Freud” and the computer came back with the suggestion, “Fraud?” I told Amy, but she wasn’t amused.

  I called Jake this morning and reported my conversation with Ollie and Hal. He was sympathetic but not exactly supportive. “I think you should be as flexible as you can,” he said. “Heartland are desperately keen for the series to continue. It’s their comedy flagship.” “Whose side are you on, Jake?” I aske
d him. “Yours, of course, Tubby.” Of course. But at heart Jake believes in Ollie Silver’s adage, “Art for art’s sake but money for Christ’s sake.” I arranged to call in at his office on Thursday.

  Had a restless night last night. Sally was already in bed and asleep when I got back from the recording. I snuggled up to her spoonwise and went off quite quickly, but was jerked awake at two thirty by internal derangement of the knee. I lay awake for hours, replaying the events of yesterday in my head, and waiting for the next twinge. This morning I noticed a touch of tennis elbow, too, when I was shaving. Be great, wouldn’t it, if I had another operation on my knee, only to find I had to give up tennis because of the elbow? Good job it’s my day for physiotherapy.

  Monday evening. I asked Roland if he’d ever heard of Dover’s Powder, but he said it didn’t ring a bell. He’s a connoisseur of anti-inflammatory gels with names like Movelat and Traxam and Ibuleve (reminds me of the song, “Ibuleve for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows …”) which he rubs into my knee after ultrasonic treatment. (“Ibuleve for every stab of pain that galls, new tissue grows …”) Physiotherapy these days is largely automated. When I’m stripped down and ready on the couch, Roland wheels a big box of electronic tricks into the room and wires me up to it, or aims a dish or a lamp or a laser at the affected part. It’s amazing how deftly he handles the equipment. There’s just one gadget I have to operate myself. It gives electric shocks which stimulate the quadriceps, and I have to turn up the voltage to the maximum I can bear. It’s like self-inflicted torture. Funny how much the pursuit of fitness has in common with the infliction of pain. From my couch, shackled with wires and electrodes, I gaze through the window and across a small courtyard at the glass wall of a gymnasium where men, grimacing with effort and glistening with sweat, are exercising on machines that, apart from their hi-tech finish, could be engines of torture straight out of a mediaeval dungeon: racks, pulleys, weights, and treadmills.

  Roland asked me if I had heard about the trans-sexual trout. No, I said, tell me about the trans-sexual trout. He’s a mine of information, is Roland. His wife reads interesting snippets out of the newspaper to him, and he remembers everything. Apparently male trout are suffering sex-changes because of the high level of female hormones getting into the sewage outfall from contraceptive pills and hormone replacement therapy. It’s feared that all the male fish in the affected rivers will become hermaphrodites, and cease to reproduce. “Makes you think, doesn’t it?” said Roland. “After all, we drink the same water eventually. Next thing you know, men will be growing breasts.” I wondered if Roland was winding me up. I have a lot of fatty tissue on my chest, under the hair. Roland might have felt it one day, when he was giving me a massage.

  Perhaps I couldn’t come the other night because I’m turning into a hermaphrodite. Internal Derangement of the Hormones.

  Tuesday evening, 23rd Feb. I asked for Dover’s Powder in the biggest Boots in Rummidge today, but the pharmacist said he’d never heard of it, and he couldn’t find it in his book of patent medicines. I said, “I expect it was banned because of the opium,” and he gave me a funny look. I left the shop before he could call the Drug Squad.

  I went into the City Centre primarily to buy some books by Kierkegaard, but didn’t have much joy. Waterstone’s only had the Penguin edition of Fear and Trembling, so I bought that and went along to Dillons. When Dillons proved to have the same book and nothing else, I began to feel my usual symptoms of shopping syndrome, i.e. unreasonable rage and impatience. Low Frustration Tolerance, LFT, it’s called, according to Alexandra. I’m afraid I was very scathing to a harmless assistant who thought “Kierkegaard” was two words and started searching on her microfiche under “Gaard.” Fortunately the Central Library was better supplied. I was able to borrow The Concept of Dread, and a couple of the other titles that had intrigued me, Either/Or and Repetition. The Journals were out.

  It’s quite a while since I used the Library, and I hardly recognized it from the outside. It’s a typical piece of sixties civic architecture, a brutalist construction in untreated concrete, said by the Prince of Wales to resemble a municipal incinerating plant. It’s built in a hollow square around a central courtyard in which there was once a shallow pond and a seldom-functioning fountain, the repository for much unseemly garbage. This gloomy and draughty space was a public thoroughfare, though most people avoided it, especially at night. Recently, however, it’s been converted into a glazed and tiled atrium, festooned with hanging greenery, adorned with neoclassical fibreglass statues, and designated “The Rialto” in pink neon lettering. The floor area is dedicated to a variety of boutiques, stalls and catering outlets of a vaguely Italianate character. Operatic muzak and Neapolitan pop songs ooze from hidden speakers. I sat down at a table “outside” Giuseppe’s café-bar (outside still being indoors in this studio-like setting) and ordered a cappuccino, which seemed designed to be inhaled through the nose rather than drunk, since it consisted mostly of foam.

  Much of the city centre has been given the same kind of face-lift, in a brave attempt to make it attractive to tourists and visiting businessmen. Resigned to the erosion of the region’s traditional industrial base, the city fathers looked to service industries as an alternative source of employment. A vast conference centre and a state-of-the-art concert hall now face the Library from the other end of a tessellated piazza. Hotels, wine bars, nightclubs and restaurants have sprung up in the neighbourhood, almost overnight. The surrounding canals have been cleaned up and their towpaths paved for the exploration of industrial archeology. It was a typical project of the later Thatcher years, that brief flare of prosperity and optimism between the recession of the early eighties and the recession of the early nineties. Now the new buildings, with their stainless steel escalators and glass lifts and piped music, stand expectant and almost empty, like a theme park before opening day, or like some Utopian capital city of a third-world country, built for ideological reasons in the middle of the jungle, an object of wonder to the natives but seldom visited by foreigners. The principal patrons of the Rialto in the daytime are unemployed youths, truanting schoolkids, and mothers with infant children, who are grateful for a warm and cheerful place in which to while away the winter afternoons. Plus the occasional privileged wanker like me.

  I don’t recall hearing the word “recession” until a few years ago. Where did it come from, and what does it mean exactly? For once the dictionary is not much help: “a temporary depression in economic activity or prosperity.” How long does a recession have to last before it’s called a depression? Even the Slump of the Thirties was “temporary”, in the long run. Perhaps there’s so much psychological depression about that somebody decided we needed a new word for the economic sort. Recession-depression, recession-depression. The words echo in my head, like the rhythm of a steam engine. They’re connected, of course. People get depressed because they can’t get a job, or their businesses collapse or their houses are repossessed. They lose hope. A Gallup poll published today said that nearly half the people in the country would like to emigrate if they could. Walking about the city centre this afternoon you’d have thought they already had.

  My young brother Ken emigrated to Australia in the early seventies, when it was easier than it is now, and never made a better decision in his life. He’s an electrician by trade. In London he worked for one of the big stores in the West End and never made enough money to buy a decent car or a house big enough for his growing family. Now he has his own contracting business in Adelaide, and a ranch-style house in the suburbs with a two-car garage and a swimming pool. Until The People Next Door took off, he was doing considerably better than me. Mind you, he was always happier than me, even when he was hard up. He has a naturally cheerful temperament. Funny how some people have, and some people haven’t, even when their genes were dealt from the same deck.

  I went to my appointment with Alexandra straight from the Rialto, and, as I was describing the scene to her, I let slip the
phrase “privileged wanker”. “Why do you call yourself that?” she demanded. “Wanker because I was sitting about drinking coffee in the middle of the day,” I replied, “and privileged because it was a free choice, not because I had nothing better to do.” “If I remember rightly,” she said, “you told me that you work extremely hard when you’re writing a television series, often up to twelve hours a day.” I nodded. “Are you not entitled to relax at other times?” “Yes, of course,” I said, “I meant I was struck by the contrast between my life and the lives of the no-hopers in the Rialto.” “How do you know they have no hope?” I didn’t, of course. “Did they look hopeless?” I had to admit they hadn’t. In fact they probably looked more cheerful than me to an observing eye, swapping jokes and cigarettes, tapping their feet in time to the muzak. “But with the recession the way it is,” I said, “I have this sense that I’m getting richer while everybody else around me is getting poorer. It makes me feel guilty.” “Do you feel personally responsible for the recession?” “No, of course not.” “In fact, I think you told me that your earnings from abroad are quite considerable?” “Yes.” “So you’re actually making a positive contribution to the nation’s trading balance?” “You could look at it that way, I suppose.” “Who is responsible for the recession, would you say?” I thought for a moment. “No individual, of course. It’s a complex of factors, mostly outside anyone’s control. But I think the Government could do more to alleviate its effects.” “Did you vote for this Government?” “No, I’ve always voted Labour,” I said. “But …” I hesitated. Suddenly the stakes had become very high. “But what?” “But I felt secretly relieved when the Tories won.”

  I had never admitted this to anybody before, not even to myself. I was flooded with a mixture of shame and relief at having finally uncovered a genuine reason for my lack of self-esteem. I felt as I imagine Freud’s patients felt when they broke down and admitted that they had always wanted to have sex with their mummies and daddies. “Why was that?” Alexandra enquired calmly. “Because it meant I wouldn’t have to pay higher taxes,” I said. “As I understand it,” said Alexandra, “the Labour Party proposed to the electorate a rise in income tax, the electorate rejected it, and now the Labour Party has dropped it. Is that your understanding?” “Yes,” I said. “So what are you feeling guilty about?” Alexandra said. “I don’t know,” I said.