by Louise Dean
In those early days, the family drank together more or less every evening when he got home — there was nothing else to do — and those were pleasant evenings, her mother standing, tongue out, hastily unpeeling the cellophane from a salty snack and her father bent as ever to the ground, murmuring to his dog and stroking its long hairs into the nuts and pretzels. They chatted through the good or bad luck of others. Richard liked to speak French. When he spoke French he felt like he was someone else — someone cleverer, possibly.
Guy’s father was a Corsican passer-by on his way to or from the war, and Guy had a string of stepfathers until he lost his temper with one of them when he was thirteen. His mother gave him a coin and sent him away. The rest was freefall: pimping in Paris in the fifties; running prostitutes; driving for the Marseillaise mafia; he may or may not have been in the French Foreign Legion; he got Simone pregnant, to the disgust of her family, then wandered off again, and years later he came back to be a father to his daughter, to which honour Valérie seemed unmoved. She was ten then. She avoided him. She never sat close to him. They never embraced. ‘She doesn’t greet me,’ he would moan in a stage whisper, to Richard.
His style of wooing his daughter was stealthy and practical. A basket of fresh vegetables picked and presented beautifully left on the outdoor table in the morning. The trimming and pruning of her shrubs and trees, which went unremarked until Simone mentioned it. And he gave Simone money, from his pension, to buy gifts for his daughter and grandson and told her not to tell them the money was from him and for her own reasons she complied.
‘The truth is, I followed my dick,’ he said to Richard one evening when they were drinking. ‘That’s not a problem for me now
of course,’ he shrugged, pointing between his legs to the ground.
‘Before I was like a human being attached to a monster.’
On each of his birthdays, since they’d lived next door, Richard saw him grimly smoking outside on the terrace, waiting for Valérie to come, but she ‘forgot’ his birthdays or she went away visiting friends, if she could arrange it.
Richard was fond of Guy, who in a way had run to ground. He was tied to the land, and nature, would rarely venture beyond their plots and the neighbouring forest and he knew its larder. He tended to them with his herbs, his cure-all soups, his applications of cabbage leaves to swellings, thyme in the bath, and notwithstanding his arthritic hands he managed to sew lavender bags. He jested that he was a lunatic, and indeed he was very occupied with the comings and goings of the moon, the fixity of the sun and the happenstance of rain. He located all manner of mushrooms, even truffles, and made a wild-leaf salad with fresh grated garlic that would send a cold packing.
Simone was the least loved of five children, the unwanted daughter in an agricultural family, the last child, mistreated by her mother, loved though, she maintained, by her father, whose photograph took pride of place above their television, and she developed mystical powers and illnesses to secure a smidgen of attention and developed a large chest and a pregnancy as soon as she could. She allowed Guy to come back not only to the warmth of her unconditional tolerance but also to raise her up, la dolorosa, to tell of her life from behind her hand, askance, and to sing of it too, the self-saucing sentiment bubbling up as she hit the top notes. She sang like Piaf, all trembling indignation. She ran a number of sideshow businesses which occasionally cross-pollinated profit-wise, the two principal ones being fortune telling and selling the cannabis that she had Guy grow.
Richard liked to assist them financially and they were not greedy; a new washing machine here, a twenty-litre box of Co-op red there. They were ostentatiously helpful in return, especially Valérie’s mother, who was always thinking aloud how she could help more but ceded agreeably to his protestations that she did too much. She listened to him, she praised his French, and deplored oh-so-covertly, for his ears only, the negligence of her daughter. Her hands went up at this point, resignation was her suit. Impassioned of an evening, the old boy customarily threatened the spectral rogue who dared to cross Richard or the family with a taste of his shotgun. They kept the paths weedfree.
Max got birthday and Christmas presents from them and five euros here and there, and they received his visits without much enthusiasm. Typically Max would stare into space and say nothing, waiting for the opportunity to leave. ‘Well, Max, your mother will be wondering where you are.’ They’d raise their eyebrows in unison as he left.
‘He’s not right in the head,’ said Guy. ‘He doesn’t communicate.’
‘He’s a boy. What do you want?’ Simone would respond taking the opportunity to kill two birds with one stone.
The low hum of chatter, as the early evenings descended, was Richard’s idea of the good life, and what he kept in mind driving home. It was idyllic. Of course it was possible they were all alcohol-dependent, he admitted to himself amiably. So what? The good life, rosé, same thing. He was looking forward to telling them about his promotion and he knew Simone would rush for a bottle of Champagne and pant and sweat, all fingers and thumbs, as she opened it and they would clink glasses together. After a few glasses of Champagne, Valérie would unwind and
smile and laugh and he’d put the boy to bed so as not to disturb her happy state.
They were able to laugh together, the family, and the laughter seemed to him to be like a night-light, a modestly useless accessory in the daytime, which could become so very important in the dark.
Chapter 4
Richard had indulged in plenty of one-night stands since joining the pharmaceutical business. He might have been losing his hair but with professional women of a certain age panicking all over Europe he was more than sorted for sex. He had a number of sexual encounters in Eastern Europe, some meaningful email correspondence, some of it quite touching, but he was careful to curtail it after two or three exchanges.
As a matter of taste he preferred not to lie to Valérie, and due to his travelling he didn’t need to. He left this other life behind him when he took to the motorway. He considered these sexual escapades a normal part of modern life, that opportunity separated those who cheated from those who did not, and the latter dressed up their bad luck with moralizing. The rest took what they could. But that wasn’t the whole story.
Just the night before, he’d sat drinking with his neighbour Rachel in her kitchen, at one in the morning, with Valérie gone home and her husband, Jeff, retired to bed, talking about sex, sex with strangers. Without going into detail, he’d alluded to his own enquiries.
‘Don’t tell me it’s about intimacy or I’ll smack you in the face,’
she said.
‘No, no. No, I’m like you, Rachel. It’s my way of finding God.’
‘Are you laughing at me?’ (Rachel was a Christian.)
‘No,’ laughing, ‘it’s just that you think the road to God is through here . . .’ he’d put a fingertip on her forehead, and gone on — ‘it’s not though, Rachel . . .’
She’d interrupted him. ‘So you think you’ll find God through a woman’s vagina?’
‘Possibly. No, seriously, I wouldn’t rule it out. I think of sex as a spiritual exercise.’ He was only half joking.
There was something else. He craved intimacy.
He liked talking to Rachel. Talking to an Englishwoman in English was like discovering a secret den at the bottom of your childhood garden.
It didn’t matter, being drunk, whether it was true; all things might be true in drink, no one knew and few remembered afterwards. It was the only way to try on new clothes without looking foolish. He shook out the match, closing one eye, feeling the sulphur’s snap. ‘Maybe.’
She looked downcast, and he didn’t ask her why, he let it go because he didn’t want to get mixed up with her that way, he didn’t want to start thinking about what she was thinking.
‘Do you know, Rachel, before we acquired language communication was touch, and between lovers, of course, copulation.’
‘Copulation! You
fool!’
‘Intercourse, not chit-chat. Think about it. Sixty years ago, sex meant so much more and words too. A word might cost as much as a penny. And sex a life. People were more sparing. Now we’re verbose. There has to be some kind of a relationship between cheap words and free love.’
She mused glumly on the subject, like a nodding dog, and he got up after a while and went home.
He went across the paddock to his house, considering whether he had had too much or not enough to drink, replaying the conversation. He’d talked too much. Verbose, indeed. Sex. Words. What was it about? Approaching the house he imagined his wife’s chaste posture in her pyjamas in their bed.
It was pretty much part of his job, pleasuring psychiatrists, most of whom were female and had a lot of doubts to be quelled. Being naked in bed with a person seemed to help both of them do the job. Between them they purveyed treatments that didn’t treat so much as muffle common suffering in all its forms, from grief and paranoia to loneliness and despair, as well as the ordinary longing to be loved.
Chapter 5
Standing beside a seated panel of five other persons, an attractive woman was awaiting a projection at the screen behind her. They were in an auditorium in the World Health Organization headquarters in Geneva. As Richard made his way to the only free seat, excusing himself for treading on toes, he glanced upwards and saw five bunkers suspended above each one with the name of a language stickered on them. The translators wore headsets and microphones, they were very animated, looking at each other and making hand gestures.
The woman spoke. ‘In terms of Disability Adjusted Life Years Lost, mental illness is up there with AIDS, TB and malaria. The stigma against mental illness in developing countries means that the people who need treatment are not coming forward. This Anti-Stigma campaign will reverse that intolerance . . .’
Charts raged on the screen. There was a scene of a man, manacled, wailing in a hut in the jungle with other people kicking him rather dispassionately. Arrows went all over the continent of Africa, throbbing and flickering. The scene was replaced with that of a young man in jeans and a T-shirt, talking to a doctor in a nice white bungalow, accepting a tablet and washing it down with a branded soda, then helping his mother hoe the field, and giving a big thumbs-up to the camera as the helicopter-based camera withdrew at speed leaving them all just dots in the field. The image faded.
‘The purpose of this campaign is to get rid of the misconception that schizophrenia is a manifestation of witchcraft. At the same time, we’ll be handing out information on depression, to make people more aware that some of what they deem “sadness” is pathological and they can get help.’
‘Good,’ thought Richard. ‘That’s very good.’
A man on the panel, buttoned-down shirt and slicked quiff, received the spotlight and a microphone.
‘Is it not true though, Yvette, that something like seventy per cent of Africans hear voices? I mean that if we describe mental illness in terms of this symptom we will have a long, long, long queue of patients. You know, in Italy it would be the same . . .’
There was laughter.
‘Dr Frank Gitu. Regional Director Africa . . .’
‘Well, now, speaking for my African colleagues, with all due respect, schizophrenia isn’t a big problem for us and, as for depression, I’m sorry but you consider yourself lucky to have it in your region . . .’
Richard let himself out. He’d felt slightly sweaty and breathless in there and knew what it heralded. He decided to take a walk, to work it out of his system.
In the lobby, there was an electronic notice with the outside temperature, the date, the soup of the day and language of the week: Cream of Broccoli and Urdu. He went up the great double stairs, traversed an entire floor, setting aflutter pamphlets and circulars in in-trays, took a lift up to Sexually Transmitted Diseases and stopped to peer through a window at men and women in suits lying on recliners wearing satin eye shields. There was a handwritten sign on the window: Bureaucrat Recycling Department! A touch of humour.
Back downstairs, he crossed the lobby again, vaguely intrigued by the little store and its WHO souvenirs. His armpits were wet. He saw the library and decided to take a break in there. He sat down at a long desk. It was warm in there, a nice place to die. He laid his head down. His mobile phone vibrated in his jacket pocket. He quickly withdrew it and put it to his ear, hiding it with his hand, pretending to be scratching his head with all his fingers.
‘Oh, Richard, so sorry to have kept you but I was in a meeting, just selling my colleagues in on the joint venture. It went well actually. Look, shall we go into town and get some dinner?’
It took him a long time to find the proper exit and once outside he was at the rear of the building so he was obliged to circumnavigate. There was an adjoining precinct for the HIV team, very deluxe, with black four-wheel drives outside it. Round the back of it was a small woody glade and as he went past it, stepping on twigs, a group of WHO employees broke cover, jettisoning embers and cigarette butts, in panic.
She drove him into town in her grey Passat. She seemed nervous, swapping sunglasses for no sunglasses and back again, swapping clipped-up hair for loose hair, and when he got out of the car she remained a moment with her visor down. When she emerged, her shirt was unbuttoned down her neck, revealing her cleavage.
Chapter 6
The lakeside panorama of Geneva presented a staid façade with its capitalized signage and its stern advertisements for gold and diamond jewellery, fur coats and private banks.
They sat out on a jetty, their menus folded. The tablecloth riled against its clip-on restraints. The water was clear down below. A swan made an attempt to fly. A group of plain women nearby clucked on about Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations. What a nice country, he thought; a bureaucrat recycling centre.
Her life at the World Health Organization was very easy, she said. She rolled in after nine, drank coffees till lunchtime, ate a long lunch, worked between two and three, had tea, then popped off home to the really hard work, to her kid. Her husband was an artist. A painter.
In Switzerland? What did he paint?
‘Bizarre things. Men being raped by women. He uses iconic materials from the sixties and seventies. Cereal boxes, Action Men, old comic books; he says he begs from innocence to pay back corruption. That’s his slogan in fact. He’s sold a few works to the Saatchi guy.’
‘Oh really. Interesting. Actually, I don’t like art much.’
‘You don’t like art? Isn’t that like saying you don’t like music?’
‘Yes. I suppose so. It feels like showing off, to me.’
‘Really?’ She took a drink. ‘Well, I agree with you in fact. We are very unhappy. Our marriage is a joke.’
‘Oh, I’m sorry.’
She didn’t talk about it normally. Amazing what a glass of wine could do. She was at the end of her tether. Just yesterday she looked at that man, her husband, and she thought: It must be nice to be you, asshole. She came up the hill to their house, with bags of shopping, their child strapped to her chest, and she saw him waving at her from the little window of his studio — he’d made their bedroom into his studio, it was the nicest room in the apartment — there he was waving, pleased his dinner was on the way.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said again. He ordered another bottle of Swiss Rolle. At her most seductive and useful she came out with it, for all intimacy requires confession, and she said it as if for the first time, that people like her, the so-called do-gooders — wrist flailing, drink spilling — were, of course, the ones who needed help. She shook as she took one of his cigarettes. She shook when she took up her glass and had to wait a moment before sipping it.
‘I’ve always had a thing about Englishmen,’ she said, by way of explanation.
He had an idea where it would lead and was not averse, but recalling his predecessor’s advice, he told her he wanted to know more about the programme. She had an important position. For such a big player, sh
e was humble, her husband was probably instrumental to her modesty. What a funny world it was at times. Especially after three drinks.
She asked him how he saw his work. He shrugged. It was what it was. People were miserable, but the pills helped. End of story.
She was six years as a lecturing professor at the Institute of Psychiatry in London, she told him, and now she was the archclassifier, the woman who matched the different diagnostics standards of the mental health departments from around the world; a hugely political business, for everyone’s misery had to be taken into account. She had to get global agreement on what constituted an unhealthy mind. Disorders came in and out of fashion, or they failed to catch on. Some slipped away, but others you had to put your red line through. It was her responsibility to admit or refuse a symptom here or there into the lexicon of madness and to honour clusters of oddness with their own syndrome. Her standing joke? ‘I’m sorry, Professor, but you’re one symptom short of a disorder.’
‘That’s a good one.’
Then she was to take her list back to each of the countries to double-check vocabulary, to make allowance for localized disorders, from ‘attention deficit disorder’ to ‘running amok’, and she had to take into account passing fads, deleting ‘hysteria’, ‘masturbation’ and ‘homosexuality’, getting rid of ‘nymphomania’ (which was nowadays normal) and adding ‘erotomania’, the idea that someone you don’t know loves you, she laughed.
She took a drink. She wiped her mouth. Under her watch, she said, they had launched borderline personality disorder and depersonalization disorder.