‘Your bed,’ she said and handed the object to me. There was a tiny tag hanging out of the side, Nkoyo pointed to it with her exquisite long finger. I pulled the tab and the cushion flopped open and expanded so quickly it pushed me against the wall causing Nkoyo to laugh discreetly.
‘Quite a big bed,’ she said as I watched in amazement, the peculiar material slowly and methodically formed itself into a bed frame, I touched the corner to discover it was a soft loose-formed foam material, hardly ideal for a solid piece of furniture.
‘It takes a few seconds to harden, in a day it will absorb moisture and gain weight,’ said Nkoyo who handed me another cushion. ‘An armchair.’
After about ten minutes my room was fully furnished, one of the smallest cushions became a very soft deep red patterned Tuareg rug. It looked incredibly familiar and homely and for some reason I cheered up a bit. That didn’t last long.
Nkoyo and I sat facing each other in two recently formed armchairs. It’s not like we were exhausted or anything, furnishing a room has never been less stressful. However, we sat in silence; I didn’t have anything to say, after the sudden activity I found I was feeling just as bereft as before we’d started. Eventually Nkoyo shifted in the armchair and said, ‘In the meantime…’
‘Doctor Markham wants to listen to me blabber about my inner mother problems,’ I said quickly and I felt my heart rate increase again. I said this before I could consciously grasp the incredible fact that I’d somehow known this is what Nkoyo was going to suggest.
Nkoyo’s eyebrows raised and she smiled. ‘You’re getting the hang of it.’
‘Do I really have to? I don’t think I can deal with the criticism.’
‘You feel Doctor Markham is critical of you?’
I nodded.
‘I see. I can only say I don’t think this is the case. It’s true she is concerned about you, concerned for your mental well-being. The strain you have been under, the problems we had in Rio, we have to accept these sort of experiences have an effect on us.’
‘You’re not kidding,’ I said.
‘No, I’m not kidding,’ Nkoyo answered flatly. ‘If you don’t wish to spend time with her, that is entirely up to you. However, I would like you to understand that Doctor Markham has enormous pressures on her time and yet she truly wishes to discuss things with you because of who you are, because you are such a special case, a man raised by a woman. There are very few examples of such people in the world now. You are pretty much unique.’
Why did I go? I was annoyed with myself, but to be fair I didn’t have anything else going on, all I could do was sit on my own and ruminate pointlessly, or go and see some tall, apparently non-judgemental woman who looked like Vanessa Redgrave and talk about my blasted childhood. So, an hour later I was sitting on another chair in the big downstairs room where I’d previously been head-shrunk by the freakishly silent Doctor. I felt as if I’d already spent years of my life in that peaceful, oh-so-calm room. Doctor Markham was sitting opposite me so perfectly still anyone not used to her demeanour would consider her to be a fairly realistic statue.
Something drew me there, I don’t know if it was subtle intervention on the part of my kidonge, I don’t know if in fact there was some kind of mood or decision control elements in it’s make- up. I only knew I wanted to try and work out why I felt so deflated.
Of course for the first ten minutes or so nothing happened, nothing as in she didn’t ask ‘and how do you feel about things, Gavin?’ She just sat completely motionless and in total silence. The annoying thing is, if this was an exercise designed to encourage me to start talking, it worked.
‘I want to go home,’ I said after a long time sitting quietly. ‘I can’t go home but that’s what I want to do. I think it’s great that the world is now run by women, really I do. I think it’s much better than it was back in my day, back in the dark times, but I want to go back to the dark times where I know what’s going on. I am perpetually baffled by everything here.’
Still no response.
‘So, if I’ve gone a little bit batty it’s not really surprising is it?’
She replied after pause long enough to make me very twitchy. ‘Are you asking me?’ she said.
I decided to leave an equally long pause before I responded. I counted to one thousand really slowly, then said. ‘Yes, I’m asking you.’
Her answer was delivered immediately, softly and with a carefully modulated tone and calculated rhythm. ‘I don’t think you are mentally unbalanced if that’s what you mean by “a little bit batty”. I think you have experienced a trauma, a mass rejection, an experience of mass dislike which may have exposed long- buried emotional scars from your upbringing.’
‘Oh, of course, stupid of me, it’s all because of the way my mother breastfed me isn’t it?’ I snapped, I was feeling snarky and I was also aware that my heart rate had increased.
‘The idea seems to make you a little upset, could that be a signal that there are some unresolved problems you haven’t faced?’
‘Yeah, maybe, but so what? There’s bugger all I can do about my childhood now isn’t there? My childhood was two hundred and thirty years ago.’
Another long silence. My mind was racing, coming up with all sorts of arguments against my mother’s behaviour in the early 1980s.
‘Can I suggest,’ I said eventually, ‘that there were very real reasons to be upset about what took place in Rio, very tangible reasons for me to think everything here is a bit fucked up?’
There was another long silence which, damn it, made me reflect on what I’d just said. There were real reasons and although I hadn’t quite said the things I’d been accused of, I had used strong language and kind of disturbing images which came out of me, came from somewhere I didn’t know existed. I had to admit they came from somewhere angry. Was I justified in being angry about what that dreadful woman said to me? That was the question I couldn’t really answer.
Eventually Doctor Markham said. ‘I’m suggesting you may be feeling upset but again I am suggesting it might not be to do with your current predicament which is very real, but maybe the physical reactions you are experiencing, the raised heart rate, the mental turmoil you are experiencing are in fact connected with events in your childhood.’
I shook my head in disgust.
‘I grant you,’ said Doctor Markham calmly, ‘there is nothing you can do about your childhood, nothing any of us can do, but the parenting you received would now be considered cruel and brutal, almost as if it was designed to cause distress later in life.’
This time I merely snorted in disagreement. I felt very strong images of my childhood bubble up, completely at odds with what the annoying Doctor was suggesting. How could she possibly know anything about the way my mum and dad treated me?
I easily recalled the photographs in my mum’s slightly tatty album, those early colour polaroids. My dad loved his polaroid camera, which he thought was cutting edge technology. In all the family pictures we looked happy, well, fairly happy. Then I could suddenly see myself in a cot, I always remembered this particular moment from my very early days. I was alone in my room in High Wycombe and it must have been an early evening in summer, I have very strong memories of the light coming through the thin cotton curtains hanging over the little dormer window. I could only remember the house from faded photographs but I did remember the room. I could remember standing in my cot and picking at the flowery wallpaper on the wall beside me. I was crying, I don’t know why I was crying but I remember being uncomfortable, I can remember my face feeling hot and the cries coming from deep within me. I was watching my little fingers try to peel the wallpaper off the wall, I can’t remember anything else about that moment, nothing that may have happened before or after, just this moment. Picking at the flowery bedroom wallpaper and crying.
�
��Do you think you needed your mother or father at that moment?’
I would suggest that anyone who wasn’t used to the ability this annoying woman had in reading your thoughts would find such an intrusion frightening but by then, for me it was no surprise.
‘Yes,’ I said although I had no idea why.
‘D’you think you may have learned to be a little withdrawn and distant, emotionally distant because of the cold way your parents treated you?’
This time I know I sat still for a long time, I was reflecting on what she said, rushing through a thousand memories of my mum; I could somehow only conjure up what she looked like from behind, she was always busy. Standing on the black and white tiled floor of the kitchen in High Wycombe looking up at my mum’s back.
As an adult I completely understood why she was busy, she would be cooking or washing clothes, she would be sweeping the kitchen floor or using the knackered old vacuum cleaner in the hallway. It made sense now, I didn’t have any conscious or intellectual criticism of my mother, but I couldn’t recall her holding me, reading to me, talking to me.
The stupid thing is, I know for a fact that she did all those things. It was a common experience to hear her speak of our early childhood when my family were gathered together on various occasions. All the old pictures we had depicted what looks like the classic 1980’s nuclear family. Slightly balding and tired dad with droopy moustache and huge collars on his shirt, mum looking like a character out of Blake’s 7 with her nightmarish haircut, my brother looking like an overgrown street thug and me, sitting on the floor, a bag of bones in shorts and a Transformers T-shirt.
‘Yes, that’s possible,’ I said eventually.
‘Might you fear rejection, you’ve told me of the complications you had with your wife, Beth.’
I nodded.
‘Is it possible if you took the chance, if you really had connected with her, opened your heart and made yourself vulnerable to her she could also turn her back on you, reject you. Might that be too painful to bear?’
I know my face creased up with pain at the point. Not the pain of realising the Doctor Markham was right. She may well have been right, it was more the pain of the crassness of the analysis. It just seemed plodding, like a subheading above an article in a garish woman’s magazine, like kindergarten psychology: ‘He Found Rejection Too Painful to Bear’ above a black and white picture of a male model with his head in his hands.
Although I could understand what she was telling me, I was worried it was only ‘an’ answer rather than ‘the answer’. I could come up with numerous other solutions as to why Beth and I didn’t really get on; we had a different outlook, we either believed in or accepted different realities. I’d come to understand that since I’d left my time.
‘What if, okay, you may be right in what you say but what if Beth and I were quite simply incompatible.’ I was simply allowing my train of thought to become vocalised.
‘Incompatible. That is an unusual word.’
‘What, are you telling me you don’t have people who are incompatible any more?’
‘No,’ came the now familiar flat, emotionless response from the hollow-eyed Doctor.
‘Oh come on,’ I said. ‘You mean to tell me that with enough of this process, me talking to you, if I spent enough time with you talking about my mum and dad, you know, coming to terms with being a badly-treated baby, I could eventually get on with everyone regardless of their outlook or behaviour.’
‘Yes,’ again, that flat delivery I was finding increasingly annoying.
I sat looking at my hands, they were resting motionless on my legs, they weren’t twitching around or writhing together as normal, I was feeling quite calm.
‘Gavin, I see it like this, you seem very able to cope with the very extreme changes you have experienced since your arrival from the cloud, but you are occasionally held back by something very strong and powerful.’
My hands were instantly twitching again and I blurted ‘Yes, it’s called being a bloke, being a man and having to deal with a load of bossy women who always assume they know better. Women who look at you in the way you’re doing now, like you fully understand what’s going on, the look which says you know me better than I do myself and it’s just a matter of time until I, a cave man from the fucking dark times, work it out.’
‘So the notion that someone might understand things you don’t makes you angry.’
‘Yes! Of course! It pisses me off because you haven’t got a fucking clue what’s really going on in here.’ I jabbed the side of my head with my finger as I said this, which hurt both my finger and my head. ‘I don’t accept your talking cure, I don’t accept that you know better, that’s just like religion, I am expected to believe you! I am expected to believe that your understanding of the workings of the human soul is perfected! Don’t make me fucking laugh!’
Another long silence, I could feel my heart pounding in my chest, I was upset but I could always see very obvious, almost mechanical reasons to feel that. I’d been torn out of the world I knew, entered another time, been wonderfully cared for and learned a great deal, then torn again into another world which on the surface seemed very benign and caring, but was actually a little bit frightening. That all made sense to me; trying to understand my upbringing, my childhood, the way I was treated by my mum and dad, that was all hazy and misty and totally reliant on vaguely held memories. I could not envisage how I could learn anything useful from trolling through my distant past.
‘If your mother was as emotionally distant as you’ve often said your father was, if they kept themselves a little further away from you than you needed when you were a very small child, that experience will set up behaviour which will affect you in later life. The fact that you are annoyed at women who may comprehend something greater than you can comprehend is a very clear indication that you are still deeply affected by your close and dependent relationship with your mother.’
I sat staring at Doctor Markham as she spoke, I felt the anger wane, I felt myself relax and become calm again. For all my misgivings, and they were many and solid, the way my body reacted to what she said underlined the truth behind it. I wasn’t defeated, I didn’t feel less of a person, I wasn’t proved wrong, I wasn’t living in a world where women had succeeded because they were better, I was living in a world where women had succeeded because men had resolutely failed. Their struggle to control the chaos they so feared with guns, bombs, machines of death and domination, their industries and corporations, their hierarchies and political structures had all been proven weak, hopelessly short-sighted, greedy and ultimately doomed.
Men had learned to let go, to flow with time and to accept their fate with dignity and it seemed on the surface at least, they were happier and healthier for it.
34
Pete’s Plan
I spent the next four days at the institute essentially sleeping, eating and digging earth in the morning, then talking to Doctor Markham in the afternoon. I didn’t have to do any of these things, I could do as I liked, but strangely for this period of time, this was what I actually wanted to do. It was the first time I’d ever done gardening. I didn’t really enjoy it but I got some physical exercise and slept like a log each night.
At the far end of garden was a large bed that needed digging over, I was given simple tools by the silent man I’d seen working in the garden that strange first day. His name was Hector, he was sixty-three years old and he didn’t speak but he was very good at showing me what to do. He’d dig a row of earth over very expertly and then hand me the shovel. You didn’t have to be a horticulturalist to know what he wanted me to do. When I’d dug over the whole bed – it took me three days – he walked up to me, his odd face cracked into a subtle smile and he patted me on the back very gently, took the shovel and walked off.
On the mor
ning of the fifth day, I was sitting in the canteen room having some fruit and porridge for breakfast when Nkoyo joined me. This was unusual, I normally saw her briefly in the evening so as soon as I saw her I sensed my normal routine was about to be interrupted.
The odd thing is I was really enjoying the mental relaxation of having a humdrum daily routine, I didn’t need to think about anything, I had a few very simple tasks to do and I had become very relaxed. My eyes couldn’t help but follow Nkoyo as she walked up to a food door as it opened, she extracted a steel canister of coffee before sitting opposite me on one of the long tables.
I knew by this stage that the food that appeared inside the small boxes was prepared by people in a kitchen the other side of the rows of folding doors. The people who worked in the kitchens were under constant supervision and were kept in complete isolation from the world and everyone else in the Institute except, I suppose, for trained staff.
‘Are they dangerous?’ I asked Nkoyo.
‘No, not necessarily, some of them have committed grave crimes but mostly they are a danger to themselves. They are kept there for their own protection, a little bit like you only with a little more security. As you understand, we don’t have any jurisdiction over you, you can leave at any time. They, however, cannot.’
‘So it’s sort of like a prison,’ I said.
‘Well, only in the fact that they’ve had their freedom curtailed until they are cured. They have their kidonges neutralised so they are unable to communicate or access data, so they are the exception rather than the rule.’
‘Wow, they’re kidonge free. That is serious isn’t it? How do they know anything?’
‘Interestingly the human brain has the capacity to store an enormous amount of information without the benefit of the kidonge,’ she said, as if I didn’t know this already. I nodded and felt a big grin on my face. She smiled back, almost showing signs of embarrassment.
News from the Squares Page 32