‘One evening he knocked on my door, told me to get my coat and he took me out for a drink. He was exceptionally easy to talk to, and our drinks together became a regular nightly affair.
‘By the end of two weeks he knew everything there was to know about me, but I realised I knew relatively nothing about him. I mentioned it to him one evening. He laughed and said something strange. He said, “But don’t you realise? I don’t exist”.’
‘And what did he mean by that?’ Joanna asked. She was wondering where this was leading and what it had to do with her, but she sipped her coffee patiently.
‘That’s what I asked him. He didn’t reply but invited me to have dinner with him in his room. We made a date for the following Friday.
‘He’d gone to a lot of trouble. The room was lit by candlelight, the food was superb, cooked to perfection, and he’d laid on several bottles of chateau bottled French wine. By the end of the meal we were both very mellow. I was still talking about Caroline – he was still being sympathetic. I remember looking up at one point, and there were tears running down his cheeks.
‘I asked him what was wrong. “I’m full up,” he said. At first I thought he was talking about the meal, but that was just ridiculous. I asked him what he meant, and he explained that for as long as he could remember people had come to him with their problems, and he had taken them all on board; helped where he could, but, he said, the most important thing he could do for all these people was to take their pain, take it into himself. “And now I’m full up,” he said. “I have filled myself with so much pain from other people there is no longer room for me. You see, without their pain I don’t exist, and with their pain I can’t exist. Not any more.”
‘To be quite honest I was shocked to hear him talking like that. Shocked and not a little guilty, after all, for the past fortnight I’d poured out all my problems to him and he’d collected them all up and bundled them away.
‘Eventually Matthew got up from the table and went across to the chest of drawers. When he came back he was carrying the travelling case. He set it down on the table before him and took out the razor. He opened out the blade and moved it in the air, letting the candlelight play on it. I sat there like a fool, mesmerised by the flashing light.
‘He said, “Do you know what this is, Robert?” I think I shook my head – I can’t remember now. “This is peace of mind, Robert. This is my escape... my ticket to oblivion. It’s the only way I can rid myself of the pain.” And then he grabbed my hand. I remember him looking deep into my eyes. His eyes were the most intense blue, the bluest eyes I think I’ve ever seen. And I was drowning in them. He was saying that he was scared of making that final journey alone, that he wanted someone to go with him... someone to share the experience, the peace. And he’d chosen me above all the others.
‘I felt something then, something like a feather being drawn across my wrist. I looked down and I was bleeding. I just watched as he took my other hand and drew that blade across that wrist too. I realise now that he was quite mad. But at that point I was powerless to do anything. As I said before, he was very persuasive and whether he had me hypnotised, or whether it was the sheer force of his personality I couldn’t say, but I just sat there watching my life bleed away over the white tablecloth. And I wanted to go with him. I wanted to die!’
Robert stopped talking. His face was white, and his body trembled from head to toe. Joanna glanced down at his wrist. The sleeve of his jumper had pulled back and she could see the livid white scar that cut through the pink flesh. As he lifted his coffee to his lips his hand shook, rattling the cup against his teeth.
‘What happened next?’ Joanna said anxiously.
Robert didn’t appear to hear her. He was lost in the memory of the horror of that night.
‘Robert!’
He shook himself back to the present. And covered his face with his hands. When he took them away Joanna saw he was crying. He choked back the tears. ‘As I said, I was like a spectator, watching everything unfold, but powerless to stop the action, impotent. I just sat there and watched as he sliced the razor across his own wrists. And then he cut his throat.’ Robert gripped the edge of the table, knuckles white. ‘The blood from his wrists was spraying everywhere, but he just sat there, calm, serene almost, and dragged that razor across his throat.
‘I must have passed out. The next thing I knew I woke up in hospital, hanging on a drip, my wrists bandaged. They told me later that Matthew was dead, and that it was Jean who’d saved my life. She’d come up to tackle Matthew about his rent arrears, and when she got no reply, let herself in with her passkey. Lucky for me really.’
There was a long silence. Joanna finished her coffee and the creamy froth was drying around the sides of the cup.
Eventually Robert let out a long sigh. ‘So you see why you must leave that room.’
‘No, I’m sorry, I don’t. What you’ve just described is tragic, a terrible and tragic story, but it’s history now. I don’t have a problem with history. Every house has its tragedies, some worse than what you’ve just described. You can’t just shun a place because of what has gone before.’
His hand closed over hers, squeezing it until it hurt. ‘But he’s still there, still in that room. I can feel him there! Can’t you? Sometimes, I swear I hear his voice. And you finding the travelling case like that… I know for a fact that Matthew’s brother took everything away with him. But the case is back. Bit by bit Matthew is coming back to that room. He’s coming home. You must leave there.’
She winced and gently pulled her hand away. She felt so sorry for him. Obviously the trauma of what happened with Matthew had disturbed the balance of his mind ‘No, sorry, Robert, I can’t. And I don’t believe in ghosts either.’ She stood up. ‘I have to go now,’ she said. ‘I don’t think we should do this any more.’ She walked to the door. When she looked back at him he hadn’t moved. He was sitting with his head bowed, his hands clasped around his empty coffee cup.
She lay in the bath, sipping her wine, determined to stay awake this time. She wanted no repetition of what happened before. Her foot was still sore from rapping it on the tap.
She was thinking about Robert’s story. It was truly awful, and she suspected the after-effects of it would be with him for years, possibly for the rest of his life. But she would endeavour not to see him again. She couldn’t take somebody else’s problems at the moment. Her own were too fresh in her mind.
She closed her eyes and thought about home, about Brian and their relationship. How good it was, and how suddenly and bitterly it ended.
She knew Brian was married long before the affair began. She’d even met his wife at a staff dinner; she was a teacher as well, at a school on the other side of town. A nice woman, if a little dull and mouse-like. And Joanna was determined nothing would happen between herself and Brian, despite the definite attraction between them.
But that resolve was undermined last summer, when they had taken a school trip to Amsterdam, and circumstances threw them together. A mix up with the hostel booking had led to them sharing a room, and despite assurances to themselves and others that they were responsible and respectable adults, the inevitable happened.
The affair lasted a heady six months, and during that time she fell deeply in love with him. So much so that she wanted nothing more than for him to leave his wife and set up home with her, so they could be together forever. So desperate was her desire for this that she forced the issue, sending an anonymous letter to Brian’s wife, telling her of the affair.
She’d been so convinced that it was the right thing to do; and for a while that appeared to be the case.
‘But life never really works out the way we would like it to, does it, Joanna?’
She opened her eyes. A man was sitting on the edge of the bath, his face lit by the flickering candlelight. It was a kind face, an understanding face, with eyes that could look deep into her soul and recognise the pain there. Matthew, she knew it was him.
&nb
sp; ‘No,’ she said. ‘It never does. I thought Brian and I would go on forever. I didn’t even expect marriage. I think I knew in my heart he would never leave her but...’
‘...but you always hoped he might.’
She shook her head, and then laughed. ‘Who am I kidding? Of course I hoped. God knows, it was only that hope that kept me going.’
‘And now?’
‘And now I don’t know what to do. I thought... we thought, Aunt Peggy and I thought, that getting away would be the answer. I certainly couldn’t stay there. Not once the letter I’d written became public. They treated me like a pariah at school – Brian’s wife was very popular, you see – and the pupils were having a field day. You can imagine.’
Matthew nodded his head slowly; so kind, so understanding. The more she spoke with him the more she could feel her burden being lifted. All she wanted was peace of mind.
Matthew was reading her thoughts. He reached into the travelling case and took out the razor. ‘Peace of mind, Joanna.’ he said, and handed her the blade.
She took it gratefully. How had Robert described it? Like a feather being stroked across his wrist? She smiled up at Matthew. He smiled back reassuringly.
They found her later that night, lying serenely in the rose-coloured bath water, the razor on the floor by the side of the bath. Later they found Matthew Longsdon’s travelling case, where Joanna had hidden it, underneath her pillow.
NAMES AND FACES
It was a room sufficiently classical in style, so that even when he lay down for the first time within such new surroundings, he felt immediately comfortable. The lower walls were all wood lined, in deepest mahogany, with that marvellous smell of rich polish, real polish, not the spray in a can variety he used in his own apartment. The walls above the wood were covered in full burgundy brocaded wallpaper that seemed to be a fabric, so strong did its colours and texture appear to him. Then there was the carpet. It was thick under foot with just enough of a subtle pattern within its russet background to alleviate the plainness, but the colour just right for the room and its purpose.
Preston Birch felt as safe there as he must have felt within his mothers womb, though, as he was not given voluntarily of thinking such thoughts about his mothers’ lower regions, he would not have dared voice such a feeling to anyone, not even the owner of the room.
There was a single window, out of which it was possible on a clear day to see the Brooklyn Bridge, and to watch the humans and the vehicles busy at whatever activity they deemed important at that captured moment of time. Preston tried not to look out of the window, preferring when he had to look anywhere, to concentrate on the framed diplomas hung on the walls, testimony to the skills and achievements in the field of analysis by the man he had come to regard as a friend over the weeks of, well he still wouldn’t call it therapy, thinking of his visits as conversations with the past. He wasn’t certain about a lot of that territory but it seemed a safer, more concrete path to tread than to contemplate his future.
‘Outcrops of rock over which we must yet stumble, as opposed to places from where we can still hide.’ As Jonathan Sterling might put it when trying to coax an emotion from his newly acquired patient.
When Preston first had the thought that the office was like a womb, he was physically sick. The room was housed in a luxuriously converted brownstone in an expensive area of the City. He approached it always the same way, and always without deviation. There would be the routine inspection of his own apartment to ensure no lights were left on, no candles still alight, no keys left in locks or windows left half open. Then he would check again. As long as he could remember the list, in that day’s correct order, then he would make the journey downtown knowing he would have a good session. If for any reason he could not remember the precise order of things, then he invariably struggled, and invariably Jonathan had to work harder to tease out the memories. He was physically sick when he thought of the womb analogy because it formed an image in his mind that he could not remove for days.
‘So, when did the dream first manifest itself?’ Jonathan spoke softly and calmly.
This was the fifth session and the first time Preston had revealed the onset of a progressive dream. One he could remember and one he could start to build a picture from.
He looked at the ceiling and felt after a while as though the pupils of his eyes had gone. All he could see, all he could imagine was a clear blue sea and it was inviting him to enter. He felt a pain in his head, as he did at night, and his vision clouded, and there were voices all around him, distorted but loud.
There was movement but it was uncertain, and then he was swimming. There was a vast desolate landscape where mountains soared in the distance, marking the horizon of this yellow barren land and the dark troubled sky above it. Smoke rose from small campfires over the prairie-land, showing the locations, of the few wandering tribes of nomadic peoples that were the human race. In the hills a large tribe of men and women lived, hunting by day the wild herds of pigs, setting traps for the giant mammoths who grew more scarce with the passing of each snow. The women were coarsely clothed in bearskin or pig-hide, their faces painted with the coloured dyes they made from the berries they pulled from withered trees higher in the hills. The men dressed in bearskins like their women, except for a handful of fierce warriors who clothed their ape-like bodies in the dried skins of the long-toothed tigers they had fought and killed single handed, armed only with the flint axes and the short throwing spears they used. The tribe quarrelled and fought with the neighbouring peoples over the rights to drink at the solitary water hole that bound them all to this wasteland. Arguments were settled with grunts and scuffles, with the hill people allowing the others access. They were a wild and primitive early people who killed the game for food and shared what comforts they could with the other tribes. Mostly they kept to their own territory in the hills. When nightfall came they huddled around the fires, cooking the fresh meat from the kill, drinking the berry juice they made in scooped out wooden bowls. It was a time of fear when the huge fire in the sky hid behind the mountains far away, and the cold pale light of different shapes came in its place. The night had sounds of its own that even the bravest of the tribes warriors flinched from facing. There were cries and howls that were not heard by day, and the women moved closer to their men folk and waited for morning. One morning when the false dawn brought the first light into the hills the warrior on lookout at the highest point of the camp called out in the primitive language they understood, that there was movement in the desert. Other tribes were moving towards the hills in a single group and at their head was a stranger. The women took the young ones into the caves where the food and clothing was stored. The men armed themselves with the weapons they used to kill game, and went to the lower slopes to meet the men of the other tribes. Although the combined plains tribes outnumbered the hill tribesmen, the peaceable settlements they had made before had been reached with ease, and they had no fear. The stranger at the head of the tribesmen could have been from a different race compared to the shambling hair-covered men. He walked erect on his two hind legs, not using his arms for support as the ape-men did. His hair was black and swept back from his white forehead; his skin was smooth and pale, not darkened by the sun and the wind. They could not see his face. Even when he and the tribesmen reached the massed hills-people his face was shielded by shadow, or by shafts of sunlight. He took a rock from the barren ground and handed it to the leader of the plains tribesmen. Without words he indicated that the man should throw the rock. With as much force as he could the tribe leader threw the rock at the nearest of the hills tribesmen. It was the first act of war the men had ever known. The rock struck the head of the man and he fell to the ground, while his companions drew back startled. The stranger motioned with his arms and the other tribesmen fell upon the fallen warrior and beat him with rocks and axes until the blood flowed into the dust.
The stranger turned away from the sun, his face clear of shadow…
&
nbsp; ‘…And I wake up shivering.’ Preston spoke almost in a whisper, as the relayed dream continued to haunt him even now, even awake and in his safe environment.
Jonathan discreetly consulted his watch. Nearly done for this session. ‘So you have no idea who this person may be?’
‘None. That’s what keeps frightening me. Who is it? Is it related to my past? Will it help me if I see his face?’
‘Everything in our past can illuminate our present,’ was another phrase Jonathan would tell Preston, although not on this occasion. Now he said, ‘That will have to wait until next time, our session is over for the moment.’
The journey back to his apartment was always the same, and always fraught with danger of some kind. Not so daunting as when he was an adolescent and he knew that everyone was looking at him. There wasn’t a reason why they should; he was ordinary enough, although he knew he carried the ability for the extraordinary within him. He would walk along the streets of his hometown, on his way to school with his hand firmly in his pants pockets, head cast down, to the sidewalk, never once glancing up. He knew if he did the curtains would twitch back into place just too late for him to see the faces of the people looking at him. He wouldn’t know their names, though he probably knew everyone in the small town, but if he could see their faces it would make their secret scrutiny of him a little more bearable.
There was a man on the subway, clearly demented, under some kind of delusion about himself, about life. He babbled away, as people shrunk smaller into their seats, or, if standing, turned away, so that they might stare more closely at the fleeting sight of darkness plunging ever faster around them. The man started singing and Preston found himself crying at the gentle lullaby that came from such lips as these.
His apartment was as he had left it; the third round of inspection confirmed that. The hair he had plastered over the door hinge was still in place, and the talcum he had sprinkled on the windowsills was undisturbed. He put on a pot of coffee and telephoned for a Chinese take out. He felt like celebrating, by sheer virtue of the fact that he had shared his dream, not yet all of them but the latest. He fancied he had seen empathy in Jonathan’s eyes but it was too soon for that. He would have to complete a much longer, what did Jonathan say?
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