The Death of Eli Gold

by David Baddiel

  6. Dr Anthony Salter. A proper psychiatrist, Harvey’s only one. A very small man – Harvey often wondered if he could legally be classified a midget – Dr Salter seemed to be mainly interested in a tiny, idiosyncratic memory, which was that when Harvey was a young child, and started crying, or being upset about anything, Eli used to say to him: stop hacking a chanik. Harvey had only mentioned this in passing, and explained to his psychiatrist that it was just his father speaking, as he often would, in nonsense language, but Dr Salter came back to it again, and again, as if stop hacking a chanik might be the primary cause of Harvey’s psychic ills; so much so that after a while Harvey felt moved to say to him – although never did – stop hacking a chanik. Dr Salter’s other main proffered solution was to prescribe antidepressants. Harvey would come back after a few weeks, to tell him how the antidepressant hadn’t worked, and he would prescribe another one.

  7. Dr Xu. Dr Xu was not an actual psychotherapist, but an acupuncturist and specialist in Chinese massage. Harvey went to him because his depression had become by this time so bodily, so located in his chest and his legs and his skin that he thought only manipulation of his frame could help. He still often thinks that the way to peace is for him to be touched: that if he could have someone permanently stroking him – on his back; on his feet; wherever it is on the body that the reassurance centres lie – his anxiety would be brought under control.

  Dr Xu did his best to pull and prick Harvey’s depression out. Harvey wasn’t sure about the underlying ideas of acupuncture – the meridians, the yin and yang organs – but he knew that Karl Marx had said that ‘the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain’ and, not being prepared to flagellate himself with thorns, wondered if pins in his skin might do the trick. And it worked: in the room. Lying on his back, looking not unlike the bloke out of Hellraiser, he would find himself distracted by the pain out of depression. The skips and jumps of electrical current induced along his muscles by connecting needles did seem to be clearing his system of something; or maybe the cold evidence they presented, that the body is simply a machine, made him feel more positive than usual about the prospect of finding a fix.

  It only worked, however, while it was happening. It only worked when the needles were in his flesh. By the time he returned to his house from Dr Xu’s practice in Sevenoaks, a journey of some thirty-five minutes, Harvey would be feeling as anxious as ever. To try and extend the life of the treatment effects, Dr Xu prescribed Harvey some extraordinarily foul-smelling herbs, the drinking of which as tea made him more depressed than ever. Dr Xu did also offer him the odd piece of psychotherapeutic advice, consisting mainly of the not unheard-before imprecation that he should live in the moment. It would be proper to report that Dr Xu did not fall into the stereotype here and tell Harvey that he should rive in the moment: it would be proper but it would not be true. Harvey felt, for a whole host of reasons, that he should not laugh at this, but since Dr Xu, when offering this homily, himself always laughed, as he also did while applying needles, prescribing herbs, walking on Harvey’s back, or offering him the buttons of the Visa machine for payment, it seemed almost rude not to.

  Even without the Chinese pronunciation, Harvey has never been keen on the live-in-the-moment thing. He knows people think it is the key to happiness, but it seems to him that he, driven by his physical impulses, lives always in the moment. If he buys a sandwich at 10 a.m., intending to eat it for lunch, he will eat it as soon as he gets back to his house at 10.15. If he feels tired, wherever he is, he falls asleep. If he sits down at his computer intending to spend four hours writing ghost-biography, he will spend three hours and forty-five minutes of that allotted time watching internet pornography. That is what living in his particular moment is: and it has brought him to a depression so severe it feels as if large weights have been sewn onto the inside of his skin.

  8. See below.

  ‘But obviously, I can’t get back in time for the session,’ says Harvey, frantically looking at his watch. The phone call to Dizzy Harris has gone on for over five minutes, and he knows, since he is still unable to remember the fucking pre-dialling number, that it is costing him a fortune in hotel charges. ‘I’m in New York. I can’t leave because my father might die any day. You’re my therapist. Have a fucking heart.’

  There was a silence on the other end of the line, a silence that Harvey took to be judgemental. This made him feel furious in two ways: first, because he was being judged – in that particularly infuriating non-reactive therapist’s way – and secondly, because those five seconds of silence just cost him, he reckoned, ten dollars.

  ‘As you know, Harvey, I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation,’ said Dizzy in his measured burr: Dizzy speaks posh Scottish, an accent that modulates very easily into patronizing. Harvey hates that tone, especially now, when he feels that it is being measured out in small Dickensian piles of his coins. ‘But most of my clients, if not all of them, are in difficult situations emotionally. And they all have to work with me according to the same rules. Which I did explain to you at the beginning.’

  Why, thinks Harvey, did I go with this twat? I should have known straight away from the name: what kind of therapist – no, what kind of twat – calls himself Dizzy? Not even as a nickname – Dizzy is his name, or at least he’s made it his name, it’s on his books, the ones forever lined up prominently on his shelves: Psychological Dysfunction and Mental Wellness, by Dizzy Harris. Overcoming Bad Belief by Dizzy Harris. Beyond Anxiety Disorder by Dizzy Yes That’s Right You Heard Me Dizzy Harris. Dizzy calling himself Dizzy is all part of what’s wrong with Dizzy, which is that he is a self-styled colourful character, the type of person who might wear a multi-coloured waistcoat, although in his case he announces his colourfulness by wearing, for the sessions, a velvet smoking jacket and bow tie. For the first session the bow tie was at least matching; but latterly he has greeted Harvey at the door of his west London consulting rooms wearing one that has been striped, and another polka-dotted.

  ‘While you are working with me, I’m afraid I have to charge for missed sessions.’

  ‘A hundred and thirty pounds.’

  ‘That’s what I charge, yes. The point is that I keep the session open – it is, as you know, standard therapeutic practice. On Tuesdays, at eleven, I come here and I sit here, whatever. Even if you have told me that you are not coming.’

  Harvey does know this, but has always hesitated to believe it. Partly because the image of Dizzy, in his bow tie, sitting on his own in his self-styled colourful character red leather chair resembles nothing so much as the man who used to read out Odd Odes on That’s Life, and partly because he does not believe in the compassion that Dizzy doing so would imply.

  ‘Do you really do that? For fifty minutes?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What do you do?’

  There is a pause at the other end of the line: Harvey wants to say, Watch TV? Wank? Flick through a bow-tie catalogue? Think about me? Or do you just count your fucking cash? Dizzy does not answer the question.

  ‘I offered the possibility of telephone sessions …’

  ‘Yes.’ You haven’t offered the possibility of paying for the telephone session, though, have you, Dizzy? The transatlantic fifty-minute tele-phone session?

  Harvey hears Dizzy exhale. He feels, almost as clearly as if the smiling jpg of Dizzy on his iPhone screen were moving, his therapist’s head slowly shaking.

  ‘We should have discussed this before you left, Harvey. What we were going to do about your sessions while you were … away.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Harvey, weakly. He knows that he should have done that. But somehow, last week, standing by the door of Dizzy’s consulting room, the idea that he, Harvey, was going off to New York later that night, to begin a vigil by his father’s deathbed, seemed utterly unreal. A different type of therapist might have said that by not discussing what to do about the missed sessions, Harvey was in denial about his father’s impending death, but Dizzy is a Co
gnitive Behaviouralist, and therefore uninterested in such subtextual hoodoo.

  What Harvey wants to say – what he wants to shout down the dark well of this telephone – was that a better therapist – or, rather, a nicer therapist, a nicer person – might have suggested it themselves. He doesn’t say this; instead, he begins coughing, the dry retch that always accompanies a rise in his anxiety levels.

  ‘Look, here’s what I suggest …’ says Dizzy, cutting through Harvey’s hacking throat with an air of munificence, ‘… if, in the next …’ – Harvey senses a checking of watch – ‘… forty-five hours, you can find someone else to take the session, then, obviously, I can charge them instead.’

  ‘But I’m in New York!’

  ‘The telephone?’

  Oh more fucking hotel-rate international calls, thanks very much.

  ‘So – what? I’m supposed to ring around my friends in London, and say “Hi – haven’t spoken to you for a bit – but anyway, how mental are you feeling? How depressed? How wrung out by existential despair? Because I’ve got just the man for you.”’

  ‘Sounds perfect,’ says Dizzy, with a chuckle. ‘Look, I must go – client waiting.’

  Suddenly, Harvey can’t be bothered with it: with all of it. With Dizzy, with being in therapy, with being on the phone, with being in New York, with trying to battle how he feels. ‘OK.’

  ‘So, let me know …’

  ‘OK. I’ll call you.’

  ‘Bye … send my best to your father.’

  ‘Bye, Dizzy.’

  ‘And remember the mantra.’

  ‘I will. Bye.’

  He puts the phone down, imagining in his mind a meter stopping somewhere in four figures. He settles back onto the too-many pillows of his hotel bed, and looks out of the window at his lack of a classic view of New York.

  The mantra: he can vaguely remember it, but the wording is so unwieldy he can’t quite believe he’s got the order right; and seeing as it is a mantra, a spell of sorts, Harvey feels he needs to say it correctly for it to have any power. He actually has it written down on a piece of paper, hidden in the bottom of his bum bag. With a grunt (when did that – the overdone old-man exhalation that now accompanies all his bending, sitting, and standing – start happening?) he forces himself out of the pillow nest and towards his case, which is resting open and overflowing on a chrome and black elastic suitcase holder by the door. Yesterday he actually had a go at unpacking, but gave up after twenty minutes of furiously stuffing too many items of clothing into a drawer and trying, unsuccessfully, to force it shut, which led to forty-five minutes of sitting on his bed staring into space.

  His bum bag has been laid, rather tenderly, over the spilling mound of those clothes still left in his suitcase by some maid. The cliché rushes into his mind: young, French, apron skirt, puff sleeves, stockings, feather duster, bent over the suitcase holder, blushing perhaps as she notices his underpants. He picks up the belt, and rummages inside the sack, his fingers brushing first his passports, then, underneath the usual bureau de change of irrelevant currency, the piece of paper. He takes it out. Paper, at least, he can fold: this small square looks, he realizes, remarkably like a cocaine wrap, and blanches inside at the thought that he had taken it through customs. His brain chases the idea as he opens it: for a second, he is one of the JFK customs officers and his image in the wardrobe mirror is himself, trembling in waiting fear. This is not a big leap for Harvey’s imagination. Although he had got through unquestioned this time, the wobbly onrush of self-consciousness that always hits him while passing through the Nothing to Declare channel – despite carrying no contraband, he always feels an urgent need to appear nonchalant; nonchalance not being a consciously strikeable attitude, what he appears to adopt, from the point of view of the customs officers, is the bearing and gait of a Colombian crack baron – has often led to his being stopped, interrogated, and, on one occasion, strip-searched.

  He imagines himself as the customs officer, excited at having caught a class A smuggler, his fingers feverishly worrying at the folded square; and then that excitement draining away as, crestfallen, he discovers that the wrap is not a wrap – it is actually just a piece of paper, containing all that paper usually does: some words. These words:

  I would much prefer it if Stella was not becoming less beautiful with time; but the fact that she is becoming less beautiful with time (like we all do) is not the end of the world.

  He imagines the customs officer, in a booming American baritone, reading out the words. He doesn’t just imagine it: he does, on his own in his hotel room, an impression of this customs officer. He reads the words out loud, in a terrible hammy borscht belt New York accent – accents are not Harvey’s strong point; to do an accent, you have to move away from yourself, and Harvey, however much he hates himself, hates not being himself even more – adding, at the end, a question mark, and not just because of the American intonation. Because the customs officer would be confused, as well he might be.

  It is a proclamation that Dizzy Harris has tailored to Harvey’s needs (there had been a previous version, which had attempted, along the way, to subvert the whole idea that the lessening of beauty with time is inevitable – it had used phrases like ‘what is considered beautiful’ and ‘in conventional terms’ and ‘gender-specific’ – but this had proved even more unwieldy and harder to memorise). Dizzy’s theory and practice as a psychotherapist boils down to something quite simple, which is: you must change your must-haves to a preference. His branch of cognitive behavioural therapy has realized (correctly: for all Dizzy’s appalling manner, he is not wrong) that the dysfunctional mind is urgent. That it says: I want I want I want I want. I must have must have must have must have. Or, alternatively, I want that gone or I must have that out. The way to sanity is not, Dizzy says, to block this urge entirely. That way – for desire, sensing a block, will implode – madness lies. Instead, one must negotiate with desire, even though we are told we must never do that with terrorists. And the negotiation is this: this shift to the laid-back, to the laissez-faire. If one’s problem is alcohol, rather than thinking ‘I must have a drink’ one must think ‘I’d really like to have a drink, but if I don’t, it’s no big deal …’; if it is continually being overlooked for a promotion, rather than constantly saying to yourself ‘Why didn’t I get that job? I need to get it!’ think ‘I’d really like to have got that job, but the fact that I didn’t is not a disaster …’ And thus anxiety, depression and manic despair are coaxed and massaged – tricked, perhaps – into feeling just a bit unsatisfied by life, which is, as it turns out, the true, the median experience.

  So this is what is at the heart of Harvey’s depression. He is forty-four. Stella is forty-two. They have been together for fourteen years, twelve of them married. Harvey’s twenties, post the drear university relationship with Alison, were a long slog through the backwaters of love. Every two years or so, Harvey would fall rabidly in love with a new woman. When in love, he would be lifted out of himself; his natural – and, in the normal run of things, disabling – sense of consequence would evaporate, and he would dive as deeply as possible into the whirlpool of his own emotions, helplessly swooning in the swirl. Every phone call, every look, every scrawled message from the beloved would fuel his heart with God’s own petroleum, while the absence of these was as a match to his aorta, turning the entire organ to dust. This state of affairs would last, every time, three months. And then, every time, there would come a morning when Harvey would wake and – without her saying anything, without him even looking over at her sleeping form: this news would be carried on the wind, the small wind blown up from the settling sheet – know instantly that the feeling had gone. It was shocking, always, even though it had happened before, but love, like, supposedly, childbirth, comes with its own builtin amnesia, which airbrushes any pain from the memory when the time arrives for the next episode. When starting up his heart again, he always believed that this time it would last. And then when, every time it
faded, came this mixture of deadness and panic, his cold turkey, his comedown from the heroin of love.

  He would hold out for a while, chasing the feeling, hoping that it might come back, but knowing in his heart that you cannot chase love, any more than you can think yourself into nonchalance in the Nothing to Declare channel. Then he would give up, and settle into a relationship with the object of his recently flown love, which would function with varying degrees of success but remain always haunted by the lost utopia of those first three months. Not that this meant that the relationship would easily peter out. The grey Sunday polytechnic afternoons with Alison had set the template: splitting up with a woman was always, for Harvey, an unimaginable terror. He could carry the dread of it around with him for months or even years. He wondered how many men and women lived their lives like this, nervously, always on the brink of saying the terrible thing, holding the bad words down like a Tourette’s sufferer. He would see his everyday domestic dialogue as on a computer screen, where what he wanted to say would be rendered in faint type, words unclickable-on by his soul’s mouse:

  GIRLFRIEND: Would do you want for dinner?

  HARVEY: Look we have to talk.

  HARVEY: What about getting a takeaway?

  GIRLFRIEND: I dunno. We had one on Monday.

  HARVEY: It’s not you it’s me.

  HARVEY: Oh come on let’s go crazy.

  GIRLFRIEND: Indian or Chinese?

  HARVEY: Sometimes I think I’d rather be in prison than with you. Sometimes I wish you had died. None of this means I don’t love you. I’m just not in –

  HARVEY: Indian.

  And, meanwhile, somewhere out there, in the world or on TV, people moved in and out of relationships with ease, treating love as if it were weightless. Harvey didn’t know how you got to this world. He was barred from it, by fear and, more importantly, by friendship. Friendship: what a problem it was. Men of his father’s generation, in most cases, had gone one of two ways: they either married someone who they grew to hate for life, or they left women in stages when their sexual interest waned (his father, obviously, the latter: King of the Latter). In neither scenario would they and their women become friends; it was never even on the emotional map. Harvey, however, always became friends with his girlfriends. Sometimes he became best friends with his girlfriends.