All in the Mind (19 page)

If that was the first want to come into his head, the first need was a toss-up between two thoughts that filtered into his head at roughly the same time. There was no chequered flag inside the mind to tell him for sure which came first, no video replay of his mental processes to give him absolute definitive proof. So he had to work it out for himself. It was a close call between ‘I need to keep busy’ and ‘I need to drink’. OK, he thought, I cannot be one hundred per cent sure which came in first, but I can at least reflect on which carries more weight, or holds the greater truth. ‘I need to keep busy.’ That was true. He had always been a busy character. At university, he was involved not just in student politics, but sport and amateur dramatics. His ministerial life was a busy one, long hours with myriad different issues and situations to deal with. Was it a want or a need? ‘I want to keep busy.’ Was that true? Yes, it probably was. ‘I need to keep busy.’ Probably, yes. He wrote them both down, on either side of the page.

The question now was whether ‘I need to drink’ came on top of ‘I need to keep busy’ or whether he could honestly put it second. He scribbled on a separate piece of paper, ‘I need to be busy every day,’ and alongside it, ‘I need to drink every day.’ There was, sadly, he realised, no contest. The second of those statements was the truer. He wrote ‘I need to drink’ at the top of his need list. ‘I want to be Prime Minister’ sat oddly opposite ‘I need to drink’ but both were true.

Even as the thoughts were coming and going, he had Martin Sturrock inside his mind. He was not simply thinking the thoughts but analysing what the Professor might make of them and what he
might
do with them. What the Professor would love to see, he was sure, was ‘I want to stop drinking’ and ‘I need to stop drinking’. He could do need on that one, but could he do want? Did he really
want
to stop drinking? Not really. He wrote down ‘I need to stop drinking’ below ‘I need to be busy’. Two out of his first three needs related to drink. He wrote another: ‘I need to face up to my problems.’ Professor Sturrock would like that one.

He was short on the want side, so he slid his mind and his pen to the left half of the page. ‘I want to live for a very long time’ popped into his head, so he wrote it down. His mind took him back to the need to stop drinking. If he wanted to live for a long time, he definitely needed to stop drinking. He wondered about drawing a dotted line between the two so he could remember the thought when he saw the Professor, but it was such an obvious connection, it didn’t seem worth it.

His first want spoke to ambition, his second to the longevity of his own life. What about others?

‘I want a good marriage,’ he wrote. Was that true? Was that up there with his political career and his desire to live to an old age? Yes, it was. But was it a good marriage he needed, or was it Sandie? ‘I need Sandie,’ he wrote, but it looked a little pathetic. He started to cross it out and replace Sandie with ‘a good marriage’, but that felt a bit harsh, even though she had annoyed him by being away longer than she had intended, so he made it ‘I need Sandie/strong marriage’.

‘I want the children to be happy and fulfilled.’

Did he need that too? Well, yes, but not in the same way as he wanted it. Instead, he wrote, ‘I need to know the children feel they are part of a family.’ That didn’t look right, or feel right. He crossed it out. He would come back to the children.

‘I need holidays.’

‘I want holidays.’ Trivial. Cross it out.

But was it so trivial? No, put it back. ‘I need to get proper rest.’ ‘I want more holidays.’

‘I want a drink.’ He crossed it out. He had a drink, so what was the point of that one? But he did want a drink. The drink was sitting
there
and he wanted to lift it to his lips and there was nothing wrong with that because it was afternoon now and it was hardly the end of the world if he had a tiny bottle of railway-trolley white wine. It would only count as ww1 or maybe 2 in his drink diary. He lifted the glass to his lips and sipped the white wine. Did it change the way he felt? He didn’t think so. Did it make him want to empty the whole glass down his throat and then order another one when the pretty Polish girl with the trolley came by again? Not really. So what was the big deal? The big deal was that in many moments of most days, he wanted a drink and he felt he needed a drink. He had to acknowledge that. He couldn’t run away from it. He wrote, ‘I want a drink, too often.’ ‘I need a drink, too often.’ He wrote, ‘I want to stop drinking’, but it wasn’t true, so he crossed it out. He wondered if Professor Sturrock could live with ‘I would like to stop drinking’, but he had been pretty clear. This was a want/need list, and it was the definitive nature of the statements he was required to make that would help the Professor do something with the information.

Two more linked thoughts came into his mind, and he wrote them down. ‘I want to increase my majority.’ ‘I need to spend more time in the constituency.’ Then two more, which at first he thought were linked, but then realised perhaps they weren’t. ‘I want Sandie to be happy.’ ‘I need Sandie to be at home more.’

‘I need more sleep.’

‘I need more exercise.’

‘I want to be more appreciated than I am.’

‘I need to be more appreciated than I am.’

Now he was motoring, and needs and wants were coming in at all angles.

‘I want to be happier than I am.’

‘I want a new private secretary.’

‘I need a new private secretary.’

The children filtered back in.

‘I want the children to stay in touch more.’

‘I want to be a grandfather.’ Was that true? Kind of. But totally, a real want? Not really. He crossed it out.

‘I need new challenges.’ Like what? Don’t know, but I do. Keep it.

‘I need more big moments, less grind and routine.’ Definitely.

‘I want to make more of a difference to the Health Service.’ Really? Yes.

‘I want to be able to relax more.’

‘I need to relax more.’

But his career came to the fore once more.

‘I need to widen my circle of support.’

‘I need to improve my operation.’

He looked out of the window again, and sat back. He felt tired. He had been poking around in his own innards and it had taken more out of him than he anticipated. At least he had broken the back of the job. He would have another think about it tomorrow. He hoped Professor Sturrock would be pleased with him. As he surveyed his list, it was perfectly clear what he needed to do if he was to have a chance of his wants happening. And that was to stop drinking. He downed the last of the Sauvignon, and told himself he would have no more until mid-afternoon at the earliest, but when the Polish girl with the trolley came back from her journey through standard class, he helped himself to the last little bottle. He had done a lot of work, he had almost finished his homework for Professor Sturrock, so he thought he deserved it.

17

The voice on the warehouse tannoy was muffled, as ever, but David heard it clearly enough, and felt it, like a blow delivered straight to the guts.

‘David Temple to Packing Station 15. David Temple to Packing Station 15.’

He had been at work for an hour. When he arrived, he had a few packages to take to sport and leisure, a batch of letters for the postroom, but was then able to hide away behind a pile of cardboard boxes hoping no one would notice him. The tannoy message was the call he’d been dreading, because Packing Station 15 was Amanda’s. He had no choice but to face her.

The morning had begun badly. If Friday had started with a seven-out-of-ten dead feeling, today it was closer to nine out of ten. It had been a struggle to force himself out of bed, then get his mind in some kind of working order, finish his breakfast without exploding at his mum, then get to work. He knew he was in for a bollocking, having failed to turn up yesterday afternoon after his appointment at the hospital, but he just had to face it. They were fairly used to him missing Fridays, but if he missed Saturday too, he might get another warning letter.

Amanda and Professor Sturrock were dominating his every waking thought. As he brushed his teeth, he wondered if he had been wrong to tell the Professor about her. At the time of telling him, he’d felt a little better, but this morning he was less sure.

Maybe it was his own fault for taking so long to tell him, but he didn’t feel Professor Sturrock had given him much by way of advice
on
how to cope with Amanda’s rejection. Normally, the doctor was great at coming up with strategies for facing down the problems that David took to him, even if David wasn’t always capable of implementing them. But yesterday, all he’d done was give him a book by some American professor of psychiatry, and ask him to read it. David had started looking at the book on the tube home, but could see no relevance to his current needs.

It was all about training your mind to think as you wanted it to, so that negative thoughts could be parked and positive thoughts brought to the fore. Professor Sturrock had told him that once you got through the American style and the over-the-top claims the author made for himself, there were some really interesting thoughts in there, particularly about death, and the importance of death to the process of life. He wanted David to focus on the death chapter for his homework, and do the little exercise on the final page.

The American professor said that, as we go through life, we should not fear death but know that one day it will come, and be ready for it. He also said we should think about how we want to be seen by others when we die and allow that to influence how we live when we’re alive. He said it was good to imagine our own funeral, think about who we would like to come, what hymns and readings we wanted, who we thought should deliver the eulogy and what we hoped they would say. Beneath the text was a little drawing of a headstone. It was a simple design, rounded at the top, with the words ‘
Here lies
…’ written across it and then a gap for a name, and a tribute. A note beneath it read, ‘
Exercise 19. Fill in above as if it’s your gravestone. Do not worry about space. Write as much as you like but try to imagine the words that best describe how you’d like to be remembered
.’ And then, with a further irritating reminder that the author was American: ‘
And please, guys, no false modesty
.’

The book had annoyed David, because he couldn’t understand why Professor Sturrock had chosen this particular moment to give it to him. Usually he felt he could see the reasoning behind the doctor’s homework tasks. But not this time. He wondered whether Professor Sturrock had actually been responding to their session of a week ago,
when
he’d talked about feeling dead inside, and had not really been listening when David talked about Amanda. How on earth was an exercise about his own death the appropriate response to an experience of rejection as bad as the one he suffered on Thursday?

All of Friday evening David had felt weighed down by rare feelings of anger towards the doctor, but now, hiding away in his corner, he tried to find a way out of the blackness he was feeling. Perhaps Professor Sturrock had just been having a bad day, he thought. It was possible. After all, he was only human, the same as everyone else. He told himself to try to imagine what a Sturrock on a good day, an on-form day, would have suggested. He was pretty sure the Professor would think that David saw in Amanda someone who could look after him as his mother tried to, but without all the irritation and with a sexual element added to the relationship. He would also think that Amanda’s rejection reinforced the feelings he had deep inside him as a result of the rejection by his father. He was always tracing things back to his father running off. Why hadn’t he said so this time then?

As to how David should react when he saw Amanda again, he suspected Professor Sturrock would advise him to be pleasant, try to be as they were before he had felt the little spark between them, and rebuild the friendship if he could. He wondered if the Professor had ever been rejected.

Rebuild the friendship. That’s what he wanted to do, but it seemed impossibly difficult. That was why he wanted to hide away in his dusty little corner. But he knew he couldn’t stay there all day, and now he’d got the call to go to Packing Station 15, he would have to decide for himself, without Professor Sturrock’s direct advice.

Amanda worked from a waist-high metal desk where she could sit if doing paperwork, or stand, as now, if she was organising shipments of goods to leave the building. She looked up as David approached, pushing a large trolley with an empty canvas bag. He worried that the bag wouldn’t be big enough to take the dozen or so packages she had ready for him. It might mean two visits. A week ago, that would have been a cause of some excitement. Today, it made him feel even more anxious.

‘Hi, David, how are things?’ She too was trying to behave as though nothing had happened, but it was clear she was tense.

‘OK,’ he said.

‘How was the shrink yesterday?’ A few days ago, he would have seen this as nothing more than a friendly enquiry, an indication of how close they had become. Today, it felt like an insult. ‘Shrink’ showed a lack of respect, to him and to Professor Sturrock. He just nodded.

‘We talked about you,’ he said.

‘My God. I don’t know whether to be flattered or worried.’ Again, he didn’t like the tone. There was the tiniest hint of mockery in ‘My God’, and the use of the word ‘worried’, he felt, was designed to convey the idea that she was sane and he was not.

‘You shouldn’t be either of those things,’ he said. ‘Just that I always tell him the good and bad in my week, so you came up.’

‘Oh.’ There was a pause. ‘Good or bad?’ she asked.

‘Both. In that order, I suppose.’ She flicked her head back in a way that he read as indicating that she wanted the conversation to end. But he was determined to try and make up with her.

‘Why did you do that?’

‘Do what?’

‘Flick back your head like you just did.’

‘I didn’t know I had.’

‘Yes, you went like that,’ and he flicked back his head, much further than she had, but he also added in a little curl of the upper lip.