All in the Mind (22 page)

His sandwich untouched, he left a ten-pound note on the table, and walked slowly back to the car. There was no doubt now, this was serious, the kind of plunge where he couldn’t function, couldn’t communicate. But he had so much to do. The funeral on Tuesday. The fund-raising for his research. All his patients – he had so many
cases
on the go, and some of them really tough. If this was a plunge as serious as he feared, it threatened to be catastrophic. He couldn’t let that happen. He had to find a way of stopping himself going further down. As he sat in the car, he tried to calm himself, using a technique he often recommended to his patients – the ‘running commentary’. It involved the articulation of a feeling, verbally not just internally, exactly as it was being felt. The only rule was that every sentence had to begin with the words ‘I am’.

‘I am feeling empty,’ he said to himself as he turned the ignition and started the journey home.

‘I am wondering why it is that I am feeling empty.’

‘I am thinking that it is because my marriage is so poor.’

‘I am feeling bad that I want the weekend to pass.’

‘I am feeling bad that I have deliberately tried to stay out of the house to avoid contact with Stella.’

‘I am thinking I have no choice, because we seem unable to speak to each other.’

‘I am feeling guilty that I did not want my mother to come to Aunt Jessica’s funeral.’

‘I am wishing it was Wednesday, then the funeral would be over.’

‘I am hoping that I will be able to see all the patients I need to next week.’

‘I am worried about Arta. I am hoping she will come back.’

‘I am worried about Emily.’

‘I am wondering if David is OK.’

‘I am sad that all my father’s family are now gone.’

‘I am wishing I could hear my father’s voice speaking to me when I am troubled like this.’

‘I am wishing I heard it when he was alive.’

‘I am thinking that I should not be worrying about things I cannot change.’

‘I am wishing I did not have to do the eulogy on Tuesday.’

‘I am wishing Aunt Jessica had stood up for me.’

The traffic was heavy, but for once he didn’t mind. He was lingering at traffic lights. He was stopping to let cars out of side roads. He was
changing
gear slowly, very deliberately, trying to make each moment last a little longer. It was like living in slow motion, another symptom of the plunge.

He was hoping that a little more passage of time might lift him, and make him feel better prepared for going home and seeing Stella. But every time he felt he was able to focus on her, and try to be positive, even for a few moments, another person, another thought, another image would crowd her out and make him more pessimistic about his ability to lift things. Aunt Jessica crowded in. Emily Parks crowded in. Arta crowded in even more. He thought of Arta’s recurring dream about trying to leave Kosovo, and the obvious message it carried that no matter how hard the journey, there appeared to be no ending.

Sturrock didn’t write down his own dreams. He had done so only when he was running a research project on dreams and depression. But he had a recurring dream of his own, not dissimilar to Arta’s, though without the background of ethnic and military conflict. He was at an airport, late for a plane, running up a gently rising travelator which gave the appearance of moving, but though everyone else on it appeared to be moving forward, he was making no progress at all. The people around him were not even moving their legs, yet they were moving forward. They were in small groups, mainly families smiling and sharing the excitement they felt at heading away to new destinations, or they were groups of friends all enjoying each other’s company. Sturrock appeared to be the only one alone. He was running hard, yet staying in the same spot. The harder he ran, the more happy, smiling people glided past him. They headed to the next stage of their journey, while he never moved beyond the gaudy poster advertising a West End musical which had closed long ago. When he looked more closely at the poster, his father was among the cast, looking morose and unyielding amid a stage full of smiles.

It was a fairly basic anxiety dream. Had it been a patient’s dream, he might have said it revealed a loner, something of a perfectionist, forever striving but never truly content. He would have further
concluded
that he saw his father as a distant and aloof figure unable to help him in any struggle he had. But he knew all that anyway.

When he finally got home, Stella was busy in the kitchen.

‘Dinner won’t be for a while,’ she said, perfectly nicely.

‘I’m fine,’ he said. ‘I was hungry when I left Mum’s, so I picked up a sandwich.’

‘OK.’

‘I was there longer than I planned to be. I’ve got a bit of work to do now.’

‘How was she?’

‘OK. Same really.’

‘Not coming on Tuesday.’

‘No, she is.’

‘Oh.’

‘I’m going to see if Jan will take her.’

He went to his study, muttering to himself.

‘I am thinking I should have been able to engage in a better conversation than that.’

‘I am relieved I am on my own again.’

‘I am hoping this gloom will lift.’

‘I am seeing and feeling nothing to suggest it will.’

20

‘Can’t or won’t?’ Can’t or won’t?’ Professor Sturrock’s question had been echoing around Arta’s head all day. Last night, as happened most nights, she’d dreamed of the rapist, but this time her psychiatrist had been there too.

He was wearing casual clothes, which surprised her, as usually he wore a jacket and trousers, or a navy-blue suit. They were meeting not in a consulting room but on a train, in a crowded, rickety carriage that was taking them through what seemed like an industrial wasteland, dark lifeless buildings on a snow-covered plain. The seats on the train were brightly coloured, a lurid mix of pinks, purples and yellows, colours so shrill they made her want to look away, stare out of the window. She was embarrassed to be talking to a psychiatrist in front of others. ‘What did it feel like, Arta, when the man entered you? Try to describe for me both the physical sensation but also what was happening inside your head.’ She wanted to say that she had tried to force her mind to think thoughts so powerful and loving that she felt nothing but she hadn’t managed to. She wanted to say she had felt a failure as a parent because she couldn’t protect Besa, a failure as a wife because she had allowed a strange man into the flat. The thoughts were clear inside her mind, and close to coming out. But the other passengers were listening, even though some pretended not to, and when she opened her mouth she found she couldn’t speak. Professor Sturrock normally spoke softly but tonight he was talking in a clear, precise voice, and loud enough for anyone in the carriage to hear. She looked out of the window and when she turned back to Professor Sturrock, there was a little crowd of people behind him, all staring
at
her. Among them was a man with a cruel smile. The rapist. This time, she had given him dark hair, brown eyes, a scar across his top lip, a brown leather jacket and yellow T-shirt. He was unshaven. He wore a badge on his leather jacket, based on the three-fingered salute of the Serbs. He had raped her, and he was smiling.

‘I can’t say,’ she said. ‘I can’t say with all these people here.’

‘Can’t or won’t?’ Professor Sturrock said. ‘Can’t or won’t?’ the passengers behind him joined in. Then the ‘can’t’ was dropped and they began to chant and stamp their feet. ‘Won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t, won’t …’

Arta had been shaken awake by Lirim. ‘Arta, Arta, Arta, wake up, wake up, it’s OK, it’s OK, you’re here, it’s fine.’ The hurt and fear she felt in her dreams started to mix in with the feelings of relief and warmth as she realised where she was – in her own bed, not on a train with the psychiatrist, the rapist and a baying mob.

‘It’s OK,’ Lirim said, sensing the calm coming over her. ‘It’s OK. What happened? Him again?’

‘Yes, but not attacking me, laughing at me. The doctor was there, saying, “Can’t or won’t?” Why does he say that? Like I have the choice.’

Lirim was in a hurry to get to work. She had her arms around his neck. He eased her grip a little, then held her close to him and kissed her on the forehead. ‘Sorry, I’ve got to go. We’ll talk more tonight. We will get there in the end, Arta.’

As he reached the bedroom door, he looked back at her. ‘Don’t forget to text me if there are any goals in Alban’s match,’ he said. And, with that, he was gone.

As soon as the door closed, Arta picked up her notebook from the bedside table and tried to record her dream. It struck her that, of all the faces on the train, Professor Sturrock’s was the only one with a kindly expression in his eyes. For a moment her anger towards him softened, but then the humiliation of yesterday’s appointment, which had clearly provoked the dream, came flooding back. Professor Sturrock always encouraged her to write exactly what she felt in her dreams. She wrote: ‘
I was angry with you in real life, because you asked me to forgive those men, and I was hurt in my
dream
that you did not defend me when the other passengers were shouting at me
.’

Once the children were up, Alban buzzing with excitement about his match, she was able to silence the taunts in her head, and concentrate on getting them ready for the day.

Alban’s only unhappiness was that his father was unlikely to be able to watch him play. Unlike Arta, Lirim loved football. Yet it was she who would be going to Herne Hill to support him. Lirim had popped in to see Alban in bed the night before, to tell him he would try to get along if he could, but he was pretty clear the chances were slim. Arta had listened outside the door. ‘This is a big weekend for us at work and I need to make sure everything goes according to plan,’ Lirim had said. ‘But I’ll be thinking of you.’ When she went in to give Alban a goodnight kiss, she could tell he had been sniffing back tears.

Arta knew next to nothing about football, but she knew this match was important to her son. The day he was told he had been picked for the school team he was so excited he could barely get the words out when he got home. It was a London Schools Cup game too, and she gleaned from the conversation between Lirim and Alban that this made it even more exciting. It meant playing on a proper, full-sized pitch at the Herne Hill Velodrome, with a team bus to take them there and their own changing room. Arta walked with him to school to wave him off, then she and Besa took the 196 bus and arrived at the ground as the teams were warming up.

Alban’s school was playing a team from another school in Elephant and Castle, so Arta recognised quite a few of the faces. She felt out of place among the other parents. Mostly it was the dads who had come, and she was the only woman with a pushchair. Alban was trying hard not to look nervous, but she knew him too well. She worried that some of the players on the other team were much bigger than him. She worried too that the pitch was so huge, that he would need to conserve his energy if he was to last the course. She was surprised at how many spectators there were, at least fifty, maybe even a hundred, mainly parents and other family, but also, she heard
one
of the other parents say, scouts from Charlton, Millwall and Queen’s Park Rangers. She found it astonishing that professional football clubs would send people to watch ten-year-olds.

She knew what the objective of the game was – to put the ball in the opponents’ net – but she had little understanding of how that was made to happen, or what made one team better than the other. For large parts of the match, Alban didn’t touch the ball, but she heard his team coach shouting ‘well done’ to him a couple of times, so she assumed he was doing fine. But then something terrible happened, which challenged fundamentally her own understanding of her son.

She was watching Alban run alongside another boy, trying to get the ball from him, when suddenly Alban deliberately tripped the boy, and gave his leg a sharp kick as he fell. She put her hands to her mouth as she watched the victim of Alban’s aggression fall to the ground clutching his shin and screaming. The referee ran towards him but was beaten to it by three or four of the other team’s players who were shoving and pushing Alban, now defended by his own teammates. Several parents were edging from the cycle track on to the pitch, shouting angrily. Arta could tell from the look on one woman’s face that she was the mother of the boy who lay on the floor. She was of a type very familiar to Arta from her life on the estate. White working class. Overweight. Unhealthy puffy face. Pink tracksuit. Holding a cigarette. Alongside her, another parent was shouting, ‘Kill the little sod.’ Others were calling for Alban to be sent off. ‘Red card, red card. It’s got to be a red card.’

Arta just stood watching, half an eye on Besa who was playing behind one of the goals with a little friend she had found. Alban had the look of a cornered animal. She just wanted the game to resume and all the shouting to stop. She wished Lirim was there. He would know how to handle this better.

Alban was given a yellow card, to the evident annoyance of many of the parents, who were now shrieking abuse at the referee. As Alban walked away, the boy he had fouled stood up. Even though she was on the other side of the pitch, Arta could hear him shout
at
Alban, ‘Why don’t you fuck off home, you asylum-seeking little wanker?’

A minority of the spectators cheered. Arta noticed that the pink-tracksuited woman was not among them. She threw her cigarette angrily to the ground, and stamped on it. Although the referee had clearly heard what the boy said, he ignored it and blew his whistle for the free kick to be taken. Alban turned and looked at the boy, walked straight over to him, and punched him twice in the face, left fist, right fist, and the boy fell to the floor once more. Parents from both teams ran onto the field and for a moment it looked as if they too were going to start fighting. Alban’s coach managed to protect him from the worst of the abuse as he escorted him from the pitch, not needing to wait for the red card. He brought him over to Arta, whose hands were shaking. To her, Alban was the kindest, softest, gentlest son. Out on the football field he had behaved like a monster. He had a look of fury in his eyes.