Fifty-Minute Hour (20 page)

I clutch at Seton's arm, to prove I'm a couple, too; long to tell the world he did actually invite me to move in and share his boat. We've been going out together fourteen days, which must be quite a record (for him, as well as me), though the term ‘going out' is not exactly accurate, since we rarely budge from the confines of the cabin, except to change positions on the bunk or bench or floor. Well,
I
go out – he doesn't – except to drive me to the station for my appointments with John-Paul. I've refused to give them up, despite my disillusion, though Seton lours and threatens, says if I want to waste my money, there are more amusing ways of doing so than regaling some sex-obsessed shyster with the details of my latest love affair.

‘Yeah, but you really have to do drugs first, to know how bad they are.'

‘She's into healing trees now. They respond better than people.'

I edge away from trees and drugs, grab a last half-Twiglet. Actually, Seton doesn't know it, but I haven't breathed a word about our liaison. Oh, I know it's breaking the analytic rule, or whatever John-Paul calls it, but that hardly seems to matter now, when he's just a piddling amateur – and anyway I've been breaking it for months. I've even concealed the existence of my clients; just casually explained that I was paying for my therapy with a windfall I'd been left from my favourite (non-existent) Uncle Jack. It really bugs me sometimes that he doesn't see straight through me, use his basic nous if he hasn't any training, or operate some inbuilt shit-detector. I've sometimes tried to test him out, told him quite outrageous tales – like my mother was a despatch rider with a vintage Harley Davidson, and my father was a murderer – and he still appears to swallow them, or at least not call me ‘Liar!'. Though maybe he's deceiving me, in turn; only pretending to believe me, and making jargon-loaded notes about my fibs or fantasies. What's truth, anyway? How can we know anything when everybody's lying, or at least acting or pretending? For all I know, my father might have murdered someone and concealed it in his turn. (He murdered
me
, in one sense, though that's another story.) And there's the added complication that the more you build-up something, the more solid it becomes, like my Uncle Jack, for instance, whom I worship now and idolise; visit every Sunday in his converted Kentish oast house (or Spanish hacienda, or Manhattan penthouse with its view of Central Park).

‘Actually, Jason of the Argonauts always struck me as an outsize wimp.'

‘Who's he?'

‘Hey, did you see that piece on gays in last week's
City Limits
?'

‘No,' I say; faze the pouf who's asking, since he was addressing someone else – a guy in green-check trousers who looks a cross between a golf pro and a clown. The crowds are building up now, the air over-breathed and stale. We're stuck down in a basement with no windows and strip-lighting (which is hardly fair to any pictures, even ones as lousy as John-Paul's). I can't get away from basements. My own bedsit's subterranean, Seton's cabin's down a ladder, and of the eleven different pads I've had since I left home in my teens, eight were below street-level and two converted cellars. Perhaps that's the attraction of John-Paul – he's up a tower, not down a hole, though actually I just can't feel the same about him, since Seton put him in his context, so to speak. The whole point about analysts is that they're meant to remain a mystery, so you can fantasise about them, turn them into your father, mother, brother, sister (or favourite Uncle Jack). In that sense, they're not real, not intended to be real, but objects to be hated, worshipped, feared, so you can re-enact the way you felt in infancy towards your
real
father, mother, sister, brother or (unreal) Uncle jack.

It drives you crazy sometimes, the way they never say a word about their own life or interests, relationships or politics, but I see now it's far preferable to knowing the grim facts. John-Paul divorced, with two great hulking dogs and a plumber for a father, isn't quite the stuff of fantasy, and at first I was so furious, I vowed I'd never set eyes on him again. But then I got so anxious, so depressed and even desperate, I realised I was totally addicted to the man, and that in some ghastly way he'd become even more attractive because he
was
a fraud – an imposter and a charlatan who'd been smart enough to fool me. I've always been involved with swinish men – which according to John-Paul is an attempt to recreate my (swinish) father, try to change him, try to make him love me. It always fails, of course. I'm a glutton for (self) punishment, and now I've got a shrink who's every bit as bad as the bastards he's been slating. Though I suppose that proves him right, at least.

‘Like the tan, Jean! Fake or real?'

‘Fake. Sunorama's sun-beds. I've almost moved my office there.'

‘They're meant to give you cancer.'

‘What are?'

‘Sun-beds.'

‘Everything gives you cancer – or all the fun things, anyway – even men, apparently.'

‘Too right,' I say to no one, as I maul my paper cup. Seton's strayed off somewhere and I suppose I should be ‘circulating'; flinging more inane remarks into the pool of conversation. But I'm sick of all the small talk; can't seem to feel a part of it or tag on to some group; can't shift my mind and focus from John-Paul. Despite his absence, he seems more real and solid than all those prattling cut-outs, and I feel I'm here alone with him, carrying on a silent tête-à-tête. We've had some really hairy sessions this last fortnight. ‘If your father's a plumber, why can't he mend your loo, John-Paul?' ‘If you must have pedigree dogs to give you breeding, or huge ones as a power thing …' ‘If you spent less time on art …' He pretended not to understand, turned everything back to me and my neuroses. Plumbers he associated with sewers, sewers with shit, and shit of course with money (that's an analytic basic), so why was I so worried about paying his bills? I couldn't win with wolfhounds, either. He refused to discuss them as his own domestic pets, but interpreted them as symbols of my animal aggression which I was seeking to repress (and also linked with shit again – you know, dogs and excrement – which seems to me plain facile).

And then his phones kept ringing. They've always done, in fact, but I've never really realised how unprofessional it is. Three phones, like three clocks – he's probably got three mistresses, and three ex-wives, as well – all connected to the answerphone so that he doesn't have to pick them up in the middle of a session, but, nonetheless, horribly distracting, since they caterwaul at least six or seven seconds before the recording cuts them out. Before, I simply accepted it, but now I know he's just a quack, their shrilling sounds insulting, or seems to be expressing my own howls of pain, resentment. And the calls themselves are suspect – not the frantic patients I always took them for, desperate for his help or voice, clamouring to see him, but cantankerous ex-wives, or jumped-up plumber fathers, or maybe angry vets who have dosed or wormed his wolfhounds, but are still waiting to be paid.

‘Hallo! Don't I know you?'

‘No,' I say. ‘You don't'; scuttle off from the creep in dove-grey suede whose eyes are on my breasts, but who'll probably feign an interest in my brain (as many so-called ‘new men' appear to do these days). Several other people have tried to say hallo, or swap their names for mine, but I sense a wall between us; keep glancing round for Seton, who's completely disappeared. I'd really hate to lose him, need him as my anchor. He's become central in my life now, partly as a sort of counterirritant to John-Paul, but also for a host of other vital reasons, like his size-eleven feet, his lack of parents, wives or job, and his total disregard for things like dress or rules, tact or meals or mores. It's also great to have a guy who's not a client, and one who's head and shoulders above all the gaffers here, not just in his height and build, but in his sheer charisma. Okay, so he's aggressive, but he's also very generous, and surprisingly soft-hearted (not to mention skilful) when it's a matter of an injured tern or a stoat caught in a trap. There's a whole quite different side to him which he hides from other people, and which appeals to me especially because I tend to do the same.

I always feel I've got two separate selves, which makes life quite confusing since I don't know which one's me. My female self is vile – tough and sharp and bitchy and often pretty devious; but my male self's more poetic and compassionate, secretive, responsive, though also much more vulnerable. Sometimes, when it takes me over, I feel very strange and frail, and things lose their shape and boundaries, so the world becomes unreal. I've discussed it with John-Paul, and he used words like ‘bipolarity' and ‘split'; referred to my ‘divided self', which made it sound like something in a textbook, rather than undefined and frightening. I sometimes swing from mood to mood so suddenly and totally, I confuse myself as well as him, feel I've changed identity, become a different person. But
Seton
understands – accepts me both ways round – the only one who ever has, which is why he's so important.

An explosive and defiant laugh suddenly rips across the room. I know that laugh – it's his. He very rarely laughs, in fact, but when he does, it startles. I trace it to its source; find him pawing Cressida, one over-friendly hand exploring the bare flesh between her child-bearing hips and her Page Three Playgirl tits. I turn abruptly on my heel, make for what I assume to be the exit, but it leads into another room – one I haven't seen – with huge black sculptures in it and crowds more giggly girls, many of them black themselves, as if they've been invited here to tone in with the works. I stare in horror at the hunks of painted metal which resemble the remains of all the worst accidents scooped up from the motorways in the last ten years or so, and set down here still wet with blood and gore. Are those John-Paul's as well? They seem far worse than the paintings. I don't mean worse artistically, which I suspect would be impossible, but worse in terms of size and sheer solidity, worse in terms of symptoms. If his patients are neurotics, then these are gross psychotics – schizophrenics, psychopaths, raving monomaniacs. How could any mere neurotic dare to take his time, when these awesome locked-ward cases must demand his full attention, must occupy his mind to the exclusion of all else?

I creep into a corner, try to make myself invisible, which may sound crazy when I'm five foot ten, but actually I'm shrinking all the time. Oh, I'm still the brazen Amazon outside, but inside I'm just an empty husk, shrivelling up to nothing. Seton's gone; I've lost John-Paul – or at least the one I thought I had – and I can rarely keep a man beyond two months. All around me people are in couples or happy chatting groups – relating, laughing, socialising. It's like a children's party where all the other lucky kids have been handed out their smiles, but the supply ran out just before my turn. The black girls seem especially wild and whoopy, sparkling with an inner oomph and verve; a powerful bottled tonic whose cork has just flown off, exploding in a shower of bubbly fizz. The noise sounds really threatening, surging up in waves, which seem to break across my head and half-submerge me. I can't even smoke to calm myself. Seton's got the cigarettes. That's a sign of coupledom – one pack between the two of you.

My hands are out of work. Even an empty cup was something to hold on to, but mine has got mislaid, probably trampled underfoot in all the crush. There's more wine on the carpet than in anybody's glass – a dirty threadbare carpet, to match the bare and dirty walls. I can't bear to think of John-Paul in this setting, or to accept those warped and twisted sculptures as his work. ‘John-Paul,' I say, as if his name might bring him back. I need him desperately.

Someone else lolls up to me instead – a tall thin floppy-looking man who appears to have liquorice sticks or sash cords where most of us have bones. ‘Hi!' he says, smiling, though his smile is sagging too, and his clothes are falling off him – folds of baggy trouser drooping round his hips, and a sweater so voluminous it could hide two football teams.

‘D'you smoke?' I snap, nicotine addiction outlawing good manners. I should at least have parroted his ‘Hi!'

‘No, I do
not
!' He sounds as if I've asked him if he tortures Jews or buggers little boys. He's probably a member of that boring anti-smoking group which tries to lock up anyone who dares to take a puff. And it never stops with cigarettes – oh, no. They're all into saving seals, as well, and believe in things like ley lines; would probably stop us breathing if they could get the legislation through, reserve the air for some endangered species. (Actually, we smokers are now the most endangered species on the globe, with smoking bans in cinemas and tube trains, even offices and restaurants – need our own society to protect us from extinction.)

I sidle a bit closer, tighten my own smile. ‘I suppose you know this show is subsidised by one of the biggest of the tobacco giants – yes, the ones who make Chesterfields, in fact. The artist's on their board, helps produce their advertising. So if you're drinking their wine,' I gesture to his near-empty paper cup, ‘you're helping swell their profits.'

He crumples up completely, sags and droops away. Why can't I meet a macho man who's come hotfoot from the airport with two hundred king-size duty-free bulging out his sweater? All I get is a floss-haired Mae West-ette, half my height and at least a decade younger, who's intruding on my corner in little spurts and teeters. She stops to flirt with the largest of the sculptures, caressing all its angles, feeling up its knobs, running teasing fingertips down one long sloping side, as if it's John-Paul's naked back. ‘Shit!' I say out loud.

‘Sorry. Did you speak?' She swings round to check the voice, bestow a gracious smile on it. Another Mary, obviously – the usual misty cornflower eyes and double-cream complexion, and this one's wearing
bows
, for heaven's sake – yes, bows on her cute fringe like a pampered Yorkshire terrier.