The Mirror World of Melody Black (6 page)

All in all, there was a pleasant weightiness to the furnishings in Dr Barbara's office. I liked being there. There was something comforting about the routine of it all: the armchairs, the unrushed journey through affluent central London, the black coffee from the Caffè Nero across the road. After seven months of fortnightly appointments, even the fact that I had to rely on my father to foot the bill had stopped rankling. Because, really, this was money he owed me. It didn't feel like the guilt money he had tried to throw at me in the past; this felt more like compensation I'd been awarded by a benign, sagacious judge in a small claims court. I felt I deserved it, and I knew that Freud would have agreed.

‘I read your article,' Dr Barbara told me. ‘The interview.' Only the interview had been printed at this point. Simon was due the following Sunday.

‘What did you think?' I asked.

‘It was very compelling. And well written, of course. But you don't need me to tell you that.'

‘Thank you.'

‘You found a body?'

‘Yes. My neighbour's.'

‘Do you want to tell me about it?'

I didn't take long to think about this. ‘Actually, Barbara, I'd rather not. I'd rather you read about it next Sunday. Is that okay?'

‘Yes. It's your choice, of course. But . . .' Dr Barbara laced her fingers and probed the top-left corner of her mouth with her tongue, the way she always did when taking some care over her next sentence. ‘But I'd like you to tell me a couple of things, concerning both articles.'

‘Fire away.'

Dr Barbara sipped her coffee. ‘I'd like to know why you'd rather I read about what happened, instead of just talking. It seems a convoluted way of doing things.'

This first question was easy to answer. ‘It's not about being convoluted,' I said. ‘It's about being clear. What I've written expresses exactly what I wanted to say. It's as perfect as I could get it. Anything I told you now wouldn't be as accurate. It wouldn't be as truthful.'

‘Okay. I think I can accept that argument. But it also leads on to my second point. I'm all for honesty – it's indispensable within these four walls – but you've chosen a very public forum to talk about some rather private issues.'

‘My father?'

‘Your father, your thoughts, your feelings. Is this the best outlet?'

‘My father doesn't read what I write. And as for my thoughts and feelings, well, I didn't really plan to write about myself. It just turned out that way. With the interview, it was pretty much thrust upon me.'

‘You have a choice about what you put into the public domain.'

‘Yes, granted. But I suppose it felt like quite a liberating thing to do. It felt nice to tell the truth, and not have to dilute it. If I'd tried to write up the interview in any other way, it would have had no basis in reality. I don't see the point in writing something dishonest.'

‘There's a difference between being honest and writing without self-censorship. Everyone self-censors, all the time.'

I shrugged. ‘As I said, it felt liberating not to. Besides, I don't think Miranda Frost self-censors, or not very much. So the format of the interview made a certain amount of sense.'

‘And what about the follow-up? Does it make sense to go on offering up your life for public scrutiny?'

‘You sound like Beck. Except he said that I was
dramatizing
my life.'

‘How do you feel about that?'

‘I think he's being a bit unfair. I'm not dramatizing my life. I'm writing about something dramatic that occurred in my life. There's a difference.'

‘A subtle difference, some would argue.'

‘It's a big difference! I mean, with the Miranda Frost interview, it's mostly just transcription. It's objective journalism in its purest sense.'

‘And the follow-up?'

‘Well, no – that's a personal account. It has to be subjective; that's what makes it interesting. But that doesn't mean I'm dramatizing. I mean, yes, there may be a dramatic element to the language and structure, but that's because I wanted to capture the feeling of the experience. I wanted to be emotionally truthful.'

Dr Barbara weighed this argument in several seconds of silence.

I obviously hadn't made myself entirely clear, so I tried again. ‘Put it this way: we all use one or two dramatic tricks when we're talking about our lives. Say you were late for work – you missed the bus or got stuck in traffic or something. It's very difficult to tell that story straight, without emphasizing certain details: the frustration, the watch-checking, the idiot in front of you who was on his mobile and didn't realize that the lights had changed. You want to convey the experience as it felt at the time. It's normal, and it's not dramatizing as such. It's just drawing out what's inherently dramatic in the situation.'

These were arguments I'd already rehearsed for when Beck read the follow-up; I was making him wait, too. Yet based on this trial run, I thought my explanation could do with some fine-tuning. Dr Barbara still looked sceptical.

‘I'll reserve judgement until I've read the article,' she said.

Outside, the sky was starting to darken. There had been only a little high cloud when I'd entered Dr Barbara's office, fifty minutes ago, but now it was dim enough that she had to switch on both of the floor lamps. As she did, I thought idly about how the session had not quite met my expectations. True, I was used to Dr Barbara challenging my thinking, on most topics, but today there was something else. I'd been left feeling defensive and a little misunderstood, as if my words weren't having the effect I intended for them. It was in this mindset that I decided to mention that my libido seemed to be coming back. I wanted to give her some unequivocal good news, proof that despite everything – despite the arguments with Beck and the anxiety dream and Simon's corpse – I was feeling generally better. But even here, Dr Barbara's reaction was guarded.

‘I think that's something else we need to keep an eye on,' she told me.

‘It's a good thing,' I assured her. ‘I mean, I actually want sex again. I'm enjoying it – really enjoying it – for the first time in months. I've had three orgasms in the past fortnight. I think it's a pretty clear sign that my mood's improving.'

Dr Barbara frowned a bit as she settled herself back in her chair, but she didn't blush. It was impossible to make Dr Barbara blush, as I'd discovered months ago. She knew, of course, that my sex drive was the first thing to go when I was getting depressed. I'd told her that before Christmas; it was as predictable as the tides. Her response was that I should focus less on the physical side of things and more on the emotional closeness that making love could bring. This almost made
me
blush; it certainly made me cringe, which caused Dr Barbara to posit that I might have ‘intimacy issues'. (Paradoxically, she also thought I had an unhealthy dependency on romantic relationships, since I hadn't been out of one for more than a fortnight since I was about fifteen.) But the only issue for me was Dr Barbara's choice of vocabulary. I didn't think a doctor should be using a phrase like
making love
. In all honesty, I didn't think it was a phrase that had any place outside pre-1950s literature, where the meaning was different and less cloyingly euphemistic.

Contrarily, I assumed it was my diligent logging of orgasms, this focus on the physical, that was now causing Dr Barbara to frown like that; though, in truth, her frown was difficult to read. It was also possible that she had more general concerns about my sudden uplift in mood. This was understandable, of course, but that didn't make it any easier to deal with. It was frustrating to feel reined in like this, to have every emotion – even the positive ones – viewed as a potential symptom.

‘Is there anything else you'd like to talk about before we finish?' Dr Barbara asked.

I was feeling slightly petulant at this juncture, but at the same time I still wanted to win back Dr Barbara's approval before we ended the session. This is why I started to tell her about the speed – how there'd been a couple of instances in the past fortnight when I'd wanted to take it, but both times I'd resisted. It was an achievement of sorts, though I realized, halfway through my story, that it was unlikely to be met with any great approbation. Dr Barbara's frown deepened, losing all traces of its previous ambiguity. In retrospect, it was stupid of me to expect anything else. When it came to drugs, Dr Barbara and I were never going to agree; we couldn't even agree on terminology. I talked about recreational use and blowing off some steam; she talked about ad hoc self-medication and comorbidity.

When I had finished my exposition, she sat for a moment in stony-faced silence, then said, ‘Okay, that's something we
really
need to keep an eye on.'

So that was three eyes now: sex and drugs and insomnia. We were fast running out.

‘I think you're missing the point,' I told her, after waiting calmly for a few seconds. ‘I decided
not
to take it, despite being exhausted and stressed out of my mind. A few months back, I wouldn't have given it a second thought. But on this occasion, I decided that given the time of day and general circumstances it would be better – in the long run – not to. That's progress, don't you think?'

This last was said jokingly, to try to force a wobble in Dr Barbara's anxious pout. But it wasn't a joke. I wanted to make her see that things were getting better, for her to give some indication that she agreed with me, even in a very limited sense.

She didn't.

‘Abby, this is lunacy. As I've told you again and again, I'm not going to be happy until you've stopped entirely. The amphetamines, the MDMA – all of it. It sets you back a long, long way every time you take it.'

‘Which I didn't,' I noted, since this emphasis was getting rather lost.

‘Wonderful. So why not go one step further and just get rid of it? Take away the temptation.'

‘I've told you. It keeps me on an even keel. Sometimes it's the only thing that does. Besides, it's much better for me than too much drink. I know that from experience.' I pointed to the scar in the centre of my right palm, a perfectly circular white disc, about the size of an ibuprofen. ‘I've never wanted to do anything like that on speed, and certainly not on ecstasy.'

Dr Barbara acknowledged this fact with a curt nod. But I don't think she was any closer to accepting the broader picture I was trying to paint.

I left feeling vaguely dissatisfied.

I wanted to kill my sister.

She called me the day before the family meal – the day before! – to tell me that some work thing had come up. She was being flown out to New York that very evening. It was something she simply could not get out of.

‘You bitch! You absolute bitch!'

There was a long unruffled silence down the line. ‘Listen, Abby. I know it's a pain. I'll make it up to you, I promise.'

‘You've spent the last fortnight haranguing me over this. How could you?'

‘It's work. I don't have a choice. It's not as if I wanted to pull out. Daddy's gone to a lot of effort, booked a really nice restaurant. I was looking forward to it.'

‘Great. So how about you go to dinner with Daddy and I'll fly out to New York and eat canapés and hobnob with a bunch of idiots and close whatever stupid fucking deal it is you have to close?'

My voice was getting increasingly shrill. I was very aware of this, but I couldn't do a thing about it. Francesca, in contrast, had started using her telephone voice – which was so enunciated you'd have thought she'd been taught it in finishing school. In actual fact, I think she'd been taught it on some moronic assertiveness course at work. It was the voice she slipped into whenever things got heated, and it always made me feel like I was eleven and she was fifteen again, and there was this unbreachable gulf that existed in our relative levels of maturity.

The more I thought about it, the more I was convinced that this four-year age gap had defined all the major differences between us. It had definitely defined our different attitudes to our father. Francesca had been eighteen when he left us; by that time she had gone up to Cambridge. She had more important things to worry about than the final death rattles of our family. I had been fourteen, and was left wondering,
Why now?
The answer, I could only assume, was that my sister had been the mysterious glue that kept my parents together. And her relationship with our father had emerged from the divorce pretty much unscathed. Twelve years later, she still called him ‘Daddy' like she was a girl from Beverly Hills asking for a lift to the Prom. When I called him ‘Daddy', I was being Sylvia Plath.

‘Abby, you're being very unreasonable about this,' my sister continued.

‘
I'm
being unreasonable? I'm not the one who's spent the past two weeks going on about how important these horrendous family get-togethers are. I'm not the one who drops every other commitment the second work calls.'

‘Oh, come on. That's hardly fair. Our jobs are very different. Yours is much more . . .'

‘More what? More frivolous? More dispensable? More of a hobby, really?'

‘It's more flexible. You don't have things like this dropped on your plate at the last minute. You get to work to your own schedule. You should count yourself lucky.'

‘Jesus! Do you know how patronizing you sound?' The weary sigh down the phone suggested she didn't. ‘That's it – I'm not going either!'

‘Don't be silly. You have to go. Daddy's already called the restaurant to change the booking. They were really good about it. And you must know how difficult it is to get a table there. They're always booked up months in advance.'