Remorseless needling
Jeremy Clarke
Iwas sitting in the doctor's waiting-room when Sharon came in. 'What are you here for?' she said. 'Psychological counselling,' I said, 'You?' Hers was a bit of a long story.
Sharon used to live with this bloke called Trevor. They were together for about seven or eight years, then she left him. She got tired of cooking his dinner, she says. When she left him he threw a complete wobbler. There was violence, attempted suicide, the lot. Then he went travelling in Asia to find himself, which oddly enough he did. He came back with a rash and a huge tattoo of a curled-up snake and he was sort of different, calmer. He wasn't upset about Sharon any more, either, he said. In fact, he was 'better off out of it', he told everyone. The difference in him was so marked when he came back, people commented on it.
I went out with Sharon for a bit after Trey, and then there was a succession of other blokes, but she just couldn't settle. Then there was this one bloke who took rejection badly and kept assaulting her in the pub. He really laid into her. It was great. And on several of those occasions it was old-flame Trevor who came to her rescue by stepping in and giving this bloke a good slap. Sharon then took to sitting beside Trevor in the pub because she felt safer beside him. I had thought when I saw them sitting together in the pub that a rapprochement might be on the cards, but she always hotly denied even the possibility of it. But there in the doctor's waiting-room she admitted that she and Trey were an item again.
They'd been back together for about a week, said Sharon, when, one glad morning, he'd woken her up with a letter, Trey isn't much of a reader, the letter looked important, could she read it for him? The letter, said Sharon, was from the hospital. She'd read it slowly and carefully. The blood test he'd had taken on his return from Asia had shown worrying results. Could Trev report immediately to his local genito-urinary clinic. 'Oh well, said Sharon. It's about time my karma caught up with me.' She believes in all that kind of nonsense, does Sharon.
I was called in first. Instead of giving me any more happy pills, my doctor has prescribed a series of counselling. The previous week had been a deceptively friendly get-to-know-you session. The counsellor had placed a blank sheet of A4 between us on the desk and together we'd compiled a family tree of my friends and relations. It was a doddle. Not threatening at all. So I went in thinking it was going to be another half an hour of the same.
The second session, however, was a much more confrontational affair. I thought it was anyway. The woman was needling me from start to finish. She was needling me remorselessly with this smile playing across her face. To get an unguarded response out of me, I guess. I just sat there and glared at her. She must have been very good at her job because she was needling me in all my vulnerable places and I could feel my eyeballs going all hard and hateful and I felt like crying. But I knew what her game was and I refused to rise to the bait. I just sat there looking daggers at her. Suddenly she stopped the needling and the smile vanished. Before we went any further, she said, she just wanted to lay down a couple of ground rules. 'You can say whatever you like to me,' she said, 'just don't hit me.'
At the end of last week's session, she'd given me homework to do. I had to ask someone who knew me why they thought I was depressed and write down the answer, So to calm things down a bit we got on to that instead. The person I'd asked said I was depressed because I drank too much alcohol. I passed this on to the counsellor. (I ought to have said that, funnily enough, the real reason for my being depressed was sitting outside in the waiting-room filing her nails.) She said, well, yes, alcohol could indeed be a factor and that I really should watch myself in that department. 'Alcohol is a depressant, you know.' I know,' I said, I was wearing my suit. Actually, I hadn't had a drink for three weeks and I'd been working out and eating right and going to bed early. Immediately after the counselling session I caught the train to London and I went to five parties in four days.
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