“Don’t you feel sad when you tell me that?” he’d ask, dabbing his eyes.
“I don’t know,” I’d say, and I’d really mean it. Often when I talked about my past, I noticed it was easy to articulate the events, but not so easy to feel the emotions that went with them. A lot of the time I felt nothing at all. I told myself it was the falseness of the situation that was restricting me. Arthur was genuinely kind, but I was paying him handsomely to listen, he wasn’t doing it out of the goodness of his heart.
On and on I talked, until I ran out of saliva, and week after week, Arthur said very little. He was fascinated by my dreams, and got me to recall them in detail at every session, but when I asked what they meant, instead of telling me outright, he’d ask cryptic questions until I came up with my own unsatisfactory explanations. It was like hiring a translator who then refused to interpret the foreign language you didn’t speak.
In one of our early sessions, Arthur asked about my father, and why I’d stayed in New Zealand instead of going back to London, and I had replied, “Because I like it here.”
“Do you?” he said. “You haven’t been very happy.”
“I prefer this to going back to Grandma and all that.”
“All that?”
“Grief, I suppose. London is where Mum died.”
“But ten years is a long time away from your homeland. Were you hoping the situation with your father would change?”
“To begin with, maybe, but not anymore.”
“When did you last see him?”
“Only once since he offered me the check. He tried to give it to me again.”
“Do you regret not taking it?”
“Sometimes.”
“And did you tell him about the list? About being suicidal?”
“I haven’t really talked to him in a while.”
“When did he last call?”
For only the second time in Arthur’s office, I reached for a tissue, and he waited patiently while I used it.
“Not having any family to fall back on,” he said. “That must be very hard.”
His pity rankled, and I sat up straight and blew my nose. His wife and children were playing noisily in the backyard behind the villa—I’d seen them arrive home in their Volvo. What did he know about having no family, about being alone? I had left his office in a snit, but later that night, listening to music in my room, I realized Arthur had only been trying to make me see that I no longer had a valid reason for remaining in New Zealand. I was refusing to accept that I’d never have a prominent place in my father’s life, and it was the only thing that was holding me here.
In another session, from out of the blue, I had recalled how the whole family had been trapped down in the air-raid shelter. I told him about the teeth, about the move across the bunker that I couldn’t account for, and as I was telling him I had the strangest sensation that perhaps it had all happened to a parallel version of myself who shared my experiences but wasn’t me. “Is that normal?” I asked. “To feel like a bystander in your own past?”
“It’s perfectly normal to disconnect from traumatic experiences,” he said. “Do you have any other memories like that?”
“There’s the hand in the cupboard,” I said, and told him about the way it had untied my dresses in a sort of game. Even as I was telling him, I knew he’d have a field day with the implications of a mysterious, meddling hand, and duly, he seized upon it as tremendously significant but wouldn’t say why.
“Do you think it’s a suppressed memory of sexual abuse?” I suggested, half joking.
“Well, do you?” he said, not joking at all.
“The hand was real,” I said. “In fact, I’d stake my life on it.”
“That’s very interesting,” said Arthur, nodding his head. “Have you always believed in things other people can’t see?”
“Only when it comes to men,” I said, surprising myself, and finding it was true. “I see qualities in them that aren’t there. Then I fall in love with my own creation.”
“What a fascinating observation,” said Arthur, making a note with his pencil. He often jotted things down while I talked and told me the reason he finished the hour early was so he could write up his notes before the next patient arrived. Early on, I’d assumed his notes were what I was paying for, that at some future interval, I’d be handed a dossier along with a diagnosis and a cure. When that didn’t happen, I began to feel increasingly duped.
“Have you figured out what’s wrong with me yet?” I asked after three or four months of weekly visits.