“Well, I won’t detain you any longer. I hope you have a lovely weekend.”
“Thank you. You too.”
“It’s a day that makes you glad to be alive, isn’t it? I find that life – just bare life – is quite underrated. Breathing, for example, and seeing the sky. Enormously satisfying, in certain moods. Almost unbearable. But maybe that’s only my morning coffee speaking.”
“Well, that’s a good recommendation for coffee. Maybe it would save people from coming to psychologists!”
“Oh, I don’t think so. Psychology is about as essential as a profession can get. People underestimate the power of words.”
There is a pleasant silence between them. His arm is hooked comfortably out of the window. Her face is a little moist from carrying the bags, even though it is a cool day. It appears that Maria has pushed herself.
“Goodbye, then,” says Kristof. And off he drives. His car, he notices through the rear-view mirror, is watched by Maria as it speeds up the road.
Three
Morning sickness does not only happen in the mornings. After lunch Maria bends, hands on knees, vomiting – a force beyond her control – onto the paving stones outside the house. Her nausea has only escalated since her meal of salty crackers and ginger tea – supposedly a palliative. When she came out earlier to fetch the post, moving from the comforting gloom of her therapy room into a sunny winter’s morning, her sickness peaked.
The paving stones are wet with vomit. This sight, plus the acrid smell, brings the nausea swimmingly round again. Frustratingly, her morning sickness does not recede after a good vomit. It persists.
She goes inside to boil water for pouring over the paving stones. While the kettle is on, she heads to the bathroom to rinse and brush her teeth. The room remains as her mother left it on the day of the accident: New Age magazines in a wicker basket and Claudia’s collection of green frogs, plastic and ceramic, on the windowsill, the front frog coquettishly lounging on its side in a pink petticoat. I should chuck out all this junk, she thinks as she brushes her teeth, but even the thought is wearisome.
Maria picks up one of the frogs and stares out the open window at the ivy-coated wall of the neighbour a few metres in front of her. She can hear the drain pipe trickling water, and wonders idly when last Claudia’s gutters – now, strangely, her own – were checked. It’s been nine months since the event in the forest, and she doubts her mother paid the gutters much attention before then, knowing her attitude towards household maintenance. The phone rings, and she rushes to get there in time.
“Maria? Kristof here. So pleased I caught you. Do you have a moment?”
“Of course.” How strange it was bumping into him on the weekend, and now a further call from this man, just five days later.
“I phoned to thank you for last week’s session. I forgot to mention it when I ran into you. A group of philosophers isn’t an ideal set of clients, I imagine.”
His voice is light on the phone, making her feel that he’s smiling as he speaks. “There’s no need to thank me,” she says. She’s wary – few of her clients ever show any kind of appreciation.
He carries on: “I know it was only one session and not quite therapy, but I feel that you’ve really made a difference to us,” he pauses, “to all of us, even those who were sceptical. I thought you managed to – shift something, maybe.” A pause: “Perhaps Rothko Chapel helped –?”
Maria senses his tentativeness, and knows that she is meant to say something about the music. Mostly she remembers the length of the piece. “It was a very” – she casts around for the correct word, favouring a policy of honesty, for the most part, towards her clients – “insistent piece of music, demanding one’s attention for its duration. I’m pleased to hear that the session had some effect. An event like the one you’ve all experienced is bound to be very traumatic for everyone.”
There’s a short silence on the phone. “Though of course people experience trauma in different ways,” she adds lamely. There has been no mention of a further session. Truthfully, she would feel fine about not seeing Joan and Cyrus again: their particular brands of dissatisfaction, Cyrus’s hyper-vigilance and Joan’s open hostility, were unpleasant. She feels differently about Luke, who appeared flustered and anxious – mental states she is more comfortable with – and Kristof, who would make a fine patient, with his capacity to access and reflect on his feelings.
“Unfortunately,” Kristof says, as if reading her mind, “I’m not sure if there are any plans to schedule another appointment. I would definitely be in favour. In any event, I hope we get to meet again.”
Maria says nothing; she is not quite sure what he is proposing. Does he want his own separate session, or is he making a more personal comment? He was a patient, after all. Still, the debriefing session was hardly long-term therapy. She’s run similar kinds of sessions at companies, for employees dealing with trauma of some kind, and some of those “patients” she wouldn’t even recognise if she met them on the street.
“Perhaps we will,” she says finally.
As she goes to the kitchen to fetch the boiled water, she remembers the disappearance of the pottery gecko after last week’s hour with the philosophers. At least, she thinks it happened after that session. Maria keeps a careful check on her therapy room, really her mother’s old study, so she is unlikely to be mistaken. Patients often leave their belongings behind – a desire to keep part of themselves with her between sessions – but no one has ever removed one of her possessions. Since she has half an hour before her next patient, she goes to the study to search for the missing gecko.
That lizard, its blue tail curled tightly around a rock, is very familiar; her mother used it as a paperweight when writing letters. Since Maria has lived in the house, the gecko has presided over her most academic bookshelf, the one containing her complete edition of Freud as well as Bowlby’s Separation: Anxiety and Anger – and none of her mother’s books. She checks the room thoroughly, including the bookshelves, the mantelpiece above the fireplace, and her desk in the corner next to the bay window. Then she looks behind the cushions of the two armchairs, and the two-seater couch. Nothing.
Perhaps it has slipped behind the bookcase. Maria edges the case away from the wall, not wanting the books to tumble out. She has developed the notion, irrational and exaggerated, that her pregnant belly is fragile, and larger than it really is. Though her stomach hardly looks different from the way it’s always been, a slightly rounded firmness the only discernible change, she’s nervous of anything knocking against it. Whatever cells are replicating within are entirely safe from external harm – of course she knows that! – yet she can’t stop feeling that the foetus is breakable and under threat. She crouches down and reaches behind the bookcase. Something brushes the tip of her fingers and she leans further inwards to get a better grip, placing a protective hand in front of her belly. No, not the gecko, only the sharp corner of the edge of a book. Pincerlike, with thumb and forefinger, she extracts it.
Maria sits on the floor and traces her fingers over the cover, the only part of this book she has ever liked: black, with a red star, sun and moon, all heavily embossed. The title: Seeking the Stars. She wonders how it came to be there, and imagines that her mother must have read it in this room.
She flips through the pages, a series of interviews with local spiritualists written, surprisingly, by a respected
