– until he wanted to scream. This tic had also happened to him on other occasions with the names Benedict Cumberbatch, Barack Obama, Tiscali broadband and the phrase ‘Apples, hazelnuts, sultanas, raisins, coconut, bananas’.
4. Adrienne Samson, the sixty-three-year-old Kleinian. Their sessions were somewhat overshadowed by the death, halfway through their time together, of Harvey’s mother. Joan had always been powered by rage, a magnificent, sometimes inspiring rage, but then came the great forgetting, the neurological airbrushing, of Alzheimer’s, which meant that she forgot what it was she was angry about. Harvey never quite realized how much he felt for his mother until she got ill. When the time came to move her to a residential nursing home in Ashford, and the manageress of the Day Care Centre in London that she had been attending said to him: ‘We’ll miss her: she’s so sparky and fun and interesting – she really perked things up here …’, he found his throat closing and tears of sadness and pride welling in his eyes.
As the disease worsened, Joan imagined that she was still married, and that Harvey, on his visits to the nursing home, was Eli. Eventually, Harvey found it easier just to go along with this idea. The more Harvey accepted the role of Eli, the more Joan was placated: he even bought a pair of glasses exactly like Eli used to wear in the 1960s in order to avoid his mother asking where his glasses had got to. He saw, at these times, even if only through the distorted lens of dementia, a version of something he had no memory of, which perhaps only existed before he was born or when he was very young: his mother happy and in love. He got a sense of what marriage to Eli might have been like before it went bad; he saw peace on her face. He wondered how it would have been – what it would have done, or not done, to him – to have been brought up by a mother like this. The visits were, in a bleak way, blissful.
The leaving of them, however, was not. Every time he said goodbye, Joan would die more than a little. She would panic; then she would get angry. For Harvey, these moments were a weekly microcosm of his parents’ divorce. There was comfort in that at least – that by the time he reached the door of her tiny room, Joan, shouting at him to fuck off and not come back ever, was recognizable once more as the mother he knew. Towards the end, though, this pattern changed. Then, when he left she would only get sad. Once, she asked, with great clarity, ‘Which wife am I again?’ To which it occurred to Harvey to say, the only one, my love, but he found that it felt wrong to lie within the lie, and so simply answered, truthfully, ‘The third.’ Another time, Harvey turned back to say goodbye and she had taken all her clothes off. She did not pose for him in some grotesque sexual way. She simply stood there. It seemed to Harvey a statement of self, of wanting to strip all things away in the hope of being re-seen and re-found. It seemed to him like that for a moment, before he closed his eyes.
Adrienne found much to chew on here. She suggested, more than once, that Harvey taking on the role of Eli in these visits was not something he was doing just to keep his demented mother calm, but that it had an oedipal motivation. She pointed out that he had referred, often, to his mother’s singular beauty when she was young. Harvey, who had only been talking about his mother’s beauty because he thought it might relate to his general over-investment in beauty, and therefore to his wider issues with women, and who found the basic idea that all men unconsciously want to fuck their mother absurd, countered that if the Eli-acting was serving a buried need, it was more likely to be a desire to be like his father, the Great Man he so clearly had not grown up to be. But he didn’t truly believe that either. It was just something he said in therapy, used as he was by now to playing the game. In his heart, he really, really thought he was just doing it to help his dying mother have the version of reality she wanted.
5. Zoe Slater, an EMDR specialist. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, involves a therapist moving his or her finger backwards and forwards while the person with the problem watches it and thinks about their problem. It’s based on the idea that a state similar to REM-sleep is induced by the eye movement, which mollifies the memory of whatever it is that causes the watcher anxiety. It was designed for people with serious post-traumatic stress – rape victims, shell-shocked soldiers – and Harvey, knowing this, felt bad, trying, while following Zoe’s finger, to focus on his narcissistic, ignoble little sexual pain. Plus Zoe was reasonably attractive – certainly for a therapist, who, on both sides of the gender divide, tend to think that facial hair and elasticated waistbands are the very dab – and looking for a long time at her finger would tend to lead Harvey’s mind the wrong way.
6. Dr Anthony Salter. A proper psychiatrist, Harvey’s only one. A very small man – Harvey often wondered if he could legally be classified a midget – Dr Salter seemed to be mainly interested in a tiny, idiosyncratic memory, which was that when Harvey was a young child, and started crying, or being upset about anything, Eli used to say to him: stop hacking a chanik. Harvey had only mentioned this in passing, and explained to his psychiatrist that it was just his father speaking, as he often would, in nonsense language, but Dr Salter came back to it again, and again, as if stop hacking a chanik might be the primary cause of Harvey’s psychic ills; so much so that after a while Harvey felt moved to say to him – although never did – stop hacking a chanik. Dr Salter’s other main proffered solution was to prescribe antidepressants. Harvey would come back after a few weeks, to tell him how the antidepressant hadn’t worked, and he would prescribe another one.
7. Dr Xu. Dr Xu was not an actual psychotherapist, but an acupuncturist and specialist in Chinese massage. Harvey went to him because his depression had become by this time so bodily, so located in his chest and his legs and his skin that he thought only manipulation of his frame could help. He still often thinks that the way to peace is for him to be touched: that if he could have someone permanently stroking him – on his back; on his feet; wherever it is on the body that the reassurance centres lie – his anxiety would be brought under control.
Dr Xu did his best to pull and prick Harvey’s depression out. Harvey wasn’t sure about the underlying ideas of acupuncture – the meridians, the yin and yang organs – but he knew that Karl Marx had said that ‘the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain’ and, not being prepared to flagellate himself with thorns, wondered if pins in his skin might do the trick. And it worked: in the room. Lying on his back, looking not unlike the bloke out of Hellraiser, he would find himself distracted by the pain out of depression. The skips and jumps of electrical current induced along his muscles by connecting needles did seem to be clearing his system of something; or maybe the cold evidence they presented, that the body is simply a machine, made him feel more positive than usual about the prospect of finding a fix.
It only worked, however, while it was happening. It only worked when the needles were in his flesh. By the time he returned to his house from Dr Xu’s practice in Sevenoaks, a journey of some thirty-five minutes, Harvey would be feeling as anxious as ever. To try and extend the life of the treatment effects, Dr Xu prescribed Harvey some extraordinarily foul-smelling herbs, the drinking of which as tea made him more depressed than ever. Dr Xu did also offer him the odd piece of psychotherapeutic advice, consisting mainly of the not unheard-before imprecation that he should live in the moment. It would be proper to report that Dr Xu did not fall into the stereotype here and tell Harvey that he should rive in the moment: it would be proper but it would not be true. Harvey felt, for a whole host of reasons, that he should not laugh at this, but since Dr Xu, when offering this homily, himself always laughed, as he also did while applying needles, prescribing herbs, walking on Harvey’s back, or offering him the buttons of the Visa machine for payment, it seemed almost rude not to.
Even without the Chinese pronunciation, Harvey has never been keen on the live-in-the-moment thing. He knows people think it is the key to happiness, but it seems to him that he, driven by his physical impulses, lives always in the moment. If he buys a sandwich at 10 a.m., intending to eat it for lunch, he will eat it as soon as he gets back to his house at 10.15. If he feels tired, wherever he is, he falls asleep. If he sits down at his computer intending to spend four hours writing ghost-biography, he will spend three hours and forty-five minutes of that allotted time watching internet pornography. That is what living in his
