A Short History of Richard Kline Read online

  I pressed the brass button.

  A short, muscular woman of around forty with prematurely white hair opened the door.

  ‘Rick,’ she said, as if she knew me. I looked at her, sizing her up sexually, as I did with any woman I’d just set eyes on. It was a reflex, even in that state: one I imagined would never leave me. To my relief there was nothing there for me; it would make the encounter easier. Sarah wore loose-fitting white pants, an orange top and leather sandals. I noted she had good skin, a good healthy tan and deep green eyes. She put out her hand and I shook it. As I stepped into the hallway she indicated a room to her left. It was light and cool and carpeted, with a sofa and two nondescript armchairs. She gestured at one and waited for me to sit down. We sat, facing one another, a metre apart.

  When I was settled, she looked at me and said, ‘What is it that you want from this, Rick?’

  I leaned over and put my head in my hands, my elbows resting on my knees. For a few moments the room blurred around me until I became aware of the silence. I couldn’t speak. Something lurched and began to rise in my chest, and I thought, then, with a pinprick of amazement, I might be about to cry. Could it be this easy? But no, my eyes were dry.

  Finally I managed to open my mouth. ‘I’m sorry,’ I said. ‘I’m tired. I’ve been working long hours. I’m not usually like this …’ The truth was that I was increasingly like this: unwilling, or unable, to communicate.

  ‘Everyone who comes here apologises for something.’ She smiled. ‘They always say they’re tired and they’re not usually like this.’

  I stared at the floor. I heard myself sigh, and that sigh seemed to come from a point just beyond my hands, which, unaccountably, were still pressed up against my forehead, as if glued.

  ‘What is it that you want, Rick?’

  ‘I want to lose my fear.’ I heard myself say this with surprising matter-of-factness. Out it came. Clear, sharp.

  ‘What are you afraid of?’

  ‘Everything.’ I heard myself sigh again.

  This wasn’t true. I hadn’t been afraid of abseiling. I hadn’t been intimidated by Leni when the rest of Jim’s staff were in awe of her. Nor was I afraid of many other things. What was I talking about? Where did these words come from? In my chest the black wind-bellows were squeezed hard up against my ribcage.

  ‘What does this fear feel like?’

  At last I lifted my head. ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘What’s your body telling you? Where can you feel this fear?’

  ‘In my head, I suppose.’ I paused. ‘All over.’ Silence. ‘Nowhere in particular.’ It was excruciating; my lips were made of sticky latex and I had to force the words out.

  Sarah looked at me. ‘Alright. Let’s get down on the floor.’ She stood, and slipped out of her sandals.

  I continued to sit, woodenly.

  ‘You okay with that?’

  At last I got my mouth open. ‘Should I take my shoes off?’

  ‘Whatever you’re comfortable with.’

  I left my shoes on.

  Sarah pushed her chair back against the wall and walked over to a wooden box by the door. It looked like a child’s toy chest. She lifted the lid and took out a roll of pale blue foam. Glancing into the open cavity, I could see a basketball there, and other things I couldn’t identify before she closed the lid.

  ‘My box of tricks,’ she said, smiling, and unrolled the foam onto the floor. ‘Just lie on your back, and get comfortable.’

  I followed her instructions.

  She knelt beside me. ‘Alright, now, take a deep breath.’

  Breathing deeply was an effort. Plus, it had always been my experience that as soon as someone told you to breathe deeply, you couldn’t. I tried to make my mind go blank, to relax my stomach muscles. Then, with effort, I inhaled deeply – but the air seemed to get stuck above my navel.

  I turned my face from side to side, away from her, and began to sigh again, almost as if hyperventilating, though not quite. Then I covered my eyes with one hand.

  ‘Why do you cover your eyes?’

  ‘So I can’t be seen, I suppose.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I thought for a minute I might cry.’

  ‘What’s wrong with that?’

  ‘It’s ugly. People look ugly when they cry. Ugly and weak.’

  ‘Say, “I look weak when I cry.”’

  ‘I never cry.’

  ‘Alright then. Say, “I would look weak if I cried.”’

  ‘I would look weak if I cried.’

  ‘Who mustn’t see you cry?’

  ‘Anyone.’

  ‘Who’s anyone?’

  ‘What do you mean, “Who’s anyone?”’

  ‘Can you be specific? Name names? Who musn’t see you cry?’

  ‘Friends … colleagues … my parents … teachers … friends … anyone.’

  ‘What will happen if they see you?’

  ‘I’ll feel stupid … ashamed.’

  ‘And?’

  ‘They’ll ask questions. I’ll have to explain myself.’

  ‘How does that feel?’

  ‘How does what feel?’

  ‘Explaining yourself.’

  ‘I don’t know. It feels tight.’

  ‘You’re holding your breath.’

  ‘I know. I always hold my breath.’

  ‘Holding the fort?’

  Smiling, I exhaled, and the smile stayed with me. It occurred to me that I liked her. Had from the minute I set eyes on her. I started to relax. She put her hand on my stomach, a large, square, practical hand. I liked the feel of it. ‘If I do, or say, anything you’re not comfortable with, tell me,’ she said. ‘Okay?’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘Okay. Now, tell me …’

  As I talked, occasionally she removed her hand and shook it away from her, as if she were flicking off some dross or contamination, some negative charge. It was weird, but I didn’t care.

  By the time I walked out of there I felt lighter. I felt as if I had handed over my problems to someone else, had stored them in some kind of psychic safe.

  I felt also as if someone was on my side. It didn’t matter that I’d paid her to be on my side. In fact, it helped: there was a freedom in the cash nexus, in the clarity of the transaction. For one thing, if I didn’t feel like it, I didn’t have to pretend to be interested in her. It wasn’t a date. I didn’t have to worry if I was talking about myself too much, if I was boring her. I could fall into myself and wallow about in the childish pain of all my stored-up sense of grievance, all my hatreds, my buried sense of outrage and grief, not just grief for Jo and Gareth, but for every blow ever dealt to me. Though I still had the problem that I wanted to impress Sarah, wanted her to think well of me, to think that I was a decent, sensitive, mature human being, so much more appealing than all her other clients, whoever they were.

  And then she spoiled it. On my fifth visit she began to talk astrology. If there was one thing I couldn’t bear, it was prattle about the stars.

  ‘You’re an Aries,’ she said, one hot afternoon, ‘but you’re holding your power in. Give yourself permission to be powerful. You’re locking your energy away in your head, and this creates a sadness in the heart area, this feeling you describe as boredom. Breathe. Unlock the channels and the breath will flow through your body and enliven the surfaces of your skin. Enlarge your aura. If we lock our energy away, our skin is vulnerable. If we let the energy flow, our surfaces are stronger. We’re stronger all over. We’re not contracted inwards, we radiate outwards. Our aura is enhanced. People feel our energy, our strength. They think twice about attacking us – if that’s what you’re worried about …’

  There I was, beginning to trust her, and she started in on that astrology shit.

  ‘… it’s partly about learning to trust your environment. But only up to a point. There are times when something in the environment is hostile, is threatening. What you have to learn to trust is yourself. And your ability to deal w
ith it.’

  ‘It?’

  ‘Whatever it is you’re afraid of.’ She got up off the floor. ‘Let me look up your moons.’

  ‘My what?’

  She walked over to her bookcase and took a thick hardbound book off the middle shelf, began to flick through the pages, and stopped. ‘You’ve got a moon in Capricorn,’ she smiled, ‘the goat. This means you’re ambitious and single-minded. Ambitious, dogged, can be overfocused … mmmmm, let’s see …’

  Somewhere in the vault of my chest I gave a low, silent groan of dismay, but at the same time I found I was listening intently, despite myself.

  It was after this session that I experienced a sense of massive let-down. I had been a fool to succumb, to get my hopes up. None of this stuff was going to work for me; for other people, maybe, but not for me. I had too sceptical an intelligence to enter wholeheartedly into the game, the spirit of it. Ninety per cent of it was faith in the cure. Faith. And no-one with a first-class intellect (why be modest?) was going to come at that.

  Not that I hadn’t at times been open to it, in a jokey kind of way. You got through the river of your day, sometimes wading, sometimes floating; sometimes it was a slow, anguished crawl, sometimes an effortless sprint. And all the time you wondered if there was some other model that made sense of things, some other dimension that you were separated from by only a thin membrane. You felt this most when you were drunk, or stoned, like a mirage of the senses: a dreamy, floating state succeeded by a ravenous physical hunger that brought you down to earth with a pleasurable thud. The plainest food tasted sublime, like manna, and I remembered once eating a packet of ginger cookies that felt like the first meal, although the delayed effect, the wash-up, was more like the Last Supper and the taste of ashes. But that’s all it was, a perpetual question mark in the mind, a disinclination to be a dogmatic nay-sayer rather than a yearning to be a true believer. As if the configuration of the planets meant something; as if there were a benign destiny moving through the heavens … Maybe all these counsellors were secret fruit loops. Behind those smooth, caring façades they were a bunch of cultists, waving incense and burning cow dung at midnight.

  The next week I cancelled my appointment. And then, when that felt hollow, I rang to make another one. That night I dreamed about the baby again, almost the same dream in all its surreal detail … the floating on the water, the woman in white, the swaddled infant that began to glow. And then, tormentingly, the sweet, sharp pain behind the breastbone, so that I woke this time and sat bolt upright in bed with my chest heaving, my hand pressed hard against my heart. Was I having a heart attack? Was there some blockage or genetic weakness there that I didn’t know about? But beyond that, I felt I had just had the most profound dream of my life. Again. I was unnerved and I was exhilarated. And I had no-one to tell.

  No-one except Sarah.

  I went back because I liked Sarah, and because I couldn’t think of anything else to do. Her house, that room, was soothing.

  One evening when I knocked on her door I could hear the light soprano of a woman singing in German, and it was her. She was still humming and trilling the odd musical phrase as she unlocked the iron grille.

  ‘Very nice,’ I said.

  ‘German lieder.’ She grinned. ‘It’s an acquired taste.’

  At the weekend I went into a shop in Oxford Street and bought a CD of lieder, only to find that while they had a certain charm, and the singer was no doubt more technically proficient than Sarah (I didn’t have a musical ear and wouldn’t know), they were not what I had heard from her lips. They were too studied; they lacked the same … the same blitheness. Did this mean I was becoming attached? I didn’t think so, not really. While I might think of her between appointments in an ‘I must raise this with Sarah’ way, there was no more to it than that.

  But there were layers to her that I had not guessed at, and this compelled my respect. I discovered she had once been an industrial chemist and worked for the Bayer firm in Frankfurt, and that she spoke fluent German. In many ways she was salty and down-to-earth, and after my initial surprise I realised this wasn’t so out of character; there was that hard-headedness about her that I’d sensed in the first session, and that had made me trust her, something about that basketball in her box of tricks – and then she’d come up with that astrology drivel, though only the one time, as if she sensed I didn’t like it. She never mentioned it again.

  But she did eventually get the basketball out of the box, and with me stretched out on the futon we began what Sarah called ‘bodywork’. Lots of deep breathing, some massage, some acute pain in surprising places. I never knew what to expect, or where it was supposed to go. Sometimes I thought it wouldn’t have mattered much what she did; it was her weekly dose of dispassionate warmth that kept me going, like taking the car to a garage to get the battery recharged.

  To begin with I saw Sarah once a week, every Monday evening after work, and then once a fortnight, and then more irregularly. And it seemed to help. Not in any dramatic way but with each visit some kind of minor catharsis took place, some discharge of toxic energy or emotions. I joked with her that she was a sixteenth-century physician of the psyche, that she bled me with invisible leeches, that she saw to it that I was opened up just enough to leak out enough of my angst, my black blood, to keep the circulation moving, to stop all the circuits congealing up with the thick bile of despair, the grey clag of sadness. It was, I imagined, a bit like being on a kidney machine, like having your psychic blood rinsed.

  One evening I found myself rambling on about Leni and the villa. For a long time Sarah listened, and then: ‘Were you attracted to Leni?’

  ‘Not sexually. She wasn’t my type. Too skinny. And obsessive.’

  ‘But she made an impression on you, obviously.’

  ‘She sought perfection. In everything. I’d never met anyone before who was so uncompromising about it. And thought it possible to achieve.’

  ‘You admired her?’

  ‘Yes and no. I felt a kind of weird kinship with her, but I felt she was barking up the wrong tree.’

  ‘And what would be the right tree?’

  This was one of those times when I was lying on the mat, staring up at the ceiling. I turned towards Sarah, who was kneeling above me, sitting back on her haunches like a relaxed muse. ‘If I knew that,’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t be here.’

  ‘From what you say, it sounds like Leni was simply trying to create beauty, and unlike most of us she had the means to do it.’

  I knew that. I wasn’t a clod. I had no objection to beauty; it was a worthwhile project. I had no objection to comfort either, as in Jim’s London office, the converted warehouse. I had loved working there. Every morning that I walked into the atrium of that building I felt my spirit quicken. There was a lot to be said for a personal barista.

  But talking about Leni was a dead end. I wanted to ask Sarah about my recurring dream, about the woman and the baby. ‘Why the baby?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘In some schools of thought the baby is said to represent the self.’

  ‘So the baby is me?’

  She smiled, mischievously. ‘Maybe. Some dream therapists believe that everyone in the dream is you: the baby, the woman, even the water. You can see the logic of this. If it’s coming out of your brain, your mind, it must be you, all of it. You create the dream.’

  ‘What do you think?’

  ‘I think it’s possible to pay too much attention to dreams. If you wake up and the meaning is clear, then listen to it. If not, forget about it.’

  In later years I would come to think of Sarah as a kind of transient angel in my life, someone I had the luck to find when I needed her. In some way I have never quite comprehended, she kept me from drifting heedlessly over the edge. She didn’t ‘cure’ me but she stopped me from becoming more careless and self-destructive. It was a conservation phase, a shoring-up of the best of what was already there.

  Of course we had dealt with ‘issues’:
my emotionally remote father, for one. Didn’t everyone have one of these? I had asked.

  ‘I’m not treating everyone,’ she had said, ‘I’m treating you.’

  Whenever I attempted to generalise she would always pull me up and bring me back to myself; what I experienced, what I felt. I could see the logic of it.

  But what I was to recall later, in the light of subsequent events, was the time I told her about my inability to cry. She had looked at me in amazement. ‘You can’t recall a time when you cried as a small boy?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Never?’

  ‘Not that I remember.’ What I remembered was being caned at school and standing alongside other boys, and how they had cried and I hadn’t, and how elated I had been at the hardness of my heart. Whatever else they did to me, they could not reach me there.

  Sarah shook her head.

  ‘I’ve wanted to cry, many times. But I just can’t do it. I remember once, when I was nineteen, this girl dumped me. I felt I was on the edge of tears, and when they wouldn’t come I put my fist through a wall.’

  ‘A wall?’

  ‘It was plasterboard.’

  Sarah was silent for a while. Then she tapped me lightly on the arm. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, ‘Tears will come in their own good time.’

  ground zero

  He met her at The Basement late one Friday night when he was having a drink there with a friend. Then, exactly a week, later he bumped into her at a jazz festival at The Wharf.

  ‘I know you,’ he said.

  ‘Zoe,’ she replied. ‘Zoe Mazengarb.’

  She was small and dark and earthy, and he was transfixed. Although a little heavy in the hips, she had an exquisite waist and within minutes of their meeting she had made him laugh. Later, over a drink, he learned that she was a social worker at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital but more on the managerial side, and he sensed that she was grounded, a woman who might be able to shake him out of his periodic torpor. There was something about her demeanour that suggested reserve, propriety, but in fact they made love on the night of the first date and the sex was good from the start.