The Freudian
Big boy, grinning Simon, I liked him. And that wasn't always easy. The moment I spied him in the laundry room I thought, there's one worth getting to know. Pegging out his clothes, one by one with spaces between, as though the maintenance of civilisation depended on doing it just that way and no other. I stared at this paradox, knowing right away this man didn't belong here, didn't belong anywhere.
He closed the laundry door gently to avoid disturbing the students who studied in the corridor, then pocketed the key - that key which came to play such a pivotal role in his attempt to establish normal relationships. He stood before me, bulbous, six foot two, roundy soft muscles, an XXL t-shirt hanging off him like sails in a calm. His long arms trailed below his waist, indecisively. His predicament emanated from him like body heat. Arms too long to leave hanging casually, hands too large to put in his pockets, palms open or balled in a fist. Each and every way he stood was simply not right.
"I wanted to wash some clothes later," I said, "if you're finished."
He appraised me cautiously, held the key on the palm of his hand, openly and honestly. "I see, but you know I am obliged to hand the key back at the desk and not hand it privately to another person. I don't want to cause confusion about the location of the key."
"That's fine, of course, no problem."
Simon sighed, appeased. His fist closed over the key. The battle scars of teenage acne remained on his face, (but he had survived, he was there, still standing, grinning) and sweat stood out on both sides of his nose. This was what happened to the schoolyard bully's favourite. Withdrawn to the self-in-a-box, he had slowly assembled himself from inside. This is no pop psychology. This is something you smelt as he stood before you with pleading eyes and sweaty palms. Simon was an acid test, to bring out the hidden schoolboy self: Were you the tormentor or the tormented? Didn't you too feel the urge to dismiss him, to curtly say, "You know what? Forget about it."
But I didn't.
"You're Simon, right?" And Simon took a moment to test the tone of this question.
"Yeah," he said amazed. "How did you know?"
"When I was looking for the key people told me, check with Simon, he's sure to know. So when I saw you there, you seemed to look like a Simon."
"Yes?" Doubtful now.
"In other words, I just guessed."
Simon laughed at last, swaying back on his heels. It was a laugh to see him laugh, people sitting along the corridor looked up at us.
"I'm Maurice," I said.
"Mau-rice," Simon said, placing equal stress on each syllable, "Mau-rice", a relentlessly equal stress, "I will leave in the key at exactly half past seven, so you can pick it up. Please make sure it is signed out in your own name."
The old washing machine took two thick fiftypence tokens. A hag at reception sold them, as well as the smaller tokens for the dryer. Not students many bought these - it was cheaper to leave clothes on the radiators and try to take them off in time before they stiffened to fibreboard. This could be difficult once the key had passed out of your hands. In an ideal world washrooms could be left unlocked all day and no-one would steal your jeans.
On a Friday evening the front porch filled with shivering girls hugging large black plastic sacks. Of course no-one would steal their washing, but they weren't taking any chances. Their parents took them away one by one to whatever small town they came from. I didn't want to bother my parents. They wouldn't have minded, would in fact have been pleased to still be of help to their college-educated son.
It took a few weeks for Simon to become confident of my absence of hidden ironies and respect for the rules of the key. "If you have no other plan for Saturday evening perhaps you will call by for a cup of tea?" One hundred and thirty kilos poised in imploration. A cup of tea, how delightful. I took a step back and nodded quickly. There was an appalling intimacy implied in the invitation and in the sigh of relief that followed acceptance.
"Fair enough, I'll drop by, sure there's nothing else happening on Saturday evening."
It was the custom for students - mainly girls - to sit out on the corridor to study. Legs casually splayed or folded pliantly underneath them. I picked my way along this obstacle course, fearing a hip might swivel to draw in a leg, my eyes might falter, and I would kick against one of those shapely ankles. This dorm held mainly language and arts students. That accounted for the disproportionate number of females - any males who lived there could rely on being the cause of a joke or two. It might account too for the large number of smokers. Smoking was forbidden in the corridors too, but there was only one alarm. It never went off, no matter how thick a stratum of sinewy tobacco smoke had accumulated.
I was a science major, and didn't quite believe in this kind of studying: mere reading, a cigarette in one hand. The same book, week after week. For me study meant laying out diagrams, working meticulously from the easy problems to the more difficult ones.
I knocked soundly, one two three. Just a moment, Simon shouted. answer. Wiping the palms of his hands, perhaps. The door eased open. Simon, grinning, huge. His room smelt of animal hides and red soap. A phone sat atop his washing basket, wires trailing across the floor. Students didn't have phones without a special dispensation.
"So this is where you live?" I took my time looking around, taking in the spice rack on the wall, the three pairs of polished shoes, the full crate of Sharwood's Indian pickles. I had called at his door several times over the past month in search of the key. (If Simon did not have it himself he would know where it was). And always he would stand in front, arms folded, nodding with heavy concern. Shifting his weight minutely from foot to foot, just possibly to block any direct view into the room.
He brought in a jug of coffee - real coffee - made with a filter. I took out a sweet tipsycake. Simon was delighted with it, cut it heavily with a flat-bladed knife, tapped the cloying crumbs back onto the plate.
"Mau-rice," he said, "this is really very fine of you. You know I thought about getting in some cake but wasn't outside today. If you prefer a sandwich I have some good corned beef there."
"Mau-rice," he said and I wished my fingernails would grow to points so I could curl them into my palms. "Mau-rice, are you listening?" and touched me on the arm until I turned away from the record collection and looked him in the eyes, staring into his earnest pupils until I should either hug him or punch him
"Maurice, people here are becoming materialistic. There are other countries I have lived in where people don't think about money and where it's more important to have friends."
"Yes."
"People become more selfish here, the more money they have. Everything is centred on the me. You can see how they have little respect for the other person. This key to the washroom for example, you see how they try to cheat. If one person gets it they pass it on to their friends, and the register at the desk is useless, it's just names, and some of them fake names. I looked for the key once and was told that Lysaght had it in room 408. I went there and she no longer had it. But please, I said, you are responsible for the key, can I ask you to get it for me. And she looked at me," he whisked his fingers delicately, "like I was nothing, not a person worthy to speak to. Not even a person at all. I went to the room number she told me, and a lady there said she was not yet finished. I said that's fine, I understand, I will come back later. But please, sign your name on the register downstairs so other people can know where the key is. And she looked at me like I was a hippopotamus. I said to her, it is important to have a system of knowing where the key is. Please, do this for everybody's benefit. And she threw the key at me and slammed the door. I stood there, in shock, can you believe it? Then I heard a mumbling behind the door so I stood closer. I thought, what is this? She was praying to God, saying please help me God, take him away. Make him go away. I think she could see me through a crack. I was still standing there because I was in shock. This is something extraordinary Maurice. Do I - " and here he shrugged with his whole arms, "Do I look like a monster?"
I laughed at the whimsy, sprang up from the couch and thumbed through his shelves. There were several maths books printed on coarse paper, St. Andrew's, Nairobi, Kenya stamped on the inside cover. Other ornaments and prints hinted of a childhood spread across Arabia, Germany, and Singapore.
"Please Maurice, why do you walk around?"
I flopped back in the armchair again, tapped my fingers on the table. When the dorm first opened all the rooms had been furnished with these hard-wearing but luxuriously padded armchairs, some absurd notion of collegiate prestige. The chairs had vanished from every room , simply dragged out into the corridors and left for the smokers.
To live in a room like this, after growing up all over the world. With all the rags and books of your past piled about you, pressing in from all sides. Dropped here by chance, in this zone of hermetically sealed ordinariness, to make up a life here too. Not enough space to take two paces. Any move from one point to another in the room had to be executed in slow motion, like living in treacle.
"You do psychology? You have some books up there . . . "
Simon took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. This constant rubbing didn't redden them, rather there was a yellow pallor on the eyelids. It was as though the blood didn't flow fast enough to flush the toxins away.
"I wanted to tell you something Maurice."
Yes, but why can you not just tell it? Why this feeling of suffocation, a leaning forward, eye contact? Simon waited intransigently for my nod of assent. Then the terrible intimacy emerged.
"I visit a psychiatrist."
"Oh."
"I have therapy sessions."
The situation seemed to demand some response from me. "What is he trying to cure?"
"It's a developmental problem." He hesitated, but not from embarrassment. "A problem of negative identity and self-image. I need to overcome some barrier before my relations with people can be established on a normal basis."
"And what's the cause of this?"
"I can't tell you everything. My doctor forbids it, it might interfere with the treatment. But I can tell you things on the level of ordinary speech. What I need to achieve is the ability to cope with normal situations. There is a pragmatics of ordinary life that I need to master. The aim is not to become normal . . ." Simon frowned. "But to be aware of the normal and have it as an option."
"So what exactly was your psychological problem?"
"My problem is not a psychological illness in the conventional sense. One of my greatest problems - though problem is not the right word, it's more a facet of my personality - is a feeling of superiority."
I held my breath. I could not believe that humans could speak like this.
"It's not a fully conscious feeling. I am not walking around thinking the world should worship me. I don't believe what this complex is telling me, it's just a little subconscious part of me. With the analyst's help it has been brought out into the daylight. Now that it is under the light I am more relaxed about chatting with ordinary people. I know each conversation does not have to be full of meaning. It can be little pointless things just to be friendly to people. It doesn't mean that I am stupid or the other person is stupid. I have learned to isolate this inner self and cut it off, saying no, you are trying to delude me. In this way I can relax. I do voluntary work with the Cyril Park Restoration Committee. The head of the restoration knows everything about nineteenth century architecture yet he's never been to college. He buys two crates of red wine and we have a party at the end of the month . . . but to be truthful, Maurice, maybe I do think more deeply than other people."
"Do you lie on your back?"
"I lie on a couch, yes. He takes notes."
"Does he give you advice on what to do?"
"No no Maurice. He gives me the thread of an idea, and with the help of this I can recognise and grasp the unconscious material that is influencing me. Unless I told him I wanted to kill myself or something, he might go as far as to say, that's not such a good idea Simon, please reconsider. He's not a counseller, he's a true psychoanalyst. There's no official qualification. He learned it from a German who studied under Berling - that was a student of Freud. By the way, don't mention any of this to Carnew."
Carnew was a psychology PhD student. When we played poker I used to stare hard in his eyes and say, "What am I thinking about?"
"Why? Surely he of all people would be understanding?"
Simon looked at me with exasperation.
"It's a Freudian psychoanalyst, Maurice. In psychology these days Freud is a crank. If the college knew I would never get a postgraduate position."
Real people could not say such things as he had said, and still remain a person. I was drawn to the whiff of decadence, that smiling passivity that taunted you to smash through it. Yes, Simon gave off an aura that pleaded to be spurned. And yet he had escaped from the universe of spuds and rain. He was irreducibly noble.
I couldn't go back for a second visit. There was nowhere left for a conversation to go now that it had turned a bright light on itself. Let's talk about being friends Simon, let's talk about how well we get on with each other. Yet in the weeks that followed I began to be jealous of his complexes. The people I knew - my family and the friends I grew up with - were too one-dimensional to have a subconscious.
I practiced being on the alert to catch my inner thoughts. We hide away what is uncomfortable in order to live more effectively. I began to make out the shapes of the forces that controlled me. My servile nature - for that was what it was - had been imposed on me. I didn't want to blame others, only to understand the roots. And though I had the feeling it was making too much of myself, wasn't that too my servile nature? - the masturbatory self too ashamed to even speak?
"I can visit him too, your psychoanalyst," I whispered. The odour of corruption is a mixture of red soap and coffee. Its sound is a heavy breath being exhaled. "If you think it's possible."
"He doesn't charge a fixed fee," said Simon. "Just leave what you can afford. Ten pounds if you have it. And please, don't think in terms of what problem you have. He won't ask you if you have a problem. Think of it as a journey downwards. You will not feel better afterwards."
"Going to visit turnip-head again? How can you stand him?" Eyes shining with derision. She was one of the girls who sit out on the corridor.
"I know, he's a terror," I answered easily, hunkering down, because she was the kind of girl any guy would stop to talk to if given half a chance.
"Old Mushroom we call him," she said. That's exactly how I pictured him: a fantastic growth in a neglected corner of the house, the diagrammatic opposite of a flower in the sun.
"Old Mushroom?" I laughed, "A minute ago he was a turnip. He must be a whole vegetable pie."
"Why do you go visit him?" She seemed to take it as a personal affront.
"He has good coffee, real stuff his parents post over from Indonesia."
"You'd sit with a weirdo for four hours just to get a free cup of coffee?"
In a dream one night I lay supine, defenceless, in a room with a calm voice listening to me, for a voice too can listen, if it quietly says, Please go on. We are nearly there. Words would mean something here, things could be said that could be spoken nowhere else. Into this voice I could bury the cathedral of complexes that made up my psyche.
I woke up with a keen sense of disappointment. My subconscious was letting me down. Thoughts turning in to reflect on themselves was fine, having fears of being afraid perhaps, but even the purest and most patient analyst would not be able to suppress a sigh of impatience if the patient were to lie back and relate a traumatic dream of lying on that same couch in that very clinic, seized with frustration that he had nothing worth relating.
But there was no turning back. Once escaped into the endless caverns of self-reflection, I had no wish to go back to single vision. The odour of ingrown thought had me in thrall. I would pay my ten pound fee and sign the legal disclaimer.
We're off to the psychoanalyst, big friend Simon and I, strolling the gauntlet of a dozen draped female legs, grinning defiantly. The children of skipping ropes and daisy chains are repulsed by the fungal odour, but we no longer craved to be of their tribe. I was forever grateful to Simon for showing me the cellars where mind can ferment and swell to a fragile midnight bloom.
I hoped I had a psyche worthy of the analyst's attention.