The Therapist
The Therapist
nial giacomelli
Fairlight Books
First published by Fairlight Books 2019
Fairlight Books
Summertown Pavilion, 18-24 Middle Way, Oxford, OX2 7LG
Copyright © Nial Giacomelli 2019
The right of Nial Giacomelli to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by Nial Giacomelli in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. This book is copyright material and must not be copied, stored, distributed, transmitted, reproduced or otherwise made available in any form, or by any means (electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publisher.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
ISBN 978-1-912054-91-6
www.fairlightbooks.com
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd
Designed by Sara Wood
Illustrated by Sam Kalda
www.folioart.co.uk
About the Author
Nial Giacomelli spent his childhood between England and the US. He attended the University of Portsmouth, studying Media, before becoming a software developer. The Therapist is his debut novella.
For Tora. For everything.
Contents
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXI
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
Acknowledgements
I
When the anguish between us grows so palpable that it manifests veins and a nervous system, an entire body that darts from beneath bed frames and behind dressers to howl the night away, I finally relent and agree to meet with a therapist. The promise floats round in the dark of my mind until finally it materialises and I find myself alone one afternoon on country roads.
I drive west as a heavy snow begins to fall, leaving the distant murmur of the city for more rural country. I pass sleepy houses with sash windows and steeped dormers, an old asylum with an imposing portico, the vague shapes of evening shoppers among a quaint collection of storefronts, until gradually the houses begin to disappear, replaced instead by a series of abandoned warehouses and outbuildings. They tell a sad history of slow, generational death, their sheet metal falling away, their brickwork slowly crumbling, until they themselves are gone.
When I finally spot the black mass of the therapist’s stately home I have all but given up hope. It comes into focus through the early evening light and I feel my apprehension like a stone at the pit of my stomach. The property is alive with Gothic spires and buttresses, a mess of stonework and wooden lattice. It looks like something out of a Shirley Jackson novel and as I pass beneath the cast iron gate and ascend the path beyond I begin to consider the impossibility of my own reality.
From the car I take a moment to inspect the black shingles of the house. There is such a sense of dereliction to the place that I am almost surprised when I notice a woman watching from one of the upstairs windows. She has a shock of white hair and stands so still that I think for a moment she must be a trick of the light.
Simone waits for me beneath the eaves of the house. As I approach she turns to greet me and at the sight of her face I feel a great exhaustion wash over me. The muscles in my legs suddenly weak. The pain so intense that for a moment I fear I won’t be able to get out of the car. But when she nods her head and beckons for me to join her I know that she understands. That she is aware of my apprehension, my reservations about the undertaking.
We stand before the house’s imposing red door. I lift its metal knocker, a brass lion, and am surprised by the weight of it in my hand. I crane my head upwards, expecting to find a portcullis, some piece of arcane medieval apparatus high above us, but I see only wooden beams.
The therapist escorts us through the property in silence. We are ushered into a room and sit beneath a crude landscape painting of the sea. I watch snow fall through the property’s arched windows. It is unending. I imagine it piling up round the house, covering the windows and blocking the doors, rising to the roof and further still to cover the chimney until we disappear completely. I can feel winter’s cold hands against the house, resting on window ledges and pressing into doors, trying desperately to work its way inside.
‘Shall we get started?’ the therapist asks finally and I feel my body tense.
On the carpet a lazy square of sunlight stretches itself across the room in the way a cat might. I use it to keep track of time.
Simone sits, hands folded in her lap, and she weeps.
She cries his name so much it begins to sound foreign.
A broken, useless thing. And it is.
The dead have no use for names.
After the session I throw the journal the therapist has given us onto a heap of snow and sit inside the stifling cold of my car. Simone raps on the driver’s side window with her knuckle. When I wind it down she brushes dirt from the cover of the notebook and kneels to look me in the eye.
‘We have to at least try,’ she says.
‘Did you try, Simone?’ I ask and regret it immediately.
She stands and though I cannot see her face I know that she is holding back tears. Her body shakes and rattles with the effort. I contemplate getting out of the car and comforting her, but instead find myself putting it in reverse.
I leave her standing alone in the snow, my breath forming clouds as I descend the gravel path. I don’t need to look for her in the rear-view mirror to know what I’ll see. Head hung, hands clasped over mouth. Face pale, eyes sunken. The same listless and forlorn expression. A ghost.
That night she writhes and thrashes in her sleep, sweat dampening the sheets round her like a halo. She calls out to him and weeps, her hands held high above her as if reaching for some imagined and unreachable landmark.
When she wakes it is morning.
‘I dreamt we were at sea,’ she says.
II
We are told to use the journals to write stray thoughts and observations between sessions. It’s a vague assignment that I find more irritating than liberating. And though I make a few genuine attempts, all I can ever bring myself to write about is how punishingly tired I feel.
‘It’s as if someone is cutting into me while I sleep and gradually stitching weights into the muscles and tendons of my body. And though it’s not debilitating I find it harder each day to fight to the surface. To re-become myself,’ I read aloud during our next session.
‘And is that what you want?’ the therapist asks. ‘To re-become yourself?’
I think about that in the dark on the way home, my car illuminated every so often by passing headlights. And when I see the house approaching I consider blowing straight past it. Just disappearing into the night.
When I pull into the driveway Simone is sat on the doorstep waiting for me. She palms up a fistful of snow and rubs it into her cheeks. When she pulls her hands away her face is shot red with the shock, her skin alive and screaming, and I am almost relieved.
III
There is a newfound levity to Simone in the weeks after we begin therapy. It’s as if a cloud has begun to lift. Early one morning I suggest we take a drive into the city and to my surprise she agrees. I can hardly remember the last time she left the house for any kind of recreational pursuit. As I help her into the car I realise I am holding my breath. I allow myself, for the briefest moment, to hope. Perhaps the fresh air will do her good, I think. Perhaps some time away is all she’ll need.
She sits with her hands folded in her lap and as I merge onto the freeway I tell myself that we have turned a corner. But with each passing mile I feel a tension building in the car. Her hands reaching up slowly to cross her chest, her muscles bracing for some imagined impact.
We order breakfast at a small diner we used to visit often. Simone had been instantly smitten by the place when we first stumbled upon it. She used to say it made her feel like she was part of an Edward Hopper painting. The chefs here wear paper forage hats and go about their work in immaculate white smocks. They serve comfort foods. Pie with ice cream, coffee and eggs.
We sit in a booth and watch as patrons shuffle in and out of doorways, as they hop on and off bar stools. Behind us a young couple sit hand in hand. They lean into each other and whisper. I watch them and try to imagine their darkest secrets, to fantasise their intimacies. They touch the napes of each other’s necks. They giggle.
‘We used to come here all the time,’ I say. ‘Do you remember?’
She nods and smiles faintly, pushing a napkin along the table in ever smaller circles. Somewhere a child laughs and she winces. When the waitress returns with our food I’m glad for the interruption. Simone mushes her food into a fine paste, until it is a slurry, and then she sets it aside.
‘I don’t think I can eat,’ she says, raising her hands up to blot at the corners of her mouth.
This comes as no surprise but it still irritates me. She is never hungry. I cook each night and watch in the dark of the kitchen as she takes little conciliatory bites. She chews the pieces dramatically, chasing them with sips of water, and each night she gives me the same frail smile as if she is expecting a standing ovation, or perhaps my eternal gratitude.
I feel my disappointment rattle through me. I close my eyes and wait for it to radiate out of my body like an aftershock. I try to remind myself that we are both victims. But when I open my eyes I notice she is distracted, staring out of the window at some distant landmark, and my irritation begins to rise up again. My anger burns inside of me, the flames licking at my throat, trying desperately to reach open air. She is sick, I tell myself. She is sick but she makes no attempt to get better.
‘It’s good,’ I say, lifting the food from my plate in great heaps, chewing it with an open mouth to irritate her.
She smiles distractedly and stares off again, this time towards the deli counter, where a small crowd has gathered. They shuffle anxiously as they watch the breaking news. Slowly the murmur of conversation begins to die down, trickling off gradually as people strain their ears to listen to the broadcast.
In Oregon the air is alive with the sound of sirens. The sick are collapsing in the streets, their bodies piling up in clinics and hospitals. The footage looks like a strange fiction.
When someone asks a waitress to change the channel she shrugs.
‘It’s on every channel,’ she says.
Members of the public are urged to contact emergency services if close relatives experience severe headaches, disorientation or a fever that persists for more than two days. Symptoms in the later stages of the illness are said to include a swelling of the face, a reddening of the eyes, auditory and visual hallucinations and a feeling of pronounced euphoria.
Investigators have so far been unable to determine a means of transmission. It’s not airborne, they say. It’s not sexually transmitted. ‘But it’s clearly communicable,’ the telecaster says, ‘given the sheer number of reports we’re receiving.’
Simone wrings her hands. ‘What do you make of it?’ she asks.
I study the troubling images on the television screen. The vast emergency response, the clear severity of the illness. I take an immediate, if slightly shameful, solace in the fact that we are half a country away. That there are thousands of miles separating us from any perceivable threat.
‘A feeling of pronounced euphoria? I think we’re going to make it,’ I say.
She is silent for a moment and then, forgetting herself, lets out a snicker. It is the first time I’ve heard her laugh in months. The sound slips out of her, a living thing fleeing a desolate fate. Her eyes widen and she clasps a hand over her mouth. The crowd turns their attention in her direction; some shake their heads.
I take her hand and lead her out of the restaurant. We venture into the cold together and look back at the congregation through the diner window. They gather round the television as if it is a religious artefact, a barer of elemental truths. They stand with their mouths agape, their hands clasped, and I realise then that we have become separated, somehow, from the world at large. That their concerns are no longer our concerns. Their urgency, the volume of their rising fear, has been quieted in us.
IV
It takes the body months to reconcile what the mind knows as truth.
He is gone, but not entirely.
He is remembered, but not completely.
The body struggles with this. There are brief moments of panic. Waves of nausea when we think that we have forgotten to collect him from school. Moments in busy crowds when we think he has disappeared from our side. Mornings when we open his bedroom door and call out his name. There are baths drawn but never occupied. Plates prepared but left untouched. Car doors opened and closed in a single, mournful gesture.
The mind is solemn. Though it grieves, it knows there is little use.
But the heart, the body, is stubborn. Its muscles reach out, its skin yearns.
And so we busy ourselves with the act of survival. We eat and drink. We shovel snow from the driveway and tend to the house. We return to work so that we may pay our bills. But the purpose is diminished. Who are we working for, if not him?
We cannot be alone together.
We cannot even be alone with ourselves, for he is with us now always. His memory is tethered to ours. His life was our life. His death is our death, for we have been forever changed.
We receive cards and flowers, tokens of commiseration. We see friends and co-workers.
We are sorry for your loss, they say.
We forget, almost, that his name was not ‘your loss’.
Everyone is sorry, yet no one speaks his name.
V
At night our sorrow lies between us, its weight pulling at the bedsheets in much the same way the boy would when seeking safe haven from bad dreams and thunderstorms.
In the dark I am taken back to the days and weeks that followed his death. I remember the stillness and vacuum-like quiet. The collective holding of breath by those who visited to offer their condolences. Even the house was changed by his passing.
You could hear small creaks and groans as its foundations shifted and settled in the night. If you strained your ears the sound of laughter radiated from behind closed doors. From a certain spot in the living room, when you sat still enough, you could sometimes make out the patter of phantom feet in the hallway.