Laura’s telephone call startles me from sleep. She tells me she’s struggling to breathe, that she’s been thinking about the future and each time she does she reaches for her inhaler. She’s struggled with asthma all her life.
“Don’t think about the future.” I tell her, staring groggily at the red digits pulsing on my clock that read five am. “Concentrate on the present, the immediate moment.”
“Zen teaching is nonsense.” She sobs. “I’ve tried all that. The future is right there in front of me like a big flashing neon sign. Have you ever been able to ignore a big flashing neon sign that’s right in front of your face?”
I prop myself up against the pillows in an effort to make myself more comfortable. I’m beginning to wake up a little, although I still feel as though my brain is caught between the stark reality of morning, and the warming imaginary dream world. I listen to her breathless voice describe the nightmare she woke from. She tells me she was drowning in an empty swimming pool, that a person she couldn’t see was pushing her head deep under the water. The pool, she says, began to fill up with black water as thick as petrol and everything became dark.
“What do you think it means?”
“I don’t believe in dream analysis Laura.”
“You don’t think it’s some kind of sign?”
Hastily push away the cotton sheets, and stand up stretching my aching back. I head for the bathroom holding the phone to my ear as I enter. I place the receiver on the edge of the bath and switch on the speakerphone. I listen to her voice becoming more frantic as I splash my face with cold water. The most important thing to do at this point I realise, is to calm her down, so that her breathing slows.
“I think the dream is trying to tell you that you’ve been focusing on the negative too much during the day.” I answer. Picking up a towel I pat my face dry and stare at my bewildered reflection and tangled hair in the mirror. “If you think negative thoughts during the waking hours Laura they are bound to manifest in your dreams.”
As I speak these words, I realise how pathetic and feeble they sound. It’s my own brand of therapeutic cotton candy, a mechanical speech that I preach to clients five days a week. But do I really believe it? Is it really that simple?
Sighing, I slip on my housecoat, shivering. It’s a crisp November morning and the air is chilled.
“I do try.”
“What you need to do Laura is reframe the images in your mind like I’ve taught you. As soon as a pessimistic image appears in your head, drain the colours from the image, shrink it and move it off to the left or right.”
“I’m trying. “She says softly.
“Then you need to substitute that negative image of the future with a wonderful picture of yourself at the beach. You are lying on a sandy beach, it’s a gloriously sunny day and you’re completely relaxed.”
I take the phone and head downstairs. In the kitchen I pour myself a coffee from the decanter and switch on the heating. I stand with my bare feet on the tiles feeling the biting cold in my toes. The rumble of the boiler bursts into life.
“The problem is James, every time I imagine myself relaxing something bad happens.”
“Give me an example?”
“I’m lying on the beach just like you told me. You said to think of a butterfly flying freely in the air representing my depressing thoughts escaping a cocoon, but the butterfly always gets torn to pieces in the sky.”
I swallow my coffee and stare outside through the glass window into the garden. A robin is eating seed from the feeder. I watch the bird fly off into one of the nearby trees. I wonder why our lives are not as simple as these small creatures. In some ways I think it’s our very intelligence that becomes the ultimate trap in life, there are always too many things to think about, too many emotions to experience every minute of the day.
Laura and I have been friends for thirty years. We have a connection that no one else can touch. That’s the way it is and even though I don’t say it, I care more about her than anyone else in my life. It doesn’t matter how many women I invite to my bed, how many relationships I’ve entered into. Laura is the only person that I can talk to without the uncomfortable silences, those painfully poignant moments when you look at someone you’re in a relationship with and realise that they don’t really understand you at all, that at times they seem to be as detached from you as a stranger sat opposite you on the train. But when I’m with Laura all these awkward moments dissipate. There is naturalness to our togetherness, a belonging when she slips her hand into mine. I’d known friends from university in loving relationships that lasted, but I’d never been that lucky.
I can picture Laura curled up in bed, knees tugged to her chest, curly golden-brown hair falling across her face as she talks; she’d be twisting a strand of hair around her fingers in agitation. It was the same when she was a child. Some physical habits never change with time, some things are indelibly printed.
“Where’s Phillip?” I ask.
“Mauritius.”
I’m not surprised. He was always jetting off to one country or another. The only thing Phillip truly cared about was his position.
“Have you got anything to help you sleep?”
“No.”
“I’ll prescribe a week’s sleeping tablets.” I step into the living room and draw the curtains open. Laura begins to cry, I can hear her taking a deep breath with the inhaler in-between tears.
“You need to concentrate on your breathing. Breathe in through your nose slowly. Are you listening?”
“Yes.”
“Hold your breath for three seconds then breathe out through your mouth. If you can’t control your mind when you have these panic attacks, you can control your breathing. It’s important because if your body relaxes so will your mind.”
I want to tell her she doesn’t have a reason to be afraid but that wouldn’t be the right thing to do. She’s the same age as me, almost forty, that time when you start to contemplate your life, or the lack of it. Everything that’s missing suddenly seems more acute, as though your entire existence has been pushed under a microscope, everything minutely detailed. In the last few years I’d felt the faith in my profession slipping irretrievably away from me. As a practising psychologist, I’d begun to doubt some of the traditional methods used in my therapy sessions. I’d been adopting some NLP techniques along with traditional psychotherapy but it didn’t always achieve the required response. Two new patients that had been recently referred to me were prime examples, a woman in her thirties who’d been diagnosed with terminal cancer, as well as an eighteen year old girl who’d lost both her parents to a house fire. Although these cases were in the minority, both were failing to respond appropriately to treatment. And here was his closest friend Laura, whose parents both died in a car accident on a road in France when she was nine years old. Could there ever be a full recovery from such traumatic events? As a young graduate I’d been full of gusto for my profession, my belief in curing patients had begun with an almost religious fervour, now I was a different man, a more worn out version of my younger self. I was a man who’d seen too many failures walking out of my office door. The arrogance and the enthusiasm had dissipated with the passing years.
“Are you still there James?”
“Of course I’m here, how are you feeling now?”
“A little better.”
“That’s good. The next time this happens, you must remember to concentrate on your breathing.”
I distract her with a story about my recent trip to Italy to a conference. I tell her about the professor I met who was so fat he could hardly fit on one of the chairs.
“I spent the whole evening wondering if the chair was going to collapse.”
She laughs at all the appropriate moments, but I’m not really sure she is listening. I wonder what has set off this particular panic attack.
I recall the first time I saw Laura. After the death of her parents she moved in with her aunt, a cold woman who wasn’t pleased that a child had been foisted upon her. She was a skinny nine year old girl with a fierce expression and intense green eyes. One hot summer’s day she stormed from the house slamming the door behind her. She glanced at me throwing the stones I’d collected from the ravine from my bucket. I ignored her. She stormed across the road, and without warning pushed me fiercely to the ground. Flustered, I’d stood up ready to slap her, but before I could make a move she started to cry. Her crying turned into an agonising wail. I didn’t know what to do, so I passed her the bucket of stones. She flopped down on the pavement next to me, reached her hand inside the bucket, grabbed a few stones and threw them into the road. Her hand dived in for more and more and she threw them as if she were in a fever.
“So who are you seeing at the moment?”
Her voice jolts me to the present.
“Sarah.” I drink my coffee. “I told you about her. She’s an accountant; we’ve been seeing each for a month.”
“Right I remember. “She’s the one that uses dental floss in bed.”
“That’s right.” I laugh.
“Simon, do you remember Adam Mayer?”
Immediately Adam’s face pops into my mind, even though it’s been ten years since I last saw him. That was just before he got married. His wife was obsessed with status and attending the right dinner parties, her only hobby was buying designer clothes. She didn’t seem to suit his sensitive intellect at all. To me it seemed as though Adam had just drifted into the relationship and marriage without thought. I’d asked him why he’d married her and he told me she’d asked him, besides, he’d said, it was better to be with someone than be alone.
“Mouse?” He said, closing his eyes and picturing him.
“That’s right. He loved to read books like me.”
“Of course I remember him. We were friends for years. Have we just changed subjects? Why are you mentioning him out of the blue? Have you seen him?”
“He jumped from his office building on Thursday afternoon.”
I try to comprehend what she is saying, to put the sentence together in my head but it’s difficult. My first response is to laugh thinking it is some kind of sick joke. It’s strange the things you do when you’re in shock.
“Why didn’t you tell me this right from the beginning?”
“I just couldn’t come out and say it.”
“Are you sure?”
She’s silent for a minute. I don’t say anything because I don’t want to upset her.
“I haven’t seen him for nine years, but I saw the story in the paper yesterday. His funeral is a week on Saturday.”
“What happened?”
“The paper says he was suffering from depression but no one was overly concerned, not even his wife. Apparently there were no indications that he would take his own life. He closed his office door at noon, ate a sandwich and jumped from the window ten flights down.”
“Christ.”
“I wondered if you wanted to go.”
“Go where?”
“To the funeral.”
“I haven’t seen him for years Laura wouldn’t it look odd?”
“Why would it look odd? We were so close when we were children.”
I picture Adam in my head holding hands with Laura by the abandoned train tracks close to our homes. He always held her hand tightly as if he were afraid of letting it go. His mother was an alcoholic who barely noticed his existence, his father a banker who seemed to spend all his time at the office. I close my eyes and picture all three of us lying on the damp grass staring up at the sky. We’d watch the clouds move inch by inch, all three of us laughing when the rain poured and drenched our skin, we’d open our mouths and let the rain slip into them. Those times were simpler, even though none of us were happy at home. He’d moved away from us and we’d never heard from him again except the odd Christmas card. It was as though he wanted to escape that part of his life, to close the door on it.
“Laura I’m coming to London.”
“When?”
“Today as soon as I can get a train ticket.”
“But don’t you have plans with Sarah?”
“I’ll cancel. This is more important. I’ll ring you with the times, meet me at Euston Station.”
She’s silent for a moment and then she laughs, it’s a nice sound. I stare at the phone waiting.
“There’s something I want to tell you.” She says softly, “Something I should have told you a long time ago.”
The line is silent. I can hear the birds chirping outside, the sound of a car engine starting up on the street. I remember the way she sighs when she feels sad; it’s a forlorn sound one and that I really wish I could hear sometimes. I know I need to speak; Laura is someone who hides her emotions so strongly. She’s so afraid of being hurt.
“Even if I can’t be with you I want you to know..........” She says.
I close my eyes.
“You don’t need to say it Laura.” I say. “I know and I feel the same. We’ll go to the funeral together okay?”
“Okay, thanks.”
I hear the phone go click. The room seems too quiet now. I stare at the phone long after she’s gone.