The drive is quicker than usual, but I spend more than ten minutes crawling around the roads by the clinic waiting for a space. Nothing’s doing and, in the end, I give up and park on the double yellow. These days, this sort of rule feels even pettier than it did before, and the idea that there are people who make it their life’s work to prowl the pavements looking for somewhere to slap their little tickets seems so irrelevant and inane it isn’t worth bothering about. Besides, if I don’t get inside soon, I’m going to have to go straight into the session without even having a coffee, and I can’t face that.
As I duck across the road, a Chelsea tractor comes bombing around the corner and the arsehole up front slams on the brakes, blaring his horn as if he’s the one with right of way. I give him the finger and stare him down for an instant through the windscreen before carrying on to the other side. Life is chock full of these lovely little interactions. Warms the cockles of your heart, doesn’t it? That said, it’s the closest I get to human contact at the moment, if you take out the hours in the counselling room and the odd ships-in-the-night moment with the woman I think I’m still married to, only she’s barely said a word to me in weeks and I can’t remember the last time we slept together. In fact, I can’t remember the last time we slept in the same bed. Night-time is something of an artificial construct for me at the moment. When you spend half the daylight hours asleep and half the dark ones awake, the days blur into one and it’s harder with each rotation to tell where one ends and the next begins.
By the time I’m in reception pouring myself a coffee and checking my notes, what passed for a good mood is already hanging by a thread, and it snaps entirely when I clock who it is I’m seeing. Going in blind isn’t something I used to do, but it’s getting harder to plan ahead and, so far, it seems to have worked out all right. In this case, though, forewarned might have been forearmed. It’s a couples session – Mark and Kirsten, a pair of forty-somethings who’ve been dipping in and out of counselling for almost three years. He’s a drinker, and she doesn’t like it. He keeps saying he’ll knock it on the head, and she believes him then gets uptight when, lo and behold, he decides he might as well just stick to the status quo.
Sometimes, my job is far too obviously open to self-reflection. There might as well be a neon sign hanging from above the clients’ chairs, flashing in capital letters: REMIND YOU OF ANYTHING? No one understands – Caroline, least of all – that it isn’t awareness that is the problem. We all have our sickening moments of clarity, our hours of bleak revelation in the greying dawn. But in the background, life is grinding on and, sooner or later, the machine takes over and we’re swept along in its wake, and getting off that treadmill seems like a pipe dream in the face of the inexorable progress of habits and compulsions that have been hard-wired for years.
Mark and Kirsten are hovering in the waiting room, making discreet little coughs and rustlings designed to make me realize it’s almost ten minutes past.
I usher them into the room. ‘Get yourselves settled.’ They both look bloody awful, like they haven’t slept in weeks and have spent their days screaming at each other with the occasional break for cigarettes and hard drugs. Having said that, they’re looking at me as if they’re thinking the same thing. I didn’t look in the mirror before I left this morning. Haven’t done for a while. I can do without the disconnect.
‘So,’ I say, when I’ve sat down, ‘tell me about the past few weeks. How have things been?’
Mark just shrugs and stares at his feet. Early on, I remember we had frequent moments of awkward but genuine connection, he and I – it was relatively easy to crack the shell and get to what was inside. I can already tell that’s over. He’s gone into lockdown, where the no-man’s-land outside his fortress stretches so far everyone else is just mist and shadows.
Kirsten is talking, a relentless barrage of words. ‘Nothing’s changing. I just keep hearing the same promises, and things get better for a short while, and then we just go round again. It’s like it washes over him. In one ear and out the other.’ Her fingernails are bitten down, streaked by remnants of hot-pink nail polish. She hasn’t washed her hair in a while and the roots are faintly glistening with grease. From what I remember, she used to keep herself in pretty good condition. I wonder if it’s a tactic, an attempt to show Mark how he’s wearing her down. If so, I know from experience that it won’t work.
I suggest that Mark responds to what she’s said, but he shrugs again and mumbles something about doing his best. We go back and forth for another twenty or thirty minutes this way – a bizarre counterpoint between trying to get blood out of a stone and battling to hold back a tsunami. Kirsten’s had enough. They’re finished. It would have more power if it weren’t the hundredth time she’d said something similar, and it’s clearly lost all its force on him, if it ever had any at all. I don’t think he’s drunk right now. Just in the fog. It comes to much the same thing.
‘You know something,’ Kirsten says at last, when she’s exhausted the litany of Mark’s wrongs. ‘I was watching telly the other day and that old clip came up of Princess Diana talking about her marriage. You know, when she says there were three people in it so it got a bit crowded.’ She’s crying now, although none of us is acknowledging it and she doesn’t reach for a tissue or make any attempt to wipe away the tears. ‘And I thought, bloody hell, I’d rather that than what I’ve got right now. There’s only one person in this marriage. It’s the opposite of crowded. It’s – empty.’
The last words are jerky, half drowned by the uneven rhythm of her tears. Mark glances over at her, and I think I see a flicker of something in his eyes, the first stirrings of some kind of understanding or compassion. I know I should pounce on it and push at that door. But something in her words has set something off in me and my moorings are suddenly lost and I’ve forgotten who I am and why I’m here … and all I can think is that they’re doing one better than we are because I’m not sure there’s anyone left in my marriage at all.
We push on through the next ten minutes, but the bleakness in my head is unfurling, suffocating everything else. I’m watching their mouths move and responding on autopilot, barely even sure of what I’m saying. A glass partition has risen between us. Thick, impenetrable. The pale yellow walls of the counselling room are fuzzing and shimmering like static on a screen.
I get them out and, when they’ve gone, I go to the desk drawer and pull out the envelope from the back. I said I’d have nothing until this evening, but trying to hold back this tide is impossible and all I want is for this spreading numbness to stop and check out for a while. I shake a few pills out and swallow them. I used to keep track of my daily consumption, set it to a certain mg and didn’t take more, but these days I have no idea what the limits are, and I stopped counting long ago. Besides, like I said, days don’t have much meaning any more. Some are longer than others, and something tells me this is going to be a fucking record-breaker. Better be prepared.