Something to Tell You Read Online Free PDF Page B

contemporary Freudian style, I liked to be modest. I would claim neither to predict nor even to “cure.” Sometimes, brashly, I might use the word modify or, more pompously, speak of “enlarging the patient’s capacity for pleasure by reducing inhibition.” Mostly, I believed in the efficacy of conversation—all Freud demanded of his patients was wilder words; they didn’t have to live differently—as a way to expose hidden conflicts.
    Nevertheless, I was told by Bushy, as though it were a secret, that Miriam “looked up” to me. This might have been because her neighbours had started to come to me with child-care problems, eczemas, addictions, depressions, phobias. The working class were always the worst served in terms of mental health. But I was moved: at last I could impress her.
    Miriam had been a terrible child, tantrummy, screaming and absolute. A girl who claimed to be neglected but who was at the centre of the house, shoving me aside, often physically. Yet she and I had once liked each other. This was when we were children, conspiring together in the bedroom we shared until she was ten. Mother had moved downstairs, into a box room, “the coffin,” we called it. Miriam and I would play tricks on the neighbours, go scrumping for apples and roam around the fields together, looking for trouble. Our fights had always been apocalyptic, though, and she would tear wildly at my face. I bore the ruts and tears even as a teenager, which was when I started to hate her, when everything she did was too grown-up for me to participate in.
    Now, in Miriam’s house, I seemed to serve as some sort of symbolic authority. Thankfully it was a formal role, like some presidents, and mainly involved me sitting down; at her place the world was my sofa. Until Henry, Miriam had only engaged with violent, stupid or addicted men. But here there were few actual men around, and none as bookwormy or word aware as me. Where were they? In the pub? In prison? Heaven only knows how the neighbourhood women and girls got to be perpetually pregnant. In creating a society of mothers and babies, it was as though the women believed that, if they got rid of the men entirely, they would no longer need them, they would forget about them, and about sex and the confusion which accompanied it.
    There were many loose adolescent boys around, in white trainers and heavily gelled, shining, thorny hair, wearing, with their acne, chains they’d obtained, no doubt, from Miriam, both of whose arms, from wrist to elbow, were covered in metal bangles. If she continued with the metal, she might as well wear a suit of armour.
    At times her kitchen was like a waiting room, as sullen boys, secure in gangs but lacking good-bad authorities, waited to see me, a part-time, suburban Godfather. They’d shuffle their feet, their eyes scatting about, barely able to speak. “Sir, if it’s okay, can I tell yer, this girl’s pregnant…” “Mister, I done this bad thing…”
    Miriam said to me, “I’ve been speaking to Dad.”
    “How is he?”
    “He needs some human warmth.”
    “Heaven’s a lonely place, eh?”
    “It can be, you know. People have the wrong idea about it.”
    Having failed to reach him in this world, Miriam thought she might have more luck contacting Dad in the “other” dimension. We had both parted from him in absurd and awful circumstances; and she still pursued his forgiveness and understanding.
    Miriam was two years older than me. Before she immigrated to the far side of eccentricity, Miriam had been the intelligent one, quicker, funnier, more easily able to grasp difficult ideas, and far less nervous and reticent. The reading I hid myself in as a child she considered a waste of time. What was a book compared to experience? Mum and I would sit in the house reading together, but Miriam was more like our father, always with others, talking, kicking people in the legs, making wild dramas.
    These days, however, little that was new or not