The Jigsaw Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

results,’ said Marilyn. ‘They came this morning. I forgot.’
    I looked at her, hardly daring to ask.
    She smiled. ‘You got an A.’
    Even with a student grant, we lived frugally for those next three years. Fortunately, I’d married a woman who could cook amazing meals even if the cupboards looked a little empty. She gave me the space and the support to keep studying.
    Within a month of starting at Warwick, a separate psychology department was established and I was able to immediately transfer across from Management Science. It didn’t take me long to realize that I’d found my future career - psychology offered me the chance to not only satisfy my own curiosity but also to repair people’s lives.
    The human mind is still largely uncharted. Its parameters are so broad they encompass everything we do and say; all that has gone before and is still to come in our understanding of the world. How is it that three or four pounds of grey sludge in our heads can produce everything that we think we know and understand? When Mozart wrote his symphonies, when Michelangelo painted the Sistine Chapel, when Hitler ordered the Final Solution, when a teenage mother abandons her baby in a rubbish bin, when a crime victim is too afraid to walk out the front door, when a couple torture and murder young girls … it doesn’t matter how significant the event or utterance, it all comes back to some aspect of human behaviour and interaction - to that three or four pounds of porridge that make up the brain.
    Imagine a fishing net formed by a matrix of hundreds of lines with thousands of knots connecting them. Any single knot may be interesting but when you try to pick it up, all the others come with it. They are all interconnected and you can’t truly understand any single knot unless you understand the principles of those around it. That’s what makes psychology so fascinating. It’s like having a three dimensional map that you journey upon and through.
    After three years of lectures, assignments and late night essays, I graduated with a First and accepted an advanced postgraduate studentship at Leicester University. My work was connected with phobic anxiety - in particular measuring arachnophobia, the fear of spiders, and I established elaborate mazes for human subjects and spiders to explore the problem.
    The move to Leicester, thirty-five miles from Leamington, hadn’t been taken lightly. For Marilyn and the children it was like going to the other side of the world and they were desperately homesick. Ian, then aged seven, now walked and ran properly, although it would be years before his joint problem would be completely cured. We told him that he’d make new friends and on the day we moved into our new house he went outside and stood on the edge of the street, saying that he wouldn’t come inside until he’d found a friend.
    The sight of him plucked at the heart strings. Eventually, the lady who lived opposite said to her young son, ‘Oh, go and talk to that little boy. He’s been standing there for ages.’
    Ian’s wish had been granted.
    Soon after starting my postgraduate work, I became an unpaid trainee clinical psychologist with the Leicestershire Health Authority, the largest in the country. My long term goal had been to work in the clinical field and I accepted a full-time salaried post when it became available nine months later.
    After qualifying, my day-to-day work involved assessing and treating people who were damaged by unfortunate events in their lives. This included people who suffered recurring nightmares or acute anxiety, others had sexual problems or personality disorders; some couldn’t sleep, or stop washing, or bring themselves to walk out of their front door to post a letter. There were also psychosomatic complaints from patients who thought they were paralysed or had exotic illnesses and disorders that doctors had failed to diagnose.
    None of these conditions are trivial or minor, because they affect