The Tryst Read Online Free PDF Page A

tissue?’
    ‘No, no. I envy you because you live in the past, professionally speaking. You’re treating people whose mental models of the brain were formed years ago, back in the Dark Ages. Your patients are like country folk who still believe that ghosts walk in the woods at night and mutter darkly about strange goings-on at the great house. In fact the woods have all been levelled on an EEC grant and the house is now the headquarters of the local agribusiness, but you’re still up to your ears in tall tales about spooks and spirits.’
    ‘My job is to help people get better. I use the most up-to-date methods available.’
    ‘But that’s still primitive in terms of current research. Take this boy of yours, for example. From a state-of-the-art perspective, he’s simply suffering from an endocrine disorder requiring hormonal analysis and treatment to correct the imbalance. That’s a world away from the land where you live, inhabited by demons with names like Schizophrenia and Paranoia. No one has ever seen these demons or knows how their power operates, but everyone believes that they haunt people. Your task, as the local witch-doctor, is to identify the demon that is haunting a given patient and then prescribe the appropriate healing ritual. I know that’s the best you can do. We can’t yet deliver therapeutically. Fair enough. But the fact remains that the difference between your view of mental life and the one we’ll be kicking around in Boston’ – Douglas was going to a conference at MIT at the end of the week – ‘is like the difference between a modern atlas and one of those old mappa mundi consisting of a dodgy outline and lots of blank space inscribed with comments like “Here be monsters.” ’
    Aileen crushed out her cigarette and stood up, stacking their plates together.
    ‘Our cures work,’ she said.
    ‘Do they? The last set of figures I saw seemed to be something less than totally conclusive. In any case, witch-doctors don’t do so badly either, you know. Never underestimate the placebo effect. At least a third of all people suffering from anything at all will show some improvement on being told, for example, to gargle a mixture of tomato ketchup and hot lemonade last thing at night.’
    This was wild enough to be ignored with safety. Recognizing that he had settled for a draw, Aileen pushed her way through to the kitchen and put the plates in the sink to soak. As she turned off the water she caught sight of the woman reflected in the glass. It was the end of September and the nights were starting to draw in rapidly. Aileen had always had a difficult relationship with those regular features of hers, that ovality so prized by the eighteenth-century land-owning class that they paid painters to clamp them on like a mask. The sixties had had very different ideals, and in her youth Aileen had worked hard to look striking and strange. She had learned that perfection is inflexible. The moment she tried to do anything with it, her face turned dumpy, common and ordinary. It was not until she met Raymond that she was able to accept that her features were herself , that there was no difference between the person others saw and the person she was. Until then, the most important parts of her body had seemed to be her hands and feet, whose size her mother was always bemoaning, and her eyes, which had traditionally been put forward as her ‘strong point’. She had thus grown up with the image of herself as a bug-eyed stick insect with boxing-glove hands, Army-boot feet and nothing to speak of in between. But Raymond told her she had a ‘neat ass’ and ‘cute tits’; Raymond told her he loved her pussy; Raymond told her that she was beautiful. In Cheltenham, ‘beautiful’ was a word without resonance, applied to a cup of tea or a vase of flowers or the weather. It indicated that the strictly limited degree of satisfaction which might reasonably be expected from such things had in fact been