Judy Tanaka and her therapist sat in an awkward though not especially hostile silence for almost all the first half of the session. Winter sun streamed into the basement room, and the shadows cast by the window frames cut the carpeted floor into sharp, bright diamonds of light. Judy’s therapist, a slender, youthful but grey-haired woman who wore big rings and yellow silk stockings, stared out of the window at the overgrown Kentish Town garden beyond, but she had the trick of letting her clients know that her attention was still in the room with them should it be required.
Judy Tanaka had spent a lot of time wondering about her therapist, chiefly about her sexual orientation, whether or not she was gay, and whether or not there was some sort of unprofessional hostility to be found in the cold way she greeted Judy at the beginning of each session. Maybe the therapist hated her because she wasn’t gay, because she had a lively hetero sex life that the therapist couldn’t hope to emulate. Maybe she was jealous. Maybe she wanted to seduce her patient. But Judy had concluded that this sort of speculation was an understandable but nevertheless irrelevant and all too obvious evasion of the matters at hand. She did her best to stop thinking about her therapist and start talking about herself.
At long last she said, ‘I think something very strange is happening to me.’
‘Something good?’ the therapist asked, slowly turning her head towards Judy, and untangling her attention from the garden.
‘I don’t know exactly,’ Judy replied. ‘But I definitely think I’m changing.’
‘And in what way or ways are you changing?’
Judy wriggled in the big, creased, leather chair and thought hard before answering.
‘I think I’m becoming more complex,’ she said. ‘More dense, more full of noise and pollution, more beset by problems of organization and infrastructure.’
The therapist looked at Judy dumbly, suspiciously, and Judy was dismayed by her unconcealed lack of interest and understanding.
‘Sometimes I feel bombed and blitzed,’ Judy said. ‘And sometimes I feel plagued. Sometimes I feel like I’m on fire, and other times like I’m lost in a fog, in a real old-fashioned pea-souper.’
‘I think you’re a little young to remember pea-soupers, Judy,’ the therapist said, kindly enough. ‘The necessary clean air legislation was passed well before your time.’
‘Maybe I have a race memory,’ Judy insisted.
‘What race would that be?’
Oh dear. Here they went again. Judy was used to this tactic. It had been tried often enough before. People, even professional helpers, wanted to believe that all her angst and confusion stemmed from the simple fact of her foreignness, from being half-Japanese, a stranger in a familiar London landscape. Judy regularly dismissed such cheap and easy explanations.
‘The race memory would be English,’ she insisted to her therapist. ‘I was born in south London, for Christ’s sake.’
The therapist demurred and Judy continued, ‘And these problems I have with men. Out-of-towners. They’re all just tourists, just day-trippers. They come and gawp at my tourist attractions, leave a pile of litter, then go on their way.’
‘It’s an apt metaphor,’ the therapist said.
‘It’s not just a metaphor,’ Judy insisted. ‘Look at me. Don’t I remind you of anything? I display signs of both renewal and decay. Strange sensations commute across my skin. There is vice and crime and migration. My veins throb as though with the passage of underground trains. My digestive tract is sometimes clogged. There are security alerts. There’s congestion, bottlenecks. Some of me is common, some of me is restricted. I have flats and high-rises. It doesn’t need a genius to see what’s going on. Greater London, c’est moi.’
The therapist coughed to hide a snigger of derision, but she failed to hide it completely. Judy knew she was foolish to come here to these expensive sessions in a part of town she never otherwise frequented to be mocked by a woman she neither knew nor trusted.
‘I’m sorry,’ the therapist said. ‘I don’t mean to be insulting, but I’m used to dealing with people who are disturbed or dysfunctional, not with people who fear they are turning into major world cities.’
‘Then it appears I may be with the wrong therapist.’
‘That may very well be true,’ she agreed. ‘Perhaps you should think about what kind of therapist might serve you better: a town planner, a local government official, a property developer.’
Judy started to cry. This too was a regular occurrence at these sessions, and in a way she welcomed it since it helped her to feel that they must at least be fiddling around in the right general area. The session was nearing its end and Judy could sense the therapist wanting to draw things to a professionally reassuring close.
‘Judy,’ she said, and she seemed to be doing her best to sound like a favourite, kindly aunt, ‘it’s always very pleasant to talk to you at these sessions of ours, and I would never turn you away if I thought you were in serious need of my services. But frankly, you’re one of the saner people I’ve met in this insane city. And I’m not just talking about my clients now, I mean everyone, the entire population.
‘So why not save yourself some money? Why not stop trying to invent interesting symptoms for yourself? Why not cancel next week’s appointment, and the one after that? And why don’t we agree that you’ll only come back to see me when there’s something really dramatically, spectacularly wrong with you?’