Instead of the damp bricks and skeletal branches that until recently had dominated the view through the glass doors of his consulting room, Martin could see salt-white hawthorn and the dark pink cherry blossom screening the walls, a trellis disappearing behind a tangle of honeysuckle shoots and, beyond that, the thick foliage of his neighbour’s chestnut tree, melding separate gardens into a single flourishing scene. Many of his patients commented on the beautiful view, if only as the starting point for a contrast to their inner state, or as a source of envy compared to what they were doomed to contemplate at home. Those with properties that ‘enjoyed’ or ‘commanded’ a magnificent view, without their owners being able to enjoy or command anything much themselves, were not likely to be consoled by Martin’s little pool of greenery when they had already been let down by Hampstead Heath or Westminster Bridge. Others hardly seemed to notice, but Sebastian was the only current patient who was almost certain to attack the burgeoning life of the garden, just as he attacked everything else. He was going through a period (if it was a period, if they were going to get to the other side of it) of psychotic transference, in which Martin was an amalgamated bad object: the person on whom Sebastian could project his deepest disturbance, paranoia and despair. This apparent deterioration was a cause for optimism: it showed that Martin’s consulting room was a safe place for Sebastian to bring more and more troubling material which, until now, had always driven people away from him and deepened his loneliness and terror. They had built up to three times a week – Wednesday, Thursday and Friday – in Martin’s home and not in the more institutional clinic where they had started out.
Today, Sebastian was late again, but Martin suspected that he would turn up eventually. Pure absence was too stark to express his current turmoil and, even if being late was the beginning of the attack, he would probably need to attack Martin in more detail. He had missed sessions before, but then a routine kicked in: Martin rang the halfway house where Sebastian lived and told the staff that he hadn’t turned up; he was either informed that Sebastian refused to come or, when he returned from his wanderings, told that he was back safely. If he didn’t come in person, the projection of his sense of abandonment, privation and unreliability found no real home, whereas when he did turn up, it found a resting place of sorts. Not that Sebastian wanted to have his symptoms removed, any more than he wanted an amputation, but he was tempted by being able to express them in a more targeted way: punching the doctor who was proposing to cut off his arm. Nobody came to such a painful and distorted state of mind unless clarity was the more terrifying alternative. Even the most collaborative and well-informed neurotic patient had some resistance, but in those cases the price of abandoning an archaic defence was a wave of anxiety, or the renunciation of a cherished self-image; for the schizophrenic patient, it felt as if the price of abandoning psychosis would be annihilation. Sebastian had tried undermining the therapy again and again. In the early days, he would come in, after taking extra anti-psychotics, claiming to be cured. Now, six months later, he came in to act out.
The session had already started and so Martin sat in his usual chair, holding his patient in mind, giving him the security of a dependable concern, even when there was no obvious way for Sebastian to appreciate it. If he did show up, Sebastian would find his therapist imperturbably keeping their session going. To Sebastian, at some level, Martin’s dependability was like discovering that a torturer was still waiting for him in his prison cell, and yet, at another level, one of the things infiltrating Sebastian’s mind was the regular rhythm, the rocking cradle of their three weekly sessions. Just because there was an eruption of unconscious material constantly bursting into Sebastian’s consciousness didn’t mean that he was able to understand its meaning; his mind was more like the ‘darkness visible’ of Milton’s hell. Sebastian had encrypted his secrets, using a system he had taken the further precaution of not knowing how to decipher. That way, if he were tortured, he could honestly say that he had no idea what the secret was. Patience was paramount; if too many delusions were removed too rapidly, he might feel too threatened to continue the work and Martin might lose him. How delusional he was being was sometimes hard to tell. When Sebastian had come in claiming that Satan had followed him from the bus stop, Martin treated the news at face value, saying how worrying that must have felt, and asking if this had ever happened before, but he was clear in his own mind that he was dealing with a fantasy. Outside the most extreme cases, though, it was important to keep an open mind, however strongly his experience pulled him towards one interpretation or another. Quite apart from the issue of data protection, and the reluctance or inefficiency that made it hard to get medical notes and detailed biographies, Martin was a psychoanalyst who preferred not to read prejudicial material about his patients, but to deal immediately and directly with the facts, in so far as they could be established, and the symbolic language that emerged from the sessions themselves. Sebastian had been referred to him at the clinic simply as Sebastian Tanner, a man of thirty-four, who had first been admitted to psychiatric hospital fifteen years before, with a diagnosis of schizophrenia, and had suffered from recurring episodes ever since.
When the basement doorbell finally rang, Martin buzzed Sebastian in and opened the inner door to his consulting room to welcome his patient. Sebastian often stopped in the bathroom to delay his arrival and only emerged with a few minutes of the session left, but on this occasion, he stormed down the corridor, swept past Martin and marched straight up to the garden door.
‘You fucking lied to me!’ he said. ‘The cow jumped over the moon long before Armstrong landed on it. One giant – stepping on mankind.’
‘Really?’ said Martin. ‘How did the cow do that?’
‘Armstrong probably gave it a huge kick, unless it had a rocket up its arse. Wernher von Braun, Wernher von Braun / What goes up must come down! Animal-tested. The Russians sent a dog, but Armstrong sent a cow. Being a Nazi isn’t rocket science, you just have to invade everything.’
Sebastian opened the door, went into the garden, took out a cigarette and paced up and down, singing inaudibly while Martin sat in his chair waiting. There were only twenty-three minutes of the session left and there was always the worry that it would be difficult to persuade Sebastian to leave before the next patient arrived. Martin tried to relax and do his work. If Sebastian didn’t come in of his own accord, he would invite him to come in a few minutes before the session ended. Until then, he would wait and work with whatever evidence he had. Every interpretation was a threat to Sebastian’s defences. There was only so much that Martin could hazard about Wernher and Armstrong and the moon, but he could persist in treating them as meaningful communications.
Before long, Sebastian threw his cigarette on the grass, ground it underfoot, and came hurtling back into the room.
‘“You say Sigi/ I say Ciggie,”’ he sang at the top of his voice, ‘“I say Ziggie/ you say Sigi. Sigi/Ciggie/ Ziggie/Sigi/ Let’s call the whole thing off!” Seriously, seriously, let’s call the whole thing off. Please. Seriously. Please, let’s call the whole thing off.’
Sebastian hid behind the armchair he was meant to be sitting in and continued to whisper ‘seriously’ again and again.
Martin could only see the edge of his arm. He let him whisper to himself for a while, and then said, ‘I take what you have to tell me very seriously, Sebastian,’ in a soothing and conciliatory voice, not much louder than Sebastian’s whisper. Sebastian reappeared around the edge of the armchair, not far from the ground.
‘I wasn’t always called Sebastian,’ he said, like a child telling a secret.
‘Really?’ said Martin. ‘What did you used to be called?’
‘They won’t tell me. They said I had to get used to my new name when they adopted me. I was only two. Two for the price of one. If they had told me my real name, my real parents might find me again, but they were Nazis who would stop at nothing.’
‘Like Wernher von Braun?’ asked Martin.
‘Raining down rockets, V1s and V2s on innocent men, women and children. Ripping people apart.’
Sebastian made a high-pitched whistling noise, but instead of ending with an explosion, it went on and on. An adoption fantasy (if it was a fantasy; he must of course keep an open mind, but it almost certainly was) represented a kind of progress. So many patients, at all levels of disorder, played with the idea of adoption, to escape their fate or to embellish the rejection of their families. Martin had treated borderline patients with convincing and elaborate adoption stories which turned out to be fake, but in the case of a schizophrenic patient, the story was even more likely to be the displacement of forbidden, life-threatening feelings of terror towards a real source of harm.
‘My granny,’ said Sebastian, ‘during the war’ (high-pitched whistle) ‘was sitting on the floor of her bedroom, playing with her favourite doll’ (high-pitched whistle) ‘when a bomb came through the roof and snatched her doll away and went down’ (high-pitched whistle) ‘through all the other floors of the house and lodged in the basement.’
The whistling stopped.
‘Did the lodger explode?’ asked Martin.
‘No, of course it didn’t explode! Did it sound like it exploded?’ shouted Sebastian.
‘No, it didn’t, that’s why I asked,’ said Martin sympathetically.
Sebastian stood up and walked out furiously from behind the armchair.
‘She spent the whole of her miserable life sitting on an unexploded bomb. Can you imagine what that feels like, you heartless bastard?’
Sebastian rampaged around the room, tearing books from the shelves and flinging them to the floor. Oh, no, thought Martin, not this again. Perhaps he was getting too old to take on psychotic patients.
‘Is this what would have happened if the bomb had exploded?’ asked Martin.
‘This?’ shouted Sebastian. ‘A few books on the floor? Are you fucking joking? We’re talking about innocent men, women and children being ripped apart. The smell of burning human flesh. We’re talking about my granny, when she was just a little girl, having her life ruined for ever.’
Sebastian sank to the floor, lay on the carpet and started to run, lying down, making his body turn in agitated circles.
‘You can’t even tell the difference between what’s alive and dead!’ he screamed. ‘You’re nothing but a monster.’
Martin stayed silent for a while, aware that they only had five minutes left.
‘So, your new parents called you Sebastian to help protect you,’ said Martin.
‘You’d have to ask William Tell,’ said Sebastian.
‘Well, maybe he’ll come to our next session and tell us his side of the story,’ said Martin.
‘Time’s running out, time’s running out,’ said Sebastian, spinning more frantically than ever around the floor. Then, he suddenly stopped, got up and knelt with his hands clasped behind his back, tilting his head and twisting his body in a perfect impersonation of a Renaissance painting of St Sebastian tied to a post with his body full of arrows.
‘What kind of monster would force his son to stand there with an apple on his head, in front of everybody, waiting for a cigarette to go through his body?’
‘Well, that’s a very important question which we can take up on Wednesday,’ said Martin, inured to the endlessly repeated phenomenon of the most important material emerging at the end of a session.
‘Can I stay here?’ asked Sebastian desperately.
‘I’m afraid, as we’ve discussed—’
‘Hang on, hang on,’ said Sebastian, switching his tone abruptly. ‘If my name was changed, who’s to say that yours wasn’t?’
‘My name has always been Martin Carr,’ said Martin firmly. ‘And we’ll resume—’
‘Put a sock in it, Wernher. For all I know, you’re my father. You’re the fucking Nazi!’ said Sebastian, walking out with the belligerence of a man determined to avoid rejection.
Martin sat motionless in his chair as Sebastian slammed the basement door behind him (if it was behind him). He listened carefully to detect any signs of his patient not having genuinely left. He heard nothing. Could it really be true? Adopted at two, covered in cigarette burns. And he had said it was his birthday last month. It was too much of a coincidence, but a coincidence was always too much, otherwise it would just be an incident. With their passion for synchronicity, this sort of thing must happen to Jungians all the time, but Martin was not at all thrilled to find himself wondering if his maddest patient was also his daughter’s twin. It might still very well be a fantasy, but he couldn’t help being reminded of some of the turbulent family discussions Olivia had provoked during her adolescence, when she was trying to process her own story and had found out that adopting parents often had detailed access to the socio-economic and health backgrounds of the children’s birth families. Describing candidates from the most troubled families, the author of one article had written, ‘One might ask, “Who would adopt such a child?”’ Olivia had confronted Lizzie about how much she had been told about her biological parents’ history and background.
‘We knew that it was an accidental pregnancy,’ said her mother, ‘and we knew about your father’s criminal record.’
‘Was that appealing to you?’ asked Olivia, half-joking.
‘I wouldn’t put it that strongly,’ said her mother, smiling at Olivia. ‘We just wanted to look after you.’
‘I suppose,’ said Olivia, who had emerged too recently from looking up ‘Adoption’ in the index of dozens of books from her parents’ shelves.
‘Was I an experiment?’ she asked.
‘Don’t be so silly,’ Lizzie said, kissing Olivia on the forehead, ‘you were a child who needed help.’
Mr and Mrs Tanner must have known about Sebastian’s background, if indeed he was adopted. It seemed to have involved considerable physical abuse, similar to the torment that Karen had described to Olivia when she first told her about Keith. If the Tanners were adoptive parents, they must have been naively or morbidly or courageously drawn to such an extreme situation, but whatever their level of motivation and awareness, they had not been competent to deal with the highly traumatised child they adopted. Martin felt that in some way, by being so difficult, Sebastian might have become an unconscious punishment for the sterility of one or both of the parents. Perhaps they had adopted a traumatised child because of the trauma of spending years trying unsuccessfully to have a child of their own. Instead of making up for their failure, Sebastian summarised it. They were not necessarily bad people, in fact they must have been ambitiously good people, to have adopted a child of nearly two from such a troubled background, and then celebrated his martyrdom by renaming him. If he was Karen’s son and if she had been telling Olivia the truth when she said she had put him up for adoption at eighteen months, Sebastian must also have been kept in a holding pen of social services for nearly six months.
What was he doing? This was all speculation, and yet he found himself so disturbed by the possibility that he had been unknowingly treating his daughter’s brother that he was tempted to break his own rules and ring the halfway house, or the adoption agency, or one of the psychiatric hospitals Sebastian had been admitted to, and see if he could find out the facts of the case. He gazed at the phone on his desk for a while and then drew back. He couldn’t abandon Sebastian, whatever family he had been born into, and he had a professional obligation not to disclose his suspicions to Olivia, so there was no immediate conflict, but he would certainly have to think about the ethical ramifications when he had time, and disentangle whatever counter-transference might have been triggered by the subject of adoption. For now, though, he had to clear his mind and prepare for his next patient.