Espresso Tales

man”, but also because he found cooking a relaxing and creative activity.

Indeed, as he stood above his saucepan, adding cream to scallops or delicately re-inflating porcini mushrooms with a judicious measure of boiling water, all sorts of thoughts would go through his mind. This, he felt, was the time in which his unconscious could order the experiences of the day, before dreams took over that function slightly later on. This theory, that one should think through things before the dreaming mind began to function, was one which he hoped to develop in a book. It would be called, he had decided, Pre-Dream Dreaming, and he anticipated that it would be every bit as successful as his well-known book on Wee Fraser. Of course there were other books to write, and these were jockeying for position in his already busy schedule. One The Memory of Pigs

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of these was Eat Your Way to Mental Health, a title which had come to him during one of his sessions at the stove. He remembered exactly how it had happened. He had been lightly sauteing garlic in olive oil when it occurred to him that our attitudes towards food were often affected by our view of what other people would think about our eating the food in question. He stopped, and stared at the garlic. He liked the taste of garlic, as did his wife. And yet people, even garlic enthusiasts, were so cautious, almost apologetic about its use. Who – other than the French, of course – would even contemplate putting a clove of garlic in the oven, its head neatly chopped off and a drop of oil dribbled very gently onto the top, and then a few minutes later taking it out and eating it? With nothing to accompany it?

And yet why should one not do that? The answer, of course, lay not in any culinary realm, but in a social one. Garlic smelled.

People who ate garlic smelled. And nobody wants to smell.

Now, most people would leave it at that. Dr Fairbairn, however, felt that social inhibitions of that sort – the desire not to smell – were probably much more harmful and limiting than people generally thought they were. A person who did not worry about how he appeared to others, or what others thought of him, would enjoy far more resolution, more inner tranquillity, than one who did. And one way of encouraging this resolution would be to get people to eat what they wanted to eat. If self-expression could be encouraged at the table, then self-expression would follow in other parts of a person’s life.

On this particular insight, Dr Fairbairn had sketched out an entire theory of how inhibitions and anxieties could be addressed both in the kitchen and at the table. It would be called food therapy and it would become immensely popular.

Other books would be written on the subject. There would be courses. There would be lecture tours. And he and Estelle, his wife, could leave Sciennes – charming though it undoubtedly was – and go and live somewhere like Palm Beach. That was a very pleasant prospect, and indeed gave rise to a new idea, 278 Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

an autobiography, which perhaps could be called From Motherwell to Palm Beach.

But now, sitting in an armchair in his flat in Sciennes, his tomato sandwiches on a plate before him, Dr Fairbairn thought of what lay ahead. Irene was right; he would have to seek out Wee Fraser and apologise to him for what he had done all those years ago. But first he would have to relive, in as vivid a way as possible, the precise sequence of events that had led him to raise his arm.

He had been in his room with Wee Fraser. He had given the boy a small wooden farm set, consisting of a couple of pigs, a tiny tractor, a stylised farmer and his wife, and some blocks out of which to make walls and pens. There was enough there to allow the child to portray a wide range of internal dynamics. But Wee Fraser had insisted on laying the pigs on the ground upside down, with their tiny porcine legs pointing upwards.

“No, Fraser,” Dr Fairbairn had said. “Piggies go like this.”

And he had placed the pigs the right way up.

“Dinnae,” said Wee Fraser, turning the pigs upside down again.

Dr Fairbairn righted the pigs, and at that Wee Fraser turned his head and bit him hard. Dr Fairbairn then smacked Wee Fraser.

That is what had to be redressed. He stood up. He would do it now. Right now. He would go to Burdiehouse and find Wee Fraser. He reached for his blue linen jacket.

85. Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

Dr Fairbairn left the flat in Sciennes and made his way to the nearby bus-stop on Causewayside. His mood was buoyant; now that he had made the decision to go, he was keen to be there as soon as possible. He was sure that he would find Wee Fraser.

He had extracted the address from his original records and a Encounter, Catharsis, Flight

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quick search of the telephone directory had revealed that there was still a family living there by the name of Maclean – Wee Fraser’s surname. If the bus did not take its time in coming, then he thought that he could be knocking on the front door of Wee Fraser’s house just before six, which would be a good time to catch them in, as that was when ordinary people (as both he and Irene called them) ate their tea.

A bus arrived and Dr Fairbairn boarded it. Because of the time of day it was fairly full, and Dr Fairbairn had to move down to the back in order to find a seat. And even then it was a small seat, as he was obliged to perch beside a large woman in a floral dress. The woman looked at him with distaste, as if he had no right to sit down on space which she could so easily have flowed into. Dr Fairbairn caught her hostile glance and returned it.

Schizoid, he thought.

He looked at the other passengers. He did not travel by bus very often – in fact he never went anywhere by bus – and it was interesting for him to look at the faces of the people and speculate on their psychological problems. On the bench on the other side of the narrow aisle were a young man and young woman, dressed in nondescript clothes. The man wore jeans, the knees of which had become distressed and ripped. Then he had a tee-shirt on which was written the word NO. The young woman had very similar garb, although her tee-shirt had a more complicated message. It said: I’M NOT DRUNK, IT’S JUST

THE WAY I’M STANDING.