‘I wanted a picture that wasn’t too interesting. That wouldn’t distract people.’
‘I like pictures that have things in them, like old-fashioned sailing ships where you can see all the details, the ropes and the sails. That’s not my kind of picture. It’s too fuzzy, too moody.’
Frieda was about to say that that was a good thing because they weren’t here to talk about pictures when she stopped herself. ‘Is moody necessarily a bad thing?’
Alan nodded. ‘I get it,’ he said. ‘You think everything means something. What you do is read things into what I say.’
‘So what would
Alan sat back and folded his arms, as if he was fending Frieda off. On Monday, he had been anxious and needy. Today he was assertive, defensive. At least he had turned up. ‘You’re the doctor. Or, at least, a sort of doctor. You tell me. Don’t you get me to go on about my dreams? Or should I talk about when I was a child?’
‘All right,’ said Frieda. ‘I’m a doctor. So tell me what’s wrong with you. Explain why you’re here.’
‘As far as I know, I’m here so that I don’t make a complaint against that other doctor. That guy is a complete disgrace. I know you all want to stick together. I still might make a complaint.’
Alan kept shifting his position. Uncrossing his arms, pushing his hands through his hair, looking at Frieda, then looking away.
‘There are places for you to complain,’ she said. ‘If that’s what you decide to do. But not here. This is a place where you come and talk about yourself, with honesty. You can do it in a way that you probably can’t with anyone else, not with close friends or your wife or people you work with. You might want to see that as an opportunity.’
‘The problem I have with all of this’ – Alan gestured around the room – ‘is that you think you can solve problems just by talking about them. I’ve always seen myself as a practical person. If there’s a problem, I believe in going out and fixing it. Talking about it doesn’t get it done.’
Frieda’s expression was unchanged but she felt a familiar kind of weariness. This again. So often the first proper session was like a particularly awkward first date. At a first session, people had to claim that they didn’t really need help, that they didn’t know what they were doing there, that there was no point in just talking about things. Sometimes it took weeks to get beyond that stage. Sometimes you never really got beyond it at all.
‘As you said, I’m a doctor,’ said Frieda. ‘Describe your symptoms to me.’
‘They’re the same as they were before.’
‘Before when?’ Frieda leaned forward slightly in her chair.
‘When? I don’t know exactly. I was young. In my early twenties – it would have been about twenty-one, twenty-two years ago. Why?’
‘How did you deal with it then?’
‘They went away.’ Alan paused, made a strange, anxious grimace. ‘Eventually.’
‘So for twenty-odd years, you’ve not felt anything like them, and now they’re recurring.’
‘Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean I need to be here, necessarily. I think my GP just referred me as a way of getting rid of me. My own theory is that doctors basically just want their patients to go away as quickly as possible and stay away. The main way they do it is to give you a pill, but if that doesn’t work they send you to another doctor. Of course, what they really want…’
Suddenly he stopped. There was a pause.
‘Are you all right?’ asked Frieda.
Alan slowly twisted his head. ‘Can you hear that?’
‘What?’
‘There’s a sort of creaking sound,’ he said. ‘It’s from over there.’ He pointed to the far side of the room, the opposite side from the window.
‘It’s probably just building work,’ said Frieda. ‘There’s a construction project…’
She frowned. There really was a creaking noise and it wasn’t coming from across the street. It was inside the house. And yet not exactly inside. The noise got louder. The creaking turned into a groaning, and then they could feel it as well as hear it. Then there was what sounded like an explosion in the ceiling and something fell through: plaster and pieces of wood, but mainly it was a man. He landed heavily on the carpet. Chunks of plaster fell on to him. The room was suddenly full of white dust. Frieda just sat there. It was so unexpected that she felt unable to process what was happening. She just stared at it as if a theatrical spectacle was taking place in front of her. And she was waiting to see what would happen next.
Meanwhile Alan had leaped up and run towards the figure slumped on the floor. Could he be dead? Frieda wondered. How could a dead man have fallen through her ceiling? Alan knelt down and touched it, and the figure stirred. Slowly it shifted, pulled itself on to its knees and then stood. He was a man. He was bulky, shaggy-haired, in overalls, but it was difficult to make out anything else about him because he was covered with a film of grey dust. Except that on his face, to the side of one eyebrow, there was a trickle of blood, which ran down over his cheekbone. He looked at Alan and then at Frieda, as if confused.
‘What floor is this?’ he asked. His accent sounded foreign, Eastern European.
‘What floor?’ said Frieda. ‘The third. Are you all right?’
The man looked up through the hole, then back at Frieda. He patted at his arms and his body, releasing a snowstorm of dust. ‘Excuse me a moment,’ he said, and walked out of the room.
Frieda and Alan looked at each other. Alan gestured at the chair he’d been sitting in. ‘Do you mind?’
‘Mind what?’
He dragged the chair under the hole in the ceiling and then stood on it. Frieda looked up at him, then at his feet and his shoes on her chair, and didn’t know what to say. Alan’s head had disappeared into the hole. She heard a muffled ‘Hello’ and other words that she couldn’t make out. Then she heard another voice that was even more distant. Finally Alan stepped down off the chair.
‘Does it look serious?’ said Frieda.
Alan pulled a face. ‘Lucky I’m not at work.’
‘Are you a builder?’
‘I work for the housing department,’ he said. ‘I’d have something to say about that if I was at work.’
‘I’ll have to get it fixed. Does it look difficult?’
Alan glanced up at the hole, shook his head and sucked air through his teeth in a hiss. ‘Rather you than me,’ he said. ‘Bloody cowboys. If he’d broken his neck, who would have paid for that? These bloody Poles.’
‘From the Ukraine,’ said a voice from the hole.
‘Are you listening?’ said Frieda.
‘What?’ said the voice.
‘Did you hurt yourself?’
‘It’s your ceiling that got hurt,’ said Alan.
‘I come soon,’ said the voice.
Frieda stepped away from the rubble. ‘I’m sorry about this,’ she said. ‘I suppose we’ll have to stop here.’
‘Did you arrange it?’ said Alan. ‘Is it a way of breaking the ice?’
‘We should make another arrangement. If you’re comfortable with that.’
Alan looked up at the hole. ‘What’s disturbing about that,’ he said, ‘apart from the shock, is that it shows how close we live to each other. We’re like animals in cages on top of each other.’
Frieda raised her eyebrows at him. ‘You’re talking too much like an analyst. Sometimes someone falling through a hole in the ceiling is just someone falling through a hole in the ceiling. It doesn’t mean anything. It’s just an accident.’ She looked at the rubble and the dust that was now settling on every surface. ‘A particularly irritating accident.’
Alan’s face turned serious. ‘I’m the one who should say sorry,’ he said. ‘I was being rude to you. That other guy wasn’t your fault. My GP wasn’t your fault. There are things I’d like to talk to you about. Thoughts. In my head. Maybe you could make them go away.’
‘You weren’t rude, not really. So I’ll see you again on Friday. Assuming I’ve got this lot cleared up.’
She showed Alan out and then, as she always did, she went to her desk and started to write notes on the session, though it had lasted barely ten minutes. She was interrupted by a knock at the door. A knock, not a ring from the street bell, so she imagined it would be Alan, but it was the man from upstairs, still covered with dust.
