strange clothes shop that sold the sort of stuff that old women wear, cardigans and tweed coats. You’re wondering why I’m telling you this, aren’t you?’ Frieda didn’t respond. ‘I was standing outside another bric-a-brac shop, full of stuff you couldn’t imagine anyone buying or selling. I remember, I was staring at a stuffed owl that was perched on a sort of fake tree branch and I was half wondering whether Carrie would allow another dead bird into the house.
‘Just at that moment, a woman came walking towards me. I wasn’t paying attention to her at first. She was walking through my field of vision, if you understand what I mean. She was wearing a bright orange jacket and a very short tight skirt and these high-heeled boots.’
Alan fidgeted and looked down. He went on speaking but no longer met Frieda’s eyes.
‘Suddenly, I realized she was talking to me. She said, “Oh, you!” and she pushed herself close against me.’ Alan faltered and then continued. ‘She put her arms round me and she kissed me. She – It was a proper kiss. With her tongue. You know when you’re in a dream and strange things happen to you and you just accept them and go along with it? It was like that. I didn’t push her away. I felt as if I was in a film or something, that it wasn’t really happening to me but to someone else.’ He swallowed hard. ‘There was blood on my lip. Then, after a bit, she pulled back. She said, “Call me. It’s been a while. Haven’t you been missing me?” And then she was gone. I couldn’t move. I just stood there and watched her walking away in her orange jacket.’
There was a silence.
‘Is there anything else?’ asked Frieda.
‘Isn’t that enough?’ said Alan. ‘A woman I don’t know coming up and kissing me? You want more than that?’
‘I mean, what did you do?’
‘I wanted to follow her. I didn’t want it to end. But I went on standing there and then she was gone and I was back in myself, if you see what I mean, dull old Alan who nothing really happens to.’
‘What did this woman look like?’ asked Frieda. ‘Or did you only see her jacket and skirt and boots?’
‘She had long hair, sort of blonde-red. Jangly ear-rings.’ Alan touched the lobes of his own ears. He coughed and turned red. ‘Big breasts. And she smelt of cigarettes and something else.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘Like yeast or something.’
‘And her face?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘You didn’t see her face?’
He looked bewildered. ‘I don’t remember it. I think she was -’ he coughed ‘- you know, nice-looking. It all happened so suddenly. And my eyes were shut a lot of the time.’
‘So, you have an erotic, arousing experience with an unknown, almost faceless woman, in the street.’
‘Yes,’ said Alan. ‘But I’m not like that.’
‘Did this really happen?’
‘Sometimes I think it didn’t – that I just went to sleep on the bench in the park and dreamed it.’
‘Did you enjoy it?’
Alan thought for a moment and almost gave a grin. He seemed to catch himself at it. ‘I felt excited, if that’s what you mean. Yes. If it happened, that’s bad, and if I made it up, that’s bad as well. In a different way.’ He grimaced. ‘What would Carrie say?’
‘You haven’t told her?’
‘No! No, of course not. How can I tell her that, although we haven’t had sex in months now, I let some attractive woman with big breasts kiss me but I don’t know if it really happened or if I just wanted it to?’
‘What do you make of it?’ asked Frieda.
‘I’ve told you before, I’ve always thought of myself as invisible. People don’t really notice me, and if they do, it’s because they’ve got me mixed up with someone else. When this happened, I think a little bit of me was tempted to go off with this woman, be the person she mistook me for. It sounded as if he was having more fun than I was.’
‘So what do you want me to say?’
‘After it happened, I was totally confused and then I thought, That’s the sort of thing Dr Klein wants me to tell her. Mostly I think what I’ve told you has been quite boring, but I thought this was weird and a bit creepy and it would be just the sort of thing I should tell you.’
Frieda couldn’t stop herself smiling at that. ‘You think I’m interested in weird and creepy things?’
He let his head drop into his hands. Through his fingers, he said, ‘Everything used to be so simple. Now nothing’s simple. I don’t even know who I am any more, or what’s real and what’s in my mind.’
Chapter Twenty-six
‘So what do you think?’ said Frieda.
Jack pulled a face. ‘It’s a classic fantasy,’ he said.
They were sitting in Number 9, their habitual meeting place now for Jack’s mentoring sessions, which had become less formal and more frequent. Jack was nursing his second cappuccino. He liked it here: Kerry fussed over him, a mixture of motherly and flirtatious; Marcus sometimes came out of the kitchen and insisted that he try his latest creation (today a marmalade Bakewell tart that Jack ate, though he didn’t really like almonds or marmalade) and Katya sometimes came and sat on Frieda’s lap. Jack thought Katya liked Frieda the way cats like people who don’t fuss over them. Frieda would ignore her or, sometimes, simply lift her off and deposit her on the floor.
‘In what way?’
‘For men, anyway. A sexually provocative woman approaches, pulls you out of your boring everyday life into a weird, more exciting existence.’
‘So what does this woman represent?’
‘It might be you,’ said Jack, and took a hasty gulp of his coffee.
‘Me?’ said Frieda. ‘Large-breasted, orange jacket, tight short skirt and blonde-red hair?’
Jack went red and looked around the cafe to see if anybody had overheard. ‘It’s a sexualized version of you,’ he said. ‘It’s a classic example of transference. You’re the woman who is stepping into his ordinary life. He can talk to you in ways that he can’t talk to his own partner. But he still needs to disguise it by expressing it in terms of this exaggeratedly sexual female figure.’
‘Interesting,’ said Frieda. ‘A bit like a textbook, but interesting. Any other theory?’
Jack thought for a moment. ‘I’m interested in this story he keeps telling of his anonymity, that he keeps feeling he’s being mistaken for other people. This may be an example of solipsism syndrome. You know, it’s the dissociative mental state where people feel that they’re the only person who is real and everybody else is an actor or has been replaced by a robot or something like that.’
‘In which case he would need an MRI scan.’
‘It’s just a theory,’ said Jack. ‘I wouldn’t recommend that unless there were other symptoms of cognitive impairment.’
‘Any other possibilities?’
‘I was taught to listen to the patient. I suppose there is a possibility that a woman simply mistook him for someone else and that the whole thing doesn’t mean much at all.’
‘Could you imagine going up to a girl and actually kissing her by mistake?’
Jack thought of mentioning a couple of examples where it would be all too easy and then thought better of it. ‘He must have looked pretty similar to the person she thought he was,’ he said. ‘If it really happened. But if I’ve learned anything from you it’s that what we’re here to do is to deal with what’s inside the patient’s head. In a way, the truth of what happened isn’t relevant. What we need to concentrate on is the meaning that Alan gave to the event and what he meant by telling you about it.’
Frieda gave a frown. It felt strange to hear her own words being parroted back at her like that. They sounded both dogmatic and unconvincing. ‘No,’ she said. ‘There’s a huge difference between someone who is mistaken for other people, for whatever reason, and someone who believes that he is mistaken for other people. Don’t you
