Anxious People(23)

24


The truth is that Zara, who appears to be a little more than fifty years old, but exactly how much no one has ever dared ask, was never interested in buying the apartment. Not because she couldn’t afford it, of course, she could probably have bought it with the spare change she found between the cushions on the sofa in her own apartment. (Zara regarded coins as disgusting little havens of bacteria which have probably been touched by God knows how many middle-class fingers, and she’d rather have burned her sofa cushions than pick one up, so let’s put it like this: she could definitely have bought that apartment for the cost of her sofa.) So she went to the viewing with her nose already wrinkled, wearing diamond earrings large enough to knock out a medium-sized child, if that turned out to be necessary. But not even that, if you looked at her really closely, could hide the lurching grief inside her.



* * *




The first thing you have to understand is that Zara has recently been seeing a psychologist, because Zara has the sort of career which, if you do it for long enough, sometimes means you have to seek professional help to get instructions on what you can do with your life beyond having a career. Her first meeting with the psychologist didn’t go terribly well. Zara began by picking up a framed photograph from the desk and asking: “Who’s that?”

The psychologist replied: “My mom.”

Zara asked: “Do you get on well with her?”

The psychologist replied: “She passed away recently.”

Zara asked: “And what was your relationship like before that?”

The psychologist noted that a more normal response would have been to offer condolences on her death, but tried to maintain a neutral expression and said: “We’re not here to talk about me.”

To which Zara replied: “If I’m going to leave my car with a mechanic, first I want to know if her own car is a worthless heap of junk.”

The psychologist took a deep breath and said: “I can understand that. So let me just say that my mom and I had a very good relationship. Is that better?”

Zara nodded skeptically and asked: “Have any of your patients ever committed suicide?”

The psychologist’s chest tightened; she replied: “No.”

Zara shrugged her shoulders and added: “As far as you’re aware.”

That was a fairly cruel thing to say to a psychologist. The psychologist, however, recovered quickly enough to say: “I only completed my training relatively recently. I haven’t had that many patients, but I do know they are all still alive. Why are you asking these questions?”

Zara looked at the only picture on the walls of the psychologist’s office, pursed her lips thoughtfully, and said, with surprising honesty: “I want to know if you can help me.”

The psychologist picked up a pen, smiled a practiced smile, and said: “With what?”

Zara replied that she was having “trouble sleeping.” She had been prescribed sleeping pills by her doctor, but now her doctor was refusing to prescribe more unless she spoke to a psychologist first. “So here I am,” Zara declared, and tapped her watch, as if she were the one being paid by the hour rather than the reverse.

The psychologist asked: “Do you think your trouble sleeping is related to your work? You said in your phone call that you run a bank. That sounds like it could be quite a stressful, high-pressure job.”

Zara replied: “Not really.”

The psychologist sighed and asked: “What are you hoping to accomplish during our meetings?”

Zara countered at once with a question of her own: “Will this be psychiatry or psychology?”

The psychologist asked: “What do you think the difference is?”

Zara replied: “You need psychology if you think you’re a dolphin. You need psychiatry if you’ve killed all the dolphins.”

The psychologist looked uncomfortable. The next time they met she wasn’t wearing her dolphin brooch.



* * *




During their second session Zara asked, somewhat out of the blue: “How would you explain panic attacks?”

The psychologist lit up the way only psychologists can do at that question: “They’re hard to define. But according to most experts, panic attacks are the experience of—”

Zara interrupted: “No, I want to know how you would explain them!”

The psychologist shuffled uncomfortably on her chair and pondered various different answers. Eventually she said: “I’d say that a panic attack is when psychological pain becomes so strong that it manifests itself physically. The anxiety becomes so acute that the brain can’t… well, in the absence of any better words, I’d say that the brain doesn’t have sufficient bandwidth to process all the information. The firewall collapses, so to speak. And anxiety overwhelms us.”

“You’re not very good at your job,” Zara replied drily.

“In what sense?”

“I already know more about you than you know about me.”

“Really?”

“Your parents worked with computers. Programmers, probably.”

“How… how on earth… how did you know that?”

“Has it been hard to deal with the shame of that? The fact that they did jobs that had a tangible application in the real world, whereas you work with…”