The room feels like the base of a cheesecake. Sylvie sits down, rolls up her shirtsleeves, looks at the box of tissues. The therapist is standing in the doorway of the therapy room holding two glasses of water. She is tall and slim, has slender exposed wrists, wears a thick gold ring on her middle finger, like a king. She is smiling, but she has to smile.
When she was coming up to the therapy room, Sylvie’s shoes had made the sound of one, two, three, shake your body down, shake it all down, on the wooden stairs, and the song still loops, silently, inside her head. She looks at the therapist—her face, her hair, her hands—and tries, not for the first time, to work out how old she is. Sylvie wants a rough age, so she can have an end date in mind for her obsession. If the therapist is approaching sixty now, the obsession shouldn’t last more than twenty years, max. Sylvie doubts she would feel desperate to touch an eighty-year-old’s body, however beautiful they were.
“You look deep in thought. What’s on your mind?” the therapist says, still smiling, as she puts down the glasses of water on their separate tables.
The room is plain and calm, but Sylvie feels a mild unease knowing she can’t leave. She feels stuck in her chair, the chair legs stuck to the floor. Still, she doesn’t want to leave, would prefer never to have to leave at all, and it’s a feeling that’s sickly and sweet. Today is her thirteenth session. She feels she’s revealed a lot about herself already, but she barely knows anything about the therapist; she doesn’t know what the therapist likes to do, for example. She knows a little bit about what the therapist’s husband likes to do, because he has a blog. He likes drinking whiskey and watching documentaries and painting landscapes. But all Sylvie knows about the therapist, apart from what qualifications she has and where she got them, is what she can see on the surface of her body—the bandage on her hand that turned out to be covering a dog bite, the change in the color of her long straight hair from gray to peach.
“I was thinking about Nick,” Sylvie says.
Sylvie told the therapist last session that the therapy room reminds her of Nick’s bedroom. Nick had been Sylvie’s boyfriend when she was seventeen and still at school. In Nick’s room, Sylvie had rolled around on the floor, smoked Camel Lights, sucked the horn-of-plenty pendant that was on his necklace. In the therapy room, she sits still in her chair and just talks, yet somehow it feels the same. The therapist had suggested that both rooms felt like contained worlds, separate from the rest of her life, with separate rules. Sylvie had said she had the feeling that she was being saved from everybody else in these two rooms. From her parents in Nick’s room, and from her contemporaries in the therapy room.
The therapist wears a different outfit every week and Sylvie wonders if she does this on purpose, so Sylvie won’t be able to appropriate her style and try to look like her, for comfort, if she wants to. Today the therapist is wearing a cream blouse with a bow, gray trousers, and a gray cardigan.
“I was thinking about this time,” Sylvie is saying, “when we were lying on Nick’s floor with a blanket over us. We were messing around, but Nick stopped and pushed the blanket upward with both hands and said he was trying to get out of the cobwebs. I remember thinking he was talking on a deeper level than other people, and I felt so happy with him then, and so happy with myself for my choice of boyfriend. I remember thinking, My mum would never understand Nick, but I understand him, he’s referencing the ‘Lullaby’ video—the video for this single that had just come out,” Sylvie says.
The therapist nods.
“But it was me that didn’t understand,” Sylvie goes on. “Nick probably thought he was stuck in cobwebs because he was high. He wasn’t trying to impress me with his knowledge of a music video, and he wasn’t being metaphorical.”
“Did you know he was taking drugs?” the therapist asks. “No,” Sylvie says. “He never took anything in front of me,
I had no idea. Then one time, when I was sitting on his knee on the merry-go-round at the park, he said, ‘Do you know every time you’ve seen me, I’ve been out of my mind on a different drug?’ I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t understand why he’d been keeping it secret, or why he waited until then to tell me.”
“Did he ask you to take drugs with him after that?”
“Yes!” Sylvie gets a mint out of her bag. She remembers Nick’s front room when his parents were away. Charlotte there, closing the curtains, Nick and Hatstand on the sofa, their spoons ready on the low table, the feeling that she couldn’t stay.
“He tried to get me to take heroin with him. He said we’d go into a different world. But I was too scared.”
“I’m glad you were too scared,” the therapist says. “It’s something we have in common,” she continues brightly.
“What, that we were both too scared to try heroin?” Sylvie asks, laughing.
“Yes!” the therapist answers, beaming.
*
Sylvie hadn’t chosen the therapist because she had found her attractive. She had chosen her because she was the only one, out of the twenty-three pages of local therapists Sylvie had scrolled through, who didn’t strike her as too annoying to talk to. She had chosen her by default! At first Sylvie had related to the therapist as she would relate to one of her mum’s friends, maybe mixed with a doctor. But then she had seen her outside of the therapy room.
Sylvie and the therapist had both been walking their dogs on the crown of the hill. They were walking toward each other, and Sylvie was conscious that they were like mirror images, both attached to a small white dog on a black lead. The therapist was dressed in peach, some kind of checked fabric, buttoned up, and above her coat there was the shape of her long straight hair and sunglasses. Sylvie wasn’t sure if she was seeing correctly in the moment, and wasn’t sure if she was recalling correctly afterward. She didn’t feel that she could trust herself. But the feeling she got then, seeing the therapist, reminded her of how she would hold her face up to the sun when she was little, and close her eyes. When the color of the light coming through her eyelids made her certain for the first time that the world was good.
Later, Sylvie wondered why she hadn’t felt this in the therapy room, wondered how she’d been oblivious to the therapist’s beauty there. Had she been too consumed by talking and crying? Had she been looking for too long at the curtains or into the corner of the room? Or maybe the therapist just looked really good in coat and sunglasses. Had she been wearing Aquascutum? In Sylvie’s first session, the therapist had asked what Sylvie would prefer to do if they crossed paths in town. It was the client’s choice, the therapist had said. Sylvie had felt that she didn’t care either way and opted for saying hello. But when it actually happened, when they were just about to cross paths, Sylvie’s body had turned around and started running down the hill. She had picked up her dog, Curtains, who had brain damage and couldn’t run on a lead, and held her to her chest as she ran.
Since that encounter, Sylvie’s brain had brought up the image of the therapist outside multiple times a day. The coat, the hair, the sunglasses, the dog on a lead. The image made Sylvie feel as if she were about to uncover the key to something big. She felt she might be saved if she followed the therapist, got her approval, made her love her. There was a sense that a great freedom was close. There might be no need to worry about carrying on when somebody else had already worked out the meaning of life, if the meaning of life was how to become the perfect human. The game, the puzzle, might be over. Whatever it was the key to, the image made Sylvie feel sharp and happy and insanely high.
The air outside Sylvie’s house hummed from then on with the prospect of another sighting. She took her dog out for extra walks. But at night, when it was too dark to see another person’s face, and when the therapist would be shut inside her house, Sylvie’s body would start to ache. She could feel herself being pulled toward the bay window which led to the street that led to the therapist’s house and she would find that she was moaning. She put her hands on the glass panes. She wanted to know what the therapist was doing. She wanted to know so she could measure it against what she was doing and, if possible, narrow the gap.
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