The meanest Flood

was no reason to damn the man.
     

33
     
    Ruben went up the stairs and into the doctor’s office where Sarah Murphy, the counsellor, was waiting for him. He wasn’t disappointed. She looked just as good as he remembered her. Nice smile on her face. Wearing a suit this time, grey for business, but she still had the silver choker on. Little make-up round the eyes. No lipstick.
    She looked at his crimson strides for a while, as if she couldn’t believe that a guy like him had so much dress sense. And there was a tiny movement around her nose as she caught a whiff of his Brut.
    ‘How’ve you been?’ she asked.
    He liked the way her shoulders sloped away from her neck, and how she kept her hands still in front of her on the desk. She’d been an object of fantasy for the last couple of days, since their first meeting, and he’d been hoping for the fantasy in the flesh. But she was subtly different.
    Before he’d gone to prison Ruben knew women who could be the fantasy. They had the knack of seeing what you wanted and giving you it almost exactly. But Kitty hadn’t been like that and that was one of the reasons he’d been so in love with her. And now there was Sarah Murphy and she was the same. He couldn’t tell if she sensed what he wanted her to be but he was sure that whether she sensed it or not she wasn’t going to compromise herself. She was going to be who she was and nothing more or less.
    And the beauty of it was that she still came across real good. She’d definitely had lipstick on in the fantasy and the fact that she didn’t wear any now didn’t diminish the memory for a second. If anything it enhanced it. He couldn’t think why. He just knew that he wasn’t disappointed.
    ‘I’ve been good,’ he said. ‘I haven’t been paralysed. I’ve done what I need to do. The grief s still there, but I understand that. I know grief, how it’s good for you. Like a natural process, something I have to go through. And I’ve been sad, a leetle bit depressed. But before it was incapacitating me, I couldn’t work. Now it’s more like sadness. I think I’m over the hump.’
    Her smile got wider. ‘It’s good to hear,’ she said. ‘But sometimes these things get better before they get worse. There might be a reaction.’
    ‘I don’t think so.’
    ‘Maybe not. But it’s as well to be aware that it could happen.’
    ‘What I thought,’ he told her, ‘because I’m so much better and because mostly it’s to do with you and the talk we had, I wondered if we should shut up shop here and go for a drink?’
    She took her hands off the desk and put them under it, maybe on her lap, he couldn’t see where they went. She was lost for words for a moment or two. The smile disappeared but she kept the eye contact. Seemed to be drilling right through him, like nobody had ever asked her to have a drink before. But he couldn’t believe that. She was a good-looking woman.
    ‘Somewhere in the town,’ he said. ‘You choose the place. We don’t have to talk about me. We can talk about you. Be more democratic. Get to know each other.’
    ‘That would be rather unprofessional of me, Mr Parkins.’
    ‘Come on, call me Ruben.’
    ‘When someone has been through a traumatic event, like you, with losing Kitty, there are a number of possible reactions. One of the best known is what we call transference. The subject becomes fixated on the therapist or the counsellor. It might feel like affection or love or a strong attraction but in reality it’s gratitude. I can only help you, Mr Parkins, if I remain at a distance, retain some objectivity. It wouldn’t be helpful for our relationship to go further than the bounds of professional decorum.’
    ‘That’s OK,’ Ruben told her. ‘You don’t have to give me an answer now. Think about it for a couple of days. I don’t want the professional stuff anyway. I want to get to know you. I’ve got a feeling about it. I think we could be good. Sometimes I’m wrong and if I’m wrong about it I won’t keep you on a string. I’ll walk away from it. Kitty taught me that. She taught me how to live better and just because she’s dead I’m not gonna go back to the old ways.
    ‘This is not transference or whatever you called it. I’m just asking you to have a drink with me, swap a few stories, see where it leads. That’s a normal thing to do. I’m a guy and I like the look of you and you’re a woman and you’re interested in me.’
    ‘I’m what? Now I know