Therapy

that Jane and Gus are not married — I guess that this would not be acceptable in her community. Well, I hope Jane will get married one day, preferably not to Gus, though she could probably do worse. Today I boldly asked Miss Wu if she expected to marry herself and she smiled and blushed and lowered her eyes, and said, “Marriage is a very serious responsibility.” She took my pulse again and pronounced that it was much improved and wrote down something in her book. Then she left the room for me to get dressed.
    I left her cheque in a plain brown envelope on the little table where she keeps her needles and other stuff. The first time she treated me I made the mistake of taking out my wallet and crassly thrusting banknotes into her hand. She was very embarrassed, and so was I when I perceived my faux pas. Paying therapists is always a bit tricky. Alexandra prefers to do it all by mail. Amy told me that on the last Friday of every month when she goes into Karl Kiss’s consulting room there’s a little envelope on the couch with her bill in it. She picks it up and silently secretes it in her handbag. It is never referred to by either of them. It’s not surprising, really, this reticence. Healing shouldn’t be a financial transaction — Jesus didn’t charge for miracles. But therapists have to live. Miss Wu only charges fifteen quid for a one-hour session. I wrote her out a cheque for twenty, once, but this only caused more embarrassment because she ran after me in the car park and said I’d made a mistake.
    When I was dressed she came back into the room and we made an appointment for two weeks’ time. Next Friday I have aromatherapy. Miss Wu doesn’t know that, though.
     
    I’m game for almost any kind of therapy except chemotherapy. I mean tranquillizers, antidepressants, that sort of stuff. I tried it once. It was quite a long time ago, 1979. My first very own sitcom was in development with Estuary — Role Over , the one about a house-husband with a newly liberated, careerist wife. I was working on the pilot when Jake called me with an offer from BBC Light Entertainment to join the script-writing team for a new comedy series. It was a typical twist in the life of a freelance writer: after struggling for years to get my work produced, suddenly I was in demand from two different channels at once, I decided that I couldn’t do both jobs in tandem. (Jake thought I could, but then all he had to do was draw up two contracts and hold out two hands for his commission.) So I turned down the Beeb, since Role Over was obviously the more important project. Instead of just telephoning Jake, I wrote him a long letter setting out my reasons in minutely argued detail, more for my own sake than for his (I doubt if he even bothered to read it through to the end). But the pilot was a disaster, so bad that Estuary wouldn’t even expose it to the light of cathode tube, and it looked as if the series would never happen. Naturally I began to regret my decision about the BBC offer. Indeed “regret” is a ridiculously inadequate description of my state of mind. I was convinced that I had totally destroyed my career, committed professional suicide, passed up the best opportunity of my life etc. etc. I suppose, looking back, it was my first really bad attack of Internal Derangement. I couldn’t think about anything else but my fateful decision. I couldn’t work, I couldn’t relax, I couldn’t read, couldn’t watch TV, couldn’t converse with anybody on anything for more than a few minutes before my thought process, like the stylus arm of a haunted record deck, returned inexorably to the groove of futile brooding on The Decision. I developed Irritable Bowel Syndrome, and went about drained of energy by the peristaltic commotion in my gut, fell exhausted into bed at ten-thirty and woke two hours later soaked in sweat, to spend the rest of the night mentally rewriting my letter to Jake demonstrating with impeccable logic why I could perfectly well work for the BBC and Estuary at the same time, and constructing other scenarios which turned back the clock and allowed me to escape in fantasy the consequences of my decision: my letter to Jake was lost, or returned to me unopened because wrongly addressed, or the BBC came back pleading with me to have second thoughts, and so on. After a week of this, Sally made me go and see my GP, a taciturn Scot called Patterson, not the one I have now. I told him about my restless bowels and