Therapy

Inspector Calls at the National. Brilliant production on a stunning surrealist set, played without a break, like a perfectly remembered dream. I never rated Priestley before, but tonight he seemed as good as bloody Sophocles. Even Amy was swept away — she didn’t attempt to recast the play once over supper. We ate in Ovations, a selection of starters — they’re always better than the main courses. Amy had two and I had three. And a bottle of Sancerre between us. We had a lot to talk about besides the play: my trouble with Heartland and Amy’s latest crisis over Zelda. Amy found a pill in Zelda’s school blouse pocket when she was doing the laundry, and she was afraid it was either Ecstasy or a contraceptive. She couldn’t decide which would be worse, but she didn’t dare to ask the girl about it for fear of being accused of spying on her. She fished the pill, sealed inside an airmail envelope, out of her great swollen bladder of a handbag, and tipped it on to my side-plate for inspection. I said it looked like an Amplex tablet to me, and offered to suck it and see. I did, and it was. Amy was hugely relieved at first. Then she said, with a frown, “Why is she worried about bad breath? She must be kissing boys.” I said, “Weren’t you at her age?” She said, “Yes, but not with our tongues down each other’s throats like they do now.” “We used to,” I said, “it was called French kissing.” “Well, you can get AIDS from it nowadays,” said Amy. I said I didn’t think you could, though I don’t really know.
    Then I told her about clause fourteen. She said it was outrageous and I should sack Jake and get the Writers’ Guild to challenge the contract. I said that changing my agent wouldn’t solve the problem and that Jake’s lawyer had already checked the contract and it was impregnable. Amy said, “Merde.” We kicked around various ideas for writing Priscilla out of the series, which became more and more facetious as the level of the wine fell in the bottle: Priscilla is reclaimed by a former husband whom she supposed to be dead, and whom she omitted to mention to Edward when they married; Priscilla has a sex-change operation; Priscilla is kidnapped by aliens from outer space... I still think the best solution is for Priscilla to die in the last episode of the present series, but Amy wasn’t surprised that Ollie and Hal gave it the thumbs-down. “Not death, darling, anything but death.” I said that was a rather strong reaction. “Oh God, you sound just like Karl,” she said.
    The remark gave me a rare glimpse of what passes between Amy and her analyst. She’s usually rather secretive about their relationship . All I know is that she goes to his office every weekday morning at nine sharp, and he comes into the waiting room and says good morning, and she precedes him into the consulting room and lies down on the couch and he sits behind her and she talks for fifty minutes. You’re not supposed to come with a prepared topic, but to say whatever comes into your head. I asked Amy once what happened if nothing worth saying came into your head, and she said you would be silent. Apparently she could in theory be completely silent for the whole fifty minutes and Karl would still collect his fee; though Amy being Amy, this has never actually happened.
    It was about eleven when we came out of the theatre. I put Amy in a cab, and walked home to exercise the old knee joint. Roland says I should walk at least half an hour every day. I always enjoy crossing Waterloo Bridge, especially at night, with the buildings all floodlit: Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament to the west, the dome of St Paul’s and the knife-sharp spires of other Wren churches to the east, with the red light on top of Canary Wharf winking on the horizon. London still feels like a great city, seen from Waterloo Bridge. Disillusionment sets in when you turn into the Strand and find that all the shop doorways have their quilted occupants, like mummies in a museum.
    It didn’t occur to me that my own chap would be in residence, perhaps because I’d only ever seen him from inside the flat, on the video screen, well after midnight. He was sitting against the wall of the entryway, with his legs and lower trunk inside his sleeping-bag, smoking a roll-up. I said, “Hey, out of it, you can’t sleep here.” He looked up at me, brushing a long forelock of lank ginger hair from his eyes. I should say he’s about seventeen. Hard