Desmond Barry - London Noir

The funny thing was, though, a few weeks after it all happened I was looking on the web for porn when something caught my eye — a video clip. The description said: Sexy brunette finger-fucks old guy up the ass — in his socks — funny. I downloaded it, sent it out on a group e-mail — to the Law Society, three Cabinet MPs, and the Lord Chancellor’s office. No text, just Nicholas Monroe, QC in the subject field.

Monroe didn’t make it onto the Queen’s birthday honors this year. He must be very disappointed.

Kentish Town

That’s what she said. “I hate his fingers.” I tugged open the freezer door — iced up, as usual; who the fuck ever had time to defrost a freezer? — and when I managed to pull the box out, it too was encased in solid ice. I stabbed at it a few times with the bread knife — more because it felt good than for any effectiveness it was having — then threw it into the microwave and put it on defrost. I opened a bottle and poured a large glass.

“You’re supposed to let wine breathe.”

I lit a Dunhill — only ten so far today, not bad.

“And you might consider letting me breathe as well,” Dino coughed. He sounded like an old, gay Jack Russell with emphysema.

“Nice try,” I said, “but I never did get the knack of emotional blackmail.”

“Shame, or Kate might still be here and we might have something decent to eat.”

“Fuck you,” I smiled.

“In your dreams. A dangerous line to use on a Freudian,” Dino giggled like a girl. “So, this patient of yours, I take it you thought of asking whose fingers and what she had against them?”

“I told you, that’s all she said.”

“ I hate his fingers? For fifty minutes?”

“Apart from the forty spent saying nothing at all and the two spent telling me she was only here because her GP told her she was getting no more temazepam until she took some sessions with the practice shrink.”

“Who’s her GP? Philip?”

“Yeah. His letter said his best guess was OCD — obsessive-compulsive disorder — but it could be a weird phobia. He said he knew what a hard-on I got from those.” Since I moved out of general practice into psychiatry — long story, and one I’d prefer not to go into here — I’d made a name, if I say so myself, with my papers on unusual phobias.

“Hating being touched is not unusual. Having your hand up my arse gives me the heebie-jeebies and I’m a hardened pro.”

I chose to ignore him. “Yeah, haphephobia’s pretty commonplace, but if it’s fingers, per se — well, dactylophobia’s a new one on me. But I don’t know, from the look of her she might well have some kind of body dysmorphic disorder. She looked borderline anorexic. Like she weighed all of seven stone.”

She was the kind of girl who leaves no footprints when she comes into a room, but makes a big impression, you know what I mean? She was small and delicate, looked about sixteen years old. Wore one of those little girl dresses, bare legs, short-sleeved cardigan. And big Bambi eyes, like one of those little urchin paintings the tabloids always say are cursed. Burn your house down the second you go out. Maybe they’re right. Her medical records said she was thirty-five and married.

“Would it help if I sat in on a session?” Now and again I’d take Dino along — mostly when I was treating children. They seemed to relax around him. Opened up more. The microwave dinged. The cardboard box was wet and steaming. Smelled disgusting. I tore it off and put the plastic tray back in the oven. Dino was right about the food.

“I don’t know,” I said. “I’ll see.”

“I’ll tell you what I see: a lump in your trousers.” Damn if the little fucker wasn’t right again. “Takes wood to know wood. And what I know I see is a man who wants this little girl all to himself.”

When Dino got excited his voice became unbearably camp. Now he was chanting in a high, sour voice, “Doc has got a stiffie, Doc has got a stiffie.”

“Right, that’s it.” I strode across the kitchen and put my hand around his throat, lifting him clean out of the chair. I carried him like that into the living room, and hurled him against the wall. Legs splayed, bow tie skewed, his jaw hinged open like a snake getting ready to swallow a rabbit, the dummy lay propped up against the TV set, staring at space.

For the first half hour of the second session she didn’t say a word. Just chewed the hangnail at the side of her thumb and looked up and sideways at me through her eyelashes. That little-girl-lost look. It was like she was waiting for me to tell her what to do. I found myself reaching across the desk to comfort her, make it all right. Fortunately I stopped myself in time; that was all I needed, another incident. If it wasn’t for my old friends at the practice — or more to the point, if it wasn’t for what I had on my old friends at the practice — I would have been out on the street. Which is where Kate and her fucking lawyer wanted me. At the last minute, I pretended to swat an imaginary bug off the Kleenex box on her side of the desk.

Since she wouldn’t talk, I did. I told her not to worry. That she’d come to the right place. Phobias, I said, like American T-shirts, came in all different colors but just one size, extra-large. There’s no such thing as being a little bit phobic. It’s like being pregnant, you either are or you aren’t. As I said that, in reflex, her knees pressed together tight. They were pink and rosy, like a little girl left out in the playground too long, but there was nothing at all childlike about the rest of those legs. They ended in a pair of expensive, black, strappy stilettos, with a half-moon cut out of the end of each one where her red lacquered toenails peeped through.

I found myself, and I don’t know why, talking about myself, telling her about my automatonophobia. Fear of ventriloquist dummies. When she didn’t seem that impressed, I admitted that it wasn’t, of course, as socially debilitating as being finger phobic, since you’re likely to run into more fingers on a daily basis than ventriloquist dummies. But the effects, I said — the panic, the terror, that black-ice, deep-gut nausea — they were exactly the same. A few years ago, I told her, I was in the Oxfam shop buying coffee when I saw an old wooden dummy staring down at me from the shelf behind the till. In the past I would have frozen in fear. But I was so over my phobia that I bought it and took it home. Since then we’d become something of a double act, at least in medical circles, me and Dino. Kate of course would have put it differently, but Kate wasn’t here. Kate was fucking her lawyer, when she was colder to me than a Marks & Spencer microfuckingwave meal.

I assured her that she too could feel the same way about fingers.

“It’s not all fingers I hate,” she said. “Just my hus-band’s.”

Her husband’s? We were getting somewhere. If I’d only known where, I’d have run straight out of that door, down to Kentish Town station, and jumped on the first train going anywhere else.

My other half is a bitch. Did I tell you that? I’m sorry. I’ve been obsessing a lot lately, going over and over the notes. These are from our third session — the one where I looked across the desk at her and fell uselessly, impossibly, in love. It was raining like a dog that day. A typical black, filthy London day, I remember. Sunny when I left home at 7.30, though, or I would have taken the car. But I walked down the street and into a climate change. You’d think I’d be used to that trick by now, wouldn’t you? The one God plays on the English almost every single fucking day: an hour of sun first thing in the morning to wake you up and get you off to work, then pissing on you mightily. I’m a slow learner, I guess.