Michael Robotham - Shatter

University of Bath

It’s eleven o’clock in the morning, late September, and outside it’s raining so hard that cows are floating down rivers and birds are resting on their bloated bodies.

The lecture theatre is full. Tiered seats rise at a gentle angle between the stairs on either side of the auditorium, climbing into darkness. Mine is an audience of pale faces, young and earnest, hung over. Fresher’s Week is in full swing and many of them have waged a mental battle to be here, weighing up whether to attend any lectures or go back to bed. A year ago they were watching teen movies and spilling popcorn. Now they’re living away from home, getting drunk on subsidised alcohol and waiting to learn something.

I walk to the centre of the stage and clamp my hands on the lectern as if frightened of falling over.

‘My name is Professor Joseph O’Loughlin. I am a clinical psychologist and I’ll be taking you through this introductory course in behavioural psychology.’

Pausing a moment, I blink into the lights. I didn’t think I would be nervous lecturing again but now I suddenly doubt if I have any knowledge worth imparting. I can still hear Bruno Kaufman’s advice. (Bruno is the head of the psychology department at the university and is blessed with a perfect Teutonic name for the role.) He told me, ‘Nothing we teach them will be of the slightest possible use to them in the real world, old boy. Our task is to offer them a bullshit meter.’

‘A what?’

‘If they work hard and take a little on board, they will learn to detect when someone is telling them complete bullshit.’

Bruno had laughed and I found myself joining him.

‘Go easy on them,’ he added. ‘They’re still clean and perky and well-fed. A year from now they’ll be calling you by your first name and thinking they know it all.’

How do I go easy on them, I want to ask him now. I’m new at this too. Breathing deeply, I begin again.

‘Why does a well-spoken university graduate studying urban preservation fly a passenger plane into a skyscraper, killing thousands of people? Why does a boy, barely into his teens, spray a schoolyard with bullets, or a teenage mother give birth in a toilet and leave the baby in the wastepaper bin?’

Silence.

‘How did a hairless primate evolve into a species that manufactures nuclear weapons, watches Celebrity Big Brother and asks questions about what it means to be human and how we got here? Why do we cry? Why are some jokes funny? Why are we inclined to believe or disbelieve in God? Why do we get turned on when someone sucks our toes? Why do we have trouble remembering some things, yet can’t get that annoying Britney Spears song out of our heads? What causes us to love or hate? Why are we each so different?’

I look at the faces in the front rows. I have captured their attention, for a moment at least.

‘We humans have been studying ourselves for thousands of years, producing countless theories and philosophies and astonishing works of art and engineering and original thought, yet in all that time this is how much we’ve learned.’ I hold up my thumb and forefinger a fraction of an inch apart.

‘You’re here to learn about psychology- the science of the mind; the science that deals with knowing, believing, feeling and desiring; the least understood science of them all.’

My left arm trembles at my side.

‘Did you see that?’ I ask, raising the offending arm. ‘It does that occasionally. Sometimes I think it has a mind of its own but of course that’s impossible. One’s mind doesn’t reside in an arm or a leg.

‘Let me ask you all a question. A woman walks into a clinic. She is middle aged, well-educated, articulate and well-groomed. Suddenly, her left arm leaps to her throat and her fingers close around her windpipe. Her face reddens. Her eyes bulge. She is being strangled. Her right hand comes to her rescue. It peels back the fingers and wrestles her left hand to her side. What should I do?’

Silence.

A girl in the front row nervously raises her arm. She has short reddish hair separated in feathery wisps down the fluted back of her neck. ‘Take a detailed history?’

‘It’s been done. She has no history of mental illness.’

Another hand rises. ‘It is an issue of self harm.’

‘Obviously, but she doesn’t choose to strangle herself. It is unwanted. Disturbing. She wants help.’

A girl with heavy mascara brushes hair behind her ear with one hand. ‘Perhaps she’s suicidal.’

‘Her left hand is. Her right hand obviously doesn’t agree. It’s like a Monty Python sketch. Sometimes she has to sit on her left hand to keep it under control.’

‘Is she depressed?’ asks a youth with a gypsy earring and gel in his hair.

‘No. She’s frightened but she can see the funny side of her predicament. It seems ridiculous to her. Yet at her worst moments she contemplates amputation. What if her left hand strangles her in the night, when her right hand is asleep?’

‘Brain damage?’

‘There are no obvious neurological deficits- no paralysis or exaggerated reflexes.’

The silence stretches out, filling the air above their heads, drifting like strands of web in the warm air.

A voice from the darkness fills the vacuum. ‘She had a stroke.’

I recognise the voice. Bruno has come to check up on me on my first day. I can’t see his face in the shadows but I know he’s smiling.

‘Give that man a cigar,’ I announce.

The keen girl in the front row pouts. ‘But you said there was no brain damage.’

‘I said there were no obvious neurological deficits. This woman had suffered a small stroke on the right side of her brain in an area that deals with emotions. Normally, the two halves of our brain communicate and come to an agreement but in this case it didn’t happen and her brain fought a physical battle using each side of her body.

‘This case is fifty years old and is one of the most famous in the study of the brain. It helped a neurologist called Dr Kurt Goldstein develop one of the first theories of the divided brain.’

My left arm trembles again, but this time it is oddly reassuring.

‘Forget everything you’ve been told about psychology. It will not make you a better poker player, nor will it help you pick up girls or understand them any better. I have three at home and they are a complete mystery to me.

‘It is not about dream interpretation, ESP, multiple personalities, mind reading, Rorschach Tests, phobias, recovered memories or repression. And most importantly- it is not about getting in touch with yourself. If that’s your ambition I suggest you buy a copy of Big Jugs magazine and find a quiet corner.’

There are snorts of laughter.

‘I don’t know any of you yet, but I know things about you. Some of you want to stand out from the crowd and others want to blend in. You’re possibly looking at the clothes your mother packed you and planning an expedition to H amp;M tomorrow to purchase something distressed by a machine that will express your individuality by making you look like everyone else on campus.

‘Others among you might be wondering if it’s possible to get liver damage from one night of drinking, and speculating on who set off the fire alarm in Halls at three o’clock this morning. You want to know if I’m a hard marker or if I’ll give you extensions on assignments or whether you should have taken politics instead of psychology. Stick around and you’ll get some answers- but not today.’

I walk back to the centre of the stage and stumble slightly.

‘I will leave you with one thought. A piece of human brain the size of a grain of sand contains one hundred thousand neurons, two million axons and one billion synapses all talking to each other. The number of permutations and combinations of activity that are theoretically possible in each of our heads exceeds the number of elementary particles in the universe.’