Philip Kerr - A Philosophical Investigation

‘You’re to go straight in,’ she said, ‘as soon as you’ve undressed.’ She led the way to the changing cubicles.

In common with other Neo-Existential therapists, Doctor Blackwell required that her patients should make the encounter in a state of total nudity, to encourage a sense of greater personal openness. Jake entered the cubicle and drew the curtain behind her. She took off her jacket and laid it on the chair for a moment. Next she unzipped her skirt and hooked it on a hanger to which she then added the jacket. While she was unbuttoning her blouse she heard the familiar rustle of Doctor Blackwell’s skirt as she approached the other side of the curtain.

‘Just come through when you’re ready, Jake,’ said the doctor.

It was a small, well-spoken voice that bordered on the edge of being reverent, as if Doctor Blackwell were the Mother Superior of a quiet and very devout order of nuns. The kind of voice that reminded Jake of the headmistress at her own convent school. Perhaps that was one reason why she consulted Doctor Blackwell and not someone else: because she was like someone who had once been kind to her and understanding, and at a time when, thanks to her father, she most needed it.

‘All right,’ said Jake, stepping quickly out of her pants and unclipping her brassiere. There was a full-length mirror on the wall of the cubicle and briefly Jake regarded her own naked body with criticism. Her breasts were too big, but apart from that everything still looked about the same as when she left Cambridge. Not bad for a woman of thirty-seven. Some of Jake’s friends who had had families now looked more like her own mother. There was no doubt, it was having children that really aged a woman.

A red cotton dressing gown that seemed to Jake to be rather masculine was hanging from the clothes peg. Jake put it on, tied the sash and then pulled the curtain back.

Doctor Blackwell’s room was big and airy with a deep-pile blue carpet that was specially designed to feel relaxing under barefoot. She was sitting at a large grey leather-topped desk that faced the wall and on which was hanging a copy of a painting by Francis Bacon. Behind her shoulder were two arched windows that were each the size of a telephone box. As Jake came into the room she looked up from Jake’s case-notes and smiled sweetly.

‘And how have you been?’

‘Fine,’ said Jake. ‘Well, I mean, about the same really. No different.’

Doctor Blackwell nodded. She was a largish woman of about fifty with big, farmer’s wife hands and an incongruously doll-like face. Her hair was expensively cut, curving neatly in under each side of her lower jaw, and she wore a short white bouclé dress which showed the tan of her arms and seemed only remotely clinical.

‘Is it warm enough for you in here?’

Jake said that it was.

‘All right then. Close your eyes and try to relax. That’s it. Breathe in, breathe out. Now when I tell you to, I want you to slip off your gown and at the same time I want you to imagine that you’re throwing off all your inhibitions, that you’re uncovering not just your body, but all your innermost feelings as well.’ She paused for a second. ‘Now take it off.’

Jake shrugged the gown onto the carpet and stood silently at attention. She felt no sense of shame or embarrassment, only a sense of complete liberation.

‘Open your eyes,’ Doctor Blackwell said cheerily. ‘And lie down.’

In the centre of the room was a black leather couch, and beside it a chair. Jake lay down and stared at the expensive light fitting that helped to heat the room. Then she heard the chair creak as Doctor Blackwell sat down.

‘Any more nightmares?’ she asked.

‘Not lately.’

‘Seeing anyone at the moment?’

‘You mean am I sleeping with anyone, don’t you?’

‘If you like.’

‘No, I’m not sleeping with anyone.’

‘How long has it been since you made love?’

Jake shook her head and remained silent. Then she said: ‘I don’t know that I’ve ever done that.’

She heard Doctor Blackwell write something on her notepad.

‘And do you still experience feelings of acute hostility to men?’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me about the most recent one.’

‘There was a man in a hotel in Frankfurt. He tried to pick me up and I was rude to him. Later on, when I saw him in the lift, he assaulted me.’

‘How did he assault you?’

‘He touched my breast.’

‘Did you think he meant to rape you?’

‘No, I don’t think so. He was just a bit drunk, I think.’

‘So what happened then?’

Jake smiled uncomfortably. ‘What do you think happened? I decked him.’

‘And how did that make you feel?’

‘For a while I felt just fine about it,’ she said. ‘But later on, I wished I hadn’t. At least I wished I hadn’t hit him quite so hard. Like I said, I wasn’t in any danger. I don’t know why I did it.’

‘Ultimately we are what we choose to do.’

‘Well that’s why I come here,’ said Jake. ‘To feel better about the choices I do make.’

‘I’m not sure I can help you feel better about assaulting someone,’ said Doctor Blackwell. ‘But tell me how you feel in general when you discover that some of the choices you’ve made have been wrong ones. As with this man you hit.’

Jake sighed. ‘I feel as if my life has no real meaning.’

‘What about your father: how do you feel about him these days?’

‘I suppose I hate him even more now that he’s dead.’

‘Even so, your father was just one man — not every man.’

‘A father is every man when you’re a child.’

‘If your father hadn’t been the monster you tell me he was, Jake...’

She snorted loudly.

... Sometimes she thought it might just have been easier to have told Doctor Blackwell that she had been sexually abused by her father, because the reality of what she had experienced was so much more difficult to explain. Incest between father and daughter and the traumatising effect it could have on a girl was so much more tangible, so much easier to understand than what Jake had been through. It didn’t seem quite enough to say that throughout her adolescence Jake had been verbally abused and reviled by her father; that he never missed an opportunity to belittle her in front of other people; that he displayed absolutely no affection for her at all.

She might have been able to have forgiven her father all of that. What she could never have forgiven was his hatred of her mother.

Jake’s mother had been a timid, long-suffering sort of woman, apparently able to ignore or to excuse each and every manifestation of her husband’s vile behaviour: his crippling sarcasm; his angers; his sulks; his many infidelities; his lies; and his violence. She never found the courage to leave him. Life may have been unspeakable with him, she had said to Jake, but it would have been unthinkable without him. Until finally the day came when that unspeakable existence had suddenly become unbearable and she had killed herself.

It had been the seventeen-year-old Jake who found her lying on the floor of the garden shed, with a kitchen knife in her chest. Naturally she had assumed that her mother had been murdered by her father. Perhaps that was how she had meant it to look. But the police had discovered that a vice on her father’s workbench was adjusted to the width of the knife handle. They had concluded that she had fixed the knife in the vice and then deliberately impaled herself upon it, in the manner of a Roman general. For a long time Jake had held the belief that the police had been wrong and that her father had indeed murdered her mother. It was only after she herself joined the police that she was finally able to accept the truth of their conclusion.