Marcel Theroux - Strange Bodies

Then the breakthrough. She started asking about Lucius without any prefatory circumlocution to let me know that she knew he wasn’t my son. Better than that. After a preliminary foray, he became ‘your son, Lucius’. When I realised that was what she’d actually said, I became a little breathless and had to stop. My first thought was This is it : Ivan’s ticker has had enough and is giving up on me. Your son, Lucius. Then my face convulsed and I began to cry. I wept for my little lost boy, and the life I used to have. She pushed a box of tissues towards me. I can’t think how long it’s been since I’ve cried like that. I felt ineffable gratitude. Even perched on a grimy pastel bean bag in the DHU, it seemed for one second that I’d had my child given back to me. I told her this after the storm had passed and she looked surprisingly gratified. We sat in silence for a while. My carcass felt an unaccountable sense of peace, as though it and I were joined up, one thing.

‘You mentioned that you saw your GP after your wife left you.’

‘Did I?’

‘Yes, in one of our previous sessions.’

‘Don’t you mean, after Dr Slopen’s wife left me?’

‘If you will, yes. Do you recall what he prescribed?’

‘It was whatever bog-standard serotonin reuptake inhibitor they’re doling out these days. Seroxat, maybe?’ I waited for her to make a note, but she didn’t, nor was she recording this one. The inference was too tantalising for me not to draw it: ‘Does this mean you believe me?’

We sat there for a while without speaking; the plastic shingle inside her bean bag gave a rustle as she crossed her legs.

‘I’m taking two weeks’ leave,’ she said.

Maybe it was the strip-lighting, but she looked sallow and hollow-eyed.

‘I usually give some advance warning, but this time it hasn’t been possible. I wonder if you’d like to explore how you feel about that.’

I told her that it made me worry slightly for her. These are not salubrious surroundings for anyone’s mental health. I didn’t mention that it’s been over a week since she added anything to her journal; not just silent about me but silent in general. I asked her if she was all right.

‘Why do you ask?’

‘You seem … out of sorts.’

‘I’m fine,’ she said reflexively and then checked herself, as though she knew she should have said something more therapeutically non-committal.

‘I’m obviously not the first to have asked you that,’ I said.

‘While I am away,’ she said, ‘you will be able to continue your work with Dr White.’

‘Very well,’ I said. ‘I’ll miss you.’

She cleared her throat. ‘That’s time.’

It’s frequently been remarked, by persons more qualified than I to pronounce on it, that the act of caring is a powerful tonic for the care-giver.

In those weeks when Jack Telauga was under my care, our relationship deepened into something that I believe was of comfort to both of us. I wouldn’t dare compare the problems I was having then with his. My worries were of the common or garden variety and from the seed catalogue of the average middle-aged melancholic male. My pain was ordinary, though not the less painful for that; while whatever was wrong with Jack was something I could barely describe. And still, it was something to have a companion in those difficult times, however eccentric.

We ate together each evening. He relaxed during meals and enjoyed his food with a touching lack of self-consciousness. At the same time his table manners were so rudimentary that watching him eat could be a stomach-turning experience. Whenever we went to Pizzeria Sette Bello on Mitcham Lane I’d ask for a table in the back where no one could see him attacking his food like a fox going into a dustbin and fouling his clothes with cheese and tomato sauce.

He would get very animated waiting for the order, drumming his fingers on the plastic tablecloth and wagging his head from side to side. ‘Depend upon it, sir, many a rich man dining tonight upon roast swan would as lief exchange his vittles for a plate of this cooked cheese!’

In the repletion afterwards, he was as happy as I ever saw him. He could be charming and talkative with a wide variety of people. There was a memorable encounter with a Bobo Ashanti Rastafarian whom we met outside the bingo hall and who tried to sell us a broom. And he had a deep curiosity about things that I took for granted, questioning the shopkeepers around the tube station for hours about mangoes, cassava and plantains.

He loved talking about religion and literature. He knew the names of no writers after 1780 until I lent him some Sherlock Holmes stories, which he devoured almost as voraciously as he went for the pizza. He couldn’t make head or tail of a newspaper. We had mixed success with the Indian restaurants on Upper Tooting Road (tandoori chicken he liked; he thought lamb dhansak was some kind of practical joke).

Jack’s mood and volubility were highly variable. Sometimes he sat sullenly, speechless; other times he was eager to talk, usually to catechise me on my religious faith, and my lack thereof. Once, he and I walked to the lido — the outdoor swimming pool on the common — in dusty, yellow, late summer sunshine, and he gazed in open-mouthed wonder at the contrails of a plane. One afternoon we even went ice-skating at the rink on Streatham High Road and he was surprisingly adept.

He didn’t seem conventionally insane in any way that I could understand. But there was no way of comprehending him. In some eerie and fundamental way, he didn’t appear to belong to our world. But that didn’t seem the same as being mad.

I tested him, of course. Some part of me believed that the whole thing was an act. It would have been the simplest explanation; but if it was a mask, he never dropped it. He remained perfectly in character. He shed real tears over the death of James Boswell when I showed him a newspaper account of it on microfiche. In fact, his whole reaction was so dramatic — pallor, astonished shaking, two hours of silent brooding before I persuaded him to take a sedative — that I decided to forgo any similar assessments.

You might think that was his intention: to intimidate me into giving up my examination. But the sincerity of his behaviour was such that I just stopped questioning it. The only way I could make any sense of him was to accept that he was in the hold of the profound and irrational belief that he actually was Johnson; a belief he never wavered from. His most immediate memories, however wittingly or unwittingly they had been constructed, were identical to Johnson’s: of the fatal sickness descending on him, fretting about his pension, about the fractious household of weirdos he’d ended up fostering under his roof, and the almost unbearable thought of the happiness he’d forgone with Hester Thrale, now Piozzi. It was patently absurd, but once accepted, the premise explained so much about him. The letters he’d forged — if that was even the right word — made a queer kind of sense. The years from 1784 to 2009 were a meaningless entr’acte to him. From his incarceration in Malevin’s dungeon he had scribbled letters in Pentel to the world he believed he belonged to, praying that someone would have the heart to help him. He can’t have known the pathos and impossibility of what he asked. I pray that the gulf between us is not so irremeable that you would neglect a promised kindness. That wasn’t the plea of Johnson in 1784, begging for assistance as he spiralled down into melancholy and death; that was Telauga in 2009, hoping against all probability that someone — his sister; Hester Piozzi; Boswell? — would spring him from his fiercely lit cell. I thought of the book sliding out of his hand, the date on its title page too alarming to digest; too dissonant with his fantasies; the proof that he was centuries out of time. And I think of Webster’s words: That is the very moving aspect of this work. How awful must reality be for the psychotic to take refuge in this? But of course she doesn’t know the half of it.