Гейл Ханимен - Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine

‘I was feeling a bit sad and things got on top of me, that’s all. So my friend suggested that I should see my GP. And the GP said I had to come here, if I didn’t want to take the pills.’

She looked intently at me. ‘Could you tell me why you were feeling sad?’ she said.

I released a sigh that was longer and more unintentionally histrionic than I had been expecting. I felt my throat constrict at the end of the breath, tightening with tears. Don’t cry, Eleanor. DO NOT CRY IN FRONT OF THE STRANGER.

‘It’s quite boring,’ I said, trying my best to sound nonchalant. ‘It was just … a sort of love affair that went wrong. That’s all. A perfectly standard situation.’ There was a lengthy silence. Eventually, purely to try and get this over with as quickly as possible, I spoke again. ‘There was a misunderstanding. I thought … I misinterpreted some signals. It turned out that I had very much got the wrong impression of the person concerned.’

‘Has this happened to you before?’ she asked, quietly.

‘No,’ I said.

There was another lengthy silence.

‘Who was this person, Eleanor? Can you talk a bit more about what happened to make you … how did you put it … misunderstand the signals? What were the signals?’

‘Well, there was a man that I took a bit of a liking to, a little crush, you might say, and I got slightly carried away, and then I realized that, actually, I’d been a bit silly. We weren’t going to be together. And he — well, it turned out that he wasn’t even right for me anyway. He wasn’t the man I thought he was. I felt sad about that, and I felt extremely stupid for getting it all so wrong. That’s all it was …’ I heard my voice trail off.

‘OK, well … there are a few things I’d like to unpick in all of that. How did you meet this man? What was the nature of your relationship with him?’

‘Oh, I never actually met him,’ I said.

She stopped writing in her notebook, and there was a bit of an awkward pause. I think, in theatrical terms, it’s called a beat.

‘Right …’ she said. ‘So how did your … your paths cross, then?’

‘He’s a musician. I saw him perform and — well, I fell for him, I suppose you’d say.’

Maria Temple spoke cautiously. ‘Is he … is he famous?’

I shook my head. ‘He’s local. He lives here. Near me, in fact. He’s not famous, as such. Yet.’

Maria Temple said nothing and waited for me to continue. She didn’t even raise an eyebrow. Nothing. I realized that I may have given her a slightly misleading impression of my behaviour.

‘To be clear,’ I said, ‘I’m not some sort of … stalker. I merely found out where he lives, and I copied out a poem for him, which I didn’t even send. And I tweeted him once, but that’s all. That’s not a crime. All of the information I needed was in the public domain. I didn’t break any laws or anything like that.’

‘And you’ve never found yourself in this sort of situation before, Eleanor, with anyone else?’ So she thought I might be some sort of obsessive, serially fixated on strangers. Charming.

‘No, never,’ I said firmly and truthfully. ‘He was just … he caught my eye, piqued my interest, that’s all. He was, you know, handsome …’

There was another long pause.

Finally, Maria Temple sat back in her chair and began to speak, which was a relief. It was exhausting, answering all these questions, talking about myself and worrying whether I sounded as stupid, as embarrassingly naïve as I thought I did.

‘Here’s a scenario. I’ll run it by you and you can see what you think. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, Eleanor, that you had developed a crush on this man. These sorts of feelings are generally a sort of emotional “trial run” for a real relationship. They’re very intense. Does that sound reasonable, plausible so far?’ I stared at her.

‘So,’ she went on, ‘there you were, quite enjoying your crush, feeling the feelings. Tell me, what happened to bring this to an end all of a sudden? What crushed the crush, as it were?’

I slumped back into my seat. She had taken me by surprise with her startlingly accurate summary of how things had been, and then asked a very interesting, pertinent question. Despite the gold shoes and the novelty keyrings, I could see already that Maria Temple was no fool. This was all going to take me a while to process, but in the meantime, I tried to gather my thoughts into some sort of coherent response.

‘I suppose on some level I actually felt the whole thing was real, and that, when we finally met, we’d fall in love and get married and so on. I felt, I don’t know, somehow ready for a relationship like that. People — men — like him don’t cross my path very often. It seemed only right not to let the opportunity pass by. And I felt sure that … certain people … would be pleased that I’d found him. When he and I were finally in the same room together, though, something that I’d worked hard to make happen, the whole thing just sort of … dissolved. Does that make any sense?’

She nodded encouragingly.

‘I suppose I realized, right there in that room, that I’d been stupid, acting like a teenager rather than a thirty-year-old woman. He wasn’t even special, I’d been focused on him, but really, it could have been anyone. I’d been trying to please M—’

Nodding, she interrupted me, thankfully stopping me from going too far.

‘There are actually quite a number of issues I’d like to suggest we explore over the next few sessions,’ she said. ‘We’ve been talking about recent events here today, but at some point I’d like to hear a bit about your childhood—’

‘Absolutely not,’ I said, folding my arms and staring at the carpet. The lady does not need to know what goes on in this house.

‘I understand that it can be a very difficult thing to talk about,’ she said.

‘I don’t want to talk about any of that, Maria. Please, do not ask me to talk about Mummy.’

Damn, damn, damn. She leapt on that, of course. Mummy’s always the star turn, the big draw.

‘What sort of relationship do you have with your mother, Eleanor? Are you close?’

‘Mummy’s in contact quite regularly. Too regularly,’ I said. The cat was out of the bag now.

‘You two don’t get on, then?’ she said.

‘It’s … complicated.’ I noticed myself physically as well as metaphorically squirming in my seat.

‘Can you tell me why?’ Maria asked, bold as brass, nosy, intrusive. Shameless.

‘No,’ I said.

There was a very long pause.

‘I know that it’s difficult, really difficult, to talk about painful things, but, as I said, that’s the best route to helping us move forward. Let’s start very slowly. Can you tell me why you don’t feel comfortable talking about your mother?’

‘I … she wouldn’t want me to,’ I said. That was true. I remembered the last — and only — time I’d done it, with a teacher. It wasn’t a mistake you made twice.

My left leg had begun to tremble; just a little quiver, but once it started, I couldn’t get it to stop. I threw my head back and made a noise, a sort of sigh mixed with a cough, to try to distract her eye from it.

‘OK,’ she said patiently. ‘If it’s all right with you, to finish up, I’d like to suggest that we try something a bit different. It’s called the empty-chair exercise,’ she said. I folded my arms and stared at her.

‘Basically, I’d like you to imagine that this chair here’ — she indicated the lone upright dining chair — ‘is your mother.’

She anticipated my response.

‘Now, I know this might feel silly, or embarrassing, but please, just try and go with it. No one’s judging you here. This is a safe space.’ I twisted my hands together anxiously in my lap, mirroring the feeling in my stomach.