Joanna Kavenna - Inglorious

Kamen told her to explain her problems as she saw them. Rosa saw them in lots of ways which never quite formed a cogent pattern, but she talked quickly, qualified herself, decided that wasn’t what she meant, began again, lost herself in tangents, dried up and stared at the rug. She thought her symptoms might be psychosomatic, she added.

‘I can’t be sure until the tests come back, but I would say you are not physically unwell,’ he said, a man with a brown beard and greying hair. He had an avuncular air, it made her submit to what he said. ‘You are young, fit, you say you exercise. You are thin and should try to eat a bit more. But the skin is healthy. The eyes are healthy. You might be a bit worn out, or agitated. Do you sleep well?’

The room they were in was tight and cramped, with a low door which you had to stoop to get through. You entered bowing and Dr Kamen bowed too. Despite his cramped quarters, Dr Kamen kept up the gravitas. He was a neat man; his beard was trimmed and his clothes were freshly ironed. He was certainly reassuring. Through the window there was a view of bricks and grey sky. They were in Kilburn, on a street of bay windows. The area was suburban without being friendly, full of the disenfranchised and uncertain. She had seen them walking outside, the minorities left to stew, piled in together, and the single mothers pushing prams in high heels, bellies out, and the truant gangs on the corners. She wondered briefly about Dr Kamen. What did he do on Sundays? Did he play cricket? Go to the pub? Not, she thought, to the church. She imagined he liked a pint. She saw him with a beer and a bag of crisps, reading the papers by a fire. She was sure he had a well-organised life. Time management, the relegation of certain things to certain parts of the day — he looked the sort. He didn’t seem troubled by global war or the rule of violence. He had crinkled eyes; his face was neither young nor old. He was easy with his gestures, self-confident but not flashy. He was a measured, contemplative man. Alert to the frailties of the human frame, of course. Quite aware of the skull beneath the skin and the rest. As a doctor you could hardly ignore it, you could hardly bury your head in myth and hope it wasn’t happening. But it didn’t stop him getting up in the mornings. He must be pragmatic, she thought, as he said, again, ‘Are you finding it hard to sleep?’

‘I don’t sleep especially well,’ she said. ‘But I never have. I have always been a light sleeper, I mean. But I don’t have insomnia, no.’

‘Do you wake early?’ Dr Kamen was saying.

‘Yes, quite early.’

‘Do you have panic attacks, anxiety attacks, difficulty breathing?’ he said. In his hand he held a pen. He had her notes on a computer screen, her small ailments of the last decade. Sometimes she was troubled by flu and once she had turned up with bronchitis. Then he had told her to stay off work for two weeks. On his desk there was a photo of his family — a wife, three children, it looked like, but Rosa couldn’t quite make them out. Young children, she imagined, looking at the crayon drawings pinned to the wall behind his desk. A tractor. Signed Oliver.

‘No no, nothing like that,’ said Rosa. ‘I just feel a bit withdrawn.’

‘Withdrawn, you say?’ Dr Kamen looked slightly concerned.

‘There’s just something, like an unseen impediment.’

‘An impediment?’

‘A temporary something, you know, I can’t see. Some basic fact. Or a conjunction of facts. Perhaps not even facts, just things. And then some days I think that maybe this is what I’m trying to get to, this fact — or facts, this thing — or things — that would explain everything.’

‘And why do you feel that?’ said the doctor with an eyebrow raised.

‘Because …’

She stopped short, reluctant to dwell on things she didn’t understand. She was aware she seemed recalcitrant. Now they were staring at each other, and then she felt awkward and dropped her gaze. She fiddled with her nails, bit one, scratched her ear. Still Dr Kamen was waiting patiently, glancing at the screen, at his watch, clicking a pen in his hand.

‘Because, you say?’ he said finally, after the clock had scraped round a few more minutes. He wasn’t going to sit there in silence for ever.

‘I was aware I was stuck in the — you know — the rut people mention, when they’re on this subject. Eyes down. Head to the desk. Nose to the grindstone, you know. And I was angry with other people. Bystanders, all of them. Then I realised how comic it was. Quite impossible, the whole thing. But I haven’t progressed. I was trying to focus my thoughts, but I’ve found the last few months have been as confused as those that went before.’

‘Well, we all feel that,’ said Kamen, smiling. ‘Particularly after a bereavement. You are bound to feel confused, knocked back, depressed.’

He meant it was hardly a pathology, hardly deviant at all.

‘Now I feel as if everyone speaks something else, some other language,’ said Rosa. ‘I really find I can’t raise myself to the challenge. There is something I am still failing to understand. A gap. Truth.’ Kamen nodded, perhaps impatiently. It didn’t sound any better the second time. ‘Perhaps beauty,’ she said, but that didn’t go so well. Kamen wasn’t interested in Rosa’s under-cooked theories of truth and beauty, her mixture of other people’s ideas and prevailing cliché.

‘Yes?’ said the doctor, expectantly.

‘I feel as if the real world, with its laws of time and space, its economics, politics, and even morality, has dissolved. Or I have been detached from it, and have emerged somewhere — I’m not quite sure where. But really it’s much better here, on the edge. It affords quite the best view. The only problem is debt, of course. And that’s why I need to change a little, sort things out.’

He smiled. She thought it was simple enough. There must be a reason behind it all. What did she and Dr Kamen know about the order of the universe? What could they know? Everything might be preordained. It might be part of an immaculate order, impossible for them to understand. Of course as Stoicism would have it no action that befell the individual — death included — could be bad, because everything that was part of logos was fundamentally good. In that case, her mother’s death was part of logos , and her current state must also be, and who was she to resist? If it left her quite shattered that was simply her impoverished perspective. She lacked pneuma perhaps, she was deficient in life force, but she was sure that things occurred for a reason. She was, she said to Dr Kamen, no Epicurean. ‘My mother disagreed,’ she added. She was explaining this to Dr Kamen, adding that they were a very primitive species, with very little to be proud of, while he nodded slightly. He wrote something down on a piece of paper.

‘I think,’ said Dr Kamen, straightening his tie, ‘you’re depressed. You should have a holiday. Go to see some friends, some good friends who cheer you up. I’m going to prescribe you some antidepressants and see if they might help you. At this stage of things you really just have to manage. If things get worse I could refer you to a psychiatrist. At present, try this course of tablets, and we’ll make another appointment soon to see how you’re getting on.’

‘Thank you very much. Very kind,’ said Rosa. He had her wrong, she was thinking. She wasn’t depressed at all. Earlier, she had been depressed. Now she woke each day at dawn; it was her excitement that was making her rise so early. That and the grinding of the trains. It was just her thoughts, she wanted to say. But Kamen had his eye on his watch, so she stood up. As she walked away, he said, ‘Don’t worry, your prince will come.’ It made her stop with her hand on the door.