Part One Hundred and Seventeen

Helen picked up the thickening file of the next patient with a sinking feeling inside her. All sorts of tributaries floated so many troubled people to her front door but the stream with the deadliest undertow was that of drug addiction. He was the most difficult patient of all but she promised to devote that inexhaustible patience of hers to seek a solution somewhere. The superficial picture was clear enough of a weak father, strong mother and a fatally imperfectly developed glimpse of adulthood, let alone masculinity. It was a glib one liner, which explained nothing or, at most, left vast gaps, which it was up to her to bridge and that was the hard bit. She was unsure how to motivate him, or, to be more precise, get him to motivate himself, to do what he had to do in life. The trouble was that the inexorable courses of his past actions were leading him down a dangerous blind alley. She could never persuade her other difficult patient to follow her advice for love nor money however politely she behaved but Helen had come to realise that she possessed a crazy sense of self preservation which this man obviously did not. Helen's bright smile greeted the surly man as he slouched his way into her room, ten minutes late. He was tall and thin and was dressed in a dirty pair of green combat trousers, tee shirt and scuffed boots. He failed to meet her eye.
"Take a seat." She received a monosyllabic grunt in return and paused before carefully selecting her opening gambit. "We were talking last time about what makes you take drugs." "Were we?" he asked vaguely, his eyes flicking across hers very briefly. If she said so, it must be true. A lifetime had passed by since the last time he had called. He has spent morning after morning lying in an unmade bed in his clothes, which he never used to take off the previous night. His mind remained in a dull fog until he leaned over to the cluttered bedside table upon which old broken cigarette lighters, empty cigarette packets and cigarette ends were littered. Somehow, he found the rollup tobacco and the last Rizla to light up his first cigarette of the day. Long ago childhood days of a good breakfast to start the day were a long way behind him. With nothing else to structure his time, it was drugs, which filled the gap and where he would go to for the day. Somehow, he had found the crumpled card on which she had written down the day and time of the appointment and he had trudged his weary, reluctant way to the clinic.
"Can you remember that we were talking about just what leads you to take drugs and what you hope to get out of them." "That's simple. My life is boring and I need a buzz every so often," Came the sullen reply.
This line of talk wasn't helping anyone, least of all this man. All she got was this sullen, frozen faint feel of aggression, which covered up the despair of his soul. "Hmm, a dangerous buzz. As dangerous as the injury to your arm judging by what I can see of it with the bandages," Helen said reflectively. The only thing, which puzzled her, was that he had not taken the obvious step of trying to conceal it by wearing a jacket over the top.
"It was just one of those things that happened. I fell over on something sharp while I was in the flat. I was lucky that a friend of mine got me in to the doctor's and patched me up," Came the perfect non-answer from him.
"So what's the difference between what gives you a buzz and what is potentially life threatening?" Helen probed gently. He had that disturbing habit of describing to others events that happen to him, as if he had no control over them and never in terms of what he had chosen to do. The man shrugged his shoulders, uncaring. He was alive now and that what all there was to it.
"How do you feel about what could so very easily have happened to you?" "No point asking me as I was too out of it. Next thing I knew, I was at the doctors, being pumped full of morphine. At least I wasn't hanging out." His sullen reply was phrased a little more aggressively than before and made her wince. His idea of purpose in his life was narrowed down to that one craving, not to be suffering from withdrawal symptoms. That said everything about how much he had withdrawn from all the multi faceted forms of self-realisation that walked past his window every day, unrecognised. The patient was only conscious that this woman was really annoying him, nagging at him, asking too many questions like all women he had ever known ended up doing, his mother first and foremost. "It sounds that you were so out of it that you might never have come back, at least not to this world," Helen intervened, seeking to uncoil the screwed up thinking right in front of his eyes. "Can you really tell me that there is no one who would care about you?" "Who do you mean? My mother?" "She's as good a place to start. Perhaps you could tell me about her." Helen's reply was as cool and calm and very softly spoken as she tried to erase out of her emotions any trace of impatience and anger that she might have felt for this man.
"You really want to hear about her? You're not going to like what I'm going to say." "If I didn't want to hear what you have to say, I wouldn't be asking you." He's more worried in trying to explain how he really feels about her, her inner voice told her. He is certainly not thinking about how I might feel about the matter whatever his words.
"My mother was never around for when I wanted her. All she ever cared about was being a career woman," and here he almost spat the words out as if they were a blasphemy. "She wasn't really married to my father and she made him feel small, weak and scared, It's no wonder he got fed up and left home……." You're talking about yourself, that inner voice told her. Never mind, if he can only handle his feelings in this distorted form, let's leave it at this, at least for the moment. That front he puts on may fool his friends but Helen could see that crude theatrical staging for what it was.
"……….she is so hard that she can never see how frightened that men get and if she did get to know, would only despise them. I knew that from when I was little and I could have told how he feels. Anyway, it doesn't matter." The patient hesitated for a second before cutting short his fantasy, shaking his head.
"Why doesn't it matter?" "Because he died a long time ago. I never knew my father. When I was growing up, there was my mum's boyfriend, for what good he was." There was a wealth of bitterness in those last few words that spoke volumes.
"And what was he like?" "He was one of those creeps who could wrap my mother round her little finger with all sorts of smooth talking words. He conned her blind, time after the time and it took her ages to see through him. I could tell the moment I first saw him. At least she did one thing right in her life when she chucked him out." This boyfriend made a very safe, very convenient focus for this man's anger. After all, it was easier to direct his anger upon someone who was real than someone he had never known.
"Did your mother talk much about your father? What did she say about him." "Just that she met him when she was too young and that their marriage was a mistake. She never did talk that much about him." He clearly resented the fact that his mother knew so little about his father. On the face of it, it was a reasonably considered remark and she didn't put all the blame on him to her patient, this wasn't enough. "Didn't she look after you and show you some sort of affection for you." "The childminders did that for me. They were there and my mother wasn't," came the chilling response. "Of course, she had all sorts of ambitions for me. She made that clear. The only thing was whatever I did in school wasn't good enough for her however much I tried. She always thought that I could have done better." She knew how that felt. Her own father was a past master in the art of running her down, This is where she parted company with this man as her reaction to her father was that determination to prove him wrong and to stand up proudly for herself. It was what had given her that manic determination to get to the top of the ladder. Only when Nikki had turned her world upside down could she see her life for what it was and she achieved that sense of balance without which she could not possibly have set about helping others with their own private hells. Her degree in psychology was the key to that abrupt change in her own career, something that had already dropped into place before she knew that it could be the means to her future. In this case, the trouble with the patient's wallowing in psychology was that he neglected the severe practicalities of what it took for a single working mother to bring up her child and what it took for her to overstretch her life twenty four hours a day to look after him. He wasn't giving up a clear picture as to how his mother was actually like. "Did she actually say that to you?" "She never needed to, don't you understand. I could tell it in the tone of her voice, in the look in her eye. It used to make me feel pathetic and stupid." It was extraordinary, how the dam had suddenly burst and the torrent of feelings had rushed out and she was hearing far more about himself than she had heard for months. From what she knew of his mother, Helen suspected that she demanded the high standards of herself in the same way that she asked of her son. The only thing was that he refused to see that the world demanded such standards as the price of survival and inflicted very much harsher punishments than his mother could ever do. "Perhaps you might have been reading more into her than she ever intended." "Don't give me that," Came the scornful reply. "You're taking her side like everyone else does. You wouldn't say that if you knew her like I know her." "So how did you get to university in the first place. Not everyone goes there or is capable of getting there." He looked blankly at Helen as if he had been totally caught by surprise by that thought, as if it had never occurred to him before.
"I had mum breathing down my neck all the time I was at home. I thought that if I went to university, I would get her off my back and have a life of my own." "That's fair enough as long as you are ready to take responsibility for your life," Helen started to say in a mild mannered enough tone of voice until her reflections were cut short.
"You sound just like my mother. You're all the same. Do you know just how patronising you sound?" "Well, just for the record, I don't. I could tell you about someone I know who was only sixteen when she was thrown out of boarding school and not allowed to go back home. She had to make her own way in life, doing whatever job she could turn her hand to so that she could make ends meet. It was a hard enough struggle but she's running a club with a friend of hers. Oh yes, along the way, she studied for a degree in English and got it." "Until she's come your way so that you can go reading her mind for a living like you're trying to read mine." "Yes, she has come my way but not as a patient." "So who is this superwoman then. Are you trying to tell me that she is for real." "Don't worry, she's as real as they get and I can back everything I'm saying up to the hilt. I'm only talking about her as an example of what can be done with your life. She wouldn't think that she is special, just that she's always done what had to be done." Helen's angry eyes locked with the unsteady weak petulance of her patient who gave way. He was losing the ability to sustain his emotions for any length of time as his perseverance in life in so many ways. His only fixed purpose in life centred on drugs. In turn, Helen was starting to regret that her anger had broken through her professional demeanour and hesitated for a second while she bottled her anger down. It was not easy as she had heard from Nikki so much about her early days and his attitude had touched her on a raw nerve. This man was so full of self-pity and self-centredness and he was not the martyr to life that he thought he was. "Yes well, it might be easier for your friend but she's straight, not using stuff like I am." A curious smile played at the corners of Helen's lips as she reflected on the curious multiple meanings of that word he used to describe Nikki of all people, all disconnected from each other. He noticed nothing of this, locked inside his own misery. "So why did you drop out of university?" "Same reason I got into drugs. I couldn't be doing with wasting my time on hanging around lectures hearing some idiot drone on when I had other things to do." He was glossing over a huge amount in one curt sentence. Never mind, she reasoned, another time, she would have only got a bellyful of aggression that meant nothing. It would have to wait till another time.
"It's not too late. You haven't irretrievably blown your future," She urged him, trying to transfer some of her own strength of will to this vacillating young man. She could afford it as she seemed almost driven by her ability to persevere against the odds. "If you are really sincere about at least setting some limits in your life, you could make something of your life." Instantly, she realised from his very body language that she had made a mistake. She had been too eager and the thought should have come from him, not from her. The sheer thought of changing his life terrified him more than anything else so conditioned as he was to failure. He had given up on life, as if he were an old man, just when it was only starting. She was at least ten years older than him and felt vital, alive in comparison. "I saw your mother recently," she blurted out as she had temporarily lost track of what new tack she was going to try.
"You can't tell her what I'm doing here. It would make things very difficult for me." You and me both, thought Helen sardonically as she spotted the unmistakable look of panic in his eye and even the sound of his voice was sharper, more precise as if only this emotion could move him to action. Yet this reaction was fatally flawed. He wasn't talking about the act of being addicted and how much he had gone down in the world, further than his mother knew. She didn't know the half of it and, in the short term, it was a mercy but in the long term, a curse. Despite his own ragged appearance, he was more concerned about how things looked, not about the grim reality. Despite herself, she could not stop the next words coming out of her mind.
"What would your mother think if she knew about what you're doing with your life right now?" The impact was dramatic. His eyes almost popped out of his skull.
"You mustn't tell her.You just can't tell her." He kept on repeating this like a little boy who had accidentally hit a cricket ball through his neighbour's greenhouse and was terrified at what she would say to his mother and what his mother would, in turn have said to him. Perhaps that very situation had actually happened to him. At this moment, he reacted like a scared little boy and he hated himself for feeling this way. Through all this, there was a faint glimpse of what he really felt for his mother but if only he would just let himself give in to it.There was a theory that the addict was locked up forever at the physical age as to when their addiction first started but he went beyond that, Helen thought in a detached moment, as she dealt with his pleas. Eventually she gave in and he was ever so grateful, ever so pleased to be let off that he started making all sorts of impossible promises to show how grateful he was. Helen privately despaired as it was quite obvious that he hadn't got a ghost of a chance of sticking to these promises. For all that, he really believed in them at that point in time. This was his undoing.
Helen lay back exhausted when the session was finished and he repeated his promises on the way out. It was no use, she realised. It was all a matter whether it took five paces for him to obliterate his promises from his mind or ten paces. At that moment, Nikki's idea of going for the wing governor job at Larkhall seemed as sensible as anything there was in Helen's world.