Part Thirteen
On the Tuesday afternoon, as John drove towards the clinic, he drummed his fingers on the steering wheel, the endless traffic jams driving him insane. Part of him was impatient to get this over with and the rest of him wanted to back out entirely. He put some rock music on, to try and steady his nerves, but it didn't really work. The clinic was in one of the more dreary parts of Paddington, and as he pulled into the car park, he heard the siren of an ambulance presumably speeding towards St. Mary's hospital. Why did the NHS always find premises in the most drab, miserable areas, he was forced to wonder. Oh well, at least he hadn't had to go on a year long waiting list, which is precisely what would have happened if he'd chosen to go via the national health route. Telling Mimi to behave, and leaving her contentedly snoozing on the backseat, he walked in through the automatic doors, already regretting his decision to come here. After informing the receptionist whom he was there to see, he sat in the waiting room, idly flicking through the pile of well-thumbed magazines on the low coffee table, though nothing could remotely capture his interest. He could now hear the rain pattering against the window, the weather seeming to perfectly reflect his sombre and extremely wary mood.
"Judge, would you like to come this way?" Helen said, breaking in on his thoughts. Coming back to himself, he realised that she was stood in the doorway, regarding him with a soft, encouraging smile. Getting up to follow her, he wondered if it was still too late to say no. She led him down the white walled corridor, simply expecting that he would follow her. When she closed the door of her office behind them, he took in its fairly functional surroundings. There was a desk in one corner, with the computer whose screen looked to be in suspended animation. There were several comfortable armchairs, arranged on either side of the room, with a coffee table in the centre. Perhaps the only personal effect John could see at a glance was a picture of Nikki, that was proudly displayed on the desk. "Can I get you a cup of tea?" Helen asked, as John took one of the armchairs. "I wouldn't mind a large scotch," he admitted ruefully. "I can't offer you that, I'm afraid," She said with a smile. When she took a chair opposite him, he realised that now, sat here as he was, there really was no going back.
"I think we should start," Helen said a little hesitantly, feeling the type of nerves she hadn't felt since her very first session. "With you telling me why you're here." This threw John slightly, because he knew that he certainly wasn't ready to tell her precisely what had forced him to make this decision. "It occurred to me," He said evasively. "That it was about time I tried therapy again." Taking this avoidance tactic for precisely what it was, Helen chose not to draw attention to it. "So, why didn't it work last time?" "Because I found it far too easy to quit," He told her honestly. "Which I suppose proves that I didn't want it badly enough in the first place." "What happened?" Helen asked, though she thought she could probably hazard a guess. "I slept with her," John replied, feeling a certain sense of disgust at just how easy it had been. "Well, that won't be happening with me," Helen told him sternly. "I know," he said with a smile. "That's why I chose you, because I knew that wouldn't be an option." "That's something, I suppose," Helen said ruefully. "It shows that you're serious about it this time. I shouldn't say it, but I do feel a certain amount of professional disgust that this therapist let that happen. Was that why you chose a woman, so that if necessary, you could sleep with her, and so end the professional relationship you had with her?" "Partly," John admitted. "Though that wasn't all of it. I find it hard enough, to talk about my feelings with anyone, Jo and George included, but discussing them with a man would be virtually impossible." "Why?" "I sometimes think feelings are a weakness," He replied, not quite answering her question. "They leave you open to being hurt, to being ridiculed, and they serve no useful purpose." "Do you not think that feelings are what make us different from animals?" "Feelings make us vulnerable," He said with more than a little scorn. "They give others the ability to manipulate us, and all they really achieve, is to make us do the most stupid, pointless things, all in the name of so-called friendship." He stopped, realising that he'd plainly said far too much, and had been about to blurt out what had happened with Karen at the conference. "You're very angry today," Helen said gently. "Whether with yourself, or someone else, I really don't know." "I don't mean to be," John replied, calming down a little, and not really knowing where all that had come from. "You can be as angry as you like," Helen told him. "That's what this time is for, if necessary. Why not tell me what happened to make you want therapy again?" John looked utterly terrified at this suggestion, knowing that at the moment, he just didn't have the face to tell her. Seeing that this was a distinctly no go area, Helen tried another tack. "Okay, but we will come back to it, because I think it might be important. For now, let's go back to the last time you had therapy." "Why?" John asked belligerently. "I didn't like where Rachel Crawchek was going, I seduced her, therefore it failed. What more is there to it?" "Why did you start seeing her in the first place?" This question seemed to briefly catch him off guard, because he had been expecting her to focus on the therapy itself. "As stupid as it sounds," He admitted eventually. "Because Jo wanted me to. She told me I needed help, and though I'm loath to admit it, she was right." "And is that why you're here now?" Helen asked, barely suppressing a smile. "No." "Good, because that is not a reason to have therapy." "I think that was partly why it didn't work," John tentatively speculated. "Because I felt under pressure to make it work." "Does anyone else know you're here?" "No, and I intend it to stay that way."
"Why did Jo tell you that you needed help?" John looked faintly embarrassed at this question, though he knew that this at least was one he couldn't avoid. "I am, or at least I was, what some might call a serial womaniser." "And is that what you would call yourself," Helen asked without a flicker. "Or is that a label others have given you?" "It was the most palatable way of describing what I sometimes still am." "There's nothing remotely palatable about therapy, Judge," Helen told him seriously. "That's the whole point of it, to abandon the concepts that you rigidly stick to as a matter of course, and to examine the truth about who you really are. So, forget the label, and tell me what it is that makes you describe yourself in that way." "Isn't that obvious?" John asked a little scathingly. "Yes, it is," Helen replied, looking him straight in the eye, almost daring him to look away. "But I want you to say it." "Fine," He said a little exasperatedly, though knowing she was doing the right thing. "Before I got into the relationship I have with Jo and George, I used to find it a very delightful distraction, to pick up random women to go to bed with. Jo told me I needed help, because I couldn't have held down a committed relationship to save my life. I lost count of how many times I hurt George when we were married, or Jo in the years that followed. I'm addicted to the chase, the conquest, the feeling of stepping off life for an hour or a night, because it allowed me to forget for a while that for the rest of the time, I am forced to inhabit a moral high ground that I don't always want to fulfill." "And now?" This threw John, because he had half been expecting some thought from her on his previous behaviour. "If it were just George, or just Jo, I would still be as bad as I was before. They almost manage to keep me on the straight and narrow, because two women can keep me far more successfully occupied than one." Helen allowed herself the ghost of a smile. "Before your relationship with Jo and George, did you ever think about the women you used to pick up, afterwards, I mean?" "Not often," John admitted quietly. "I used to tell myself that they saw it as just as much of a random distraction as I did. That made it extremely simple to immediately forget about them the next day. There was the occasional one who managed to get under my skin, but it was pretty rare. Any love, affection, or fondness I had in me at the time was reserved specifically for Jo, with a very deeply buried portion for George that was still unresolved from when I was married to her. But no matter how much I loved Jo, I couldn't give up the women. Part of her despised me for it, I know she did, but I did try. For the six weeks that I was having therapy with Rachel, I didn't pick up anyone, and in those days that was quite a long time for me." "Why did you sleep with her?" Helen asked into the resulting silence. "What was it she did, that made you suddenly want to back out?" "She was getting far too close," He said, not looking at her. "She was gradually peeling away some of my layers, and I didn't like it." "Did that frighten you?" Helen asked gently. "Yes, I suppose it did," John said disgustedly. "And yes, I do realise that is the whole point of doing this, but I don't think I was ready for it. I don't think I knew quite what to expect." He got up, and began thoughtfully pacing round the room, as Helen just sat and watched him. "Do you resent the fact that she made it so easy for you to quit?" Helen asked, seeing rigidity in his posture that could only mean anger and frustration. "Yes," He replied, his eyes briefly rising to meet hers. "So say it," She encouraged. "Actually try putting that into words." "I loathe the way she just gave in," He said eventually, surprising himself immensely, because he'd never dared to think about Rachel so vehemently. "Oh, she put up the pretense of a refusal, but that was just a test, to see how far I would push it. At first, she played the game of assuming I was just another patient who had fallen in love with her, as if that was remotely likely," He added in total disgust. "I couldn't have fallen in love with her if I'd tried. She was forcefully prising away forty years worth of thoroughly constructed barriers, making me relive one of the most painful events of my life, and yet she stupidly thought I'd fallen in love with her. I found out where she lived, and went to visit her at home. Don't say it, because I know just how low that was. But it worked. She didn't put up any fight whatsoever. You see, simply walking away wouldn't have been good enough, because it would have meant that she'd won. I had to take back the reins, I had to get the situation back within my control, and the only way of doing that, was constructing the most clear of reasons for not continuing to see her on a professional basis. She couldn't remain as my therapist once I'd slept with her."
"Do you often use sex to manipulate a situation to your advantage?" Helen asked, provoking a long, penetrating stare from him. "What sort of a question is that?" He replied, not knowing how to answer such a thing. "I'm just trying to work out how important sex is to you," Helen told him. "Isn't it important to everyone?" He responded dryly, not receiving a smile in return. "Not to everyone, no. The point is, that sex appears to be your fallback, something you rely on whenever you either want a break from your life, or when you want to escape from a situation that maybe frightens the hell out of you. Is sex something you've always found especially easy to be part of?" "Don't you?" He asked, getting a hint of where she was heading with this, and not liking it one bit. "That's none of your business," She deflected easily. "Is it perhaps the one area of your life, where you've always felt most confident?" "Probably," He replied eventually, loathing the fact that he had to concede this point to her. "Why do you think that is?" She persisted, half wondering if she should have a scoreboard on the wall for the next session. "I couldn't possibly tell you," He said with a laugh. "Though I suppose that the more you do it, the better you become." "It doesn't always work like that," Helen told him with a rye smile. "But that brings me back to the reason why it appears to be the one thing you can rely on, when things aren't quite going your way." "I've never really thought about it like that," He was forced to admit. "It's just my usual reaction to almost anything. If I'm happy, then I want to go to bed with someone, and if I'm furious, such as after the very bitter row I had with George back in April, I want to cheer myself up." "So why sex?" Helen probed further. "Why not alcohol, or drugs, or gambling, why sex?" "Because sex doesn't usually hurt either me or anyone else," John told her, receiving a raised eyebrow at the word usually. "After that argument I had with George, which was definitely the worst we've had in years, I went out, and picked a woman up in a bar. A couple of months later, George discovered that because of this woman, I'd given both George and Jo Chlamydia." "I bet you weren't popular," Helen said ruefully, easily able to picture an irate George. "Not very," John replied a little shame facedly. "I don't think I've ever seen George so angry. But most of the time, sex doesn't hurt anyone." "Thought for another's welfare, isn't really why you do it, is it, Judge?" "What makes you so sure?" He asked her, giving Helen the thought that if he asked any more questions in response to her own, she just might be struck off for shaking a patient to death in their first session. "Because you came out with that explanation far too easily," She told him, seeing by the slight slump of his shoulders that she'd finally broken through, finally achieved something with her questions. His continued pacing led him over to the window, where he stood looking out at the still pouring rain. He didn't want to do this, he did not want to stand here and show her just how weak and sometimes vulnerable he was. Helen simply waited, knowing that he was summoning up the courage to tell her something that to him was the first step in the long, highly treacherous road of his unveiling. He gripped the hot radiator in front of him, the warmth slightly taking the edge off his fear.
"I need to feel loved," He said eventually. "And being physically close to someone, getting to know every inch of her body, and giving her as much pleasure as is humanly possible, is really the only way I can understand that feeling, or at least the pretense of that feeling. With Jo and George, making love is the only way I can show them I love them, and the only way I can believe that they love me. With a stranger, it just for a while, allows me to feel loved, even if I'm not." As these words were dragged out of him, she could tell that this had taken an enormous amount of effort. It crucified him to be so vulnerable with anyone, and he deserved some praise for this first achievement. After quite a lengthy silence, John turned and came back to his chair, refusing to look at her, not wanting to see what might be in her eyes. "I think we should leave it there for this week," She said, at last bringing his gaze back on her. "Is the time up already?" He asked in surprise, glancing at his watch to see it was almost six o'clock. "Yes, almost, but what you've just told me, that was an enormous achievement to get that far, and I think you need to recover from that, before we go any further." "It doesn't feel much like an achievement," He said miserably. "No, it probably doesn't," She said with sympathy. "But you did make the right decision in coming here, and I hope that you'll keep coming back." "I'm not going to give up now," He said, offering her a slightly shaky smile, and feeling as exhausted as he usually did after a serious workout. As they walked out to their cars, John appeared to be miles away, clearly submerged in his thoughts. "Try to keep your eyes on the road," Helen told him as she got into her car, thankfully lighting a much needed cigarette as she watched him drive away, wondering precisely what the next few sessions would bring. John Deed had many layers, she realised, each and every one of them complex and steadfastly maintained. Helen just hoped that she really was up to the job of breaking through them all.