Three Dont Tango 19

It is getting late. The afternoon is growing dark, and a winter depression has lowered itself solidly from the grey-black sky, and presses down into my head. There is a pain spreading from a line which runs from my back teeth on the left side of my mouth, up through the base of the nose, and then cutting back like a boomerang across to my left ear and the neck below the ear.
I am trying to type. I am halfway through my work.
The pain is gnawing away at my back teeth. I start grinding them and scowling. My mouth is working overtime. I am beginning to sweat. I realise I am desperately trying to hang on to a clear view through my memory circuits. My forehead is creased up, my eyes are bunched under half closed lids, and I begin to breath deeply and systematically. My temperature is going up by leaps and bounds. I feel like a pan of milk coming to the boil. I want to scream, but I hold myself tightly together, and then, without warning the whole of the pain suddenly lurches around my forehead and begins banging at my temples.
I involuntarily stand up, throw the typewriter at the folding screen and start shouting. The typewriter goes clean through the fabric, leaving a gaping rent, and jangles onto the floor, the keys going cockeyed, and the carriage getting thrown out of its seating., The machine is totally wrecked. I flop back onto the settee. There is a banging of heavy drums across the front of my head. A total sense of frustration floods through me.
"Johnsie, you must go to the doctor."
"What the hell for? He doesn't do anything."
"I think you ought to go to a psychiatrist."
"What on earth can a psychiatrist do?"
"But perhaps you are making your head feel that pain."
I lay still. What is the reply to such a remark? No doubt there are people who like to push the blame for things onto other people, and talk their way out of problems. But how can losing my eyesight, and having such horrendous pains in my head have anything to do with problems that one can talk through?
I flap my arms uselessly. How does one explain? Why should I want to give myself pain that prevents me from doing the things I want to do? Why should I then, despite all the problems, try to struggle on doing what I want to do under such appalling circumstances?
"Do go Johnsie. I'll come down with you." She sits on the edge of the couch and strokes my hair. "I'll get you a cold flannel for your forehead."
The cold dampness on my hot swollen eyes cools me slightly and shuts out the faint glow of light. It also helps me keep my flesh down. It feels as if it is bubbling up ready to burst away from me.
I lie on the settee all day. I can barely move because of the pain.


Two weeks later I am sitting in front of a funny little man with a nervous twitch. He doesn't say much. He keeps looking at a sheet of paper on the desk in front of him.
I dont know what to say at all.
Eventually he asks me a question. "What is your job?" He is filling in a form. "What is your age?" More writing. "Do you have problems with your sex life."
What is the idiot bleating on about? What the hell has my sex life got to do with losing my eyesight and getting frightful pains in my head? I mean.... I'm getting pains in my head, not in my cock!
"How many times a week?"
How the hell should I know? I don't count these things.
"Do you sleep with someone else?"
What's the matter with this guy, he's obsessed with sex? I look up at him. He turns away. He seems nervous. One eye is twitching. I wonder vaguely if he has problems with sex, but then why should I care?
He is playing with the form. He covers slots. He ticks boxes. He looks as if he is filling in some silly crossword. Five across. Ten down. How many left? Is he a schizo? Is he paranoid? He turns over the form.
"Come again next week. Take this form. Fill it in. Take these tablets three times a day."
"What do they do?"
"They'll slow you down."
"Why should I slow down?"
"I think you're getting over excited."
Over excited? About what? I have pains in my head. I am trying to work. I am trying not to get excited. There is nothing to get excited about. What the fuck is he talking about?
The following week I go again. The quack is sitting fiddling with a pen. He gives me another form. “Underline the ideas which most appeal to you from each section.”
A few minutes later he looks at my completed form. “You are slightly introverted. You make friends with great difficulty.”
Really? I had no idea. And how does that make me lose my eyesight and get terrible head pains?
“You are a paranoid, but not seriously so. Take these tablets, and come again in two weeks'  time.”
I go again. The trouble is I begin to realise the man is largely a fool. Yes, I know, Annabel says I think everybody is a fool. But look at the guy. He's sitting there fiddling with his pen, his eye is twitching, and he keeps shifting about in his seat as if he's got piles.
What am I supposed to do? Fill in bloody silly forms, and take these wretched tablets? I desperately want to get rid of the pains. I am bullied by Annabel to stop thinking everyone else is a fool. Perhaps it is me who is the fool. He is the expert. I should listen. He will make me better. He is paid a lot of money by the state to cure me.
On the other hand, does he have a clue what he is supposed to be curing me of? By the stupid questions he asks he seems to think my problem has something to do with sex, going too fast, or being slightly paranoid.
If I fuck Annabel twice a day, or maybe only once a month will my headaches go away? If I sedate myself into a semi-comatose state will my eyesight be cured?
I cant adjust to all this nonsense. I put up with this against my better judgment. I go again. The trouble is, I feel worse. I feel this idiot is dragging me down and making me much much worse than I was before I had the misfortune to meet the blighter. I have somehow entered a sick zone, and the fact that I keep going to see him confirms there is something wrong. When I stayed home there were just pains, which I could struggle through; now I'm ill.
I go again. I pretend he is the clever guy who will cure me of all my ills. I resolve to come to some communicative arrangement with him. I will tell him secrets which he so obviously wants to know. Of course, I'll have to make them up, because there really isn't anything to tell. Then I will do as I am told, and he in his infinite wisdom will cure me.
Another week goes by and I go again. He feels that part of my paranoid feelings are making me dependent upon him, and yet frightened of him, and I must try and see my own life in positive terms.
This guy really is a total idiot. What on earth would make me frightened of him. He is small, stupid, doesn't understand anything about me at all, and he is obsessed with sex, and has these funny twitches. I'm sure there is something seriously wrong with him, and he needs treatment. Perhaps being a psychiatrist is his form of therapy.
Because of Ann and because of the kids I try to suppress my feelings of antagonism towards him, and try my best to accept that what he is saying may have some truth. Perhaps if I descend into the depths of all this crap I will come up sometime later a new man shorn of whatever it is that is causing the headaches. Perhaps. But what am I descending into? I don't know what is going on here. I cant work out what he is trying to do, or how any of this will work.
I go again.
“Take these pills,” he says.
I go again. I have just had a frightful migraine. He books me in to have electro-convulsive treatment.
I go again, this time to the hospital. Annabel comes with me. I sit in a chair. They stick a needle in my arm. I feel a crackling in my brain, and before I manage to count to eight I have vanished into a no-man's-land.
Now I am being led down a corridor. There is a man each side of me, helping me walk. I am dimly aware of them. It is dark in the corridor. A few seconds later I can actually see the people, and feel my rubbery legs being dragged along. I start to walk tentatively, but there is no strength in my legs. I sit on a bench. There are six or seven of us in various states of stupor. The nurses bring us breakfast.
I go again. I sink into no-man's-land. Then I am sitting at a table. I notice I am sitting in front of my breakfast. I reach out for a spoon and knock something into my lap. I stand up suddenly and my legs give way, and the bench falls over. I am on the floor. I am made of rubber. I cannot stand.
Annabel takes me home and I go to bed. My head has a solid rigid pain across it, filling every cavity. I try to sleep. I get up at five in the afternoon. I feel disorientated, and my head is still full of awkward pains.
I go twice a week for three weeks. I am so ill I don't think I can stand any more of this.
"I will never go again Annabel. It is making my head worse and worse."
The following week I visit him in his little room. "Well," he smiles, and looks brisk. "You should be feeling better now."
I look up at him. He seems a long way off. My brain has slowed to a crawl. I can hardly think let alone translate thoughts into words, but I stare straight at him and try to form a sentence. “I feel worse than I have ever felt in my life. I have never, ever, ever felt this bad for this long. This experiment of yours just doesn't seem to be working.
"Experiment!” he shouts. “It wasn't an experiment."
"You mean you knew what you were doing, and what was wrong with me, and that this treatment would cure me?"
He doesn't answer the question. "It's the standard treatment for your kind of problem. It is not an experiment. Hundreds of patients have been treated in this way and it has improved their condition considerably."
"I feel a hundred times worse than before I came to see you. Then I used to get pains in my head and they made me feel violent and frustrated. Now I get pains in my head all the time and I feel thoroughly confused and depressed, and I seem to have a deep seated feeling of malevolence within me."
"Perhaps you ought to be taking stronger tablets."
"Perhaps they would strengthen my complaint."
"You're being childish."
I stare back at him. I am beginning to get angry with him. He is the one who is being childish. Can't he see he doesn't know what the fuck he is talking about? He doesn't understand the problem, doesn't understand me, and hasn't a clue what to do next. He's a charlatan.
He avoids my eyes. His takes a piece of paper from his desk and moves it around, then folds it over, and pushes it about. Am I being childish? Or is he playing games? Perhaps he is playing games that have been invented to mask the fact that there is no reality beneath what he is doing. The game is sophisticated and complex, therefore they hope the patient wont notice it is merely a game, and therefore will be conned by the whole rigmarole and reassured, and therefore conned into a cure. And if the patient sees through the charade, then it truly is merely a charade and a waste of everyone's time.
I go once more. “A total waste of time,” I bleat at Annabel, but she is insistent.
I look at him coolly and analytically. He is blinking like some mad florescent light tube. He is embarrassed at the way I am watching him. He looks worried. One eye is twitching manically. He starts fiddling with things on his desk. I stare at the pen and paper he is fiddling with. He puts his hands in his pockets, and looks out of the window. He can't face me, the creep. He tells me there is nothing else he can do for me, and for the first time I actually believe him. I smile and leave, and walk the whole way home.
I begin to feel better already.

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