He turned the page in his notebook and asked me what diagnoses I’d been given by previous doctors. I said, ‘Glandular fever, clinical depression, then – this is in order –’ and proceeded to list them, one after the other until I was being boring and did a little laugh. ‘Most of the index of the DSM, really.’
I looked around for the dictionary of mental illnesses that was always somewhere on display in the office of the kind of doctors I saw. It had become a dismal kind of Where’s Wally – trying to pick its blood-red spine out of the shelves of psychiatric textbooks with titles that seemed intentionally menacing. But it wasn’t anywhere. I felt another surge of gratitude as I turned back and saw that he was waiting for me.
‘What I’m most interested to know is what diagnosis you’ve given yourself, Martha.’
I paused as if I had to think about it. ‘That I’m not good at being a person. I seem to find it more difficult to be alive than other people.’
He said that was interesting. ‘But based on the fact you’ve come here today, you must also think there’s a medical explanation.’
I nodded.
‘What would you say it was, in that case?’
I said, ‘Depression probably, except it’s not constant. It just starts for no reason or a reason that seems too small.’ I braced myself for him to take the laminated list out of his drawer, turn it towards me and make me do my Always, Sometimes, Seldom, Nevers.
Toujours, parfois, rarement, jamais.
Instead, he took a moment to recap his pen, laid it on the notebook and said, ‘Perhaps you can tell me what it feels like when you suddenly find yourself in the trenches, as it were.’
I described it in the ways I had to Patrick, after his first exposure to it – that day in summer when we weren’t yet together – and so many times since. I said, ‘It’s like going into the cinema when it’s light and when you come out you’re shocked because you didn’t expect it to be dark, but it is.
‘It’s like being on a bus and strangers on either side of you suddenly start screaming at each other, fighting over your head and you can’t get out.
‘You are standing still and then you’re falling down a flight of stairs, but you don’t know who pushed you. There is no one behind you.
‘It’s like when you go down into the Tube and the sky is blue, and when you come out, it’s pouring with rain.’
For a moment he waited as though there might have been more, then said those were interesting and very helpful descriptions.
I bit my thumbnail, then looked down at it for a second and peeled off a part that hadn’t torn completely. ‘Mainly, it’s like weather. Even if you see it coming, you can’t do anything about it. It’s going to come either way.’
‘Brain weather, as it were?’
‘I suppose. Yes.’
Robert said, ‘I’m very sorry for you. It sounds like it has been hard for a long time.’ I nodded, biting my nail again. ‘I wonder, has anyone ever mentioned —— to you, Martha?’
I moved my hand and said no, thank goodness. ‘It’s the only one I haven’t got, or been told I have. Although actually,’ I recalled as I spoke, ‘when I was maybe eighteen, one did say, a Scottish doctor said he couldn’t rule it out but my mother told him she could. She said the only thing it made me do was cry all the time; that I wasn’t a complete nutcase who thinks she’s Boudicca and that God talks to her through her orthodontia.’
‘No, of course. But may I say,’ he paused briefly, ‘the sort of symptoms your mother described, in such vivid terms, only exist in the popular imagination. Actual symptoms might include –’ Robert named a dozen.
I had been starting to feel uncomfortably hot and now my throat felt like someone had stuffed a rag down it. I swallowed. ‘I don’t really want —— though,’ I said and felt stupid, then rude.
He said, ‘I quite understand. As a condition —— is not well understood and undeniably, within the general public, it carries somewhat of a –’
‘Why do you think it’s that?’
‘Because typically it begins with –’ a little bomb going off in your brain when you’re seventeen. ‘And you will have been given –’ Robert listed every medication I had ever taken, all the familiar and long-forgotten names, then told me the clinical reasons why they would not have worked, worked poorly or made me much worse.