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  Reactive: or would you rather those blue-black days, that indigo inner landscape, were a direct and more or less reasonable response to the things that have happened in your own lifetime? Things that might deflate even Mr Cherrybum: for instance, the loss of your mother before the age of eleven, the death of your father, redundancy, illness, marital fracture, und so weiter? Because then you could argue to yourself that if only the world were to sort itself out, you could do likewise. However, if you are thinking clearly—which is unlikely, since your metabolic thought-rate will either have slowed to the plop of a grizzly’s heartbeat during hibernation or else be whizzing along like the overture to Russlan and Ludmilla—you will perceive a logical problem here. If, say, one of the ‘life events’ which has nailed you to your bed is the death of your mother at the age of six, then it’s hard to imagine how such a calamity gets unfixed, isn’t it? A stepmother is no serotonin, as the saying has it. Equally, if you have been pole-axed by a redundancy notice, that is hardly the best position from which to apply for a job, is it?

  Endogenous vs Reactive: still making up your mind? Bong, bong, bong. Time’s up! And now I shift the goalposts. This binary-choice quizette was, I confess, a little bogus. Because The Men Who Guess have in recent times disowned their own famous distinction. Nowadays they propose that you may be gifted with a genetic propensity to be downcast by those naughty ‘life events.’ So: endogenous or reactive—you can have both! It could be you! It’s all your mother’s fault (and hers before her)—and then she dies as well! Suck on that, Mr Well-Balanced-on-a-Balcony. There is no either/or, there is only both/and. Which even the most wall-eyed observer of what the philosophers call life could have told you in the first place. Life, after all, does indeed consist of walking bollock-naked along Oxford Street with a pineapple on your head and then being obliged to marry a member of the Royal Family; of being buried up to the neck in wet mud while listening to all available recordings of the New World symphony.

  The clever thing about depression, you see, is that it makes compatible what is outwardly incompatible. As in, none of it is my fault, and it’s all entirely my fault. As in, Islamic fundamentalists are releasing nerve gas into the London Underground to kill the city’s entire population—but they’re only doing it to get me. As in, if I can make jokes about it, I can’t be depressed. Wrong, wrong! It’s cleverer than you, and it’s even cleverer than me.

  Stuart Sophie told me she thinks it’s wrong to eat animals.

  I explained about organic principles, the Soil Association, non-intensive husbandry, organic feed, animal welfare, and so on. I told her about all the things that are banned, from growth hormones to permanent tethering, from GM feedstuffs to slatted concrete floors. I probably went on a bit.

  Sophie said it was still wrong.

  ‘Well, what are your shoes made of?’

  She looked at them for a while, then back at me, and said, in a very grown-up way, ‘I’m not proposing to eat my shoes, am I?’

  Where did she get that from? ‘I’m not proposing to …’ She sounded like a Prime Minister all of a sudden.

  She stood there, waiting for an answer. I couldn’t find one. I could only think of that film where Charlie Chaplin eats his shoes. But that’s not an answer either.

  Oliver Gillian marks up the newspaper every morning. She has a red pen and puts *s by stories she thinks I might find interesting or amusing. What a trouper, eh? Bound to work like breakfast cereal, isn’t it? With added moral fibre, indeed.

  But news delights me not, nor features neither. I do not even understand the concept of ‘news’ any more, I realise. It’s an absurd plural to begin with. What’s the singular—‘a’ new? So the word ought to be ‘the new,’ not ‘the news.’ The new as opposed to the old. Ah, the spirit of pedantry still flickers briefly in Oliver, you see.

  My second beef. The new as opposed to the old. But it never is opposed, is it? The news always contains the oldest stories known to the tribe. Brutality, greed, hatred, selfishness, the four horsemen of the human soul ride across the broad screen applauded by the envious: this is the world news tonight, this morning, tomorrow, for all time. Cloying the gazettes with cant, well said, my friend.

  So I have taken to reading those pages in which I have no interest. Item, the goings on among the horse-racing fraternity. Tales of fetlock and pastern. Who’s putting up several pounds overweight (me! me!). Who thrives in muddy going (pas moi! pas moi!).

  Here is a piece of sempiternal wisdom from the land of blinkers and binox: it is a known truth that the owner of an unraced two-year-old is never a candidate for suicide.

  Isn’t that so very fine?

  The only question remaining is: who will buy me an unraced two-year-old?

  Dr Robb You listen. You are a witness. You validate.

  Sometimes just getting them to talk helps. But it takes courage to do so, to talk about the sort of feelings they’re going through. Often more courage than they’ve got. Depression is full of vicious circles like this. As a doctor, you find yourself recommending exercise to someone who feels exhausted all the time. Or explaining research into the benefits of sunlight to someone who only feels safe lying in bed with the curtains drawn.

  At least Oliver isn’t a drinker. Cheering yourself up in the short term in order to depress yourself in the longer term. That’s another vicious circle. And here’s another. Sometimes—not often, and not in Oliver’s case—you look at a person’s life and think that, objectively, they’re quite right to be depressed. You would be too if you were in their shoes. And then your job is to try and convince them they’re wrong or mistaken to be depressed.

  There was a report out recently which stated that people who are more in control of their professional lives are healthier than those who aren’t. In fact, not being in control of your life was shown to be a more significant negative health indicator than drinking or smoking or other conventional factors. The newspapers made much of this, but it seems to me that such findings could be reached by anyone with a modicum of common sense. People who are in control of their working lives are likely to be closer to the top of the pile anyway. Probably better educated, more health-conscious, and so on. People who aren’t in control of their lives are likely to be nearer the bottom of the pile. Less well educated, less well paid, more likely to have the sort of job that exposes them to health risks, and so on.

  What’s obvious to me, as a GP of twenty years’ standing, is that the free market operates in health just as it does in business. And I’m not talking about running hospitals on a commercial basis. I’m talking about pure health. Free markets make the rich richer and the poor poorer and tend towards monopoly. Everyone knows that. It’s the same with health. The healthy get healthier, the unhealthy get unhealthier. More vicious circles.

  I’m sorry, my partner would say I’m on my soapbox again. But if you saw what I see on a daily basis. I sometimes think at least plagues were more democratic in their effect. Except of course they weren’t—because the rich were always better able to isolate themselves, or better able to run away. The poor were always wiped out.

  Oliver You recall that I was un peu hyper about the wallpaper? Afear’d o’ reading the runes, of being panicked by a recurring pattern of madeleines, if you follow my piste. Funny thing was, when we moved in, there wasn’t any. It’d all been painted over by the previous occupants. Who could imagine that the heart’s salve could be as easily applied—indeed, turn out to be exactly the same thing—as a gallon or two of brilliant white vinyl matt emulsion?

  But not so fast. The other day I was having a bad day, as we like to say—since to call the day bad is to blame the day for its malignity rather than stigmatise the endurer of the said day—one of those days when, nailed to the couchette, the prisoner of his own consciousness can find naught to fall back upon except the wide-screen entertainment of the wall. At first I took it to be an ocular disturbance possibly occasioned by a gourmandising attitude to the dothiepin. A flawed diagnosis,
rectified by the calling-in of a specialist—Matron herself—who confirmed that the hallucinatory Op Art before my eyes was none other—O trite yet brutal phenomenon—than the old wallpaper beginning to show through again.

  You see how realism dogs us? How fruitless our efforts to muzzle the beast? Who was it said, ‘Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be; why then should we desire to be deceived?’ Bastard. Old eighteenth-century bastard. Deceive me, O deceive me—as long as I know it and like it.

  Stuart I think Oliver is completely losing it.

  I said to him, ‘Oliver, I’m sorry you’re depressed.’

  ‘It’s moving house,’ he replied. ‘It’s up there with death of the paterfamilias.’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’

  He was sitting in his dressing-gown on the sofa in the kitchen. He looks terrible at the moment, all white and lethargic. Plump as well. Pills plus lack of exercise, I assume. Not that Oliver ever took anything but mental exercise. He isn’t even taking that nowadays. His expression seemed to say that he wanted to be bitter and sarcastic but didn’t have the energy.

  ‘Actually, there is,’ he said, ‘old chum. You can buy me an unraced two-year-old.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘It’s some kind of nag,’ he explained. ‘It’s more effective than Dr Robb’s entire pharmacopoeia.’

  ‘Are you serious?’

  ‘Perfectly.’

  He has lost it, hasn’t he?

  Gillian Sophie has announced that she’s a vegetarian. She says lots of her new friends at school are vegetarians. My immediate thought was I didn’t want to have another picky eater in the house. Thinking about what Oliver will and won’t eat at the moment is enough for me. So I asked Sophie—treating her in a very grown-up way, which she always responds to—I asked her if she would mind putting off the implementation of her decision—which of course I respected—for a year or two, because we seemed to have enough on our plate at the moment as it is.

  ‘Enough on our plate,’ she repeated, and laughed. I hadn’t said it deliberately. Then—since I was treating her as a grown-up—she did me the honour of treating me as one in return. She explained that it was wrong to kill and eat animals, and once you had understood this, there was no choice except to be a vegetarian. She went on at some length about this—well, she is Oliver’s daughter, after all.

  ‘What are your shoes made of?’ I asked, when she had finished.

  ‘Mum,’ she replied, with all a child’s weary stubbornness, ‘I’m not proposing to eat my shoes.’

  Oliver Jogging is recommended. Do you know Dr Robb, by the way? (Probably not, unless you are in the same bateau ivre as moi.) The Good Doctor only used the word exercise, but I heard jogging. I must have let slip a swaddled preference for the Oblomovian divan, so she explained. Exercise, according to this week’s wisdom from The Men Who Guess, raises the sacred endorphin levels and so provokes a lifting of the spirits. Before you know where you are it’s happy-bunny time again. QED.

  My response was not Archimedean, I fear. I did not let slip the bathwater in exultation. I may even have whinnied my despair like a stressful slimline porker. Later, I reasoned it thus: the very adoption of jogging apparel, from cheesy trainers to cheesy smile via saggy-bummed two-piece with lurid zip, would so depress my endorphin levels to begin with, while the idea of showing myself thus arrayed in daylight, that other supposed mood-enhancer, would so fill me with shame, that I would have to pogo my way to Casablanca and back merely to restore this mythical substance to its original basement reading. QEFD, and you can work out the F for yourself.

  Ellie It’s true what I said about Stuart. It’s not a problem, it’s not a big deal, it isn’t high-maintenance. So why isn’t it more straightforward?

  We were back from a Chinese, and I was in one of those do-I-don’t-I moods, when you want the other person to help make your mind up. But he wasn’t playing. Either he wasn’t picking up my mood or he was and it didn’t bother him one way or the other. And I wanted to say: look, when we first met you were all grown-up, i.e., bossy, about things like me wanting cash and going out for a drink. Now you can’t even tell me whether you want me to stay the night or not.

  I said, ‘So what do you think?’ We were halfway between the front door and the bedroom.

  ‘What do you think?’ he answered.

  I waited. I just waited. Then I said, ‘I think that if you don’t know what you think, then I think I’m going to fuck off home.’

  Now there are a few things you can say to that, but ‘Fine’ is fairly low on my list. And there are a few bits of body language you can go in for at the same time, but turning away to the bathroom to have a pee before I’m out of the front door is also low on my list.

  The next morning I’m in the studio, both of us working away, and I suddenly lose it. There’s Gillian, sitting at her easel, bending forwards, adjusting the lamp, in profile, like some calm bloody cut-out Vermeer, and I’m thinking: hey, excuse me, but didn’t you and your second husband, the big fraud himself, didn’t you try to get me off with your first husband without telling me you’d been married to him, and didn’t he run this Mr Henderson scam on me, and then when I did end up shagging him didn’t it soon become mega-obvious that while he was perfectly polite about shagging me and even seemed to enjoy it, he was still completely fucking obsessed with you over there?

  So I told her. I told her in those words too. Have you noticed how grown-ups hate the word shag? My dad doesn’t mind if I smoke and get cancer, that’s fine by him, but when I once said I was shagging a boy, he looked at me as if I was a real slapper. Also, like I was failing to appreciate the beautiful act of making love like it had always been with my mum, blah blah, back in the days before they split up. So I deliberately said shag to Gillian, except she didn’t even wince as I hoped, just carried on listening very carefully, and when I got to the bit about Stuart being completely fucking obsessed with her, you know how she reacted?

  She smiled.

  Stuart I read about this case in the paper today. It’s a truly horrible story, and I advise you to skip the next bit unless you’ve got a strong stomach.

  It happened in the States, though it could have happened anywhere. I mean, America is just an exaggerated version of everywhere else, isn’t it? Anyway, there was a man, fairly young, in his twenties, whose father died. His girlfriend was away on a cruise at the time, and she no doubt quite reasonably decided that since the father was dead rather than just dying, she would carry on with the cruise rather than cut it short in order to comfort her boyfriend. Now he—perhaps equally reasonably—resented this bitterly, with a bitterness that time didn’t heal. It seemed like a terrible betrayal. So he decided to inflict as much pain on her as he had suffered himself. He wanted her to know the sort of grief he had felt at the death of his father.

  Are you sure you want to go on? I’d bail out now if I were you. So he married his girlfriend, and they talked about starting a family, and she became pregnant and had the baby, and he waited long enough for her to be properly bonded with the child, and then he killed it. He put plastic wrap—what we call clingfilm—over the baby’s face and left it to die. Then he came back, took the clingfilm off and turned the baby face down in its cot.

  I warned you it was horrible. And then there’s this. For several months, apparently, the mother thought it was a case of cot death. That’s what the doctor had said. But one day her husband went to the police station and confessed to murder. Now, why do you think he did that? Guilty conscience? Maybe. I’m not sure I altogether believe in guilty consciences. Not much, not in cases I’ve seen. OK, perhaps there was a bit of that. But wasn’t it about inflicting even more and even worse pain on his girlfriend-wife? If she thought it was a case of cot death, she could blame Fate or something. But now she knew it wasn’t Fate. It was deliberate. Pain had been caused deliberately, by someone she thought loved her, to someone else she loved, with th
e sole purpose of hurting her. You could say that she found out what the world was like at that moment.

  It was a terrible thing to do, wasn’t it? I’m not saying it wasn’t. But in a way, what was most terrible about it was that it was also, in a way, quite reasonable. In a terrible way, of course.

  Oliver The whipcrack of DNA. Rather pleased with that, I admit. Made me think. Man (not forgetting woman, neither). The being without a reasonable reason for being. Gave himself a reason in the old days, in the time of myths and heroes. When the world was big enough for tragedy. Nowadays? Nowadays we just tippy-tip our toes in the circus sawdust to the whipcrack of DNA. What is human tragedy for today’s diminished species? To act as if we have free will while knowing that we don’t.

  17

  A TODGER AMONG THE DRACHMAE

  Anonymous

  TO WHO IT MAT CONCERN, TAX OFFICE N16 DISTRICT

  This is to inform you that Oliver Russell of 38 St Dunstan’s Road N16 is avoiding paying tax. He is employed by the Green Grocer company (head office Ryall Road N17) as a van driver and is paid in cash by the boss Mr Stuart Hughes. Russell and Mr Hughes are in point of fact old friends. We estimate that he is currently in receipt of £150 p.w. cash from Mr Hughes. We have reason to believe that Russell is also involved in the distribution of bootleg video rentals and leaflets advertising curry houses and other items. You will understand that in the circumstances I am unable to sign this letter except as—