Notes on Myself

I do write the notes that night. Not because he told me to — I want that clearly on the record, I write them because writing is my discipline and discipline is what I have left — but I am aware, as I uncap the pen, that I am also obeying him, and that the two facts can be true at once is exactly the kind of thing I would point out to a patient and exactly the kind of thing I do not want pointed out to me. I write at my kitchen table. The blue jug is on the third shelf above where the radio used to be. I have not looked at it directly in years; tonight I cannot look at anything else. I try to write about Mr. Vane and I find that I cannot describe him. Mid-height, grey jacket — I have those, but they are nothing, they would not find him in a crowd of two. What I can describe, in unsettling detail, is myself. I have filled a page and a half and every line of it is about me — what I felt, when I glanced at the clock, the summer I was eleven, the door, my mother, the jug. He has been my patient for one session and my notes on him are a portrait of Frances Aldous. This is, I tell myself, a known phenomenon. It even has a name. Counter-transference: the clinician's own material, stirred by the patient, mistaken for the patient's. I write the word in the margin. Counter-transference. It is a good word. It is a handrail. It says: the strangeness is in you, Frances, not in him, and that is uncomfortable but it is ordinary, and ordinary can be managed. And then I turn back to the first page to read what I have written, and I stop. I do not recognise the handwriting on the first three lines. It is close to mine. It is so close that I had not noticed while writing — the same forward lean, the same closed loops — but it is not mine, it is mine the way a voice on a recording is your voice, recognisable and wrong, and those three lines say something I have no memory of deciding to write. They say: He is not the patient. He has never been the patient. The patient has always been you, and you came here today because it was time to begin. I put the pen down. I sit in my own kitchen, under my own cracked jug, and I do the thing thirty years has taught me to do with a frightened mind, which is to slow it, and question it, and ask it for its evidence. Possibility one: I am tired, and frightened, and a tired frightened clinician misreads her own handwriting and her own memory, and there is no Mr. Vane problem, there is only a Frances problem, and the Frances problem is stress, and stress is treatable, and I should call my own supervisor in the morning and say the words I have spent a career listening to other people fail to say: I think I am unwell. Possibility two: a man walked into my consulting room this afternoon knowing the precise contents of a childhood I have never disclosed, counted the minutes of the hour without a clock, and left instructing me to write notes that have appeared on the page in a hand that is almost, but not quite, my own. A clinician is trained to prefer possibility one. Possibility one is humble, and testable, and kind to everyone but me. I have sent patients gently toward their own possibility-ones for thirty years and I have been right to, almost always. But I keep returning to the one detail that possibility one cannot hold. When Mr. Vane stood at my door, before he said the thing about writing my notes, he said: same time next Thursday. And I have just now, looking at my open diary on the kitchen table, found Thursday four o'clock already filled in, in ink, in the not-quite-mine handwriting, under a name that is not Vane and not any name I gave him. It is my own. The four o'clock on Thursday, every Thursday, stretching forward through the diary as far as I have dared to turn the pages, is booked for a patient called Frances Aldous. And I cannot tell you, sitting here, pen down, jug above me, which of us made that appointment — and that, precisely that, is the symptom I would be most afraid to hear described, if a patient ever sat in my room and described it to me.