Waiting for client R.

I imagine her pale hand on the door knob. She is forty seconds late.

 Let me tell you my theme.Yes, let's start with the theme. Let's have all the pipework, the struts, let's have the architecture on the outside. Well, it's all display, is it not? If we are anything we are within the world. We cannot pretend we don't have surfaces. So, fuck it, take it all then, take everything.  So, my theme. As I have said over and over I believe in nothing but the beauty of horseshit. Lies, falsehood, have always seemed to me the entire engine, the oil, of existence. They are what makes stuff happen. I mean the lies we tell ourselves, the lies we tell others, but mainly the lie to ourselves. The secret grandeur of our delusions is what makes stuff happen. It's what gives us the cock stand. Of course, truth exists, and we need it now and again. Sometimes you have holler from the balls, slap the wife, check the weather. Sometimes you require even the mathematics of breakfast. And yet, it's the delusion that made you rise, hungry,  from the bed. It's what makes people, even animals and plants, strive. It is the striving, the birthing, of an unknown bud. Striving to birth under a terrible sun. But like fucking, all this is secret. We never see any of it. Like death, it never happened. We wipe it off the face of the earth. All we are left is a skirt, and the memory of sniffing. How else should a healthy man spend his time? So, having always honoured the horseshit, always enjoyed the blarney of lying and being lied to, I became a therapist. I sat in rooms hiding behind my eyes, creating nothing. I had exceptional success with women. I died every day. And if I can trace all of this to the twin influence of an insincere mother and a brutal father then, no matter. I have trodden those paths for the both of us. But I am not here to tell more lies. It occurs to me, sat here waiting for client R., that without a few truths we could never know our inventions. And just possibly, it's time to touch base. And I will. But for now, fuck it. Let us dance a little, dance together. Let us be warm under the winter sun.

Her pale hand.

Shall we dance..?

Oh lordy.

I dance alone.

And why not? We live as we die, alone. And so I dance.

But do I deserve you, really? What have I ever done for you? Maybe in the past I came here for comfort. Maybe I conveyed a glamour to the grime of my life, maybe the O lay a soporific haze over all my crimes, did it? No more, no. I am clean now a year and half. Clean as a whistle, clear as a bell. Lithe, erect. My bowels? Definitive. Libidinally insane. And me, nearly fifty!  And yet, is that not the age for truth? Because this is what this is: one last assault on my life and I am here for the truth, nothing less. And so if I ask of your time, it is because I know why I am here.  Yes, I, who never believed in such a thing. Who saw reservoirs of falsehood and knew them to be the better places rather than the grimy taps of truth. Yes, me, me! I am here, buckled under that rusting tap, straining for a single drop, before it's all too late. So bear with me, one last time, if you will.

And if you won't, no matter.

We all deserve what we get, precisely.

I hear Gareth, the scrape of his chair.

Has nothing changed?

Plenty.

Of Rome, lately.

What can I say? How cold her arse must have felt on the Spanish steps. And pregnant, too. Of course, I took to the skies with redemption in mind and did not expect to have my intentions so thwarted, so quickly. And yet what are plans for, if not subversion? I came to banish shame and found, instead, a smiley blonde from Texas.

I sat with her, smiled, and offered the sense that I, too, were far too weary to work out how or why I landed here, on these steps in the furious cold of a February morning. Of course, I knew exactly why, and yet, as my befuddlement began to amuse her, I could sense we were only minutes away from undressing and so, like a proper Englishman, I took her for tea, to gather myself. I should have been in the Galleria in the park behind us, groping my Pauline, my marbled mistress, but, in fact, I was captivated and later, as we drank and our knees touched, I felt the arousal of my long dormant desire, and fetish, maiesiophilia. Was I not done with all that? I wanted my hands on her belly and to follow the long curve into her thighs. I wanted the honey scent of her hormone. If I had her, I would never want of anything, nor have any need of justifying, or articulating, redeeming or even listening, ever again. And if could hear, in the singsong of her accent, the insincerity of my own mother then, so be it, so what. It was all I ever wanted then, and forever. And so, I did.

She was twenty one.

Oh what am I for? No, really.

When we were shopping and dancing, watching and waving, therapy seemed a radical, almost subversive thing to do. When all of life seduced you outward, into the shops, to go inward was the highest refusal. And yet now, with the world entering a depression that will hang over the best years of my son's life, I cannot help but see therapy as becoming the shameful preserve of the upper middle classes. And yet, are they not interesting, too? Certainly, I have found much to savour in these women. They tend towards their mid-forties, teenage children, a travelling husband and a general sense of losing purchase on their attachments. And into this aporia they fill memories of childhood, the angry nanny, the abusive uncle, the desolation of wealthy parenting and so, partly vengeful, they come to see me, in my room , once, maybe twice a week. Who's complaining? And yet, is this what I am for? Inevitably, I am dependent on the state of the ecomony. I hawk my wares as much as anyone and yet, in truth, I will heed a lesson I learnt from Axel: when times are hard, put your prices up.

I really must buy a ticket to Rome. And yet, the loneliness of groping Pauline again, on my own. Would Thom come?

Would he ever recover?

And so, cock robin...

I took a flask of O to the cemetery. In truth, as we stood listening to another African song (hardly an expression of Colin's soul, I have to say, yet certainly indicative of his contemporaneity), I took a quiet blast of O, less to stifle my grief, but the better to experience it. I also wanted the O to muffle a certain preoccupation I was having. I couldn't stop asking myself what the collective noun for a group of therapists would be. An alliance, perchance? A hum? Eventually I came round to exactly where I stood, a funeral of therapists. Appropriate and accurate, if entirely meaningless. And so later, I casted around for any old uncles, retarded sisters or pervy cousins, anything to give a real whiff of Colin, or the hinterland he'd polished away, both in therapy and half a life consorting in cosmopolita. There was nothing, there was nobody. He'd filled the church with friends and, of course, contemporaries. Even Gareth was restless.

I shall break into his room and steal one of his books.

God knows, I'll inscribe it to myself.

Colin's funeral.

Gareth said the clients can't come. He insists on maintaining proper boundaries, even in death. I feel rebuked, slightly, while noticing, however, that the zeal Gareth puts into insisting upon boundaries, is the very same zeal he puts into transgressing them himself. I really must do some proper spying on him.

Saw Thom this evening. He was quiet, preferring to practice his grade 5 piano pieces. I wonder if he has girl trouble? And then it occurs to me, for all our international pursuit of the finest erotica, would Thom feel at ease telling me about his girlfriends...? Is that possible? Could I have been a more liberal, more, in fact, shameless father? I began to crumple under a wave of stunning dismay. And so he, sensing my disintegration, reminded me of how I, at his age, had failed my grade 4 flute exam. Had not the teacher called my playing 'disturbing'? And so Thom, as only a son is able, saved me from my disintegration, by pointing it out.

I still have that report of my musical failure.

I must frame it. It'll be a reminder of my vocation.

The worst snow for eighteen years, they say.

What would Colin have said? Undoubtedly, he would have made some pertinent comments about the media, and our penchant for a national crisis. But Colin is dead. And so, alas, there is nothing I can do but shake the snow from my wellies and enquire after Gareth, his health, and where he procured his rather fetching, undoubtedly new, bobble hat.

It was a bracing start to the day and yet it paled, quickly. Client L, for all her rosy cheeks, left the room having deposited, in earnest, a certain amount of the sexual shame she inherited from her demented, Plymouth Brethren parents. Oh, what matter? And yet it left a stain that attached itself to me, to my face, in fact, to my nose. Very slightly, it quivered. For a moment I had no control over my nose and, aware of the symbology, made a direct connection to Canova's Pauline. Clearly, this was all about my dick and my doomed, teenage groping of Pauline's left breast. I really must get back to Rome and finish the job properly.

The rest of the day I was restless. I tore a copy of Courbet from the shelves and stared at The Origin of The World for twenty minutes. Later, at home, I poured my flabby but bronzed body into my old wetsuit, slithered into the car and headed for the coast where I then staggered into the freezing winter sea. I roared into the waves as they annihilated, and yet affirmed, my burning body. Thank fuck for life, as they say.