Monologue 4 - Be Careful What You Wish For

Birgit, my therapist. She’s… An anomaly? Is that kind? I think that’s the kindest thing I can say about her. She’s a striking woman. Big, angry features, and folds in her face like a bulldog. Dribbles a bit like one too. To be fair to her, that’s the main reason I chose her. That and the fact that she’s really old. 

I’d had an unfortunate trial session with an ineffectual and relentlessly uplifted young woman called Rebecca who I wanted to kill. Wide eyes full of wonder at every utterance I made, in the inane, sing-song whine-drone of a shit primary school teacher. Cooing in appreciation, as if I’d presented her with one of those rabid scribbles that toddlers put so much effort into. Elongated vowels. I fucking hate elongated vowels, there’s no need for them. Ever. And WAY too much volume. I wanted to say ‘I’m two feet from your face, Supernanny, no need to project. And I’ve wet myself.’

On the way home on the bus, I imagined her smiling through a rendition of ‘so you’re feeling suiciiiiidalllll?’, all concerned, followed by a big old Sorry face, like that cartoon Puss-in-Boots in Shrek.  I also imagined punching her in the face until she bled, so… best not, in the end. I suppose she’d have helped me work on my anger, but… no.

So I was looking for the antithesis of that. Be careful what you wish for. Birgit is… well, she’s about 90, or maybe she’s 45 and had a hard life. She’s definitely had a hard life, because I’m paying her £60 a session to hear about it. Her father died recently, you see, and she’s falling apart. Cries two or three times per session. And her husband left her (not surprised. Not generous of me, but not at all surprised) so what with her father now ‘leaving her’ too, it’s all building up and she’s only just… 

Don’t get the wrong idea, though. This is not a gentle woman. Fragile, definitely, but not weak. Very, very forceful. She speaks with terrifyingly clipped German accent and I come out of sessions tapping into a kind of concentration camp trauma. I mean, not, obviously, and that’s terribly disrespectful, but still. She’s … commanding.

I only went to get some help getting rid of my ex-husband. Not in a hit-man way. In some ways, that would have been easier. It’s just, we’ve been divorced four and a half years and he’s still living in the spare room. Brings his girlfriend over sometimes (which is a relief – she’s much nicer than he is) but there he still is, eating my cornflakes and leaving scum around the bathtub as if we’d never split up. And I can’t seem to bring myself to give him the push. I can’t bear the smell of him. Literally and figuratively. He has one of those fungal infections that makes him smell like a camembert and corpses and he’s always had breath that could stop horses in their tracks. But just his presence. I’ll do pretty much anything to avoid him. I took up pole dancing, for fuck’s sake, because it’s the only class I could find on a Tuesday night and I can’t bear to go home. I’m 59. Sixty in three weeks. Everyone else is about 23 and a little bit mental. It’s almost worse than going home to play ‘which room is Alan in?’ – it’s an olfactory little puzzle which I always solve within seconds of walking through the door. 

But I wasn’t managing to bring myself to get him out. He’s such a pathetic waste of a person, it would feel like finding a baby bird fallen from a tree, plucking all its fledgling feathers out and shoving back out into the night. And I wanted to get a handle on why, so that’s how I ended up in Birgit’s consultation room every week, questioning why on earth I keep going back.

Since I started going six weeks ago, I think I’ve been permitted to speak for a total of about 63 minutes. Actually, it’s exactly 63 minutes. Or maybe 62. I started timing it after the first week, which was definitely less than 10 minutes, but I rounded it up. She doesn’t notice, because when she talks, which she does for the other 40 minutes of our strictly-timed 50-minute session, she rolls her big old bulldog eyeballs back in her head and shuts her eyes. And dribbles. Just a bit, on the left side of her mouth, but enough to be immensely compelling. 

And if I talk, in answer to one of the few questions she asks me near the beginning, she starts looking at her watch, or one of the three clocks she has in the room so that she can see the time from any angle – unless she’s talking, of course, in which case all she can see is her own rich inner tapestry – and barges in with “We mast moof on now. You are stack in the unhealsy stories.”

She doesn’t take any shit, doesn’t Birgit, and she likes to use examples from her own life to illustrate how she’s right about what’s wrong with my life. Which is a lot, if hers is anything to go by. She has told me that I am “wery, wery damaged indeed” and that I’m suffering from the loss of my father, which I’ve never grieved, apparently, even though I remember pretty clearly that I cried a lot when he died and that when my step-father came on the scene, I wouldn’t even look at him for about ten years, even though I was already 40. I think that counts, doesn’t it? And I keep telling her, he died thirty years ago. Thirty years! 

“No”, she says, before she launches into the latest details of her unravelling in her own therapist’s office, and her (frankly unwelcome) account of her borderline oedipal relationship with her own son, “You are wery sad and wery cripplt and you will never be without wery mach therapies.” And then she tries to sign me up for a year with her. A YEAR. 

She reckons that not only am I grieving my dead father and my Gertrude-like mother (she waited ten years, and she didn’t marry my dad’s brother, but try telling Birgit that), but I’m also suffering from early developmental trauma (I’m not even sure what that is), agoraphobia (like I say, I spend ALL of my time out, because of my infection of an ex-husband) and probably bi-polar. I probably would be by the end of a year with her.

The final straw was when she told me that she could guarantee (a legally dubious promise, at the very least) that if I did succeed in ousting the Mushroom and found myself finally, blissfully alone in the house with nothing but an ageing cat and some housespiders, I would also find myself afflicted by (and I quote her verbatim) “a deep, difficult, debilitating depression and wery mach loneliness to the very core of your psyche.” Guaranteed.

That was my last session with Birgit. I’d completed my six weeks (I didn’t dare miss one) but I declined the offer of a year of further torture. When I said goodbye, she wouldn’t shake my hand. Wouldn’t even look at me. Shut the door behind me with a definite tinge of a slam. I went straight home and told Alan he had 48 hours to ship the fuck out. He looked relieved, weirdly, and was gone before I woke up the next morning, leaving nothing but the smell. 

The house feels a little empty, I admit. The cat’s not much company. But I have lots to do. The corpse smell seems to have permeated the walls so I’ve had to get people in to spray and redecorate, and I’m busy making the place mine. It feels much bigger than it used to. I’ve stopped going to pole dancing and most of my other classes now that Alan's gone. I haven’t really got the energy any more. It's good to have the place to myself. I don't even leave the house most days. I'm just here. 

I tried to check in on Alan but he’s not returning my calls. I’m sure he’s fine. I’m fine. I’m okay, anyway. I will be fine. It’s just a question of re-adjusting. We were together 30 years, you know. It will just take a little time.

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Inspiration thanks to Kate