Patricia usually appeared at breakfast and made a speech about the purpose and aims of the Centre. Once, she told us one of her dreams; then she interpreted it, to prevent any misunderstanding. There was an impressed silence, before she swept away. She uttered few words in my direction but she always looked hard at me as if we were connected in some way, as if she were about to speak. I supposed she looked at everyone like this, now and again, to make them feel part of her community. I no longer believed she understood me, but did I make her particularly curious? She seemed to say: what do you really want? It agitated me. I kept away from her but she remained in my mind, like a question.
Patricia’s workshops were the most popular and intense, and always full. However, as Alicia told me in confidence, they were known more for the quantity of tears shed than for the quality of wisdom transmitted. But I was only a kitchen skivvy and took no part. Taking my father’s advice, I was on a working holiday.
Ten days after I’d started, Patricia came into the kitchen, where I laboured under the regime of an old Greek woman with whom I could barely communicate. I’d never seen Patricia in the kitchen before. Like the obdurate adolescent I wanted her to see me as, I refused to meet her look. She had to tell me to stop peeling potatoes.
‘Just stop now.’
‘Patricia, I wouldn’t feel good about leaving half a potato.’
‘To hell with potatoes! I am about to begin my dream workshop with the new group. I’ve decided that it’s time you joined us.’
‘Me? Why?’
‘I think you should learn something.’
‘Oh, I don’t want to learn. I had years of it and nothing went in, as you pointed out.’ She looked hurt, so I said, ‘What kind of thing is it?’
She sighed. ‘We free-associate around people’s dreams. We might write around them, or paint or draw. Or even dance. I’ve seen you shake your butt, at the disco. The girls were certainly intrigued, as they are when you parade around the place with your shirt off. But you keep away from the workshop members, don’t you?’
‘It goes without saying.’
‘Even that idiot with the ghost?’
‘Ah, yes,’ I said. ‘That damned ghost.’
The ghost always cheered Patricia up.
One of the women who’d recently come to the Centre and been allocated a room in town, as some people were, had stood up at breakfast and told us her room was haunted. Typically, Patricia imagined this was a ruse for the woman to be moved to a superior room with a sea view — not something Patricia could offer or fall for. Instead of moving her, Patricia had deputed me to sit, all night, in the doorway of the woman’s room, keeping an eye out for the revenant.
‘Watching for ghosts is one of your duties,’ Patricia had said to me, barely containing her delight. ‘When the bastard turns up, you deal with it.’
‘Such work wasn’t in my original job description,’ I said. ‘And do ghosts use doors?’
I had told Alicia, ‘Wait ’til they hear this back in London — that I’ve been employed on a ghost-watch.’
That night, I’d stayed awake as long as I could but had, of course, fallen asleep in the chair. The ghosts came. Nothing with a sheet over its head bothered me, but my own internal shades and shadows, by far the most hideous, had become mightily busy. The woman I guarded slept well. By morning, I was in a cold sweat with rings the colour of coal under my eyes. The women at the Centre, when they weren’t being solicitous, found they hadn’t laughed as much since they’d arrived.
‘Particularly not with the ghost-woman,’ I said now to Patricia.
‘Good. You’re not included in the price of the holiday.’ She went on, ‘Now, come along. People pay hundreds of pounds to participate. I want you to see what goes on here. Tell me. Surely you don’t believe that only the rational is real, or that the real is always rational, do you?’
‘I haven’t thought much about it.’
‘Liar!’
‘Why say that?’
‘There’s more to you than you let on! How many kids your age whistle tunes from Figaro while they’re peeling potatoes?’
She strode out, expecting me to follow her, but I’m not the sort to follow anyone, particularly if they want me to.
I looked at the old Greek woman, washing the kitchen floor. This was the kind of reality I was adjusted to: getting a patch of earth the way you want it while thinking of nothing.
However, I left the kitchen and, outside, went up the steps. In the large, bright room, I could see that Patricia, along with the rest of the class, had been waiting for me.
She pointed at the floor. ‘Sit down, then we’ll start.’
Around the group she went, soliciting dreams. What a proliferation of imagination, symbolism and word-play there was in such an ordinary group of people! I stayed for over an hour, at which point there was a break. Breathing freely at last, I hurried out into the heat. I kept going and didn’t return, but went into town, where I had provisions to buy for the Centre.
When I returned, Alicia was waiting under a tree outside, with her notebook. She stood up and waved in my face.
‘Leo, where have you been?’
‘Shopping.’
‘You’ve caused a terrible fuss. You can’t walk out on Patricia like that,’ she said. ‘I kind of admire it. I like it when people are driven to leave my lessons. I know there’s something pretty powerful going on. I don’t like poetry to be helpful. But we masochists are drawn to Patricia. We do what she says. We never, ever leave her sessions.’
‘I had work to do,’ I said. I wasn’t prepared to say that I had left Patricia’s workshop because it had upset me. Dreams had always fascinated me; in London, I wrote mine down, and Margot and I often discussed dreams over breakfast.
My dream on the ‘ghost-watch’ had been this: I was to see my dead parents again, for a final conversation. When I met them — and they had their heads joined together at one ear, making one interrogative head — they failed to recognise me. I tried to explain how I had come to look different, but they were outraged by my claims to be myself. They turned away and walked into eternity before I could convince them — as if I ever could — of who I really was.
The other dream was more of an image: of a man in a white coat with a human brain in his hands, crossing a room between two bodies, each with its skull split open, on little hinges. As he carried the already rotting brain, it dripped. Bits of memory, desire, hope and love, encased in skin-like piping, fell onto the sawdust floor where hungry dogs and cats lapped them up.
Much as I would have liked to, I couldn’t even begin to talk about this with the group. My ‘transformation’ had isolated me. As Ralph could have pointed out, it was the price I had to pay.
I couldn’t either, of course, say this to Alicia, who had become my only real friend at the Centre. She came from a bohemian family. Her father had died in her early teens. At fifteen, her mother took her to live in a sex-crazed commune. It had made her ‘frigid’. She felt as neglected as a starving child. Now, she overlooked herself, eating little but carrying around a bag of carrots, apples or bananas which she’d chop into little pieces with a penknife and devour piece by piece. She only ever ate her own food, and, I noticed, would only eat alone or in front of me.
In the evenings, she and I had begun to talk. Twice a week there were parties for the Centre participants. The drinking and dancing were furious. The women had the determined energy of the not quite defeated. They liked Tamla Motown and Donna Summer; I liked the ballet of their legs kicking in their long skirts. After, it was my job to clear away the glasses, sweep the floor, empty the ashtrays and get the Centre ready for breakfast. I did it well; cleanliness had become like a poem to me. A cigarette butt was a slap in the face. Alicia liked to help me, on her knees, late at night, as the others sat up, confessing.