The Hypnotist’s Love Story Read online

  Ellen just nodded and offered her the bowl of chocolates, but later, as they were standing at the front door and Deborah was putting on her coat, she said slowly, without looking at Ellen, concentrating on doing up her buttons, "You know, you might actually cure me."

  "I'm not curing you," Ellen reminded her. "The physical cause could still very well be there, whatever it is. I'm just helping you find a way to manage the pain."

  "Yes, but it might actually work," said Deborah, and the surprise and respect in her eyes reminded Ellen of the look on her grandmother's face all those years ago.

  Ellen smiled now, remembering that moment. That was job satisfaction.

  She opened her diary and her smile faded when she saw her last appointment for the day: Mary-Kate McGovern. Oh, well. No more surprised, respectful looks today.

  She glanced at her watch. There was still time for Mary-Kate to cancel. On three previous occasions she had called at the last minute to say that she couldn't get away from work. She was a legal secretary and always sounded full of breathless self-importance when she called to cancel, as though the law firm she worked for couldn't operate without her.

  Ellen chided herself for that uncharitable thought. Maybe Mary-Kate was indispensable. And she always insisted on paying the fifty percent cancellation fee that Ellen specified on her price list (for cancellations with less than twenty-four hours' notice), even though Ellen never tried to enforce her own policy. She hated the idea of accepting money for doing nothing.

  The doorbell rang and Ellen swore, as if she'd stubbed her toe.

  So she was annoyed when Mary-Kate canceled and she was annoyed when she turned up. For some reason she was feeling a strong antipathy toward this poor, sad woman. What was that about? She'd had annoying clients before, and clients she liked more than others, but she'd never experienced such a visceral feeling of displeasure when a client turned up for an appointment.

  If she wasn't careful, her dislike would seep its way into Mary-Kate's therapy and that would be unconscionable.

  She reminded herself of the Buddhist doctrine: We are all one. She was Mary-Kate and Mary-Kate was her.

  Mmmm.

  She opened the door with a warm, welcoming smile. "Mary-Kate! Wonderful to see you!"

  "I'm sure it's just glorious to see me," said Mary-Kate with a bright, sarcastic smile.

  She couldn't have heard Ellen swear, could she?

  As usual, Mary-Kate was dressed entirely in black. She was a dumpy, lumpy woman with long, lank hair parted in the middle like a 1970s flower child, except that she didn't have the fresh baby face to carry it off. Her face had a resentful, hangdog look.

  Oh, you're a depressing sight, thought Ellen. She longed to give her a makeover, to cut her hair off, give it some volume and color, to dress her in some color other than black. Her face was quite pretty really. Even a touch of lipstick would brighten her up!

  Good Lord, she was turning into someone's awful mother.

  "Would you like to use the bathroom?" she asked Mary-Kate.

  She always asked clients if they wanted to use the toilet first; a full bladder was the worst thing for a good hypnosis session.

  "No thank you," said Mary-Kate. "Let's just get on with it."

  When Mary-Kate was sitting in the green recliner, somehow managing to make it look like the most uncomfortable chair ever, Ellen opened Mary-Kate's file on her lap.

  "How have you been since we last met?" she asked.

  "Same as ever. Fat as a whale. How have you been?"

  Ellen glanced up at her. "You're worried about your weight?"

  "No, well, yes of course, obviously, but whatever." Mary-Kate sighed and yawned. "So, Friday today. Got anything interesting planned for the weekend, Ellen? Seeing friends? Family?"

  "No particular plans," said Ellen. "So, tell me, is weight loss something you'd like us to work on?"

  At Mary-Kate's first appointment she'd said she wanted hypnosis because she'd started becoming panicky whenever she drove through the Sydney Harbour Tunnel, and she wanted to put a stop to it before she became one of those "nutty, fragile" types. She hadn't mentioned anything about her weight, but that was often the case with clients. The real reason they were there didn't emerge until after a few visits.

  "Perhaps I went through the potato famine in a past life," said Mary-Kate. "And now I'm trying to make up for it. That's why I crave potatoes."

  "Well, hypnotherapy can be very useful--"

  "I don't believe in past lives," said Mary-Kate truculently. "That's such crap."

  "I think we talked about this at our last session," said Ellen mildly. She was not fond of the word "crap." Also, they had talked at some length about Mary-Kate's lack of belief in past lives.

  "So you don't take people back to their past lives."

  "I don't specifically offer past-life regression," began Ellen. "But I certainly have had clients who believe they have re-experienced past lives under hypnosis. I have an open mind about it."

  Mary-Kate snorted and gave a little sneer.

  "Have you had to drive through the tunnel since I saw you last?" asked Ellen.

  Mary-Kate shrugged. "Yeah, I did. I was fine, actually. I must have got over it."

  Ellen studied her. "So, then, what are you hoping to gain from today's session, Mary-Kate?"

  Mary-Kate sighed again. She looked disdainfully around the room as if it was a cheap hotel room, leaned over, took a chocolate, then changed her mind and dropped it back in the bowl again.

  Finally she spoke. "Actually, I think I do need to use your bathroom."

  It felt like relief to see her again.

  I don't know how she feels about me, but I sort of like her. I mean, I'm sickened by her existence obviously, but I find her strangely compelling.

  It's almost a perverse crush. Like when you meet a man and you find him repulsive, but you still want to go to bed with him, and when you do, it's great, but afterward you feel ill with regret. Like that apelike guy I met at one of the client Christmas parties last year. He wore too much aftershave and more jewelry than me. The sex was fine, but afterward I was like a rape victim scrubbing myself in the shower and sobbing for Patrick. I guess it's like that self-loathing you feel after eating bad greasy junk food.

  Ellen wouldn't eat junk food. Tofu and lentils, I imagine. I wonder if she is lovingly appalled by Patrick's pizza habit yet.

  It's not like I want to go to bed with her. I just want to know everything about her. I want to watch her, in every imaginable situation. I want to get inside her head and inside her body. I want to be her, just for a day.

  I haven't felt like this about any of the other girls Patrick has dated.

  The thing about Ellen--

  It makes me feel good that I can use her name.

  I used it a lot at our last session. "Thanks, Ellen." "See you next week, Ellen." Each time I use her name it's like I'm slapping Patrick across his self-satisfied face.

  Don't think you've moved on, boy. Making a new life that has nothing to do with me. I'm still here. I'm tossing her name about. I've been in her house. I've used her bathroom. I know what brand deodorant and tampons she uses. She's nothing special.

  Except maybe she is. She might even be too good for you, buddy. She might be out of your league. Out of our league.

  The thing about Ellen is that it seems like she is exactly the same person on the outside as she is on the inside. That's the impression she gives anyway, as if she is without artifice or affectation, as if she doesn't have to filter every word that comes out of her mouth to make sure it gives the impression she wants to give.

  Of course, she must have some sort of filter. Everyone has a filter. It's just that her filter is something quick and simple that carefully discards anything that might accidentally offend anyone.

  Whereas my filter is a labyrinth of pipes and funnels and sieves that converts everything I think into something acceptable to say, depending on the situation and the person and what I'm
trying to prove at that particular moment.

  She has nothing to prove. She really believes all that "power of the mind" crap. She's passionate about it. It's like her religion.

  She comes across as a bit sanctimonious at first but I think she is actually a genuinely good person--in the old-fashioned sense of the word. She wishes only good for the world. Whereas you and I, Patrick, we're sort of flawed. We don't wish everyone well, do we?

  I feel like such a fake when I'm with her, not just for the obvious reasons. If I met her as my true self, I would still be aware of that difference between us.

  I can understand why you think you might love her, Patrick. I do understand. I love her a little bit too.

  It's just that on our first Christmas Eve together you and I fell asleep flat on our backs, like sunbakers; we were holding hands with the taste of raspberries in our mouths from that wonderful liqueur Stinky gave us, and the ceiling fan whirled above us, and the room seemed to rock, just gently, and I remember thinking it was like we were two children on a raft, floating down a magical river.

  That night happened. I don't care how sweet or pure-hearted Ellen is, that night happened. To us.

  When she didn't even exist.

  Remember how we both had a crush on Cameron Diaz?

  Well, that's how it should be with Ellen. We should have met her at a dinner party, and on the way home we could have talked about how lovely she was, and how interesting and weird all that hypnosis stuff was, and by the time we got home we should have forgotten all about her.

  She's extremely nice, but she's like Cameron Diaz, Patrick. She's not meant to be a real person in our lives. She's nothing to do with us.

  Ellen and Patrick were driving to her mother's place. Patrick was behind the wheel. He was the sort of man who automatically assumed it was his job to drive, which was fine with Ellen, who was a nervy driver. (She remembered how Jon always carefully, correctly shared the driving. "Your turn," he'd say, tossing her the keys, and then he'd sigh and snort and criticize her driving the whole way.)

  "So your mother never met anyone else after your dad," said Patrick. "Jesus. This traffic is out of control." He banged his foot on the brake and the car jerked. "Sorry."

  He was clearly nervous. It was such a pity that Ellen couldn't reassure him by saying something like, "Oh, my mother is going to adore you!"

  Her mother probably wouldn't adore him. Out of all of Ellen's past relationships, Anne had liked Jon the best, with his witty, caustic remarks. Of course she had. Jon was the one who had done the most damage to Ellen's self-esteem, the one she'd loved who hadn't really loved her back.

  If only she had one of those sweet, slightly plump, chatty mothers who were sort of vague about politics and business and anything outside the domestic realm. If only she had a gray-haired, bespectacled father who would warmly shake Patrick's hand and ask him man-to-man questions about surveying, while the sweet mother fussed about, trying to get the "fellows" to take a second piece of cheesecake.

  It wasn't going to be like that at all.

  "Mum has had a few long-term relationships over the years," she told Patrick. "But not for a while now."

  "And your dad is just ... not in the picture?"

  "Never anywhere near the picture," said Ellen. She paused, aware of a slight flash of irritation. "Like I said."

  She had told him her family history a few weeks after they started dating. She had perfected the telling of the story over the years, so that it was the ideal party piece or dinner party anecdote, unusual and interesting and intimate, just the right length, with no embarrassing emotion likely to cause guests to shift uneasily in their seats.

  She always started the same way. "My mother was a woman ahead of her time." Then she would explain that early on the morning of the first of January 1971 the intensely pragmatic Doctor Anne O'Farrell made a New Year's resolution to become a single mother. She was a successful, independent woman in her thirties and she didn't especially want to be married, but she did (oddly) want a baby. With the help of her two closest female friends, she made a list of potential candidates to father her child, along with their positive and negative attributes: their education levels, their medical histories and their personality traits.

  Anne had kept these lists and given them to Ellen when she was a teenager. Her "father" was a list of bullet points in her mother's scrawly handwriting with the figure "85%" circled next to it. The highest score by ten percent.

  Her father's positive attributes included "postgraduate education level" (he was a surgeon; Anne had met him at the university), "good teeth," "small ears" (her mother abhorred large, flappy ears), "excellent skin," "no family history of heart disease, diabetes or respiratory problems" and "good social skills."

  His negative attributes were "eyesight" (glasses), "spiritual tendencies," "mother who reads tarot cards," "somewhat strange sense of humor" and "engaged to be married."

  Over recent years, Ellen had started leaving off the "engaged to be married" part when she told people about the list. She didn't know if it was the whole world that was becoming more moral--a sort of increasing level of global prudishness--or if it was just her own social circle that appeared to be becoming more conservative.

  Apparently her father's engagement hadn't been an obstacle. It had been as easy as pie to seduce him, not just once, but the optimum number of times, and on the appropriate days before and after ovulation.

  "It was the seventies after all," said her mother.

  And that was that. A job well done. Her "father" got married two months later, and went off to live in the UK and never knew of Ellen's existence.

  "What if I wanted to go and find my dad?" she'd said to her mother when she was going through her extremely tame, short-lived rebellious teenager stage, and she quivered a little at the unfamiliar, almost sexual word in her mouth, "Dad."

  "I'm not stopping you." Anne didn't even look up from the newspaper she was reading. "It would be a very cruel, hurtful thing to do to his wife."

  And, of course, Ellen would never knowingly do anything cruel or hurtful, and besides, the thought of actually meeting this middle-aged man filled her with shyness. Her friends' fathers were big and hairy and deep-voiced, sometimes funny but mostly boring, and somehow essentially irrelevant to real life.

  Her mother's friends Melanie and Phillipa had never had children of their own. They had been Ellen's godmothers, and for much of Ellen's childhood had shared a house with her mother. There had been various boyfriends who arrived to take them out on dates, who sometimes turned up at breakfast time (unshaven and croaky-voiced at the kitchen table), but mostly they were just an amusing sideshow in Ellen's life; their mannerisms and appearances were dissected with much hilarity before they vanished. (Although Mel had finally got married in her fifties to a shy, inscrutable man who seemed to make her very happy and didn't overly impact on her social life.)

  "It was like having three mothers," Ellen would tell people, which was true. Three successful, opinionated single women who all had an equal say in her upbringing.

  "It was like growing up in a lesbian commune," she'd continue, but she'd stopped saying that as she got older, because she'd just been trying to sound sophisticated and edgy, and maybe it was a bit disrespectful to lesbians, and she actually had no idea what it would be like to live in a lesbian commune or even if they existed.

  "So my father was basically a sperm donor--he just didn't know it." That's how she always finished the story, and it normally generated lots of stimulating discussion, and people would say things like, "Aha! That's where you get your hypnotism thing from--your spiritual dad and your tarot card-reading grandma!" (as if they were the first people in the world to have thought of that), and some would applaud her mother's actions, and others would politely, or not so politely, express their disapproval.

  She didn't mind when people disapproved. She wasn't sure if she approved herself, but she knew her mother couldn't care less what anyone else thought,
and Ellen had told the story of her conception so many times now, she felt quite detached from it. It was like Julia's story of how her father had kidnapped her and her brother during a bitter custody dispute between her parents and dyed their hair brown, and there had even been a thrilling police chase. Ellen knew that Julia must have once felt some sort of emotion about this memory, and probably at some subconscious level she still did, but now it was just an excellent story. A party piece.

  Patrick had listened to her story carefully, and at the end he'd said, "Good for your mum, but I'm sorry you missed out on having a father."

  "You don't miss what you don't have," said Ellen, which wasn't something she really believed at all, but she certainly hadn't spent her childhood sobbing into her pillow for "Daddy." "Maybe it would have been different if I'd been a boy."

  "I think daughters still need their dads," Patrick had said gravely, and his seriousness had made her fall a little bit further in love with him, and imagine him tenderly holding a baby girl (yes, all right, her own baby girl) like a man in a baby powder commercial.

  And now he was saying, "And your dad wasn't ever in the picture?" as if he hadn't really concentrated on the story properly, as if he'd heard her story at a dinner party many years ago and couldn't quite remember the details. It was so disappointing. Ellen felt that nauseous, anxious feeling again. What if she just wanted to be madly in love with this man? What if it was all a gigantic self-delusion? What if he was actually a superficial, selfish prat?

  Would she have been better equipped to pick out the good men if she'd grown up with a father? Probably. In fact, almost definitely. After her mother had called her bluff about contacting her father, she'd researched the psychology of fatherless daughters and left photocopies around the house for her mother to find with particularly damning sections marked in yellow highlighter. "What exactly do you want me to do about this?" her mother had said. "Go back in time and never conceive you?" "Feel guilty," Ellen had answered.

  Anne had laughed. Guilt wasn't in her emotional lexicon.

  "I'm sorry," said Patrick, as the light changed to green and the car inched farther forward. "I know your dad wasn't in the picture. I'm just nervous. I've got that job interview feeling. I'm not great at job interviews, especially when I badly want the job."