Part 35 (1/2)
Josh let go of her hands and sat on the bed.
”You've no idea how warfare” remembering fourteen years old and the rifle coming up and his head exploding years old and the rifle coming up and his head exploding but that was not the worst of it ”screws you up.” but that was not the worst of it ”screws you up.”
”We can deal with this later,” said Suzanne. ”And I mean it we will deal with it.”
”Maybe there are things that shouldn't be... but it's Richard we need to think about. Sorry, my l... Sorry.”
Her lips twitched.
”Everyone,” she said, ”has the resources they need to deal with their life and make it better, and I mean everyone.”
”What if I want to learn Chinese, and I have no materials and no ability? There's positive thinking and there's delusion.”
”I didn't say you could learn the language in ten minutes, but that's more than enough time to dissolve whatever holds you back, like the false belief that you can't learn a language. I worked with a webmovie writer who'd been blocked for three years. Freeing up the block took five minutes. It still took him a year to write the next script, but he did it, that's the point.”
”And you didn't discover what caused the block?” he said.
”Actually, the guy knew precisely what had caused it, but if he hadn't, I wouldn't have tried to find out. I didn't need to know. It's a form of brief therapy, and that's a technical term.”
This was what he did not understand about her work. Despite the counselling he had been through, he still thought of therapy as uncovering hidden pasts.
”So treating traumas, you don't need to know the details.”
No heads exploded in his memory. Her presence kept him calm.
”It depends. If someone was in a traffic accident, not their fault, just something dreadful they had experienced... then all I need do is recode the memory, so they don't re-experience anguish whenever they think of it. Not amnesia, but no overwhelming emotion, either. Delving back into their childhood and how they related to their parents would be nonsense, because it's not the problem.”
”All right.”
”The old opponents of that approach called it treating the symptom instead of the cause, but sometimes treating the symptom is all you need. For example, sweating is a symptom of bubonic plague. During the Black Death, if the victims had been given more fluids, many would have lived, because it was the dehydration that got them.”
This was not what he wanted to hear, because there was something odd about young Richard's reactions,
and not just to witnessing his friend fall.
”On the other hand, if the trauma patient is a victim of violence” Suzanne glanced down at her own inner forearms ”then recoding the memory is not enough, because two-thirds of such people become victims again within eighteen months. Their behaviour patterns mark them out as soft prey for predators, so then I do have to explore their world, use the psychodynamic approach, and help them get more freedom in their lives.”
”So maybe you need to uncover Richard's past.”
”Ah. That's what you're after.”
”Look, obviously my first sight of him was when he's under stress. But he gave this strange reaction...”
He described the soft cry that Richard emitted, seeing the bulldog logo on the back of a paramedic's jumpsuit. And how his catatonia if that was what it was started then, not at the moment Opal fell.
”I'll ask,” said Suzanne. ”But when the moment is right.”
”OK.”.
”So what are you going to do next?”
”I thought I'd take a drive to Surrey.”
”To Richard's father?” She glanced at the closed door.
”Yeah, but maybe I should do it after you've talked with Richard some more.”
”That would be wise.”
”Why don't I go fetch my car from the hotel, and bring it back here?”
”To take Richard home?”
”Only if he's ready.”
”All right. I may not have anything for you. Uncovering memories is delicate, because it's too easy to implant false ones, vivid hallucinations of things that never happened.”
”I have vivid memories of last night. Something I must have imagined.”
She leaned over, and their kiss was fire.
”A shared hallucination,” she said.
”Relax now, in trance everything is fine, and my voice will go with you as you go deeper still into the tranceinside-the-trance, and go back in time to a moment when...”