But apparently not.
It probably would have driven me crazy anyway. I just like the idea of it. I’m too tall to be treated like a princess.
When they stopped at the counter, I saw him kneading the back of her neck as they talked to the car hire woman. At one point all three of them laughed heartily over something. After they left the terminal, I went to the carousel to pick up my bag. It was the only one left. Slowly revolving around, alone and ignored and invisible. No pretty ribbon. Old and tired and sagging in the middle. Now, I wonder who that could remind me of?
“Don’t look so sorry for yourself,” I snapped at it, and a man walking by quickly looked away.
I went to the same car hire place. No hearty laughs from the woman for me. Just grim slapping down of paperwork and dire warnings about the excess on the insurance and how it was my responsibility to look carefully for any damage on the car before I took it.
“Actually, I think it should be your responsibility,” I said.
The woman stared, and I said, “Oh, forget it.”
I drove to the Sheraton and steeled myself for the memories as soon as I walked into the lobby, but they’d renovated. The place looked completely different. It was like they’d done it on purpose. You don’t exist anymore, Saskia. We’ve brought in interior designers to wipe away all trace of you.
There was no sign of Ellen and Patrick.
I went for a walk on the beach and tried to use Ellen’s dial technique for my leg pain. Maybe it works. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it. She would say that’s exactly the point: to use my imagination so that I don’t actually experience the pain.
I guess she will have the chance to use her techniques for a pain-free childbirth. She said that women have been known to have cesareans without painkillers, “using their body’s own natural anesthesia.” Sure. Someone cuts open your stomach with a knife and you don’t feel a thing. All you need to do is believe. Sounds like something from a Christmas movie.
It never really occurred to me that she might actually help me with my leg pain. It was just the first thing that came into my head when she said, “Why are you here today?” Instead of answering, “I’m here because you’ve been on a few dates now with Patrick and I’ve seen the way he looks at you and I’m thinking you could be the first serious contender, so I followed you home, and there was your cute little ‘Ellen O’Farrell Hypnotherapy’ sign sitting on the front lawn outside your house, with your phone number conveniently listed, so I rang up and made an appointment. How do you do?”
After each of our sessions, I told her that I didn’t think I’d been hypnotized, but she just smiled her smug Mona Lisa smile as if she knew better.
To be honest, I wasn’t really sure what happened in that sunny glass room. Each time I sit in that green chair I start out thinking that I don’t really need to listen to her instructions, I should just think of something else, it’s not like I’m really there to be hypnotized. I’m there for the before-and-after chat, where we’ve discussed everything from hay fever to the difficulty of finding comfortable shoes. But then her words always seem to trickle into my head and I start to listen, and I think, Oh, well, it won’t hurt to let my eyelids feel heavy, and next thing, my whole body is sinking into the chair, and she’s telling me to try and open my eyelids and I can’t. Well, presumably, I could if I really wanted to.
Once she starts talking, I don’t think about Patrick at all.
Last time she asked me to remember a “fleeting perfect moment” when I felt filled with confidence or joy or peace or power, and so I remembered Sunday morning breakfasts in the summer with my mum when I was a child. I’d make a whole stack of pancakes and Mum would always act so impressed, and then we’d sit on a picnic rug in the backyard and read our books and eat the pancakes with lemon and sugar, and sometimes we’d stay there until lunchtime.
I’m meant to be using the “power of that memory” to help with my leg pain.
It’s a load of crap, of course.
I think.
I can remember the first time I experienced the pain in my leg. It was just after Mum told me her diagnosis. I was buying groceries with Jack, and it was taking ages because Jack kept seeing things he wanted, which we had to argue over, and we were having a dinner party with one of Patrick’s clients whom we were trying to impress, so I was looking for obscure ingredients. “Just do something simple,” Patrick always said, but I said that people feel special when you go to some trouble, when you have the table set with a good linen tablecloth, with fresh flowers and cloth napkins and gleaming glasses. I loved a beautifully set table. Now I eat sitting on the couch, with the plate on my lap, or standing at the kitchen counter, or in bed.
I noticed this ache creeping up the side of my leg. It wasn’t excruciating, just annoying, like I’d pulled a muscle, and eventually I had to sit on the edge of a specials display in the middle of the supermarket aisle and rest it, and Jack said, “What are you doing, Sas?”
Then it happened again the next day. I still didn’t give it much thought. It certainly never crossed my mind that five years later I would still be dealing with it.
I was so confident when I went to see that first physiotherapist that she would be able to fix it. I thought it was something that needed to be crossed off my “to do” list, like getting my car serviced or my legs waxed. Quick, fix this pain, please, it’s annoying me.
Patrick was sympathetic at first, but then he seemed to lose patience and interest. We couldn’t do our bushwalks anymore. We couldn’t walk through the city to a restaurant for more than two blocks without me having to find a bus stop to sit down. We couldn’t stand in a group at a party without me saying, I need a chair. I caught a flicker of impatience cross his face once when he came home and found me sitting on the kitchen floor with the chopping board on my lap, slicing up carrots. I guess it was just so boring for him to have a girlfriend who behaved like an elderly person.
Then Mum died, and then he “ended the relationship.” Perhaps he’d been getting bored and my leg was the final straw.
The pain in my leg isn’t as bad as it was, but it got to a certain point and then it never went away. It’s like a permanent physical reminder of that time in my life, when everything changed forever. It’s the marker between the person I am now—strange, obsessive, flabby and unfit—and the person I was before—normal, happy, very fit, could go for years without seeing a doctor. As soon as I start to feel that creeping ache, I feel a corresponding creeping sense of hopelessness and pointlessness and nothingness.