Espresso Tales - Alexander Hanchett Smith [36]
72
Chow
The mention of a kilt seemed to interest Dr Fairbairn, who wrote something down on his pad of paper. The psychotherapist opened his mouth to speak, but Bertie was too quick for him. “My dream,” he said, fishing into his pocket for the notebook he had been given. “We mustn’t forget my dream.”
Dr Fairbairn smiled. “Of course,” he said. “Why don’t you tell me all about it? I’m very interested in your dreams, Bertie. Dreams are very important, you know.”
Bertie opened the notebook. He did not think that dreams were important. In fact, he thought that dreams were silly, and hardly worth remembering at all. Indeed, he had been quite unable to remember many dreams recently and had been obliged to resort to a dream he had experienced some months ago, so as to humour Dr Fairbairn.
Dr Fairbairn stared at Bertie. What a strange little boy this was – only six years old, and how determined, how astonishingly determined he was to suppress the Oedipal urge. It would come out, of course, but it might take some time, and dream analysis could help. All would be revealed. There would be father figures galore in this dream; just wait and see!
“I was on a train,” read Bertie. “I was on a train and the train was going through the countryside. There were fields on either side of it and there were people standing in the fields waving to us as we went past.”
“Were these people men or women?” asked Dr Fairbairn gently, his pencil moving quickly across the paper. They would be men, of course: fathers . . . watching, scrutinising.
“Girls,” said Bertie. “Girls with wide-brimmed hats. All of them were girls.”
Dr Fairbairn nodded. “I see,” he said. “Girls.” Waving goodbye to girls? To mother, of course; that was mother in the field, being left behind by the masculine train.
“Yes,” said Bertie. “Should I go on, Dr Fairbairn?”
“Of course.”
“I looked out of the window of the train and then I went back into the compartment. It was an old train, and there were separate compartments, with wood panels on the walls. I sat Chow
73
there for a while, and then I got up and went out into the corridor. It was a long corridor and I began to walk down it, looking into the other compartments as I went along.”
“And who was in the compartments?” asked Dr Fairbairn.
“Was your father there?”
“No,” said Bertie. “I did not see my father. He must have been in his office – at the Scottish Executive. No, I did not recognise anybody on the train. They were all strangers. Strangers and dogs.”
“Dogs?” interrupted Dr Fairbairn. “How interesting!”
“One of the dogs was a big furry dog. He looked at me and barked.”
Bertie looked at Dr Fairbairn, who had stopped writing when he mentioned the dog and who was staring at him in a very strange way. He wondered whether the time had come to make his escape, but the psychotherapist did not move. Dr Fairbairn was thinking about the dog. A large furry dog could only be one thing . . . a chow. And that, as every follower of Vienna was only too aware, was precisely the breed of dog owned by Sigmund Freud. Already the title of a paper was forming in his mind: Echoes of the Freudian Chow: nocturnal symbols and a six-year-old boy.
“Chow,” said Dr Fairbairn quietly.
Bertie looked up sharply. This must be a signal.
“Ciao,” he said quickly, and rose to his feet. For a moment, Dr Fairbairn looked puzzled, but then he glanced at his watch and nodded to Bertie. He wanted to speak to Irene, and there would be ten minutes or so before his next patient arrived.
“Ask Mummy to come in for a moment,” he said to Bertie.
“You don’t mind waiting in the waiting room, do you?”
Bertie did, but did not say it. There was no point. There was nothing he could do to make his life more as he wanted it to be. His life was so limited, so small in its room. Waiting. Listening. Being lectured to. Told to write his dreams down. Taken to the floatarium. Forced to learn Italian. And there were years of this ahead of him – year upon