Fiction: Termination

By Simon Firth

 

The analyst kept trying to surprise me. He’d suddenly start talking after months of silence (complete gibberish as far as I could tell). Or he’d stand up while I was talking and start fiddling with the curtains and rearranging the vases on the windowsill. Or, after ten minutes, he’d suddenly end the session, intoning in a flat voice: I think that’s enough for today. 

I assumed the analyst was bored. I was bored too. For several sessions I didn’t speak. (This seemed to calm the analyst down a bit; at least he stopped ending the sessions early). Then I decided to start speaking again. But from now on, I’d only tell lies. 

At the next session, after wittering away for twenty minutes or so, I suddenly went quiet. In a trembling voice, I told him that I needed to share something that I’d never so much as whispered out loud before. I’ve killed someone, I said. No, not in fantasy – this was real. The analyst leaned forward in his chair. I carried on. I told a strange story about accidentally killing someone who tried to steal my bike, which was possibly based on a crime drama I’d watched the night before. He listened very closely, and at the end of the session he said: thank you.

After a few sessions of this (which again had the desired effect; he sat there in silence, and then started making comments again, the same comments he’d been making for years before he started trying to surprise me) I was getting tired of having to invent stupid stories about myself on the fly. And so, like a good obsessive, I prepared them in advance, a full fifty minutes’ worth. I practiced them in the bathroom (in the mirror and in the bath) and made a game of predicting when the analyst would comment, and then what that comment would be. 

I didn’t predict what the analyst told me this morning: that he’s unwell, he has throat cancer, and that (sadly, regrettably) we’ll have to terminate the analysis. 

I’m considering telling the analyst what I’ve been up to. I’m fairly sure that the analyst will want to laugh, but he won’t. I predict that he’ll stand up, as if he’d been the one to end the session and reach pointlessly for the windowsill. And I’m certain that by the time he returns to his chair, he won’t realise that I’ve already left.

 

 

 

 

 

Simon Firth is a writer from Morecambe Bay.