The Death of Eli Gold. David Baddiel

to his wider issues with women, and who found the basic idea that all men unconsciously want to fuck their mother absurd, countered that if the Eli-acting was serving a buried need, it was more likely to be a desire to be like his father, the Great Man he so clearly had not grown up to be. But he didn’t truly believe that either. It was just something he said in therapy, used as he was by now to playing the game. In his heart, he really, really thought he was just doing it to help his dying mother have the version of reality she wanted.

      5. Zoe Slater, an EMDR specialist. EMDR, which stands for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing, involves a therapist moving his or her finger backwards and forwards while the person with the problem watches it and thinks about their problem. It’s based on the idea that a state similar to REM-sleep is induced by the eye movement, which mollifies the memory of whatever it is that causes the watcher anxiety. It was designed for people with serious post-traumatic stress – rape victims, shell-shocked soldiers – and Harvey, knowing this, felt bad, trying, while following Zoe’s finger, to focus on his narcissistic, ignoble little sexual pain. Plus Zoe was reasonably attractive – certainly for a therapist, who, on both sides of the gender divide, tend to think that facial hair and elasticated waistbands are the very dab – and looking for a long time at her finger would tend to lead Harvey’s mind the wrong way.

      6. Dr Anthony Salter. A proper psychiatrist, Harvey’s only one. A very small man – Harvey often wondered if he could legally be classified a midget – Dr Salter seemed to be mainly interested in a tiny, idiosyncratic memory, which was that when Harvey was a young child, and started crying, or being upset about anything, Eli used to say to him: stop hacking a chanik. Harvey had only mentioned this in passing, and explained to his psychiatrist that it was just his father speaking, as he often would, in nonsense language, but Dr Salter came back to it again, and again, as if stop hacking a chanik might be the primary cause of Harvey’s psychic ills; so much so that after a while Harvey felt moved to say to him – although never did – stop hacking a chanik. Dr Salter’s other main proffered solution was to prescribe antidepressants. Harvey would come back after a few weeks, to tell him how the antidepressant hadn’t worked, and he would prescribe another one.

      7. Dr Xu. Dr Xu was not an actual psychotherapist, but an acupuncturist and specialist in Chinese massage. Harvey went to him because his depression had become by this time so bodily, so located in his chest and his legs and his skin that he thought only manipulation of his frame could help. He still often thinks that the way to peace is for him to be touched: that if he could have someone permanently stroking him – on his back; on his feet; wherever it is on the body that the reassurance centres lie – his anxiety would be brought under control.

      Dr Xu did his best to pull and prick Harvey’s depression out. Harvey wasn’t sure about the underlying ideas of acupuncture – the meridians, the yin and yang organs – but he knew that Karl Marx had said that ‘the only antidote to mental suffering is physical pain’ and, not being prepared to flagellate himself with thorns, wondered if pins in his skin might do the trick. And it worked: in the room. Lying on his back, looking not unlike the bloke out of Hellraiser, he would find himself distracted by the pain out of depression. The skips and jumps of electrical current induced along his muscles by connecting needles did seem to be clearing his system of something; or maybe the cold evidence they presented, that the body is simply a machine, made him feel more positive than usual about the prospect of finding a fix.

      It only worked, however, while it was happening. It only worked when the needles were in his flesh. By the time he returned to his house from Dr Xu’s practice in Sevenoaks, a journey of some thirty-five minutes, Harvey would be feeling as anxious as ever. To try and extend the life of the treatment effects, Dr Xu prescribed Harvey some extraordinarily foul-smelling herbs, the drinking of which as tea made him more depressed than ever. Dr Xu did also offer him the odd piece of psychotherapeutic advice, consisting mainly of the not unheard-before imprecation that he should live in the moment. It would be proper to report that Dr Xu did not fall into the stereotype here and tell Harvey that he should rive in the moment: it would be proper but it would not be true. Harvey felt, for a whole host of reasons, that he should not laugh at this, but since Dr Xu, when offering this homily, himself always laughed, as he also did while applying needles, prescribing herbs, walking on Harvey’s back, or offering him the buttons of the Visa machine for payment, it seemed almost rude not to.

      Even without the Chinese pronunciation, Harvey has never been keen on the live-in-the-moment thing. He knows people think it is the key to happiness, but it seems to him that he, driven by his physical impulses, lives always in the moment. If he buys a sandwich at 10 a.m., intending to eat it for lunch, he will eat it as soon as he gets back to his house at 10.15. If he feels tired, wherever he is, he falls asleep. If he sits down at his computer intending to spend four hours writing ghost-biography, he will spend three hours and forty-five minutes of that allotted time watching internet pornography. That is what living in his particular moment is: and it has brought him to a depression so severe it feels as if large weights have been sewn onto the inside of his skin.

      8. See below.

      ‘But obviously, I can’t get back in time for the session,’ says Harvey, frantically looking at his watch. The phone call to Dizzy Harris has gone on for over five minutes, and he knows, since he is still unable to remember the fucking pre-dialling number, that it is costing him a fortune in hotel charges. ‘I’m in New York. I can’t leave because my father might die any day. You’re my therapist. Have a fucking heart.’

      There was a silence on the other end of the line, a silence that Harvey took to be judgemental. This made him feel furious in two ways: first, because he was being judged – in that particularly infuriating non-reactive therapist’s way – and secondly, because those five seconds of silence just cost him, he reckoned, ten dollars.

      ‘As you know, Harvey, I’m entirely sympathetic to your situation,’ said Dizzy in his measured burr: Dizzy speaks posh Scottish, an accent that modulates very easily into patronizing. Harvey hates that tone, especially now, when he feels that it is being measured out in small Dickensian piles of his coins. ‘But most of my clients, if not all of them, are in difficult situations emotionally. And they all have to work with me according to the same rules. Which I did explain to you at the beginning.’

      Why, thinks Harvey, did I go with this twat? I should have known straight away from the name: what kind of therapist – no, what kind of twat – calls himself Dizzy? Not even as a nickname – Dizzy is his name, or at least he’s made it his name, it’s on his books, the ones forever lined up prominently on his shelves: Psychological Dysfunction and Mental Wellness, by Dizzy Harris. Overcoming Bad Belief by Dizzy Harris. Beyond Anxiety Disorder by Dizzy Yes That’s Right You Heard Me Dizzy Harris. Dizzy calling himself Dizzy is all part of what’s wrong with Dizzy, which is that he is a self-styled colourful character, the type of person who might wear a multi-coloured waistcoat, although in his case he announces his colourfulness by wearing, for the sessions, a velvet smoking jacket and bow tie. For the first session the bow tie was at least matching; but latterly he has greeted Harvey at the door of his west London consulting rooms wearing one that has been striped, and another polka-dotted.