Some Kind of Fairy Tale (24 page)

S
he talks of making a crossing. We can be sure there is no crossing, at least not in the material world. There is no border, no gateway nor checkpoint. There is not even a river to ford. The crossing she has made is from the safe place of what she feels is her domestic incarceration to a place of open possibility. Her psyche has opened up like a flower to her own unconscious longings. She has crossed from the restricted, rationalized world of the local, the world of her safe childhood, to the open, creative, and chaotic world of the universal, to the more dangerous realm of the adult.

Yes, she has met someone. But still we don’t know who or what he is, and we don’t know anything about her intentions.

What can we say of the place at which she arrives? We are told there is a sandy beach, though it appears to be more lake than sea. We can safely say that it is a version of the land of Tir Na Nog or some other fabled land beyond the reaches of any map, a place that can only be reached either by arduous voyage or through an invitation by one of its fairy residents. It exists, in a very precise way in a plane of the mind, and although this is true for TM’s story, we can be sure that this place has some kind of parallel in the material
world, and it is here we get some insight into where she went, at least initially.

There are descriptions of what appears to be a commune of some kind. Certainly it is a gathering of folk with what might be called antiestablishment values. The house she describes as cob-webbed and rather filthy by the bourgeois standards to which she is accustomed at the Martin household. But there appears to be high value placed on the arts and on music, because we hear details of musical instruments and descriptions of books and beautiful illustrated charts. Scholarship, at least, seems to be prized in this commune to which she has been brought.

The house is shared, we know that. There is no electricity and there are no phones available. The electricity may have been turned off because no one has paid the bills, but the rejection of telephone communications seems radical and indicates an ideologically based group of people perhaps living an experimental lifestyle, possibly anarchistic in character. There appears to be no property ownership, no rigid social structure, and no obvious leadership or hierarchy, and this might point to an early eco-group or green-living project; alternatively, we might be looking at a religious troop or fringe spiritual cult, though TM’s report offers no clues in the way of religious dogma. Even though these events happened twenty years ago it might be possible to make inquiries to see if there were any such communes either in the immediate locality or, say, within a thirty-mile radius.

Yet even though there are no telephones available to her, we can assume that there was nothing stopping her from simply walking out and finding her way home. There is nothing at all to suggest that she was being held against her will, and we are surely not to take seriously the idea that she couldn’t find her way back. Again, we must reassert that TM was perfectly happy to be there until some process of disillusion had set in, by which time she might have felt that she had disgraced herself to her family and couldn’t face returning. And I think we have the answer to why that might have been.

TM makes much of a ritual drink she takes with her seducer. The drink comes in a ridiculously tiny glass, and two things are happening here. Once again, TM is falling back on traditional
fairy lore. The food and drink of the fairy folk is dangerous. Tradition has it that their hospitality should be resisted, because those who do partake of the offered food and drink can never leave this enchanted place. And so with TM. The drink, along with her oath, traps her in this place, at least in her own head. But there is a more mundane level to all of this. After the drink TM reports that she feels calm and finds the night velvety. She is drunk and is trying to excuse her behavior by minimalizing the quantity of the drink. How many people lie about how much alcohol they have consumed and claim to be surprised by how they came to be in such a state? This is a young girl’s post-debauch lament that she had no idea how much she was drinking or that someone put something in her drink.

And although it is not reported, this debauch probably led to sex. This conclusion is guaranteed not by any admission, but by the force of her outrage against the sexual act itself. She is in an overly energetic state of denial.

Her revulsion of the open sexuality she describes is a projected revulsion of her own behavior around the time of her disappearance. She has sublimated her distaste for what happened to her and blamed it on the other, which in this case is the community in which she had been living. The sex she sees happening openly in the commune is always described in orgiastic rather than sensual terms; the sex is mechanical rather than loving. TM expends a great deal of energy distancing herself from these sexual activities. Rather too much energy.

A word or two here about the family context, such as it is, though the patient has been distanced from her own parents for some twenty years. The patient’s brother has stepped into the father’s role in bringing her here and arranging for her well-being. I’ve also been able to meet the brother’s wife, a psychologist by academic training. I put it to her that we have here a complete Darling family, with TM as one of the lost children seduced away by Peter Pan. She was less than amused, though confirmed her own role in that she continues to want to take hold of the story by advancing a few theories through her affable husband, who raised the question of
pathological narcissism
, a phrase his wife had surely equipped him with. These people really do have an almost superstitious belief in
the power of words, as if by naming Rumpelstiltskin they suddenly have power over him. Similarly, they desperately want to name the condition. This is the academic way, and I have to say that it’s less than helpful.

TM’s account does have the pervasive pattern of grandiosity that is an indicator of narcissistic personality disorder, but the trait’s two other most common indicators, the need to be admired and the lack of empathy, are absent. In every single case of NPD that has come before me the patient has gone to great lengths to seek my express approval (and why wouldn’t they want the approval of someone who is, on the face of things, fascinated by them?), whereas TM couldn’t care less whether I like her or not. On the other hand, she never exhibits irritation, boredom, or distraction and her cooperation with my line of questioning is fully empathetic to my own needs. I am happy to dismiss the narcissistic diagnosis or any variant forms of NPD.

I do, however, suspect an inability to face up to adult functions. The nature of TM’s revulsion of sex may confirm this. The question remains as to whether this was caused by trauma resulting in amnesia or by chronic fear of family disapproval. In her mind, of course, she has just experienced an abortion and she may be carrying over a squeamishness permanently associated with sexuality.

The most puzzling thing muddying any potential diagnosis is the complication of TM’s extraordinarily juvenile appearance. I have encountered examples of psychosocial short stature in which growth hormones freeze, but TM’s physiognomy doesn’t correspond at all. In most cases of psychosocial short stature we see a thickening of limb growth, whereas TM’s appearance corresponds more roughly with anorexia nervosa.

But only roughly. TM is, I think, grown to her full height as a woman, and although she exhibits the slender physiognomy that would be unsurprising in a teenage girl, she is extremely slender for a woman in her mid-thirties. I looked instantly for Russels sign, the scarring or knuckle markings often caused by ramming the fingers down the throat, and found none; no lanugo or soft hairs growing on the face; no enlargement of the cheeks. She indicated to me that her periods were regular. Finally, the other telltale signs of an anorexic, such as wearing baggy clothes to conceal the disorder
or complaints about a cold room (I keep my office at a consistently cool temperature, often prompting complaints even from non-anorexics), are absent, and she seems not to be sad, lethargic, or depressed.

Just remarkably thin for a woman her age. I haven’t ruled out anorexia nervosa, but nothing I have yet seen has encouraged me to rule it in. Her fresh, juvenile appearance is a real puzzle.

I’m not certain whether TM is reporting a story her confabulation—that she has already laid out in completion, or whether she is changing it subtly as she reports it to me. Neurolinguistic leakage appears to suggest she is reporting from memory (of a previously told tale, that is) but as she tells her story and stares into the middle distance it always seems to me that she is in the saddle of inspiration.

I sense a crack in the egg, however. No longer is she drawing on traditions of English fairy literature. Having led us into fairyland by the traditional and antecedent routes, she is now having to create a geography for it, and that geography is no longer being drawn from the well of tradition. Instead it is being constructed from the pressing concerns of her own psyche, and this is where she will reveal herself.

Her sublimation of sexuality is clear from her portrait of the living lake. The lake itself is, of course, a mighty symbol of the unconscious in general, and of the condition and temperature of her own troubled psyche in particular. Here we see a community experiencing a communal orgasm of sorts, a shared ejaculation. We have a simultaneous rendition of the sexual act, away from which she still wants to run, but it is embraced by communal participation and approval. I take this to be a sign that she has a deep desire for reintegration with her family and acceptance by the community that she left behind.

We are also now given names—those closely guarded codes that were originally designated as secrets. The seducer is named at last and he is called Hiero. I’ll risk a guess and say that she has at some point in the last twenty years spent time in France.
Hier
is the French word for yesterday, and she has drawn a clear line between her life now and her life in the past. There is the world of yesterday and the world of today.

The name is also compounded with the designation
Hero
, which is exactly what she wanted him to be. This man is prepared to fight for her—to the death. She projects her girlish fantasies on to the idea of a protective male who would prevent a repetition of the assault or attack that caused the crisis in the first place. A devoted, nonsexual male. A father figure. It does seem significant that the man who at first appearance seems to be a lothario figure, a seducer, is the man who promises celibate protection.

Hieros
is also an ancient Greek word for sacred. This man is almost a religious projection (and I understand from TM’s brother that her parents, particularly her mother, are religious people).

In this fantasy of the martial protector TM can maintain the status of the little girl. She can repress the unpleasant events that perhaps took place in the Outwoods and she can refuse to grow up to be a mature woman with a sexual nature. So strong is her impulse to do this that she has arrested the production of growth hormones through some process of
hypopituitarism
. The pituitary gland at the base of the brain has only to decrease the secretion of one or more of the eight hormones it releases to make this happen. She compounds this apparent antiaging process by wearing teenage or youthful clothes. Her diet keeps her skinny as a whippet.

Hiero, no longer the seducer, switches roles from id to superego in that he now has to fight off the dazzling, handsome, and virile Silkie. In Scottish folklore a silkie or a selkie is a shapeshifting creature, a kind of seal who can take off his or her pelt and become human. TM knows her folklore very well, at least on an unconscious level, for the tale of the silkie is so often the tale of the footloose woman, the unfaithful wife, the faithless lover trapped by her domestic ties. It is an image, projected into the male silkie, of TM’s very own frustrations.

And in another sense Hiero and Silkie are shapeshifting variants of the same projected and idealized male. They both operate as shadow figures to TM’s juvenile female: the one a wise and spiritual protector, the other a virile and handsome but rapacious young man. What woman has never been caught between these disparate desires? Take one and you end up yearning for the other. This, in a dark place in her own psyche, TM understands very well.

And so they fight, to the death, it seems, while those dark
forces ringed about the combatants cheer; meanwhile, the rational side of TM safely objects and is properly appalled. The competing forces within the human consciousness are, when the mind is out of joint, aggressive and determined to restore equilibrium. The fight to the death is real. TM is rehearsing in her tale the violent battles being conducted inside her own psyche.

T
ara was a willing volunteer for any kind of test: dental, psychological, or medical. Peter had once saved one of his customers a lot of veterinary fees when he had diagnosed black mold on the hoof and offered a simple peroxide solution. The customer’s father was a dentist, Iqbal Suida, a Muslim with an impressive long black beard. Peter decided to call in his favor, and the dentist was very happy to oblige.

Though the dentist had agreed to make an examination of Tara’s teeth, there was a problem in getting hold of her dental records. The dentist Tara had seen as a child had retired many years ago. Iqbal told Peter that the files would be available somewhere but that they had to be tracked down. It might take a long time.

Meanwhile, it had come as a surprise to Peter that modern science had no way of offering an exact test for a person’s age, unless that person were dead. Passport, political asylum, and criminal justice authorities still faced the same problem many times over. Crystalline proteins in the eye’s lens make it possible for radiocarbon dating, but only when the eye has been removed. Radiocarbon dating was also good for dating a tooth within a couple of years, but again, the tooth would need to be removed. Meanwhile, Iqbal said that X-ray evidence could be accurate, plus or minus a couple of years. He agreed to make X-rays of Tara’s teeth and to have the plates sent off for analysis.