The Hypnotist's Love Story (10 page)

I rescheduled my appointment with the hypnotist because I had to go away to Melbourne for work.

I tried to get out of it, but Trish supposedly came down with some terrible virus, and I was the only one available at short notice. Single, childless woman. What else have you got to do? That’s right. Nothing.

Patrick and I never went to Melbourne together, so there were no memories lurking on street corners. At first it seemed like the trip was a good idea. The brooding skies and cruel breezes were a relief after Sydney’s relentlessly cheery weather. Work kept me busy and distracted. I was tired at night and fell asleep straightaway.

But the longer I was away from Sydney, the more my desire grew to see Patrick and Ellen again. On Thursday morning I woke up early, ravenous for information.
What were they doing right that moment?
Had he stayed at her place? Had she stayed at his? My need to know felt physical, like a nutritional deficiency.

I flew back to Sydney on the first flight out on Friday morning, my hands clenched around the armrests, leaning forward as if I could will the plane to go faster. I was a vampire and I needed blood.

It was Friday afternoon and Ellen was taking a moment in between appointments for some deep breathing and positive affirmations.

She had a somewhat stressful weekend ahead of her.

That night Patrick was meeting Ellen’s mother and godmothers for
dinner, and the following evening Ellen was being introduced to Patrick’s family. On Sunday Patrick was meeting Julia for the first time. They were having fish and chips at Watsons Bay, and Patrick’s friend Stinky was coming along too, to meet Ellen and also as a possible match for Julia, although his name obviously didn’t bode well. (“Oh, he doesn’t actually
stink,
” Patrick had said, all chuckles at the thought of Stinky actually stinking. “That’s just what we call him.” “So why do you call him that?” Ellen had asked, but Patrick just chuckled. Men were so strange sometimes.)

They hadn’t meant for all these introductions to happen on consecutive days. It had just turned out that way because of various reasons such as Ellen’s mother suddenly rescheduling their dinner, and Stinky unexpectedly being in Sydney for the weekend.

The weekend loomed in front of Ellen like a week of exams and dental appointments. She’d woken up that morning with a vague sense of dread, manifesting itself in an unpleasant feeling of nausea. It felt like a crowd of people was about to come stomping through the middle of their delicate new relationship, throwing about their opinions, asking questions, digging up flaws. Patrick and Ellen would see each other through the eyes of other people, people who mattered. Their perspectives would be like harsh, unflattering spotlights illuminating shadowy corners.

Breathe in.

She didn’t give a fig what other people thought!

Breathe out.

Rubbish. She gave a whole fig tree. She wanted everyone she loved to love Patrick and everyone he loved to love her.

Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe—

“Forget it,” she said out loud.

She gave up trying to access her higher self and instead took a chocolate from her silver bowl, letting it dissolve slowly in her mouth. The chocolate was there for therapeutic purposes. It released the neurotransmitters endorphins and serotonin, leading to a sense of well-being, and even euphoria.
Which, as Julia said, was all just a complicated way of saying chocolate tastes good.

Ellen closed her eyes for a moment and felt the warmth of the sun on her face. She was sitting in the recliner chair that her clients used. She often sat here and tried to imagine what it must be like for them, seeing her sit opposite them. Did they ever catch a glimpse of her doubts, or worse, her vanities? Did she look silly sitting there, with her legs so professionally, elegantly crossed? Did the sun shining through the windows show up the little hairs and lines around her lips?

She would bet that when Patrick was out on a job, leaning over to peer into his theodolite, lifting one arm high, he never felt a moment of self-consciousness. But it was different in a “soft” profession like hers, where there were still some people who thought she was akin to a magician, or a faith healer, or a fraud. She remembered meeting an old friend who said, with genuine surprise, “You’re not
still
doing that hypnosis stuff, are you?” as if it had just been a funny little phase. “It’s my career,” Ellen had told her, but the friend, a corporate lawyer, thought she was joking, and laughed politely.

In fact, it was more than a career. It was her passion, her calling, her
vocation
.

The recliner was still warm from the last client who had sat there: Deborah Vandenberg, the woman who suffered from unexplained, debilitating pain in her right leg if she walked for more than ten minutes. Before coming to Ellen, she’d tried physiotherapists and chiropractors and sports doctors; she’d had X rays and MRIs and exploratory surgery. There appeared to be no physical reason for the pain. The medical profession had basically shrugged their shoulders and said,
Sorry, we don’t know.

“
I was very active,” she’d told Ellen. “I loved bushwalking. Now, some days, when it’s very bad, I find it hard to
shop.
This pain has changed almost everything about my life.”

“Chronic pain does that,” said Ellen.

She’d never experienced it herself, but over the years so many clients
had brought her stories of how pain was a corrosive presence that cruelly ate away at all the simple pleasures of life.

“But I may be able to help,” she’d said.

“Everyone thinks they can help.” Deborah gave her a politely cynical smile. “Until they give up on me.”

She reminded Ellen a little of Julia. She was tall and confident, with short dark hair and a tomboyish grace as she sat back in her chair, one long black-jeaned leg entwined about the other.

She had mentioned that she enjoyed cooking, so at their previous session Ellen got her to imagine a stove dial she could use to turn her pain down. Today, as soon as they sat down, Deborah told Ellen that it was “possible” she’d turned her pain down one notch while walking through a car park that morning.

“But I probably imagined it,” she said, as if suddenly doubting herself. She had made it clear from the beginning that she was a skeptic. At the end of her last session, she said, with some pride, “You didn’t put me under; I was fully conscious the whole way through.” “That’s fine,” Ellen told her. (She got that a lot, and often from clients who had just moments ago been drooling and slack-jawed, quite clearly in deep trances.)

“We’re going to work on another dial today,” Ellen told her. “I think we’ll call it your ‘Good Energy Dial.’”

Deborah’s lips pulled back in a slight sneer. “That sounds very … cute.”

“I think you’re going to like it,” said Ellen firmly, ignoring the sneer. Negativity hid fear.

She used a quick, simple induction that involved feeling a deeper sense of relaxation with each step taken down a flight of stairs and watched as Deborah’s sharp features relaxed. She looked much younger when she was in a trance (and in spite of her skepticism, Deborah most certainly did go into a trance). The lines on her face smoothed out, and there was a vulnerable, naked look about her, in contrast to her conscious edgy confidence. It made Ellen feel motherly toward her.

“I want you to think of a time when you felt filled with confidence or joy,” she said. “Sift through your memories until you find that one perfect moment. Nod when you’re there.”

Ellen waited and watched, and as she did, she traveled back through time herself to her own perfect moment, when she had first practiced hypnosis. She was eleven, sitting in this very room, with her grandmother, her mother’s mother, who believed that everything Ellen did was spectacular. Ellen had just finished reading a book she’d found at the library,
How to Hypnotize Anybody,
and her grandmother had agreed to be her first patient. She’d used a necklace as a pendulum and watched her grandmother’s shrewd brown eyes follow it, back and forth, back and forth.

“You’re very good at that,” her grandmother said afterward, blinking with what Ellen could tell was genuine surprise: It was quite different from her generous clapping after Ellen played her the recorder. “I think you might have a gift.”

I think you might have a gift …

The sweetest, most surprising words imaginable. It was like that moment in the movies when superheroes discover their powers, or perhaps it was how nuns felt when they first heard the spooky, charismatic voice of God whispering in their virginal ears.

Deborah, her eyes still shut, her cheeks slightly flushed, nodded to signal she had her moment. Ellen wondered, briefly, what Deborah was remembering.

“That feeling you’re reliving right now, that’s the feeling that I want you to be able to call upon, whenever you need it. Whenever you press your thumb into your right hand, you can generate that feeling. The harder you press, the more you can increase the feeling, until it’s flowing like electricity through your body.”

Ellen let her voice rise with the vigor and power she wanted Deborah to feel.

“So next time you feel pain, this is what you can do. First you can use
the pain dial to reduce your level of pain, and then you can use your energy dial to recreate that feeling of power.”

She saw a flicker of hesitancy on Deborah’s face and immediately switched to a more authoritative, paternal tone. “You have the ability to do this, Deborah. It’s all there, inside you. You are going to excel at these techniques. You can be pain-free.
You can be pain-free
.”

A few minutes later, Ellen brought Deborah out of her trance. She blinked in a disoriented, bleary-eyed way, like a passenger waking up on a plane, before quickly checking her watch. Then she ran both her hands through her hair and said, “I didn’t go under again,” and briskly pulled out her wallet from her handbag.

Ellen just nodded and offered her the bowl of chocolates, but later, as they were standing at the front door and Deborah was putting on her coat, she said slowly, without looking at Ellen, concentrating on doing up her buttons, “You know, you might actually cure me.”

“I’m not curing you,” Ellen reminded her. “The physical cause could still very well be there, whatever it is. I’m just helping you find a way to manage the pain.”

“Yes, but it might actually
work
,” said Deborah, and the surprise and respect in her eyes reminded Ellen of the look on her grandmother’s face all those years ago.

Ellen smiled now, remembering that moment. That was job satisfaction.

She opened her diary and her smile faded when she saw her last appointment for the day: Mary-Kate McGovern. Oh, well. No more surprised, respectful looks today.

She glanced at her watch. There was still time for Mary-Kate to cancel. On three previous occasions she had called at the last minute to say that she couldn’t get away from work. She was a legal secretary and always sounded full of breathless self-importance when she called to cancel, as though the law firm she worked for couldn’t operate without her.

Ellen chided herself for that uncharitable thought. Maybe Mary-Kate
was
indispensable. And she always insisted on paying the fifty percent cancellation fee that Ellen specified on her price list (for cancellations with less than twenty-four hours’ notice), even though Ellen never tried to enforce her own policy. She hated the idea of accepting money for doing nothing.

The doorbell rang and Ellen swore, as if she’d stubbed her toe.

So she was annoyed when Mary-Kate canceled and she was annoyed when she turned up. For some reason she was feeling a strong antipathy toward this poor, sad woman. What was that about? She’d had annoying clients before, and clients she liked more than others, but she’d never experienced such a visceral feeling of displeasure when a client turned up for an appointment.

If she wasn’t careful, her dislike would seep its way into Mary-Kate’s therapy and that would be unconscionable.

She reminded herself of the Buddhist doctrine:
We are all one.
She was Mary-Kate and Mary-Kate was her.

Mmmm.

She opened the door with a warm, welcoming smile. “Mary-Kate! Wonderful to see you!”

“I’m sure it’s just glorious to see me,” said Mary-Kate with a bright, sarcastic smile.

She couldn’t have heard Ellen swear, could she?

As usual, Mary-Kate was dressed entirely in black. She was a dumpy, lumpy woman with long, lank hair parted in the middle like a 1970s flower child, except that she didn’t have the fresh baby face to carry it off. Her face had a resentful, hangdog look.

Oh, you’re a depressing sight,
thought Ellen. She longed to give her a makeover, to cut her hair off, give it some volume and color, to dress her in some color other than black. Her face was quite pretty really. Even a touch of lipstick would brighten her up!

Good Lord, she was turning into someone’s awful mother.

“Would you like to use the bathroom?” she asked Mary-Kate.

She always asked clients if they wanted to use the toilet first; a full bladder was the worst thing for a good hypnosis session.