The Hypnotist's Love Story (12 page)

“So my father was basically a sperm donor—he just didn’t know it.” That’s how she always finished the story, and it normally generated lots of stimulating discussion, and people would say things like, “Aha! That’s where you get your hypnotism thing from—your spiritual dad and your tarot card–reading grandma!” (as if they were the first people in the world to have thought of that), and some would applaud her mother’s actions, and others would politely, or not so politely, express their disapproval.

She didn’t mind when people disapproved. She wasn’t sure if she approved herself, but she knew her mother couldn’t care less what anyone else thought, and Ellen had told the story of her conception so many times now, she felt quite detached from it. It was like Julia’s story of how her father had kidnapped her and her brother during a bitter custody dispute
between her parents and dyed their hair brown, and there had even been a thrilling police chase. Ellen knew that Julia must have once felt some sort of emotion about this memory, and probably at some subconscious level she still did, but now it was just an excellent story. A party piece.

Patrick had listened to her story carefully, and at the end he’d said, “Good for your mum, but I’m sorry you missed out on having a father.”

“You don’t miss what you don’t have,” said Ellen, which wasn’t something she really believed at all, but she certainly hadn’t spent her childhood sobbing into her pillow for “Daddy.” “Maybe it would have been different if I’d been a boy.”

“I think daughters still need their dads,” Patrick had said gravely, and his seriousness had made her fall a little bit further in love with him, and imagine him tenderly holding a baby girl (yes, all right, her own baby girl) like a man in a baby powder commercial.

And now he was saying, “And your dad wasn’t ever in the picture?” as if he hadn’t really concentrated on the story properly, as if he’d heard her story at a dinner party many years ago and couldn’t quite remember the details. It was so disappointing. Ellen felt that nauseous, anxious feeling again. What if she just
wanted
to be madly in love with this man? What if it was all a gigantic self-delusion? What if he was actually a superficial, selfish prat?

Would she have been better equipped to pick out the good men if she’d grown up with a father? Probably. In fact, almost definitely. After her mother had called her bluff about contacting her father, she’d researched the psychology of fatherless daughters and left photocopies around the house for her mother to find with particularly damning sections marked in yellow highlighter. “What exactly do you want me to do about this?” her mother had said. “Go back in time and never conceive you?” “Feel guilty,” Ellen had answered.

Anne had laughed. Guilt wasn’t in her emotional lexicon.

“I’m sorry,” said Patrick, as the light changed to green and the car inched farther forward. “I know your dad wasn’t in the picture. I’m just nervous. I’ve
got that job interview feeling. I’m not great at job interviews, especially when I badly want the job.”

She glanced over at him and caught an expression of almost terrified vulnerability cross his face. For an instant he looked exactly like his son.

“When I’m nervous I just start coming out with all this crap that doesn’t even make sense.” He frowned as he looked in the rear-vision mirror. “Also, I’m sort of distracted because our friend is back.”

“Friend?” said Ellen.

“Our bunny-boiler friend. Behind us.”

“Saskia is following us again?” Ellen swung around in her seat and scanned the cars behind them. “Which one is she?”

“Yeah, that’s great. That’s fantastic. That’s one thing you really need, your ex following you to meet your girlfriend’s family for the first time,” muttered Patrick.

“Yes, but
where is she
?” The seat belt pulled hard across Ellen’s neck. Directly behind them was a man in a truck, his eyes closed, thumping his hands against the big steering wheel, his mouth moving as he sang along to an unheard song.

“She’s in the lane next to us, a couple of cars back,” said Patrick. “Don’t worry. I’m going to lose her.”

He slammed his foot down on the accelerator and the car shot forward. Ellen turned around in time to see the lights change from orange to red. When she looked back, they were crossing the intersection, leaving a bank of stationary cars at the lights.

“What
color
?” she said desperately. “What color car?”

“Lost her,” said Patrick happily. “Look. We’re moving again.”

“Great,” said Ellen, and rubbed at her sore neck.

I lost them at the lights and I couldn’t guess which way they were going.

Maybe they were meeting up with friends of hers. Patrick doesn’t know anyone down that way.

I saw her turning around in her seat. I wonder if she was trying to see me. Patrick probably knew I was behind. I know when he knows I’m behind him. He drives faster than usual, erratically. Sometimes he sticks his finger up at me. Once I saw him getting a ticket for doing an illegal right-hand turn trying to get away from me. I felt bad about that because he’d always been proud of the fact that he’d never got a ticket in over twenty years of driving. I sent him a bottle of wine to his work to apologize. I picked it out especially. A Pepper Tree white. We’d discovered that wine on a trip to the Hunter Valley during our last summer together. We bought a whole case and we got addicted to it. I don’t see how he could drink that wine without thinking of me. But I waited outside his office that night, and I saw one of the girls he worked with walking to her car carrying my bottle of wine. I recognized it because I’d wrapped it up in blue tissue paper. He didn’t even bother to open it. He just handed it to that girl.

I try to imagine how he describes me to the hypnotist. To
Ellen
. I guess he tells her I’m “psychotic.” He yelled that at me once. I was walking behind him at his local shops, when he suddenly swung around and walked straight back toward me. I stopped and waited for him, smiling. He was smiling too. I thought we were finally going to have a proper conversation. But then, when he got closer, I saw it was a sarcastic, angry smile. He stuck his finger in my face and yelled, “You’re a psychotic lunatic!”

Which … you know, might have been funny in other circumstances, except that I was worried he was going to hit me.

He was so angry he was shaking.

Actually, I sort of longed for him to hit me. I needed him to hit me. If he wasn’t ever going to hold me in his arms again, at least he could hit me. There would be a connection once more. Flesh against flesh.

But he didn’t. He locked his hands behind his neck and rocked his head like an autistic child. I just wanted to comfort him. He didn’t need to get so worked up. It was only me. I’m still only me. That’s what he can’t seem to get. I said, “Darling.”

He dropped his hands and I saw that his eyes were red and watery. He said, “Don’t call me that,”
and he walked away, and I stayed where I was, looking at the specials pinned up on the window of the shop where we always got fish and chips on a Sunday night.

That’s the thing. I’m permanently stuck in this crazy person role now. He will always think of me as a crazy person. He used to think I was a “funny bugger” and I had “beautiful eyes” and that I was “one of the most generous people he’d ever met.” Those were all things he said to me, things he meant at the time.

But now I’m just crazy.

The only way for me to not be crazy would be to disappear from his life. Like a proper ex-girlfriend is expected to do. To discreetly vanish into the past.

And that’s what drives me … crazy.

Ellen could see Patrick’s “fight or flight” response kick in as soon as they walked across the doorway of her mother’s home.

Oh, my poor darling, she thought. She remembered the first time she’d taken Jon to meet her mother; the way he’d looked about with those lazy, hooded eyes, so certain of his own superiority. Patrick’s clear green eyes were darting about as if looking for possible escape routes, and he was clearing his throat over and over.

It mattered to him what Ellen’s mother thought. It mattered, and that meant Ellen mattered.

Poor man. It was understandable that he was nervous. Jon was an exception; most men would find this intimidating.

Three immensely elegant, immensely confident women in their sixties, all holding the delicate stems of their wineglasses with their fingertips, all bizarrely dressed almost entirely in white, to complement her mother’s all-white theme—white couches, white walls, white accessories—all swooping down from the high stools on which they’d been perched to kiss Patrick on both cheeks. And Patrick, who only expected to be kissed on one cheek
and kept offering the wrong one, having to bend awkwardly at the knees so they could reach him.

“Why are you all dressed in white?” asked Ellen. “You’re blending into the furniture.”

There were peals of laughter.

“We couldn’t believe it when we saw each other!” gurgled Pip.

“We look like that Bette Midler movie.
First Wives Club
. Not that we’ve ever been wives.” Ellen watched her mother’s eyes rest on Patrick’s tradesman-out-on-the-town outfit of blue jeans and long-sleeved Just Jeans checked shirt rolled to the elbows. Jon wore Armani and Versace and some other Italian men’s designer label that was so very special Ellen had never heard of it.

“Ah, Anne, Mel is a wife,” pointed out Pip.

“Of course she is. I just never think of her as one. Which is a compliment, Mel.”

“I’m so flattered, Anne.”

“Who else was in that movie?” mused Pip. “Bette Midler, Goldie Hawn and somebody else. Someone I like. Do you know, Patrick?”

Patrick looked startled. “Ah, I’m not—”

“We finally worked out it was because we’d all read the same article in
Vogue
,” said Mel. “About flattering colors for women in their fifties. Not that we’re
technically
in our fifties.”

“Speak for yourself,” said Anne. Ellen’s mother found it genuinely insulting to be reminded of her actual age.

“You’re thirty-four days older than me, Anne O’Farrell.”

“
Diane Keaton
!” cried Pip. “That was the third wife. Thank goodness I got it. That was going to drive me crazy for the whole night.”

“Patrick, what can we get you? Beer, wine, champagne, spirits? You sound very dry.” Ellen’s mother flicked her hand at the sideboard containing a selection of drinks on ice, while keeping her violet eyes upon Patrick, like a bird on its prey.

(Anne’s eyes were her most striking feature. Her friends had wanted
her to enter an Elizabeth Taylor look-alike competition when she was young, and she probably would have won if she hadn’t thought such competitions beneath her. Unfortunately, she hadn’t seen fit to pass on her beautiful eyes to Ellen. Obviously this wasn’t really her decision, except that Ellen had always suspected that if her mother
did
have the choice, she might have decided to keep all the glory for herself. She was very vain about her eyes.)

Patrick cleared his throat again. “A beer would be great, thanks, ah…”

“You haven’t actually introduced us properly yet, Ellen. The poor man probably thinks he’s stumbled into some sort of elderly harem.”

“You haven’t stopped talking,” said Ellen. She put her hand on Patrick’s arm. “Patrick, this is my mother, Anne.”

“Can you see the resemblance?” Anne fluttered her eyelashes up at him as she handed Patrick a glass of beer.

“I’m not … I’m not sure.” Patrick clutched his hand around his beer.

“And my godmothers, Mel and Pip,” continued Ellen, ignoring her mother. “Or are you Phillipa tonight? She switches back and forth.”

“Depending on whether I’m skinny or fat,” said Phillipa. She beamed at Patrick and waved a hand up and down her plump body. “So it’s perfectly obvious who I am right now, hey?”

An expression of pure panic flew across Patrick’s face.

“Phillipa,” remonstrated Ellen.

“Aha! So not thin enough for Pip! I have to come back to you for some more hypnotherapy sessions, Ellen.” Phillipa turned to Patrick with a deadly serious expression on her face. “I suffer the most debilitating addiction to carbohydrates.”