The Hypnotist's Love Story (31 page)

“I know,” said Ellen. “It’s so strange!”

The phone rang. It was her mother.

“I just broke one of Grandma’s plates,” Ellen told her. “The wedding present set.”

“Those plates always gave me such a musty, fusty feeling,” said Anne. “I’d keep them handy for throwing against the wall whenever you have an argument with Patrick. Not that you’d ever do anything like that, would you? I guess if you two have an argument you just meditate together, or chant or align your auras or something.”

“I actually did throw it against the wall,” said Ellen.

“You did?” Her mother sounded impressed.

“Yes,” said Ellen. She was suddenly furious with her mother. “And
Patrick and I do not chant or meditate together and I do not believe in auras, well, not as an actual physical manifestation, and anyway, you don’t align your auras, you align your chakras. If you’re going to be cutting, at least get your terminology right.”

There was a pause.

“I didn’t mean to be cutting,” said Anne in a softer placatory voice. “I’m sorry. I thought I was being witty. Actually, your father, ah, David, made a comment last night. He said I could be a bit ‘sharp’ at times. Perhaps he has a point.”

For some reason her mother’s apology made Ellen feel even angrier. “Well, I assume you’re not going to change your personality to suit a man!” she snapped. “You drummed that into me from when I was eight years old! When Jason Hood wanted to sit next to me at lunchtime, I told him that he couldn’t because he might repress my personality. He said he wouldn’t press anything and then he blushed and cried and ran away.”

Anne giggled. “Actually, I never said anything of the sort. You would have got that whole repression lecture from Melanie. I never believed any man was capable of repressing my personality, thank you very much.”

“You might be right,” sighed Ellen, although she was sure it had been her mother. That was the problem with having three mothers; they all got mixed up in her memory. She pressed a fingertip to her forehead. “I think I have a headache. What were you calling about?”

“Well, I just wondered if we could change this weekend’s lunch. David and I have been invited to go up to the Whitsundays for a long weekend on a yacht, a sixty-foot yacht, if you can believe it! Some friends of his from the UK are in Australia at the moment. Bankers apparently. Very wealthy. By the sound of it they’re weathering the financial crisis rather well.”

There was an undercurrent of pure pleasure running beneath her mother’s normally clipped, cool tone. It occurred to Ellen that this was the sort of life Anne had always been meant to lead. Drinking champagne on a yacht, chatting with bankers. Next it would be shopping in Paris.

“David didn’t want to put off our lunch, but I said you wouldn’t mind. Of course, I didn’t
tell him that you were totally blasé about the whole event.”

“It’s fine,” said Ellen, but she was hurt. Her father had got a better offer. After all, he could meet the daughter he’d never met any old time. And now she would have no excuse not to go up to the mountains on Sunday and meet Colleen’s parents. Wonderful.

“Are you sure?” said her mother. “You sound upset. You’re not upset, are you? Because it was me who said we should accept the invitation. I know it’s horribly superficial of me, but I have to admit it just sounded so wonderfully … decadent, I guess is the word.”

Her mother’s honesty and slight embarrassment made her sound vulnerable. She was never embarrassed. Ellen’s heart softened. She took a deep breath. For heaven’s sake. Her emotions were skidding about all over the place.

“It’s perfectly fine. It’s good, in fact. Patrick had something he wanted me to do.”

“Excellent!” said her mother. “Oh, by the way, I thought you’d be interested to hear that I’ve had not one but three patients tell me they’ve lost weight through hypnosis over the last week.”

“Is that right,” said Ellen, not especially interested.

“Yes, apparently they’ve been going to these ‘hypno-parties.’ They’re all the rage in Sydney at the moment. They’re like Tupperware parties but instead of handing around plastic containers they all get hypnotized. Then they drink champagne and eat carrot sticks, I guess. Ladies of a certain age and income bracket are going crazy for them.”

“Fancy that,” said Ellen. Well, good for Danny.

Although it gave her an obscurely depressed feeling. What was the point of stock-standard hypnotherapists like her when there were dynamic young guys like Danny shaking up the industry?

“Well, I have to run,” said her mother. “We’re off to the theater.”

“OK. Say hi to Pip and Mel.”

“I’m going with David, actually.”

“Oh,” said Ellen. “What are Pip and Mel doing?”

“I don’t know, but David and I are seeing the new David Williamson play. It’s opening night. We’ve got front-row tickets.”

“Of course you have,” said Ellen.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Nothing. Say hi to Dad!”

“Ellen?”

“Sorry. I’m in an extremely peculiar mood. I’m fine. Have fun.”

She hung up the phone and looked at the tiny pieces of broken plate glinting on the floor.

Everything she had ever believed would make her happy was happening. She had a father and a mother going to the theater together tonight. She had a fiancé and a stepson and a baby on the way. Why wasn’t she in seventh heaven? Why was she feeling so skittish and irritable? It couldn’t just be pregnancy hormones combined with a simple fear of change, could it?

She couldn’t be so ordinary, could she?

Aha! So you think you’re extraordinary then, do you, Ellen?

There was an enormous crash in the hallway and Ellen jumped. She ran out of the kitchen and saw that two of Patrick’s boxes that had been piled on top of each other had toppled over and split open, spilling their contents in a great jumbled mess across the hallway floor.

She could see an old dirty sneaker, CDs that had fallen out of their cases, tangled extension cords, a travel hair dryer, Christmas decorations, a fry pan, a Matchbox car, a bulging photo album that had fallen facedown, an old dustpan, coins, receipts … stuff.

As she went to pick up one of the fallen boxes, she saw that Patrick had carefully written “Miscellaneous” on the side. She laughed. It was meant to be a gentle, loving laugh at her imperfect but adorable husband-to-be, but it came out an unpleasant, bitter-sounding bark, as if she’d been unhappily married to him for years and this was the last straw.

Then she said, “Oh, please
don’t
” as the bottom of the box broke and another flood of “miscellaneous” items crashed to the floor.

She dropped the soft dusty sheets of cardboard and stamped her foot. Her home would never be hers again. It was going to disappear under a mountain of rubbish. She scratched viciously at her wrist as an itchy feeling of rage enveloped her, as though tiny bugs were crawling all over her body.

This is an inappropriate reaction. You need to breathe. In and out. Imagine a white light is filling—

“
Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!” she screamed in the empty hallway.

She looked about for something, anything, to distract her.

She bent down and picked up the photo album.

The first photo she saw was of an impossibly young-looking Patrick wearing a puffy-sleeved white shirt with a blond girl sitting on his lap. She had on white jeans tucked into her boots, padded shoulders, earrings with dangling orange feathers. Patrick and Colleen. Young love in the late eighties.

She flipped the pages.

Photo after photo of Colleen posing for the camera, presumably held by Patrick. Hands on her hips, pouting her lips, opening her eyes wide, smiling seductively.

Ellen’s seventeen-year-old self, the one who had worn a very similar pair of earrings when she was a schoolgirl but would never have had the confidence to model like that for a boyfriend, responded bitchily. “Yes, you’re pretty hot stuff.”

Her better self spoke up:
Ellen! What’s wrong with you? She’s a little girl! Seventeen and she’s going to die young. Give the poor girl a break.

She turned the page.

“Oh, lordie me,” she said, this time in her grandmother’s voice.

She was looking at naked photos of Colleen. Her blond hair slick against her head like she’d just stepped out of the shower. Without the dated clothes and hairstyle, she’d lost that faintly silly look that people have in old photos. Now she wasn’t just a pretty eighties girl, she was a classic beauty, with high cheekbones and big eyes. Ellen studied each photo, feeling both weirdly excited and slightly sick. Colleen had a perfectly
proportioned body, slim and curved in all the right places. She could have been a model.

There wasn’t anything pornographic about the photos. They were innocently sensual; Ellen could feel the raw intensity of first love.

There was one beautiful photo of Colleen lying completely naked on a single bed with her eyes closed, sunlight across her face. Ellen imagined how Patrick must have felt as a horny teenage boy looking at this gorgeous girl. Ellen had been perfectly attractive as a teenager, a “pretty” girl—but she’d never had a body like this, and now her skin was aging and her body was thickening with pregnancy and she was filled with a feeling of pure envy. She wanted to be that young girl, lying naked on a bed with the sunlight on her face, and the truth was she never had been and she never would be.

Stop looking,
she told herself.
This is highly personal, private stuff! You have no right! It’s disrespectful. Your reaction is emotionally immature. Everyone has photos of their high school sweethearts tucked away in old boxes, it’s no big deal! Shut the photo album, put it somewhere safe where Jack can’t find inappropriate photos of his dead mother, and go and research prams for the baby on the Internet, or do your taxes or something.

She sat down cross-legged on the floor among all the miscellaneous junk and kept looking, and as she did, she felt a strange longing to have a girl-to-girl talk with Saskia.

“Do you think he’s still in love with his wife?” she could ask her. “Do you think he ever really got over her? Do you think neither of us really ever had a chance with him?”

She felt like Saskia would be the only person who would truly understand why she couldn’t stop looking at these photos.

D
escribe what’s going through your mind,” said Ellen. Alfred Boyle, the humble accountant who wanted help with public speaking, was sitting in the green recliner displaying all the signs of an ideal hypnotic state: His cheeks were flushed, his eyes moved restlessly behind his eyelids, his well-polished black business shoes splayed outward.

It was Ellen’s second session with him and she was doing an age regression.

After their first appointment, it had become obvious to Ellen that Alfred’s fear of public speaking was a full-blown phobia. He trembled and stammered just talking about it. It was having a serious impact on his life. He regularly called in sick on days he was due to give a presentation.

Alfred had already regressed to his first job as a trainee accountant, when he’d made such a hash of a short presentation, his boss had eventually interrupted, “Don’t worry about it, mate.”

Now Alfred was describing an incident in high school where he’d had to give an impromptu speech on the topic of music.

“I feel sick,” said
Alfred. His voice sounded younger. Not as deep. Even the awkward way his jaw moved reminded Ellen of a teenage boy. “I’ve got nothing to say about music. Music. What is music even? Like, sounds and shit? I cannot think of a single word to say about music. They’re all staring at me. They think I’m an idiot. I
am
an idiot.”

“Where do you feel the fear?”

“Here.” Alfred pressed his hand to his stomach. “I’m going to vomit. Seriously. I’m going to vomit all over the classroom floor.”

Ellen looked at him uneasily and felt her own nausea rise.

“We’re going to use that feeling like a bridge,” she said firmly. “And we’re going to follow that bridge to the
very first time
you felt that way.”

She was on the hunt for what was called the “Initial Sensitizing Event.”

“As I count backward from five to one, you will travel back in time. Five, you’re becoming younger, smaller … four, you’re following the feeling … three, you’re nearly there … two … one.”

Ellen leaned forward and tapped Alfred lightly on the forehead with her fingernail. “Be there.”

She waited a beat.

“Where are you?” she said.

“Preschool,” said Alfred.

At the sound of his voice Ellen felt a cold shiver. It never ceased to amaze her when this happened. There was a fifty-two-year-old man sitting in front of her, but she was talking to a small child.

“How old are you?”

Alfred held up his palm and tucked back his thumb.

“Four?” said Ellen.

Alfred nodded shyly.

“And what’s happening, Alfred?”

“It’s quiet time, but Pam is crying in the reading corner. She’s really sad. I think I should cheer her up and give her a present.”

“How?”

“I’m giving her a present.”

“Ah, that’s a good idea. What is it?”

“My snail.”

Oh, dear. This was clearly not going to work out well.

“Your snail?”

“Yeah, I found it on the footpath this morning and I put it in my pocket. It’s
huge
! And guess what?” Alfred’s face filled with boyish enthusiasm. “His shell is
hairy
! I’ve never seen a hairy-shelled snail before.”

“What are you doing now?”

“I’m saying, “‘Look, Pam, this is for you.’”

“What’s Pam doing?”

By the expression of shocked horror on Alfred’s face, it didn’t look like the snail had been a hit. “She’s screaming and pushing me away!”

Oh,
Pam
, thought Ellen.

“I’m falling back against the bookshelf and it’s crashed to the floor with everyone’s Easter eggs we painted this morning! And Miss Bourke is yelling like she’s on fire, and I can’t find my snail and
everyone is looking at me
.”