Chapter Fifteen
Joe
Karen was wearing a white shirt under a thin grey jumper, and despite it being June and with summer just around the corner, it was lashing it down outside, which created a gloomy atmosphere in the room. It wasn’t the day for therapy.
‘How are you?’ said Karen brightly, which was somewhat jarring given the dampness of the day. I fidgeted in my seat. Why didn’t she have a sofa? I would have loved a comfortable sofa. I had brought a coffee with me, and I took a sip. It was the day for warm drinks, comfy seating and jumpers. I longed to be at home.
‘Umm, good, yeah. A few things have happened since my last visit.’ She got herself ready, pen in hand to jot down notes. ‘Dolly got a place at Durham to read English. We’re obviously really proud of her. We went out for dinner to celebrate, and it was nice. We went to Wagamama, and, I don’t know, but things with Freya felt good. Before we left, we sat on her bed and reminisced about the old days, and it was nice. I’m also working on a new script.’
‘That’s exciting,’ said Karen, quickly writing something down on her notepad. ‘Do you want to talk more about you and Freya?’
‘Yeah, we’re good. I don’t know, we’ve had a lot of positive interactions lately. I suppose it’s easier without the pressure of marriage. Although I did walk in on her naked, which definitely didn’t go down well.’
‘Sounds awkward. Do you want to discuss that?’
‘Not really. I’d had a couple of drinks, made a hasty decision, instantly regretted it, apologised, and I think we’re both over it now.’
‘Right, that’s good.’
A pause.
‘But there’s something else I need to talk about.’
‘Go on,’ said Karen, sitting up a little taller in her chair. The rain continued lashing against the window and it sounded like a thousand small gunshots.
‘The thing is, my new sitcom, it’s about me and Freya. I had a meeting with my agent and he thought the idea of a couple, separated but forced to keep living together, would make a great sitcom. It’s modern, zeitgeisty, and yet it still has all the traditional tropes of a sitcom. At first, I was against it, but then I started making notes, sketching out ideas, and I just fell in love with it. It’s the best thing I’ve written in years.’
A beat. More rain hammered against the window.
‘But?’ said Karen after a moment because she could obviously detect the uncertainty in my voice, and probably see it written clearly across my face.
‘I haven’t told Freya about it, and I know I should. It’s so personal, and we’re still going through it. It’s happening right now, and I’m using it for laughs, but it’s cathartic, writing the scenes we’ve already lived, and seeing things from her perspective has, I think, really helped me understand what went wrong. What I’ve written so far is probably the best stuff I’ve done for a while, and I love it. It’s reminded me that I’m good at writing, that I can do this and be successful again, but a part of me knows I have to tell Freya. That I need to ask for her permission.’
‘So why don’t you? What are you so afraid of?’
A good question. What was I afraid of?
‘I don’t know. I think about telling her, but when it comes to actually doing it, I can’t, and usually I just change the subject. I suppose I’m afraid of upsetting the apple cart. Like I said, we’ve been doing so well, and I don’t want to jeopardise that. I suppose I’m also worried she might tell me to stop writing it.’
Karen looked at me from behind her glasses with a familiar expression. ‘Would you?’
‘Would I what?’
‘Stop writing it if she asked you? Remember your homework from last time? I asked you to think about why your marriage ended, and if there was something you could have done differently.’
‘I remember.’
‘Do you think that this lack of willingness to risk confrontation had something to do with it? You have always lacked the ability to tell Freya exactly what you’re thinking. When it comes down to it, you don’t tell her your deepest, darkest fears, your worries, frustrations, and even now when you have separated, you’re still afraid to tell her something even when you know you should. Where do you think this challenge with communication comes from, Joe?’
This was the sort of thing that made me hate therapy. I despised being put on the spot and questioned in such a practical, straightforward way, and yes, I knew she was right and had a valid point, but it wasn’t something I wanted to address. I would rather keep things light and breezy. It was probably why I had ended up being a comedy writer. Nothing could get too deep when you were writing a sitcom, and if it did, you just chucked in a knob gag and you were back to laughter again because the thing about sitcoms was that people didn’t really change. It was why audiences loved to watch them again and again because the characters, the situations, didn’t change in the way that life did. Sitcoms were comforting because they were simple, uncomplicated, and always had a happy ending – or at least an ending. A whole storyline neatly wrapped up in a tight thirty-minute script. There was something incredibly beautiful about it.
I leaned back in my chair for a moment, running a hand through my rapidly thinning hair, and I didn’t quite know how to reply.
‘I’m not sure,’ I said finally.
A pause. She looked at me.
‘But do you agree your, shall we say, lack of communication effectively hurt your marriage?’
‘I’m sure my inability to tell Freya how I’m feeling, and what I actually need or want, negatively impacted our relationship.’
‘But where do you think it comes from? Sorry if I’m repeating myself, Joe, but I think it’s important to get to the root of where this fear of confrontation comes from.’
There wasn’t a neat, perfectly scripted answer for this question. The obvious answer was my parents, and more specifically my father, but was it that simple? Could everything I was, or wasn’t, solely be blamed on the deficiencies of my parents?
‘We’ve spoken about my parents before,’ I eventually replied. ‘And it’s clear my childhood has informed much of my adulthood.’
‘Agreed. But do you think there’s something else at play here, Joe?’
‘Like what?’
She took her glasses off and placed them carefully on her desk. I noticed her earrings because they looked new, and I hadn’t seen them before. Long, silver, with pearls at the end.
‘It seems to me you have a complicated relationship with failure that has led to many of the decisions you’ve made as an adult. You decided to go into a career with a high chance of failure—’
‘Which I have largely succeeded at.’
‘True, and it’s incredible what you have already achieved, but even that success has been laced with some failures. You seem afraid of opening up to Freya in case you upset the apple cart, despite the fact you’re already separated. I’m just speculating here, Joe, but do you think your desire to live on the surface, keeping everything light and breezy, is linked to your relationship with failure?’
‘It’s because of my fucking parents!’ I said, slightly more aggressively than I intended. ‘Sorry, I just meant—’
‘No, it’s good to get emotional, Joe. You need to explore that. Don’t you see that you have a particular fear of letting go, of telling people what you think, and being honest with yourself in the process? Sometimes it’s okay to let go. You can’t control every aspect of your life.’
‘You think I have a need to control things?’
‘Do you?’
‘Doesn’t everyone?’
‘Not necessarily. Sometimes people need control because they think it equals some sort of success. If you control everything, it gives you power, and that power will be rewarded. Some people need to control every aspect of their lives because they’re afraid of letting go and revealing their weaknesses. It’s a way of protecting themselves.’
‘And which am I, Karen? Driven by success or fear?’
‘Which do you think, Joe?’
I hated the way she never answered my questions and would often turn it around as a question for me. Imagine if I did that in everyday life? People would literally hate me.
‘There was a boy at my school, Harvey Cooper, who purposely failed his GCSE exams because he didn’t want to go to sixth form. His parents thought he was going to be a doctor, and he ended up working at Halfords. He was definitely driven by a fear of success. Although if you needed a new inner tube for your bike, he was the person to go to.’
‘Why are you bringing up a boy from your school?’
‘Perhaps for the same reason his first girlfriend dumped him. No, not a tiny penis, although there were rumours. She probably realised he wasn’t going places and if she stuck with him, she would be stuck, too.’
‘What are you saying, Joe?’
‘That I’m driven to succeed because I’m terrified there’s nothing else out there. Writing is the only thing I’m good at. The only thing that will stop me from ending up working in a shit job I hate that pays very little money,’ I said, and then I added without thinking, ‘and essentially becoming my father.’
‘That’s time today, Joe, but really good work. Let’s hang on to that last thought and really delve into it next time, okay?’ said Karen with a smile.
I couldn’t believe we were leaving our session on a cliffhanger like that. Perhaps Karen should write for television because she fucking nailed the ending on that one. Talk about good plotting. Of course it all came back to my fucking dad. He was solely responsible for my inability to communicate like a proper, emotionally well-balanced, functioning adult, and now, just as we were discussing it in therapy, he was fucking off to France to run a bed and breakfast with his French girlfriend. I hadn’t even told Karen about that yet. No doubt she would have an absolute field day with that one. Talk about daddy fucking issues.