(first published in The Flash Fiction Press, May 5th 2017)
Jenny Birkett was sitting in the bar with five fellow psychiatrists at an academic conference. A quiet middle-aged woman with quiet clothes and a gentle manner, it wasn’t unusual for her to take little part in professional chitchat. The discussion was about some remarks that the opening conference speaker had made in his plenary address. He had referred to a famous paper that the great Swiss psychotherapist, Carl Jung, delivered to the annual meeting of the British Medical Association in the summer of 1914, ‘The Importance of the Unconscious in Psychopathology’. At the time, Jung secretly feared that he himself was suffering from schizophrenia. Two days after he delivered his paper, the First World War broke out. In the middle of that collective European madness, Jung’s recovery was slow and painful: he later interpreted his initial disturbance as a precognition of the European slaughter.
The conference speaker had suggested that personal experience of mental illness could be valuable to psychiatrists in caring for their patients. The suggestion had sharply divided the group in the bar. Old Danny McCafferty, who knew Jenny better than most, noticed not just her quietness, but a clouded, troubled expression. Hesitantly, he asked her if she had an opinion. Jenny spoke so gently that they had to strain to hear her above the hubbub of the bar: ‘I don’t say that personal experience of psychiatric illness is going to be helpful to us in diagnosis or treatment. But there was an occasion when I felt sure that I was going mad and I’ll never forget the sheer anguish that I felt then. It’s got to be valuable for us to understand – to know from our own experience – the awfulness that our patients are living through. I hope it’s helped me to bring more compassion to my patients.’
There was a pause. Jenny reached for, and swigged, her dry white wine. She ran her finger over the wet ring her glass had left on the table. ‘I suppose, after a declaration like that, I owe it to you all to tell you what happened…
‘Nearly twenty years ago, I went to Poland on an EU exchange scheme. I learnt the language at my mother’s knee: she had fled Poland during the war. I spent six months in an academic psychiatric department in Warsaw and a Polish colleague, Darek, came to my unit in Edinburgh. I had his flat in Warsaw and he stayed in my cottage in Roslyn. You probably know that the ancient centre of Warsaw was painstakingly recreated after the destruction of the war. But most of the city’s population don’t stay in the chocolate-box city centre: they live in the countless high-rise flats in the suburbs. Like everyone else, I used to travel in and out to work on the bus, down long, long avenues of these post-war workers’ flats. A dreary journey.
‘One autumn evening of murk and rain, I was absorbed in an article I was reading and almost missed my stop. I scurried into the downstairs lobby of the flats and into the battered lift. Darek’s flat was on the eighth floor. There was no light on the landing and it was always a titanic struggle to locate and operate Darek’s battered door-lock. So it was a relief when, finally, the lock yielded. But once inside the flat, it always used to feel homely. The living room used to be lined with books in Polish and English – literature and philosophy, as well as medicine. Darek was evidently a polymath whose learning put me to shame.
‘But that night, when I switched on the light, I got a stupefying shock. The books and the book shelves were gone. So were the warm Afghan rugs and the rich red curtains.
‘I dropped my briefcase and almost collapsed myself. I sat down abruptly on a battered dining room chair (never previously seen) and, not daring to lift my eyes, stared at the unfamiliar scuffed lino at my feet. The lino was patterned with entwined pink roses on a green background: the thorns on the roses seemed unnaturally large. I struggled against the panic, tried to control my rasping breathing, and sought desperately for some rational explanation of the changes. Sought and failed: how could somebody (a relative of Dareks? a housing official?? the security police???) have entered the flat and, in a few short hours, completely refurnished it with this old tatt – this scuffed lino? In truth, I knew that nothing could explain the transformation of the flat. There had to be something wrong with my perception: I, a psychiatrist, was delusional. My eyes filled with tears; I have never known such pain.
‘I thought back to patients I had known, trying and failing to recall similar cases. And then I was mistrusting my recall, as I had already mistrusted my perceptions. Inexpressible wretchedness. My breathing was now quite out of control, my heart was banging like a gong. I felt faint and I got up to open the living room window, to breathe some cold air. As I stood at the window, struggling with the catch, I glanced out to the evening street below…
‘It was a different street.
‘And then, in a flash, I knew. This was a different street: it wasn’t Darek’s street and this was not Darek’s flat. Unknowingly, I had got off the bus at the wrong stop. Unknowingly, I had run through the rain into the wrong block of flats. Unknowingly, I had contrived with Darek’s key to open the shoddy lock to the wrong flat.
‘Such relief. But my understanding of my patients was changed utterly.’
Biography:
Michael Bloor lives in Dunblane, Scotland, where he has discovered the exhilaration of short fiction, with more than a hundred pieces published in Literally Stories, Everyday Fiction, The Copperfield Review, Litro Online, Firewords, The Drabble, The Cabinet of Heed, Moonpark Review and elsewhere (see https://michaelbloor.com).
Saragun Springs 
Mick
This one fooled me! I believe we all have had a similar experience in which conditions were just right for us to fall into a mental trap. But seeing it happen to a “Shrink” makes it amusing; I am glad she took it as a lesson.
Leila
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Leila, thanks for commenting and thanks again for re-publishing it after the original online publication ceased and disappeared.
Truthfully, it was an odd feeling, re-reading it now. And, to be honest, while I still like the ending, I think I’d now (with eight more years of writing experience under my belt) write it rather differently. For a flash fiction, it starts terribly slowly. And the first two paragraphs are too long and clunky. Still, it is what it is, and I’m glad to see it again, ‘warts and all.’ bw mick
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Mick
That’s a good way to feel! Although I like it, it is always for the best for the writer to not fall too much in love with him/herself. I hate re-reading anything I’ve done because I begin picking it apart instantly. But better that than thinking oneself a genius whose words are the gospel.
Leila
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Ha, thank you for your wise and consoling words!
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Hi Mick
An excellent tale with a great beginning, middle and ending that all blend into one another to keep the reader eagerly reading.
The way you set up this story with the opening paragraph and the Jung material interspersed with the fictional characters is truly effective and draws the reader in in just the right way. Great suspense and tension are very much created by the end of the first paragraph and any reader who’s awake enough would surely be forced to read on just to find out what happens.
Then the structural shift to the focus on the protagonist is seamless and perfect, as flash fiction must be perfect.
Her voice sounds real. The dialogue-monologue is wonderfully pitch-perfect. Her voice continues the narrative in an artful way that grows naturally from the set-up of this piece.
Finally, the O. Henry-like twist at the end of the tale also does all that it’s meant to. Not too hot and not too cold, not too much and not too little, the ending achieves a well-nigh-perfect balance between well-roundedness and a sense of closure and leaving the reader with a surprise, something to think about.
Overall, a truly artful tale told with the kind of near-perfection the best flash fiction can achieve. Bravo for an intriguing and artistic shaping of language on a theme (Jung and insanity) that fascinates!
Dale
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Hi Mick
An excellent tale with a great beginning, middle and ending that all blend into one another to keep the reader eagerly reading.
The way you set up this story with the opening paragraph and the Jung material interspersed with the fictional characters is truly effective and draws the reader in in just the right way. Great suspense and tension are very much created by the end of the first paragraph and any reader who’s awake enough would surely be forced to read on just to find out what happens.
Then the structural shift to the focus on the protagonist is seamless and perfect, as flash fiction must be perfect.
Her voice sounds real. The dialogue-monologue is wonderfully pitch-perfect. Her voice continues the narrative in an artful way that grows naturally from the set-up of this piece.
Finally, the O. Henry-like twist at the end of the tale also does all that it’s meant to. Not too hot and not too cold, not too much and not too little, the ending achieves a well-nigh-perfect balance between well-roundedness and a sense of closure and leaving the reader with a surprise, something to think about.
Overall, a truly artful tale told with the kind of near-perfection the best flash fiction can achieve. Bravo for an intriguing and artistic shaping of language on a theme (Jung and insanity) that fascinates!
Dale
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Dale, Thank you for a very generous judgement, and an implicit rebuttal of my own recent re-appraisal that it began a bit too slowly. You make a good case – thank you, I’ll let it rest.
I suspect that you’re a Jung fan? I used to have a copy of his Red Book, but I eventually passed it onto a very brilliant friend who somehow combined being a Jung fan with being an Orthodox priest – I knew he’d profit from it more than me.
with best wishes, mick
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Hi Mick
Yes indeed, at odd moments I might even call myself almost a disciple of Jung, and at the very least a very great admirer of his work at all levels. Not that he was perfect as a human being. But as a thinker and a psychologist, he touched heights that few if any can match (from my point of view).
I’m not always a fan of his writing style. He can be wordy, and he can go on and on for pages and pages saying the same thing or saying the exact same kinds of things in just slightly different words. And he has other, probably egregious, faults, as a writer.
But those are just his faults. Few have reconceived the spiritual side of humans for the modern age in a more powerful way than Dr. Jung.
In fact, I have a recent essay right here on Saragun Springs called “The True Way” which begins with Jung and continues referring to him throughout the piece. Zero hurry, but I think you’ll find it interesting whenever you get a chance. A lot of synchronicity in the fact that we both have Jung pieces appearing or reappearing this way too! “The True Way” just came out on Friday, September 19.
Thanks!
Dale
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Thanks for tip, Dale. Just scrolled down to Sept 19th, and indeed I’d missed that one. It was an interesting read, but a sad read because my interest was entirely historical. I’m 78, so I was there in the summer of love. Had a few unpleasant experiences along the way and I eventually settled on mushrooms as my choice, The UK’s wet climate ensures abundant crops. Not just psilocybin, I branched out to forage for some of the delicious edible mushrooms (chanterelles in beech and birch woods, boletus edulis). I grew field mushrooms in old tomato boxes full of compost. Great days.
Perhaps I eventually overdid it, or it was just the frailty of age, but nowadays all mushrooms give me…
terrible diarrhoea.
So I have to content myself with the odd pint of IPA or a glass of Highland Park single malt. Hey ho.
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