RUSSIAN DOLLS

RUSSIAN DOLLS

He sees layers:
The pellucid patinas of abused and abandoned psyches coat the room. The last layer is a thin coat of pale insipid green designed to reassure and calm. Not this time. The client sits in the deliberately easy chair: a bundle of tight Russian dolls in a man’s uneasy skin. He fears this sickly green and spreading growth because he’s come without his secateurs.

Layers:

The soul skins flake and drift like dandruff captured motes in the swathes of light from the slats in the half-open Venetian blinds. The analyst, intending to inspire confidence, glibly lists qualifications and allegiances. For affidavits she slips a mock-shy glance at the array of certificates geometrically arranged around the room. Yet another skin, walls on the wall. The client attends closely, as good clients should, but cares little whether she follows Freud, Jung or Adler or jogs her carefully-hidden knee to Skinner’s meagre tune.   Layers:   Dancing in the dust drifts are subtle implications inviting admiration for the trappings of success. Learning is indicated, intelligence is presumed, though wisdom doesn’t come with the counselling package and common sense [always the least common of the senses] is a stranger here. She sits her barely decorated mouth smug and close to smirk. Thin lips, thinks the client, thin lips and little soul.   Layers:

Two analysts, suitably armoured, proffer smiles. One, settled easy in her easy chair, is dressed in pseudo-gypsy style; ankle-length brocaded skirt and high-necked embroidered blouse specifically designed to cover the allure of distracting skin. The other, a photograph of her, tight wrapped with man and child, reinforces the message: taken - keep off the grass. A pity, that. The client is an aficionado of unforced flirtation and a little suggestive banter could, perhaps, loosen the stiff seized thread of the Russian dolls.   Layers:

The client [obsessed with barriers] enquires if the analyst knows the safe way to strip the skins from an onion. Did she know that a humble crust of bread clamped in the teeth would absorb the acrid spray and avoid the flash-flood of vision-barring tears and the itch behind the eyeball which you can never get to scratch? His mother taught him. The analyst, excited now, thinks she has a doll within her reach. Once more into the breach she rides: his relationship with his mother – how was it? The client explains that he loved his mother, but always fully-dressed and he never coveted her underclothes on or off. As to fathers, he had two: one he never knew, and the other he knew too well. The dolls remain intact and tight.   Layers:

Time passed and opportunities too. Two marriages were mentioned, bracketed between betrayals and births, and finally bereavements. All carefully wrapped and packaged acceptably and received with mumbled sympathetic acknowledgements and feigned interest. The analyst shifts her head above the crenellations, consults her watch, and sighs, and rises. The client follows suit, brushes the invisible debris of exfoliating failures from his shoulders, and exits nursing the vestal matreshka in the palm of his hand.   Laid bare:   Later, after loving, he will take himself to a safe and favoured haven and, back against the wall, slowly open and cherish all his dolls one by one, deeper and deeper, layer by layer.    ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------