Rob McClure

The Divided Self

1966 The book release party was in a house in South Kensington. We were led into a high-ceilinged Regency sitting room where stood scattered an odd assortment of odder people, drinking whisky out of miniscule glasses. I was introduced to a sculptor, an Israeli cello player, a Finnish pianist and a garishly made-up-to-the-point-of-clownishness Romanian actress. Syd was whisked away by an ophthalmic surgeon to admire the art adorning the walls. There was a green-daubed tree with malevolent eyes by Cocteau, a giant’s face by Dali, a few dark watery landscapes by Dorel Pascal. They nattered merrily about some Rothko exhibition they’d seen in ’65.
I pretended to browse the bookshelves near an antique black zither and a tiny Clavinova so I wouldn’t have to talk to a poet.
“They do say the quickest way out of Glasgow is through two large whiskies?” The speaker, a short middle-aged man in a black suit with a natural pink linen shirt and matching tie, nodded at my drink. Foppish sort, a hint of James Mason louche. The face was pale, whitish-grey hair receding from the crown, velvet-brown eyes warm and attentive. He had an unlit pipe in one hand, a double-Pernod in the other, and the demeanour of the Vice character from a medieval morality play. “But the fact of the matter is,” he added, grinning devilishly, “that there’s nowhere for a person to go in modern life and scream.”
“You’d be from Glasgow too?” My accent, flattened by a year in London and the inconvenience of perpetual misunderstanding back with a vengeance, a spiraling glut of glottal stops.
“Cannot be helped but. We’ve no say in where we’re born.” He hunched his shoulders. “You can take the boy out of Govanhill etc. I grew up in a flat up a close and there’s damn all the matter with that. You can still read Kierkegaard in The Govanhill public library, if you’ve the inclination. And a library card.”
I laughed. “I grew up in a flat as well.”
“I can see it,” he said, having a nibble at an olive. “A grey street wet with rain. Blank faceless tenements streaming drizzle. Yon terrible green and white floral wallpaper and the borders of a three-piece uncut moquette.” He had the habit of raising his eyes to the ceiling while talking. “Aye, the banister and the stained glass and the respectability.”
“You don’t have me pegged at all,” I explained. “This was a council flat in Airdrie. It wasn’t posh. I’m not one of you toffs lived it up in Glasgow. I’m not one of you mucky-mucks.”
He stuffed the pipe in his jacket pocket.
“Would you be another of these fucking poets then?” I inquired.
“No.” He scrunched his nose as at an unfortunate smell. “I’m a specialist in events in inner space and time.”
“Seriously though.”
“I’m an anchorman.” I noticed his strange eyes again, gelid, gray with hooded, deep mysterious irises. “A psychiatrist.”
“You don’t look like a psychiatrist.”
“How many do you know?”
“About none.”
“Well,” he sniffed, “there you go then.”
“I’m just relieved you’re not a poet.”
“Art and psychiatry are the same thing.” He was acknowledging my skeptical expression. “They’re both about new realities, language and its limitations.”
“You seem awful full of yourself for a psychiatrist.”
He winked. “Who else would I be full of exactly?”
“You got a twitch?”
“It’s very strategic.” He winked again. “Look into my left eye a minute and I’ll look into yours.”
“For God’s sake.”
“It’s an exercise just.” He jabbed a forefinger at my eye. “I’m not putting you on.”
“There’s a name for folk like you.”
He offered a little pout as response. “I think you need to pay attention.”
“Attention?” I was astonished at his audacity. “To you!”
He looked disappointed now, eyes downcast, lids batting up and down every few seconds to hypnotic effect. “No, to yourself.”
I put my drink on a coaster and leaned in, staring dutifully into his eye. He reciprocated. Neither of us spoke for a while, just stood staring. Others had begun looking at us looking at one another oddly, oddly.
“What are you looking for?” I blurted.
“What are you looking for?” His eye still deeply focused on mine. “Yourself? Because the self you’re trying to find is the you that is trying to find the self you’re trying to find.” His voice hypnotic. “So, you will never find yourself,” he intoned dreamily, “since you have never been lost yourself since the self you have lost is the you that has lost it.”
“Run that by me that again?”
He broke off the staring contest to take out his wallet and extract a card. “Here, you can stop by and I’ll give you the whole show.”
“I don’t need a psychiatrist!” I studied the embossed card. It even looked genuine. “So, Doctor. . . “
“Ronnie.”
“Ronnie?”
“Well done.” He snatched the card back, jotted a number, and returned it. “This is the main line for an emergency.”
“How will I survive in the meantime?” I asked, sarcastically.
He seemed to consider the question seriously, knitting his brows. “Don’t lose your sense of humor?” he offered. “It’s a great life if you don’t weaken?”
“How’s about a trial run? See if you’re a worthwhile investment?”
I pointed to where Syd sat cross-legged on a sofa rapt before a Kokoschka. He gazed at the sprawling mess of canvas, mute and still. “What’s your diagnosis of my friend?”
Ronnie shrugged. “What makes you think it’s his problem and not yours?”
I couldn’t think of anything to say.
“We’re talking about the punter by the paintings in the silk shirt looks like somebody threw up all over it?”
“Correct.”
Ronnie studied Syd’s profile, rubbing his lip. “My unbiased professional opinion?”
“Do you have an unprofessional one?”
“Christ, yes.” Ronnie’s face clouded over as if I’d obscurely injured him. “I think your lover is a half-crazed creature more or less adjusted to a mad world.”
“My lover?”
Ronnie shrugged. “I notice. This is how come I make the big bucks.”
“What if I told you that I think he is going crazy?”
“I’d say insanity is a perfectly rational adjustment to an insane world.”
“What?”
“Mental illness is a social disease, an inability to tolerate the status quo. But who in their right mind can tolerate the status quo? Can you?” Ronnie drained the dregs of his Pernod. “Madness need not be breakdown. It might be breakthrough too.”
“You realize you’re the one that sounds mad, Ronnie?”
He addressed his next remarks to a chandelier. “To get through to severely disordered people you have to go there yourself. If I’m as fucked up as you are, and I can get you to see you’re not fucked up at all, but I’m fucked up for believing you are, then I can stop being fucked up.”
“So how can you tell who’s mad?”
Ronnie snapped his fingers at me. “There you go, lassie. Now you’re catching on!”
“Are you saying you’re more disturbed than your patients?”
“I wouldn’t go that far.” Ronnie tapped a finger on his temple. “Some of them are pretty far-gone. I had one girl was a circus rider. Her horse fell and rolled over her head and had to be destroyed. The horse I mean, not her head. She was unconscious a while. When she came out her coma she was a horse.”
“What?”
“I mean she looked a bit like a horse. She had a horse’s eyes and a big mane of hair, which she’d toss about. She also neighed, some days. Downright disturbing it was. She’d graze on the grass by the wards, naked, on all fours. Go galloping around the grounds when the fancy took her, whinnying up a storm. We considered entering her in the Grand National.”
I stared at him. “You’re kidding me.”
“Aye, about the Grand National. The rest is true. But after three weeks of just listening to the girl, hearing her perspective on things, giving her the occasional carrot as a reward, playing along a bit, she turned back into herself. What I do is try and understand this kind of thing.”
I knocked back my vodka in a single brutal swig and at once felt like I could use another. “It must be terrifying, dealing with people like that.”
Ronnie shoulder-hunched again. “If you’re frightened of your parents, you shouldn’t bother being a therapist.”
“Parents?”
“Patients.”
“You said parents.”
Ronnie was nonplussed. “No. I said if you’re frightened of your patients, you can’t be a therapist. For me mental illness is theory not fact. If a woman daubs the walls of her bedroom with her own feces, to give you a less than obvious example, get her some paints and, who knows, she might become an artist. As a matter of fact, the patient I’m thinking of did just that. Then it was only her canvases looked like shite.” Ronnie smirked. “I had another girl with total catatonic immobility. Couldn’t walk down a street without freezing, coming to a dead stop, so I told her to market her condition.”
“Market it?”
“Aye, she’s an artist’s model now, very successful. Perfect opportunity. Catatonic immobility is the sentient condition of the fashion model.”
“I think I have that sometimes,” I noted. “Catatonic Catriona.”
“Is that your name?”
“The Catriona bit just.”
“You’re not catatonic. I’ve seen you make faces. You just made one like an elephant farted in your ear. I make faces too. Have a gander at this. This is my number 4.”
Ronnie squeezed his eyes shut and stuck out his tongue. It was long and red. He waggled it experimentally. Then he retracted it and opened his eyes very wide. Other partygoers returned to regarding us with curiosity and concern.
“Don’t do that. People are staring.”
“Of course, they are. They’re witnessing an interesting and unpredictable event. Make a face at me.”
“What kind?”
“Any kind. You’ll feel better. It’s therapeutic.”
I slit my eyes and thrust my lower jaw at him.
“You must be able to do better than that,” he said, irritated.
I tugged my mouth wider with my fingers and commenced clacking my teeth. I flared my nostrils.
“That’s better,” he said, clapping. “Now you look like the girl thought she was a horse.”
We made faces for some time, till a crowd of intrigued artists assembled believing themselves at a happening.
“Feel better?” Ronnie asked.
“A little,” I admitted, grudgingly.
“That’s the thing about making faces. Clears your sinuses.”
“We were acquiring a bit of an audience.”
“My mission in life,” he explained, “is to make psychotic people comfortable and normal people uncomfortable. Come see us some time. We can make more faces if you like. I have a special one soothes dementia. My number 14 it is, a right humdinger, all about deployment of the eyebrows.” Ronnie glanced at his empty glass. “If not, we can just sit and talk about how daft the fucking English are.”
“Maybe,” I said. “Life can be painful and I have a lot to say about the English.”
“There is a lot of pain in life.” He nodded. “I was five when my mother told me Santa Claus didn’t exist. It triggered my first existential crisis. In life the only pain that can be avoided is the pain that comes from trying to avoid pain.”
“I don’t believe that,” I said.
“Well, I’ve failed then, haven’t I?” he said. “Because I thought I was inviting you to set us both free.” With that cryptic rejoinder, he wheeled away. “Be seeing you.”
“Not if I see you first!”
I realized I hadn’t wanted him to leave. But that mad little elf had dissolved into London twilight like the hallucination he might have been.

1986 Getting in late to National, I decided a drink was in order before attempting the Metro. Having inhaled a few on the plane, I had a rare rolling glow going on. I ordered a gin and tonic in a sterile airport eatery. The other serious evening drinker sat catty-corner, a short bald man in a dark suit gesticulating towards a corner nook. He had a beetroot face and his upper lip was cut and swollen and his pants pockets were turned out like elephant ears. “I am the high priest of Kali,” he declaimed at a booth. “God of destruction and so forth.”
The man being so enlightened, a strapping chap could go 15 rounds with Behemoth, wasn’t amused. “Pipe down, mate,” he suggested. English, obviously. “Put a bloody sock in it.”
“In what?” The questioner had a Scottish accent. “Be more specific.”
It took five minutes of amused observation of this contretemps before I recognized the drunk. I sat on an adjacent stool. Having watched my approach with concern, he commenced an intricate study of my legs.
“I don’t recollect me ordering a whore. It’s not a good time. I’m about to take flight. In a plane I mean.”
“Ronnie?”
“Away to fuck and leave us alone.”
“You don’t remember me?”
“No, I don’t have a clue who you think you are.” He looked me over lasciviously. “Did we screw or were you a patient? Or both?”
“Neither.”
“Another missed opportunity.” He sighed. “Story of my life.”
“What happened to your face?”
He touched his lip, chagrined. “I got punched in the mouth by a Buddhist monk.”
“Was he a patient?”
He looked at me sharply now. “I have damn all left. God knows where all my schizophrenics went. It’s somewhat of a relief. I’m sick to death of people rooting around like pigs in their emotional feces to get my attention.” He gave me a sideways glance. “Are you a rooter?”
“Not any more.”
“What are you miserable about then?”
“I’m not miserable.”
He lifted his eyes to the fluorescent lights above the bar. “People only talk to me when they’re miserable. You can have no conception of how depressing that is.” He wiped a sliver of snot dependent from his nose onto his sleeve. “I would like to tell them there’s something better than this pointless existence, but is there?”
“Yes.”
He tried to locate me in the smoking Pompeii of his memory. “You’re drunk,” he observed, finally.
“So are you.” He nodded at that. “And pissed as a newt or not, I remember you showing me something good.”
“Wasn’t me. Far as I’m concerned, life is a sexually transmitted disease with a mortality rate of one hundred percent.” He rapped his glass and the Englishman glanced up from a booth layered with loose-leaf papers, graphs and diagrams, a briefcase propped at his feet, a glass of beer within reach. He resumed the pummeling of a calculator.
“Slange var,” Ronnie said, waggling the glass. “Two rules for drinking whisky. First, never take it without water. Second, never take water without whisky.” The barmaid, a blonde with hair like frosted fur and a smile like a well-healed surgical wound, foolishly refilled his glass. “God love you, angel,” Ronnie said. “This is situational drinking, to get us up in the air.”
“Where to?”
“Philadelphia. I’m enlightening them this time about that time I spent enlightening myself with Babaji at 9000 feet, meditating on a ledge. Even in winter he wore only a loincloth. Babaji spoke English and French and Italian fluently and could play the bagpipes, fuck knows why. It’s not very practical in the Himalayas. Bit on the weird side.” Ronnie recalled my presence. “Where am I supposed to know you from?”
“London.”
“At least you haven’t spread out like some women your age.”
“I take care of myself, Ronnie.”
“I don’t. Know how I got that moniker? Mother named me after Ronald Coleman. He was a suave fuck. She wanted me to be a suave fuck. Talk about deluded.” Ronnie yawned. “She was certifiable, burned the rubbish in our house so the neighbors wouldn’t go through it. She believed next door aspired to rummage our rubbish. I’m sure there are folks had happy childhoods. Not me. She broke my toys when I got too attached to them. I had a wooden horse, Neddie. I loved Neddie. One day she set him on fire with the rubbish. Can you imagine what that does to a person? I always say the initial brutality against the child is the mother’s first kiss.” He nodded ferociously at me. “Did you hate your mother too?”
“No.”
“I go back one Hogmanay and she’s made a doll of me and been sticking pins in it. I found it in a biscuit tin. This is my mother I’m talking about. Trying to induce a heart attack using this weird voodoo palaver.” He stared wide-eyed. “What do you think of that?”
“That you’ve changed.”
His elbow kept slipping on the counter. “There are tribes in New Zealand use older women as pin ups. Down under you could get worshipped by Maoris in the bush. By which I mean the outback and not your pubis. Maybe they’d do their dance for you.”
He levered himself off the stool and commenced stomping a haka. It involved fierce facial grimaces, eye bulging, stomach thrusting and grunting. Then, he sat down and sloshed his refilled dram. “Ever been rebirthed? You look like you could use it.”
“Why are you so angry, Ronnie?”
He scratched his pate. He had grown the hair long at the back as compensation for the baldness on top and acquired an incipient mullet. “You ask more questions than a divorce lawyer you do, and I would know.”
“You had so many good feelings.”
“Oh, them.” He assembled a disturbing face. “I banished them yonks ago. I hated my feelings. I told them to fuck off and they fucked off.”
I felt like crying.
“You feel like crying?” he asked. “See,” he tapped his forehead. “Still got it. Some say I’m paranoid. Which makes me paranoid. Do you think I’m paranoid?”
I shrugged.
“We have the term paranoia for a person feels he’s persecuted when he isn’t. But what’s the term for a person doesn’t feel persecuted when he is?” He pointed at the T.V. above the bar, a Redskins game in the third quarter. “There are no events anymore, only pseudo-events. Humanity is estranged from its authentic possibilities.”
“You sound like a fortune cookie generator gone wrong.”
“I got one once in a restaurant in Govan said ‘Help, I am trapped in a Chinese bakery.’ I took it to be a joke.” Ronnie looked at the Englishman, punching at his calculator. “His lot colonized us so I colonized them. I plundered the Sassenachs like they did us for 250 years, payback for the Darien expedition.”
“I’m not telling you again, mate.” The big man didn’t even look up. “Or you’ll be going home in an ambulance tonight.”
“Ambulances don’t take you home, what’s he havering about? What ambulance takes a person home? None I know of.”
“Maybe leave him alone?” I suggested. “He might break your neck.”
“You remind me of my daughter. She had a breakdown. I said send her to Gartnavel or Ruskin Place, home or loony bin what’s the difference? Classic double bind. Either I had damn all to do with her breakdown and my theories were shite, or I had everything to do with it and I was shite. No win situation.” His elbow slid along the counter. “Did you know that the word schizophrenic comes from the Greek for broken hearted?”
“You can’t just sit around hating yourself like this.”
“Why not?” He felt his split lip. “I’m nothing now I’ve lost my funky charm. No offence intended, pet, but why don’t you just shut up and look pretty?”
The Englishman, overcome by chivalric valor, said: “Everyone has had enough of you. If you can’t hold your liquor, go home.”
Ronnie winked, and walked, like a baby deer on roller skates, on ice, to the booth. “I wish to apologize,” he said. “Permit me to purchase you an ale to compensate for my loutish behavior.” He examined the man’s beer glass. “Do you like that?”
The Englishman nodded.
Ronnie spat a thick gob into the glass. “Well, how’d you like it now, ya mealy-mouthed wanker?”
The big man leapt up, scattering papers. I insinuated myself between the combatants. The barmaid looked for assistance from the concourse. She wore too much eye makeup and resembled a startled raccoon. If no one had come to help her before, no one was going to now. “Stand aside, miss,” the big man seethed.
“Let it go,” I pleaded. I pointed at Ronnie, shadowboxing an imaginary pugilist. “He’s drunk as a skunk. . .”
“That’s neither here nor there.” The Englishman began rolling up his shirtsleeves.
“If something’s neither here nor there, where the fuck is it?” Ronnie assumed a southpaw stance. “Don’t tell me. Your father was a simple man. Your mother a simple woman.” He put his hand on my shoulder, for balance: “And we see the result now before us: a fucking simpleton.”
The Englishman took a step forward, purpling with rage, and Ronnie charged him like a goat, head ramming into groin. Both went sprawling, the bigger man doubled over and gasping hoarsely. Ronnie, after a few failed attempts, the floor become an escalator, teetered to his feet.
Two armed police officers arrived to pry the brawlers apart, one thin and solemn and the other thickset and solemn.
“I’m a psychiatrist. Arrest this man.” Ronnie gestured at his opponent, crouched and cupping his testicles. “This patient accosted me here. A chronic public masturbator. He’s fondling his dick even as we speak!”
Ronnie handed the thin officer his card.
“I’m a Chartered Accountant,”
wheezed the Englishman, retrieving a wallet from his discarded jacket. “I work for Lloyds.”
“Put that down,” a policeman yelled. “Slowly.”
Ronnie faked sobriety remarkably well in the circumstances. “The man’s delusion is complete. He’s procured false identification. Must have got discharged by masquerading normalcy. Not the first time.”
“Come with me, sir,” the heavy-set officer said, grasping the accountant’s elbow.
He shook the arm off. “This runt . . .”
“Typical strategy,” Ronnie said. “The delusional project neurotic fantasies, accuse the Other of that of which they are guilty, classic transference. Man needs sedating.”
“We’d best be leaving now, sir,” the larger policeman explained, wrenching the accountant to the floor in a nasty chokehold.
Ronnie shook his head. “I recommend a substantial dose of Thorazine. Administered anally if he’s resistant.”
“He followed you to the airport and attacked you, Dr. Laing?” “Aye, struck us in the gob too. But I don’t want to press charges. His neural circuits are misfiring.” Ronnie pointed at me. “This lady is a witness.”
I wondered again at how I became the innocent bystander of my own life. “What the doctor said,” I told them. “It’s all true.”
“You cunt,” the Englishman screamed.
“He sees her as genitalia,” Ronnie explained, assuming a tragic mien. “We had him cured through exposure therapy, but he’s relapsed and hallucinates throbbing vulvas. That’s why he has to play with himself all the time. It’s a terrible thing to suffer from.”
The policemen contemplated the accountant with expressions mingled horror and disgust before hauling him up and frog-marching him across the concourse.
Ronnie waved. “Unbelievable, the triumph of blind authority.” He made a shooing motion. “That’s enough excitement. Away you go. I cannot focus on getting shitfaced with you mooning around.” He contemplated the place I gripped his jacket and recoiled, alarmed by the expression. He lifted my hand and laid it on the counter as though it were delicate as a wine-stem. “There’s a good girl, Catriona, right?”
All this time he knew my name. He summoned the barmaid and she poured, filling his glass to the brim. My last sight of the wounded healer was him going down on his drink like a hummingbird to a flower, swollen lips slowly parted by the rim.

Rob McClure’s fiction has appeared in Chicago Quarterly Review, Gettysburg Review, New Ohio Review, Fugue, Barcelona Review, Manchester Review and other magazines. He is the author of the collection The Violence (Queen’s Ferry Press, 2018) and the novel The Scotsman (Black Springs Press, 2024).

Rob McClure

The Divided Self

Share this:

Like this: