Going Loco by Lynne Truss

doorway. It always grieved her to spend less than half of her allotted three hours telling people how long it was since she bought a scarf. She tried again. ‘Bleeding great ’urricane on the way, apparently.’
    ‘Mm.’
    ‘That Salman Rushdie was in the butcher’s again. I said to him, “Very good, mate. Disguising yourself as a pork chop, are you? That’s fucking original.”’
    ‘Mm.’ Belinda pretended to be deeply engrossed in her notes.
    ‘My boy says he’s written a new book called
Buddha Was a Cunt.
Is that true?’
    In the café, Maggie read last week’s
Stage
from cover to cover, filling time before her therapy appointment at two p.m. Maggie had run the gamut of therapy over the years. She’d done Freudian twice and Jungian three times, but had so far avoided Kleinian because Belinda had once said, ‘What, like Patsy Cline?’ which had somehow ruined it. Belinda had an awful way of belittling things that were important to you, by saying the first thing that came into her head. Kleinian therapy would now only involve singing maudlin I-fall-to-pieces country songs, which was what Maggie did at home anyway without paying.
    Nowadays Maggie was working with a new therapist, Julia, who was the best she’d ever had. The idea was to work on isolated problems, and correct the thinking that led to inappropriate behaviour or beliefs. For example, Maggie had a problem about other people being late. ‘So does everyone,’ pooh-poohed Belinda. ‘Not like me,’ said Maggie. And it wastrue. Maggie not only got angry and worried as the minutes ticked by, but after a while she started to imagine that the other person was not late at all. He had actually arrived on time, and was standing at the bar or something –
but that she had completely forgotten what he looked like.
    ‘But he’d recognize you?’ Belinda objected. ‘So you’d still meet up.’
    No, said Maggie. Because it was worse than that.
He’d forgotten what she looked like, too.
    ‘That’s mad,’ Belinda had said, helpfully. ‘You should never have become an actress if you can’t handle the odd identity shift, Mags.’
    Luckily, the therapist took a more constructive approach.
    ‘Now, since this non-recognition event has never occurred in reality,’ said Julia, ‘we must uncover the roots of your irrational anxiety, which I’m afraid to say, Margaret, is your sense of total unlovability. It’s not your fault. Not at all. Your needs were never met by your parents, you see.’
    ‘You’re right.’
    ‘You were made to feel invisible by those terrible selfish people, who should never have had children.’
    Maggie sniffed. ‘I was.’
    ‘They looked right through you.’
    Tears pricked Maggie’s eyes. ‘They did.’
    ‘Did they tell you to stop dancing in front of the television, perhaps?’
    It was a lucky guess.
    ‘Yes!’
    And so Maggie had wept and signed up for six months, figuring that she had very little else to do, and Julia was local (in Tooting). Besides which, she couldn’t keep sitting stock-still with panic in theatre foyers with a sign pinned on her chest: ‘It’s really me! Is that really you?’
    Professionally, things were a bit bleak for Maggie, and thisdidn’t help matters. Her total unlovability was being confirmed in all quarters. The Pinter had been good experience, though incredibly badly paid. She’d had a job on
Casualty,
classified in the script as ‘Bus crash scene – a woman moans’. But all the while her ambition to rejoin the Royal Shakespeare Company was coming to nothing. For the time being she must comfort herself with memories of two years ago, when she’d peaked in Stratford as the Lady Olivia in Shakespeare’s
Twelfth Night,
getting a review that singled her out as ‘quite extraordinary’ and ‘probably quite good-looking’.
    She had really loved that production, which was very loyal of her because it was generally reviled. Playing to paltry houses who sometimes booed, it did not