From "Moon Madness"
by Liann Snow
 

I've heard of psychiatric patients trying to drive their analysts crazy, but bringing out all this lesbian business ...

Bernard certainly had a way about him – a certain playboy, feckless charm. A psychopath of course, but through the years of analysis, he had given much pleasure. Indeed, it pleased me to believe his tales for minutes at a time. He wasn't getting any better, only more polished, but he appreciated the gloss that I had given him and so did I – it made our sessions so much more entertaining.

In the first year, he had sown a seed (or perhaps he had only watered it!). Then he fondly watched it grow. In due season, with the true gardener's canny eye, he judged the time to be ripe. "You are a lesbian, Miss Ambleside," he had declared, unusually forthright, one sunny afternoon.

I merely gazed at him. He had been such a patient patient, nurtured the seedling for so long that now I was laden with fruit, my branches creaked and sagged. With a triangular smile gaping on his paper-white face he dazzled me; he boggled his eyes, vibrated his wiry brows. Even his rusty hair curled and crackled. And then, having all of my attention, he turned his head and beamed our combined gaze at Miss Amelia Blondesberry, State Registered Nurse (Psychiatric) as she slowly passed, trundling a wheelchair, doting patient contained. "That," he said, "is your prey!"

I chased down my prey all right, like a good born-again carnivore, and vanquished it. The good, well-bred, house-proud, house-trained State Registered Nurse (through dilated but beautifully-fringed Piscean eyes) saw this podgy, middle-aged nascent dyke as her tall and darkly handsome Heathcliffe, no less.

"Cathy, Cathy" I crooned at Miss Amelia, playing the game with gusto and faint cinematic memories of Merle and Larry O.

"You came!" she cried, swooning on cue and smiling as we pursued our happy little play. 

We were enraptured as the moon shone through the casement. The Hospital Committee was not. Thus, when the privatisation of the NHS began in earnest in the early nineteen nineties and Her Majesty's government let loose a great flood of the physically and mentally "challenged" into the heaving bosoms of their families, my reprobate self was washed up in their befuddled wake.

At first, I pursued my previous profession in a private capacity, that is, I advised and assisted and aided and abetted former patients in their new lives outside the institution, this time at the behest of their less-than-patient nearests and dearests. Then I broadened my private patient list to include those less mentally-disabled more emotionally-unabled women of grief, guilt and unconfronted grievances.

Thus, in my North London consulting room in the front of a house in Hackney, I met the modern woman. I listened to her, and so did she. I learned of Jung and Dreams and mother-love and of the Tarot and the Goddess. She learned to love herself and sometimes she loved me. I put a mirror up before these often beautiful women, in their twenties and mutinous thirties; in their linen shorts or trousers or their peasant-style skirts, and sometimes the clouds parted and they saw themselves and liked what they saw.

Perhaps we sat in silence till they spoke or, if the silence weighed too heavily, I said, "Did you dream?" And they did, she did. So I would be told. And the images would flutter and glitter like butterflies in the white-walled blankness of my room, till they made a shimmering, pleasing tapestry to adorn the walls.

I enjoyed those days, but went home in the evenings restless and alone to my one-bedroomed flat atop a four-floored, late-Victorian conversion. I didn't even have a cat.

However, I did have a small garden and that turned out to be my shortest path to physical release. No, I didn't sublimate my passions digging and delving in the stubborn London clay. Instead, being short of time and less short of cash, I engaged a horny-handed gardener who, in due season, engaged me in amatory tussles in the potting shed (amongst other agreeably grimy places). 

Oh! Davinia Bulstrode! How often did I bounce around beneath your beefy thighs?

Ah, tribadism. What an effort! What an exodus! What an arid waste of time! Or so I thought, till one post-horticultural evening, I flipped her over and she liked it; consequently no longer liking me. (No, I couldn't follow the logic either. I only knew I'd lost a gardener and a fond companion. I missed the latter more – the dahlias saw it differently.) I bought myself a cat and gave the garden back to the weeds.

Davinia was the first in a fairly long line of fairly memorable women who I have known (and vice versa) in the time between the Institution and the present day. Another such was Suzee Jellycube. Of course that wasn't her real name; her parents called her Beryl, but she changed it. 

Suzee was a bright, pretty south London girl who worked in a shoe shop. I loved her for her ignorance, but, unable to resist ploughing a fallow field, I told her about Jung and read books to her about the Goddess. She was impressed, she was inspired, she made us have a witches' wedding and burnt more than her fingers as we jumped the ritual fire. 

Suzee changed her name again, this time in honour of our union. She became Hestia the Hearth Goddess, and wouldn't leave the house. Instead, I was required to vacate my north London flat (though I retained the tenancy, not being quite as optimistic as Hestia about our union, and wanting instead to give it an as-it-were "trial run" before making any irreversible decisions. Naturally I did not think it prudent to trouble Hestia with this detail – I would of course quietly let my tenancy lapse in the nearest future – just as soon as I felt as assured of the durability of the relationship as Hestia undoubtedly was), and to move south of the river with Mister Bates, my spiteful tom.

Our fire blazed all through that Winter then turned to ashes in the Spring. I was ashamed to leave her but secretly glad I'd kept up the payments on my flat. Out of guilt as much as anything, I declared myself still "married" to Suzee for another six months after we split. Suzee heard me say it and gazed at me in attentive silence while I spoke, but perhaps surprisingly didn't offer the same guarantee. 

Celibacy was difficult at first, but got easier. Perhaps because I knew it wouldn't last forever. In fact my avowed marriage and my celibacy ended on the same night, more or less six months after breaking up with Suzee. The night I met some real old-fashioned dykes, or "gay girls" as I imagined they would call themselves.

I was way outside my usual run, up out in the country. One of my regulars, Marlene, had thrown a wobbly and was too far gone to travel to me. I motored over – all part of the service.

Buy this e-book!